71. Telephone Conversation Between President Johnson and the Indian Ambassador (Nehru)1
[Here follows discussion of U.S.-Indian relations.]
BKN: I hope you had a very successful visit in [Honolulu].
LBJ: We were very, very pleased in several respects. One, I knew very little about Westmoreland, and youʼre having to act on a manʼs cables here. And itʼs good, I think, for the commander in chief to know the man whose cables he has to act upon every day. Second, I knew nothing about Ky and Thieu, the Chief of State, and what I learned was quite favorable. The impressions, the titles, the military backgrounds, the generals, the air marshals, the field marshals, so on and so forth. They never have been very impressive to civilians in Johnson City, Texas, cause we didnʼt have many storm troopers out there. And we havenʼt had many of them in our government. And I was amazed, as Alex Johnson said, whatever else may be, he [Ky] certainly knows how to talk. Whether he knows how to do as well as he knows how to talk is different. The declaration2 that we wrote was really his speech and it said in effect that we are going to act to prevent aggression, to defeat aggression. He didnʼt take in any more territory. He was defeating aggression. And weʼre going to defeat social misery, with considerable details along the line of his January 15th speech.3 And Ky was a young man who was going to lead the revolution [Page 219] in his country and build a new society and a stable society, and he was going to seek and obtain an honorable peace. And thereʼs not anything in those four points that any country, I think, wouldnʼt apply to themselves: to prevent an aggressor, and try to defeat social misery, and establish a stable society, and seek an honorable peace. And it was so eloquent and so simple and so young, [but] we have no illusions and weʼve seen a good many governments come and go and we donʼt know whatʼll happen that night. It was quite different from the General marching around with a sword at his side. And when we had the technicians, sixteen of ʼem, with Orville Freeman, sit down and meet with him, they all, every Ph.D. there, came away rather stimulated at this manʼs exciting interest in the quality of the rice seed and how youʼre going to increase its production. And his demand that we get eight million more school books in there next year. And his telling us how to handle the economic aid that Dave Bell has given him. And he just traded back and forth with Dave Bell for an hour on how to build classrooms. And he said that the American contractors come in and put ʼem up overnight, and the Viet Cong come in and burn ʼem down a week later. And they say, “We burned down American schools.” But he said, “You gave me some materials. We took the materials and put our own people to building the schools and when the Viet Cong came in to get the school they said you cannot touch our school.”
BKN: That is very important.
LBJ: It becomes our school if they built it. In any event, my point—we have tried for two years to get these people to thinking in terms of building a better society there and not just strictly a military operation but a political one, too. And you canʼt do it unless you can get Lodge and Westmoreland and the Prime Minister to adopt the baby as their own. And we did that. So they went back to put in the Lodge-Ky-Westmoreland program. And I sent along the Vice President and the Secretary of Agriculture, and in about a month from now Iʼll send out the Secretary of Education and Health. And then Iʼll send out the Surgeon General of Medicine. And then I told him weʼd meet back in Honolulu six months from now to just see what weʼve done in this period of time. So, Iʼm gonna stay on it and if itʼs impossible Iʼll find it out, but Iʼm gonna try.
[Here follow closing remarks.]
- Source: Johnson Library, Recordings and Transcripts, Recording of Telephone Conversation between Johnson and Nehru, Tape F66.04, Side B, PNO 4. No classification marking. This transcript was prepared by the Office of the Historian specifically for this volume.↩
- See Document 69.↩
- See Document 24.↩