I can think of 50,000 people that would disagree with you, but they can’t say anything about it.
And whose fault is that? The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and 500,000+ troop levels happened long after November 1963.
What - he had some goofs mixed in with his successes? Well, then!
I never said it wasn’t Johnson’s fault. It was. He didn’t have to escalate troop levels beyond Kennedy’s commitment. And his mistake, on top of everything else, scuttled the War on Poverty’s chances of really succeeding.
All of this only proves that Lyndon Johnson was a fascinating, complex political figure who will be judged by the defining event of his presidency.
IMHO, any WW2 era politician, Johnson, Kennedy, Nixon, Rockefeller, Goldwater, Symington, you name it, would have sent troops into Vietnam and found himself in a big mess. Some would have cut their losses and gotten out, others would have escalated. Probably someone would have considered going nuclear at some point.
But ultimately, it happened on LBJ’s watch, and he’s the one who has to answer for it.
I agree with those who say that Vietnam defeated him. He was too trusting of McNamara, especially.
There’s my favorite scene in a docudrama where the generals are giving Johnson and his key advisors a slide show, hoping to talk him into escalating the bombing. One of the slides showed an old woman on a bicycle transporting arms through the jungle ostensibly to Viet Cong fighters. The more people around the table talked, the more restless Johnson became.
Eventually, they showed him a slide of a truck facility in Hanoi that they wanted to bomb. “We could effectively cripple their distribution infrastructure by destroying their ability to build trucks.”
Johnson snapped and began screaming at them. “Trucks? They don’t need trucks! They got old women on fuckin’ bicycles haulin’ their stuff around! What am I supposed to do, start bombing old women!?”
I really enjoy when they play Johnson’s Whitehouse tapes on NPR and the like. Irregardless of his legacy, he was a pretty entertaining guy to listen to, if for no other reason then the amusement of hearing the leader of the free world curse every other word. One clip had him haggling with his barber over the price of a haircut. One of the tragedies of Watergate that we didn’t get a similar record from presidents after Nixon.
One of the Whitehouse tapes has someone (assume it was McNamara, but it was years ago I heard it, so I might be wrong) trying to talk Johnson into escalation. It’s obvious that he’s uneasy with the idea, and he rather chillingly predicts a fairly accurate guess of what will go wrong.
Couldn’t google up the clip I mention, but here’s a transcript of a similar bit from one of LBJ’s tapes:
Johnson was just about the most corrupt president we ever had. His whol career reeked of corruption-from his firts senate win, to his last election. Johnson knew how to extort money from lobbyists, and made a ton of cash. He was personally gross and crude, and like to embarass his staff-he once delivered command while sitting on the toilet. As for Vietnam, his advisors told him the risks-but he just blundered in to it, and wound up killing 60,000 Americans. An absolute disaster!
I have to agree. The Great Society was basically vote-buying with massive social programs.
Johnson was a political thief. He was damn good at it, and he was popular because he stole enough to pass it around and make everybody happy.
If by this you’re referring to the Great Society program, from whom exactly would you say he was stealing?
I have heard of the dog thing before, but did he really ship out his cock in a cabinet meeting? More than once?
I think astro is confusing it with the well-authenticated anecdote of him lifting his shirt and showing ascar from his gall bladder op to the press.
I remember reading once that as a young lad – maybe late teens – he hitchhiked to the West Coast just to see it, then hitchhiked back again. I thought that was a pretty neat thing for a guy to do back then.
How dare he make everybody happy!
His crudeness may be revered in much the way that Ben Franklin’s mischief is now. And dammit, he deserves credit for the Civil Rights Act. You can’t just say that it was coming anyway. People had to fight hard for it when it was passed and they shouldn’t have had to wait in the first place. A person with less finesse wouldn’t have been able to broker the deal. And we made important changes to the system. (Wait until you hit retirement.)
There was plenty of responsibility for the war. McNamara was on Kennedy’s Cabinet too. Even Eisenhower had sent forces in.
I’m not excusing Johnson at all. I voted for him. Now the thought of the war makes my flesh crawl.
I give Johnson credit for actually doing something about Civil Rights. Most people were content to say that things were going to get better someday. It was Johnson who pushed to get something real done now.
Path to War, with Michael Gambon as Johnson and Alec Baldwin as McNamara.
Yes, thank you! That’s the one.
Agreed and affirmed. But you have to make allowances – Johnson was an effing saint by standards of Texas politics at the time. (An interesting take on Johnson in that context can be found in Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics, by Michael Lind.)
You must be joking. Replace the “Johnson” with “Bush” and he gets no forgiveness from you. Oh, that’s right, Bush isn’t a populist Democrat. You can forgive a lot of sins when it’s someone you like that commits them, can’t you?