President LBJ and Memorial Day

“Gentlemen, we are being killed on the beaches. Let us go inland and be killed.”   -General Norman Cota, Omaha Beach, the Normandy invasion, 1944.

Every year we Americans observe both Memorial Day and Veterans Day as a way to pay homage to the veterans of all of our wars — to the men and women who put their lives at risk, many of whom lost their lives, to preserve our freedoms.  With that in mind, the following true story about a past Commander-in-Chief is worth telling.  It shows that Lyndon Baines Johnson, reviled for his role in the Vietnam War (“Hey! Hey! L-B-J! How many kids did you kill today?”), had his moments of honor and a better grasp of history than is generally supposed for a so-called Texas cowboy and redneck southerner.  The story goes like this:

In 1966, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the French resistance during World War II and then‑president of France, announced that his country was pulling out of the military wing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). De Gaulle’s motives were no secret. Worried that France was seen as a second‑rate power, he wanted to free France from “American hegemony” and establish a new identity for his country.

In addition to leaving NATO, de Gaulle announced that all American troops on French soil must be evacuated. He wanted no trace of America’s military presence in France, even if those soldiers served as part of a NATO force.

This, of course, is the same de Gaulle and the same France that had been liberated during the war by a similar force of American soldiers, many thousands of whom died in the fighting.  Which is why when Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, briefed the president on the plan he would present to de Gaulle—a plan that spelled out how we would move NATO headquarters from Paris to Brussels and remove all American soldiers from France—Johnson had only one comment.

“Ask him about the cemeteries, Dean,” Johnson said to Rusk.

Quickly grasping the meaning of Johnson’s request, Rusk tried to talk him out of it but Johnson was insistent. “Ask him about the cemeteries, Dean!” he repeated, turning the request into a presidential command.

And so Rusk did. At the end of his meeting with de Gaulle, in which he explained how America would comply with de Gaulle’s orders, Rusk asked him whether his demand that all American soldiers be removed from French soil included those thousands of American GIs still buried in French cemeteries — GIs who had died fighting in France to preserve that nation’s sovereignty and freedom.

In his later autobiography Rusk recalled that de Gaulle was too embarrassed to reply.