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lamented on Friday to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Beneath public assurances of stability, Johnson faced a bleak reality that guerrilla armies were defeating the partitioned South, and would unify Vietnam under Communist rule unless the United States swiftly intervened. Worse, his military experts advised that a commitment of blood and treasure could stave off immediate disaster in South Vietnam—but little more. Classified military projections stubbornly refuted the ingrained presumption that a flick of American power would prevail in backward Vietnam, and strategic plans failed to predict lasting success by warfare of any design, scale, or duration. Johnson, trapped between looming humiliation and futile war, erupted in moments of primal fury against resignation to Communist victory. This to him was spineless surrender and political suicide for the leader of a great power, because American voters would “forgive you for anything except being weak.” Yet he also recoiled from a vision of bloody stalemate, saying, “this is a terrible thing we’re getting ready to do,” and that the prospect of sending American soldiers into Asia “makes the chills run up my back.”
    Bad weather still delayed the start of sustained bombing against North Vietnam, destined to last eight years, which Johnson had approved secretly on February 13 amid warnings of impending collapse in the South. (It was this crisis that had shortened his patience for King’s visit from Selma.) In the interim, another military coup by South Vietnamese allies installed the latest of six chronically unstable governments over the past eighteen months. Nerves tightened, the President made the best of a decision no longer deferred. “Now we’re off to bombing those people and we’re over that hurdle,” he told McNamara privately. “And I don’t think anything is gonna be as bad as losing, and I don’t see any way of winning, but I would sure want to feel that every person that had an idea, that his suggestion was fully explored.”
    On Monday, March 1, when McNamara explained the latest weather postponement and obtained clearance to “go ahead tonight” with the first of the new air attacks, he found the President transfixed by a report in the New York Times of plans for these continuous air strikes as well as ground troops to follow. “Am I wrong in saying that this appears to be almost traitorous?” Johnson asked shortly before noon. News about Vietnam decisions risked disclosure of the mountainous doubt and brutally frank pessimism inside his government—with Johnson and most of his advisers skeptical of airpower in this guerrilla war, with General Maxwell Taylor, ambassador in South Vietnam and America’s most illustrious active soldier, warning sharply against the introduction of American troops. Almost any candor about actual deliberations would erase the appearance of sovereign control, violating Johnson’s first rule of successful politics. He ached to introduce the conflict matter-of-factly, confidently, and even as quietly as possible, and pleaded with McNamara that Monday morning to track down those leaking war news to the press. “Somebody ought to be removed, Bob,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. “I just, you just can’t, you can’t exist this kind of thing…you just can’t exist with it.”
    By then, a draining twelve hours since Los Angeles, King began registration day in Alabama with an explicit prophecy of relief in the national arena. “We are going to bring a voting bill into being in the streets of Selma, Alabama,” he told a late-morning crowd at Brown Chapel AME Church, the twin-steepled gathering point for demonstrations in Selma. “President Johnson has a mandate from the American people.” Then he led an orderly double file of some three hundred volunteers on the familiar short walk