Johnson Vietnam Quotes

The Americans won't win. They're not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.

A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.

We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one.

The argument that there are just wars often rests on the social system of the nation engaging in war. It is supposed that if a ‘liberal’ state is at war with a ‘totalitarian’ state, then the war is justified. The beneficent nature of a government was assumed to give rightness to the wars it wages. ...Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were liberals, which gave credence to their words exalting the two world wars, just as the liberalism of Truman made going into Korea more acceptable and the idealism of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society gave an early glow of righteousness to the war in Vietnam. What the experience of Athens suggests is that a nation may be relatively liberal at home and yet totally ruthless abroad. Indeed, it may more easily enlist its population in cruelty to others by pointing to the advantages at home. An entire nation is made into mercenaries, being paid with a bit of democracy at home for participating in the destruction of life abroad.

the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.

A month after it ended, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection, and Westmoreland would shortly thereafter be removed as its commander. Richard Nixon was elected president eight months later mendaciously promising not victory, but a secret plan to bring the war to an “honorable end.

by 1950, caught up increasingly in our own global vision of anti-Communism, we chose not to see this war as primarily a colonial/anticolonial war, and we had begun to underwrite most of the French costs. Where our money went our rhetoric soon followed. We adjusted our public statements, and much of our journalism, to make it seem as if this was a war of Communists against anti-Communists, instead, as the people of Vietnam might have seen it, a war of a colonial power against an indigenous nationalist force.

Not until 1961 did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson deliver his memorable apologia for Diem: ‘Shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.

The 1968 bugging issue revolved around a Republican initiative to undermine Johnson's Paris peace talks that could have ended the Vietnam War and brought home 500,000 American soldiers then fighting in Indochina. The Nixon-Agnew campaign, however, feared that this 'October Surprise' would catapult Vice President Hubert Humphrey to victory and again deny Nixon the White House.

And Johnson was a convert. Body counts were the first thing he asked for in regular war briefings. He bragged that his general in Vietnam killed thousands of enemy personnel for every one man he lost:

Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was that fellow with the Stacomb on his hair from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara. “Well, Lyndon,” Mister Sam answered, “you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal fluency which the team exuded, and the true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.

The passions and pain of the Vietnam War have subsided to a degree to which we are now able to look at the broader achievements of the Johnson administration,” said playwright Robert Schenkkan, whose Broadway show about the president, “All the Way,” is playing to packed houses.

Things are not going well here….Vietnam is getting worse by the day. I have the choice to go in with great casualty lists or to get out with great disgrace. It’s like being in an airplane and I have to choose between crashing the plane or jumping out. I do not have a parachute.

In April 1967, Johnson had dispatched General Creighton Abrams to Vietnam as Westy’s deputy. Abrams, a famous tank commander in World War II, had more combat experience than any other officer in the upper ranks of the US military, and some saw his appointment as a hint that LBJ was not entirely satisfied with Westy’s progress.

I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.

I added another chapter, the story of John Paton Davies, one of the most distinguished of the China hands who had had his career savaged during the McCarthy years. The section reflected my belief that in a better and healthier society he or someone like him might have been sitting in as Assistant Secretary of State during the Vietnam decisions.

If the Chiefs had successfully pressed with the president their position that the United States needed to act forcefully to defeat the North, they might have forced a difficult choice between war and withdrawal from South Vietnam. Through their own actions as well as through the manipulation of Taylor and McNamara, the Chiefs missed their opportunity to influence the formulation of a strategic concept for Vietnam, and thereafter always found themselves in the difficult position of questioning a policy that the president had already approved. The intellectual foundation for deepening American involvement in Vietnam had been laid without the participation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 5

We went to war because our country asked us to go, because our new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, ordered us to go, but more importantly because we saw it as our duty to go. That is one kind of love.

For northern liberals, Vietnam was a much more divisive issue than voting rights and integrated drinking fountains, and many supported Johnson’s effort to stem the spread of international Communism.

Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.

I took the thin magazine from the pouch in front of me and began to thumb through it. I felt self-conscious, as if I shouldn't be there. My mind began to wander, as I knew it would, back to the boonies. I was on patrol again. Monaco was on point. Peewee and Walowick followed him. Lobel and Brunner were next, then Johnson, the sixty cradled in his arm as if it were a child. We were walking the boonies, past rice paddies, toward yet another hill. I was in the rear, and for some reason I turned back. Behind me, trailing the platoon, were the others. Brew, Jenkins, Sergeant Dongan, Turner, and Lewis, the new guys, and Lieutenant Carroll. I knew I was mixing my prayers, but it didn't matter. I just wanted God to care for them, to keep them whole. I knew they were thinking about me and Peewee.

I don't know how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam. I don't see how he can send troops to the Congo. I don't see how we can send troops to Africa, and he can't send troops to Selma, Alabama." -John Lewis

There were stories that the tunnels went for miles. There were monsters down there, blind reptiles and insects that had never seen the light, there were hospitals and brothels, and horrible things, piles of the offal from VC atrocities, dead babies, assassinated priests.

It hung heavily albeit secretly over the internal calculation of Democratic leaders of the period. But of course it was never discussed in the major newspapers and magazine articles that analyzed policy making in Vietnam. It was a secret subject, reflecting secret fears.

Even though the American people may not know what has been done in their name, those on the receiving end certainly do: they include the people of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to the present), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961–73), Laos (1961–73), Cambodia (1969–73), Greece (1967–73), Chile (1973), Afghanistan (1979 to the present), El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua (1980s), and Iraq (1991 to the present). Not surprisingly, sometimes these victims try to get even. There is a direct line between the attacks on September 11, 2001—the most significant instance of blowback in the history of the CIA—and the events of 1979.

Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ... McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history. The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

I was struck, in fact, by President Johnson’s reaction to these revelations as “close to treason,” because it reflected to me this sense that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration, a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very close to saying “I am the state.” And I think that quite sincerely many Presidents, not only Lyndon Johnson, have come to feel that.

From the perspective of nearly half a century, the Battle of Hue and the entire Vietnam War seem a tragic and meaningless waste. So much heroism and slaughter for a cause that now seems dated and nearly irrelevant. The whole painful experience ought to have (but has not) taught Americans to cultivate deep regional knowledge in the practice of foreign policy, and to avoid being led by ideology instead of understanding. The United States should interact with other nations realistically, first, not on the basis of domestic political priorities. Very often the problems in distant lands have little or nothing to do with America’s ideological preoccupations. Beware of men with theories that explain everything. Trust those who approach the world with humility and cautious insight. The United States went to war in Vietnam in the name of freedom, to stop the supposed monolithic threat of Communism from spreading across the globe like a dark stain—I remember seeing these cartoons as a child. There were experts, people who knew better, who knew the languages and history of Southeast Asia, who had lived and worked there, who tried to tell Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon that the conflict in Vietnam was peculiar to that place. They were systematically ignored and pushed aside. David Halberstam’s classic The Best and the Brightest documents this process convincingly. America had every right to choose sides in the struggle between Hanoi and Saigon, even to try to influence the outcome, but lacking a legitimate or even marginally capable ally its military effort was misguided and doomed. At the very least, Vietnam should stand as a permanent caution against going to war for any but the most immediate, direct, and vital national interest, or to prevent genocide or wider conflict, and then only in concert with other countries. After

Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

1 and 2. The United States represents less than 5 percent of the world’s population; it consumes more than 25 percent of the world’s resources. This is accomplished to a large degree through the exploitation of other countries, primarily in the developing world. Point 3. The United States maintains the largest and most sophisticated military in the world. Although this empire has been built primarily through economics—by EHMs—world leaders understand that whenever other measures fail, the military will step in, as it did in Iraq. Point 4. The English language and American culture dominate the world. Points 5 and 6. Although the United States does not tax countries directly, and the dollar has not replaced other currencies in local markets, the corporatocracy does impose a subtle global tax and the dollar is in fact the standard currency for world commerce. This process began at the end of World War II when the gold standard was modified; dollars could no longer be converted by individuals, only by governments. During the 1950s and 1960s, credit purchases were made abroad to finance America’s growing consumerism, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. When foreign businessmen tried to buy goods and ser vices back from the United States, they found that inflation had reduced the value of their dollars—in effect, they paid an indirect tax. Their governments demanded debt settlements in gold. On August 15, 1971, the Nixon administration refused and dropped the gold standard altogether.   Washington

Ah, yes, poverty," said Chatterjee and smiled as if the word had deeply ironic connotations. "Indeed, there is much poverty here. Much squalor by Western standards. That must offend the American mind, since America has repeatedly dedicated its great will to eliminating poverty. How did your ex-President Johnson put it . . . to declare war on poverty? One would think that his war in Vietnam would have satisfied him." "The war on poverty was another war we lost," I said. "America continues to have its share of poverty." I set my empty glass down, and a servant appeared at my elbow to pour more scotch.

The truth was that history—and in Indochina we were on the wrong side of it—was a hard taskmaster and from the early to the middle sixties, when we were making those fateful decisions, we had almost no choices left. Our options had been steadily closing down since 1946, when the French Indochina War began. That was when we had the most options, and the greatest element of choice. But we had granted, however reluctantly, the French the right to return and impose their will on the Vietnamese by force; and by 1950, caught up increasingly in our own global vision of anti-Communism, we chose not to see this war as primarily a colonial/anticolonial war, and we had begun to underwrite most of the French costs. Where our money went our rhetoric soon followed. We adjusted our public statements, and much of our journalism, to make it seem as if this was a war of Communists against anti-Communists, instead, as the people of Vietnam might have seen it, a war of a colonial power against an indigenous nationalist force. By the time the Kennedy-Johnson team arrived and started talking about all their options, like it or not (and they did not even want to think about it) they had in fact almost no options at all.

America’s last step into the Vietnam quagmire came on November 22, 1963, when Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Unlike Kennedy, Johnson was no real veteran. During World War II he used his influence as a congressman to become a naval officer, and, despite an utter lack of military training, he arranged a direct commission as a lieutenant commander. Fully aware that “combat” exposure would make him more electable, the ambitious Johnson managed an appointment to an observation team that was traveling to the Pacific. Once there, he was able to get a seat on a B-26 combat mission near New Guinea. The bomber had to turn back due to mechanical problems and briefly came under attack from Japanese fighters. The pilot got the damaged plane safely back to its base and Johnson left the very next day. This nonevent, which LBJ had absolutely no active part of, turned into his war story. The engine had been “knocked out” by enemy fighters, not simply a routine malfunction; he, LBJ, had been part of a “suicide mission,” not just riding along as baggage. The fabrication grew over time, including, according to LBJ, the nickname of “Raider” Johnson given to him by the awestruck 22nd Bomber Group.

Lyndon Johnson was a master of self-justification. According to his biographer Robert Caro, when Johnson came to believe in something, he would believe in it “totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter.” George Reedy, one of Johnson’s aides, said that he “had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act… He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” Although Johnson’s supporters found this to be a rather charming aspect of the man’s character, it might well have been one of the major reasons that Johnson could not extricate the country from the quagmire of Vietnam. A president who justifies his actions only to the public might be induced to change them. A president who has justified his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self-correction.

On November 26, 1963, President Johnson had signed National Security Action Memorandum, 273, which was in diametrical opposition to JFK’s NSAM 263. While Kennedy’s body was still warm in his grave when LBJ’s signature changed future US direction in Vietnam, NSAM 273 had, incredibly enough, actually been drafted on November 21, 1963, while Kennedy was still alive. The memo was written by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy (more on him later). Why would such a memo have been created, when it contradicted JFK’s policy and certainly would not have been signed by him? LBJ let it be known early on that he wanted to “win” in Vietnam, and had no intention of following Kennedy’s plans to withdraw completely by 1965.

The story of how this postwar consensus broke down—starting with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his prediction that it would lead to the South’s wholesale abandonment of the Democratic Party—has been told many times before. The realignment Johnson foresaw ended up taking longer than he had expected. But steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.

By the 1950s, most Republicans had accommodated themselves to New Deal–era health and safety regulations, and the Northeast and the Midwest produced scores of Republicans who were on the liberal end of the spectrum when it came to issues like conservation and civil rights. Southerners, meanwhile, constituted one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful blocs, combining a deep-rooted cultural conservatism with an adamant refusal to recognize the rights of African Americans, who made up a big share of their constituency. With America’s global economic dominance unchallenged, its foreign policy defined by the unifying threat of communism, and its social policy marked by a bipartisan confidence that women and people of color knew their place, both Democrats and Republicans felt free to cross party lines when required to get a bill passed. They observed customary courtesies when it came time to offer amendments or bring nominations to a vote and kept partisan attacks and hardball tactics within tolerable bounds. The story of how this postwar consensus broke down—starting with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his prediction that it would lead to the South’s wholesale abandonment of the Democratic Party—has been told many times before. The realignment Johnson foresaw ended up taking longer than he had expected. But steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.

Why were hippies such a threat, from the President on down to local levels, objects for surveillance and disruptions? Many of the musicians had the potential to become political. There were racial overtones to the black-white sounds, harmony between Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix. Black music was the impetus that drove the Rolling Stones into composing and performing. The war in Vietnam we escalated. What if they stopped protesting the war in Southeast Asia and turned to expose domestic policies at home with the same energy? One of the Byrds stopped singing at Monterey Pop to question the official Warren Report conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a “lone assassin.” Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home album features a picture of Lyndon Johnson on the cover of Time. By 1966, LBJ had ordered writers and critics of his commission report on the JFK murder under surveillance. That research was hurting him. Rock concerts and Oswald. What next?

After initial annoyance about the surprise drills, the Pentagon quickly saw value in the president’s interest. “It is the first time in years that they have a president who takes his role as Commander-in-Chief seriously,” a White House aide bragged. “They’re ecstatic.” Amid Vietnam, Watergate, and a relatively calm period of the Cold War in general, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford had shown little interest in the emergency procedures, which for the most part had continued to chug along far off the White House’s radar. Carter’s administration, on the other hand, ran the only full-scale activation of the Greenbrier congressional relocation facility—on cue, the Forsythe Associates team hauled hundreds of desks out of their warehouse on the resort grounds and—while the conference facilities were closed to the public—set up the exhibit hall as if Congress had successfully relocated there. Outside the small Forsythe Associates crew, none of the resort guests or staffers noticed. •

Points 1 and 2. The United States represents less than 5 percent of the world’s population; it consumes more than 25 percent of the world’s resources. This is accomplished to a large degree through the exploitation of other countries, primarily in the developing world. Point 3. The United States maintains the largest and most sophisticated military in the world. Although this empire has been built primarily through economics—by EHMs—world leaders understand that whenever other measures fail, the military will step in, as it did in Iraq. Point 4. The English language and American culture dominate the world. Points 5 and 6. Although the United States does not tax countries directly, and the dollar has not replaced other currencies in local markets, the corporatocracy does impose a subtle global tax and the dollar is in fact the standard currency for world commerce. This process began at the end of World War II when the gold standard was modified; dollars could no longer be converted by individuals, only by governments. During the 1950s and 1960s, credit purchases were made abroad to finance America’s growing consumerism, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. When foreign businessmen tried to buy goods and ser vices back from the United States, they found that inflation had reduced the value of their dollars—in effect, they paid an indirect tax. Their governments demanded debt settlements in gold.

What would have happened had he not been killed? He would certainly have had a rocky road to the nomination. The power of the Johnson administration and much of the party establishment was behind Humphrey. Still, the dynamism was behind Kennedy, and he might well have swept the convention. If nominated, he would most probably have beaten the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Individuals do make a difference to history. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have brought a quick end to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Those thousands of Americans—and many thousands more Vietnamese and Cambodians—who were killed from 1969 to 1973 would have been at home with their families. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have consolidated and extended the achievements of John Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The liberal tide of the 1960s was still running strong enough in 1969 to affect Nixon’s domestic policies. The Environmental Protection Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act with its CETA employment program were all enacted under Nixon. If that still fast-flowing tide so influenced a conservative administration, what signal opportunities it would have given a reform president! The confidence that both black and white working-class Americans had in Robert Kennedy would have created the possibility of progress toward racial reconciliation. His appeal to the young might have mitigated some of the under-thirty excesses of the time. And of course the election of Robert Kennedy would have delivered the republic from Watergate, with its attendant subversion of the Constitution and destruction of faith in government. RRK

Uncle Alfred was very respectful of Owen’s desire to go to Vietnam, but Aunt Martha—over our elegant dinner—questioned the war’s “morality.” “YES, I QUESTION THAT, TOO,” said Owen Meany. “BUT I FEEL ONE HAS TO SEE SOMETHING FIRSTHAND TO BE SURE. I’M CERTAINLY INCLINED TO AGREE WITH KENNEDY’S ASSESSMENT OF THE VIETNAMESE PROBLEM—WAY BACK IN NINETEEN SIXTY-THREE. YOU MAY RECALL THAT THE PRESIDENT SAID: ‘WE CAN HELP THEM, WE CAN GIVE THEM EQUIPMENT, WE CAN SEND OUR MEN OUT THERE AS ADVISERS, BUT THEY HAVE TO WIN IT, THE PEOPLE OF VIETNAM.’ I THINK THAT POINT IS STILL VALID—AND IT’S CLEAR TO ALL OF US THAT THE ‘PEOPLE OF VIETNAM’ ARE NOT WINNING THE WAR. WE APPEAR TO BE TRYING TO WIN IT FOR THEM. “BUT LET’S SUPPOSE, FOR A MOMENT, THAT WE BELIEVE IN THE STATED OBJECTIVES OF THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION’S VIETNAM POLICY—AND THAT WE SUPPORT THIS POLICY. WE AGREE TO RESIST COMMUNIST AGGRESSION IN SOUTH VIETNAM—WHETHER IT COMES FROM THE NORTH VIETNAMESE OR THE VIET CONG. WE SUPPORT THE IDEA OF SELF-DETERMINATION FOR SOUTH VIETNAM—AND WE WANT PEACE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. IF THESE ARE OUR OBJECTIVES—IF WE AGREE THAT THIS IS WHAT WE WANT—WHY ARE WE ESCALATING THE WAR? “THERE DOESN’T APPEAR TO BE A GOVERNMENT IN SAIGON THAT CAN DO VERY WELL WITHOUT US. DO THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE PEOPLE EVEN LIKE THE MILITARY JUNTA OF MARSHAL KY? NATURALLY, HANOI AND THE VIET CONG WILL NOT NEGOTIATE FOR A PEACEFUL SETTLEMENT IF THEY THINK THEY CAN WIN THE WAR! THERE’S EVERY REASON FOR THE UNITED STATES TO KEEP ENOUGH OF OUR GROUND FORCES IN SOUTH VIETNAM TO PERSUADE HANOI AND THE VIET CONG THAT THEY COULD NEVER ACHIEVE A MILITARY VICTORY. BUT WHAT DOES IT ACCOMPLISH FOR US TO BOMB THE NORTH? “SUPPOSING THAT WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY—THAT WE WANT SOUTH VIETNAM TO BE FREE TO GOVERN ITSELF—WE SHOULD BE PROTECTING SOUTH VIETNAM FROM ATTACK. BUT IT APPEARS THAT WE ARE ATTACKING THE WHOLE COUNTRY—FROM THE AIR! IF WE BOMB THE WHOLE COUNTRY TO BITS—TO PROTECT IT FROM COMMUNISM—WHAT KIND OF PROTECTION IS THAT? “I THINK THAT’S THE PROBLEM,” said Owen Meany, “BUT I’D LIKE TO SEE THE SITUATION FOR MYSELF.

The significance of LBJ's personal traits accounted for the growing belief, especially by anti-war activists, that Vietnam was "Johnson's War." His critics are correct in pointing to the role of these traits and in arguing that Johnson, commander-in-chief until 1969, possessed the ultimate power to stem the tide of escalation. He was the last, best, and only chance for the United States to pull itself out of the quagmire.

Meanwhile, the Democrats grew divided between supporters of Johnson’s foreign policy and those who had embraced Robert Kennedy’s antiwar position. This split played out in a particularly disruptive manner at the Democratic convention in Chicago. With Kennedy tragically gone, the traditional party organization stepped into the breach. The party insiders who dominated on the convention floor favored Vice President Hubert Humphrey, but Humphrey was deeply unpopular among antiwar delegates because of his association with President Johnson’s Vietnam policies. Moreover, Humphrey had not run in a single primary. His campaign, as one set of analysts put it, was limited to “party leaders, union bosses, and other insiders.” Yet, with the backing of the party regulars, including the machine of powerful Chicago mayor Richard Daley, he won the nomination on the first ballot.

He studied me. “You were in Nam?” I nodded. “Yep.” He turned to Lolo. “Hey, Chief, how many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” She stared at him. “I don’t know.” He pointed his cigar at her in an agitated fashion. “That’s right, because you weren’t there, man!” We

LIED-ABOUT WARS Advertising campaigns, marketing schemes. The target is public opinion. Wars are sold the same way cars are, by lying. In August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson accused the Vietnamese of attacking two U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf. Then the president invaded Vietnam, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Democrats in power and the Republicans out of power became a single party united against Communist aggression. After the war had slaughtered Vietnamese in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, confessed that the Tonkin Gulf attack had never occurred. The dead did not revive. In March 2003, President George W. Bush accused Iraq of being on the verge of destroying the world with its weapons of mass destruction, “the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Then the president invaded Iraq, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Republicans in power and the Democrats out of power became a single party united against terrorist aggression. After the war had slaughtered Iraqis in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Bush confessed that the weapons of mass destruction never existed. “The most lethal weapons ever devised” were his own speeches. In the following elections, he won a second term. In my childhood, my mother used to tell me that a lie has no feet. She was misinformed.

In “Flag Plot,” the naval operations room, Anderson became irritated with McNamara’s specific instructions on how to run the blockade. The admiral told McNamara that the Navy had been conducting blockades since the days of John Paul Jones and suggested that the defense secretary return to his office and let the Navy run the operation. McNamara rose from his chair and retorted that the operation was “not a blockade but a means of communication between Kennedy and Khrushchev,

Neither Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam nor President Bush in Iraq had heeded the words of the nineteenth-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote that, in war, a nation should “never take the first step without considering what may be the last.

The previous year, on February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite returned from Vietnam. In his editorial report, Cronkite broadcasted to the American people that “the war could not be won.” That put the nail into the coffin of victory. President Johnson said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” Several weeks later, Johnson announced he would not be running for re-election.

It was misconceived because Johnson appeared to think the kind of tactics that worked in a Texas saloon would work in Vietnam: beat a man, then stop beating him and say, “Give in, or I’ll beat you some more.

holding it secure, sort of. I held out the posters and slid them through the opening. “I thought you might want these.” She took them and then placed her face closer to the opening—I could see that she’d been crying. “They took my stapler.” “Yep, well . . . You have to have a concealed/carry permit for those things here in Wyoming.” She smiled. “I nailed him, didn’t I?” “Stapled him, to be exact. Don’t feel so bad about it. I did something like that in Vietnam once.

A great majority of Americans are going to resist you know. They’ll resist all of this government spending and putting people on the government dole. What do I do about that?” Johnson asked, worriedly. “If you begin to have a backlash, I propose you expand the involvement in Vietnam, and have the Department of Defense draft a lot of young men whose families lean anti-government or are religious in nature. Of course, you’ll also get young men who are part of the establishment, which I’ll use later on to bring about more control over the American people. I’ll get my people to whip anti-authority types into a frenzy, have them accuse returning soldiers of being baby killers, or I’ll get them to cause riots, and maybe a couple of them will terrorize parts of the United States. That will give you the distraction you need to get our agenda passed. No one, not even future Republicans, will attempt to take it out of the books as the law of the land. Are you on board?” “You bet your bottom dollar I am. I look forward to informing Congress and the Nation about what I plan on doing. This should be interesting times.

Although Allen Dulles does not say it in his book, his concept of Intelligence is about 10 percent real Intelligence and 90 percent clandestine operations. In other words, he would have us busy all around the world all of the time countering “all aspects of the invisible war.” By this he means intervening in the internal affairs of other nations with or without their knowledge and permission. (This leads to a serious danger, which will be treated at some length later.) It is what the United States has been doing in an increasing crescendo of events, beginning with such actions as the involvement in Berlin and Iran in the 1940s and culminating in the terrible disaster of Vietnam that began as a major intelligence operation, went on into the clandestine operations stage, then got out of hand and had to become an overt activity during the Johnson era.

After John F. Kennedy’s death his successor Johnson, received orders for the continuation and support of the Vietnam War. As noted before, under Johnson this war escalated enormously. The Vietnam War is a horrible example of Illuminati manipulations and was a huge financial success for them.

Facing It" My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way--the stone lets me go. I turn that way--I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman's trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

At the time of his death about 16,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam. U.S. policy in Vietnam changed within twenty-four hours of Kennedy’s death. Under President Johnson the U.S. involvement escalated and 543,000 soldiers (ground forces) were sent to Vietnam.[82] Kennedy wanted to establish a lasting peace in a world free of nuclear weapons. Amongst others he wanted to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb. He also was seeking for a peaceful coexistence with Russia and Cuba. Kennedy came up against the Federal Reserve Bank as well. He was the only president of the United States who tried to put an end to the power of the Federal Reserve. He refused to cooperate with the Federal Reserve Bank any longer. Four months prior to his death John Kennedy dared to challenge the Federal Reserve Bank. Kennedy wanted to have his own state money printed instead of prolonging the outstanding loans of compound interest issued by the Federal Reserve Bank. On June 4, 1963, a little-known attempt was made to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the government at interest. On that day President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 11110 that returned to the U.S. government the power to issue currency, without going through the Federal Reserve.

Kennedy also offended the Military-Intelligence complex. Amongs others for the reason that he decided to pull out of Vietnam.[81] He was against a continuation of Western colonialist domination of Vietnam and criticized the U.S. alliance with the French effort to retain its empire. During his presidency he opposed a massive commitment of U.S. forces to fight a war that he felt the Vietnamese had to fight primarily on their own. He consistently rejected recommendations to introduce U.S. ground forces. Shortly before his assassination he started withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. At the time of his death about 16,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam. U.S. policy in Vietnam changed within twenty-four hours of Kennedy’s death. Under President Johnson the U.S. involvement escalated and 543,000 soldiers (ground forces) were sent to Vietnam.[82] Kennedy wanted to establish a lasting peace in a world free of nuclear weapons. Amongst others he wanted to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb. He also was seeking for a peaceful coexistence with Russia and Cuba. Kennedy came up against the Federal Reserve Bank as well. He was the only president of the United States who tried to put an end to the power of the Federal Reserve. He refused to cooperate with the Federal Reserve Bank any longer. Four months prior to his death John Kennedy dared to challenge the Federal Reserve Bank. Kennedy wanted to have his own state money printed instead of prolonging the outstanding loans of compound interest issued by the Federal Reserve Bank. On June 4, 1963, a little-known attempt was made to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the government at interest. On that day President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 11110 that returned to the U.S. government the power to issue currency, without going through the Federal Reserve. Kennedy’s order gave the Treasury the power “to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury”. This meant that for every ounce of silver in the U.S. Treasury’s vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation.

Americans generally think of Pol Pot as some kind of unique, self-generated monster and his “killing fields” as an inexplicable atavism totally divorced from civilization. But without the United States government’s Vietnam-era savagery, he could never have come to power in a culture like Cambodia’s,

Lonnie smiled and nodded as Herbert repocketed the cutter and produced a chopped-down, brass Zippo lighter, the one that he had carried in the seventies in Vietnam. “St. Peter leaned down to the Crow woman and asked her if she had anything she wanted to say, and she told him that to her, there

There was a lesson my mother had instilled in me at an early age, which had been reinforced by my experiences in Vietnam and by my twenty-four years as sheriff of Absaroka County. She said that I should protect and cherish the young, the old, and the infirm, because at some point I would be all of these things before my own journey ended.

Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon, two Delta operators, won posthumous Medals of Honor for taking the initiative to secure one of the Black Hawk helicopter crash sites until Rangers could reinforce them. They knew the risk. They saw the enemy closing in before they even landed. At the White House during their Medal of Honor ceremony, the father of a Delta operator became unglued, furious that he was to receive the Medal of Honor from President Clinton, who in the father’s words was too cowardly to accept a draft to the Vietnam War at the behest of the president at the time, Lyndon Johnson. He believed President Clinton unworthy to bestow the award on his late son. His wife apologized to me and the other officers for her husband. But we felt the same way.

This, then, is the legacy of January 1973. The "me generation" found its voice, religion became a political force, poverty and civil rights became someone else's problem, and the national will for concerted action for the common good of all its citizens was scattered into "a thousand points of light." At some point, perhaps those scattered lights will re-form and reunite to give birth to a rededicated nation, one that includes a place for everyone, opportunity for all, and help for those who need it. After all, it only takes a moment in time and some simultaneity. As Lyndon Johnson so aptly observed in his greatest speech - the "We Shall Overcome" speech - there are times in America when "history and fate meet at a single time in a single space to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom." Let us hop such a time is nearing.

You want to know what I learned in Vietnam? I learned that if you’re lucky, I mean really lucky, you find the one thing you want in life and then you go after it; you give up everything else because all the rest of that stuff really doesn’t matter.

Vietnam War threatened to tear that consensus asunder, as the disaster in Southeast Asia consumed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Party began questioning the costs of American global leadership

It began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle we could no longer afford.

In retrospect, Reston was convinced that the Vienna bullying became a crucial factor in the subsequent decision to send 18,000 advisory and support troops to Vietnam, and though others around Kennedy retained some doubts about this, it appeared to be part of a derivative link, one more in a chain of events which saw the escalation of the Cold War in Kennedy’s first year.

I believed love was all you need. I believed you should be here now. I believed drugs could make everyone a better person. I believed I could hitchhike to California with 35 cents and people would be glad to feed me. I believed Mao was cute. I believed private property was wrong. I believed my girlfriend was a witch. I believed my parents were Nazi space monsters. I believed the university was putting saltpeter in the cafeteria food. I believed stones had souls. I believed the NLF were the good guys in Vietnam. I believed Lyndon Johnson was plotting to murder all the Negroes. I believed Yoko Ono was an artist. I believed Bob Dylan was a musician. I believed I would live forever or until I was 21, whichever came first. I believed the world was coming to an end. I believed the Age of Aquarius was about to begin. I believed the I Ching said to cut classes and take over the Dean's office. I believed wearing my hair long would end poverty and injustice. I believed there was a great throbbing web of cosmic mucus and we were all part of it somehow. I managed to believe Gandhi and H. Rap Brown at the same time. With the exception of anything my mom and dad said, I believed everything.

The intelligence people at State were not the only ones who knew the French would have trouble. In Vietnam, General Jacques Philippe Leclerc, De Gaulle’s favorite general, landed to take charge of French forces. After a tour of the country he was fully aware of the political-military problems that lay ahead. Turning to his political adviser, Paul Mus, he said, “It would take five hundred thousand men to do it, and even then, it could not be done.

In the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s presidency and assassination, something called the New Left emerged in American politics. Much like Bernie’s following, the new left found its strength on college campuses across the United States. Organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) populated the movement. Meanwhile, in Washington, Lyndon Baines Johnson, perhaps to provide cover for his failing war in Vietnam, tried to appease the New Left by ushering through a socialist agenda. Among the programs he supported were food stamps in 1964, Medicaid in 1965, and the Gun Control Act of 1968. By the early 1970s, the hippies of the New Left had traded their peace signs for raised fists and terrorist organizations. Among them was the Weather Underground, which was responsible for more than two thousand domestic bombings. The Weather Underground’s manifesto, called Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism, is dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin.

So I conclude that John Kennedy would have eventually gotten out of Vietnam rather than move more deeply in. I express this judgment now because, in light of it, I must explain how and why we—including Lyndon Johnson—who continued in policy-making roles after President Kennedy’s death made the decisions leading to the eventual deployment to Vietnam of half a million U.S. combat troops. Why did we do what we did, and what lessons can be learned from our actions?

Khrushchev backed down, Kennedy wisely instructed his staff not to betray any hint of gloating—a provocation to Soviet credibility and pride could lead to a later war. Similarly, he rejected additional plans for an invasion, which Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put before him in case the Soviets did not honor a promise to remove their missiles. Kennedy continued to see an invasion as carrying huge risks: “Consider the size of the problem,” he told McNamara, “the equipment that is involved on the other side, the Nationalists [’] fervor which may be engendered, it seems to me we could end up bogged down. I think we should keep constantly in mind the British in the Boer War, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish and our own experience with the North Koreans.” Given his concerns about getting “bogged down” only ninety miles from U.S. shores, would Kennedy have been as ready as Lyndon Johnson to put hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Vietnam?

I am not going to lose Vietnam," he said. "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went."2 For many Americans then and later the struggle in Vietnam was simply "Johnson's War."3

Though not a man of action himself – it was one of Camus’s more hurtful gibes that Sartre ‘tried to make history from his armchair’ – he was always encouraging action in others, and action usually meant violence. He became a patron of Frantz Fanon, the African ideologue who might be called the founder of modern black African racism, and wrote a preface to his Bible of violence, Les Damnés de la terre (1961), which is even more bloodthirsty than the text itself. For a black man, Sartre wrote, ‘to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.’ This was an updating of existentialism: self-liberation through murder. It was Sartre who invented the verbal technique (culled from German philosophy) of identifying the existing order as ‘violent’ (e.g. ‘institutionalized violence’), thus justifying killing to overthrow it. He asserted: ‘For me the essential problem is to reject the theory according to which the left ought not to answer violence with violence.’59 Note: not ‘a’ problem but ‘the essential’ problem. Since Sartre’s writings were very widely disseminated, especially among the young, he thus became the academic godfather to many terrorist movements which began to oppress society from the late 1960s onwards. What he did not foresee, and what a wiser man would have foreseen, was that most of the violence to which he gave philosophical encouragement would be inflicted by blacks not on whites but on other blacks. By helping Fanon to inflame Africa, he contributed to the civil wars and mass murders which have engulfed most of that continent from the mid-1960s onwards to this day. His influence on South-East Asia, where the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, was even more baneful. The hideous crimes committed in Cambodia from April 1975 onwards, which involved the deaths of between a fifth and a third of the population, were organized by a group of Francophone middle-class intellectuals known as the Angka Leu (‘the Higher Organization’). Of its eight leaders, five were teachers, one a university professor, one a civil servant and one an economist. All had studied in France in the 1950s, where they had not only belonged to the Communist Party but had absorbed Sartre’s doctrines of philosophical activism and ‘necessary violence’. These mass murderers were his ideological children.

Generally, Morgenthau ignored the hate mail, though he occasionally responded to the more temperate letters. But one public attack that he chose to answer came from the influential, nationally syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop. Among the members of the press, he was the most vociferous of hawks. Even lifelong friends like Isaiah Berlin thought his views on Vietnam “a trifle mad . . . even odious.” In March 1965 Alsop wrote a column directed at Morgenthau that began: “One proof of the wisdom of President Johnson’s Vietnamese policy is its marked success to date.” But that success had generated criticism from credulous politicians like Fulbright and “pompous” professors like Morgenthau, whom Alsop labeled an “appeaser” in the mold of “the be-nice-to-Hitler group in England before 1939.” The mention of Hitler had to be especially wounding to Morgenthau, who said “the gates of the political underworld seem to have opened.” Before Alsop’s column appeared, Morgenthau reported, even those who disagreed with him did so respectfully, but now “I receive every day letters with xenophobic, red-baiting, and anti-Semitic attacks.” Morgenthau responded to Alsop with a long letter to the editor of the Washington Post. The debate, such as it was, turned on the intentions of the Communist Chinese. To Alsop, who prided himself on his knowledge and appreciation of Chinese civilization, the Chinese were historically expansionist, always bent on conquest and therefore analogous to the Nazis of the Third Reich. To which Morgenthau rejoined that “Mao Zedong is not Hitler, that the position of China in Asia is not like that of Nazi Germany in Europe,” and that his opposition to the war in Vietnam could not be equated with the appeasers of the 1930s. No doubt wearily, he took up the task once again of explaining that spheres of influence were a reality of international relations, ignored only at one’s peril, and that if China had managed to extend its power in Asia it was “primarily through its political and cultural superiority and not through conquest.” (Years later, Kissinger would offer a similar assessment of the Chinese.)

covered by triple-canopy jungle, the floor of which was thick

I was a hunter and a killer. That's exactly what a Marine rifleman does in combat. I was there to find the enemy, close with the enemy and kill the enemy." SSgt. James L. Johnson, Victory Betrayed, Operation Dewey Canyon

Defeat: The Liberal Way of War After studying hundreds of books written by liberals about the Vietnam War, you realize that their prime objection to this war, waged by liberal presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, was that it was just too hard to win. They never stepped back and recognized that what made it hard to win was fighting it the liberal way of limited war where you tell the enemy your limits;

logical, reasonable regime, such as Johnson and McNamara dreamed they were dealing with, would certainly have considered negotiating an end to the war and the horrific burden on its people. But the Communists were neither reasonable nor logical, which is why a strategy of attrition and graduated escalations to encourage negotiations was utterly misbegotten. The Communists were fanatic believers in the justness of their cause and the inevitability of their triumph—and the anti-war movement in the West encouraged their sense of inevitable victory.

McNamara revealed in his memoir In Retrospect that he had secretly advised President Kennedy, and after him President Johnson, that under no circumstances should they ever initiate nuclear war. He didn’t tell me that, but it was implicit in everything he had said. There is no doubt in my mind that he did give that advice and that it was the right advice. Yet it directly contradicted the U.S. “assurances” on U.S. readiness for first use he felt compelled to give repeatedly to NATO officials throughout his years in office. (NATO retains a first-use policy to this day, as does the United States outside the NATO area—perhaps now with a new degree of sincerity, indicated by the first-use premises of the Bush administration’s nuclear policy review leaked in March 2002.)

Carmichael also criticized the student peace movement and argued that if peace activists wanted to be relevant to most people, they needed to start organizing to resist the draft: The peace movement has been a failure because it hasn’t gotten off the college campuses where everybody has a 2S [draft deferment] and is not afraid of being drafted anyway. The problem is how you can move out of that into the white ghettos of this country and articulate a position for those white youth who do not want to go. . . . [SNCC is] the most militant organization for peace or civil rights or human rights against the war in Vietnam in this country today. There isn’t one organization that has begun to meet our stand on the war in Vietnam. We not only say we are against the war in Vietnam; we are against the draft. . . . There is a higher law than the law of a racist named [Secretary of Defense] McNamara; there is a higher law than the law of a fool named [Secretary of State] Rusk; there is a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. We will not allow them to make us hired killers. We will not kill anybody that they say kill. And if we decide to kill, we are going to decide who to kill.89

Unlike Lyndon Johnson, who would later be swayed by the influence of Kennedy’s advisors on Vietnam, Truman developed an independent view.

Lyndon Johnson overcame the racist environment of his youth to marshal votes for the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, as well as Medicare so that the disabled and elderly would not suffer needlessly and die early, even as he lost his way in Vietnam.

In foreign affairs, Johnson was admittedly less self-assured. “Foreigners are not like the folks I’m used to,” he once said. To deal with them, he retained in office all of his predecessor’s top advisers—Dean Rusk at State, Robert McNamara at Defense, McGeorge Bundy as his National Security Advisor. “You’re the men I trust the most,” he told them. “You’re the ablest men I’ve ever seen. It’s not just that you’re President Kennedy’s friends, but you are the best anywhere and you must stay. I want you to stand by me.

Johnson signed on. He was resolved not to be “the president who saw Southern Asia go the way China went,” he said. “I want [the South Vietnamese] to get off their butts and get out into those jungles and whip the hell out of some communists,” he said. “And then I want ’em to leave me alone, because I’ve got some bigger things to do right here at home.

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE,” Dean Rusk warned not long after the Gulf of Tonkin confrontation, “are already beginning to ask what are we supporting.” President Johnson agreed. “The weakest link in our armor is public opinion,” he said.

JOHNSON: And they oughtn’t to be doing this. This is treason. [The 1799 Logan Act forbids any American citizen from negotiating with a foreign government without authorization.] DIRKSEN: I know. JOHNSON: I know this, that they’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war. DIRKSEN: That’s a mistake. JOHNSON: And it’s a damn bad mistake. Now, I can identify them, because I know who is doing this. I don’t want to identify it. I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important.

Walt Rostow encouraged Johnson to “blow the whistle” and “destroy” Nixon. Dean Rusk urged him to keep silent: since the story came from someone in Saigon, the White House need say nothing, he argued, and to confirm it would expose the “special channels that we don’t make public.” Clark Clifford shared Rusk’s concern, and added another: he found “some elements of the story…so shocking that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story, and then possibly have a certain individual elected. It could cast his administration under such doubt that I would think it would be inimical to our country’s interest.

On Noam Chomsky: "By the mid-1980s Chomsky's focus of attention had shifted from Vietnam to Nicaragua, but he himself had moved himself well beyond the point at which reasonable people were still prepared to argue with him seriously, thus repeating the sad pattern of Russell and Sartre. So yet another intellect, which once seemed to tower over its fellows, plodded away into the wasteland of extremism, rather as Tolstoy set off, angry and incoherent, from Yasnaya Polyana. There seems to be, in the life of many millenarian intellectuals, a sinister climacteric, a cerebral menopause, which might be termed the Flight of Reason.

in the summer of 1964, coincided with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which became the basis for a congressional resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson almost unlimited authority to pursue the Vietnam War. Ellsberg establishes that the incident was not the military attack on an American ship that Congress thought it was, and that the administration was cooking up evidence to justify a course of action it had already decided upon.

Lyndon Johnson told the nation Have no fear of escalation. I am trying everyone to please Though it isn't really war We're sending fifty thousand more To help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese." — lyrics from Lyndon Johnson Told The Nation by Tom Paxton

In the first hours of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency there was an atmosphere of two presidents of the United States - the new president sworn in and officially the president and the ghost of the assassinated president. The living president and his people in the front of the aircraft with the dead president and his people in the rear of the aircraft with the coffin. In the minds of the Kennedy people, Johnson would not truly be president until they accepted him and, in some cases, it seems doubtful that they ever did accept him..." — an excerpt from Vietnam War: Through My Eyes by Clarence Vold.

The really crucial decisions were made at the tail end of the Truman years, with Acheson as Secretary of State and Rusk as his principal deputy for Asia. This was the period when the United States went from a position of neutrality toward both sides in the Indochina war to a position of massive military and economic aid to the French. The real architect of the American commitment to Vietnam, of bringing containment to that area and using Western European perceptions in the underdeveloped world, was not John Foster Dulles, it was Dean Acheson.

Kissinger was true to his word, and during the 1968 presidential contest, after his favorite, Nelson Rockefeller, failed to win the Republican nomination, he covered all his bases. In a well-known and still controversial episode, he passed along information to the Nixon people about the Johnson administration’s last, and futile, efforts at negotiations with the North Vietnamese; he also offered to provide the Hubert Humphrey camp with the Rockefeller campaign’s files on Richard Nixon. “Six days a week I’m for Hubert,” he told a friend, “but on the seventh day I think they’re both awful.” Like Morgenthau, he reluctantly voted for Nixon—or so he says. In any case, Kissinger’s political double-dealing contributed to his winning the trust of the pathologically untrusting Nixon and landing the position of national security adviser with the new administration. Humphrey later said that if he had won the presidency he too would have appointed Kissinger national security adviser, suggesting two things: first, that Kissinger’s deviousness had paid off; second, that America’s Vietnam policy would not have been very different if Humphrey had been in the White House instead of Nixon.

THE PASSION eventually faded from Johnson’s relationship with Alice Glass. She married Charles Marsh, but quickly divorced him, and married several times thereafter. “She never got over Lyndon,” Alice Hopkins says. But the relationship itself survived; even when he was a Senator, Lyndon Johnson would still occasionally dismiss his chauffeur for the day and drive his huge limousine the ninety miles to Longlea; the friendship was ended only by the Vietnam War, which Alice considered one of history’s horrors. By 1967, she referred to Johnson, in a letter she wrote Oltorf, in bitter terms. And later she told friends that she had burned love letters that Johnson had written her—because she didn’t want her granddaughter to know she had ever been associated with the man responsible for Vietnam.

The United States had been sharing fail-safe technology with the Soviets as early as the Eisenhower administration. The sensitivity of giving technology to the enemy was referenced in an obscure, recently declassified memorandum from the hottest point of the Cold War era, when President Johnson was rapidly accelerating the war against the Communist forces in Vietnam. The memo was sent by then NSC staffer Spurgeon Keeny to President Johnson’s special national security advisor, Walt W. Rostow. Excerpts from that secret 1966 memo are revealing.