Summary

Four-hundred thousand soldiers had been deployed to Vietnam. The president kept saying that the U.S. was winning the war but the news that Americans watched every night told a different story. The largest anti-war protest occurred on April 15th in Central Park in New York. There were 300,000 protestors. Animosity toward President Johnson and Congress was growing. Johnson largely stayed out of sight and felt like a prisoner in the White House. Westmoreland wanted more troops – up to 200,000 more – to break the stalemate and win the war. McNamara privately urged Johnson to reject the request. Johnson approved the deployment of an additional 55,000.

In March 1967 Daniel Ellsberg returned to Washington and resigned from the State Department. He shared what he’d learned in Vietnam with Walt Rostow, the President’s national security advisor who insisted that the U.S...