The USA in LBJ's Time
1963-1969
By Mike Donovan
Mr. Vietnam - VP Hubert Humphrey –Southwest Texas State Teachers College – The Great Society - #36 – The Rose Garden Curtain - Slammed ultra-conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in 64. Final in the EC was 486 to 52.
“If you were a journalist you were against the war because you realized that to write good things about the war would never win you the Pulitzer Prize.”
Johnson on Vietnam
I Don't buy it. I don't buy that LBJ was a Mt Rushmore level social progressive, that his heart bled for the poor and that he was the spearhead of their advancement. Johnson was pushed from behind to make changes for the betterment of the American people. LBJ was an animal of a politician who made it to the top and did what was expedient when he got there.
I also don't believe that the CIA would assassinate the president of the United States because he was planning on withdrawing from Vietnam, nor that a big mobster would have him whacked over a dame. These of course are the top two theories on who killed JFK. But who had the most to gain from the death of Kennedy? Who had best real motive, the kind that adds up on an episode of Law and Order?
Its certainly no crackpot theory. One of the best selling books on the Kennedy assassination (the Lifton book) ends with the words, 'eh tu Lyndon?'
Johnson was the first president I was old enough to hold an opinion of. I was 9-13 in his time. I supported the war in Vietnam for simple reasons. But I knew how I felt about our president. I thought he was an ugly bore. I felt very strongly about that. I couldn't stand the sight of him or the sound of his voice. I never felt that way about any other president. I thought all the others had charisma.
Lyndon Johnson used to have his bed flown ahead of him when he traveled outside of Washington. That’s pretty bizarre and hard to believe but it comes from Richard Nixon who says that he and his wife Pat were aghast when they learned of this upon entering the White House. Johnson’s bed flew more miles than the one in Bed-knobs and Broomsticks. His bed covered more air miles than 98% of the American people. Johnson meanwhile told the poor how his heart bled for them.
Johnson entered the White House on the grim reaper’s coattails. He rode them to re-election in 64. The martyred predecessor made the White House a tough prospect for any Republican candidate in 1964. The Dealy plaza killer not only put LBJ in the White House, he re-elected him too. (Notice we don’t have to write ‘he or she.’ No one suspects that a second gun-woman might have been present at Dealey Plaza.)
Johnson was a dreadful orator; all the more so because you can tell he thinks he’s really good. He was a ham with no pizazz.
Lyndon was the redneck that helped the Blacks on Civil Rights issues because the era demanded it, not because he did. He was also the man who in the opinion of many asked our military to fight the Vietnam War with one hand tied behind its back.
Popular vote 1964-------------------------- Johnson 43, 129,000
Goldwater 27,178,000
SHORT TAKE
Lyndon Johnson was an insufferable thug and bully posing as a liberal who cared about black people and the poor.
A Professor Leuchtenburg interviewed him in 1965 but was told that he couldn’t use any of it until after Johnson left the White House. Leuchtenburg was also warned by Johnson’s press secretary to definitely not use the things Johnson would surely say about Kennedy.
The material was so rotten that Leuchtenburg never got around to having it published. American Heritage magazine finally released the interview in 1990.
Johnson called JFK “Joe College man” and said that Kennedy knew as little about how Congress ran as anyone in the House. As far as Johnson knew, Speaker Sam Rayburn only thought of Kennedy as just a young guy who was probably going to die of malaria. Kennedy had been sick with malaria during his Pacific days of WWII.
As for his supposed idol FDR, Johnson said that Franklin was like some a farmer who sold all his lumber and bought fireworks for Christmas with the dough. “It all went up with a bang.” As for FDR’s achievements with labor and Social Security, Johnson said, “None of it compares to my Education Act.”
Leuchtenburg staggered out of the interview shocked by Johnson’s egomaniacism. He had only managed to get two questions in for the entire 90 minute interview. The President had just talked a blue streak about his own greatness and the smallness of other great men.
And people actually occasionally bother to ask me who my least favorite president was. Two plus two is four and LBJ wins running away.
‘If Goldwater ever gets in there will be a war.’ That’s what they said about Johnson’s opponent in 1964. I later heard this about Reagan. RR got the chance to prove them wrong. Goldwater never did and is still remembered as that guy that “it’s a good thing he didn’t get in, whew”. Yeah, it’s a good thing. We might have even won the Vietnam War in two years and the great leftist mania, driven by the one great issue of that losing war in Southeast Asia, might never have materialized.
Lyndon Johnson bored me to tears as a young teen-ager. With his elderly look, his slow drawl and his boring scripts, Lyndon was the ultimate sleeping pill. He was a man of many words and long speeches. It was nearly impossible to like him.
LBJ was also the man who was going to send me to Vietnam so I could fall into a camouflaged pit with spikes on the bottom, a very real fear for a 13 year old boy, especially when the older kid across the street Jimmy Madden had already been drafted and shipped off to the jungles.
LBJ was the liberal Democrat who created the left wing opposition of government-hating hippies. I always thought that was strange. The hippies began wearing Nehru jackets and hating ‘the establishment” and saying ‘off the pig’ under Johnson long before Republicans in the Kissinger gang took over. The nation had been Democrat ruled for 8 years and was a maelstrom of unhappy left-wingers demanding change and hating not “the government” but “government”.
It was a political paradox that Nixon later powered down the war and he was the conservative, while Johnson powered up the war and he was the liberal. Johnson handed the Olympic torch of Vietnam to Nixon, but with only the flame for a handle.
Johnson declined to run for re-election in 1968 (the clip is overplayed “I shall not seek…”). In this sad speech he gave noble reasons for his decision, but really he was just tired, beaten, knew he could not get re-elected, and had no idea how to get out of Vietnam. There was a lot of death on his conscience and the protesters rubbed it in every day right in front of his house. (“Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did ya kill today! Hey! Hey!…)
BIO;
Lyndon Johnson was born near Stonewall, Gillespie County, Texas on the Pedernales River on August 28, 1908. No biographer says he was born in Stonewall so he belongs to his country and his county, but not to a hometown.
When little Lyndon was five, the Johnsons moved to Johnson City, a town named after his own great grandfathers. After he graduated high school in JC he went to California to kick around with some friends for a while in a beat up old Model T Ford. Lyndon had his ups and downs as an elevator operator in California, but that job didn’t last. California was a bust. He as even told by a Hollywood mogul that he would have his own sit-com if he stuck around for 20 years, but Johnson was tired of being broke and far from home. If he wanted to be poor he could at east go back to Texas and be poor among family and friends.
Johnson moved back to Texas with holes in his pockets to work on a road construction project for a whopping one dollar a day. (Lyndon in 64 began a run of four presidents who grew up less than rich – LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Carter were anything but baby boys.)
His mother didn’t have any trouble this time convincing him it was time to think about college. She loaned him 75 dollars to enroll in Teacher’s College in San Marcos where he worked as a janitor to help pay his way. A janitor on his way to the White House!
Johnson left beloved STSTC for a year to take a job as principal at a Mexican-American school. In 1931 Johnson graduated from Southwest with a B.S. degree, which would come in handy later when he reported to the nation on the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Johnson, the man from Johnson City, began teaching at James Pearsall High in Pearson Texas, and then became a full time public speaking instructor at Sam Houston High in Houston.
Lyndon entered politics in 1931/2 by managing successfully, the campaign for Congress of Texan Dick Kleberg. For this good work he was appointed secretary to Kleberg. It was Mr. Johnson goes to Washington, the poor dirt-farmer and struggling school teacher mixing with giants. Johnson worked in Klebergs office in Washington from 1932 to 1935 where his quality work came to the attention of his idol, Franklin Roosevelt. King Roosevelt then made Lyndon the head of the NYO, the National Youth Organization, in Texas.
Lyndon attended Georgetown University Law School in ’34 but did not graduate. On November 17, 1934 he married Claudia Taylor, a woman America came to know later by her nickname, ‘Ladybird’ Johnson (few ever knew her real first name.) Johnson and Taylor had known each other all of two months when they were wed in San Antonio.
In 1937 a chance for public office opened up in the 10th Congressional District (map). Congressman J Pat Buchanan had died in office and a special election was called to fill the seat. Johnson resigned from the NYO and threw his ten-gallon hat into the ring. LBJ ran as a full-fledged FDR New Dealer, and won the seat with ease. Lyndon was then re-elected semi-annually until 1948.
Congressman Johnson saw a chance to run for the Senate when death again reared its friendly head. Texas Senator Morris Sheppard, the “Father of National Prohibition” passed away on April 9, 1941 in Washington. Johnson took on conservative Republican Pappy O’Donnell in the special election to fill the vacated seat. LB lost to O’Donnell by less than 14,000 votes. On the morning after Election Day, Johnson stunned a small group of supporters by hurling a heavy glass ashtray through a closed hotel window and then declaring that whatever it takes, he would never lose another election. He never did; A war, yes, but never again an election.
When Japan attacked America the feisty Johnson showed his true colors by volunteering for combat duty. While an active US Congressman, LBJ enlisted on December 9, 1941.
There are conflicting versions of Johnson’s service in World War II. Johnson won a Silver Star for bravery, but was it legitimately earned? The President wore the Silver Star conspicuously during most of his speeches and news conferences on the Vietnam War. We get the message. He wasn’t asking others to risk their lives when he was too cowardly to risk his own. This is of course, the standard criticism of all presidents who want to use our military power for any reason.
Johnson began his war service with an assignment to office work until May 1942 at which time he went to the South Pacific as FDR’s ‘personal emissary.’ He made the scene on May 14 and just over one month later the tour of duty was over.
So what about the Silver Star? On one occasion he was assigned as photographer to an aerial combat mission in the New Guinea theatre. According to Johnson’s 1964 campaign biography Japanese fighters attacked his plane. There were no casualties on either side and the plane came back without completing its assignment. But Johnson had showed much courage under fire and General MacArthur awarded Lyndon the Silver Star, the same medal later given to John Kerry for rescuing several men under heavy fire during a river battle in Vietnam. Johnson got his star for gallant fighting that “enabled him to obtain and return with valuable information.”
The cynical version asks what information he obtained since the mission was never completed. And was it not strange that no other members of the airplane crew received a medal of any kind, but FDR’s emissary did. And for doing what? Was it for looking out the window and saying ‘I’m not scared”? That’s the only explanation I can think of.
The only available account of this mission is from the New York Times in 1942. It says that the plane developed mechanical trouble and returned safely. There is no mention of any attack by Japanese planes.
President Roosevelt soon ordered all US politicians on combat duty to return to their old jobs on Capitol Hill. Johnson returned to DC in July. War duty was for the politicians of tomorrow, not today (As late as 1996, Bob Dole was the Republican candidate for President running as a World War II War hero. Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Bush all served in World War II.)
Johnson as Texas Congressman and then Senator was one of the most powerful politicians on Capitol Hill throughout the 1950’s. He fought hard for the Democratic nomination for President in 1960. He was not a household name in Peoria at the beginning of 1960, but he had been a prominent name in Washington for some time.
Kennedy asked Johnson to be his running mate in July of 1960 but did so in a cold and unflattering manner. At least John wasn’t a phony about it. He needed Lyndon more than he wanted him. Johnson was three Kennedy was not; he was conservative, Southern and wrinkled. And he had powerful connections inside the hill. Kennedy didn’t make a pretense of friendship but he respected Lyndon, as everyone did.
Johnson’s Southern friends urged him to decline the VP. One oilman from Houston told Johnson to request a private meeting with Kennedy and then “put that Yankee in a headlock and teach him a lesson in Southern manners.”
But Johnson may have known the futility of running for President from the Congress and may have correctly figured that 60 would be his one great chance. The postman always rings twice but opportunity only knocks once. On July 14, 1960 Johnson accepted the offer from Kennedy to be matey to skipper K.
They should have been happy but Lyndon and his wife could not hide their inner downer. One newspaper publisher who saw them that night said that “they looked as though they had just survived an airplane crash.”
Johnson’s cabinet;
Secretary of State----------Dean Rusk-----1963-1968
Secretary of Defense----Robert McNamara-1963-1968
Clark Clifford------1968-1969
Sec of Treasury------------C. Douglas Dillon—1963-1965
Henry H. Fowler-----1965-1968
Joseph Barr-----------1968-1969
Att General----------------Robert F. Kennedy—1963-65
N deB Katzenbach----1965-1967
Ramsey Clark---------1967-1969
Sec. of the Interior---------Steward ‘Mo’ Udall 1963-1969
CABNOTES
Ramsey Clark is the left-wingers all time favorite recruit from the ranks of conservative power. If you know a left wing group or idea that needs a voice of authoritative support from the other side just call this guy. 674,987 times a year you find some left wing story that includes, “Even former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark is.” in favor of such and such a radical left idea.
How many times can you milk the idea that here’s a guy from ‘the establishment’ side of things and even he is with us on this one? At some point his staid cabinet credential is revoked. Today I heard on the news that Ramsey Clark is assisting in the legal defense of Saddam Hussein who is on trial in Iraq. Gee, what a shocker.
This is the same Bozo that traveled to Hanoi in 1972 and told the world that our POW’s were being well treated.
Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State was a soft-spoken Rhodes scholar that Johnson inherited and retained from the Kennedy Administration. He seldom gets the blame for the Vietnam escalation, but he had something to do with it. Rusk believed that the Communist Chinese were the backbone of the North Vietnamese war effort and for that reason the Communist domination of Indochina must be contested. In other words he had a very simplistic and unsophisticated view of the causes and realities of the conflict. He had the correct one.
Joseph Barr was the grandfather of comic actress Roseanne Barr.
Johnson rejected all of Joey’s suggestions for improving the economy so Barr resigned.
Events;
24th AMENDMENT
THE VIETNAM WAR
THE TONKIN GULF DECEPTION
THE VIETNAM WAR PROTEST MOVEMENT
FEDERAL AID PROGRAMS EXPANSION
ELECTION OF 1964
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT 1964
VOTING RIGHTS ACT 1965
25th AMENDMENT 1965
APOLLO PROGRAM
THE SO CALLED “GREAT SOCIETY”
RACE RIOTS NEWARK, WATTS AND OTHER CITIES
SIX DAY WAR IN MIDDLE EAST 1967
ASSAULT ON LIBERTY
ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING
ASSASSINATION OF ROBERT F KENNEDY
DEATH OF HOOVER
SEIZURE OF THE PUEBLO
INAUGURATION
Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President on Air Force One on 11.22.63 just before the plane left the Dallas airport for Washington. Jacqueline Kennedy was a few feet away, with JFK’s blood still full red on her dress.
He retained the entire Kennedy Cabinet. Few of them liked him. They had loved John Kennedy. AG Robert Kennedy and new President Johnson famously hated each other.
FIRST MOVES
Johnson had one key advantage over almost every other US prez who has ever served. LJ had been a wizard in the Congress for more than two decades before entering the White House. He knew how to get a deal through Congress as well as any living Congressperson or any living person. So when Lyndon had a bright idea for a policy or a move, he knew how to turn his dream into reality. There was nothing a shrewd Congressman or Senator could pull behind Lyndon Johnson’s back. He was already the world’s reigning king of the back room parlay and log-rolling deals.
No one ever came to the presidency so well qualified to deal with Congress as Johnson.
Henry Clay had a comparable record in Congress in the 1800’s but he only won the nomination three times, and lost three times for the Presidency. Most of the great names of Congress hit a glass ceiling in those hallowed halls. Governors, Actors and University Professors have as good a chance of winning the White House as does a Congressperson, much to the eternal frustration of these Congresspersons.
In all of American history only one man, John Kennedy went from the Congress directly to the Presidency! (let me double check McKinley…)Wow. And Kennedy made it more on his family name than his record there. Congresspersons are forever running for President but they never win. They’re always dropping out with three months to go and throwing their support for someone who didn’t stab them in the back on the campaign trail.
So the Congressional doyen as Prez is actually a rather unusual and unique concept in American history and Johnson’s record is certainly interesting for it.
LBJ called cabinet meetings at the end of November and was often working hard on the budget in the White House while JFK’s body was still in the same building. J took 137 billion in governmental requests for fiscal 1964 and trimmed it to 97 billion, many of the cuts coming at the expense of defense of course, a standard Dem tradition going back to Tom Jefferson, and one which LBJ embraced. Johnson cut far less from social programs
POLL TAX ABOLISHED 1 64
In one of the Johnson era’s first political events Congress passed the 24th Amendment in January of 1964 making it illegal to require the payment of a poll tax to register to vote in any election national or local. This put an end to the use of the poll tax to enforce white supremacy in the South. The passage of this measure helped to generate momentum for more far reaching civil rights legislation the next year.
GREAT RHETORIC
On May 9 1964 Lyndon gave a speech in Atlantic City in which he first introduced the term “great society.” The jive piled up from there. It was just rhetoric and became a catch phrase for the ages. It meant whatever anyone wanted it to mean which meant it meant nothing. It was great semantics of no real consequence except as applied in practice, and even then it could be termed whatever anyone wanted to term it. A program to help the poor in new housing could go by any of a thousand rhetorical titles.
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964
It had of course begun as the Civil Rights Act of 1963 and Kennedy had initiated it. In the spring of 1964 the law was still moving its way slowly through the processes of the Hill. Now its was Johnson’s Civil Rights Act.
The only way to pass it would be to enlist some Republican support. The Southern Democrats were an almost complete untied front against it. The old boy guard of Southern white racists Senators were going to go down with the ship if they had to, but they were ‘not no way not no how’ going to pass a law that allowed the Federal government to guarantee by law that Negroes could use the same toilets as Whites in Birmingham. And in private they didn’t use the word ‘Negro.’
There were reasons why it was taking it so long to pass. First of all the Southern racist Congressmen were using the filibuster. They had been doing this for more than a hundred and fifty years to promote racism in America. If a bill came up that was in any way progressive on the black and white issue they would just speak endlessly for weeks on the floor of the House or Senate, never yielding the floor until the Bill expired (or the speakers). (see Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for the Jimmy Stewart filibuster movie example). The filibuster is a completely horrible and nauseating feature of our imperfect governmental system. Its just complete petulant obstructionism without and decent purpose or morality. Its like a teen-ager asks dad if he can go to the dance tonight and the father gives a seven hour answer until the dance is over and then he says ‘maybe.’
The other reason why CRA64 took such a long time to come to a showdown was that the supporters of it had to use caution. If the supporters of the Bill brought it to a vote when they were a nickel shy of passing it, they would regret their call to action. To override a filibuster required a 2/3 majority and they almost had the votes but not quite. The margin of error rested with Republican Everett Dirkson, an influential veteran of renown. If they could convince the old goat to vote their way, he could persuade five or six more. Besides, the country was changing its feelings on the issue on a month to month basis. Racial strife in the South was creating headlines in Northern newspapers. People outside of the South were beginning to realize that this was not a Southern problem anymore. The entire country through the help of the headline spectacular media, so often condemned for its nature but in this case a savior, was driving home to the entire country that this was a simple matter of a moral outrage, a matter of right versus wrong in terms as simple as black and white. The national conscience could not sweep southern segregation and oppression under the rug anymore.
The churches of the nation became more involved politically than at any time in the century. Pressure from church activism helped change the momentum for the bill, putting pressure on Congresspersons to repent and stop being racist sinners.
The old guard of 18-20 racist senators were hurt by their elderly age. These mummies were having trouble physically maintaining the filibusters. Seventy seven year old men can’t give nine hour speeches on their feet in the Senate, and their wrinkled faces, combined with a complete lack of support outside their inner circle, made the writing on the wall clear enough for the centrist forces in the country.
The Civil Rights Bill was finally put to the vote in the Senate on the 19th of June 1964. All 100 of them voted, something that doesn’t happen very often in that august body. The yeas had it 73 to 27.
After the vote, Senators Ted Kennedy and Birch Bayh caught a small plane north. It crashed. Bayh suffered minor injuries but initial reports came in that Kennedy had been killed. It turned out that he survived but was severely injured. Kennedy was bedridden in a hospital for many weeks. The FAA suspended Kennedy’s pilots license and charges against him for flying while intoxicated were being considered. I’m kidding. Kennedy did not pilot the plane. He was a just a passenger. The pilot was an unknown young singer named Jack Denver.
UNCIVIL RIOTS OF 1964
On July 16th 1964 a New York City police officer shot and killed a 15 year old black youth named Jimmy Powell. The boy was attacking the cop with a knife and had cut the officer in the arm when the fatal shot was fired.
The city of New York became the scene of a massive riot, the blacks protesting the unfair deal Powell was given by the evil cop. No justice no peace. Justice means that a cop should be an understanding social worker in all situations involving blacks, but a person trying to do his duty when situations arise with other races. This went on in 1964 and it still goes on today.
Another NYC riot on the 18th of July started with trouble at 125th St and 7th Ave. A protest march of blacks surrounded a New York precinct police station. Gee, what could possibly go wrong here? The fighting with police led to general indiscriminate looting, the victims (as in 1992) primarily being hard-working honest black store-owners. For two more nights it was bedlam in Haarlem, and the next three nights after that there were riots in Brooklyn where it was Bedlam-Stuyvesant. Similar riots erupted that summer in Jersey City, Rochester, Chicago, Boston, and Brigantine.
Politically the race riots (FBI reports and journalists alike agreed that the NYC disturbance was not in actuality a ‘race-riot’ in the sense that the young black men were rebelling against all authority and order, not against whites) were a new problem for the candidates of both parties. It was helpful to the racist George Wallace of Alabama who ran in the Northern Democratic primaries in 64, a prelude to his serious challenge for the White House in 1968. The so called “backlash” from the ghetto riots generated scared white votes for Wallace in the North in scary numbers. In white suburbs where there had been inner city rioting Wallace put up some impressive numbers.
VIETNAM OVERVIEW
I was a boy in the Johnson Vietnam years. I thought we were winning and I was rooting for our guys in this one on TV while reading World War II books at home. Every week there was a graph bar showing something like 924 Viet Cong killed and a little graph bar at the bottom showing something like 24 GI’s killed. I can still see Cronkite 500 times telling me how much we were winning. I don’t recall any sense of media approbation towards the war but I might have been too young to be aware.
Although Vietnam involved several US Presidents, it is generally considered to be Lyndons' war, or sometimes ‘McNamaras' War’. When LBJ took office there were 16,000 USA troops in Vietnam. When he left office there were over 600,000.
Coincidentally, when he entered office the approximate size of a campus protest against the Vietnam War, and ‘the bomb’ was 16,000. When he left office, the size of a well-organized demonstration against the VW was 600,000.
The arguments about Vietnam are as endless and hopeless. There are two historical camps, both absolutely sure of themselves.
The majority of about 97% knows today that the war was wrong, that the protesters were right, and the US was the bad guy in Vietnam. There’s nothing to discuss. Only a pathetic pinhead could look back on the Vietnam War and come to any other conclusion.
The minority camp of 4% is miffed because the war was not conducted with victory in mind. They feel that Johnson conducted the war with a mixed message of strong but limited military force combined with diplomatic and political weakness. This group feels that we fought the war “with one hand tied behind our backs.” They are astonished that Johnson never thought to occupy enemy territory as a sound military and political strategy, and are amazed that we were just there to take hits, not give them back. One Vietnam Vet put it this way, ‘We were not allowed to cross the 50-yard line.’ That is tough on the morale of soldiers. This 6% believes that the stop and start quality of the bombing campaigns was a blunder.
While both sides may well concede the hopelessness of the quagmire, one side also believes that the cause was noble. These people believe that our soldiers behaved far better than the enemy, just as surely as did our GI’s in WWII compared to the Japanese and the Germans.
Johnson gave much consideration to withdrawing from Vietnam, but like Kennedy he didn’t want to jeopardize the 1964 Presidential election. It is no coincidence that Johnson escalated American involvement in 1965, not 1964. His fears for 1964 were confirmed in 1968 when his escalations in Nam cost the Dems the White House.
The successor to Diem in late 1963 was a man named Huong who didn’t last four months. There were ten regime changes in the two years after the coup against Diem. The killing of Diem had created a leadership hole in South Vietnam that the United States had little choice but to fill.
The North Vietnamese Communist cause was ironically set back by the assassination of Diem. Indigent rage at the Diem regime came to a screeching halt and suddenly a lot of peasants who had been sympathetic to the Viet Minh wanted nothing more than to get back to rice farming. The entire revolution in the South was suddenly stalled. The North Vietnamese as a result decided to send in regular army troops to the south to destabilize the improving situation and give chaos a chance.
The introduction of regular NVA troops into South Vietnam changed the entire dynamic of the war for Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, Bundy and the rest of the military think tank. Without Diem the South Vietnamese army and police were now less effective. With this weakness combining with NVA infiltration, the situation was becoming precarious. As Washington perceived it, the war might be flat out lost if the USA did not intervene in force.
Johnson was in the same bind as Kennedy. He was an oxymoron, a liberal hawk. Complete liberal withdrawal might have been a productive solution in the long run. Aggressive military intervention might have been a productive solution in the long run. The worst choice, the one he made, was a middle ground of limited military intervention. This pleased no one on the left or right and set up a war without end in Indochina.
Johnson should have listened to Ike, who abhorred the concept of limited warfare. While LBJ played it half way, Ike asked him, “When do you go after the head of the snake, instead of the tail?” Johnson went after the tail for five years in Vietnam and as a result in the end we had to put ours between our legs.
Historian Michael Lind disputes this common conservative analysis of the war, which is my own view generally. Lind happens to think that the middle ground was actually the only choice available to Johnson and that LBJ made essentially the right call. What is even more annoying is that he argues his case so well. After all, it is a pleasure to look down on the Vietnam performances of Kennedy Johnson and Nixon, especially Johnson. Who needs anyone spoiling our fun?
Lind’s logic is that a withdrawal would have obvious clear implications of democratic and American global retreat both politically and militarily On the other hand trying to win the war would have been a burden not worth the cost. The aftermath of administrating conquered communist southeast Asia would have been a nightmare. Johnson according to Lind, had only one option and he took it. It is a radical, yet simple argument.
NAMPOLS
The Vietnam War produced the presidential candidates for Generation X. Today’s Nam soldiers were tomorrow’s politicians.
The first fighter ace of the war (five or more planes shot down = ace) was a Mr. Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham. He was also the first person in history to make ace through missile fighting, as opposed to machine gunning. Cunningham served in the US Congress for many years. He left Washington in 2005 when it was revealed that he was a scoundrel taking millions of dollars in bribes. He resigned from Congress upon his conviction in November of 2005. He should be going to jail soon. I’m very mad at him right now.
John Kerry volunteered to command a swiftboat and saw much fighting during his short service up close in Vietnam. He spent Christmas of 1968 a few miles short of the Cambodian border, deep up the dangerous Mekong River. Kerry had begun his tour of duty in the South China Sea on a Navy cruiser.
Bob Kerry has been a United States Senator for about two decades now. He was wounded in Vietnam. It was revealed in the late 90’s that he had been a small part of some atrocities over there, but he had some mitigating explanation that fended off the political damage. Kerry has been re-elected since. I shook his hand once as a tourist in the Capitol Building.
Democrat Max Cleland picked up a live enemy grenade in Vietnam in 1968 and lost three of his four limbs. He was elected to the Georgia Legislature at the age of 28 in 1970. Cleland was sent to Washington as U.S. Senator in 1996, but was defeated in 2003 by a Republican.
Democrat Bill Clinton entered the ROTC for a couple of weeks but withdrew when he received a low number in the draft. He then became part of the college anti-war movement.
Republican John McCain was shot down in his fighter-bomber over Vietnam and lived out the war under brutal conditions in a Hanoi P.O.W. camp. The VC beat him and tortured him for seven years. McCain is one of the influential politicians of our time and his name is as synonymous with Arizona Senator as Goldwater’s once was. McCain has tried to run for president, with impressive support, none of which came from me. He is a front-runner for the Republican nomination on 2008.
George W. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard and has been accused of being a no-show for several months of that service. In any case he did train to fly fighter jet aircraft and in this alone, he risked his life for his country.
Democrat Al Gore enlisted in the Army in 1969 and was in the jungle as a war correspondent for 141 days. He carried an M-16.
Admiral James Stockdale was the Vice Presidential running mate of third party (Reform Party) candidate Ross Perot in 1992. Stockdale, like McCain, was a brave flyer that was shot down and captured by the NV. They beat him and tortured him for 7 years, four of those years in solitary confinement, while Jane Fonda and Ram Clark told the USA from Hanoi that our guys were being well treated.
NY WORLD’S FAIR 1964
In Queens, New York the great World’s Fair opened in the spring of 1964. I went to it and so did my wife. We didn’t know each other at the time. I was nine and she was two. We might have passed like ships in the night.
On the eve of the Fair’s opening the Black radical community planned a “stall-in” a motorized version of a “sit-in”. The angry black protestors would take their cars on next to no gas to key points in the city arteries and then pull over and run out of gas. Stalled cars at the intersections of tunnels and bridges would bring the city to a grinding halt and cost everyone in money time and productivity.
The city prepared for the worst. Fleets of tow trucks were waiting with police escort at key intersections near bridges, tunnels and other choke points. But the protest never materialized, possibly because the city was so thusly prepared for it. The World’s Fair opened without home grown sabotage.
DEATH OF HOOVER 10.20.64
On October 1964 former President Herbert Clark Hoover became the third president to pass away in New York City when he died at the age of 90. Hoover had been ill off and on for a couple of years. He died on one of the upper floors of the Waldorf Towers in New York City. Monroe and Arthur were the other two DOA in NYC.
Deathplace of Herbert Hoover 1964
The word ‘deathplace’ is not in the dictionary but birthplace is, which is hardly fair. In 1959 at the age of 85 Hoover had written his best book, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson. Hoover died in his suite on the 31st floor of the Waldorf Astoria towers in New York City on October 1964. He was a great person and a great Republican. As far as a great president, well that’s hard to sell, but it’s doubtful any human leader could have prevented the onslaught of the Great Depression for which he is blamed.
EVENTS IN VIETNAM 1964-5
Most histories blame the United States for all of the escalation. George Herring writes of 1965, “North Vietnam matched U.S. escalation of the war”.
The US feared that South Vietnam would either lose the war or make a separate peace. There was such a rotation of leadership in South Vietnam in the aftermath of Diem’s demise that the US was afraid that one of the new regimes would ask America to simply leave.
Bill Bundy was an important Johnson advisor on Southeast Asia. He was against a plan to ‘neutralize’ Vietnam that was being tossed around.
Michael Maclear’s book, The Ten Thousand Day War and the video it is based on are a very important test plates for all V-War arguments. The book is not extreme leftist by Nam standards, but nevertheless holds a standard liberal bias on every page and was a popular work.
According to Mike, it was the United States that was responsible for the attacks on the south from the NVA. He takes a statement by Bill Colby of CIA about mutual troop movements in 1964 and extrapolates it into Colby blaming the USA as war instigator, when it is Maclear that is doing it, not Colby. If that is Maclear’s opinion, and it is throughout his book, I can respect that, but don’t play writer games and place Colby in a left column he clearly was never a part of,
In fact, North Vietnam was not “renewing” any
military intervention because it had not yet begun
any, according to CIA’s William Colby. His
intelligence … shows that North Vietnamese
main forces did not start moving South until late
1964, or several months after the fifty percent
increase in US troop levels. It was only then that
Colby assessed that the Communists ‘would
probably win the war by the end of 1965.
(Italics mine) – William Colby never did and never would suggest that the North had never begun any aggression. I've read his book, Lost Victory and you are definitely misrepresenting him through one quote taken out of his context and placing it cleverly in yours.
Notice that MM plays stat juggler with the ‘fifty percent increase in troop level’ part. He doesn’t want to state the number of increased US troops because it is small in truth, and not proportionate to the response to it by North Vietnam. But by calling it a ‘fifty percent’ increase, our deployment is made to seem more provocative than it actually is.
In 1964 South Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked installations along the North Vietnamese coast with the logistical support of the CIA and the Army advisors. Maclear uses Daniel Ellsberg as his mouthpiece, condemning America first as the provocateur, as though these attacks were not in response to Communist aggressions of the past several years,
Ellsberg would come to consider these commando raids
as a provocation and the fuse for all-out war.
Mighty Maclear then mocks Bundy for thinking these raids were no big deal, then adds editorially,
Bundy does not state whether he considered the US
response a breach of international law.
All of a sudden the test for all becomes strict respect for international law, as if the Communists all over the globe had not been brazenly breaking international law on a steady basis since the last weeks of World War II (none of which aroused leftist anger by the way.) Maclear has no indignation at any point in his book for the torturing of our prisoners of war in North Vietnam, but when PT boats attack storage depots on the North Vietnamese coast in a rare case of taking the fight to the enemy he has a few choice words of scolding for Colby and the CIA’s insensitivity to legal strictures.
Wish the lib historians would make up their mind as to which event in the Blame the Anti-Communists History of the Vietnam War we are supposed to understand was the real trigger. One book says it’s the French refusal to recognize Ho, then another book says it was the shelling of Haiphong Harbor in November of 46, then it’s the endorsement of Bao Dai, then it’s the endorsement of Diem, then it’s the assassination of Diem, then it’s the deployment of more American advisors, then it’s the torpedo boat attacks by the South Vietnamese Navy that started the Vietnam War. Each is the cause of the war. But one thing is consistent. It’s never the fault of the Communists.
The basis of western apologism for Communist behavior is that they are always only reacting to something bad the west did. For an example read professor G. C. Herring’s story of Ho Chi Minh joining the French Communists in Paris in the early 1920’s,
Departing Vietnam in 1912 as a cabin boy aboard
a merchant steamer, he eventually settled in France
with a colony of Vietnamese nationalists, and when
the Paris Peace Conference rejected his petition for
democratic reforms for Vietnam, he joined the
French Communist Party.
Oh, brother. Look how our hero was pushing for democratic reforms! You see, he never would have joined that silly old Communist Party but he was forced to join because the evil bums at the Peace Conference put his petition into the shredding machine and laughed. Deep down he wasn’t really a Communist. He was just a Vietnamese nationalist using Communism as an expedient vehicle for achieving an independent Vietnam. And I’m the King of Portugal. Nixon woke me up to the real biography of Ho in his book No More Vietnams. Now that I’ve read his side of it I am noticing slippery apologism in western writing for everything in Ho’s life in far too many works. I just want all the facts presented and both points of view examined. Then we can each choose sides and argue. To only cite favorable facts for your team’s side is dishonest, that is unless of course your goal is not honest debate and the search for truth but rather partisan vindication per se.
SEABORN ASSAULT JUNE 1964
In the spring of 1964 the Johnson war team asked Canadian Blair Seaborn of the ICC, the International Control Commission to go to Hanoi and meet quietly with Vietnamese leaders and warn them that the United States was going to setup the war effort if North Vietnam did not compromise while there was still time. This scarcely veiled threat was our idea at the time of giving diplomacy a chance to work.
The ICC and the left in America wanted a negotiated settlement and Laotian style neutrality for South Vietnam. Seaborn met with the charming Prime Minister of North Vietnam Pham Van Dong, and it turned out that he too wanted a neutral status for South Vietnam. All that was required was for the United States to withdraw completely from Southeast Asia first and then a neutralist coalition government would be set up there. Of course there was no danger that a minority of militant Communists would then take over the government. That had happened about 12 times in this century in similar situations in other countries but of course it would never happen in Vietnam because the gentle Ho and the soft spoken and articulate Van Don assured Seaborn that it would not.
Johnson and the JCS had decided to start bombing the North in strength soon but they hoped that by warning the North of their intentions they could achieve a diplomatic power-down of the entire battlefront. It was not to be.
Van Dong was just like all the other VC leaders. He was only interested in the oxymoronic goal of compromise through total victory. Give us your total surrender and then we will compromise diplomatically. This was the North Vietnamese stand throughout the war.
Seaborn did not relish his job of threatening Van Dong, the man known in NV as ‘Ho Chi Min’s favorite nephew,’ but he delivered the warning. If a settlement wasn’t reached soon the North was going to suffer a great deal. Van Dong scoffed at the warning and noted that the heroism of the VC warriors ‘exceeds the imagination. It has astonished us too.’ US bombs could not match VC guts. “Bring it on,” taunted Dong.
Okay, I’m paraphrasing on that last part but Dong warned Seaborn that
North Vietnam had plenty of friends, meaning of course the USSR and China.
MacLear quotes Van Dong’s counter warning in French, which is rude, since I don’t speak French and The Ten Thousand Day War is supposed to be an English language book. Now I have to see my chiropractor, Dr. Andrei Bolougne so he can translate it for me. Just as well, since my neck has been bothering me lately from the strain of carrying home all the 500-page left wing Vietnam War books from the stores,
Nous sommes un pays socialiste, un de pays
socialistes, vous savez, et le people se
dressera.
I’ve been to Paris twice so I have a vague idea of what this is saying. Essentially Dong is admitting unwittingly that the Sino-Soviet split is a hoax, and that the ‘historical enmity’ between China and Vietnam is a lame smokescreen to blind the west. He’s telling America that if we bully him, he will get his big brothers.
Seaborn’s mission accomplished nothing except to give the Bundy McNamara gang a license to claim they had given diplomacy a chance first before bombing North Vietnam. Before the summer ended a North Vietnamese torpedo attack on a US ship gave Johnson the opening he needed to implement an offensive military plan he’d had in mind for some time.
TONKIN 8 64
With the regular North Vietnamese infantry units joining the Viet Communist guerillas in 1964, Johnson and Rusk had to decide on whether to escalate in return, hold the line, or begin thinking about withdrawals from a losing cause. Secretary of Defense McNamara, who revises the history of what he said at the time every decade, weighed in too. It was time to escalate, big time. But before the public would accept a large increase in US military commitment, the enemy should be provoked into firing the first escalatory shot.
US Navy destroyers patrolled provocatively close to the North Vietnamese mainland until on August 2, 1964, one of them; the USS C Turner Joy was attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Two days later the NV Navy assaulted a second US Destroyer the Maddox, near the North Vietnamese coast.
Lyndon was outraged. The US retaliated with air strikes against limited North Vietnamese targets. But that was hardly enough.
On August 7 the Southeast Asia Congressional Resolution, citing the attack, was put before the Congress to give the President almost a blank check for increases in military deployment in Southeast Asia. SACR stated that the independence of South Vietnam was vital to our ‘national interests and world peace.’ It was hard for anyone in Congress to vote no. It would look like they were soft on Communism and the flag. If they didn’t support the President they would be voted out faster than a Kennedy can drive to a liquor store.
The ‘Tonkin Gulf Resolution’ as it is known to history, was passed overwhelmingly. The House vote was 416 to 0; the Senate vote was 88-2. Lyndon could go to war. Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernie Gruening of Alaska were the only two that showed any liberal guts.
The first attack almost certainly took place, but the second attack on the Maddox may have been a disinformation plot to garner support for what was already a not a popular war.
In response to the Tonkin attacks, the United States and South Vietnamese forces launched large retaliatory attacks against targets inside North Vietnam, primarily against their PT boat bases along the coast. The JCS and the Administration had been some time debating whether it might be time to begin taking the war to where the enemy lived. Tonkin gave them the excuse to implement this sea change in military tactics.
Critics charge that in assaulting the Maddox, the North Vietnamese were justifiably responding the recent covert aggressions by our side against targets in North Vietnam, neglecting to consider that our covert operations equaled one hundredth of the aggressions of the North against the South up to August of 1964. The left writers also fume that Johnson misled the Congress about the nature of the attacks because he did not inform it of these covert operations we were committing against the North. How were Johnson and the CIA to keep these covert operations covert if we had to tell the entire US Congress about them?
Senator Fullbright led the Democratic majority in steering this Tonkin resolution to passage. The Senator later admitted that his primary considerations were political. Barry Goldwater was gaining strength by criticizing Johnson’s wimpy prosecution of the War. By displaying high-profile resolute military action, Johnson took the issue away from Goldwater. Many analysts felt that the Tonkin Gulf affair sealed the victory for Johnson in the election of 1964.
Johnson and the military were planning on instituting a bombing campaign of the North in gradual increased amounts to send a message to Hanoi to desist or else (as Seaborn had indirectly warned.) But LBJ was set on waiting until after the election. The attack on the Maddox and the support he received from the nation at large made him change his mind. His approval rating had jumped almost 30% in a few days when the Tonkin Gulf resolution was proposed and passed. Lyndon now believed that bombing the North would no longer have a large political risk domestically.
The US air attacks along the North Vietnamese coast were ostensibly retaliatory raids for the Tonkin Gulf attacks. But in reality they were the beginning of a sustained air campaign of bombing above the 17th parallel, one of two major bombing campaigns of the North in the Vietnam War. The second under Nixon would be named ‘Linebacker.’ The first under Johnson was titled Operation Rolling Thunder. Unfortunately there was a three-year lull between the two campaigns, which gave the VC the impression (correctly) that our resolve to take the offensive was indecisive, inconsistent and scatterbrained.
The gang of left historians are quite certain that United States bombing raids in response to Tonkin (and other later incidents used as pretexts) were the only reason that the North Vietnamese Communists backed by the Soviet Union and China decided to send regular NVA divisions into the south to do battle. It was all the fault of the United States that the war escalated. I guess there was no desire on the part of the North to conquer the South militarily, no matter how long or what it took until America began its evil bombing raids on the admirable and courageous North. That is the tone describing the events by historians later and by leftist observers at the time. The few conservative voices who try to offer another point of view are reduced to a nosebleed seat in the bleachers by ridicule and scoffing dismissal. If not for our bombing campaign, which began slowly after Tonkin and increased gradually over the next two years, the North Vietnamese Army would have stayed where it was in the North and would have completely respected international boundaries. Our bombing only motivated the North to take justifiable revenge.
This is not slick paraphrasing of the liberal history books. It is point blank passing on of what they say. We started everything. The Communists were admirable and innocent and peaceful until we started bombing the North. Only then did they become the determined and ruthless enemy we had to scrap with for the next ten years. ‘Blame America Only’, was their cry and still is. Blame America First would be much too kind in their books.
On November 1, 1964 just two days before Election Day, VC guerillas attacked the American air base at Bien Hoa near Saigon. They killed five American airmen, but more importantly, they destroyed five B-57 bombers. It was one thing to kill a few mere human beings, but you destroy our bombers, you looking for trouble. The Bien Hoa attack would be avenged (‘used as a pretext’ in liberal language), but not of course until after the election.
COLD WAR
In spite of the seriousness of Vietnam, it was not the number one issue for most Americans as the election year evolved. It wasn’t the Civil Rights battle either. No, it wasn’t the economy either, stupid.
Gallup and Harris polls in 1964 consistently turned up the Cold War as the number one issue with voters. If there was one thing more important to voters than their pocketbooks it was their hides. The USSR and the USA were building up a horrible nuclear capability. For the first time people were becoming aware that not only were there enough nuclear bombs to destroy the world, there were now the ICBM delivery systems to make that bad dream come true. But the poison icing on the cake was that the two teams with all the nukes were consistently saying mean and threatening things to and about each other. They were having international disputes in several hot spots around the globe. It should be no wonder that this was the most important issue to Americans in 1964. It was also the issue that made the Republican candidate seem dangerous.
ELECTION OF 1964
Essentially there were only three issues in the campaign of 1964. War and peace, big government, and was Goldwater a nut or was he not a nut? Would Johnson stay on in Vietnam and was he tough enough on Communism? As for big government, the Democrats saw it as the solution to America's social problems while Goldwater and his running mate Miller saw big government as the problem itself.
Johnson was a lock for the Democrats, but the Republican was a wide open field. The front-runners in late 1963 were Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. NR was that oxymoron, a ‘Liberal Republican.’ By 1964 standards he was a RINO. Rocky was liberal on the black issues and voted each issue according to his personal analysis. He voted against Party lines if he felt like it.
Rockefeller was the ultra oxymoron, a liberal Republican, and came from the ultra rich family name. He was a bit like a Kennedy, the elite rich charismatic friend of the poor, jumping back in the limo from a frank talk in the ghetto saying “Jeeves, lets get the hell out of here!” Rocky had homes in Seal Harbor Maine, a 5,000 acre family-owned gated community up in Pocantico Hills, NY up the Hudson and a posh pad in Manhattan on 54th St.
Rockefeller probably would have won the nomination from Goldwater but he pulled a Woody Allen and that was the difference between victory and defeat. Woody Allen can dump his wife for a young scandalous new gal and still go back to making movies filled with dirty jokes. A politician that dumps his wife and then breaks up the marriage of a family friend to get his new wife can’t go back to elections without consequences. Rocky was ahead in the polls until his second wedding day. The next morning he was behind for good.
The story goes like this. Rocky married Mary Toddhunter Clark of Philadelphia in 1930. She was a well to do and brilliant woman and they had five children. But this RINO was also in a MINO, a marriage in name only. All his friends knew that their marriage was rocky. Mary helped him win the campaign for governor of New York in 1958. It was in November of 1961 that Rockefeller went public that he and his wife Todd were on the rocks and a divorce proceeding was under way. This part the public could handle and they forgave him with a landslide reelection vote in 1962.
Now the plot thickens. Dr James S. Murphy was a scientist working for the Rockefeller Foundation and a very successful one. He was close to old man Rockefeller, Nelson’s dad. Murph had a pretty young wife named Margaretta, whose nickname was ‘Happy.” The Happy couple was part of the social scene up in Seal Harbor, where Maggie went for long walks with old man Rocky and was a popular member of the fireplace crowd even when her husband was away studying slides.
The Murphy’s were so loved by the Rockefellers that they were given permission to build their own house on the Rockefeller woodlands at Pocantico on the Hudson. Nelson also just happened lived on Pocantico grounds and had met the Murphy’s many times before. Now it just so happened that Nelson had a great personal interest in housing designs and the building trade. He began to hang around the Murphys as they planned their new home. Then one day when Jimmy Murphy was away the mouse did play. Margaretta studied the drawing intently. Nellie leaned over her shoulder at the blueprint for the new house and showed Happy where the third bathroom should be placed. Then she leaned back with a long look and said “Where should we put the playroom?” You know the rest.
Happy asked Rob Murphy for a divorce and the Irishman said, “Sure, no problem. When the Cleveland Indians win three consecutive World Series I’ll be glad to grant you a divource” A few months later Robyn dropped the impossible conditions and the divorce went through.
This foursome was a very public affair, the talk of the gossip world. The Governor divorces his wife, then starts up with the wife of one of his top employees, forcing them to divorce and then starts shacking up with the divorcee But Rocky wanted more. He wanted to make his fling the real thing. He wanted to marry Happy. He couldn’t be happy without her. His advisors pleaded with him to wait until after the election. America could barely handle the number of offenses so far. The final blow of marriage to the poor guy’s ex-wife was pushing the Rockefeller lick. Nelson said “I’d rather fail at politics with a woman in my bed than succeed in politics without one.” On May 4 1963 the Happy Rocky marriage was sealed in a vow. Overnight, Nelson Rockefeller dropped steeply in the polls for Republican nominee for President. He had been the front runner for the months leading up to May 4 1963.
As for Robin Murphy, he never got over the humiliation and the loss of his Happy wife. In a 1984 interview with Esquire he is quoted as saying, “John Kennedy wasn’t the only man assassinated in 1963.”
Rockefeller wanted the job and had sought it in 1960. He always seemed pretty likeable to me. He had power, ability and charisma. After Nixon lost in 1960, Rockefeller commented that in light of the close vote and Nixon’s negatives, he would have won if he had won the nomination for the Republican Party. John Kennedy said the same thing! Jack felt that he would have lost a close one to Rocky if Nellie had run as the ellie (elephant.)
It was in November of 1961 that Rockefeller confessed that he and his wife Tod were on the rocks and a divorce proceeding was under way. This part the public could handle and they forgave him with a landslide reelection vote in 1962.
Goldwater was another oxymoron (some libs would not include the oxy.) He was a radical and a conservative. Barry was a also Major General in the United States Air Force Reserves. If he became President and started World War III, like so many people feared he might, then he could have called himself up for duty to bomb the Kremlin in a B-52. Goldwater was to the right of electable.
Being a member of the military reserves, Goldwater was comfortable with blunt simple talk about nuclear warfare and weaponry. He consequently created news bulletins and alarms as he casually discussed nuclear war to the press with the same calm that talked about a chicken sandwich on rye. The Democrats and even most radical conservative Republicans were more dramatic, or euphemistic in their phraseology.
Other Republicans in the hunt early on were Governor George Romney of Michigan, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, and William Scranton of Pennsylvania.
Governor Romney’s son Mitt, ran running for President in 2008 as the sitting Republican governor of Massachusetts. George Romney in 64 was, like Mitt, a first term governor and thus didn’t really have the credentials nor the definite desire, unlike Mitt who definitely had the desire.
Hank Lodge was the Ambassador to Vietnam, had been Nixon’s losing mate in 1960, and was expressing no desire to run for President from a base in Saigon. But he was an obvious possibility for his name recognition and venerable life of public service. Lodge had a small but determined group of supporters organizing his campaign for president while he truly had absolutely nothing to do with any of it. William Scranton from Scranton was the good-looking young candidate, the Republican Jack Kennedy. He was a war hero, had served as a very popular and effective governor of his Keystone state, had the support of Eisenhower, and was popular with the big banking Republicans of the East coast. The one thing Scranton didn’t have was a firm desire to run for president and he frustrated supporters and reporters with his lack of commitment.
These three were long shots. The heavy favorites for the Rep nod were Rocky and Goldwater.
But the old guard Eastern Establishment did not favor either of these two. Rocky might have had a banker’s name, but he didn’t have the politically correct attitude to be an old school Republican candidate. Relative to his party in 1964, Nellie was a liberal. He was a New Yorker in name but not in spirit. Rockefeller was long up the Hudson from Wall Street, and his riches notwithstanding, was more of an Albany man than a Manhattan man.
To the New York City snoot scene, Goldwater was even worse. He was simply a southwestern cowboy who had no business thinking he should even fantasize about being president, let alone take a serious run at it. Arizona was even farther in spirit from New York City than it was in miles. The Republican old boy NYC club had been dictating who would run for President since at least 1940. Their guy didn’t have to be from New York City, (it looked better actually if he was not) but he had to be acceptable to them in order to have their support. Both Goldwater and Rockefeller were therefore heading for a brick wall at 90 miles per hour. They were the front runners for a Republican Party that would have a tough time winning in 64 if it were fully united behind a candidate with all the emotional and financial backing of the rich Republican eastern power base. These two individuals were facing the prospect of running without that base.
The Brooks Brothers set had to stop Rocky and Nellie somehow and their only hope was Ike. The former President was the only man with enough power and influence to stop the disaster train and get the Republican machine re-tooled for victory with a new and fresh (not as in young and fresh but as in fresh to the race) candidate. Only Ike could bury these whippersnappers who had no chance, and help install an old square who might have half a chance to unseat Johnson.
Ike wasn’t the most political president of all time but he had his opinions. He wasn’t big on Goldwater. The former Prez was against Rockefeller for personal reasons. Rockefeller’s intimate friend Larry Hughes had written a very negative account of the Eisenhower presidency called The Ordeal of Power. The book was widely read. Ike felt that Rockefeller was implicated by proxy in the nasty book, and he could not forgive nor forget the insult.
Eike had his own list of candidates he would like to see run for president in 64 including General Lucius Clay, who had been in charge of occupied Germany after the war, and Milton Eisenhower. The Republican old guard liked 'Uncle Milty', but since they were planning on criticizing the Kennedy nepotism, they didn’t want to look like they were throwing stones in a glass house. Bobby Kennedy cancelled out the political career of Milton Eisenhower.
The Establishment Reps planned a meeting in late 1963 between old guard mavens and Eisenhower in New York City to plan a way to birth and bankroll a new and less offensive candidate than Nelson or Barry. The date set for the meeting was November 23, 1963.
The assassination of John Kennedy killed the meeting and any hope that anyone but Rocky or Goldwater would be the Republican nominee. By the time the political smoke had cleared from Dealy Plaza and the country started to get back to normal it was January of 1964 and the two front-runners were so far over the top that they had reached the enemy barbed wire. The New Hampshire primary was about to take place and it was too late to stop a sure defeat. The shots that killed Kennedy also killed the Republican alternatives, while at the same time giving Johnson a halo of Dem sainthood. The election of 1964 may have been held on November 3 1964 but it was decided on November 22, 1963. It might be a safe bet to say that if an ideal Republican candidate had run a flawless campaign in 1964 he still would have lost to Johnson in a somewhat closer contest.
Few leaders in the Republican Party took Goldwater seriously enough until it was too late. When he secured the nomination, BG essentially pulled off a right-wing coup within the party The wise men in the Party knew damned well that this extremist could never win an national election against any Democrat, let alone Saint Lyndon riding Kennedy' bloody coattails. The didn't do enough to stop him early one because they presumed that his extremism would also preclude him from winning the nomination of their own party.
The first Republican primary was in New Hampshire on March 10. Goldwater led over Rockefeller in the early polls, but Goldwater made the mistake of campaigning hard there. The more he talked the more he kept putting his cowboy boot in his mouth. The press had a great time jumping all over every indiscreet comment Goldwater made. The Arizona senator was taking his wild west cultural approach into tight lipped Yankee New Hampshire, and the more he talked the more he dropped.
Rockefeller let Goldwater do his campaigning for him. Goldwater would say for example, that if only we dropped a few tactical nukes on North Vietnam that mess over there would clear up in a hurry. He might have been a little facetious as he spoke but in print it came out like a genuine foreign policy suggestion. Even conservative Republicans in New Hampshire were gasping for air when they read statements like this. The garrulous affable south-westerner was having fun with stylish overstatements, intended to bemuse (he was witty), but he was speaking to a region where the way to speak was through understatement. In Arizona ‘I’m gonna kill ya’ means I’m mad at you and I’m not really going to turn kill ya. In New Hampshire 'I''ll kill ya means” its time to call the police and report a genuine death threat. Goldwater was in essence saying he was gonna kill all the Commies and the Yankee voters were hearing it at face value. Barry Goldwater presumed they knew better than to take it literally.
He made equally incendiary remarks about education, social security, race relations and federal spending. Barry was having fun with his clever big mouth and kissing an Arizona rattlesnake.
Rocky led Goldy in the polls at the last hour, but a falling rock was awaiting both of them. Four dedicated supporters of Henry Cabot Lodge had been ringing doorbells in New Hampshire for a year. They were working endlessly with mailing lists, phone calls, offers of rides to the polls, and all the other accoutrements of political grass roots labor. HC Lodge wasn’t on the ballot and wasn’t even in the country. His base was Saigon, Vietnam and he had never expressed the slightest interest in running in 1964. The four Lodgers, two men and two women, never dreamed they could actually win. But they sincerely believed in their candidate and they were having a great time campaigning. It was more fun than it was work, partly because they didn’t take their campaign’s chances seriously and no one else did either. Neither Rocky’s people nor Goldwater’s were conducting any ‘stop Lodge’ activities. But four determined people, count em four, managed to pull off one of the greatest political upsets in US history. Henry Cabot Lodge, a write-in candidate who wasn’t running, a man who wasn’t even in the country, won the 1964 New Hampshire Republican primary. The final score was (in thousands) Lodge 33, Goldy 20, Rocky 19 and Nixon 15 (Nixon was also a write in candidate.
The victory of Lodge as a neighboring favorite son of a gun destroyed Rockefeller. Most of Lodges votes would have gone to Rockefeller and he would have won handily in New Hampshire.
The next primary was Oregon on May 15. Rockefeller won big here 94 to 79 over Lodge (dislodging him for good), with Goldwater scoring only 50. Even Nixon who was not running almost beat Goldwater in Oregon scoring 48 thousand.
So the Republican Party woke up breathing easier on the 16th. The threat from within from that kook Goldwater was over. Staid Republican establishment leaders could go back to their lives and stop fretting over this Arizona Senator who was as unelectable as he was intemperate, and because he was.
The California primary was coming up on June 2. Goldwater had been anathema to hippie Republican farmers in Oregon, and would in turn have little appeal to northern California mellows. But Southern California is loaded with rednecks. And they weren’t understated Yankee New England conservatives like the ones that had double-crossed him in New Hampshire. Orange county was a color close to Gold. Here was Barry's Goldwater’s chance.
Most east coast people think of Southern California as lefty land, but these are those who either have never lived there, or they judge all of Southern California by the West Hollywood crowd they run with. There’s a giant voting block of right wingers in Southern Cal that don’t take no backseat to any southern fire-eater in Alabama or Idaho. Try burning the American flag at a shopping mall in Garden Grove and you’ll get the point.
It was a close fight and voter turnout was heavy. Most of the pre-game polls gave Rockefeller a slight advantage, but it was obviously going to be close. The Rockefeller campaign was bogged down by its riches. There was a fear that if his billboards were too numerous and large, and his radio ads were too frequent, then the voters would be turned off that he was Ritchie Rich buying the election with family dough, a Republican Kennedy without the cutie pie looks and charm. So Rocky fought in California with one hand tied behind his back. He couldn’t use his best weapon, big money. He could have, but fear of a backlash led to a decision not to.
Goldwater won by a fraction of 51%. He got 1,120,000 votes to 1,052,000 for Rockefeller. So Lodge had won New Hampshire, Rockefeller had won Oregon, and Goldwater had won California. But Goldwater was way ahead in the states that did not hold primaries, states where candidates were chosen by caucus. His people had been working harder than any other candidate’s forces in these states. Mr. Goldwater was further ahead than a singular marginal win in California might indicate.
The public might not have been aware of this big edge Goldwater had in the non-primary states his Party did. There was panic in the Republican party. The mainstream Party troops and the old guard leadership had two reasons to panic. First of all he wasn’t electable. The second reason was that if Goldwater even won the nomination it would be a severe defeat within the Party it would change its constitution. The extreme right had taken over the party like a Bolshevik coup, a minority of a party claiming a majority through bold leadership and aggressive politicking.
Was it too late to stop Barry? Eisenhower hoped there was still time. The General had been annoying every other Republican candidate for two years with his fence-sitting and his almost endorsing a guy, then pulling back and denying his official support. After the California, Ike may have well wished he had picked a team and rode the wagon early on. If Ike had long endorsed Romney, Lodge, Scranton or even Nixon, one of these could have at least beat Goldwater. It’s possible that none of the four could have beaten LBJ anyway, but they could have at least saved the Party from losing it’s soul to its extreme right.
The conservative conservatives turned to Governor Scranton of Pennsylvania to jump into the race and maybe stir up a storm in the nick of time to give the Party back the ‘Eastern Establishment.’
Ike and the “Eastablishment” were further displeased with Goldwater for his voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Scranton fought hard but couldn’t get ahead of Rockefeller let alone beat him.
The Republicans held their convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Goldwater had the nomination locked up before the Convention began but the stage was useful for his opponents both within and without his Party. Outside the arena, demonstrators of all sorts performed for the news cameras. Sarcastic signs read “Goldwater for President – Jefferson Davis for Vice President” or “Goldwater; Courage, Integrity, Bigotry.”
Rockefeller and Scranton were showing party unity. Virtually all the powerful leaders of the Republican Party opposed or supported only lukewarmly, candidate Goldwater. They sabotaged the Election of 1964 in order to save the Party from becoming the instrument of its right wing. They made defiant speeches at the convention and were booed by the Goldwater supporters. It sent a bad signal to the nation and undermined the image of unity so vital to success. It was one thing for Democrats to call your candidate a bum, but when your own party is doing it, it is much more damaging. Pat Buchanan can testify to that.
The Scranton campaign sent Goldwater a nasty letter of condemnation on the eve of his nomination. Goldwater knew Scranton and could tell that his signature was faked. Barry correctly surmised that Scranton’s subordinates had lost temperance when they took on an assignment to write this letter and that Billy Scranton would never have approved it as written. But Goldwater did have copies of the letter (in paragraph 11 Barry was called an “wild turkey”) distributed all about the Convention, turning the Party against Scranton and creating a rush of support for himself.
Scranton and Rocky still made defiant speeches at the convention and the Goldwater supporters booed them as they talked. It made great TV and blasted Rockefeller out of the water at his own victory party.
Goldwater won the nomination and in his speech made what is now properly considered one of the most famous verbal blunders on American political history. He knew he was being called an extremist all the time so he thought he’d embrace it and build a house with the bricks other people threw at him. He said,
“Extremism in the name of liberty is no vice!”
The crowd cheered, but cheered with some hesitation. They cheered because there were being cued to cheer by the structure of the speech and because of the moment in place and time. But you can hear some “did he just say what I think he said?” in the tone of the cheering. It is exactly the same cheer that Mike Dukakis got in 1988 when he said incompetently, “This election is not about ideology .. it is about competence!”
Extremism in the name of anything is of course a vice, and Goldwater had uttered one of the most idiotic things ever said on this planet, let alone by a guy running for President in his acceptance speech. What a way to start the race. Goldwater was likely to go down in flames in 64 anyway. He didn’t have to start out by dousing himself with Zippo lighter fluid.
Scranton and the Eastablishment went down with the ship in 1964. They torpedoed their own Loose-itania rather than see it fall into hostile hands. Their sabotage was a cry to the American people that this is not what this party really stands for. The saboteurs also correctly surmised that they weren’t damaging an electable candidate so they were throwing away a White House they didn’t have.
Goldwater had two main slogans.
One was “A Choice Not an Echo.” Not much fire in that one. I couldn't figure out what the hell it meant until I read more about it. A Choice not an Echo meant that Eisenhower, a so-called Republican had recently given us 8 years of watered-down big government FDRism, not real Republican conservatism. Ike’s Fifties had been just an “echo” of the New Deal, but with Goldwater you had a choice between the big Federal government interference in your economic and social lives of the Roosevelt-Truman dynasty, or something new and old-fashioned conservative at the same time. You had a choice; either Johnson liberalism or true gold unwatered conservatism. A stupid slogan really, but that’s what it meant.
The other slogan was “Goldwater; In your heart, you know he’s right.” That’s bad because it implies that on the surface we all think he obviously sounds wrong. The “in your heart” part is an indictment of his electability. We know he sounds like a lunatic cracker that wants to start a war but in your heart, you know he’s right. You’d never say, “He’s super qualified, a born and proven leader and a great thinker but in your heart you know he’s right.” That doesn’t even make sense. The ‘in your heart’ would not be in your sentence. It reminds me of the banner that used to hang in the baseball stadium in Minneapolis, “We Like it Here.” You'd never se that in New York or Chicago because it goes without saying.
Bill Moyers of the Lyndon Johnson staff said of Goldwater, “In your heart you know he’s extreme right.” Goldwater would have been better off doing a spoof of the movie Goldfinger in his campaign ads. That James Bond movie was released in 1964. The title song opening riff by Shirley Bassey could be changed to “Vote for Goldwater. He's man a man who's smart and tough. We've had enough. ”
Goldwater’s campaign was a little like Jimmy Carter’s in 1976. It was a great campaign, a grass-roots hard-work upset by the underdog, and a true case of Jacksonian Democracy at work. But Carter was electable because he leaned to the center of the board and he was running against Gerald Ford. Goldwater leaned towards one of edges on the board and was running against LBJ and the ghost of JFK.
It was Barry the unelectable against Lyndon the unlikable, and it was one of the most not even close races ever. Johnson had a huge early lead in all the polls and never looked back. 64 made Dole-Clinton look like a cliffhanger.
Now for the Vepp. The Party chooses its candidate but the candidate chooses the Vice president. Mrs. Johnson had a lot of influence on her husband on this one. To Mrs. Johnson, the choice was which liberal Senator from Minnesota should it be? The very liberal one (Humphrey) or the very, very liberal one (McCarthy.) But McCarthy was too liberal for Ladybird's husband, so he was out.
Front runners for #2 in the Democratic Party think tanks were Adlai Stevenson and Bobby Kennedy.
Millions of Americans would have welcomed Robert Kennedy on the ticket. The Kennedy name and Bobby’s close relationship to Jack would have meant votes. But all polls indicated that Johnson was going to win even if he named Jack the Ripper as his VP. So Bobby was not needed. Johnson was trying to establish himself as president on his own. He had been unable to win the nomination over John Kennedy in 1960 and now he was free of them. Did he really want to get right back into the shadow of the Kennedy greatness less than a year after he shook them off? The fact that Lyndon personally hated Robert Kennedy might influence his decision making process also. The fact that Bobby Kennedy had been opposed to Lyndon being named Vice- President in 1960 factored in just a bit too.
Lyndon called Bobby into his office on July 29 1964 at 1 p.m. and told him frankly that he was not going to name him for Vice President. Robert handled it with class and offered his support to help Lyndon win. Johnson later told the press with glee how Bobby had just “gulped.” When Johnson told reporters the story he mocked that gulp in imitation. Johnson had deliberately taken the press into his “confidence”, telling them an off the record story about how he had humiliated Kennedy, knowing full well the story would be leaked. Later Bobby confronted him on the stories coming out in the press about their private 1 p.m. meeting, and Lyndon swore up and down that he had not told a soul.
Lyndon won the battle but lost the war for his party. Sure, he didn’t need no ‘little pip squeak’ like Bobby Kennedy to win the election. But what about 1968? Lyndon picked Hubert Humphrey instead of Kennedy in 64, a man who could not beat Richard Nixon in 1968 with a strong economy. Johnson sabotaged the party in 64 by neglecting the man who could have won in a waltz in 1968 if he had been the sitting vice-president. And the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a freak incident of precise circumstances surrounding a hard working candidate without White House support, probably would not have happened if he was the sitting VP with a diplomatic schedule.
Johnson informed the public at a press conference that he was not going to consider any sitting member of his cabinet for the post of Vice-President and with that the name of RFK was out of the hunt.
Now who? Future Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was a strong candidate, but party loyalists disapproved of him because Mr. Mac had been a Republican until only just recently. It didn’t seem fair to the Party to have him a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Sergeant Shriver of Peace Corps fame who just happened to be John Kennedy’s brother-in-law was considered. But Johnson rejected him because he had been John Kennedy’s brother-in-law.
The Democrats worried that they might need some support in the Northeast if a popular Eastablishmentarian like Rockefeller or Scranton won the nomination for the Republicans. But when Goldwater became the flag bearer, Johnson was free to pick from any part of the country he chose to. The Democrats had the northeast in the bag.
Johnson didn’t need another Southerner either, so he looked to the Midwest where two good choices held senate seats from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, one of my first impressions. McCarthy was a liberal’s liberal and a Catholic too. The idea of balancing the Protestant Johnson with a Catholic McCarthy VP was appealing to some strategists, a reversal of 1960, but for the same goal.
But Johnson thought that was insincere. “Religious McCarthyism,” he joked. Johnson chose instead the senior Senator from Minnesota. Humphrey was one of the most talented, capable, and sincere Senators in the country and everyone knew it. Both Johnson and Humphrey had moved to work at the Capitol Building in 1949. Hubert had battled for progressive Civil Rights legislation for his entire career, whereas Lyndon had been a redneck segregationist in his voting record until 1960 when he changed his tune expediently with the times. Humphrey balanced Johnson’s red neck with his own blue collar.
Hubie would not only help with the black vote, he was the best friend that labor could hope to ever see on the ticket. The president of the AFL-CIO was asked by President Johnson to name his top three preferences for Vice President. He replied, “Humphrey, Humphrey and Humphrey.”
The Democratic Convention of 1964 took place in Convention Hall, Atlantic City, home of the Miss America contest. But in 1964 it ended up holding the ‘Ol Miss America contest’. The state of Mississippi was challenged at the Convention to abandon its ol’ racist ways.
A black activist group called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party invaded AC and forced America to face the racism in the South and the responsibility of the Democratic party for the lions’ share of it.
In 2007 I was in AC with my mother-in-law and when we passed the famed Convention Hall I mentioned that the Democratic Convention was held there in 1964.
“Fannie Lou Hamer,” she said without missing a beat. It was a name I had never heard of.
Hamer was a young black woman from Mississippi and the keynote speaker for the MFDP. Her moving story of personal abuse at the hands of racist cops in the South was a spotlight moment in American history. It was one thing for a do-gooder liberal to write an article about these issues in the Village Voice, preaching to the choir. It was another for Hamer to send out on every street in America the voice of a woman whose story was as bad as Rodney King, yet her only crime was that she wanted to vote! Fannie wasn’t some male felon who got drunk and charged the police. She was a young black woman who wanted to vote and that was all. That was her crime for which she was beaten in Southern police cell. The cops then forced a black male prisoner whom they had already beaten, to beat Miss Hamer some more, a sadistic crime worthy of an SS prison guard. It must have been a little bit satisfying for her to toast their entire state on national TV a few months later.
It should be emphasized that by this time, 1964, most of the states of the South had thrown in the racist towel. Places like Tennessee and North Carolina were liberalizing at an acceptable rate. But the two stubborn flags were those of Mississippi and Alabama. It was you and me against the world, Bama. Rite on, Ol’ Miss.
The MFDP was not authorized by the Democratic Party to use their name in the title. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party did not have delegates to the convention and had not been funded or supported by the white Democratic leadership. That leadership was challenged to accept a protest against themselves as a way of indirectly supporting the goals of their ostensible adversaries. It was like when the liberal family bought Dred Scott to help him sue them for his legal freedom. The Dems welcomed the MFDP protest because they supported their goals and feared their wrath if they had been barred.
The MFDP demanded recognition and the Dems had to plead that they could not give it. They would however allow the speech by Hamer to the floor, and two delegates were given in the end but not after a tough argument with Mississippi and Alabama.
The Mississippi and Alabama delegations were all white, and were criticized accurately for being an illegally exclusive and racist bunch. They had the power but not the moral momentum. The MFDP delegation was an extralegal organization with no formal power within the Party but the Democratic Party supported it. They had the morals and the mo. The racists had the power cord but not the juice.
The two delegates were a compromise between what the blacks wanted and what the racist whites wanted. But Mississippi and Alabama had to pay a price even for the compromise. In agreeing to not seat the full MFDP delegation, the Party included a new rule that beginning with the next election and all to follow, “no delegations would be seated from states where the Party process deprived citizens of the right to vote by reason of their race or color.” In other words, take that, M&A.
The MFDP failed in its technical goal, recognition by the Democratic Party of its delegates at the Convention with full voting rights. The MFDP succeeded in its larger goals in a major league way. They stole the show. My mother-in-law remembered in a flash 43 years later, “Fannie Lou Hamer.”
The MFDP story settled down as the Convention progressed. The race issue had been addressed enough as far as Johnson was concerned. In fact, both candidates had a gentlemen’s agreement from hereon in to leave the race issue out of the campaign and they stuck to it. The two nominees only spoke of the race issue in one speech per person on the post convention campaign trail. The agreement to not discuss the race issue has historical similarities to the pre-Civil War elections in which the candidates agreed to avoid the slavery question in the campaign, the one issue on every American’s mind.
The 64 gag rule on racial unrest hurt Goldwater much more than Johnson because Goldwater had already voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the public had reacted to him accordingly. He had nothing to lose by taking on the issue and trying to clarify his positions in a way that reduced his redneck image. Johnson had nowhere to go but down on the race issue since he was the signer of the Civil Rights Act and silence made him by default almost a racial harmony saint.
Johnson made sure that Bobby Kennedy would not address the convention until after the nomination of both President and VP had been secure. He didn’t trust Bobby and Bobby in turn told a colleague once that he hoped that Johnson would have a few martinis and stumble overboard a cruise ship in the middle of a stormy night on the icy North Atlantic.
Once he had the nomination and the Mississippi controversy in control it was remember Jack night in AC. They showed a film about the Kennedy’s and Bobby made a speech in which he quoted Shakespeare. The quote has been quoted quite often and I have no qualms about quickly saying that a modern quip with bite is more effective in my house than almost any quote by the quintessential genius Billy Bacon Shakespeare, so if you want the full quota of the quote you’ll have to quench that thirst quietly somewhere else. Quigley’s Pub in Hanover NH has a wall of Shakespeare quotes, I think it’s on there. Something about the “garish night.”
In any case the speech by Bobby and the film about Jack was a hammer slam of emotion. Just about everyone in Convention Hall was in tears. Janitors who didn’t speak a word of English were crying. American TV viewers following suit by the million. It was one of the saddest nights in American history as Johnson exploited the Kennedy death for his own selfish purposes.
Just after midnight Teddy White was walking along the Boardwalk in Atlantic City (the Boardwalk). He passed a flashing neon billboard of Goldwater and his slogan “In your heart you know he’s right.” Then Ted spotted someone he recognized as Pierre Salinger, the former Press Secretary for JFK and later the famous news correspondent for many years on ABC news. Salinger had worked for LBJ in the same capacity. Just days earlier Salinger was appointed US Senator from California after death had opened up a vacancy there. Pierre would be running on the same ticket indirectly with Johnson in November but would lose the Cal seat largely because of accusations of carpet-bagging. He’d only recently moved there.
White tried to talk to Salinger but Pierre apologized and had to turn away. He was obviously crying like a baby. The film and the speech had really shook him up.
Johnson campaigned on the contradictory issues of prosperity and poverty. He emphasized that he was going to enlist maximum federal support for a war on poverty in America. But LB also emphasized prosperity, that he and Kennedy had given the country four years of prosperity.
What chance does any challenger have against a sitting President in a boom period of economic happiness? The Dow Jones Industrial Average was 733 on the day before Kennedy was shot in Dallas. When the Democrats held their convention in Atlantic City the Dow was up to 851 after a steady climb. (the Dow is the collective price of a share of the top 30 stocks – today it is a little over 2,000, but don’t hold me to that because I never played that casino game and I haven’t checked in a while. When you include the halo of the Kennedy torch and Johnson’s political skills it is really hard to imagine a Republican who could have beaten Lyndon in 64.
I was nine years old in 1964 and I distinctly remember seeing the famous ‘Daisy Spot’, a commercial made by the Democrats that showed a little girl picking daisies while the audio overdub was a voice of a nuclear missile countdown to launch. The ad ends with a nuclear explosion, and solemn plea to vote for Johnson because the stakes are too high to risk.
There was not a single adult I ever overheard talking in politics in 1964 that did not say with absolute certainty to another adult or to me, “If Goldwater gets elected we will have World War III.” I heard this probably 200 times, and never heard any opinion to the contrary. Naturally I believed it. If somehow this nine year old had been allowed to vote, I certainly would have voted for Johnson out of fear of Goldwater. I used to wonder how we allowed such a lunatic to even run for president.
By the way the Daisy Spot was only shown one time. I remember seeing it. I watched a lot of TV back then.
Lyndon Johnson Throws the Republican Out of the Ring, 1964
In 1964 LBJ (who used the three initials moniker because he worshipped FDR) took Senator Goldwater down hard, but really he was riding the coat tails of the man he hated, the martyred John Kennedy. The snipers in Dealey Plaza won the election of 64 for Johnson, not Johnson.
As for Vietnam, I have to give the liberal historians credit where it is due. When it comes to their religious zeal for Blame America First, they do not single out the Republicans. They go after Dem Johnson with bare knuckles. MacLear and Herring both condemn Johnson for not telling the American public that while their campaign painted Goldwater as a dangerous irresponsible chauvinist hawk that was going to escalate the war in Vietnam, the Johnson team was secretly planning to do the exact same thing as soon as they won the election.
Goldwater later reflected on the election with the valid excuse and observation, “The country simply wasn’t ready for three presidents in two and a half years.”
Gentiles rarely are aware of a white person being Jewish or not being Jewish, although Jews don’t always believe us. I’d studied the 1964 campaign many times over the years and lived through it as a boy. I never knew until I was 52 that Goldwater was a Jew. I should have added up the Goldberg Goldstein Goldwater connection. But not until Teddy White’s mini-bio mentioned that his grandfather was a Polish Jew from Konin by the name of Mike Goldwasser did it dawn on me that BG was a major Jewish candidate for President, and long before Joe Leiberman ran for VP in 2004 with his Jewishness openly embraced by the country.
The Election of 1964 was the only one in my lifetime in which a decisive number of Republicans refused to support their own candidate. Perhaps it was Henry Lodge that was mostly to blame. If he had insisted on withdrawing from the New Hampshire primary to make room for a Rocky victory, then Nelson would have won even bigger in Oregon and almost certainly would have continued on to victory in the California primary. With California’s delegates he probably would have overcome the Goldwater effort in the non-primary states too.
The bottom line for the election of 1964 is best summed up by a sign on the floor of the Atlantic City Democratic Convention. It read, “Goldwater. In Your Heart You Know He Might.”
The VP also-ran for the Republicans was William Miller. His daughter, Stephanie Miller is now a divisive acerbic unreasonable and hateful left wing talk-show host who could never get to first base as a political pundit without this extremism style. I would hope that her father is rolling in his grave with each of her unfair selectively informed at best tirades. Political extremism in the shrewd pursuit of personal career gain is a vice. Miller claims to be the anti-dote to all those hostile right wing talk show hosts. That’s true. There are plenty of first class nasty jerks in the right-wing talk show field and this divider matches their horrible hatreds tit for tat.
Lyndon Johnson told reporters during the 1964 campaign of how in his youth he used to tell his opponents to “go to hell,” but with age came wisdom and his slogan evolved full circle into Isaiah’s “Come, let us reason together.” I have heard the shrill Stephanie many times and she is a sad commentary on these two opposite approaches. There’s no one shriller than Stephanie Miller.
Now SM is the VP on a phony ticket called Goldwater-Miller for President. Sue Goldwater, the ticket’s Pat Paulsonian presidential candidate is the granddaughter of Barry Goldwater. Steph is the VP. Their premise is that since George Bush is completely unqualified to be President and only made it because of family name, they would do the same thing. I guess these two women were both once acting governors of a major state and I just don’t know about it.
NAM 65
1965 was the year in which the United States made the decision to truly go to war in Vietnam. The year began with 20,000 or so U. S. advisors there and ended with 125,000 combat troops in place, and commitments for another couple of hundred thousand there in the near future. The decision to intervene in force was made for a number of reasons which altogether added up to yes.
First and foremost, the Americans on the ground in South Vietnam both civilian and military, were warning Johnson that the South Vietnamese Army was in danger of being overrun on the battlefield. Without US intervention in force, the war would simply be lost. If that happened, the United States would have put ten years of effort into Southeast Asia only to see complete defeat of its key ally, and the failure of their common goal of stopping the spread of Communism.
Johnson kept asking his military leaders how many troops were needed as the year 1965 went on. The answer came back over and over, ‘as many as it takes until the situation is at least stabilized.’ The military wasn’t even asking for enough troops to win! They were asking only for as many troops as it took to stabilize the situation on the battlefield.
The Cold War was in full swing and the perception of most people in the world at the time was that the US and the Soviets and Chinese were fighting a hot war by proxy in Southeast Asia. There was morale on both sides to sustain this for some time, even in the United States. Political gains outweighed the risk of political cost, at least in 1965.
I don’t think there is any truth to the charge that the big munitions companies were pushing the US government into the war.
PLEIKU 2-65
On February 7, 1965 the VC attacked an American airplane base at Pleiku and a helicopter base four miles away. Seven Americans were killed and over seventy wounded. In 1968 this would have been just another day in Vietnam but in February 1965 this was big news. Several aircraft were destroyed and a dozen helicopters seriously damaged.
Johnson responded to the Pleiku attack by authorizing a bombing campaign against North Vietnamese targets titled OPERATION FLAMING DART. Liberal histories of the war say that the Pleiku attack was a mere excuse for a policy of air war that Johnson and his team of advisors were itching to put into action anyway. Other historians do not agree and say that the aggressions of the North were responded to in kind, with Pleiku as a key milestone in the process. There is probably some truth to both extreme versions with a blend of the two being the real truth. Its almost silly to take one side and condemn the other as a lie.
The next major escalation of Americans came in March of 1965. The situation on the ground was deteriorating and the ARVN was losing one battle after another to the fanatical Viet Cong fighters. On March 8, 1965 3,500 Marines were deployed in Da Nang South Vietnam ostensibly to protect the US airbase there. This was the first open commitment of our fighting forces. These men were not arriving as advisors. Few would have guessed that this was the beginning of a gradual escalation that would top a half a million men and 72 women.
The liberals writers love to mock this Da Nang Marine landing by depicting them wading ashore in full battle gear with fixed bayonets while the only enemy there to meet them were friendly young Vietnamese women in grass skirts smiling and waving. All right, this probably did happen and it was probably an embarrassing scene. But do the liberal authors ever cite stories of American bravery in combat in Vietnam? No. Never. They only praise the enemy, telling us what tenacious fighters they were. They quote American commanders only when they praise the courage of the VC, but never ever quote an enemy source praising American skill or tenacity.
Dean Rusk later said that the reason the build-up was so gradual was because he did not want to provoke a reaction from Hanoi’s ally in Moscow. He did want to have to force the Soviets into “an orgasm of decision-making based on world-wide strategic considerations.”
So the USA under Johnson was not only afraid to attack North Vietnam for fear of provoking the Chinese. We also lost the chance to gain advantage in the Cld War with a spotlighted show of force because of fear of provoking the Russians. They provoked us wherever, however, and whenever they wanted, but we dare not ever provoke them. Maybe Johnson should have scrapped the NASA space program out of fear of provoking India.
Johnson, Rusk, McNamara and others concluded in July 1965 that without a large commitment of US troops, South Vietnam would lose the war outright within a year or two at the most.
One of the orthodox historical opinions on Lyndon Johnson and the decisions he made on Vietnam is that he was afraid to make open commitments to Vietnam because he was afraid this would lead to the ruin his visionary dream of the “Great Society.” This is largely the work of Doris Day Kearns who sold this grand angle in her famous book on Johnson. Now a sadly large number of people buy this. Can a man who is needlessly cruel to waiters and his own wife in public really be that full of humanitarian motive? History, controlled by Democratic university liberals buys his expedient song and dance about his great compassion. It goes like this.
Johnson was an unbelievably caring liberal who lived for one thing and one thing only; to see the poor helped, to see civil rights granted to blacks and to help the less fortunate in general in every way. But Vietnam would cost the government so much money that there would be none left over for his “Great Society.” Johnson could not afford to lose the political capital he had at the Capitol and Vietnam could cost him that too. How could he expect Congresspersons to support his Great Society if he had to first ask them to support a vaguely popular war too? So for these reason he increased our commitments in Vietnam without explaining things directly to the American people. He brought us into a war by the back door because he knew it was the only way he could still hold up any dream of his Great Society.
The Great Society was a mere slogan, like the Fair Deal of Truman, or the “New Covenant” of Bill Clinton. Actions are measured individually, not against some grandiose slogan scheme. Johnson was not a genuine liberal and never was. Comedian Lenny Bruce addressed an audience of 2,000 Berkeley students in 1966 and spoke of Johnson in head-shaking terms, suggesting that after he became president it took Lyndon six months to learn how to say ‘negro.’ The crowd howled and applauded. There must have been a reason why the audience howled and applauded. Johnson was a redneck Texan with an old fashioned racial attitude that was politically wise enough to know what positions to take officially once he climbed the powerful Democratic ladder. He also felt the rush of change pushing him from behind. He was never out in front.
There was no reason why the US could not support a war abroad and social reform at home, both financially and morally. His plea to Doris Kearns that this was the essential dilemma with his Vietnam policy holds no weight at this particular typewriter, even if it does at hers. What’s sad is not that she bought it, that is to be expected. What’s sad is that history has bought it.
'CROSSING THE RUBICON - JULY 1965
By mid-1965, it was clear that a decision had to be made about the American military and political role in Vietnam. Johnson summoned his think tank for a series of dramatic meetings. The inner circle debated and Johnson did more listening than talking. In the end he decided for massive escalation.
The leading proponents of escalation were Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara and General Westmoreland. These two men were formally asking the president for another 100,000 troops for South Vietnam in 1965 and probably as many more in 1966.
Their views on the need for this escalation was backed up by most of the other important players, including the head of the CIA, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
The domino theory ruled at these meetings. Everyone agreed that there was a threat to our chance of winning the Cold War if we let the Communists take over Southeast Asia. Even those who opposed this escalation, and there were only two, did not deny the domino theory. The opponents simply felt that this was was not winnable, and we should cut our losses and take a stand against the Communists somewhere else. This was no Korea. Vietnam wasn't surrounded on three sides by international waters, like in Korea. The U.S. couldn't use its naval might with strategic impact, as it did in Korea. The South Vietnamese government we supported was not reliable, nor very democratic. The longer we stayed, the more the people would turn against it.
The two men who tried to tell Johnson that the Vietnam War was a loser were George Ball and Clark Clifford. Ball was Deputy Secretary of State (Under) and Clifford was a special council to the President, the Harry Hopkins post.
In a series of dramatic meetings in Washington in July of 65 the proponents and opponents of escalation in Vietnam argued their cases to the President.
George Ball argued for a US withdrawal from Vietnam, even allowing that this was essentially a cut and run. It was unusual for an Undersecretary of State to espouse a point of view on an important subject that was not in sync with the views of his superior, the Secretary of State. But Rusk welcomed respectful disagreement from his vice president of sorts. He was secure enough to want to have a talented number two who was not a rubber stamp for the Boss' views.
He was opposed by all the other military and civilian advisors as well as two Ambassadors to Vietnam. Johnson accepted the majority conclusion.
Politically, Johnson had been afraid to withdraw or make a major escalation in 1964 until the election was over. Now he would have three years to repair the damage from the right if he withdrew, and from the left if he escalated.
The heads of the Armed Services backed McNamara. Johnson was asking for 100,000 troops in 1965 and possibly more later. He wanted opinions on what this would and would not accomplish.
All of the war wizards were still a little intoxicated from the victory over the Soviets in the Cuban missile crisis. After staring down the great Soviet Union in a nuclear showdown the idea that a little country like Vietnam could defeat the United States was remote. This wine of victory might have left the decision makers still a little high when looking at Indochina.
Johnson had decided to bomb the North. But he would have to send in at the very least enough troops to protect our airfields while we did that. So bombing the North meant ground troops even if the idea of using air power was to avoid ground troops. The military men avoided telling Johnson this connection between air power and ground troops. The President entertained the idea of air strikes alone to turn the tide in Vietnam, while the military never advised him of the required ground support involved.
Near the end of July 1965, Lyndon addressed the nation and announced that 50,000 US combat troops were going to be sent to Vietnam. The war was on. He added that additional troops would probably be required before the end of the year. He did not say how many.
The Johnson team decided that an air campaign would commence against North Vietnam. US bombing would increase gradually, giving the North an opportunity at any time to cry uncle Ho, and ask for a negotiated settlement. It was a strategy designed to reduce the ‘shock and awe’ effect of bombing, not maximize it. By increasing the bombing in careful dosages, the United States enabled the North Vietnamese to develop counter-strategies to cope with the bombing, such an elaborate tunneling system that enabled guns, tanks and families to live underground safely during these raids.
Russia and China gave the North Vietnamese free of charge all the anti-aircraft weapons that could be deployed effectively at any and all locations, especially around Haiphong where the Soviets delivered supplies by ship.
The White House closely monitored the air campaign. Johnson told the press that there wasn’t an outhouse in North Vietnam that could be bombed without his specific approval.
On the ground it was different. The jungle war was much more complex and General Westmoreland was given an independent hand in conducting ground ops. The more he got the more Westmoreland wanted. Soon the US would be spraying Vietnamese jungles with toxic chemicals to remove the hiding place for the enemy. The General wanted more men, more guns and more agent Orange. Westmoreland wanted to waste more land.
Support for the president was fairly strong at this point in the Congress, the press and the public at large. The cold war by proxy was an accepted fact in the national consciousness. The Korean War was the legal precedent overshadowing the Vietnam War from the start. Unpopular while it was being fought, the Korean Conflict had enjoyed a revisionist comeback as a victory for the good guys, which it was.
Rostow at the State Department wanted the US to bomb North Vietnamese industrial centers, but Johnson rejected this. We don’t want to give the enemy the impression that this is a war, now do we? Incredibly, the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong was not employed throughout the war partly because the threat of doing it was considered a political point worth holding on to.
The trump card in Vietnam was the Chinese border. Johnson had Yalu fever. He was afraid to fight the war the old-fashioned way, to attack and win, because he was afraid of Chinese military intervention, like the one in 1950. He saw the northern border of North Vietnam as Truman saw the Yalu River, a hot zone to beat all hot zones. It was as if the USSR was fighting on one side in a civil war in Mexico. The northern boundary of North Vietnam was such a dangerous political hot zone that it ruined our ability to properly fight the war from a military standpoint. We were always afraid to occupy enemy territory, and the northern border area was a safe sanctuary for all supplies and personnel.
Clark Clifford and George Ball were the only two insiders that really tried to talk Johnson out of sending significant amounts of American combat troops into Vietnam in 1964-5. Yet when Ball tried to explain his argument with McNamara, he was asked if withdrawing from Vietnam would make it easier or more difficult for the USA wage the Cold War elsewhere in the world in the immediate future. McNamara even conceded that the war might not be winnable, but he gave a good argument that fighting a partial war to stabilize the situation in South Vietnam was the least worst of all the bad choices, even without disputing any of the objections of Cliff and Ball.
CIVIL WRONGS ACT 1965
Johnson signed the famous Civil Rights Act in 1965, the greatest deed of his years in power. It was really designed to correct civil wrongs that had been directed against African-Americans for 100 years. From now on, blacks could not be strong-armed out of their right to vote by devious laws, such as the poll tax. Blacks nationwide would benefit from the law, but the real target of the revisionism was the segregation and discrimination in the South. When he signed the law in the presence of Martin Luther King and other prominent black leaders, Johnson quipped to one of his close friends that ‘this will kill the Democratic Party in the South for a generation.’
He was right. Only two southern Democrats would win the White House after him. With one stroke of his pen, Johnson finished off the ‘Solid South’ as an American political tradition. The good news was, after 100 years of racism the Southern Democratic Party was finally free to reacquaint itself with the better values of that liberal party.
The term “Solid South” is reappearing today in American politics. But this time it means solid Republican.
VIETNAM 1966
General Westmoreland was getting about as many troops as he asked for but there was one small problem. ‘Westy’ was not allowed to attack to the westy into the Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos. Here was a career soldier who had fought in World War II and Korea and he was ordered to not pursue the enemy the best of his army’s ability. The first rule of warfare was being violated. The destruction of the enemy’s fighting forces is the primary goal in any war, and we made it worse than secondary. We were fighting in Vietnam with military force in order to win only political goals. The General was frustrated because he was being asked to fight with one hand tied behind his back. Johnson had promised the American people in an earlier speech that he was not going to ask his military to fight with on hand tied behind their backs. This expression became popular in political circles for the next several decades. In 1991 George Bush stressed publicly that he was going to use the military in full fashion in the Gulf War and was going to put ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ behind us and that he was not going to ask the American military to fight with one hand tied behind its back.
Johnson continued to use American air power in stop and start fashion, hoping with each halt that the Communists would be ready to negotiate. But the Communists were always ready to negotiate, just as long as the USA withdrew completely from Vietnam first.
This year 1966 marked the turning point in support for the war at home. When 1966 began the Johnson Administration had more to fear from the anger of the hawks than the doves. We weren’t prosecuting the war vigorously enough. By the end of 1966 Johnson had more to fear from the angry doves who were saying that the war shouldn’t be waged at all and that the United States should get out. There were too many American dying and the situation seemed to be a stalemate at best.
The opinions of about 300 really stupid historians notwithstanding, North Vietnam still had the full and united support of China and the Soviet Union, which made the war un-winnable even if we had decided to fight it without one hand tied behind Westy’s back.
ARAB-ISRAELI WAR/ATTACK ON LIBERTY 1967
In 1967 a full-scale war broke out between Israel and its 3 nearest Arab neighbors. History remembers it as “The Six Day War.” It lasted 11 days. It was Egypt, Syria and Jordan against Israel. Iraq, the USSR and Libya supplied and supported the Arabs. Kuwait, Iran and Saudi Arabia helped out with money. It was a united Arab effort to destroy the Jewish menace.
The Arab states surrounding Israel were determined to wipe the Jewish state off the map. None of Israel’s neighbors recognized it as a legitimate nation. They decided to destroy the Jewish state with a united Arab effort.
But the real reason for the war between the Arabs and Israeli’s in 1967 was rank Islamic anti-Semitism, disguised as geo-military-political grievances.
Instead of wiping Israel off the map, the Arab states lost the war. Israel gained former Arab territory in the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights of Syria.
So who started the war? Technically it was Israel that started it. But israel attacked because it was obvious that it was about to be attacked. The Arab states surrounding Israel were about to invade and conquer. So Israel struck out for strategic opening advantage. In that sense, who started the war?
For the last decade prior to 1967, the Israeli's had not been instigating terrorist raids into Arab territory, nor was it racist anti-Arabic in its official state documents. Israel did not make it a matter of state policy that the Arab neighbors had no legal right to exist and had to be destroyed. Yet that was the position of the Arabs with regard to Israel. And the Arabs had been killing Israeli civilians for their cause for years. So in that sense, who started the war?
Recent documents released after the fall of Communism in the Gorbachov
era indicate that the Soviet Union used disinformation to help start the war. The leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria were flown to Moscow in may of 1967 and told that Israel was about to invade Syria, which it was not. Syria then mobilized to attack Israel. Israel saw that Syria was about to attack so Israel attacked first. So in that sense who started the war? The answer probably lies in the Kremlin archives that were shredded before the archives were opened. Partial answers found in the released secret archives (secret archives can be scanned and filtered before being 'discovered')
The USSR was like a schoolyard instigator telling two different parties, “Did you hear what he said about your mother?” when in fact no one said anything. Then when the fight starts he goes to their locker and robs them blind.
The Soviets hoped to see their client state of Syria supreme in the Lebanon, and wanted to deliver a knockout to American influence there.
The United States supported Israel but declined to intervene militarily. The Israeli Air Force intervened against the United States instead.
ATTACK ON LIBERTY
On June 8, 1967 the USS Liberty was cruising in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea when Israeli fighter jets attacked the ship. It was the Panay all over again but this time we were being attacked by an ally. The Liberty was clearly marked with United States flags. The attack continued for some time. It wasn’t enough to attack the US ship with Mirage fighters. The Israelis then sent in several torpedo boats to continue the attack.
The Liberty was badly damaged but did not sink. The Israeli Defense Force murdered thirty-four American sailors. Seventy-five were wounded, including Commander McGonagle who continued to relay details of the attack back to base while down and bleeding on the bridge.
Israel attacks Egypt and the USS Liberty 1967
The Israeli government apologized for the attack, but never adequately explained why it happened. Was this revenge for our refusal to take Israel’s side in this war, or payback for US lack of action in the Suez Crisis of 1956?
The Israeli’s claimed that they mistook the ship for an Egyptian horse freighter that had a similar silhouette. What a bunch of horse freighter.
If they did do it deliberately, the next obvious question is why? Why attack the one nation on earth that had always supported Israel both politically and materially?
The answer may be very diabolical. Several observers swear that unmarked planes delivered the attack.
The conclusion is inescapable and inexcusable. The Israelis wanted to make it look like an attack on a US ship by Egyptian planes. In this way they hoped to draw the United States into the war on the side of Israel. They hoped to sink the ship and leave no survivors to tell the story. Liberty foiled their plan by staying afloat and hobbling back to port.
Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State never accepted the Israeli explanation of mistaken identity. There are a few hundred other expert opinions that also doubt Israel's veracity. Only Robert McNamara seems to have believed their explanation, which is perfect since McNamara has made a life long career out of being wrong on everything (on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War he warned Congress that we were going to suffer “thousands and thousands and thousands of casualties!”)
There is no statute of limitations on the crime of murder. Several Israeli participants have admitted that it was not an accident.
The attack on the Liberty was an attack on liberty.
The Israeli government to this day of course insists that the attack was an accident. Liberty was allegedly in the vicinity where an Egyptian ship had recently been shelling Israeli troop positions in the Sinai. The attack was in response to that big gun attack from sea to shore, and the American were mistaken for the Arab enemy.
The case is mysterious. It is easy to imagine a callous political decision being made to do this by Israel’s top officials, but it is hard to imagine that so many individual members of the Israeli Defense Forces would knowingly attack loyal ally as part of a fantastic disinformation operation.
Having said my piece about the Liberty let me say something about the 1967 Arab-Israeli War that few historians ever say.
Wasn’t that great? Gee, I love Israel. Those Arab bums tried to swallow her up, wipe her off the map, eliminate her off the face of the earth in the name of racism and religious bigotry. And little Israel picked up all the Arab bullies at the same time and threw them out of the ring. Tremendous. Right triumphed over wrong. Sometimes life really is like a fairy tale.
VIETNAM 1967-68
CREDIBILITY GAP
Johnson sold the American public in 1967 on how well things were going in Vietnam, and it backfired on him during the Tet Offensive in January of 1968. A lot of conservatives blame the media for misrepresenting the Tet offensive as a defeat for America when in fact that famous Communist military offensive was a major defeat for them. That is a legitimate complaint, but Johnson and the hawks have largely themselves to blame. If the Johnson administration and the military leaders had been more straightforward with the American people in 1967 about the difficult struggle in Vietnam, about how it was actually hanging in the balance, then the Tet offensive might have been seen for what it was, a critical strategic battle that ended in a victory for the forces of South Vietnam, America, and democracy.
But since the public and the media had been told that the war was being won throughout 1967 when it was not so, then the very fact of a major attack on several cities in January 1968 by the VC, NVA, NLA or whatever the Communist were calling themselves that month, created an overwhelming reaction in the states against the war.
After Tet the war might have been won in the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people was lost in the hearts and minds of the American people. The fact that is was a military victory became irrelevant. The credibility gap took a strategic military victory and turned it into a tactical victory and a strategic defeat.
“HEY HEY LBJ HOW MANY KIDS DID YA KILL TO-DAY”
That was one of the favorite chants of the anti-war crowd. Pretty well written. But Johnson could afford to ignore the hippies with placards if he wanted to. He was an arrogant sort of fellow, so that wasn't hard to do. But he couldn't ignore the protest of short haired Congressmen with $2,000 suits.
Leading the charge against the Vietnam War at home was Senator William Fullbright of Arkansas. On his staff was a young intern named Bill Clinton who worshipped Fullbright.
In 2004 historian Clinton wrote his autobiography My Life and mixed in quite a bit of polemic U.S. history telling in the process,
Fullbright thought Ho Chi Minh, who was an
admirer of Franklin Roosevelt because of his
opposition to colonialism, was primarily
interested in making Vietnam independent of
all foreign powers. He believed that Ho, far
from being a Chinese puppet, shared the
historic Vietnamese antipathy for, and
suspicion of, its larger neighbor to the north.
… He supported an attempt to “neutralize”
Southeast Asia, with American withdrawal
conditioned on agreement by all parties to
self-determination for South Vietnam and a
referendum on reunification with South
Vietnam. Unfortunately, by 1968, when
peace talks opened in Paris, such a rational
resolution was no longer possible.
I hate to break the news to the Willies, but such a ‘rational resolution’ was never possible in the first place. It is and was naïve to think that the Communist revolutionaries under Ho would have agreed to and then honored any such arrangement. Their standard operational procedure was to murder all the important officials in every village until that village agreed to support and succor the Communists. And that was just for openers.
So Ho admired FDR, eh. Is that supposed to make us realize how wrong we were about Mr. Minh? So maybe Hitler admired Abe Lincoln. Perhaps Sadaam thought Mark Twain was a fine writer. What does that have to do with the price of eggs in Togo or the atheistic violence, determination to bury capitalism, and totalitarian suppression of human rights that represented the Asian Communist movement in the 1960’s?
The sentence about Ho’s ‘antipathy for and suspicion of China’ is a joke. China supplied, bankrolled and inspired the North Vietnamese Communist movement. Ho lived and studied in Communist China.
Every time I see a documentary on Vietnam Fullbright is always there sanctimoniously demanding ‘a diplomatic solution to the Vietnam conflict.’ Well thanks, for the tip, King Solomon. If only someone else had thought of that, a diplomatic solution. Wow, who knew?
Fine. I demand a negotiated settlement to the crime problem. Lets sit down and negotiate with all the thugs on the streets of New York and Boston and LA. We’ll arrange a diplomatic solution and when all parties sign the documents there will be no crime. It’s the same stupid logic.
You can’t arrange a diplomatic solution with a group whose only starting condition for even beginning the negotiations is complete concession on all points that are going to be put on the table. Thats what Rusk and Kissinger were up against all those years. It was easy for Fullbright to say because he didn't have to sit down with Le Duc To and come out with nothing to say. US negotiators in Paris went in with Le Duc To and came out with Le Duc tape.
The Arkansas Senator consistently insisted that he was not in favor of simple unilateral withdrawal. He wanted ‘negotiations’. He demanded a ‘diplomatic settlement.’ But the VC terms were both impossible and insulting; complete US withdrawal from all of Indochina as a condition to even begin discussions! Fullbright’s position was therefore an untenable naive illogical net-zero idea. His famous anti-Vietnam War book was appropriately titled ‘The Arrogance of Power.’ You should know. Fullbright in the 60’s reminds me of Senator Dodd of Connecticut in December of 1990 demanding a negotiated settlement to get Sadaam out of Kuwait, while Secretary of State Baker tried in vain to ask exactly what sort of diplomatic solution he had in mind.
The same ‘We prefer diplomacy’ garbage was hurled at President Reagan for 8 years for not negotiating with the Soviets for arms reductions, when in fact the USSR demanded every concession that could possibly be won in the negotiations as a condition to begin those negotiations. Even when this insulting formula was explained to them, the liberals still demanded negotiations, and condemned Reagan for his truculent behavior towards the admirably progressive Russians.
In Nam, LBJ and Nixon were under strong domestic pressure to negotiate, and the enemy was using this domestic pressure to win what they could not win on the battlefield.
Now lets listen to Howard Zinn, the king of the lefties. No one speaks for the left more often or better than Zinn. He is a scholar and a formidable opponent, no matter what subject he is wrestling over. In his 1967 book Vietnam, The Logic of Withdrawal, Zinn provides a transcript of Senator Church grilling Secretary of State Rusk over the continued presence of US troops in Korea. Since Rusk is cornered into ‘admitting’ that the North Koreans have not attacked the South since 1953 then, concludes Zinn the presence of US troops there is not to stop North Korea, but rather to show our John Wayne enmity towards China.
Church then put words in Rusk’s mouth to the effect that if the Viet Cong and the NLF had attacked South Vietnam without the support of China, then the United States probably would not have intervened at all.
From this Zinn concludes that,
“we maintained military forces in Asian countries
not because of “aggression,” but simply because
of the presence of China on the Asian continent.
No, Howard. The Korean War began when North Korean forces under Soviet guidance and with Soviet equipment, overran a United States ally, a weak South Korean defense force, and nearly wiped South Korea off the map forever.
The United States maintained troops there after the war to protect its ally and itself from a similar experience. It didn’t matter to the USA what combination of North Korean, Chinese, and/or Soviet forces might in the future attack South Korea. We simply did not want to lose 50,000 killed in action again if another invasion took place, and we did not want to have to start the counterattack in a desperate situation like the one we had to work from in the Pusan perimeter of 1950. We stayed in Korea to play defense, not offense. The Zinn charge is Blame America First. Hey Z, who attacked whom in June of 1950?
The point about Chinese support for North Vietnam is more difficult to fend off because the charge is basically true. If China were not behind the North Vietnamese aggression then the United States would not have intervened to save South Vietnam. If an indigenous North Vietnamese Communism, with Tito level of maverick independence, free of any Maoist or Leninist soul had been the essence of the war against South Vietnam the US would never have put 200,000 troops there by 1966..
Yes, Howard. But this accusation proves that Zinn is fully aware that the Chinese were behind the entire operation, something the left always denied! So they admit Chinese complicity only when it’s convenient and deny it when it is not. Zinn is also proving that Fullbright and Clinton were/are wrong about Ho’s supposed enmity towards China.
The North Vietnamese were of course never remotely in the intellectual or political vanguard of Communism. Zinn theorizes about an independent North Vietnamese Communist movement that we wouldn't have reacted so forcefully to.. But such a thing did not exist nor could it have existed. All the international Communism of the era came from the USSR and China. How we would respond to a purely North Vietnamese Communist threat is inadmissible. North Vietnamese Communism was a pet dog of the Chinese and the Russian. Communists of the world looked to Moscow as Mecca because that's where the money came from.
China and Russia were the Kings of Communism instigating and controlling both the Korean and the Vietnam wars from the North side, but if we react to their attacks we are the aggressors in Zinn’s book.
Who were the aggressors? Did Kennedy yell at Krushchov that “your grandchildren will live under democracy!” Whose propaganda preached that as a first step that all of the nations with a capitalist philosophy must be undermined, destroyed from within and then reconstructed? Did Zinn ever read any of the big Communist books about their grand scheme of world domination, the ones that all schoolchildren living in Communist countries had to read and know by heart? I did. I lost a of months out of my life reading them and I concluded that the Communist desire to rule the world under atheism was real and that the American and European leaders who reacted to this threat as Cold Warriors should not go down in history as pinheads but rather as wise heroes.
THE ANTI-WAR DEMONSTRATORS
Thoughts are deeds. Hatred is violence. The antiwar protestors are always described as non-violent peaceniks, a spin-off of their predecessors the beatniks. The left thinks they stand for love while conservatives stand for hate. It’s the way the left thinks now.
But no one hates like a lefty with a cause. The anti-war demonstrators chanted “off the pig” as a standard rally-cry for years. That meant kill all policemen, for cops represented the establishment. My father was a policeman. How was I supposed to feel? The lefties carried peace and love signs while hating anyone that disagreed with them. The hippies advocated love towards each other but hate towards the squares. They casually advocated the random murder of police officers on revolutionary general principles. But after shooting the cops were were supposed to hold hands on the grass and listen to Joan Baez sing about justice.
At Columbia and Berkeley, to name two Universities, the left wing hippies seized control of key Administrative buildings and held the building hostage until the United States got out of Vietnam. Very Violent.
Oh, and by the way doyeeeeee!
Professor Jones did not send out boys over to Nam to die. Those were politicians that did that. You see, son, these things your parents paid thousands of dollars to for you to go to these places that are called ‘schools.’ Is it really fair that because a college lets the Government recruit students in the ROTC program, that this means they are to blame for the Vietnam War? Did the students really believe that destroying school property and holding conservative professors at knifepoint would get us out of Vietnam? That was very stupid and very violent. And what did it accomplish? Zero. Most of them got expelled. A University is a private institution you nitwits.
Burning the American flag and chanting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” while hundreds of other hippies cheered (and try and tell me that never happened); that wasn’t violent?
The hippies were wrong about many things. No, I take that back. The hippies were wrong about everything except music. And a few thousand are our political and cultural leaders today. They have old photos with hippie haircuts but look average now. And they continue to perpetuate the myths and lies about Vietnam. The newcomers are brainwashed. No hip young adult with a University education is going to defend the US involvement in the Vietnam War. She or he has been taught all the myths and lies and opinions as if they are facts that are not debatable.
The number one charge against the War was that is was un-winnable. Nonsense. We never tried, so we’ll never know.
The next one was that the South Vietnamese government we supported was just as corrupt as the one we were at war with. Wrong again. There is no doubt that an educated leftist can argue this point of view effectively because the South Vietnamese regime was corrupt especially by today’s standards. But it was peaches and cream compared to those atheistic, brutal murderous Communists under Ho and Dong.
Mostly the demonstrators were wrong about the Communist ideology in form and in practice. The left had no hate for Communist incidents, but American atrocities proved that the United States military was a force for evil in the modern world. My Lai and our air attacks do not outweigh the evils of Communism, as it existed in these years, especially the fanatical Asian brand. “Life is cheap in the east” was a well-known saying. Communism had a lot to do with that. Communism in Asia was relaxed about mass murder and genocide. That’s who and what we fought over there. Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and then Ho; these men were mass murderers in ways that would have made Himmler say, “Damn, I should have thought of that!.”
Communism is a legitimate political ideal, a formidable force, and these people really believed in the global dream of it, some schisms here and there notwithstanding. Most hippies did not exactly embrace Communism but they praised it with faint damnation while damning our own way of life, period. The founding mothers and fathers of the Blame America First movement didn’t even bother to give the USA a token damning with faint praise. There was no praise, except perhaps a compensatory praise for what America could be someday (if we change to the left.)
The domino theory was probably correct. The Communists were legitimately trying to take over the whole world. The old nations would remain autonomous within the Communist global empire, but Communism would rule the world. It might take fifty or two hundred years. The process might well be very gradual, but that was their goal.
The left then and now still mocks our mission in Vietnam as though it was naïve in concept because everyone knows that all the anti-Communist business was lame.
It wasn’t lame. It was right on. Those people we fought over there were terrible. Good soldiers, but sad bad people under a the sinister spell of an immoral philosophy.
Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a Communist, not a Vietnamese nationalist. He left the country in 1921 and lived in France for most of his adult life. He was a founding member of the French Communist Party and lived in Moscow for three or four years as a graduate student at CCIT, the Communist College for International Troublemaking.
What if the USA had never supported South Vietnam and the Communists had overrun Vietnam Laos and Cambodia by the end of 1964. How would that have played out on the global stage? Would other Communist revolutions have been inspired by the success in Indochina? Would other states in Asia, Africa and Central America been motivated by the clear momentum that Communism was demonstrating? Would the cause of freedom and democracy suffer a set-back? Would the fall of Communism that was so celebrated when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 have taken place in 1989? Or would its fall have been delayed or prevented if Indochina had fallen to the Communists?
How can we know the answer to these questions when the fact of the matter is that we did intervene and, even though we lost, the triumph of Communism in Southeast Asia was delayed at least ten years? Can it not be argued that Democracy in fighting this delaying action, both slowed down the momentum of Communism and gained time with which the western states could improve their own democracy, a democracy that could then be shown to the world as that much better a way of life than Communism?
For those fatherless sons who lost their dads in Vietnam, it is worth considering that maybe the man died for a noble cause. They fought for the same cause that liberals and conservatives alike celebrated wildly when Communism crashed in the period of 1989-1991.
TET OFFENSIVE COVERAGE 1968
The tourist who wishes to visit Vietnam today is advised to avoid the Tet holidays at the end of January and beginning of February. The hotels are overbooked and the entire country comes to a standstill while celebrating the special holiday season. It is their Christmas. At the end of January 1968 the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) was almost entirely on leave. Few Vietnamese would ever think that the VC would launch their biggest attack of the entire war at the exact moment of the Tet holiday. They did. It was Yom Kippur East. The VC hoped to incite a popular uprising at the grass roots level while attacking with massive sleeper cell military force.
The most spectacular element of the Tet Offensive was the partial and brief capture of the American Embassy in Saigon, which was exaggerated when it happened by the media and still often is. It was portrayed as if the VC had completely taken over the American Embassy and held out against a fierce counterattack for several days before being overcome.
The facts were that in the middle of the night of January 29/30th 1968 a few VC had blown a hole in a wall of the American Embassy and had occupied about half the building for a few hours before being blown to pieces to a man. They held out from three to nine am. That was it. But we never hear the end to this day about how the Communists “overran” and “took over” the American Embassy. T
The red arrows mark areas where the CF (Communist Forces) launched diversionary attacks preparatory to the attack within the cities that was the real goal of the Tet Offensive. ARVN and US forces went west to meet these challenges, falling fo the bait. This opening strategy was a success. When Tet broke out in the cities of South Vietnam, the defense forces were undermanned.
For the Communists, the Tet offensive was the attempt to take the war from passive subversion to the attack mode.
Tet was like Christmas to the ARVN soldier and many of them were home for the holidays when Tet broke out. The South Vietnamese forces were scattered in their homes and huts in the countryside. They were the sailors with a hangover on Ford Island when the Japanese attacked in 41. The Communists had chosen the Tet date on purpose. Typical Communists. Even in 1979, they just had to attack Afghanistan on Christmas.
US forces were also deployed to the west of the cities. For these reasons the South Vietnamese cause was badly prepared. Tet was a sudden burst of offense from behind enemy lines and it was aimed at the cities, not the jungles. The cities erupted in a revolutionary guerrilla war.
Tet scared the living ink out of the media politically because it scared them at the personal level. There were far more press people embedded in the cities than in the distant hamlets, and this time they heard the bombs and smelled the gunpowder. The film from Tet was especially good because the media was already there when it broke out.
The CF tactical successes did not make up for the most important strategic failure. The population of the cities of South Vietnam did not rise to support the rebels. Ho Chi Minh did no better than John Brown in inciting a slave uprising. This time there simply was no popular support. The South Vietnamese people did not consider themselves living under the slavery of capitalism and reactionaryism. At least Brown failed because his support system really was in chains.
Tet was a definite military failure for the NV cause. They held some important buildings for a few days and took Hue in the North, where they murdered thousands of unarmed civilians after the battle was long over. But the VC Tet attack fizzled after a few days and soon the streets of Saigon and most of the other cities were completely secure. There was a battle for Hue that was World War II in scope but Hue was re-taken. It was status quo ante-Tet.
The US media however, reported the Tet offensive as if it had been a complete military victory for the Communist. They saw it this way; if the North Vietnamese can attack the South Vietnamese cities, then we are losing the war, because previously they only could attack in the countryside. The liberal reporters ran with that and that was the end of it.
But the North Vietnamese had in reality lost the Tet Offensive. It was supposed to have succeeded militarily. Its primary mission was not propaganda for the American home front. The VC had expended the better part of its military resources in a failed campaign. They were spent. After Tet the VC were considerably less capable of the countryside attacks they had been launching for the previous years. They had gambled all their resources on Tet and lost. Their army of sleeper agents had emerged from underground in the assault and many had been killed, wounded or been captured. Tet took its toll on these double agents. Charlie was low on ammo and food. The Vietnamese Communists had no chance of following up with a renewed attack.
More than 1,100 US soldiers died in the first two weeks of the Tet offensive. More than 10,000 Vietnamese civilians are estimated to have perished also. 5,000 died in Hue.
Hue was the ancient capital of Annam and the second most important city in South Vietnam. But it was perilously close to the DMZ and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When the VC and NVA attacked the city of Hue, there was a protracted battle which I followed intently on the news each night. Hue fell to the Communists and was re-taken a few days later by the good guys. During the week or so of occupation the Communists executed 2,800 Hue civilians. These were confirmed by the discovery of fresh mass graves when the Americans entered the city. It was like Bradley liberating Dachau in 45. Another 2,000 South Vietnamese citizens were missing and were never found. I don’t think the average starry-eyed lefty tie-dye high school student knows about this, but they surely learned about My Lai and agent orange.
The media snatched defeat from the jaws of victory at Tet. Coverage became based on self-fulfilled analysis. We in the media are against the war because it is immoral and un-winnable. Now here we see an event that we can interpret in many ways. We will choose to interpret this military event in the way that most supports our opinions as we have expressed them thus far.
The media excitedly maximized the initial success of the Tet offensive, but minimized the implications of the vigorous counter-attack. The blood spilled by our GI’s was washed down the drain by the biased analysis of the liberal media.
Back in the states Tet changed the political situation immensely, but not the way a military victory should. A winning battle usually pushes the fence-sitters off to the right. But now the fence sitters fell off to the left. The violent doves rubbed their hands in triumph. After the misrepresentation about Tet, it was much easier for our national legislators to come out in the open against the war and demand our withdrawal. Oh, excuse me, to demand a negotiated settlement, meaning an intellectual rationalization for surrender.
Throughout the war, the media minimized the atrocities and murders of civilians by the Viet Cong, and that’s being generous. It was unfair enough to argue that at times we were just as evil as they were. At least that sort of admits that the evil deeds of the Communists are the starting point.
But listen to how historian Bill Clinton explains Tet and the famous General Loan incident. He reluctantly admits that the VC might actually have been every bit as murderous and cruel as we were; as if American atrocities are the starting point from which to examine Communist ones.
In February [1968], two events in Vietnam further
hardened opposition to the war. The first was the
impromptu execution of a person suspected of being
a Vietcong by the chief of the South Vietnamese
Police, General Loan. Loan shot the man in the head
in broad daylight on the street in Saigon. The killing
was captured on film by the great photographer, Eddie
Adams, whose picture caused more Americans to
to question whether our allies were any better than our
enemies, who were also undeniably ruthless.
From My Life c) 2004
“Also?” So the starting point is that we are undeniably ruthless, but, hey, we must admit that maybe the VC were also ruthless. The fact of the matter is that in 1962 while Jack Kennedy was courting Marylyn Monroe and Bill Calley was pumping gas in Arizona, the Viet Cong were systematically assassinating all civilian village leaders who did not succumb to their demands. This policy was employed on a mass scale and was supported and indeed demanded by the top political leadership of the Communists. The Communists were the first-strike authors of Vietnam atrocities. They drew first blood. We came along and reacted to them years later.
As for the shooting by General Loan, which is still shown more often on TV in this country than footage from the moon landing, Mona Charens’ research tells another side to the story,
The photo of South Vietnamese general Nguyen
Ngoc Loan executing the Viet Cong prisoner
made the rounds, and the history books, as
evidence of the brutality of the South Vietnamese
government America was defending. Photographer
Eddie Adams of the Associated Press won a
Pulitzer Prize for the picture, and he knew the
truth of the matter – namely that the Vietcong
prisoner had only moments before murdered a
Vietnamese policeman along with his entire
family. Adams regretted that this photo became
a rallying point for discrediting American
participation in the war.
Clinton’s version of the story was not exactly a lie, but was a typical slick liberal spin on the Loan information, tossing to the editing room floor what is not convenient and stressing what is.
President Thieu responded to Tet by initiating an expanded draft for South Vietnamese men. From late 1968 on, all men between 16 and fifty would be drafted. The oldest and youngest did not have to serve in the regular army, but rather would form the nucleus of a People’s Defense Force, a militia for the villages. The PDF was something like the American militia of 1775, an unpaid but armed force of patriots opposing outside oppressors. These minute rice men of South Vietnam would grow into a force of over two million grass roots fighters by the time the US began major withdrawals from Nam.
But don’t ever bother trying to find any western journalists describing the bravery of South Vietnamese troops. It is next to impossible to even find any reporting for the bravery of American troops, let alone SV. But if you want to read compliments about the tough fighting qualities of the VC, now you’re in business. The compliments to the VC are fulsome amongst all the lib biased historians.
The most common method is to interview an American commander for three hours. He talks for two hours about the courage of his American soldiers. Then he talks for 45 minutes about the bravery of his South Vietnamese allies. Then the liberal reporters push poll interview him about the courage of the enemy. The American of course concedes that the VC are a tough opponent, even fanatical at times in their near suicidal efforts in combat. The commander has been set up to say what he doesn’t mean. Then we see an isolated 14 second clip of an American General praising the courage of the enemy, and that's all we see.
The VC were such dedicated fighters. I’m sure the 1st Marine Division from Guadalcanal or the men of the Big Red One division from Europe would tremble at the thought of taking them on.
Why were they such hardened fighters?
Most of the VC were poor and homeless. That had nothing to live for or fight for except their cause. It gave them a meal, a home and an identity. Communist philosophy was the choice because only that one side was offering free room and board and a pillage license. These were the proletarians and the landless peasants who had embraced Communism because it gave them a free hand to seize the property of those who had earned it. It had given them authority to imprison or shoot anyone who had land or money. The South Vietnamese farmer and the American soldier already had a life. They didn’t gain dignity the day they signed up to fight. But that was the case with Charley. It explains his admirable élan.
Now the reporter goes to the typewriter and writes a polemic against the American participation in the war. He goes over the litany of American crimes and immoral acts in the decisions leading to our involvement and then in our actions once over there. The reporter has no use for the compliments the commander gave to our side. But when the reporter writes about the just cause of the North suddenly there appears in print the American commander adding that the VC were ‘some incredibly tough fighters.’ It makes it look as though the Americans were in awe of the superiority of the fighting qualities of the Northern soldiers, when in reality it was merely the standard soldier to soldier respect that is given to opponents in all wars for all time immemorial, taken out of context for political purposes. Isolate the excerpt and set it up with biased window dressing.
MY LAI 4 – 3.16.68
March 16, 1968 was a sad day in US history. On that day the 30 men of Charlie Company of the US Army’s Americal Division entered a small hamlet in northern South Vietnam and massacred approximately 300 unarmed civilians, mostly women, old men and children.
The news of this Nanking-like slaughter would not leak out until the next Administration. When it did it, two American soldiers would be arrested for war crimes. The My Lai trial would be the most spectacular and controversial trial of the Nixon years, even more than any trials of the American radical leaders.
GO WEST OLD MAN
General Westmoreland was recalled back to the states in the spring of 1968 and was replaced by General Abrams. Johnson felt bad for him and wanted the poor guy to stop being the military scapegoat for everything that was going badly in Vietnam. he took the 5,000 mile flight back West to head the Army at home and write a book.
VIETNAM AID
We meant well. The United States gave more than $7 billion worth of non-military aid to Vietnam during the war years. We wanted to avoid civilian casualties although sometimes it happened, while they wanted civilians to be the very targets of their attacks, and sometimes it happened that they had to fight our Marines and GI’s instead. General Westmoreland states, “Never in the history of warfare, certainly never in the history of the use of American arms has more attention been given to the avoidance of civilian casualties than we did in Vietnam.”
There are certainly people who would not agree with the General but it is an opinion worth considering for its integrity.
PUEBLO CRISIS: January 1968 –
On January 23 1968 the US Naval Intelligence gathering ship the Pueblo was seized by North Korea in what it claimed to be was it’s territorial waters. One sailor was killed in the short firefight and the Crew of 88 taken held prisoner. The US claimed that Pueblo was in international waters and demanded the release of the captives. Which side was right has never been proven.
Johnson was concerned that South Korean forces in Vietnam would withdraw and return home. He ordered and additional 14,000 USA troops to South Korea but did not draw Korean or America troops from his Vietnam till. The new troops were called up and sent to Korea from home reserves.
Johnson did not respond militarily to Puebo and we all wondered why. We would defend another country but not our own guys? Johnson was in a bind because the Tet offensive was in full swing in Vietnam and in an election year he could not afford a second war in Korea. As with Vietnam, he was also fearful of Red Chinese intervention if there was a renewed Korean War.
The Administration had already been fearful of an impending invasion from North Korea. A major assassination plot against the South Korean President Rhee had only recently been prevented in a dramatic last minute gun battle. The hit men were from North Korea, what a surprise.
The solution was a classic Democratic negotiate until we all grow old plan. I guess it worked, but the Pueblo crew missed the ’68 World Series. That December, the commander of the ship Captain Bucher signed a statement that his ship was a spy ship in international waters when captured, and that he and his crew were a bunch of bad guys. In exchange for this self-flagellation, the crew was released. It was Francis Gary Powers and the U-2 trial all over again, this time on water. Upon returning to the states the men, supported officially by the administration said that the confessions were not valid and obviously had been acquired under severe duress.
Not a day went by in 68 that America didn’t see a news story on the national news about the latest on the Pueblo. It was much like the Jimmy Carter hostage crisis of 1979-1981. The history books and documentaries do not give justice to its importance. Pueblo was unresolved on Election Day and probably helped elect Nixon. Along with Tet, the length of the war, race riots and protest movements, Pueblo enhanced the image of Johnson as losing control in general.
So the Pueblo men came home in December of 68 after LBJ was a lame duck and Nixon was president-elect, a scenario similar to the 1981 Iran hostage release as Reagan prepared to take office.
Johnson says very little about the Pueblo incident in his memoirs, which is surprising since the event was such a sensation. It was a big event in my life but somehow, not in Lyndon Johnson’s. People were talking about the Pueblo in diners and around office coolers. I was just shy of my 13th birthday and was very much caught up in the Pueblo. The nation was angry and so was I. Now its treated as a passing footnote in American history, small compared to the historical significance of Elvis Presley’s drug problem, Joe Namath and Planet of the Apes.
BACK-TO-BACK ASSASSINATIONS KING AND KENNEDY 1968
On April 4, 1968 in Memphis Tennessee a lone sniper shot and killed Dr. Martin Luther King the greatest African American leader of his time. This charismatic and beloved man (and fabulous orator) was gunned down on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, which is now a Museum of the Assassination.
A cracker racist on the lam named James Earl Ray was arrested and pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 99 years.
There are a lot of intelligent people who have done a lot of research and they think that Ray did not kill King and that it was the result of some kind of government conspiracy. Code Named Zorro by Mark Lane is one of them. Lane suspects the FBI.
The country experienced some race rioting after the shooting. Robert Kennedy gave a dramatic speech in which he asked blacks to forgive the whites. His brother had been “killed by a white man” so he knew what they were feeling. It’s a genuine, moving and compassionate speech.
RFK RIP
Less than 2 months later on June 5, 1968, just minutes after winning the California Primary, Robert Kennedy was walking through the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shaking hands with well wishers and about to met his destiny at the hands of an ill-will-wisher. An assassin stuck out his arm to shake the Senator's hand but instead emptied the 8 rounds of his Iver-Johnson 22 calibre revolver into Kennedy and the walls of the pantry. A round hit Robert in the head, leaving him bleeding and unconscious in the floor, never to revive. Bystanders tackled Sirhan to the ground, including Roosevelt Greer, a defensive lineman for the NFL who was good at it. But it was too late to save Kennedy.
The shooter was a Palestinian-American named Sirhan Sirhan. RFK died the next day, the sixth of June. The police later found his diary in which he wrote repeatedly that “RFK has to die,” but it wasn't clear why.
Sirhan is still on death row in a California prison and says he doesn’t remember committing the crime. His story has changed often.
There is no death penalty in California and Sirhan still comes up for parole every few years. Sirhan has testified in his defense that if RFK were alive today he would forgive him and approve his parole. A comedian responded to this with, “What a shame. The one guy that could have gotten him released, and he had to go and shoot the guy.”
There are many conspiracy theories about the shooting of Robert Kennedy. They “prove” that there was a second gunman in the pantry and that the killing was a government conspiracy. Charts, diagrams and testimonies prove that there had to be more than one gunman in the pantry. The fact that no one saw the guy doesn't mean much to the conspiracy nuts, (like the large numbers of people all over the world who think that no planes actually hit the World Trade Center on 9/11/01 and that it was trick photography to mask an international conspiracy to take over the Middle East.)
Sirhan's Iver Johnson 22 revolver was one of many of its type that carried the nickname of “suicide special.” That's because it misfired often, causing injury to the shooter. You can buy a working antique IJ22 today for about $36 at a redneck flea market. If the assassination of RFK was a conspiracy of the CIA or the US military, it seems odd they would give the main assassin one of the worst pistols available to do it with.
The most important thing about the event was not who did it or why. The breathtakingly important thing about is that Robert Kennedy definitely (and we do mean d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y) would have won the Election of 1968 and that all of American and perhaps world history would have been different. Instead of Nixon we would have Robert Kennedy in the White House for four and probably eight years, America would have almost certainly been out of Vietnam by the spring of 1970, there would have been no Watergate, no resignation of Nixon, no Ford, and no Jimmy Carter in 1976 coming in from the side door and picking up the pieces of a disheveled Republican reign. Ted Kennedy probably would have been too busy in the RFK Administration to be galavanting on Martha's Vineyard in July of 1969 and he quite likely would have continued the Kennedy Dynasty in 76.
It's horrible that an assassin can change history like that, but Sirhan has to go down as having done so with the same evil power as that commanded by Gavril Princip and Dr. Carl Austin Weiss.
AFTER OFFICE
LBJ in the last months of his life let his hair grow very long, like a high school hippie. There are very few photographs of him like this as he became reclusive on his ranch in Texas. He may by way of hair have been sending an apology to the angry left for having sent so many young men to their deaths. Long hair had a lot of political meaning back then. Today it’s just a way to get girls and matter of personal style. Back then is was a carefully chosen political statement.
Lyndon Johnson died in December of 1972. Had he been re-elected in ’68 he would not have finished his second term. Had he lived just a month longer, he would have witnessed the end of the Vietnam War (for the United States at least.)
CONCLUSION
As for Vietnam, there is one thing that all sides of the argument can agree on; Lyndon, you messed up.
The one thing that most disturbs me when I read about Lyndon Johnson is the consistency of the reports that he was a bully. It’s creepy that a man with that much power still needed to intimidate people. Bullies are usually small people, and that’s why they are bullies. But the image of the President of the United States, acting like some bully from the office or factory is hard to accept. I always wanted not to believe it no matter how many times I read it.
CBS news show 60 Minutes ran a 30-Year anniversary special and producer Don Hewitt spoke on camera of an encounter with Lyndon Baines Johnson. I’m using the doctrine of revived recollection to quote him,
Lyndon took me and another reporter for a ride around
his ranch at some very high speeds. The limo pulled over
in the middle of nowhere by an abandoned building. Lyndon
was in the front seat chewing a candy bar when he handed
back the empty wrapper to me, of all people. Then he asked
me to throw the wrapper away into that old trash barrel.
I wanted to say no but here he was, the President of the
United States, so I got out and threw the wrapper into the
ash can, and off went the limo, gone.
Don didn’t finish the story to my and your frustration, but that tale says enough for me about Lyndon Baines Johnson the man and the President.
After office Johnson wanted to tell and sell his side of his presidency to the right reporter. But whom should he give this prized plum to. Hmm.
According to biographer Robert Merrill, LBJ always tried to change the minds of his worst critics by making their personal acquaintance and trying to convert them to his side. The first thing his worst critics could expect was a call and a friendly invitation to spend a couple of days with him at the Presidential ranch. Who could say no? More often than not it worked. And why not?
Aesop said accurately that, ‘acquaintance softens prejudice.’ Disarming the enemy is cheaper, easier and wiser than fighting him, and converting him is far far better than disarming. The goals were worth it. It was a sneaky technique that shrewd observers resented and the gullible fell for. Merrill tells of one critical reporter who spent days with Lyndon and then had the moxie to remain an opponent after leaving the ranch. Lyndon was livid.
Early in 1968, before Johnson had announced that he would not run, a young journalist named Doris Kearns wrote a rough article drawing up a political map and route of how the Democrats could manage to dump Johnson from the 1968 ticket and run a progressive like Kennedy or Gino McCarthy in his place.
Later in the year when he was a lame duck, he spotted Kearns at a Washington gala and asked her to dance. While dancing, he told her that she had him all wrong and said that he wanted to tell his entire life story to her and to her alone. Doris was star struck and who could blame her? It was a reporter’s dream-come-true.
Kearns ended up spending more one-on-one time with Lyndon at his home than any reporter ever spent with any President in American history. The result of these endless interviews was her acclaimed book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. Doris also helped Johnson write his White House memoirs along the way. They were writing each other’s book.
Kearns bought everything he said, hook, line and sinker. He made a complete fool out of her, and then she sold his jive story to the American people making fools of them. Doris had read a lot of books but had evidently neglected to keep up on her Aesop. She went from a healthy cynic to a sycophant through acquaintance.
The gist of her book is that Lyndon was a great warm guy with a heart of gold, feeling lonely and misunderstood. The guy cared about blacks and the poor so very much, but that stupid Vietnam War ruined all his plans for The Great Society. He couldn’t sleep at night while the less fortunate people in America were sleeping in homeless shelters or being discriminated against in the South. And now the war protestors were saying mean things about him, but all he had ever wanted to do in politics was help the less fortunate. He was a genuine progressive liberal and now they were calling him a war mongerer. His dream had been broken and now, so was he.
Johnson turned his presidency into a chick-flick and sold it to Doris. No guy would have bought it, and no tough conservative woman would have either. Doris is neither. That’s why he chose her.
I have seen Doris Kearns Goodwin interviewed on television at least 200 times. She is based in Boston so I see her on both local and national news programs on a regular basis. She doesn’t have a hostile bone in her body. Rarely is she placed against an opponent. 98% of her interviewers are deferential at the least and loving at the most. The few times I have seen her in an adversarial debate her opponent got the best of her in my opinion. She is adored as an historian and is a friend to all in the media at all levels.
It is understandable. Kearns is has a very likeable look, demeanor, and personality. It is not surprising that she married a very important man, Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter and advisor to John F. Kennedy.
But Lyndon Johnson wrote a revisionist nonsense version of his presidency and sold it to us through her.
Interesting that she says that her interviews were usually conducted in his bedroom. Hmmm. She got up at dawn and then Lyndon would have some breakfast and then slip into his bed and do the interviews from under the sheets. I kid you not.
There isn’t something a little sexual going on there? Of course there is. At face value Lyndon was about as sexy as the Hunchback of Notre Dame. But power is always sexy to a woman. The president is sexy, period. Henry Kissinger was as handsome as a discarded peach-pit but he was always recognized as one of the sexiest men in America. He was close to the President and held great power.
On Lyndon’s end it was certainly sexual. Doris Kearns was a little cutie pie. She was short, didn’t wear make-up, had golden shoulder length hair straight with bangs, brains and a cute little voice without the remotest trace of harsh. Doris couldn’t sound shrill if she lost her temper and screamed. She was hot in a very mature and disarming way. Lyndon dug her way down deep in his Texas boots. I can see the bedside interviews in my head right now and it only had something to do with politics. He was a very old man with two heart attacks under his belt. He was having a great time. His heart was tickled. The sexual act itself is only one of the many thousands of sexual acts in our everyday lives. I’m surprised Lady Bird even allowed Doris in the door.
These months of DK interviews would have produced an entirely different version of his Presidency if a sympathetic man had conducted them. And if a tough Republican man had conducted the same interviews he would have written a book destroying Johnson. Lyndon knew how to play this game well and Kearns was the perfect sucker.
When I was a radio talk show host in 2006 I met Doris for just a few seconds. I didn’t give her anything more than a nod because there were a lot of people being introduced to her. I wanted to argue with her over something she said on NBC on election night 2004 concerning the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, but it wasn’t the time or place.
Doris Kearns Goodwin currently has a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Abraham Lincoln on the best-seller list.
The problem with being a conservative on the Vietnam War is that it’s hard to pass the hot-seat test. Okay, you’re the President in 1965. What do you do about Vietnam? It’s hard to even imagine a course of action that did not involve some dangers and risks, some needless killing through action or inaction. Pick another year in the Vietnam War. It is the same.
For a liberal on the other hand, it’s easy to pass the hot-seat test. America from 1946 on gets out of Southeast Asia and stays out of Indochinese affairs completely, and if the problem is inherited from another Administration, the US should get out of Vietnam immediately and completely, and should stay out.
When a liberal tries to show a conservative wing it’s trouble and the reverse is true. No American Administration ever ‘picked a team’ in Vietnam.
SOURCES
The Accidental President C) 1967, by Robert Merrill - a hatchet job on poor Lyndon the unlikable. Very good read by a lively journalist, but Merrill goes too far even for this reader who doesn’t like Johnson at all. It’s too dripping with venom even for my taste.
America’s Longest War, The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975, c)1986 (revised edition), by George C. Herring.
All praise for the courage and excellence of the Communist warriors. None for US combat troops or the sacrifices of the ARVN soldiers. Take the icy mountain roads on the way home, George.
My Brother Lyndon, by Sam Houston Johnson, c) 1969. Sam blames Kennedy’s leftover advisors like Bundy, Rostow, Fortas and McNamara for the mess Johnson left behind in Vietnam. Samuel is doing his duty as a brother.
The Path to Power, by Bob Caro is 900 pages on Lyndon’s early life and ends with his reaching the vice presidency in 1961. Too daunting for me in scope. I only made page 50. I always give books the 50-page test. On page 50 I circle the number and put in an up or down arrow indicating whether I should continue. Caro’s is not a bad book but I had to give page 50 a downer.
Out of Many – New textbook cited often
The Enduring Vision- I’m pretty rough on this p.c. college textbook and it deserves it. The enduring lib bias vision.
The Making of the President 1964, by Theodore H White, c)1965 – Whites books are a pleasure. I use a lot of his thoughts in my own words. In other words, this is a guy I rip off. It's the highest compliment.
White admires Johnson and gives him every benefit of the doubt on sincerity, courage, and effective decision making to date. But White concedes that Johnson lacked warmth and had few if any real friends. ‘Lyndon the unlikable’ from yet another source.
White sometimes tries too hard to be clever and creative in his style and an will go off the deep end on some minor point until you begin to question his sanity.
Vietnam Witness, by Bernard Fall, a journalist who wrote two excellent books on Vietnam before being killed by a mine there in 1967. He is a pro-France and anti-US chauvinist, but since he died heroically, I can’t stay mad at him, and his books are helpful to say the least. But it’s not fair that he gets a free ride because he died. He is cited so very often but his over the top anti-American bias is never cited. This paragraph marks the end of never.
The Pentagon Papers, the Senator Gravel edition, four volumes.
Vietnam, The Logic of Withdrawal, by Howard Zinn, c) 1967 – I love Zinn and all I ever do is disagree with him. He’s not just a shouter; he’s a fine man and historian.
The Ten Thousand Day War, by Michael MacLear, c) 1981 – A great book. The Ten Thousand Day War PBS - a 10 volume video documentary based on this book. Most of those interviewed are now dead and it is a great thing for history that the doc was made. Both the book and the TV series have a ludicrous liberal bias (what a surprise!), which they try and pass off as the accepted verdict of history, when in truth, many of the opinions and conclusions are wide open for debate today just as they were at the time. Left fables agreed upon.
Going Upriver – I saw this film about three weeks before the 2004 election. There was controversy over Kerr’s Vietnam service. Some were challenging the story and the image of Kerry as a fighting tiger saving his mates in close calls. Going Upriver is a testimonial movie putting as positive a spin as possible on Kerry’s war record in an election year. It was the film version of a campaign book, a polemic disguised as a full-length documentary. It also worked. It convinced me that Kerry was a genuine Vietnam War hero.
My Life, by Bill Clinton, c) 2004 for the material on his mentor Fullbright and for Clinton’s slanted History of the Vietnam War years. Clinton couldn’t wait to recognize Vietnam as soon as he became President. I have a wonderful photograph of him in Hanoi smiling broadly while standing beneath a 70-foot bust of Ho Chi Minh. Awful stuff.
Lightning Out of Israel, The Six-Day War in the Middle East, by the Associated Press, c) 1967
Out of the Cold, by Robert McNamara, c) 1989 – You know that short book you ‘read on the plane?” – This one you can read on the cab ride. It’s his analysis of the Cold War, and the aftermath of its end.
The Vantage Point, by Lyndon Baines Johnson is the title of Johnson’s memoirs and it is a fine book. Vietnam coverage is divided into four separate chapters. It makes a great Nam short history book if one chooses to read only those chapters.
Exploring American History, by John R. O’Connor, c) 1991 – This colorful textbook is for the junior high school student. I enjoy reading history at this level. It’s very relaxing.
Here’s a quiz for the student-reader on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 7.64,
‘What did Congress mean when it said
South Vietnam is vital to our “national
Interests?’
That’s a tough one for a 60-year-old university professor to answer, let alone some poor seventh grader. This book is commendably even-handed on Nam, but p.c. to a fault on too many other occasions.
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