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In Canberra, he buttonholed nine allied leaders for talks, turning the somber occasion into an impromptu summit conference on the war. In Viet Nam and Thailand, he showed one part of his celebrated "two-fisted" approach, urging U.S. servicemen to "give it to" the enemy. Karachi was a jet hop, skip and jump away, so he dropped in to press the flesh with President Ayub Khan, a difficult ally of late. Whisking on to Rome, he unlimbered the other fist, the one that holds the olive branch, assuring Pope Paul VI that "we will agree to any proposal that would substitute the word and the vote for the knife and the grenade in bringing an honorable peace to Viet Nam."
When High Hopes Turn Sour. Johnson is acutely aware of how much is expected of him as President and of the fact that, in the eyes of many, he has fallen short. As Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner indicated in a year-end appraisal of "the alarming character of our domestic crisis," the President fell victim to "the bitterness and anger toward our institutions that wells up when high hopes turn sour." Johnson himself conceded early in the year: "In all candor, I cannot recall a period that is in any way comparable to the one we are living through today. It is a period that finds exhilaration and frustration going hand in hand when great accomplishments are often overshadowed by rapidly rising expectations."
As the months unfolded, frustration waxed relentlessly and exhilaration waned. It was a time when the war was escalating just as the problems of peace were intensifying, and Johnson was badly buffeted by the conjunction of those two powerful trends.
In Viet Nam, the President increased the U.S. troop level until it had passed the high-water mark of the Korean War (472,800 men) and soared on toward 525,000, where it will presumably level off this year. The big-unit war continued decisively in favor of the allies, though the enemy shifted to a strategy of mass assaults on exposed frontier positions such as Dak To and Con Thien in hopes of bloodying a big U.S. force and further eroding Stateside support of the war. American casualties since the beginning of the war climbed well over the 100,000 mark, including 13,000 dead, while the monetary cost of the war last year alone totaled $25 billion part of a $70 billion Defense budget that, in terms of the gross national product, was 50% smaller than the Pentagon's expenditures in the last year of the Korean War.
There were encouraging improvements most notably in the allies' military progress and in the legitimization of the South Vietnamese government through elections but many Americans doubted that they were worth the enormous expense. Even so, Johnson at year's end still enjoyed the support of a fair-sized majority of the U.S. for his middle course "between surrender and annihilation."