The Price of Loyalty. Andrew L. Johns
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but he also lobbied for Point Four and Public Law 480 funds for underdeveloped areas around the world and championed the Alliance for Progress.[16] He never voted against a military budget appropriation, yet he also helped to create the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1961 and led the fight for the ratification of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In fact, in a speech at Yale University in December 1959, Humphrey asserted, “Disarmament should be the core of American foreign policy.”[17] Humphrey’s liberal and anticommunist principles remained consistent throughout his career. The disconnect arose when those two impulses clashed or when other political imperatives interceded. When that occurred, the resulting decisions and rhetoric could make him appear to have adopted contradictory positions. Nowhere would this be more apparent than in dealing with Vietnam.
Humphrey’s anticommunism and U.S. policy in Southeast Asia would collide in the 1950s. Given his visceral opposition to communism worldwide, Humphrey predictably backed U.S. policy in Indochina from the outset and consistently warned against the cost of losing ground to communism in the region in speeches on the Senate floor. On January 5, 1950, for instance, he said, “I want to stop communism, and I say that if we lose the south part of Asia, if we lose Burma, if we lose India, we shall have lost every hope that we ever had of being able to maintain free institutions in any part of the eastern world.” When Harry Truman decided to increase U.S. aid to Indochina in the wake of the invasion of South Korea, he was supported by both sides of the political divide. Humphrey called it a “most encouraging” decision on the part of the administration. Humphrey wanted to protect Indochina from “the Communist onslaught,” believing as did many in Congress that a communist victory in Vietnam would lead to the conquest of the entire region.[18]
Yet Humphrey would exhibit uncertainty about the proper course of action in Vietnam. He embraced the idea of an independent Indochina while vocally opposing those within the Eisenhower administration who suggested using nuclear weapons to aid the French in 1954. Although he refrained from publicly criticizing the administration on Indochina, Humphrey did express some reservations about U.S. policy privately. In February 1954, for example, he complained to John Foster Dulles that “it is patently obvious that we just do not have any plan.” When the senator asked what the United States would do in the event that France abandoned Indochina, Dulles responded that the administration still had faith in the Navarre Plan: “I feel that the program upon which we are now embarked will probably hold the situation in Indochina.” Humphrey was not wholly convinced.[19] On March 31, 1954, Humphrey declared that “the loss of Indochina would be a tragedy for the free world . . . [and] would mean the loss of all Asia and probably the subcontinent.” In April, following newspaper reports that the administration was considering deployment of U.S. troops to Indochina in the event of a French withdrawal, Humphrey and Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA) complained about the administration’s lack of consultation with Congress, suggesting that this proposal went far beyond U.S. policy as they understood it.[20]
In the midst of the siege at Dien Bien Phu, Humphrey opined that he did not think that “anybody seems to have any plans whatsoever about Indochina” and that the odds of “getting anything very constructive toward the cause of the free nations” at the Geneva Conference was “very, very limited.” The senator also worried that the administration did not have any contingencies in place in the event that the French decided to withdraw from Indochina. Given the importance of the region, he argued, “we just do not have any plan.”[21] On April 19, 1954, Humphrey asserted that losing Indochina “is unthinkable. It cannot happen. It will not happen.”[22] Yet it did happen. The French withdrew from Southeast Asia, the international agreement reached at the Geneva conference effectively created two states in Indochina, and the United States quickly committed itself to the task of maintaining a Western-oriented, noncommunist government in Vietnam irrespective of the language of the accords.[23]
As U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia entered a new phase, Humphrey continued to support efforts to oppose communism in the region. In 1955, it was Humphrey who made the motion that led to Senate ratification of the Manila Pact, more commonly referred to as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), by a vote of 85–1. That agreement would be used by many in Washington to justify an expanded presence in South Vietnam. But Humphrey—along with several of his Senate colleagues, including J. William Fulbright (D-AK), Mike Mansfield (D-MT), and John F. Kennedy (D-MA)—viewed the Eisenhower-Dulles approach in Vietnam somewhat skeptically. While they agreed about the need to construct a bulwark against communist expansion and supported the Diem government, they were not completely satisfied with the administration’s policy priorities. Humphrey later recalled, “When I spoke out in the fifties against what we were doing, mine was a relatively lonely voice. We narrowly avoided joining the French in the death throes of their Southeast Asian colonialism. This seemed absurd.”[24] Hoping to prevent a recurrence of the French experience in Indochina, in September 1958 the senators asked the president to give more economic aid and less military assistance to the Diem regime in order to stimulate development and to bolster South Vietnam’s social stability.[25]
During the Kennedy administration, Humphrey generally supported JFK’s policy on Vietnam but also urged caution in terms of expanding U.S. commitment. He told the Senate in 1962 that the United States should limit its participation in Vietnam to “military assistance, to supplies, and to military training” but remained steadfast in his commitment to preventing the spread of communism. Humphrey praised the administration’s efforts to develop counterinsurgency programs, stating that “in recent months, the tide may well have turned for the forces of freedom against the Communist guerrillas of the north,” and urged additional weapons and supplies to “put out these brush fires” in Vietnam.[26] But as things got progressively worse in Southeast Asia, it became clear to Humphrey that different solutions would be required to achieve U.S. goals.
As the United States faced increasingly difficult and limited choices in South Vietnam, Humphrey’s views on U.S. involvement in Vietnam were shaped by General Edward Lansdale, the counterinsurgency expert who had been Ramon Magsaysay’s chief adviser in the Philippines in the 1950s and who later became a special assistant to the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. After Kennedy’s assassination, Humphrey “tried to educate myself on Vietnam. I turned to Colonel (later General) Edward Lansdale . . . [who] urged a political approach. . . . After the election I became a conduit for his ideas to President Johnson.”[27] Lansdale’s theory, which Humphrey came to support enthusiastically, was that conventional military techniques were useless against a rural-based communist insurgency and that the only way to succeed would be to adopt similar tactics and demonstrate the potential benefits of democratic government through a rural reconstruction program. Humphrey embraced Lansdale’s ideas in 1964, even sending LBJ a memorandum in the spring recommending against withdrawal of the 16,000 U.S. advisers in Vietnam but arguing that “direct U.S. action against North Vietnam, American assumption of command roles, or participation in combat of U.S. troop units are unnecessary and undesirable.”[28] What is clear is that by early 1964, while Humphrey remained committed to opposing communism in Vietnam, he did not support the idea of a major escalation of U.S. military presence on the ground. That reluctance would inform Humphrey’s advice to LBJ in the months of decision that followed.
The relationship that Humphrey had with Lyndon Johnson looms as a significant and indispensable part of the story. The two had been friends since the early 1950s. Johnson had mentored Humphrey in their early years in the Senate, helping to transform and legitimize Humphrey from an impulsive liberal zealot into a seasoned and effective legislator who understood that politics is the “art of the possible.” Yet the relationship could not be described as balanced. Humphrey, for his part, considered Johnson to be a close friend and confidant. The Minnesota senator was a big fan of LBJ and defended him to other Senate liberals in the 1950s. In fact, Humphrey thought Johnson was “a lot more liberal” than he appeared, telling his allies, “On minimum wage he’s with us; on health measures . . . he’s with us; on agriculture measures he’s with us; on all the public works programs he’s with us; on public employment measures when we had recessions he was with us.” It helped that the two men shared a common background. Both were from small-town rural communities,