Please take 5 seconds to understand that LBJ + NO WAR = NO NIXON.

[grahamhgreen]

We didn't need this to get Medicare & the Great Society reforms, in fact, we would have beat Nixon without it:

[Scuba]

1. ...

[Mnemosyne]

2. This photo still breaks my heart every time I see it. No War! nt

[FailureToCommunicate]

5. It took 40 years, and a swift defection at a stop in Canada, but Phan Thi Kim Phuc's

life began turning around from that awful day of the nightmarish napalm attack.

A nightmare all of us shared a tiny bit back then.

The story:

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2012/06/the_story_behind_the_heartbrea.html

[bemildred]

3. +1. nt

[el_bryanto]

4. This is potentially a long conversation

I tend to agree with the thesis of the Best and the Brightest that you had a bunch of dedicated people who believed America could succeed in Vietnam (and anywhere really) with Kennedy counting on himself to be the voice of reason; to stop things before they got too far. But then, he was murdered, and we got LBJ who was more or less of the same "American can do it all" mentality, so nobody was appropriately critical of the information they were getting out of Vietnam.

Bryant

[mountain grammy]

6. Yes, a very long conversation about what might have been but

this picture has always been worth a million words. In so many ways, America is better than it was then, but every step forward has come at huge costs.

[Bad Thoughts]

7. You should add the Civil Rights Bill to the equation. eom

[grahamhgreen]

8. Well, I include all the great society programs in 'LBJ':

Maybe a bit of literary license....:



Major Great Society Programs

War on Poverty: forty programs that were intended to eliminate poverty by improving living conditions and enabling people to lift themselves out of the cycle of poverty.

Education: sixty separate bills that provided for new and better-equipped classrooms, minority scholarships, and low-interest student loans.

Medicare & Medicaid: guaranteed health care to every American over sixty-five.

The Environment: introduced measures to reclaim our heritage of clean air and water.

National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities: created with the philosophy that artists, performers, and writers were a priceless part of our heritage and deserve support.

Job Corps: provided enabling skills for young men and women.

Head Start: program for four- and five-year-old children from disadvantaged families that gave them a chance to start school on an even basis with other youngsters.

Representative sampling of the laws passed during the Johnson administration to promote the Great Society.


HIGHER EDUCATION FACILITIES ACT OF 1963 DEC. 16, 1963

PREVENTION & ABATEMENT OF AIR POLLUTION
(THE CLEAN AIR ACT) DEC. 17, 1963

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION ACT OF 1963 DEC. 18, 1963

INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK ACT JAN. 22,1964

CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 JULY 2, 1964

URBAN MASS TRANSPORTATION ACT OF 1964 JULY 9, 1964

FEDERAL-AID HIGHWAY ACT OF 1964 AUG. 13, 1964

CRIMINAL JUSTICE ACT OF 1964 AUG. 20, 1964

FOOD STAMP ACT OF 1964 AUG. 31, 1964

WILDERNESS ACT SEPT. 3, 1964

NATIONAL ARTS CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT ACT OF 1964 SEPT. 3, 1964

MANPOWER ACT OF 1965 APRIL 26, 1965

OLDER AMERICANS ACT OF 1965 JULY 14, 1965

SOCIAL SECURITY AMENDMENTS OF 1965 JULY 30, 1965

VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 AUG. 6, 1965

HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT ACT OF 1965 AUG. 10, 1965

PUBLIC WORKS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ACT OF 1965 AUG. 26, 1965

DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT ACT SEPT. 9, 1965

NATIONAL FOUNDATION ON THE ARTS & THE HUMANITIES
ACT OF 1965 SEPT. 29, 1965

AMENDMENT OF FEDERAL WATER POLLUTION
CONTROL ACT OCT. 2, 1965

AMENDMENT TO THE IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALITY ACT OCT. 3, 1965

HIGHER EDUCATION ACT OF 1965 NOV. 8, 1965

CHILD NUTRITION ACT OF 1966 OCT. 11, 1966

CHILD PROTECTION ACT OF 1966 NOV. 3, 1966

NATIONAL SCHOOL LUNCH ACT MAY 8, 1968

[mountain grammy]

9. When this picture was published, my sons were 4 and 1 and I saw their faces on these children.

My ex husband had voted for Nixon and was passed out drunk while I took both kids to every peace march I could get to.

This picture changed lives like no other. My dear husband of 27 years, spent 1970 in Vietnam as a crew chief. Like most vets, he doesn't dwell on it. He feels lucky to have returned with a sound mind and body. He does say, the first time and every time he sees this photo, he's moved to tears. He is totally and completely against any war for any reason.

[Just the facts]

10. LBJ wasn't the only one responsible for the Vietnam War

"LBJ + NO WAR - = NO NIXON" is a simplistic and misleading understanding of the actual history of the Vietnam War. Furthermore, the truth of the terrible scene of children running from war as depicted in the famous photograph above is not unique to the Vietnam War.

In fact, the truth of that photograph applies to all wars.

To quote General Sherman, “War is All Hell”.

All war.

Not just the Vietnam War.

Do you think that photographs were published by the media of the aftermath of the latest American drone strike in Pakistan in 2014, the images of dead and dying men, women and children would be any less horrific than this famous photograph from the Vietnam war? Do you imagine the images of incinerated human beings from Dresden or Tokyo in 1945 are any less terrible? What about the dead from Iraq and Afghanistan? All wars are hell.

When presidents and other national leaders sit in comfortable chairs, push maps around polished conference tables in secure locations far from the danger and horror of battle, and make solemn pronouncement about "national security" and the regrettable need to use armed might against the “enemy”, the inevitable result is dead, dying and terribly wounded people – many innocent -- on all sides who are bombed, shelled, shot, burnt and dismembered by the in discriminant weapons of modern war.

That is the simple reality and in the American context, this has been true from start of the Revolution in 1775 to Afghanistan in 2014. All wars – the “good wars” and the “bad wars” are all pretty much the same that way.

LBJ has blood on his hands for the Vietnam War for sure, but so do many others. The slaughter in Vietnam had been going on for many years before Johnson came on the scene. In 1950, Truman supported the French against Ho Chi Minh. The blood flowed. In 1954, Eisenhower supported South Vietnam and Ngo Dinh Diem against Ho Chi Minh. More blood flowed. In 1960, Ho Chi Minh escalated the killing by supporting the Viet Cong and then the infiltration of Northern irregulars into the South. The blood continued to flow. In 1961, Kennedy told his people that they would “pay any price, bear any burden” anywhere in the world to ensure the triumph of “freedom” over communism and then upped the ante with thousands of American “trainers and advisors”, along with massive shipments of war material, to South Vietnam in order to stem the Red Tide. Yet, more rivers of blood flowed. In 1965, a conflicted LBJ ultimately demonstrated fidelity to the policy of his predecessors and followed the advice of JFK’s “best and brightest” to escalate American involvement through combat forces and bombing. In 1968, LBJ realized that the Americanization of the Vietnam War had been a terrible mistake and reversed course by initiated peace talks with North Vietnam. Of course, Nixon then came on the scene, actively stalled the peace talks, thus extending the killing several more years in order to enhance the American position at the bargaining table.

Many people are responsible for the thirty of so years of bloody carnage in Vietnam that finally ended in 1975, Not least of which are the American people themselves. It should be noted that American public opinion was strongly in support of LBJ’s escalation from 1965 through to end of 1966 and early 1967. It finally collapsed when the grim reality of the Tet Offensive was broadcast into everyone’s home in glorious Technicolor in January, 1968.

No single president, advisor or foreign leader mentioned above is completely responsible for the horror that led to the terrible photograph above. They all had a hand in it.

What is the lesson? War is terrible and it inevitably kills innocent people – men, women and children. It should never ever be resorted to unless it is an absolute last resort and all other actions have been exhausted.

It is not a lesson that has been learned.

[warrprayer]

11. Welcome to D.U.

Helluva first post man.

[Orsino]

12. Anticommunism lies near the heart of the matter.

That's how it was sold to us. But this was just another war for the profiteers.

[grahamhgreen]

13. Thanks for expanding on this. My point was in resopnse to a front page post yesterday

here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024757947

This one argues that although LBJ was bad on Vietnam, he was good on other things, therefore, we should give Obama a pass on crap like wars, the TPP, rendition, etc.

Fact is, without the (illegal & immoral) crap, we'd be winning elections.

[Just the facts]

17. Sadly, I am not so sure "we'd be winning elections" ...

Last edited Wed Apr 2, 2014, 01:38 AM - Edit history (1)

Let's look at the "realpolitik" of domestic politics when it came to Vietnam as an example. LBJ was in a real political box and he knew it. Withdrawal from Vietnam, the "right" decision in hindsight, would not have been perceived by many Americans in 1965 as anything other than weakness from a president who was the leader of a political party already tagged as "soft on communism". Back in the early decades of the Cold War, as is the case today, domestic politics played a significant part of presidential decision making in regards to foreign policy. Truman and Acheson were torn to pieces in the court of public opinion by Republicans and Senator McCarthy for “losing” China and failing to secure victory in Korea. Adlai Stevenson and the Democrats took a thumping for being “soft of communism”. The lesson was not lost on JFK who took a stridently anti-communist position in his bid for the White House. When Kennedy said in 1961 that Americans would “pay any price, bear any burden”, his words implicitly heralded a hard-line policy against the Communist bloc that was popular at home, but also significantly upped the stakes for American prestige everywhere, including the long-standing policy of US support for South Vietnam. Yes, LBJ was the “decider” who committed American ground troops and escalated the war. As such, he deserves his share of the blame for doing so, but the blood resulting from that decision is also on many other hands as well. With the exception of George Ball, the “best and brightest” from JFK’s administration who remained with LBJ, men such as Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, Rostow, etc. all agreed that bombing and then US ground troops were necessary to ensure the survival of South Vietnam. Thanks to the instability brought on by the US supported coup against Diem, which was green-lighted by the Kennedy administration in August, 1963, by the time LBJ made the decision to go in with US troops in July, 1965, his only other real option would have been to pull out and let South Vietnam fall to Communist NVN. In regards to the real world political calculation, this would not have been very popular with an American populace who generally believed at the time, perhaps wrongly in retrospect, that it was their nation’s solemn duty to resist the Reds everywhere. In fact, as I mentioned, American public opinion strongly backed Johnson’s escalation of the war and support did not finally collapse until the roof caved in on his Vietnam policy during the aftermath of the January 1968 Tet Offensive. Had LBJ let SVN fall in ’65, folks such as Goldwater, Nixon, etc, undoubtedly would have attempted to destroy him for “losing” Vietnam in the same way they crippled Truman back in the early ‘50’s. Furthermore, many Democrats including RFK (who did not repudiate the Vietnam War until 1967) would have attacked him for reneging on JFK’s pledge to “pay any price, bear and burden”, which sounded good as long as Americans didn’t have to see the bill to pay for Kennedy’s promises. Johnson believed (not unreasonably) that his political capital to achieve domestic reforms would have been destroyed had he pulled the US out of SVN in 1965. All of this is not to absolve LBJ of the blame for his decision to escalate the Vietnam War, but rather an attempt to understand the complexities and realities of the political context in which his decision was made.

Furthermore, I doubt the Great Society reforms would have been enacted without LBJ in the White House. Take Civil Rights. The actual facts indicate that the landmark legislative achievements embodied in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were not at all inevitable, and even if they had been achieved later on, would have occurred after much greater violence and bloodshed. Civil rights legislation proposed by Kennedy had languished in Congress (along with Medicare). Reactionaries across the South circa 1964 were resisting change mightily and prepared for even greater efforts to fight the Civil Rights movement, and this wasn’t just the KKK. Look up the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission as an example of how the official power structure across Dixie was preparing to fight The Civil War II. The violence and bloodshed would likely have been much worse had the conflict over Civil Rights in the South dragged on. Segregation was ultimately broken because black Americans were prepared to resist their oppression, take to the streets in large numbers to protest Jim Crow and get their heads busted for their trouble. LBJ’s genius was in recognizing that the combination of the Civil Rights movement and the aftershock from Kennedy’s murder created a unique political opportunity for him push Congress to act on Civil Rights, thus finally redeeming the promise of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. In fact, LBJ coordinated extensively with Civil Rights leaders such as MLK to help him push through legislation that would put the final nails in the coffin for legalized apartheid in America. I don’t think this would have happened as quickly, simply or has bloodlessly had any other president been in the Oval Office at the time, including JFK. I would suggest reading “Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Laws that Changed America” (2005) by Nick Kotz. It’s an excellent history of how LBJ and MLK frequently consulted each other from 1963 to 1965 with a view to creating a strategy to coordinate their respective actions to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Presidents are not gods and do not have a monopoly on wisdom or morality. When it comes to presidential decision making, political reality and morality are often two separate things. This has been true from Washington through to Obama. Presidents are leaders and decision-makers who can sometimes great and good things, and then turn around on a dime and do bad things (sometimes even for good reasons). Vietnam was not just a tragedy for Lyndon Johnson, it was a tragedy for the American people. However, LBJ's decision to escalate in 1965 at the height of the Cold War was made in the knowledge that there would have been an enormous political backlash to the notion of an American withdrawal. Presidential decisions and calculations are based on the view of the American people as they actually are and not as a president wished they were. It would have taken an extraordinarily courageous president to tell the American people in 1965 that they were wrong about fighting communism every where in the world and that America was ultimately not prepared to "pay any price, bear any burden" to defend SVN. LBJ was certainly courageous in his efforts to ask Americans to be on the side of Civil Rights, but he didn't have enough left over to tell the American people that one of their fundamental precepts of the Cold War was wrong.

[TBF]

16. Excellent post -

Welcome to DU!

[Martin Eden]

19. "It is not a lesson that has been learned."

Lessons have been learned over and over again but, sadly, not retained.

One of JFK's "best and brightest" learned some lessons, which he attempted to convey to the rest of us. McNamara's 11 lessons in his "Fog of War" are by no means a comprehensive wisdom on the lessons we should have learned from Vietnam to guide future American foreign policy, but it is abundantly clear the American public and its leaders were blind to these hindsights regarding Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is absolutely essential for the American voter to learn and retain such lessons. Until we do, we will be misled into war after war by ambitious politicians and the elites of wealth and power who put them in office and get richer from the rivers of blood.

Excellent post, BTW. We need more of that here.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

14. LBJ fell into the trap of politicians, he was determine to prove himself a "strong leader".

Instead, he proved himself to be a mass murderer.

[grahamhgreen]

15. Exactly the trap Obama is in.

[Just the facts]

18. Yes, I suppose ...

... but also remember that LBJ, and others of his generation, had been around when Chamberlain gave in to Hitler's demands at Munich in 1938, which then led to World War II and the deaths of over sixty million people across most of Europe and Asia. People of Johnson's generation were traumatized by the horror of such unimaginable devastation and learned a lesson -- never ever show weakness to an aggressor. It's fair to argue that this "lesson" was misunderstood and misapplied to many situations, including Vietnam. It's also fair to argue that the question as to which country was the "aggressor" in any particular dispute was open to interpretation and America was certainly not always benign in its intent. Nevertheless, in the context of the Cold War, all the presidents from Truman through to Reagan took the "lesson" to heart and believed that it was important for the US to always demonstrate strength and resolve in foreign policy. It's also true that for the most part, the American people expected it of their presidents. It's not a surprise that President Obama echoes that sentiment as well.

Furthermore, setting aside the actual definitions of "murder" and "mass murderer", I will take your comment to mean that Johnson was responsible for many people being killed. True. However, the same can be said of many presidents, virtually every one from the beginning of the 20th Century to now. Every so often, every president issues an order that results in the deaths of people. How many Americans died under Lincoln's watch? FDR is beloved by many people, but he was the Commander-in-Chief who oversaw the American firebombing of Japan and is just as much a "mass murderer" as Johnson. Of course, FDR's war was thought to be a "good war" by most people, so no one seems to worry too much about what the United States (and its allies) did to win it. I raise this merely to point out that the difficult moral and ethical questions raised by the use of war are beyond just LBJ (or Obama) and can be applied to many presidents in American history.