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

[Just the facts]

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

Last edited Wed Apr 2, 2014, 12:38 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.