Forty years ago tonight, Lyndon B. Johnson stopped bombing Vietnam long enough to drop a big one on the U.S. political landscape.
The issue of course was Vietnam. (Or as we might call it now, Pre-raq.)
His speech to the nation on the evening of March 31, 1968 is best remembered for its peroration, but from start to finish it was a shock. White House counsel Harry McPherson had been the principal speechwriter on the speech, and had worked with LBJ, newly-minted Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford (himself a writer of presidential speeches under Harry S. Truman) and other top national security officials on an address that aimed to change the country's course on that conflict.
But, as I recount in my forthcoming White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters, neither McPherson nor Clifford, nor most of Johnson's top aides, knew exactly how much LBJ was aiming to change.
One of the few aides who did know was Horace "Buzz" Busby, who had first joined Johnson's staff in 1948 with instructions to make Johnson sound like Winston Churchill. Square-faced and soft-spoken, Buzz was a smoker and would sometimes be so lost in concentration that he would singe his eyeglasses with the cigarette angled into his mouth. No writer was ever closer to Johnson than was Busby, and LBJ had secretly summoned his old aide to help him with the closing of the March 31 speech.
What ensued was a White House game of speechwriter hide-and-seek which (though it was neither the first nor the last time presidents hid their ghosts from each other), with Busby sequestered in the family residence, refining the dramatic conclusion. (Even there he was not safe from Johnson's teary daughter.)
Minutes before LBJ reached the climactic conclusion of his speech, top aides started calling key supporters and other political figures to let them in on the secret. Reactions ran from muted to (in the case of one cabinet secretary) distraught to (in the case of another) mute silence.
"I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president," Johnson told the nation around 9:38pm.