Lyndon Johnson vs. the Hawks

LBJ was the last hawk. His phone calls in 68 demonstrates it

President Kennedy was under intense pressure from day one of his Administration to launch a major land war in Asia. Instead, he negotiated a deal in Laos and had already ordered the start of a Vietnam pull out the week he was murdered.
LBJ gave the military the big war they wanted.
When then Senator Robert F. Kennedy met with Johnson at the White House after a European trip LBJ sneered at him:
"In six months this war will be won and you doves will be politically dead."
That's the 1967 that I remember.

You don't red to be a political phenom to know kicking the can down the road won't get you on Mount Rushmore. It seems obvious LBJ figured kicking the can in 1967 would at least get him past the 1968 election.

I used to be pretty forgiving in judging elected officials. I would say, look, those guys need to get re-elected, I don't.

Recently, I am saying...does the need to get re-elected really give you a free pass? The Senator who stood up to Trump's threat on Obamacare, responding to the effect go ahead, come after me, this Senate job is only temporary anyway. Now THAT was refreshing.

So my new position, used in judging LBJ: it is a moral imperative for all to do what's right, not just muddle through, even our precious electeds.

One has to blame more than Stennis and the generals(parallels to the present?) for the 3.5 million people that were killed in South East Asia during American involvement. Apparently we took a way nothing from the French failure. We inflicted cruelty beyond any measure rivaling the worst of WW2. It was the resistance of of the young, thousands of bombs going off, and the fragging of the officer corp in Nam itself, that made it clear that short of the nuclear option the war was unwinnable. We killed in amounts unimaginable . We wasted our capital and our human capital and went from the rich nation with wealth beyond imagination to moral degradation that surpassed even the brutality of the USSR.
And now the handing over of military weapons(surplus Ha) to the domestic police only reinforces the idea that we the people did stop the war.

Politicians almost always avoid taking big decisions. With few exceptions, they act only when a serious crisis forces it. And when there are no good options is when they particularly dither, wait it out, avoid biting either bullet, and hope something will change. Johnson not only did not "lead effectively" in the case of Vietnam, he didn't lead at all! He just dithered and let it happen.

Obama did the same in Afghanistan. Now Trump is, apparently, also going to do the same, but with a few (!) more troops. Trump may (or may not) be an idiot, but as David Halberstam laid it out for us in "The Best and the Brightest," some of the smartest people ever to come to Washington have made some of the stupidest decisions of all time.

Anybody say "military-industrial complex?"

Thoughts:

Re Stennis: Being a conservative means never having to say I'm sorry or that I made a mistake.

Re Johnson: Other than total withdrawal and admitting the war was a mistake (ie, defeat...) he had no viable option. LBJ was in a classic no-win situation.

The true villain, however, was Richard Nixon who killed the '68 peace talks for personal political gain. To borrow a phrase, "May his name be obliterated".

Or President Johnson found himself in a "lose-lose" situation and thus lost.

Always easier for men in tailored suits sitting in their committee rooms to justify sending others into battle. The mistakes made in Vietnam continue to be made 50 years later. Ironic that we now rely on professional military men to control, or attempt to, the worst instincts of their Commander in Chief.

LBJ didn't read history, JFK did.
JFK had toured Vietnam in the early fifties and realized it was a quagmire.
He blocked attempts by the senate to send troops after the French surrendered.
He had a few thousand "advisors" only there before his assassination and had told associates we were getting out.
LBJ's approach was the same he used on legislation. Superior Forces -- All out assaults. Meanwhile his patron, Harold Brown of Brown and Root was getting rich off it.
Read Caro on LBJ -- he was a monster. And Vietnam brought out all his worst qualities.
This professor from Vassar is either nearsighted, too young to know the experience firsthand or trying to find a novel angle -- but LBJ deserves no sympathy or respect. His was the second step we fell down the stairs to here.
Bottom line -- most of the big gung ho pro war types -- LBJ, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan -- were war dodgers trying to rhetorically compensate for being cowards at heart. D___ them and their mindless sheep followers. God bless Neil Sheehan, David Halberstram, Ellsberg, Senators McCarthy, McGovern, and Robert Kennedy.

Political decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Millions of Americans fully supported the war and if current events are any indication that spirit remains alive and well.

Maybe Stennis was once an ally of LBJ but that was before the civil rights legislation LBJ so strongly supported. Stennis was one of most vociferous opponent of it. No doubt any damage he could have done to LBJ he had already attempted to do it.

Actually, the U.S. wasn't at war with North Vietnam, but rather was conducting a military assistance program for South Vietnam. When the U.S. got out in front of the people it was assisting, you knew that the assistance was failing.

Hypothetically, had there been a reason for the U.S. to be at war with North Vietnam, U.S. military measures and likely the result of the conflict would have been different.

Omitted from the discussion is the human cost. By 1967 Vietnam, indeed, the nations of former French Indochina, had been subject to war since the end of World War II. The author's academic discussion is relevant to lecture halls, and students of the war will appreciate the arguments. But the U.S. wasn't close to ending its involvement. While there was political angst about rising public concern the rising flow of dollars into the U.S. military industrial complex fed a pro war, or at least laissez faire attitude toward war that resulted in a far less visible, but far more powerful leverage than protestors.

Despite the insistence of the military on increasing bombing the Army Air Force effectiveness in World War II is open to debate, regardless of the mass destruction of German and Japanese cities. By 1967 in Vietnam it was recognized that the Vietnamese were expert at dispersing manufacturing and troop concentrations as well as recovering from even effective raids.

As old soldiers living at attention discussed war with formal politicians in serious chambers instead of ending the war dragged on, field and civilian hospitals filled, graveyards were expanded, the toll of deaths and maimings flooded toward 2 million, and only those who produced balance sheets and reported revenues to boards of directors and share holders, profited from the debates.

The article neglects to mention one critical factor: that the Pentagon's argument for an eminently winnable war rested upon the deliberate, cynical inflation of body counts of North Vietnamese Army troops and Viet Cong fighters killed in combat, as engineered by Gen. Westmoreland and surely known to the Joint Chiefs.

Whether President Johnson and Defense Secretary knew is an open question; if they did, then they had ample justification for demanding the resignations of the Joint Chiefs and Westmoreland, which would have given Johnson a free hand to block Stennis and his committee, and de-escalate the war.

While it seems like an alternative history worthy of "Star Trek," in a strategic and political sense, then, that was the great tragedy of Vietnam and Johnson's presidency. The entire history of the United States that followed would have been changed, as Johnson likely would have sought a second full term in office, Nixon would almost certainly would not have followed him into the White House based on a "Southern Strategy" whose effects are still playing out, and the lawlessness that led to Watergate and served as a template for the Reagan, George W. Bush and Trump administrations would never have occurred.

The escalation of the Vietnam War is a result from trusting political leaders from Texas and Mississippi. Not the clearest of thinkers and compassionate hearts have come from these states.

As if the "telling" makes it so. That war, a private affair in some repsects - or doesn't the CIA's interests and involvement merit reportage? - began, endured and finally "ended" for all the same reason: there was money to be made and then, there was money not to lose. All the major political players were bought and owned by the unseen rulers of the country, then as now. Whether any of them knew it or not; that's how insignificant many of them were, and are, to the true turning of the wheels. For the tens of thousands of American boys from working class families, and the hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians killed, hundreds of billions were made by dozens of corporations and the private interests of the elite. America? Poorer, more riven within, an entire generation wasted, another made disillusioned and a legacy of division lingering even unto today. Meanwhile the inheritors of the wealth created through the letting of blood lead our country today through commerce, banking, the military and the media. Unscathed, more powerful than ever and more disdainful of those who do the fighting and the dying, the paying and the praying. Resistance?? Where?

I was a young adult during the seemingly interminable Vietnam War. Every young man I knew faced the dilemma of Vietnam as the central challenge of their lives. Did they go? Did they avoid service? Were they veterans, marked for good or ill by the experience? Were they spared going, marked for good or ill by that choice?

No one escaped Vietnam and more to the point, it destroyed any ill-advised notions of trusting the government of the United States. I saw a brief respite from distrust after 9-11 which was again completely destroyed by our adventure in Iraq, spurred on by the threat of WMD. It was a bitter reminder when the Bush administration insisted that we let slip the dogs of war because of the threat Saddam Hussein represented. The pallid excuse offered by supporters that surely the President knew things that justified the reasons to invade was like a remembered dream. Now, after 16 years of war, it is the nightmare we can't wake ourselves from. Listening to Trump last week on Afghanistan was like hearing LBJ all over again. As the mother of a Marine, it made me heartsick.

IF the American multi-million information/security apparatus had worked in coordination, the 9/11 attack would have, probably, been thwarted.

History is never written by lost opportunities but rather by unwise decisions and their consequences. Vietnam and Iraq are top examples post WWII.

The Vietnam disaster rests squarely on the shoulders of Lyndon Johnson beginning with the Gulf of Tonkin.
He made the decision to commit huge numbers of troops to a ground war despite objections by the General Wheeler and the other chiefs as early as 1965.
Worse, Johnson's decision were made for mostly political reasons as he feared a GOP comeback should he lose Vietnam as Truman had supposedly lost China and Korea.
Certainly, McNamara deserves condemnation for his lies and his budgetary gimmicks. Congress, too for not exercising its own responsibility.
However, any attempt to excuse Johnson for his bad decisions about Vietnam would be as unacceptable as excusing George W, Bush for his bad decisions about Iraq.