s taying the c ourse 251on November 2, 1968, Thieu backed off his commitment. Johnson
announced the unconditional bombing halt on the last day of October
and said new negotiations would commence one week later, while
Th ieu, still determined to draw out the process, replied that his gov-
ernment would not participate. If he believed that the next American
administration would be prepared to sustain Saigon with American
blood indefi nitely, he was soon disappointed. His representative in Paris
informed him that Nixon would disengage from Vietnam, but do so
more slowly than a Democrat would. ^
Johnson’s success with diplomacy was on a par with the other ele-
ments of his wartime leadership. Th e early Johns Hopkins University
speech pointed to some of the diffi culties that would dog him. In that
address, Johnson left himself with precious little space for diplomatic
maneuvering: almost any negotiated outcome, because it would have to
allow for either power sharing, neutralization, or eventual reunifi cation
of the two Vietnams, would appear to be a defeat. He also established
no standards for the GVN’s performance, denying the United States
any rationale for disengagement and the leverage over Saigon this might
have provided. And in stating that it was up to Hanoi to decide when
to cease its aggression, he let the communists determine when negotia-
tions would begin. Further, the confi dence that military force could be
manipulated precisely to send clear signals to the other side proved
misplaced. Time and again, attempts to communicate a message did
not align with military action; witness the resumption of bombing
before Hanoi could respond to diplomatic overtures. Washington also
sent signals inadvertently that were quite at odds with what the Johnson
administration intended. By announcing a fi rm ceiling on American
troop levels in Vietnam, as Clark Cliff ord pointed out to the president
in late 1967, the administration communicated very plainly that its
commitment to the war was limited. Hanoi understood that it need
not fear American force increases it could not hope to match.
Above all, Johnson misunderstood his communist adversaries and
underestimated their will. His Mekong River development proposal
betrayed the president’s profound parochialism. In making the off er, he
revealed that he saw Ho Chi Minh and the other Vietnamese com-
munist leaders as conventional politicians who would bargain away any
goal for pork-barrel projects. Th is approach had served Johnson well in