The War: The Hawaii Conference

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The decision, activist and abrupt, was in the quintessential Johnson style. With no advance warning, the President announced that he would fly to Hawaii for three days of talks with U.S. military commanders and leaders of South Viet Nam's government. The South Vietnamese did not even have time to draft position papers. Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, asked when he first heard about it, confessed in some embarrassment: "Very recently."

Nevertheless, the imposing array of officialdom at the Honolulu talks signaled that the President intended to conduct a wide-ranging examination of the military, political and psychological conduct of the Viet Nam war—indeed, of U.S. strategy in all Southeast Asia. From Washington came Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle Wheeler, retired Joint Chairman Maxwell Taylor, White House Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner and Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman. From Saigon came a 28-member South Vietnamese entourage headed by Ky, Chief of State Nguyen Van Thieu, Foreign Minister Tran Van Do, Defense Minister Nguyen Huu Co, and a nine-man U.S. team led by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. Waiting for the President in Honolulu were General William C. Westmoreland, commander of all U.S. forces in Viet Nam, Pacific Commander Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp Jr. and Major General Richard Stilwell, who heads the U.S. military effort in Thailand.

Slim Chance. The hastily scheduled meeting, Johnson made clear, betokened no military crisis or vital policy change. Rather, as suggested by its unprecedented emphasis on peaceful programs for the Vietnamese, the President's mission reflected his determination to continue what he calls his "two-fisted" approach to the war: a simultaneous attempt to wage the conflict with vigor while hoping to end it at the negotiating table. Johnson had resumed that now-familiar stance earlier in the week when he announced resumption of U.S. bombing of North Viet Nam while taking his peace offensive to the United Nations.

The decision to go to the U.N. had been weighed in secret for ten days. There were impressive arguments against it, most notably the likelihood that a Security Council debate might simply become a forum for anti-American tirades and might also force a hardening of the Soviet position. But a renewed appeal for U.N. "arbitration" from Pope Paul VI, coinciding with a cogent memo from Rusk and U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, persuaded the President to try. "It's a slim chance," said a U.S. official, "but one worth probing." Just how slim a chance was demonstrated when the U.S. managed to get its resolution requesting the U.N. to arrange a peace conference on the Security Council's agenda by a one-vote margin. Since Hanoi had already announced that it would consider any U.N. decision "null and void," the effort seemed less like peace-punching than shadowboxing.