Monday, March 05, 2007
Lyndon Johnson and the breaking of trust
Doris Kearns Goodwin, who is a smart woman, wrote this of Lyndon Johnson in 1999:
Sadly, in the midst of these great triumphs, [Johnson] made a fatal decision with respect to the war in Vietnam. Initially he was reluctant to get involved in the war; his whole heart was in domestic policy. But by July 1965 it was clear that he either had to escalate our commitment or gradually withdraw. He decided, of course, to escalate, to commit hundreds of thousands of troops and millions of dollars. But it was the way he made that decision that proved his undoing. Some people within his administration had argued that he should mobilize the American public behind the war effort by going to Congress for a declaration of war, making a series of speeches explaining his position, imposing a war tax to create a sense of shared participation, and calling up the reserves.
But Johnson rejected all these ideas. Instead he decided to finance the war with the current level of appropriations (while putting in secret Defense Department appropriations) and keeping from Congress and the public the very pessimistic estimates about how much time and human effort it would take to win the war. His first goal was always to keep his Great Society moving forward, and he didn't trust the American people or the Congress to support him if the full scope of the war were understood.
Of course, a leader cannot break trust. It's a disastrous decision in any institution, but particularly when lives are at risk. In his speeches Johnson kept promising that there was light at the end of the tunnel -- a promise that proved fatal when he was unable to keep his word. The public was not prepared for the long and difficult war that emerged, and Johnson's credibility was destroyed. Divisions in the society deepened, the peace movement grew, and North Vietnam's successful Tet offensive provoked a challenge to the 1968 primaries from Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, leading eventually to Johnson's withdrawal from the presidential race. His retirement was almost unbearable to him, because he knew how he had failed at the moment that his triumph had almost been achieved. In the end, his greatest enemy was not his political or military adversaries, but his own arrogance.
In light of what has transpired since 1999, would you say that George W. Bush failed to learn from history, that the experience of his presidency proves that Johnson was wiser than Goodwin gives him credit for being, or that our superficial attempt to draw comparisons between the two administrations is a fool's errand?
Unleash the hounds.
14 Comments:
By 
Meme chose, at
Tue Mar 06, 01:32:00 AM:
What Bush learned from Johnson will enable him to leave office at the end of 8 years as an honest man with his head held high. How different an outcome!
Bush will have been vilified by many, but so was Lincoln while he lived, for very similar reasons.
What we should now beware is the way the naive, inexperienced and idealistic Democrat who followed Johnson went on to compound so many of his mistakes, particularly in Vietnam.
By 
, at
Tue Mar 06, 01:52:00 AM:
Perhaps they were both wrong. Both thought they could somehow cheat the three-year rule. Both chose a middle path: neither peace nor total war.
War is not an endeavor for half-measures.
By SR, at
Tue Mar 06, 02:07:00 AM:
Back to the drawing board Doris. The "Tat" offensive was a US military victory.
By TigerHawk, at
Tue Mar 06, 06:15:00 AM:
By TigerHawk, at
Tue Mar 06, 06:22:00 AM:
More: Tet was, indeed, a military victory for the counterinsurgency, insofar as we no know that it broke the back of the Viet Cong. Only a conventional invasion from the North would threaten the South after Tet. Unfortunately, the press positioned it at the time as evidence that the United States could not win. Tet was the occasional for Walter Cronkite turning against the war, which in turn was the reason given for Johnson's withdrawal from the presidential race.
By , at
Tue Mar 06, 07:56:00 AM:
There is a book called "Bush's War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age" by Jim A. Kuypers, a professor of communication.
The book empirically establishes the disconnect between what Bush has said and what the media has reported. I haven't gotten around to reading the whole thing but I think that the study has a bearing on your question.
By , at
Tue Mar 06, 08:55:00 AM:
imposing a war tax to create a sense of shared participation...
What a crock. I'm so tired of that old trope. First of all, half of the country pays almost no income tax at all, and a consumption tax would immediately fall prey to the ridiculous, yet nearly universally accepted, assertion that consumption taxes are somehow inherently unfair to the "poor." No, heaven forbid that the highest consumers of public largesse actually contribute now and then.
Now, I think we (the half that actually do pay some income tax) would be the first to tell you that some intangible feeling of "shared participation" does absolutely nothing to reduce the sting of April 15th. In fact, it causes nothing but resentment.
I contend that if you want to lose the remaining 30% of the country that supports the war, by all means bring on yet another tax burden. After all, I already work nearly to June to fulfill my "fair share" of the tax burden - why the hell not make it July?
By Jeremiah, at
Tue Mar 06, 09:06:00 AM:
I'm confused by meme chose's reference. As I recall, no "naive, inexperienced and idealistic Democrat" followed Johnson. Are we discussing Nixon as naive, inexperienced or idealistic or are we referring to Carter, the next Democrat to hold the Presidency? It seems to me that our involvement in Vietnam was over and Carter had nothing to do with compounding those mistakes (although he certainly went on to break new ground with his own mistakes).
By Habu, at
Tue Mar 06, 09:35:00 AM:
Doris Kearns Goodwin, ah yes, lets take a look at the source first.
"As a former Lyndon Johnson aide, Doris Kearns Goodwin knows all about credibility gaps. After becoming a historian, she wrote a book about LBJ that described his increasing isolation in the White House from anyone who might tell him an unpleasant truth: "Self-deceptions multiplied in this hall of distorting mirrors," she wrote, as quoted by U.S. News & World Report in its current cover story on "Fifteen Presidents Who Changed the World."
That was the opening paragraph to her plagerism scandel of several years back, as noted in Forbes Magazine. Delores and plagerism
As for LBJ..I think Robert A. Caro's definitve trilogy finished off LBJ's legacy as anything but a power hungry asshole.
By Cardinalpark, at
Tue Mar 06, 09:37:00 AM:
TH - FWIW, I think Bush did in fact learn from the LBJ experience. Whether you agree with the decision to go to war in Iraq or not, Bush knew that he was betting his Presidency and his legacy on Iraq. He then stood for election again in Nov 2004 in the face of very challenging conditions (post Fallujah I, pre Fallujah II) but well after Saddam had been defeated. The primary difference was that he had the political will to stand before the US electorate -- something which LBJ did not have.
While I cannot transport myself back to 1967/8, i think it is clear that LBJ was thin-skinned and could not bear the scrutiny and criticism that came his way due to the Vietnam War. I can't explain why, he simply couldn't bear it.
By contrast, Bush could and did. The media criticism to which Bush was subjected fax exceeded what Cronkite did to LBJ and the Vietnam war effort. He and his administration was never subjected to the personal attacks and character assassination that Bush was -- for instance the Dan Rather fraud and Plamegate. McNamara was not attacked like Rumsfeld.
It's difficult to assign responsibility as to why, though I would speculate that part of it had to do from the division in his own party regarding the war. Bush did not face that; LBJ did.
The Vietnam war was a much longer, more costly conflict. We lost 50,000+ men there. It was based on a "domino theory" regarding the risk of advance of communism; these men were sacrificed in the name of containment. It was a proxy battle in the Cold War against the Soviets.
The Iraq War is a piece of a larger war against radical, Middle Eastern Islamism. The cost has been - as measured by any historical standard - extremely low. Most Americans perceive a relatively direct connection between why we are there now and what happened in PG I in 1991, Somalia, the WTC attack in 1993, the Embassy attacks in 1998, 9/11 and Afghanistan. So it is less costly, less theoretical, etc.
These are vastly different deals with vastly different leadership. There are other important lessons this administration has internalized as it relates more to the 1930s and the lead up to WWII...
By , at
Tue Mar 06, 02:09:00 PM:
On the other hand, we keep hearing various versions of "there's light at the end of the tunnel" from this administration. I won't call such statements "lies", but I think they can be fairly characterized as unduly optimistic, and I think this tendency has terribly hurt the administration's credibility with the general public.
- Liberator Waiting For Flowers
By , at
Tue Mar 06, 02:50:00 PM:
Why dont the demacrats admit to the facts we were brought into the vietnam mess by a demacrat LBJ and he did,nt use the WAR POWERS ACT ether
By Lanky_Bastard, at
Tue Mar 06, 06:13:00 PM:
GWB couldn't even learn from GHB, nevermind LBJ.
By Purple Avenger, at
Tue Mar 06, 08:55:00 PM:
The American public has been paying a "war tax" dating back to WWII. Next time you buy a set of tires for a car, look at the bill.
The fed excise tax on tires was enacted as a WWII wartime measure.
