Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, distinguished members of the Congress.

In January, 1967, Lyndon Johnson violated a long-standing state of the union custom.

He told the Congress and the country something most Americans didn't want to hear.

I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do.

We face more cost, more loss, and more agony.

For the end is not yet.

It was a rare moment of public candor and clarity

on the war that was ravaging his presidency

and threatening an historic domestic agenda.

Our adversary still believes, I think, tonight, that he can go on fighting longer than we can.

And longer than we and our allies will be prepared to stand up and resist.

Johnson was right about that.

The North Vietnamese did believe they could outlast the mightiest military force on the planet.

What the president could not imagine was that they would actually do so.

I'm David Brown, and from Public Radio International, this is episode five of LBJ's War,

a six-part series on how an American president bound for greatness lost his way and came to grief in a ruinous faraway war.

Our men in that area, there are nearly 500,000 now, have borne well the burden in the heat of the day.

Their efforts have deprived the communist enemy of the victory that he sought and that he expected

a year ago.

After his brief moment of truth-telling on Vietnam, LBJ has quickly reverted to the President's

traditional role as salesman-in-chief.

Here, that means putting the best possible face on a war that is proving much harder to win than anyone had expected.

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