s taying the c ourse 237dead and wounded seemed to negate administration claims of progress,
while the occasional television report of an atrocity committed by
American troops undercut the offi cial rationale that they were there to
help the South Vietnamese people. (For obvious reasons, the coverage
frustrated the president because cameras did not record similar abuses
by the enemy.)
Elite support for the war, strong at the outset, eroded with the lack
of progress on the battlefi eld. Where Wilson had been able to margin-
alize dissent during the First World War because intervention
commanded broad support among mainstream leaders, Johnson faced
a situation that more closely resembled Lincoln’s in the Civil War—an
initial surge of enthusiasm followed quickly by disappointment as casu-
alties rose with no sign of victory. In Johnson’s case, antiwar expression
came not from the partisan opposition but from within the ranks of his
own Democratic Party. Th e fi rst critics of American involvement, leftist
college students and a handful of liberals, could be ignored or dismissed.
By 1966, however, the position that the United States should cease
bombing North Vietnam and begin negotiations without preconditions
found a growing number of mainstream advocates. Foes of the war
gained visibility early that year when Senator J. William Fulbright, an
erstwhile Johnson backer who had turned against the war, used his
position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to
hold televised hearings on the confl ict in which the critics received a
full opportunity to voice their reservations.
With each passing month, additional liberal Democratic politicians
broke with the president over the war. These included Robert F.
Kennedy, who had strongly supported American assistance to South
Vietnam while serving as attorney general under his late brother. O n
November 30, 1967, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, a staunch
foe of the war, announced he would challenge Johnson for the Demo-
cratic presidential nomination in 1968.
Distressed though the president was about the opposition from the
left, the attacks from the other end of the political spectrum caused him
deeper alarm. Republicans and conservative Democrats picked up the
theme that too many restrictions had been imposed on the use of
American military power. In August 1967, Democratic Senator John
Stennis of Mississippi, chairman of the Preparedness Investigating