Rethinking LBJ...Was He That Bad?

[XT]

Since there is a thread on whether or not Bush was as bad as he's popularly thought to have been (consensus seems to indicate that 'yes' is the answer), I thought maybe we could have a discussion about another president that I believe enough time has gone by to take a fresh look. This is inspired by a recent History Channel special that focused on key turning points in American history wrt individual presidents (the presidents were FDR, LBJ and Ronnie btw...check out the series if you haven't seen it).

LBJ was president when I was a kid. I barely remember JFK as he was killed when I was essentially a baby. What I DO remember is that, at least in my family, JFK's picture sat next to Jesus on the mantle, while for LBJ there was genuine anger (and my family were and are die hard Democrats)...even rage. So, I grew up with a pretty poor impression of LBJ, mostly due to the Vietnam war.

But perhaps that's not the whole story. Watching the show on History I got a bit of a different perspective on LBJ as civil rights leader. Again, in my family, most of the credit for civil rights goes to JFK for starting the programs and getting the ball rolling, while the perception I always got was that LBJ just sort of carried on (with connotations of reluctance). However, at least according to the show, while it's true that JFK did make various attempts at civil rights and voting reforms, he did so in an almost desultory and half hearted manner because he didn't want to piss off the southern Democrat bloc of Senators, Congressmen and Governors.

At any rate, given that a sufficient amount of time has passed now to take a more dispashionate view of LBJ and his impact on history, what say you 'dopers? To paraphrase, Was LBJ That Bad?

-XT

[Hentor the Barbarian]

LBJ's Great Society would place him among the greatest of presidents, while his expansion of the war in Viet Nam would place him among the worst. I don't think I've ever heard people evaluate his overall presidency as "that bad," so I'd say no it wasn't.

Again, his domestic achievements were phenomenal, both in his ability to enact them, and the success that they have demonstrated over time. It really is amazing when you look back at what he was able to do.

And yes, LBJ was very personally invested in passing civil rights legislation.

[XT]

I don't think I've ever heard people evaluate his overall presidency as "that bad," so I'd say no it wasn't.

All I can say to this is that you obviously move in different circles than I do if you have never heard that he's 'that bad'. I've heard a lot worse than 'that bad' in my time. :p

(ETA, that said, I have to say that this show really gave me a new perspective on the man that I never had when I actually lived through his presidency and the ones that followed him...which is why I started this thread to see what others think)

-XT

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

I think he like President George W. Bush a man who tried his best and does not deserve to be so viciously condemned.

His Great Society included many workable programs but other programs encouraged (for instance) women to remain single in order to get better welfare leading to the breakdown of families in inner cities.

His efforts to save South Vietnam are admirable in the face of domestic opposition. His worst mistake was not invading North Vietnam-it would not have started World War 3 (if the Soviets had complained Johnson could easily cite the example of Hungary) and quite possibly annihilated the Vietcong bases there.

His civil rights bill were excellent.

So overall I'd list him as a good President who tried his best.

[BrainGlutton]

Cons:

1. Vietnam.

2. Totally corrupt sleazebag throughout his career.

3. Vietnam.

4. Authorized wiretapping of Martin Luther King and others.

5. Vietnam.

6. In Latin America, supported the overthrow of democratically-elected leftists such as Jao Goulart of Brazil and Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic while supporting authoritarian regimes.

7. Vietnam.

8. Vietnam.


Pros:

1. Civil Rights Act of 1964.

2. Voting Rights Act of 1965.

3. Great Society.

4. War on Poverty.

5. Medicare and Medicaid.

6. Federal funding for education.

7. Appointed Thurgood Marshall to the SCOTUS.

8. Maintained support for the Apollo program.


On balance, LBJ would be remembered today as the second-greatest POTUS of the 20th Century after FDR -- if not for Vietnam. Which, by the way, sucked the funding from his War on Poverty and made it much less successful than it might have been.

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

Cons:

1. Vietnam.

2. Totally corrupt sleazebag throughout his career.

3. Vietnam.

4. Authorized wiretapping of Martin Luther King and others.

5. Vietnam.

6. In Latin America, supported the overthrow of democratically-elected leftists such as Jao Goulart of Brazil and Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic while supporting authoritarian regimes.

7. Vietnam.

8. Vietnam.


Pros:

1. Civil Rights Act of 1964.

2. Voting Rights Act of 1965.

3. Great Society.

4. War on Poverty.

5. Medicare and Medicaid.

6. Federal funding for education.

7. Appointed Thurgood Marshall to the SCOTUS.

8. Maintained support for the Apollo program.


On balance, LBJ would be remembered today as the second-greatest POTUS of the 20th Century after FDR -- if not for Vietnam. Which, by the way, sucked the funding from his War on Poverty and made it much less successful than it might have been.

What about Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight D Eisenhower?

[kunilou]

As someone who's old enough to remember:

First off, you can't evaluate Johnson without Vietnam, just like you can't evaluate Nixon without Watergate. But if you want to talk specifically about Civil Rights, the record shows that Johnson worked for it even without Kennedy. For example, he pushed the Civil rights Act of 1957, and its follow-up in 1960. Critics say the legislation was half-hearted and Johnson's support was insincere, while his champions say that getting anything through the Senate at all was close to a miracle.

Johnson was an old-school politican, which meant he was willing to cut deals, grant and call in favors, twist arms and do whatever it took to get a bill -- any bill -- passed. He used Kennedy's death as a political tool to ram through a lot of legislation. But he grew up poor, and his support of the underpriviledged, whether sincere or coldly calculated, was at least consistent and life-long.

It was a somewhat similar situation with the space program. Johnson advocated for it while he was still in the Senate, and his support seemed sincere. Of course he also managed to put a large chunk of it in Texas -- but hey, if you can do well by doing good, why not?

I tend to take a more sympathetic view of Johnson than many of my contemporaries. But, as I said, it's impossible to evaluate his presidency without factoring in Vietnam, and that's his legacy.

[Rodgers01]

I've also never had the impression that Johnson is largely hated or even particularly disliked. Most people seem pretty dispassionate about him these days - you certainly don't hear as much about him as you do, say, FDR, JFK, Nixon, or Reagan.

From what I know of him, he strikes me as a decent-ish president.

[BrainGlutton]

What about Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight D Eisenhower?

None of their accomplishments would rank with the Great Society, if the the Great Society had been adequately funded.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Other than Vietnam, he was pretty good. The Great Society and Civil rights legislation alone put him in the "good" category, I think.

He also had the decency to at last feel guilty about Vietnam, and handwrote letters of condolence to the families of every soldier killed there under his Presidency.

[XT]

When he left office he was so reviled and so disillusioned that he essentially drank himself to death. I guess today things have changed, but at the time, at least in the circles I ran in when I was a kid, LBJ was not a very popular president at all. Think about the riots in DC and Watts, and the increasingly strident anti-war protests. Even people like MLK basically turned against him over the war. It was...ugly. Much more ugly than even people who lived through GWB can conceive I think.

-XT

[Diogenes the Cynic]

"Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

That shit actually did get to him. He had a conscience about it. There are Whitehouse tapes of Johnson expressing his misery about being trapped in Nam, and saying he knew he'd made a mistake.

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

None of their accomplishments would rank with the Great Society, if the the Great Society had been adequately funded.

Great Society actually as I mentioned above encouraged many inner city women not to marry in order to get increased welfare payments and thus contributed to inner city violence. And Truman at least helped found NATO and stopped the tidal wave of Communism-one of the greatest accomplishments in world history.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Great Society actually as I mentioned above encouraged many inner city women not to marry in order to get increased welfare payments and thus contributed to inner city violence.This is a load of right wing, propaganda bullshit.

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

This is a load of right wing, propaganda bullshit.

What a great counter-argument. :rolleyes:

[Diogenes the Cynic]

What a great counter-argument. :rolleyes:
Well, if you really want to debate it, you need to start. You are the one making a claim. You have the burden of proof. Let's see some cites and figures to back it up.

[5 time champ]

A bit off-topic- but I wish LBJ or someone like LBJ was Senate Majority Leader today.

[gonzomax]

Curtis your programming is complete.
LBJ picked his beagle up by the ears. That was a no no. It got lots of press. Who could defend him?
Most people like his social programs. But my impression was he did it to carry on for JFK.
The war was his undoing. We did not even know the Gulf of Tonken was a lie ,yet we did not trust him. His rep was a hard bargainer that knew how to control the house and senate. He got things done. Most of us knew he was enriching himself in his wifes name while in office. He came out pretty rich. She bought radio stations and invested in a start up military contractor that made a ton of money.

[Hentor the Barbarian]

What a great counter-argument. :rolleyes:No, really, your countering of the Great Society with an argument that it increased inner city crime because black women did not get married in order to get welfare is simply the worst kind of pablum. It really isn't worthy of a response, it's just that ignorant.

[Švejk]

And Truman at least helped found NATO and stopped the tidal wave of Communism-one of the greatest accomplishments in world history.

You certainly don't think very highly of world history if this is one of our greatest accomplishments. BTW, it is quite outrageous to credit HST with 'stopping the tidal wave of communism' when it had already largely come to a standstill by the end of WW II, when the Iron Curtain was drawn. Anyway, back to debating Johnson everyone!

[XT]

LBJ picked his beagle up by the ears. That was a no no. It got lots of press. Who could defend him?

I remember the beagle incident, but I don't recall it taking on quite the depth of outrage that you seem too. :p It was probably a white liberal thing, ehe?

-XT

[Paul in Qatar]

HOw could LBJ have done so much stuff in such a short time? In comparison, Clinton did nothing at all in two full terms.

Say what you will but the guy had Congress wired like a pinball machine.

[Llama Llogophile]

Curtis, I don't even know where to begin with your viewpoint on Vietnam. One of the big mistakes we made there was our almost complete lack of understanding of the country and its history - a trait I suspect you share. A lot of that (but certainly not all) was enabled by Johnson.

He increased our involvement in Vietnam in a way that was doomed to failure. What's more, he knew it as time went by and felt he couldn't do anything about it.

Not sure what you're reading on that subject, but you might start with Backfire, by Loren Baritz (http://www.amazon.com/Backfire-History-American-Culture-Vietnam/dp/0801859530).

LBJ handled certain things with mastery, and others with disastrous results. He was certainly one of the most powerful presidents in recent history, I'll say that for him.

[Snowboarder Bo]

Curtis, I don't even know where to begin with your viewpoint on Vietnam. One of the big mistakes we made there was our almost complete lack of understanding of the country and its history - a trait I suspect you share. A lot of that (but certainly not all) was enabled by Johnson.

He increased our involvement in Vietnam in a way that was doomed to failure. What's more, he knew it as time went by and felt he couldn't do anything about it.

Not sure what you're reading on that subject, but you might start with Backfire, by Loren Baritz (http://www.amazon.com/Backfire-History-American-Culture-Vietnam/dp/0801859530).

LBJ handled certain things with mastery, and others with disastrous results. He was certainly one of the most powerful presidents in recent history, I'll say that for him.

bolding mine

I thought it was very interesting in The Fog Of War (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/) when McNamara related the story of his going to Vietnam after the war.

There aren't many examples in which you bring two former enemies together, at the highest levels, and discuss what might have been. I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.

The former Foreign Minister of Vietnam, a wonderful man named Thach said, "You're totally wrong. We were fighting for our independence. You were fighting to enslave us."

We almost came to blows. That was noon on the first day.

"Do you mean to say it was not a tragedy for you, when you lost 3 million 4 hundred thousand Vietnamese killed, which on our population base is the equivalent of 27 million Americans? What did you accomplish? You didn't get any more than we were willing to give you at the beginning of the war. You could have had the whole damn thing: independence, unification."

"Mr. McNamara, You must never have read a history book. If you'd had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara, didn't you know that? Don't you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. And we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us."

cite (http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html)

[Guinastasia]

What was worse -- the beagle incident, or showing off his gall bladder scar? ;)


I'd also suggest McNamara's In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. (Yes, it's self-serving and McNamara didn't fully accept the blame he should have, but it paints a good picture of what a collossal fuck-up Vietnam was from start to finish)

And invade North Vietnam? Where the hell do you come up with this kind of bullshit, Curtis?



(Why am I reminded of MacArthur insisting we invade China during the Korean War?)

[Stink Fish Pot]

Yeah, Vietnam was a mess, and there is no way around that. It almost tore this country in two, and he was the one that built up our involvement. I'm not sure that if we even dropped the bomb, which many wanted, things would have changed much. I think we were doomed to defeat in Vietnam.

As a country, we totally missed the boat with Vietnam. We had no idea to what lengths they would go to to win. Vietnam was their home. They were willing to live in tunnels for months on end, fighting a grinding war of attrition that the US wasn't prepared for.

Looking at today's fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, it makes me wonder if we are doomed to repeat history.

Anyway, I always wondered how Johnson took the JFK assassination, and how that impacted his own presidency.

[BKReporter]

He had a talent for pushing through legislation that remains unrivaled today. Robert A. Caro's biography of him offers a good insight into this. Civil Rights for instance was a far more incendiary issue in the 1960s than HCR is today. And you can see for yourself just how successful the Democrats today have been at passing the latter. It's a damn miracle he got any race related legislation through in that era.
If you're going just by his domestic agenda, he would probably be as revered today as FDR and Lincoln. But his foreign policy was disastrous and he turned Vietnam into one big sinkhole, which ended up hurting our image in the world, as well as sucking up money that could have been used to further domestic programs.

[Voyager]

A bit off-topic- but I wish LBJ or someone like LBJ was Senate Majority Leader today.

You can say that again.

That JFK, a Brahimin from liberal Boston, supported civil rights was admirable but no big deal. That LBJ, a native of the segregated South did showed real guts. Especially because he knew full well that doing so was going to lose the Democratic party the south, which it did.

He was perhaps the most masterful politician we've had as president since - I don't know. And I graduated from high school the year he left office, and by the end he was definitely hated because of Vietnam. He clearly had his pluses and minuses.

[The Second Stone]

LBJ was a very complicated man, much like Richard Nixon, his successor. He tried to improve the lot of the lives of the poor and oppressed and had mixed success, with his lasting achievement being the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which I think includes fixes to voter disenfranchisement due to race. This is nothing to scoff at, it was a great achievement accomplished by Johnson due to his great skill at getting politicians to vote with him. The opposition was and to this day remains ferocious to these measures. He knew the Congress as perhaps only a few Americans before him did, and he was willing to martyrize JFK to get these measures done. This was the hero part of him.

The villain part was, of course, Vietnam. LBJ was damned certain he was not going to be tagged with "losing Vietnam" the same way Truman was about "losing China". Republicans had spent more than a dozen years demogoguing China being taken over by communists and the Kuomintang being booted to Taiwan. That too, continues to this day. And of course, it is bullshit. China was never ours to win or lose, and there was no way that the US could have prevented the Koumintang's fall to the communists. The Nationalists were too ineffective and corrupt to have any hope of beating Mao.

So LBJ was determined not to be on the weak end of "national defense" on this issue. But he knew it was a loser. And had he played his cards correctly, he could have done what Nixon did and had China (and Vietnam) as allies in the cold war against the Soviets. All he had to do was put as much effort into courting Ho and Mao as Nixon did with Mao later. Mao needed the US and Ho was an admirer of the US. And LBJ was smart enough to know these things. But he was afraid of domestic opposition should he not pursue the war. He probably would have been a one term president in either event, but the Vietnam war tore the country apart due to the draft and costs of the war in lives and money. And it gave us Nixon, whose administration embodied everything wrong with Johnson's policies combined with paranoia.

LBJ should have understood the hand he was dealt and improved it, not gone all in on Vietnam, a losing proposition that cost millions of lives and accomplished nothing.

[Lakai]

I'm convinced that LBJ just wasn't competent enough to handle Vietnam. Bill Moyers recently did a whole show on LBJ and Vietnam. (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11202009/watch.html) The show is tapes of LBJ struggling with the decision of whether to escalate the war or not. It shows just how much LBJ was in over his head.

Yet he was the polar opposite when came to dealing with Congress. He had the Senate by the balls and wielded power in that chamber unmatched by anyone in history.

Even despite all his corruption, if he was only judged by his domestic policy he would have been remembered a hero. You couldn't win an election back then unless you played dirty. In fact, the first time LBJ ran for the Senate he lost because he announced his vote totals from his corrupt districts too early. His opponents quickly changed the totals in their corrupt districts so that it would add up to more than what LBJ announced earlier.

He grew up dirt poor in a really poor district. When he became a Congressman he brought electricity to that district. When he became President he passed the Civil Rights Act. He and FDR probably did more than any other Presidents to help poor people. I don't think anyone one else even comes close.

[septimus]

I view LBJ with great admiration, especially since he was born without any "silver spoon." Decisions about Vietnam were difficult ... which is why it's better just not to embark on foolish wars in the first place.

... He also had the decency to at last feel guilty about Vietnam, and handwrote letters of condolence to the families of every soldier killed there under his Presidency.

Contrast this with GWB! Any sentence which tries to formulate comparisons between these two Presidents will be insanely absurd.

[tagos]

Great Society actually as I mentioned above encouraged many inner city women not to marry in order to get increased welfare payments and thus contributed to inner city violence. And Truman at least helped found NATO and stopped the tidal wave of Communism-one of the greatest accomplishments in world history.

You seriously need to learn some history before spouting off. And get some compassion.

[Merijeek]

You seriously need to learn some history before spouting off. And get some compassion.

To some people the spectre of the Welfar Queen stalking poor Lady Liberty with a garrotte is a very real thing. Saint Ronnie told them so.

-Joe

[Mr. Moto]

Are we evaluating LBJ as a historical figure, or just his presidency? Because on the subject of civil rights we should note that his record is a bit mixed - he sent Eisenhower's 1957 Civil Rights Act deliberately to committees headed by rabid segregationists to water it down before passage. He did this solely to prevent a Democratic party split.

This isn't to deny his later achievements - which cannot be denied. But the 1957 Act was a comparatively weak act in large part because of Johnson's actions.

As for the Great Society, the impact of its programs on family stability in inner cities (and in other pockets of extreme poverty like Appalachia) were noted by liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And while the corrosive effects of the "man in the house rule" can't be pinned on Johnson alone, his programs perpetuated these issues which clearly did exist (see Supreme Court case King v. Smith). This is one reason that the welfare reform of the 1990s was so desperately needed.

[E-Sabbath]

Johnson was an old-school politican, which meant he was willing to cut deals, grant and call in favors, twist arms and do whatever it took to get a bill -- any bill -- passed. He used Kennedy's death as a political tool to ram through a lot of legislation. But he grew up poor, and his support of the underpriviledged, whether sincere or coldly calculated, was at least consistent and life-long.


It is my impression that Johnson's support for civil rights was a _lot_ like Nixon's concern for the common man.
Nobody actually believed it, and he wouldn't admit it, but he wouldn't have done so damn much for it if he didn't care somewhere.
(Nixon: EPA, OSHA, various consumer rights protections, etc)

Brainglutton: I'd say Ike's interstate program did at _least_ as much as the Great Society did. A lot of people worked on the highway, still wearing their threadbare fatigues, the anecdotes go. I really wonder how much it did to avoid a depression after WWII, as the surplus manpower returned.

[E-Sabbath]

Yeah, Moto, but it _did_ get passed, and that was a big start. Man was a genius at working the Senate.

[BrainGlutton]

LBJ took the IRT
Down to Fourth Street, USA
When he got there, what did he see?
The youth of America on LSD! :)

-- Hair

[RTFirefly]

On balance, LBJ would be remembered today as the second-greatest POTUS of the 20th Century after FDR -- if not for Vietnam. Which, by the way, sucked the funding from his War on Poverty and made it much less successful than it might have been.Forty years ago, there was a humorous little book called "The Begatting of a President" retelling the politics of the Sixties in pseudo-Biblical language. The chapter titled "LBJenesis" describes how LBJ created the Great Society in six days, and on the seventh day he threw a barbecue. The chapter continues:
Still LBJ rested not from his labors but said, "Shucks, let there be an eighth day." And on the eighth day, he escalated.
That might as well be LBJ's political epitaph.

[Ravenman]

It shows just how much LBJ was in over his head. I think this is a very unfair conclusion. Consider what was at stake: staying involved in the war and continuing to lose thousands of Americans; or ending the war and facing the consequences of making the US look like a weakling against the rising power of the Communist bloc. Keep in mind that these decisions were being made just a few years after the US and USSR came THAT close to nuclear war, and at and just after the time that France left NATO's command structure. One cannot help but wonder whether pulling out of a inconsequential but costly war could have effects that would embolden the Soviets, fracture NATO, and shake the West's confidence in the US security guarantees. Looking at the situation with fifty years of hindsight of course gives one a false sense of confidence that the problems in US foreign policy were the result of a lack of competence, but I do not think that there is any president at any time in this country's history who could be considered to have been fully up to the task (whatever that means) of dealing with the decisions that LBJ had to.

We can look to other foreign policy crises, and not to be too dismissive of the high stakes in any of them, and see that good outcomes were not assured by the leadership. The Cuban Missile Crisis: in no way was JFK in full control of the situation, as McNamera states, "We just got lucky" in avoiding nuclear war. The containment doctrine after World War II: Truman was not a genius. Nor was he smart. He admitted upon taking the office that he doubted whether he was up to the job, got the country mired in an unwinnable war, too, but fortunately adopted the good advice of some subordinates (George Kennan) and avoided the bad advice of others (MacArthur). World War II: for as serious as the stakes were in supporting our allies prior to Pearl Harbor, and as difficult a domestic situation was, FDR was not faced with a dilemma of only bad options in guiding the US through the early war period.

I don't mean to absolve LBJ of his Vietnam policy. His early decisions to deepen US involvement (especially after Tonkin) essentially boxed himself in to a situation where there were no good options. The idea that some other leader could have turned the mess around is to fail to understand the lack of good options after 1964.

[Ffperson]

Well, if you really want to debate it, you need to start. You are the one making a claim. You have the burden of proof. Let's see some cites and figures to back it up.

It's well known that it is economist Thomas Sowell's contention that there are statistical measures that show black progress in education, out-of-wedlock births and income were hindered after 1964. I haven't read his books so I can't personally vouch for his findings, and who knows what would have happened if some of those programs weren't enacted. Sure, it FEELS like all the programs were the right thing to do (It feels right to me), but apparently he is a stickler for figures and that intentions are not important, but results and unintended consequences are. I'm sure he'd want the civil rights act portion though, he is black.

[BrainGlutton]

In Vietnam: The Necessary War (http://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-Necessary-War-Reinterpretation-Disastrous/dp/0684842548) (which is well worth reading for many different reasons) Michael Lind (http://www.newamerica.net/people/michael_lind) argues it was a war worth fighting even if it could not be won and even if the South Vietnamese regime was not worth fighting for -- because of the global implications. It was but one theater in the Cold War. In the '60s and '70s, the Western and Communist blocs were fighting for the allegiance of the non-aligned Third World countries; that was essentially a political battle, a battle of perceptions. It was far from clear, at the time, which side represented The Future. If the Communist side appeared stronger at a crucial moment, that might lead to a "bandwagon effect" which would swing more and more countries around to their side, success feeding on success. The Vietnam War was necessary simply to shore up American/Western credibility, to make clear we would not give up easily. You might disagree that that was strictly necessary, you might even disagree that the Cold War as a whole was worth fighting or worth winning, but it is at any rate a very well-reasoned thesis and not to be rejected out of hand.

[RTFirefly]

In Vietnam: The Necessary War (http://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-Necessary-War-Reinterpretation-Disastrous/dp/0684842548) (which is well worth reading for many different reasons) Michael Lind (http://www.newamerica.net/people/michael_lind) argues it was a war worth fighting even if it could not be won and even if the South Vietnamese regime was not worth fighting for -- because of the global implications. It was but one theater in the Cold War. In the '60s and '70s, the Western and Communist blocs were fighting for the allegiance of the non-aligned Third World countries; that was essentially a political battle, a battle of perceptions. It was far from clear, at the time, which side represented The Future. If the Communist side appeared stronger at a crucial moment, that might lead to a "bandwagon effect" which would swing more and more countries around to their side, success feeding on success. The Vietnam War was necessary simply to shore up American/Western credibility, to make clear we would not give up easily. You might disagree that that was strictly necessary, you might even disagree that the Cold War as a whole was worth fighting or worth winning, but it is at any rate a very well-reasoned thesis and not to be rejected out of hand.I'll gladly reject it out of hand, because it's an inherently self-defeating thesis.

You know why Communism could get away with looking like it represented The Future? Because, over and over again, throughout the Cold War, we were the ones supporting authoritarian strongmen like Diem, Somoza, and the Shah, which ceded to the Communists the role of supporting 'popular' insurgencies, some of which were genuinely popular, and some of which weren't. But we always put ourselves on the wrong side of that argument, even to the extent of undermining the regimes of people like Allende and Mossadegh.

In a straight-up comparison between the USA and the USSR, we were of course on the right side of history: we were great, and they were both evil and awful. But the Cold War mostly took place in proxy wars throughout the Third World, and almost never, in all those proxy wars, were we meaningfully trying to bring our freedoms to the countries whose struggles we took sides in.

By siding with Diem and Thieu in Vietnam, and siding with similar despots around the world, we conferred moral legitimacy to the Communists that they would have been unable to earn based on the lives of the people in the countries where they actually governed. They were never The Future, but we did our damnedest to give them the opportunity to make it look like they were. Vietnam was right at the heart of that effort.

[gonzomax]

I remember the beagle incident, but I don't recall it taking on quite the depth of outrage that you seem too. :p It was probably a white liberal thing, ehe?

-XT

It was huge and very important. I have 2 beagles now, so I am totally impartial.

[ralph124c]

For a Texas politician, LBJ was surprisingly cynical. He didn't give a sh*t about the thousands of deaths he caused in Vietnam. All he cared about was his "honor".
He was personally corrupt and gross (insisted on making his staff work while he was sitting on a toilet.)
He also freely admitted his corrupt senate campaign (he and Connoly's goons stuffed ballot boxes).
And steering fighter contracts (to General Dynamics in Texas) was SOP with him..not to mention the Manned Spaceflight Center (which was to have been in Cambridge, MA-LBJ had it moved to Houston).
So, in the balance, he was a corrupt and devious man, who should presently be enjoying one of the warmer regions of Hell.

[Ffperson]

Well, if you really want to debate it, you need to start. You are the one making a claim. You have the burden of proof. Let's see some cites and figures to back it up.

I'll gladly reject it out of hand, because it's an inherently self-defeating thesis.

You know why Communism could get away with looking like it represented The Future? Because, over and over again, throughout the Cold War, we were the ones supporting authoritarian strongmen like Diem, Somoza, and the Shah, which ceded to the Communists the role of supporting 'popular' insurgencies, some of which were genuinely popular, and some of which weren't. But we always put ourselves on the wrong side of that argument, even to the extent of undermining the regimes of people like Allende and Mossadegh.

In a straight-up comparison between the USA and the USSR, we were of course on the right side of history: we were great, and they were both evil and awful. But the Cold War mostly took place in proxy wars throughout the Third World, and almost never, in all those proxy wars, were we meaningfully trying to bring our freedoms to the countries whose struggles we took sides in.

By siding with Diem and Thieu in Vietnam, and siding with similar despots around the world, we conferred moral legitimacy to the Communists that they would have been unable to earn based on the lives of the people in the countries where they actually governed. They were never The Future, but we did our damnedest to give them the opportunity to make it look like they were. Vietnam was right at the heart of that effort.

I don't think the goal of US foreign policy at any time was to promote "freedom" and "democracy" abroad, people outside of the US aren't naive to believe that sort of rhetoric. The goal was to stop communism/socialism, and keep political stability. (keep friendly dictators in power). We supported our dictators, They supported theirs (Cuba, Eastern Bloc...) They overthrew our dictators with communist revolutionary rhetoric we overthrew theirs with the CIA. (maybe their KGB operations didn't get media criticism because they don't live in a free society)

Korea worked out eventually... Vietnam didn't... not sure why though.

[BrainGlutton]

And steering fighter contracts (to General Dynamics in Texas) was SOP with him..not to mention the Manned Spaceflight Center (which was to have been in Cambridge, MA-LBJ had it moved to Houston).

Porkbarrel either way . . . Why did nobody propose putting it at Cape Kennedy, where the spaceships were launched from?

[Algher]

LBJ gets no love in our house. He sent my FIL to Vietnam, and he tried to kill my father with crony contracts on the F4. For his escalation of Vietnam and incompetency in managing it - he can burn in hell.

Some aspects of the Great Society were poorly thought out and planned for. I consider that to be more of a partisan battle that can be fought elsewhere.

[Mr. Moto]

Porkbarrel either way . . . Why did nobody propose putting it at Cape Kennedy, where the spaceships were launched from?

Nitpick - while it is the Kennedy Space Center, it hasn't been Cape Kennedy since 1973. At that time it properly reverted to the historical name of Cape Canaveral.

The Straight Dope article on this topic. (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/613/why-did-they-change-the-name-of-cape-kennedy-back-to-cape-canaveral)

[Mr. Moto]

Porkbarrel either way . . . Why did nobody propose putting it at Cape Kennedy, where the spaceships were launched from?

Why is Basic Training generally at a different base than the one to which a soldier is eventually assigned?

Houston is a large facility that includes a lot more than just manned spacecraft mission control - and NASA has other facilities as well handling other jobs.

[RTFirefly]

I don't think the goal of US foreign policy at any time was to promote "freedom" and "democracy" abroad, people outside of the US aren't naive to believe that sort of rhetoric. The goal was to stop communism/socialism,Well, sure. But if the means you choose for stopping communism turns out to be an accelerant for communist-backed insurgencies, then your means and your goal aren't matching up.
and keep political stability. (keep friendly dictators in power).This seemed to be our true priority, far too often during the Cold War. It was pretty obvious that we didn't give a good goddamn about how things worked out for the people living in the countries whose strongmen we supported. Whether the communists did or not can be debated, but even if they didn't, we let them support the insurgencies that could at least claim to care. We supported our dictators, They supported theirs (Cuba, Eastern Bloc...) The problem here is that after the very early days of the Cold War, Europe wasn't a battleground anymore: it was static. The rest of the Cold War was fought in the Third World. And there, the Communists were largely supporting insurgencies, or Fidel. And Castro's Cuba was always a better argument for Communism than Americans gave it credit for, while Batista was just another corrupt Latin American strongman.

They overthrew our dictators with communist revolutionary rhetoric we overthrew theirs with the CIA. (maybe their KGB operations didn't get media criticism because they don't live in a free society)Well, which of their dictators did we overthrow with the CIA? Allende and Mossadegh were neither dictators nor 'theirs.' They were not our puppets, but we could have at least been their allies. Except we didn't.

Korea worked out eventually... Vietnam didn't... not sure why though.Time is one factor. South Korea was a repressive dictatorship for 35 years after the end of the Korean War. 35 years after the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnam is a repressive dictatorship.

[BrainGlutton]

35 years after the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnam is a repressive dictatorship.

It is . . . Like China, however, it is not quite so Communist as it used to be.

In this thread (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=422789) from 2007, the only Vietnamese (not Vietnamese-American, but living in Vietnam) Doper I've ever seen, Geekmustnotdie, expressed (at posts #28 and #59) general satisfaction with the government, and not the slightest wish the U.S. forces had stayed in the country a day longer.

[Chen019]

How much responsibility did he have for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965? While well intended, the unintended consequence is that California is sliding into bankruptcy. Also, it has actually hurt african americans when LBJ had hoped to help them with other programmes.

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

Well, if you really want to debate it, you need to start. You are the one making a claim. You have the burden of proof. Let's see some cites and figures to back it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society

Conservative economist Thomas Sowell argues that the Great Society programs only contributed to the destruction of African American families, saying "the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life." [14] Professor William L. Anderson also criticized the War on Poverty, noting the increase of dependency on the government as being harmful to the lower classes.[15]

You certainly don't think very highly of world history if this is one of our greatest accomplishments. BTW, it is quite outrageous to credit HST with 'stopping the tidal wave of communism' when it had already largely come to a standstill by the end of WW II, when the Iron Curtain was drawn. Anyway, back to debating Johnson everyone!

No it did not:

1. In Greece a civil war broke out between the Communists and the anti-Communists-after Britain withdrew Truman sent American aid saving the anti-Communists.

2. In the Korean War despite public opposition Truman sent troops and saved the Republic of Korea.

3. In Germany Stalin tried to make the Free World surrender West Berlin by blockading it-Truman oversaw the Berlin Airlift.

Curtis, I don't even know where to begin with your viewpoint on Vietnam. One of the big mistakes we made there was our almost complete lack of understanding of the country and its history - a trait I suspect you share. A lot of that (but certainly not all) was enabled by Johnson.

He increased our involvement in Vietnam in a way that was doomed to failure. What's more, he knew it as time went by and felt he couldn't do anything about it.

Not sure what you're reading on that subject, but you might start with Backfire, by Loren Baritz (http://www.amazon.com/Backfire-History-American-Culture-Vietnam/dp/0801859530).

LBJ handled certain things with mastery, and others with disastrous results. He was certainly one of the most powerful presidents in recent history, I'll say that for him.

And had President Johnson been more aggressive it might have worked. South Vietnam did survive with heavy US aid until Congress more or less cut off funding for South Vietnam.

What was worse -- the beagle incident, or showing off his gall bladder scar? ;)


I'd also suggest McNamara's In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. (Yes, it's self-serving and McNamara didn't fully accept the blame he should have, but it paints a good picture of what a collossal fuck-up Vietnam was from start to finish)

And invade North Vietnam? Where the hell do you come up with this kind of bullshit, Curtis?



(Why am I reminded of MacArthur insisting we invade China during the Korean War?)

Invading North Vietnam would not have started World War 3!


Looking at today's fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, it makes me wonder if we are doomed to repeat history.



Thankfully we seem to be winning in Iraq and Afghanistan has yet to divide us like Vietnam.

You can say that again.

That JFK, a Brahimin from liberal Boston,

Minor nitpick here: Boston Brahmins refer to WASP Bostonians (such as the Adamses)



The villain part was, of course, Vietnam. LBJ was damned certain he was not going to be tagged with "losing Vietnam" the same way Truman was about "losing China". Republicans had spent more than a dozen years demogoguing China being taken over by communists and the Kuomintang being booted to Taiwan. That too, continues to this day. And of course, it is bullshit. China was never ours to win or lose, and there was no way that the US could have prevented the Koumintang's fall to the communists. The Nationalists were too ineffective and corrupt to have any hope of beating Mao.



Actually Chiang Kei-Sheik was on the brink of crushing the Communists in Manchuria when George Marshall forced them to negotiate instead.

HOw could LBJ have done so much stuff in such a short time? In comparison, Clinton did nothing at all in two full terms.

Say what you will but the guy had Congress wired like a pinball machine.

I'll have to defend Bill Clinton there-he DID accomplish some good: comprehensive welfare reform and he intervened in the Balkans to prevent the mass murders and ethnic cleansing there.

It is . . . Like China, however, it is not quite so Communist as it used to be.

In this thread (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=422789) from 2007, the only Vietnamese (not Vietnamese-American, but living in Vietnam) Doper I've ever seen, Geekmustnotdie, expressed (at posts #28 and #59) general satisfaction with the government, and not the slightest wish the U.S. forces had stayed in the country a day longer.

Of course-he is a communist (or at least someone sympathetic to it)-but I don't blame him. Considering Vietnam is a dictatorship you may not want to criticize the government.

[Ffperson]

Well, sure. But if the means you choose for stopping communism turns out to be an accelerant for communist-backed insurgencies, then your means and your goal aren't matching up.
This seemed to be our true priority, far too often during the Cold War. It was pretty obvious that we didn't give a good goddamn about how things worked out for the people living in the countries whose strongmen we supported. Whether the communists did or not can be debated, but even if they didn't, we let them support the insurgencies that could at least claim to care. The problem here is that after the very early days of the Cold War, Europe wasn't a battleground anymore: it was static. The rest of the Cold War was fought in the Third World. And there, the Communists were largely supporting insurgencies, or Fidel. And Castro's Cuba was always a better argument for Communism than Americans gave it credit for, while Batista was just another corrupt Latin American strongman.

Well, which of their dictators did we overthrow with the CIA? Allende and Mossadegh were neither dictators nor 'theirs.' They were not our puppets, but we could have at least been their allies. Except we didn't.

Time is one factor. South Korea was a repressive dictatorship for 35 years after the end of the Korean War. 35 years after the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnam is a repressive dictatorship.

Eastern Europe did have its rebeliions, Hungary and Czech, we would have supported them if we could like we did in Afghanistan.

CIA went overboard with the overthrows with any dictator suspected of socialist leanings, probably a result of cold war paranoia. CIA attempted plenty of well-known coups in SE Asia, Latin America, Africa, Middle East.

I think people will only protest for the vote and free elections (Gahndi, Polish guy in 80's, Tienamen Square, Iran today). People only will pick up guns and go che guevara if they get to be in charge at the end. If there are foriegn troops everybody will take up arms (Vietnam, Iraq)

I think the difference in Vietnam and Korea, is that the Vietnamese kicked the French out so their insurgent movement was stronger. If South Korean communist movement was more experienced, organized and armed from kicking out the Japanese then the same would have happened in Korea. Vietnam had the template from China's Mao.

[appleciders]

Chiming in- His civil rights work was stellar. His foreign work (Vietnam) was abysmal. It's a wash, and he'll be ranked right in the middle because of it.

[BrainGlutton]

How much responsibility did he have for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965? While well intended, the unintended consequence is that California is sliding into bankruptcy.

:rolleyes:

1) Care to make an argument, as to that cause-effect relationship?

2) Bear in mind that the immigration regime at that time was the national-origins-quota system of the Immigration Act of 1924, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924) which was blatantly racist in intention and effect, limiting substantial immigration to Europeans with the avowed aim of preserving America's character as a white man's country. You won't defend that, I hope, and "unintended consequences" be damned. Justice often has costs. The abolition of slavery arguably was devastating to the economy and society of the South; that doesn't mean it was worth keeping.

Also, it has actually hurt african americans when LBJ had hoped to help them with other programmes.

How?

[Llama Llogophile]

And had President Johnson been more aggressive it might have worked. South Vietnam did survive with heavy US aid until Congress more or less cut off funding for South Vietnam.


Again, I'm nearly shocked into silence. Johnson ramped things up so heavily in Vietnam, the only way we could have been more aggressive was by using nukes. This would have accomplished nothing strategically or tactically, and worsened the entire geopolitical situation.

You've said you're interested in becoming a politician - well then learn something from history and the mistakes of others. The U.S. involvement in Vietnam was run by people who espoused the same theories as your namesake. They saw every problem as a nail, so their only solution was a hammer. And I'll use a word to describe that thinking which I rarely use in life: Stupid.

What they did was stupid, and we've had decades to analyze why. Yet you think we weren't aggressive enough. I don't care how smart you think you are - that's just stupid. You're the first person who has gotten me to use that word in years.

You've said in other threads that you consider yourself quite intelligent. Robert McNamara was quite a smart man too. He worked with Curtis LeMay in WWII - or didn't you know that? But he made grievous errors in policy, particularly with regard to Vietnam. McNamara has admitted his errors, and we're fortunate to learn from them. Will you be as brave?

Read the Baritz book I suggested. You'll see that the U.S. didn't bring a knife to a gunfight in Vietnam. We brought a sack of unsuitable weapons to a place we had only vaguely heard about, and had no idea how many people we were up against. The U.S. acted stupidly, and refusing to learn how dooms us to more stupidity.

If you're going to go into politics, learn from the mistakes of people like Johnson and McNamara.

[XT]

Again, I'm nearly shocked into silence. Johnson ramped things up so heavily in Vietnam, the only way we could have been more aggressive was by using nukes. This would have accomplished nothing strategically or tactically, and worsened the entire geopolitical situation.

I'm really trying to avoid the discussion about Vietnam here, but this is simply not true. Whether it would have been a good idea or not is debatable, but there were most certainly a wide range of options that Johnson COULD have taken that would have been well short of using nuclear weapons. For instance, he COULD order a full scale invasion of the North. Or a limited scale invasion. Or deep strike raids with special forces. Or a complete land and sea blockade.

Whether or not these would have been good things is certainly debatable (I think they would not have been, FWIW), but I'm fairly sure that they could have certainly accomplished quite a bit both tactically and strategically. For instance, it would have been rather hard for the North to continue to support operations and guerrilla groups in the South if they were attempting to fend off an armored division pushing into Ho Chi Minh City or Marines in Haiphong. And had this pushed the Russians and/or the Chinese into getting into the act, that would CERTAINLY have changed the strategic and tactical picture.

For some reason people today (as well as people of my generation who lived through the war) think that the North Vietnamese were almost magical beings who couldn't lose. This was definitely not the case. They came within a hairs breath of losing several times, and the conflict could have gone either way...it was all a matter of who would flinch first and how long the funding would hold out. If the US was willing to pay the price in blood and treasure and stay there we could almost certainly have 'won' in the same way we 'won' in Korea...i.e. there would be a South Vietnam (probably being propped up by the US) and a North Vietnam, with a level of hostility and even low level conflict continuing to this day.

-XT

[Llama Llogophile]

I'm really trying to avoid the discussion about Vietnam here, but this is simply not true. Whether it would have been a good idea or not is debatable, but there were most certainly a wide range of options that Johnson COULD have taken that would have been well short of using nuclear weapons. For instance, he COULD order a full scale invasion of the North. Or a limited scale invasion. Or deep strike raids with special forces. Or a complete land and sea blockade.

Whether or not these would have been good things is certainly debatable (I think they would not have been, FWIW), but I'm fairly sure that they could have certainly accomplished quite a bit both tactically and strategically[b]. For instance, it would have been rather hard for the North to continue to support operations and guerrilla groups in the South if they were attempting to fend off an armored division pushing into Ho Chi Minh City or Marines in Haiphong. And had this pushed the Russians and/or the Chinese into getting into the act, that would CERTAINLY have changed the strategic and tactical picture.

[b]For some reason people today (as well as people of my generation who lived through the war) think that the North Vietnamese were almost magical beings who couldn't lose. This was definitely not the case. They came within a hairs breath of losing several times, and the conflict could have gone either way...it was all a matter of who would flinch first and how long the funding would hold out. If the US was willing to pay the price in blood and treasure and stay there we could almost certainly have 'won' in the same way we 'won' in Korea...i.e. there would be a South Vietnam (probably being propped up by the US) and a North Vietnam, with a level of hostility and even low level conflict continuing to this day.

-XT

Bolding mine. I don't think we could have done much more strategically or tactically, and not because of the magical properties of the Vietnamese.

For one, I think the surroundings were such that simply driving an armored division into the north would have been a lot tougher than it sounds. I suppose it would have been possible, but the losses would have been unacceptable. Heck, they were unacceptable without doing that.

But that's the sort of "aggressiveness" that I think wouldn't have gotten us anywhere but into a deeper hole. Our military was just not set up for combat in Vietnam. The only time our forces really got to fight with preferred tactics was in the battle of Hue, and that was no picnic.

[XT]

Let me preface this by clearly saying that I don't think we should ever have been in Vietnam in the first place, and that we were foolish in the extreme to side with the French (the FRENCH!! Sheesh) over the Vietnamese who had been our allies during WWII.

For one, I think the surroundings were such that simply driving an armored division into the north would have been a lot tougher than it sounds. I suppose it would have been possible, but the losses would have been unacceptable. Heck, they were unacceptable without doing that.

With the exception of the Soviet Union, the US was THE preeminent military during this period. While driving a single armored division into the North would probably not have worked, the US could certainly have invaded North Vietnam fairly easily had we wanted too (and leaving aside the question of what the Russians and Chinese might have done). There was, simply put, nothing the North Vietnamese could have done to stop us in a set piece battle such as this would have been. I doubt it would have even been all that costly in terms of lives...during the initial invasion.

Of course, holding North Vietnam would have been a different proposition. It would have been very similar to how things worked out in Iraq except that the North Vietnamese would have had support from one super power (Russia) and one regional power (China) at a minimum...so, it would have been costly and bloody. It would have boiled down to...how badly did we want to be there? If we REALLY wanted to stay then we would have soaked up the causalities and the cost and we would have stayed for exactly as long as the American people would tolerate the costs (which, depending on when this fictitious invasion might have happened, could have been measured in days or weeks, at best).

But that's the sort of "aggressiveness" that I think wouldn't have gotten us anywhere but into a deeper hole

Couldn't agree more. But there is a big difference between whether we COULD have done something and whether we SHOULD have done something. We most certainly COULD have invaded North Vietnam, for instance, and there was literally nothing the North could have done to stop us. Russia COULD have done something to stop us, of course, and China COULD have made things difficult, but North Vietnam, regardless of how brave and resolute it's fighters were, could not have prevented it. Just like the Iraqi's couldn't prevent it when we invaded their country, and the Afghans couldn't prevent us from invading them either. All they could do is hurt us, and possibly make things hard enough that eventually the public back home threw in the towel and screamed to bring the troops home. Which is what ultimately happened in Vietnam and almost happened in Iraq (and still might) and Afghanistan.

. Our military was just not set up for combat in Vietnam.

No, it wasn't...which didn't prevent us from winning most if not all of the major confrontations, and wouldn't have prevented us in the slightest from winning a conventional offensive in the North, had we chosen to go that route. During the years we were in Vietnam, as unprepared and with a conscript army, we lost something like 50,000 troops, while the Vietnamese lost over a million, many of them hardened and seasoned fighters, masters of guerrilla warfare...and this while the US stayed mainly in a defensive posture, at least on the ground, and fought in a way that was least favorable to our military strengths. If, early on, we had gone for a more conventional strategy of invasion (and assuming it didn't end in the entire world being a large smoking nuclear ash heap), we would have probably lost FEWER troops than we ultimately lost in over a decade of defensive warfare.


Anyway, I don't want to really re-fight the Vietnam war, especially since I wish to hell we'd never even been involved there at all, so I'll leave it at that.

-XT

[Clothahump]

For a Texas politician, LBJ was surprisingly cynical. He didn't give a sh*t about the thousands of deaths he caused in Vietnam. All he cared about was his "honor".
He was personally corrupt and gross (insisted on making his staff work while he was sitting on a toilet.)
He also freely admitted his corrupt senate campaign (he and Connoly's goons stuffed ballot boxes).
And steering fighter contracts (to General Dynamics in Texas) was SOP with him..not to mention the Manned Spaceflight Center (which was to have been in Cambridge, MA-LBJ had it moved to Houston).
So, in the balance, he was a corrupt and devious man, who should presently be enjoying one of the warmer regions of Hell.

You put it better than I would have.

LBJ was a thief on a grandiose scale. He was popular because he spread it around. You hung with LBJ, you made money.

There's a reason why Texans used to crack jokes like this:

Did you hear about the disaster at the LBJ ranch? Someone left a gate open and all the cows went home.

[Bridget Burke]

You put it better than I would have.

LBJ was a thief on a grandiose scale. He was popular because he spread it around. You hung with LBJ, you made money.

There's a reason why Texans used to crack jokes like this:

Did you hear about the disaster at the LBJ ranch? Someone left a gate open and all the cows went home.

Yeah, the racists never did forgive LBJ for pushing through Civil Rights....

[RTFirefly]

And had President Johnson been more aggressive it might have worked. South Vietnam did survive with heavy US aid until Congress more or less cut off funding for South Vietnam. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#Exit_of_the_Americans:_1973.E2.80.931975):
Gerald Ford took over as U.S. president on 9 August 1974 after President Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal. At this time, Congress cut financial aid to South Vietnam from $1 billion a year to $700 million. The U.S. midterm elections in 1974 brought in a new Congress dominated by Democrats who were even more determined to confront the president on the war. Congress immediately voted in restrictions on funding and military activities to be phased in through 1975 and to culminate in a total cutoff of funding in 1976.Which totally explains how the North Vietnamese regular army met essentially no resistance as it marched south to Saigon in the spring of 1975.


Thankfully we seem to be winning in IraqDefine 'winning.' I mean, we could turn Iraq into a huge crater, so we can always 'win' in a strict 'we're living, they're not' sense. But success has to be related to goals and aims. What were our goals, to what extent have we achieved them, at what cost, and is that cost reasonable?

Actually Chiang Kei-Sheik was on the brink of crushing the Communists in Manchuria when George Marshall forced them to negotiate instead. Uh-huh. Which reminds me of this amusing story (http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20050919/NEWS/509190434?Title=Opponents-beware-when-Gov-Bush-unleashes-Chang-).

[scabpicker]

He was from my state, and we are a little biased toward the natives, but I am gonna chime in anyway.

He was a man and a president with honorable dreams and aims, and all of the necessary skills to have them implemented, but was ruined by his fears of what his enemies would say about him. It's the classic failing of a politician, I suppose. Thinking about him and his presidency has brought me to tears, and I wasn't even alive until he was out of office.

Would Goldwater have continued his mistakes? I don't know, Nixon did. It's difficult to say whether that makes him a good or bad president, which probably means he ends up being an average president in a world where the alternatives aren't known. He was certainly better than most that have been offered for the position in my lifetime, and better than the majority that held the office during that time.

[foolsguinea]

LBJ's Great Society would place him among the greatest of presidents, while his expansion of the war in Viet Nam would place him among the worst. I don't think I've ever heard people evaluate his overall presidency as "that bad," so I'd say no it wasn't.

Again, his domestic achievements were phenomenal, both in his ability to enact them, and the success that they have demonstrated over time. It really is amazing when you look back at what he was able to do.

And yes, LBJ was very personally invested in passing civil rights legislation.This. A man of gigantic melancholies and gigantic...accomplishments.

The war was a gigantic way of following on the misguided foreign policy of adventurism, assassination, & anti-Communist interventionism which he most definitely shared with JFK. Remember that JFK had tried to assassinate Fidel Castro, & a Castro sympathizer assassinated him.

Really, the romanticization of JFK is amusing. Who knows what we'd think of him if he'd lived to oversee the Vietnam fiasco?

LBJ is a case of a lot of good & a lot of bad in one. Some of the bad lived after him longer than the good, but enough of the good stuck to really change the country.

But it's so tempting to credit the good to people like MLKjr, RFK, & "random hippie kid I used to be," even though they were all out of power. LBJ did the hard work of a politician, where many politicians would rather stick head under pillows & hope all the noise would just go away.

[BrainGlutton]

The war was a gigantic way of following on the misguided foreign policy of adventurism, assassination, & anti-Communist interventionism which he most definitely shared with JFK.

And with Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.

[ralph124c]

You put it better than I would have.

LBJ was a thief on a grandiose scale. He was popular because he spread it around. You hung with LBJ, you made money.

There's a reason why Texans used to crack jokes like this:

Did you hear about the disaster at the LBJ ranch? Someone left a gate open and all the cows went home.

You are right about LBJ's thievery. It was estimated that at the end of his first senatorial campaign, LBJ had less than $1000 to his name.
By the time he became president, LBJ was a multi-millionaire!
how did he do it? He got to be head of the senate communications committee, and received copious bribes from people who wanted radio and TV station licenses.
He was also involved with a slippery chap named Billy Sol Estes-a swindler and thief who bilked investors out of millions.
It was also alleged, that the Vietnam War provided huge contracts to his businessmen friends, who willingly "kicked back" money to Johnson.
The man was thoroughly corrupt, and left a stench wherever he went.:(

[BrainGlutton]

You are right about LBJ's thievery. It was estimated that at the end of his first senatorial campaign, LBJ had less than $1000 to his name.
By the time he became president, LBJ was a multi-millionaire!
how did he do it? He got to be head of the senate communications committee, and received copious bribes from people who wanted radio and TV station licenses.
He was also involved with a slippery chap named Billy Sol Estes-a swindler and thief who bilked investors out of millions.
It was also alleged, that the Vietnam War provided huge contracts to his businessmen friends, who willingly "kicked back" money to Johnson.
The man was thoroughly corrupt, and left a stench wherever he went.:(

In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's recent novel Escape from Hell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Hell_(novel)) (sequel to Inferno), LBJ is consigned to the boiling-pitch Pit of the Grafters.

J. Edgar Hoover is assigned to the same bolgia, but he gets to be an apprentice demon, under the name of Pink Claw.

[Perciful]

Great Society actually as I mentioned above encouraged many inner city women not to marry in order to get increased welfare payments and thus contributed to inner city violence. And Truman at least helped found NATO and stopped the tidal wave of Communism-one of the greatest accomplishments in world history.

The Great Society built those lovely projects for the welfare Mom's to live in. He hoped it would lower poverty but it actually increased it. He created the ghetto's and the absentee fathers who were not allowed to live with the women and children so those kids went out and got pregnant and got their own apartment in the same project. He meant well with the program but it was a flop.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. He wanted to help the poor but you need to give them a hand up not a hand out.

[kunilou]

Great Society actually as I mentioned above encouraged many inner city women not to marry in order to get increased welfare payments and thus contributed to inner city violence. .

The Great Society built those lovely projects for the welfare Mom's to live in. He hoped it would lower poverty but it actually increased it.

It's time we put this to rest. (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov2.html)

Percentage of all blacks below the poverty level:
1959 -- 55.1%
1966 -- 41.8%
1969 -- 32.2%
The highest percentage after that was 35.7% in 1983 (under Reagan.)

Blacks in families with female householder, no husband present, below the poverty level
1959 -- 70.6%
1966 -- 65.3%
1969 -- 58.2%
1970 -- 58.8%
The highest percentage after that was 58.8% in 1982 (again, under Reagan.)

By the way, the data also show that the number of people in white families headed by a female is increasing at a faster rate than the number of people in black families headed by a female.

Heckman and LaFontaine (http://ftp.iza.org/dp3216.pdf) have charged that overall high school graduation figures have been inflated, but even their own data show that the percentage of black males with a high school diploma (not a GED) has increased since the 1960s.

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#Exit_of_the_Americans:_1973.E2.80.931975):
Which totally explains how the North Vietnamese regular army met essentially no resistance as it marched south to Saigon in the spring of 1975.

According to the same article:

On 13 December 1974, North Vietnamese forces attacked Route 14 in Phuoc Long Province. Phuoc Binh, the provincial capital, fell on 6 January 1975. Ford desperately asked Congress for funds to assist and re-supply the South before it was overrun. Congress refused. The fall of Phuoc Binh and the lack of an American response left the South Vietnamese elite demoralized and corruption grew rampant.

And President Thieu:

At the time of the peace agreement the United States agreed to replace equipment on a one-by-one basis.But the United States did not keep its word. Is an American's word reliable these days?...The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom and it was in the same fight that the United States lost 50,000 of its young men.

Define 'winning.' I mean, we could turn Iraq into a huge crater, so we can always 'win' in a strict 'we're living, they're not' sense. But success has to be related to goals and aims. What were our goals, to what extent have we achieved them, at what cost, and is that cost reasonable?


Our goals were to stabilize and democratize Iraq, we have acheived that quite well, and the casualties have been in my opinion reasonable. Had we not invaded Iraq and Saddam had died or been overthrown there would have been civil war anyways.

Uh-huh. Which reminds me of this amusing story (http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20050919/NEWS/509190434?Title=Opponents-beware-when-Gov-Bush-unleashes-Chang-).

Which does not make what I said any less true.

It's time we put this to rest. (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov2.html)

Percentage of all blacks below the poverty level:
1959 -- 55.1%
1966 -- 41.8%
1969 -- 32.2%
The highest percentage after that was 35.7% in 1983 (under Reagan.)

Blacks in families with female householder, no husband present, below the poverty level
1959 -- 70.6%
1966 -- 65.3%
1969 -- 58.2%
1970 -- 58.8%
The highest percentage after that was 58.8% in 1982 (again, under Reagan.)

By the way, the data also show that the number of people in white families headed by a female is increasing at a faster rate than the number of people in black families headed by a female.

Heckman and LaFontaine (http://ftp.iza.org/dp3216.pdf) have charged that overall high school graduation figures have been inflated, but even their own data show that the percentage of black males with a high school diploma (not a GED) has increased since the 1960s.

It was under the Reagan administration, yes, but it was due to the welfare programs of Johnson. Plus what of lower class (but not poor as in below the poverty line) black families?

[Perciful]

It's time we put this to rest. (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov2.html)

Percentage of all blacks below the poverty level:
1959 -- 55.1%
1966 -- 41.8%
1969 -- 32.2%
The highest percentage after that was 35.7% in 1983 (under Reagan.)

Blacks in families with female householder, no husband present, below the poverty level
1959 -- 70.6%
1966 -- 65.3%
1969 -- 58.2%
1970 -- 58.8%
The highest percentage after that was 58.8% in 1982 (again, under Reagan.)

By the way, the data also show that the number of people in white families headed by a female is increasing at a faster rate than the number of people in black families headed by a female.

Heckman and LaFontaine (http://ftp.iza.org/dp3216.pdf) have charged that overall high school graduation figures have been inflated, but even their own data show that the percentage of black males with a high school diploma (not a GED) has increased since the 1960s.





The legacies of the Great Society From Wikpedia

The War on Poverty
Interpretations of the War on Poverty remain controversial to American conservatives. The Office of Economic Opportunity was dismantled by the Nixon and Ford administrations, largely by transferring poverty programs to other government departments. Funding for many of these programs were further cut in President Ronald Reagan's first budget in 1981.

Alan Brinkley has suggested that "the gap between the expansive intentions of the War on Poverty and its relatively modest achievements fueled later conservative arguments that government is not an appropriate vehicle for solving social problems."The poverty programs were heavily criticized by conservatives like Charles Murray, who denounced them in his 1984 book Losing Ground as being ineffective and creating an underclass of lazy citizens. One of Johnson's aides Joseph A. Califano, Jr. has countered that "from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century." The percentage of African Americans below the poverty line dropped from 55 percent in 1960 to 27 percent in 1968.

Conservative economist Thomas Sowell argues that the Great Society programs only contributed to the destruction of African American families, saying "the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life." Professor William L. Anderson also criticized the War on Poverty, noting the increase of dependency on the government as being harmful to the lower classes.

[Little Nemo]

Johnson had some serious flaws. He really was a scumbag in his personal life - one of the most dishonest Presidents we've ever had. And he did escalate the war in Vietnam. He deserves all the criticism he gets for these things.

He doesn't really deserve the criticism he gets for not being John Kennedy. Too many of Kennedy loyalists hated Johnson irrationally in direct connection to how much they loved the Kennedys irrationally.

But to give Johnson his due, he made huge strides on civil rights. And probably nobody else could have done what he did. He was the right man in the right place with the ability and the willpower to move things forward. Too many people nowadays think racial progress was inevitable but it wasn't - another President might have just made some token efforts and let the "old ways" go on for another hundred years. So on the issue of race, Johnson stands next to Lincoln.

[Perciful]

This. A man of gigantic melancholies and gigantic...accomplishments.

The war was a gigantic way of following on the misguided foreign policy of adventurism, assassination, & anti-Communist interventionism which he most definitely shared with JFK. Remember that JFK had tried to assassinate Fidel Castro, & a Castro sympathizer assassinated him.

Really, the romanticization of JFK is amusing. Who knows what we'd think of him if he'd lived to oversee the Vietnam fiasco?

LBJ is a case of a lot of good & a lot of bad in one. Some of the bad lived after him longer than the good, but enough of the good stuck to really change the country.

But it's so tempting to credit the good to people like MLKjr, RFK, & "random hippie kid I used to be," even though they were all out of power. LBJ did the hard work of a politician, where many politicians would rather stick head under pillows & hope all the noise would just go away.

LBJ cried and was in therapy. He was melancholy for good reason. He died within a few years of leaving office probably of a guilty conscience. I don't know where you get your info but JFK was not assassinated by a Castro sympathizer. Castro himself would tell you that! JFK was ending the Vietnam war and preparing to send the troops home. After his murder LBJ reversed Kennedy's decision to end the war and tore up the documents. So there would not have been any Vietnam disaster had Kennedy lived. I would have liked to see him live and see what he would have done for our country. There is still a lot of unanswered questions we may never know. My childhood in the 70's was greatly affected by the Vietnam War on the news every night. It was very depressing. War has been a long drawn out affair ever since.

JFK and LBJ were two totally different men with very different ideas on running the country.

[ralph124c]

This disaster is estimated to have consumed some $3,000,000,000,000!
If the money had simply been given to every person adjudged "poor" in 1964, every one of these people would be a millionaire.
And now, we are stuck with all of these Federal agencies and programs, still costing us huge amounts of money.
The povery industry has been VERY good for a lot of people-one wonders how this country would be, had LBJ never come up with this boondoggle.

[Little Nemo]

LBJ cried and was in therapy. He was melancholy for good reason. He died within a few years of leaving office probably of a guilty conscience. I don't know where you get your info but JFK was not assassinated by a Castro sympathizer. Castro himself would tell you that! JFK was ending the Vietnam war and preparing to send the troops home. After his murder LBJ reversed Kennedy's decision to end the war and tore up the documents. So there would not have been any Vietnam disaster had Kennedy lived. I would have liked to see him live and see what he would have done for our country. There is still a lot of unanswered questions we may never know. My childhood in the 70's was greatly affected by the Vietnam War on the news every night. It was very depressing. War has been a long drawn out affair ever since.

JFK and LBJ were two totally different men with very different ideas on running the country.Not sure what you're saying on the Kennedy assassination. Do you believe Oswald wasn't the assassin or are you disputing his Castro sympathies?

I'm also wondering what your evidence is that Kennedy was going to withdraw from Vietnam. Sure he said things that might have indicated that. But he also said a lot of things that indicated he was willing to escalate the war. But talk is cheap so I look at his actions: Kennedy kept increasing the American presense in Vietnam throughout his term and never initiated any plans to withdraw.

I think there's a parallel here with Vietnam and civil rights. Kennedy sort of edged around these issues during his lifetime. After he was killed, Johnson took over and implemented the things Kennedy had talked about - which was good on civil rights but bad on Vietnam.

[Susanann]

We did not even know the Gulf of Tonken was a lie .

Yes we did, some of us.

Nobody with half a brain would think that a small little armed Vietnamese PT boat would attack 2 United States Navy destroyers back in 1964.

Nor did it make any sense even at the time to have a Vietnam War in retribution for that insignificant attack which did not cause any damage to our destroyers.

All of us vietnam war protesters at the time knew the whole Tonkin Bay attack and War Resolution was a sham, a lie, and a poor excuse to go to war.

[Susanann]

There are Whitehouse tapes of Johnson expressing his misery about being trapped in Nam, and saying he knew he'd made a mistake.

And the worst part is, that he knew it was a mistake, he knew he could not win it, he knew he had no plan to win it, he lied about it to the American people, he knew the senseless Vietnam war would undo all the other good things that he had done or tried to do, and yet he went ahead and kept making war in Vietnam and brutally killing hundreds of thousands of vietnamese civilians and tens of thousands of American boys anyways.

Yes, LBJ WAS!!!!!!! that bad!...........and lots of us knew he was bad....he was a very bad man.

[Susanann]

"Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

.


LBJ's theme song.

[Susanann]

On balance, LBJ would be remembered today as the second-greatest POTUS of the 20th Century after FDR -- if not for Vietnam. .

Not just vietnam, but LBJ lost all support from conservatives/gun owners because of his 1968 Gun Control Act.

The young college and the liberals and the mothers of drafted sons hated LBJ because of Vietnam............... and the conservatives hated, and still hate, LBJ because of his 1968 GCA and because LBJ never tried to win the war.

Once LBJ became hated by the young, hated by the liberals, hated by the gun owners, and after civil rights people like MLK went against LBJ, then there werent any people left to like him.

When you lose the left, and the right, and the poor, and the blacks, and the gunowners, and also the middle class families, there isnt much remaining as a base of support. Who is left to like him?

[kunilou]

It was under the Reagan administration, yes, but it was due to the welfare programs of Johnson. Plus what of lower class (but not poor as in below the poverty line) black families?

Conservative economist Thomas Sowell argues that the Great Society programs only contributed to the destruction of African American families, saying "the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life." Professor William L. Anderson also criticized the War on Poverty, noting the increase of dependency on the government as being harmful to the lower classes.

This disaster is estimated to have consumed some $3,000,000,000,000!
If the money had simply been given to every person adjudged "poor" in 1964, every one of these people would be a millionaire.
And now, we are stuck with all of these Federal agencies and programs, still costing us huge amounts of money.
The povery industry has been VERY good for a lot of people-one wonders how this country would be, had LBJ never come up with this boondoggle.

So your response is that whatever economic strides the poor have made since 1964, they would have been better off without Johnson's programs, but that Johnson's programs destroyed black families.

I'd be interested in seeing some numbers from the conservative Heritage Foundation or the libertarian Cato Institute -- organizations which at least strive to put some REAL analysis behind their claims that might indicate the poor would have been better off without Johnson's programs.

As for Sowell's arguments that the poverty programs destroyed black family structure, it deserves to be looked at more closely. (http://www.census.gov/apsd/www/statbrief/sb93_2.pdf)
Percent of black families with female head, no husband.

1950 -- 18%
1960 -- 22%
1970 -- 28%
1991 -- 46%
In other words it's increased by about 2 1/2 times.

Since 1960 the percentage of white children living with their mothers only (http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hh-fam.html)has risen from 6% to 21%. In other words, it's increased by 3 1/2 times.

So the data don't support that the Great Society programs disproportionately destroyed black families (a trend that had begun earlier) -- and can even be read to support the argument that they had LESS impact on blacks than on whites.

Again, I'd like to hear from someone with better access to data and no axe to grind.

[Perciful]

These three video's show LBJ for who he really was. There is some great history and video from the archives on the Kennedy assasination. The motorcade footage is very interesting.

Was It Johnson? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fATmzROAs5E&feature=related)

[scabpicker]

These three video's show LBJ for who he really was. There is some great history and video from the archives on the Kennedy assasination. The motorcade footage is very interesting.

Was It Johnson? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fATmzROAs5E&feature=related)

That's some dandy character assassination they engage in, there. Lots of innuendo and accusation, but zero evidence. <Lionel Hutz>Well, Your Honor. We've plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence. </Lionel Hutz>

[The Flying Dutchman]

The real after tax income of Americans rose by 30% during the Kennedy/Johnson years. That duing an expensive war.

And declining to run again for the presidency given his reservations about the war puts Johnson near the top of American presidents. He put country before himself.

[ralph124c]

[QUOTE=kunilou;12141894][B]So your response is that whatever economic strides the poor have made since 1964, they would have been better off without Johnson's programs,
Not at all. The "Great Society" programs put in place programs that hobble us to this day.
Had we had real economic growth (free investment and innovation), instead of the dead hand of government, we would NOT have today:
-enormous urban slums (public housing projects)
-uninhabitable inner cities (the crime in the inner cities inhibits business and drives people away)
-welfare programs that discourage marriage and promote out of wedlock births
What do you think about such disasters as the Cabrini-green project? A high rise housing complex, it was torn down after the inhabitants made it uninhabitable.

[Perciful]

That's some dandy character assassination they engage in, there. Lots of innuendo and accusation, but zero evidence. <Lionel Hutz>Well, Your Honor. We've plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence. </Lionel Hutz>

Did you see the motorcade scene? That was not evidence? That was about as close as you get to seeing Kennedy was set up by his own people. Did you see the bodyguard called off Kennedy? How he threw his hands up in the air? I am not saying it was LBJ but it was planned and they found Wallaces prints in the room of the building he was shot from.

I never knew that Kennedy was about to expose LBJ paying bribes. I'm sure there is a lot we are not privy to. A lot of the video is all historic footage I had never seen before.

That evidence was real.

[kunilou]

What do you think about such disasters as the Cabrini-green project? A high rise housing complex, it was torn down after the inhabitants made it uninhabitable.

Cabrini Green was built in phases starting in 1942 and ending in 1962. Pruitt-Igoe (an even more notorious example of public housing) was built in 1954-55. In other words, before Johnson and Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Find another strawman.

[nicky]

Im inclined to be sympathetic to LBJ, on the basis that

- he did better pushing through Civil Rights than other possible presidents would have

- although Vietnam was a disaster, many other possible presidents would have screwed up badly as well.

[Imasquare]

This disaster is estimated to have consumed some $3,000,000,000,000!
If the money had simply been given to every person adjudged "poor" in 1964, every one of these people would be a millionaire.


Giving away $3,000,000,000,000 would allow you to make 3 million people millionaires.

Was there only 3 million people living below the poverty line in 1964? Probably more like 20 million.

[The Second Stone]

How much responsibility did he have for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965? While well intended, the unintended consequence is that California is sliding into bankruptcy. Also, it has actually hurt african americans when LBJ had hoped to help them with other programmes.

No, California is sliding into bankruptcy because we only tax new homeowners at superhigh rates and then pay public servants large six figure incomes for jobs that could employ two people at half the wages. See corrections officers. Then to top it all off, we have to have two-thirds of the legislature vote to pass a budget, which leads to more pork. All other taxes are regressive and property taxes decrease over time due to the inflation in the cost of homes. It is possible for someone who lives in a $2 million home to pay less property taxes than someone living in a $300,000 home by virtue of having lived there a long time. So the taxes fall most heavily on newer families. It is highly regressive. Oh, and everybody buys from Amazon to avoid the exorbitant sales tax.

[Chen019]

Originally Posted by Chen019
Also, it has actually hurt african americans when LBJ had hoped to help them with other programmes.

How?

By increasing competition and lowering wages in the job markets they're overrepresented in. They've had employment opportunities reduced as a result.

MARTIN: Mm-hmm.

Prof. SWAIN: ...because I have no problem with America being a nation of immigrants and immigration thats orderly and done legally. But there are some programs like the H2B Program, a visa program, brings in low-skilled labor from foreign countries to work in hotels and occupations where African-Americans and low-skilled other Americans that include whites and legal immigrants, legal Hispanics, have worked and that is a problem.

And if you look at how those programs operate, its like indentured servitude. Its another form of slavery. What we dont need in America is competition in areas where you have qualified Americans that are unemployed.

And so, Im not against legal immigration. I think we are all for legal immigration, but we have a broken system that floods the market in areas where we have Americans that are unemployed.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123811962

Originally Posted by Chen019
How much responsibility did he have for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965? While well intended, the unintended consequence is that California is sliding into bankruptcy.



1) Care to make an argument, as to that cause-effect relationship?

The cause is low skilled immigration and subsequent lack of educational achievement or integration.


The consequences of a large ethno-cultural group’s lagging behind the majority in education and income are significant. In strictly economic terms, perpetually poor immigrants and their descendants will be a major strain on social spending and infrastructure. Health care, public education, welfare payments, the criminal justice system, and programs for affordable housing will all require more tax dollars. When pro-immigration conservatives declare that these government programs should be scaled back or eliminated entirely, I am sympathetic. But a large public sector is a reality that cannot be wished away — we will not be abolishing Medicaid or public schools anytime soon. Immigration policy needs to take that reality into account.

Even if economics were not a concern, the lack of Hispanic assimilation is likely to create ethnic tensions that threaten our cultural core. Human beings are a tribal species, and this makes ethnicity a natural fault line in any society. Intra-European ethnic divisions have been largely overcome through economic assimilation — Irish and Italian immigrants may have looked a bit different from natives, but by the third generation their socioeconomic profiles were similar. Hispanic Americans do not have that benefit. http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=YjQ4N2EyMTQ4NzZjZmNlOWQwN2RiNTZjMWZiZDY4YzQ=

This is greatly exacerbated by the accompanying illegal immigration set out in this article.

Perhaps the most disingenuous myth about illegal immigrants is that they do not impose any cost on society. The reality is that even those who work and half do not, according to the Pew Hispanic Center cannot subsist on the wages they receive and depend on public assistance to a large degree. Research on Los Angeles immigrants by Harvard University scholar George J. Borjas shows that 40.1 percent of immigrant families with non-citizen heads of household receive welfare, compared with 12.7 percent of households with native-born heads. Illegal immigrants also increase public expenditures on health care, education, and prisons. In California today, illegal immigrants' cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be $13 billion half the state's budget deficit.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112167023

[The Second Stone]

How much responsibility did he have for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965? While well intended, the unintended consequence is that California is sliding into bankruptcy. Also, it has actually hurt african americans when LBJ had hoped to help them with other programmes.

No, California is sliding into bankruptcy because we only tax new homeowners at superhigh rates and then pay public servants large six figure incomes for jobs that could employ two people at half the wages. See corrections officers. Then to top it all off, we have to have two-thirds of the legislature vote to pass a budget, which leads to more pork. All other taxes are regressive and property taxes decrease over time due to the inflation in the cost of homes. It is possible for someone who lives in a $2 million home to pay less property taxes than someone living in a $300,000 home by virtue of having lived there a long time. So the taxes fall most heavily on newer families. It is highly regressive. Oh, and everybody buys from Amazon to avoid the exorbitant sales tax.

[The Second Stone]

Actually Chiang Kei-Sheik was on the brink of crushing the Communists in Manchuria when George Marshall forced them to negotiate instead.




http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/2292-chinese-civil-war-1945-1949/

The above link seems to indicate that your assertion is a propagandist version of history. After the Long March the Kuomintang was finished. And your statement about George Marshall is completely inaccurate and again, propaganda and libelous to Marshall. If Chiang was actually "on the brink of crushing the Communists" there was nothing that the US or George Marshall could have done to stop him. The statement is so absurd as to be laughable: if General Chiang was so foolish as to "negotiate" his defeat on the brink of a victory over his enemy, then he was no general to begin with.

[The Second Stone]

You've said in other threads that you consider yourself quite intelligent. Robert McNamara was quite a smart man too. He worked with Curtis LeMay in WWII - or didn't you know that? But he made grievous errors in policy, particularly with regard to Vietnam. McNamara has admitted his errors, and we're fortunate to learn from them. Will you be as brave?


Curtis LeMay in WWII in the Pacific theater was interchangeable with his staff man Robert McNamara who did all the numbers analysis justifying the firebombing campaigns of the Japanese cities. McNamara put the methods and goals of LeMay into operations and carried them on. These methods did not work in Vietnam.

The only way to win a war like Vietnam is to remove the entire population and resettle them in different areas or commit genocide against the populations. It worked for the ancient Romans. It is not something that the US is willing to do.

[Chen019]

No, California is sliding into bankruptcy because we only tax new homeowners at superhigh rates and then pay public servants large six figure incomes for jobs that could employ two people at half the wages.

Did you read this?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112167023

[Hentor the Barbarian]

Here's my problem with Great Debates: Great Debates is simply a platform for the mindless repetition of established partisan talking points. Nobody is interested in actually looking at data or considering questions empirically.

So, people can advance a notion like "The Great Society was detrimental to poor black families because this one guy said so this one time."

kunilou goes to the trouble to pull some data together to consider the question, and lo and behold it looks like over the same span of time, the number of single parent white households increased at a faster rate.

What's the outcome? A chorus of chirping crickets, and then right back to the mindless blathering, and the same talking points get carried over from thread to thread.

It's this experience that led me to propose Hentor's Law of Post Construction, which says that there is an inverse relationship between the time you take composing a post and the impact that post will have on the discussion. It's almost like people would rather hear "You're a great big doodoo head" than "Gee, if we look at the actual rate of change in single parent households, it doesn't look like the Great Society can be described as detrimental to black families."

I'm not suggesting that each post has to be founded upon a novel analysis of data, but I'd like to see a greater respect for data based arguments, and for those who put forth arguments which are inconsistent with the data to at least acknowledge such.

[China Guy]

Actually Chiang Kei-Sheik was on the brink of crushing the Communists in Manchuria when George Marshall forced them to negotiate instead. Curtis - do you have some kind of legitimate cite that would back up this frankly farcical claim?

You are parroting the completely unsubstantiated claims of Joe McCarthy, who does not need to be debated on these boards as a lying sack of shit.
[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Mission"]Specifically McCarthy alleged (and has never proven): "When Marshall was sent to China with secret State Department orders, the Communists at that time were bottled up in two areas and were fighting a losing battle, but that because of those orders the situation was radically changed in favor of the Communists. Under those orders, as we know, Marshall embargoed all arms and ammunition to our allies in China. He forced the opening of the Nationalist-held Kalgan Mountain pass into Manchuria, to the end that the Chinese Communists gained access to the mountains of captured Japanese equipment. No need to tell the country about how Marshall tried to force Chiang Kai-shek to form a partnership government with the Communists."[4]

:

[The Second Stone]

Did you read this?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112167023

A racist tirade mostly unrelated to our annual budget mess. Ewww.

[kunilou]

Here's my problem with Great Debates: Great Debates is simply a platform for the mindless repetition of established partisan talking points. Nobody is interested in actually looking at data or considering questions empirically.

So, people can advance a notion like "The Great Society was detrimental to poor black families because this one guy said so this one time."

kunilou goes to the trouble to pull some data together to consider the question, and lo and behold it looks like over the same span of time, the number of single parent white households increased at a faster rate.

What's the outcome? A chorus of chirping crickets, and then right back to the mindless blathering, and the same talking points get carried over from thread to thread.

It's this experience that led me to propose Hentor's Law of Post Construction, which says that there is an inverse relationship between the time you take composing a post and the impact that post will have on the discussion. It's almost like people would rather hear "You're a great big doodoo head" than "Gee, if we look at the actual rate of change in single parent households, it doesn't look like the Great Society can be described as detrimental to black families."

I'm not suggesting that each post has to be founded upon a novel analysis of data, but I'd like to see a greater respect for data based arguments, and for those who put forth arguments which are inconsistent with the data to at least acknowledge such.

Hentor, I'd settle for even less. I'd appreciate if people would at least check their facts before they post, or acknowledge those "facts" are actually opinions.

[scabpicker]

Did you see the motorcade scene? That was not evidence? That was about as close as you get to seeing Kennedy was set up by his own people. Did you see the bodyguard called off Kennedy? How he threw his hands up in the air? I am not saying it was LBJ but it was planned and they found Wallaces prints in the room of the building he was shot from.

I never knew that Kennedy was about to expose LBJ paying bribes. I'm sure there is a lot we are not privy to. A lot of the video is all historic footage I had never seen before.

That evidence was real.

Here's a hint: If you want to prove that LBJ had anything to do with a plot to assassinate Kennedy, you're gonna have to prove that there was an conspiracy first. After that, you're gonna have to prove LBJ was involved. I had a lot more than this written, but then realized that I was debating someone who believed in Kennedy assassination conspiracies. I give you best wishes and lots of luck in your endeavors, but I will not be debating this particular topic further.

[Chen019]

The Second Stone wrote

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=112167023

A tirade mostly unrelated to our annual budget mess. Ewww.

$13 billion isn't related to your budget mess?

In California today, illegal immigrants' cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be $13 billion half the state's budget deficit.

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/2292-chinese-civil-war-1945-1949/

The above link seems to indicate that your assertion is a propagandist version of history. After the Long March the Kuomintang was finished. And your statement about George Marshall is completely inaccurate and again, propaganda and libelous to Marshall. If Chiang was actually "on the brink of crushing the Communists" there was nothing that the US or George Marshall could have done to stop him. The statement is so absurd as to be laughable: if General Chiang was so foolish as to "negotiate" his defeat on the brink of a victory over his enemy, then he was no general to begin with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Marshall

In December 1945, President Harry Truman sent Marshall to China to broker a coalition government between the Nationalist allies under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and Communists under Mao Zedong. Marshall had no leverage over the Communists, but threatened to withdraw American aid essential to the Nationalists. Both sides rejected his proposals and the Chinese Civil War escalated, with the Communists winning in 1949. His mission a failure, he returned to the United States in January 1947.[23][24] As Secretary of State in 1947-48, Marshall seems to have disagreed with strong opinions in The Pentagon and State department that Chiang's success was vital to American interests, insisting that U.S. troops not become involved.

[China Guy]

Curtis - do you have any kind of cite to back up your assertation that "Chiang Kei-Sheik was on the brink of crushing the Communists in Manchuria when George Marshall forced them to negotiate instead."

Anything that the KMT were anywhere near victory in the civil war anytime in the decade before 1949?

Marshall failed to puppet master the KMT to come out on top. That part is true. Aid to Generallissimo Cash My Check was not cut by the way only threatened. The only way that the KMT would have won is if the US shipped entire armies to China and took on the communists ourselves. You might want to read Stillwell and the American Experience in China and then you'd have a little context on how well a US led effort would have helped. The KMT lost when a) they let the Long March survive and thrive in Yan'an and b) proactively pursued the civil war instead of taking on the Japanese.

Again, you made a bald faced assertation that CKS and the KMT were on the brink of winning. Please provide some real cites to back up that claim. And then some cites to back up the claim that Marshall forced the KMT to negotiate instead of fight to victory.

[The Second Stone]

$13 billion isn't related to your budget mess?

That is not true, it is a right wing talking point. Here is the Sacramento Bee on the budget mess.

http://www.sacbee.com/qna/forum/election/index.html

[Chen019]

This is the rebuttal you're relying on?

A: By all accounts, a relatively tiny portion of the budget pertains to illegal immigrants - imprisonment and health care, primarily - and research conducted by the Wilson administration in early 1990s basically concluded that those costs are fairly well offset by taxes paid by illegal immigrants.


Answered at 7:36 AM on May 13, 2009, by Dan Walters

[The Second Stone]

This is the rebuttal you're relying on?

Yep. A reliable source, unlike the right wing blogs which are all repeating the same talking point. Just because a bunch of people tell the same lie, that doesn't make it true.

[Chen019]

Yep. A reliable source, unlike the right wing blogs which are all repeating the same talking point. Just because a bunch of people tell the same lie, that doesn't make it true.

Its hosted on the National Public Radio site. Did you even read Alexiev's article? There is far more to it than a claim about the exact figure of the debt. The broader point is the level of welfare dependence and low level of academic achievement amongst those who will make up the majority of the population in the future.

[The Second Stone]

Its hosted on the National Public Radio site. Did you even read Alexiev's article? There is far more to it than a claim about the exact figure of the debt. The broader point is the level of welfare dependence and low level of academic achievement amongst those who will make up the majority of the population in the future.

Yeah, I read it, did you read it? It is garbage, wherever it is hosted. The NPR site hosts a National Review article. It is a bald faced lie that $13 billion goes to immigrants in California.

[Chen019]

Originally Posted by Chen019
Its hosted on the National Public Radio site. Did you even read Alexiev's article? There is far more to it than a claim about the exact figure of the debt. The broader point is the level of welfare dependence and low level of academic achievement amongst those who will make up the majority of the population in the future.

Yeah, I read it, did you read it? It is garbage, wherever it is hosted. The NPR site hosts a National Review article. It is a bald faced lie that $13 billion goes to immigrants in California.

You seem to be missing the wood for the trees. You disagree with the education stats too? That is the long term problem.

The $13 billion claim appears to originate here (up from estimated 10 billion in 2005).

http://www.fairus.org/site/PageNavigator/facts/state_data_CA

The more than $10.1 billion in costs incurred by California taxpayers is composed of outlays in the following areas:

Education. Based on estimates of the illegal immigrant population in California and documented costs of K-12 schooling, Californians spend approximately $7.7 billion annually on education for illegal immigrant children and for their U.S.-born siblings. Nearly 15 percent of the K-12 public school students in California are children of illegal aliens.


Health care. Uncompensated medical outlays for health care provided to the state's illegal alien population amount to about $1.4 billion a year.

Incarceration. The cost of incarcerating illegal aliens in California's prisons and jails amounts to about $1.4 billion a year (not including related law enforcement and judicial expenditures or the monetary costs of the crimes that led to their incarceration).
State and local taxes paid by the unauthorized immigrant population go toward offsetting these costs, but they do not come near to matching the expenses. The total of such payments can generously be estimated at about $1.6 billion per year.

The fiscal costs of illegal immigration do not end with these three major cost areas. The total costs of illegal immigration to the state's taxpayers would be considerably higher if other cost areas such as special English instruction, school feeding programs, or welfare benefits for American workers displaced by illegal alien workers were added into the equation.



http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecentersffec

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

Curtis - do you have any kind of cite to back up your assertation that "Chiang Kei-Sheik was on the brink of crushing the Communists in Manchuria when George Marshall forced them to negotiate instead."

Anything that the KMT were anywhere near victory in the civil war anytime in the decade before 1949?

Marshall failed to puppet master the KMT to come out on top. That part is true. Aid to Generallissimo Cash My Check was not cut by the way only threatened. The only way that the KMT would have won is if the US shipped entire armies to China and took on the communists ourselves. You might want to read Stillwell and the American Experience in China and then you'd have a little context on how well a US led effort would have helped. The KMT lost when a) they let the Long March survive and thrive in Yan'an and b) proactively pursued the civil war instead of taking on the Japanese.

Again, you made a bald faced assertation that CKS and the KMT were on the brink of winning. Please provide some real cites to back up that claim. And then some cites to back up the claim that Marshall forced the KMT to negotiate instead of fight to victory.

I own a book entitled What If? a collection of historical essays and according to one of them, "China Without Tears":

"What followed next is rather like Hitler's famous 'Halt Order' which stopped the Wehrmact as it closed in on the defeated British at Dunkirk-turning what should have been a decisive German victory into a strategic defeat.

General Marshall was at this point attempting the impossible task of brokering a coalition government between Mao's Communists and Chiang's Nationalists. Nowhere had it been agreed that Chiang would not invade Manchuria. But the Communists at the talks objected vociferiously, maintaining that by his surprise attack Chiang had undermined the trust and cooperation necessary for a peaceful resolution. Marshall secured one truce in January but it broke down quickly; now the Communists pressed him to act, for they realized that he-and not their own army-was the only force left that would stop Chiang.

Marshall listened. With all the power of a sole ally, rich and overwhelmingly strong in a ruined world (and in his own mind, some unrealistic ideas), Marshall pressured Chiang to halt his advance-and Chiang did.

When his incredulous commanders begged him to reconsider, telling him that Harbin in Nationalists hands ensured a total victory over Communist military forces in Manchuria, Chiang became very angry. To his supreme commander he said, 'You say that taking this city will be easy, but if you knew the reasons why we can't take it, then you would understand the reasons why not taking it is not easy at all.' Later Chiang would calls this the worst mistake he ever made in dealing with the Communists.

Had the Chinese leader refused Marshall's request, one can imagine him actually succeeding in his attempt to deliver a knock-out blow to the Communists and presenting the world with a fait accompli that would have won not only Washington, but Moscow as well, to his side. Or one can imagine his initial triumph going bad, as the Communists reorganized and attacked his extended supply lines. One thing is certain, though: The decision to halt would remove the one chance Chiang had of actually winning the war militarily."

[Perciful]

Yeah, I read it, did you read it? It is garbage, wherever it is hosted. The NPR site hosts a National Review article. It is a bald faced lie that $13 billion goes to immigrants in California.

How many millions/ billions go to immigrants in California? I have no clue but this may be part of the problem CA is having? Why are we not addressing the problem? How many immigrants can a state support and stay solvent?

We keep increasing the number of immigrants we allow into the US every year. New Zealand and other countries have tough restrictions on immigration.

I would think the economy alone would be reason enough to shut down immigration until our economy rebounds. We could also deport all illegals back to their countries and save a ton of money.

Why doe we want to bring so many immigrants in at a time like this? Any ideas?

[BrainGlutton]

Look, let's not get hijacked: We're debating about President Johnson and his performance in office and his legacy. Now, can anyone seriously contend LBJ did the wrong thing, in signing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_Amendments_of_1965) which abolished the openly racist (effectively limiting immigration not only to Europeans but to Northwestern Europeans, and intentionally freezing out Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, and practically all European Jews) national-origins quota system of the Immigration Act of 1924 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924)? Even knowing what we know now about the social and economic effects of post-1965 immigration to America, is there any of you who, in LBJ's shoes, would have hesitated for a moment to sign that bill?! If so, why?

[RTFirefly]

According to the same article:

And President Thieu:So, after the U.S.' propping up South Vietnam for 20 years and training its military all that time, South Vietnam was still such a basket case that it was dependent on a substantial flow of U.S. cash for its moment-to-moment existence as a nation.

I'd honestly never realized that that was the argument you guys were making about the cutting of funds. Holy cow.

That's quite the own goal, isn't it?

Our goals were to stabilize and democratize Iraq, we have acheived that quite well, and the casualties have been in my opinion reasonable. I could have sworn there was something about WMDs, but maybe my memory's playing tricks on me. :)

Iraq's certainly less stable than it was in 2002, but we have semi-democratized it. Of course, this has come at a cost of a few hundred thousand Iraqi lives, but hey, we didn't have to pay that cost; the people who we were supposedly helping did. :rolleyes: I don't think we're exactly the proper judges of the reasonableness of those casualties.

OTOH, imagine what we could have done with the roughly $700 billion we've already spent over there, and the hundreds of billions yet to come in VA expenses and the like. You think many people would have supported this war at the time if it had been known we were going to be there for the rest of the decade, and the bill would run well over a trillion dollars? Not a chance. Hell, the Bushies fired one guy who estimated, during the run-up, that the war might cost us a couple hundred billion.
Had we not invaded Iraq and Saddam had died or been overthrown there would have been civil war anyways. And it might not have happened for decades, either: Saddam was a 65 year old in pretty good health when we invaded.
Which does not make what I said any less true.Your problem is, it doesn't make it any more true either.

[Really Not All That Bright]

Considering that containment of Communism was pretty much universally accepted as a necessity by both parties, I don't think he should take all the blame for Vietnam. More than any other individual, perhaps.

I think passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, despite the knowledge that it would cost the Democratic Party the South for decades, was a stunning triumph, and frankly what he should first be remembered for.

He knew that no President in the near future would have the sort of political capital he gained from JFK's assassination, and he did what he knew was right despite the cost.

Considering how fractured and ineffective the leadership of the civil rights movement became after MLK's death, it might never have passed otherwise.

[Perciful]

Look, let's not get hijacked: We're debating about President Johnson and his performance in office and his legacy. Now, can anyone seriously contend LBJ did the wrong thing, in signing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_Amendments_of_1965) which abolished the openly racist (effectively limiting immigration not only to Europeans but to Northwestern Europeans, and intentionally freezing out Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, and practically all European Jews) national-origins quota system of the Immigration Act of 1924 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924)? Even knowing what we know now about the social and economic effects of post-1965 immigration to America, is there any of you who, in LBJ's shoes, would have hesitated for a moment to sign that bill?! If so, why?

Sorry for going off topic. Thanks for the cites. Interesting that from LBJ on we went from 120,000 immigrants a year till today over a million a year. It was to be more free to all countries. After LBJ several more immigration bills also affected todays numbers by increasing the numbers of immigrants. I would not have been hesitant to sign a bill making it more equal to other countries but I would not want to increase the overall number to what it is now.

[Really Not All That Bright]

How many millions/ billions go to immigrants in California? I have no clue but this may be part of the problem CA is having? Why are we not addressing the problem? How many immigrants can a state support and stay solvent?

We keep increasing the number of immigrants we allow into the US every year. New Zealand and other countries have tough restrictions on immigration.

I would think the economy alone would be reason enough to shut down immigration until our economy rebounds. We could also deport all illegals back to their countries and save a ton of money.

Why doe we want to bring so many immigrants in at a time like this? Any ideas?
We aren't letting in more immigrants every year; the number of immigrants, including those on temporary visas, stays pretty stable at a little under 1 million a year. New Zealand and other countries' restrictions on immigration are pretty meaningless, because we are not another country. In any event, New Zealand does not have tough immigration restrictions; the 2005 census showed that 20% of the population was foreign born (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_New_Zealand#Recent_years). By contrast, 12.5% of the US population is foreign born (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/21/AR2009092103251.html), and that figure actually went down last year.

"The economy" would be a terrific reason to shut down immigration if you were somehow upset that the economy was doing too well and trying to destroy it. Quite apart from the illegals who pick our tomatoes and oranges (because nobody else will), there are any number of industries which rely on skilled, graduate and postgraduate immigrant labor to remain competitive. However, if you want to spend $8 on a potato or $2,500 on an annual physical - before lab screening - you're on the right track.

Deporting illegals wouldn't save us any money at all. We already do that.

[Chen019]

"The economy" would be a terrific reason to shut down immigration if you were somehow upset that the economy was doing too well and trying to destroy it. Quite apart from the illegals who pick our tomatoes and oranges (because nobody else will), there are any number of industries which rely on skilled, graduate and postgraduate immigrant labor to remain competitive. However, if you want to spend $8 on a potato or $2,500 on an annual physical - before lab screening - you're on the right track.

Deporting illegals wouldn't save us any money at all. We already do that.

You need to distinguish between skilled and unskilled immigration. As noted above in the Alexiev article, the overall burden of low skill immigration is massive as the subsequent generations are doing worse academically.

Households headed by persons without a high school diploma are roughly 15 percent of all U.S. households. Overall, these households impose a significant fiscal burden on other taxpayers: The cost of the government benefits they consume greatly exceeds the taxes they pay to government. Before government undertakes to transfer even more economic resources to these households, it should have a very clear account of the magnitude of the economic transfers that already occur.

The substantial net tax burden imposed by low-skill U.S. households also suggests lessons for immigration policy. Recently proposed immigration legislation would greatly increase the number of poorly educated immigrants entering and living in the United States.[12] Before this policy is adopted, Congress should examine carefully the potential negative fiscal effects of low-skill immigrant households receiving services.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/sr12.cfm

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

So, after the U.S.' propping up South Vietnam for 20 years and training its military all that time, South Vietnam was still such a basket case that it was dependent on a substantial flow of U.S. cash for its moment-to-moment existence as a nation.

I'd honestly never realized that that was the argument you guys were making about the cutting of funds. Holy cow.

We support Israel similarly-until Israel got it's nukes had we not supported them like that it's quite likely they would have been crushed by the Arabs. Plus the cuts were massive-hundreds of millions of dollars.

That's quite the own goal, isn't it?

I could have sworn there was something about WMDs, but maybe my memory's playing tricks on me. :)

Iraq's certainly less stable than it was in 2002, but we have semi-democratized it. Of course, this has come at a cost of a few hundred thousand Iraqi lives, but hey, we didn't have to pay that cost; the people who we were supposedly helping did. :rolleyes: I don't think we're exactly the proper judges of the reasonableness of those casualties.

OTOH, imagine what we could have done with the roughly $700 billion we've already spent over there, and the hundreds of billions yet to come in VA expenses and the like. You think many people would have supported this war at the time if it had been known we were going to be there for the rest of the decade, and the bill would run well over a trillion dollars? Not a chance. Hell, the Bushies fired one guy who estimated, during the run-up, that the war might cost us a couple hundred billion.

And what the Democrats suggested, that we withdraw from Iraq, would have made it worse-a lot of more Iraqis dead.

And it might not have happened for decades, either: Saddam was a 65 year old in pretty good health when we invaded.

Which just puts Iran in a stronger position.

[RTFirefly]

We support Israel similarly-until Israel got it's nukes had we not supported them like that it's quite likely they would have been crushed by the Arabs.We only started supporting them in the manner we do now after the Camp David accords; we basically bribed Israel and Egypt over the finish line on that deal. Israel already had nukes at that point.

At any rate, you're saying South Vietnam was a basket case that would fall apart pretty much the moment we ceased sending them big bucks, even after we'd been propping them up for a generation.

And what the Democrats suggested, that we withdraw from Iraq, would have made it worse-a lot of more Iraqis dead. Whatever. When your guys got us into a gigantic fuckup, griping that the other guys' way out of the cesspool doesn't meet your standards is pretty silly.

Which just puts Iran in a stronger position.There's a theory in some quarters that Iran was the real string-puller in making the war happen. No doubt they were trying - and apparently your guy Chalabi was an Iranian agent the whole time - but I think the war was a done deal once the neocons managed to become the inner circle of advisors to a very dumb, very hawkish President.

However, it's been clear since 2003 that Iran is the big winner of the Iraq War, speaking of own goals. The ups and downs of the occupation period haven't affected that one whit.

Which means, of course, that we lost.

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

We only started supporting them in the manner we do now after the Camp David accords; we basically bribed Israel and Egypt over the finish line on that deal. Israel already had nukes at that point.

At any rate, you're saying South Vietnam was a basket case that would fall apart pretty much the moment we ceased sending them big bucks, even after we'd been propping them up for a generation.


If we had waited only a decade or so South Vietnam could have been greatly strengthned. Already the Vietnamese army was growing more competent and defeat the North Vietnamese. Think of it as a Marshall Plan for Asia.

Whatever. When your guys got us into a gigantic fuckup, griping that the other guys' way out of the cesspool doesn't meet your standards is pretty silly.

Which would be defeat.

There's a theory in some quarters that Iran was the real string-puller in making the war happen. No doubt they were trying - and apparently your guy Chalabi was an Iranian agent the whole time - but I think the war was a done deal once the neocons managed to become the inner circle of advisors to a very dumb, very hawkish President.

However, it's been clear since 2003 that Iran is the big winner of the Iraq War, speaking of own goals. The ups and downs of the occupation period haven't affected that one whit.

Which means, of course, that we lost.

No. For instance in World War II both the Soviets and the US could be considered to "win".

[Really Not All That Bright]

You need to distinguish between skilled and unskilled immigration. As noted above in the Alexiev article, the overall burden of low skill immigration is massive as the subsequent generations are doing worse academically.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/sr12.cfm
If you can provide citations to sources other than the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Heritage Foundation I might bother reading them.

[BrainGlutton]

Look, Curtis, we've been over the Vietnam what-ifs many times before in GD. Believe me, there is no way South Vietnam ever could have become stable and successful the way South Korea did. South Korea never had to deal with an analogue of the Viet Cong. The important point being not that the VC was an invincible force, but simply that it existed and would not go away and kept fighting on and kept attracting recruits despite being defeated repeatedly and losing men in battle after battle. The people of SV, or a critical mass of them at least, simply did not want the government they had.

[RTFirefly]

If we had waited only a decade or so South Vietnam could have been greatly strengthned. Already the Vietnamese army was growing more competent and defeat the North Vietnamese. Think of it as a Marshall Plan for Asia. That's an evidence-free assertion. The evidence we have is the 20-year history of the U.S. effort to prop up South Vietnam and train its military. And that history is one of total and complete failure.

No. For instance in World War II both the Soviets and the US could be considered to "win".What does that have to do with anything? Rather than an ally, even during the run-up to the Iraq war, we quite legitimately regarded Iran as a much more potent threat than Iraq. One of the neocon theories and motivations for the war was that an easy win over Iraq would be a steppingstone to keeping Iran in line, either by invading it in turn, or by using the threat of doing so to exact concessions from it.

So if the result of the Iraq war was to empower Iran and permanently remove its #1 enemy, we lost.

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

That's an evidence-free assertion. The evidence we have is the 20-year history of the U.S. effort to prop up South Vietnam and train its military. And that history is one of total and complete failure.



Total failure? The Vietcong were no more by the end of the war and the conquest of South Vietnam was undertaken by the North Vietnamese. The South Vietnamese army was strentgthned and was gradually improving and honing their skills. Plus according to many historians if the US hadn't intervened in Vietnam even more Southeast Asia could have gone Red.

[RTFirefly]

Total failure? The Vietcong were no more by the end of the war and the conquest of South Vietnam was undertaken by the North Vietnamese. And this is on point how? The South Vietnamese army was strentgthned and was gradually improving and honing their skills. Plus according to many historians if the US hadn't intervened in Vietnam even more Southeast Asia could have gone Red.Repetition of evidence-free assertions.

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

And this is on point how? Repetition of evidence-free assertions.

Huh? Don't get your first part.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietcong

The severe communist losses during Tet allowed the U.S. to gradually withdraw combat forces and to shift responsibility to the South Vietnamese, a process called Vietnamization. Pushed into Cambodia, the Vietcong could no longer draw South Vietnamese recruits.[67]...At the victory parade, Tạng noticed that the units formerly dominated by southerners were missing, replaced by northerners years earlier.[67]

Plus even during the fall of South Vietnam many units offered tough resistance as seen in the Wikipedia article.

[The Second Stone]

The Viet Cong were doing just fine at the end of the US involvement. The assertion that they were near to being wiped out is just dead wrong. The Vietnamese were completely uncontent to let the tyrants who had been backed by the French continue to rule them. The government was extraordinarily corrupt and was easy pickings as soon as foreigners left, whether that was 1954, 1968, 1975 or 2010.

The Vietnamese defeated Genghis Khan, and he was prepared to commit atrocities as daily policy, not the occasion aberration. Unless the conquering power is prepared to uproot all the citizens and relocate all of them as the Romans did (and the Brits tried in the Boer war), or simply to wipe them out, a war like Vietnam is not winnable.

Nor was Vietnam a necessary war. Ho wanted the US as it's primary ally, not China or the USSR. Today, with Ho's successors, we do enormous business with Vietnam. And they aren't flipping dominoes all the way to San Francisco.

[RTFirefly]

Huh? Don't get your first part.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VietcongThe U.S. defeat of the Vietcong back in 1967=68 doesn't demonstrate the skillz of the ARVN.

Plus even during the fall of South Vietnam many units offered tough resistance as seen in the Wikipedia article.Obviously not very many, because the North Vietnamese army moved south pretty damned fast, meeting far less resistance than even they had expected.

At any rate, "some soldiers fought well" only means something if there's evidence to suggest that a lot more would have fought well a few years later. If it took 20 years for us to enable a relative handful of units to fight well, that pretty much wraps it up AFAIAC.

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

The U.S. defeat of the Vietcong back in 1967=68 doesn't demonstrate the skillz of the ARVN.

Obviously not very many, because the North Vietnamese army moved south pretty damned fast, meeting far less resistance than even they had expected.

At any rate, "some soldiers fought well" only means something if there's evidence to suggest that a lot more would have fought well a few years later. If it took 20 years for us to enable a relative handful of units to fight well, that pretty much wraps it up AFAIAC.

The South Vietnamese army was slowly getting better-they were getting thousands of pieces of equipment. In fact American ground support was not necessary at all only air support.

[RTFirefly]

The South Vietnamese army was slowly getting betterKeep on repeating it; maybe you'll believe it.-they were getting thousands of pieces of equipment. Verifiable, but we'd given them TONS of equipment over the decades. It didn't mean ARVN was a good army in 1965 or 1970. There's no reason to suppose a bit more equipment in 1975 would have made them better in ways that the earlier stuff didn't. In fact American ground support was not necessary at all only air support.Where was Air Marshal Ky when they needed him? :D

Seriously, the North Vietnamese army didn't win this war because it dominated the skies, and it's not like we'd never given any airplanes to ARVN. So this is really reaching.

[ralph124c]

Well, after spending over $250 billion (and losing over 55,000 lives), I think the USA just got tired of the endless Vietnam War.
Despite the fact that the Vietcong had been largely destroyed, the NVA regulars were happily taking their place.
Plus, the pervasive rotteness of the Soth Vietnam Government-many of the ARVN generals were highly corrupt.
In the end, NVN wanted to win, and the American public had had enough.
Kinda like Afghanistan, in a few years.

[nicky]

IF Curtis LeMay is right, then LBJ is okay, and the real villain is Nixon.

[Qin Shi Huangdi]

Keep on repeating it; maybe you'll believe it.Verifiable, but we'd given them TONS of equipment over the decades. It didn't mean ARVN was a good army in 1965 or 1970. There's no reason to suppose a bit more equipment in 1975 would have made them better in ways that the earlier stuff didn't.

As in the cites many ARVN divisions were capable of resisting the Reds.

Where was Air Marshal Ky when they needed him? :D

Seriously, the North Vietnamese army didn't win this war because it dominated the skies, and it's not like we'd never given any airplanes to ARVN. So this is really reaching.

It's not air power-it's bombing the North Vietnamese army on the ground. Linebacker anyone?

IF Curtis LeMay is right, then LBJ is okay, and the real villain is Nixon.

Nixon's peace deal was basically that if North Vietnam invaded again America would bomb North Vietnam.

[Try2B Comprehensive]

Well, sure. But if the means you choose for stopping communism turns out to be an accelerant for communist-backed insurgencies, then your means and your goal aren't matching up.

It just depends on whether or not you stand to profit from a longer or a shorter war, that's all. If you don't understand, take another listen to War Pigs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbxfe7DMxVo).

[BrainGlutton]

IF Curtis LeMay is right, then LBJ is okay, and the real villain is Nixon.

He was, though not in any sense Curtis might (intentionally or unintentionally) mean: Nixon used certain influence he had, even while out of office, to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks from behind the scenes, early in 1968, just so the war would still be there as an issue for him to run against in November. See Nixonland, (http://www.amazon.com/Nixonland-Rise-President-Fracturing-America/dp/0743243021) by Rick Perlstein.

[Susanann]

How many millions/ billions go to immigrants in California? I have no clue but this may be part of the problem CA is having? Why are we not addressing the problem? How many immigrants can a state support and stay solvent?

We keep increasing the number of immigrants we allow into the US every year. New Zealand and other countries have tough restrictions on immigration.

I would think the economy alone would be reason enough to shut down immigration until our economy rebounds. We could also deport all illegals back to their countries and save a ton of money.

Why doe we want to bring so many immigrants in at a time like this? Any ideas?

Do you want to over-burden all public services and all public welfare?
Do you want to increase unemployment?
Do you want to increase crime?
Do you want to have crowding and more traffic?
Do you want to have more taxes and have the government support more people?
Do you want strange diseases from third world countries?
Do you want to lower the average income?
Do you want to have a mixed up society of many cultures and languages who wont assimilate?
Do you want to crowd out our hospital ER and our schools?

If so, then the best way to do it is to have lots and lots of immigration from third world countries. The 1965 Immigration bill, proposed by Teddy Kennedy, and signed by LBJ, is why California and the rest of the country is going bankrupt and why we are bulging at the seams and running out of money to support all these unskilled foreigners from third world nations .

[David Myers]

In spite of getting the Civil Rights and Great Society legislation through congress and signing it, LBJ should be considered the worst, and most evil president ever! There is a host of evidence of his graft and corruption, for anyone who wants to dig a little, which includes his keeping on his payroll, a professional hit man, Mac Wallace, who is implicated in over a dozen murders on Johnson's orders, including a number of persons threatening to implicate Johnson in both the Billy Sol Estes scandle and the Bobby Baker Scandal (a partial palm print found in the Texas school book depository, on the sixth floor) was finally identified as Wallace's. There is clear evidence that JFK was going to drop Johnson from the ticket in 1964 and that indictments were coming down on Johnson as soon as early December, 1963. JFK's assassination, perserved Johnson's reputation and made him president. He was present at the Clint Murchison meeting the night before the assassination which included, J. Edgar Hoover, a top CIA officer, Carlos Marchello (New Oreleans mafia don), Texas oil billionaire, H. L. Hunt, the Dallas police chief, the Dallas mayor, who changed the motorcade route to go right by the Texal book depository building, as well as the grassy knoll, and a number of other Texas oil "high rollers". After this meeting LBJ came out and whispered in the ear of his mistress, Madeleine Duncan Brown, that "those son of a bitch Kennedys will never embarass me again after tomorrow." For the full interview with Madeleine Brown, conducted by Robert Gaylon Ross on June 22, 2002, go to:

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=15167

Johnson was a prolific murderer and that makes him "worst president ever!"

[David Myers]

Johnson's succession as president abruptly halted AG Robert Kennedy's prosecution of the mafia and made Robert powerless which in turn led to his resignation six months later. The justice department's probes of Johnson's corruption and involvement in murder were also terminated with his ascension. The Justice department, under Bobby Kennedy had been preparing to indict Johnson and his associates for fraud and murder, as of early December, 1963. Here are quotes from a letter to Mr. Stephen S. Trott, Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice; from Douglas Caddy (Billie Sol Estes' lawyer in a letter dated May 29, 1984:

"My client, Mr. Estes, has authorized me to make this reply to your letter of May 29, 1984. Mr. Estes was a member of a four-member group, headed by Lyndon Johnson, which committed criminal acts in Texas in the 1960's. The other two, besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses:

I. Murders

1. The killing of Henry Marshall
2. The killing of George Krutilek
3. The killing of Ike Rogers and his secretary
4. The killing of Harold Orr
5. The killing of Coleman Wade
6. The killing of Josefa Johnson
7. The killing of John Kinser
8. The killing of President J. F. Kennedy.

Mr. Estes is willing to testify that LBJ ordered these killings, and that he transmitted his orders through Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who executed the murders. In the cases of murders nos. 1-7, Mr. Estes' knowledge of the precise details concerning the way the murders were executed stems from conversations he had shortly after each event with Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace." And"Mr. Estes, states that Mac Wallace, whom he describes as a "stone killer" with a communist background, recruited Jack Ruby, who in turn recruited Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Estes says that Cliff Carter told him that Mac Wallace fired a shot from the grassy knoll in Dallas, which hit JFK from the front during the assassination."
Also, "Mr. Estes desires to discuss the infamous illegal cotten allotment schemes in great detail. He has recordings made at the time of LBJ, Cliff Carter and himself discussing the scheme. These recordings were made with Cliff Carter's knowledge as a means of Carter and Estes protecting them selves should LBJ order their deaths. Mr. Estes believes these tape recordings and the rumors of other recordings allegedly in his possession are the reason he has not been murdered. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose illegal payoff schemes, in which he collected and passed on to Cliff Carter and LBJ millions of dollars. Mr. Estes collected payoff money on more than one occasion from George and Herman Brown of Brown and Root, which was delivered to LBJ."







For the complete letter follow this link:

http://home.earthlink.net/~sixthfloor/estes.htm

[gonzomax]

LBJ picked his beagle up by the ears. That was a no no. It got lots of press. Who could defend him?

I remember the beagle incident, but I don't recall it taking on quite the depth of outrage that you seem too. :p It was probably a white liberal thing, ehe?

-XT

No it was a tri-colored dog lover thing that was on the front pages and in the TV news. It was covered heavily at the time.
http://www.presidentialpetmuseum.com/Pets/Him-Her.htm Described here as a storm of protest.

[Marley23]

David Myers, I repeat what tomndebb (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12876409&postcount=412) said: do not bump old threads to make your accusations against LBJ. If you want to talk about his alleged crimes, start a new thread. Do not revive or hijack other discussions.

[David Myers]

The topic of this thread is "Rethinking LBJ, was he that bad?" I don't see how my comments are off topic. Please explain. I guess I don't really understand the statement, "bump old threads". I'm under the impression this is a current thread and I responded to the title. If I am making some kind of mistake, please enlighten me.

[David Myers]

Maybe the problem is my assumption that a thread is still open unless it is specified as being closed. So are we only to post replies to comments made in say . . . the last week according to the date? If so, what is the expected limit since the last comment, that would imply that this is an old thread and should not be replied to? I'm new to this site so I may be missing something here.

[tomndebb]

Maybe the problem is my assumption that a thread is still open unless it is specified as being closed. So are we only to post replies to comments made in say . . . the last week according to the date? If so, what is the expected limit since the last comment, that would imply that this is an old thread and should not be replied to? I'm new to this site so I may be missing something here.Generally a threead is considered to have died, (thus, resurrecting it makes it a "zombie" when enough time has elepsed that posters might have moved on, (so that responses or challenges to them are pointless), or when feuds among participants may have sttled down and we would prefer that they not be pushed back into flames.

I admit the length of time is a bit subjective, but for a really hostile thread, six months certainly falls into that category.

[ /Modding ]

[LouisB]

Curtis LeMay, if you haven't read Once an Eagle, I strongly suggest that you do. In fact, you should read it several times and you will learn the truth about what you think you know concerning Vietnam. Pay particular attention to the last part of the book that deals with the hero being recalled by the Army and sent to that part of the world as an observer. If you know any wartime history at all, you will have no difficulty in identifying the real people who appear in the book under various fictional names. You might do well to remember that this book is required reading at the US Army War College. And, the book itself is NOT propaganda nor is it an apologia for war, nor does it endorse any political agenda. It's a masterpiece, pure and simple.

[ralph124c]

What I don't understand about Johnson-despite his venality and corruption, he was not a stupid man. By 1967, he knew Vietnam was a lost cause.
I have read that he planned a massive buyoff ofHo Chi Minh-the deal was to be a facesaving thing to allow Johnson to say he never lost. Except that Ho Chi Minh wouldn't do anything untill all US forces were withdrawn-so Johnson kept on with the pointless conflict.
The US Airforce dropped more bombs than were droppen in WWII-yet the North Vietnamese fought on.
Even someone as amoral and cynical as LBJ must have realized it was hopeless.
Johnson was trapped-but he kept on killing people, for nothing.

[pseudotriton ruber ruber]

he kept on killing people, for nothing.

He didn't think he was killing people--he thought he was killing pissants who failed to understand what a massive, unstoppable force the US military was.

[elbows]

Came to the White House without a fortune, left with one. Say no more.

[jasg]

A bit off-topic- but I wish LBJ or someone like LBJ was Senate Majority Leader today.I agree, can you imagine someone picking up a Senator by the ears :D

[Shodan]

Came to the White House without a fortune, left with one. Say no more.
I don't know about that - I thought he made his money from some (admittedly shady) deals in Texas before he ever made it to the Oval Office. Some sweetheart deal about a radio station IIRC.

Google reveals me to be pretty close to the mark - cite (http://www.slate.com/id/2170481/).That was back in the day when this kind of graft was looked on as almost one of the perks of office.

Didn't Kennedy call him "Landslide Lyndon" because he was elected to some early office or other in part because of a slew of voters who voted in alphabetical order? More Googling - yes, in 1948 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson).

Regards,
Shodan

[Clothahump]

At any rate, given that a sufficient amount of time has passed now to take a more dispashionate view of LBJ and his impact on history, what say you 'dopers? To paraphrase, Was LBJ That Bad?


In a nutshell, yes.

His Great Society was one of the major socialist actions taken in the USA and it has burdened us with Medicare, etc., which is helping to bankrupt our economy. In addition, LBJ was the walking embodiment of a crooked politician. He was popular because he spread the money around. If you hung with Lyndon and were on his good side, you got rich.

Frankly, I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out that if there really is a conspiracy about JFK's assassination, LBJ was behind it.

[The Second Stone]

I'm going to chime in again. LBJ ruined his historical reputation over Vietnam. Getting involved in non-distinct and unnecessary and unwinnable wars to avoid the domestic political fallout is one of the worst things a leader can do.

[BrainGlutton]

His Great Society was one of the major socialist actions taken in the USA and it has burdened us with Medicare, etc., which is helping to bankrupt our economy.

You know, most historians consider the Great Society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_society) a qualified success (don't forget it included Johnson's civil-rights legislation, consumer protection, education, etc., etc.); and I'm sure the percentage of Americans who would seriously want to abolish Medicare is very small, and the proportion of economists who seriously think it will bankrupt our economy is smaller still.