LBJ by Randall Woods

Author:Randall Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2006-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

“THE COUNTRYSIDE OF THE WORLD”

FOR MANY PEOPLE, LBJBRINGS TO MIND TWO HISTORI -cal phenomena: the Great Society and Vietnam. For almost everyone, Vietnam was the issue that brought him down and has forever tarnished his reputation—whether in liberal eyes, for escalating the war, or conservative ones, for badly mismanaging it. Yet both sides need to re-think his fundamental commitment to the war. It touched on his deepest beliefs and those of his fellow Americans.

Americans, Richard Hofstadter has written, are prone “to fits of crusading” and “do not abide very quietly the evils of life.” They are, Seymour Martin Lipset observed, “particularly inclined to support movements for the elimination of evil.”1Religion was a most significant dimension of anticommunism during the cold war. Marxism-Leninism was repugnant in no small part because it was “godless.” Those in the 1950s, like Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had sought to create an anticommunist monolith to compete with the Sino-Soviet bloc had made the Judeo-Christian ethic its centerpiece. Christian realists like Reinhold Niebuhr and Lyndon Johnson saw racism, imperialism, and totalitarianism as threats not only to America’s strategic and economic well-being, but to its spiritual and moral integrity as well. Among the most passionate supporters of the war in Vietnam were American Catholics, who were well aware that the church constituted the backbone of resistance to the VC and NVA in South Vietnam even after the demise of Diem and Nhu.2LBJ both participated in these perceptions and inclinations and manipulated them to achieve his policy objectives. “From our Jewish and Christian heritage, we draw the image of the God of all mankind, who will judge his children not by their prayers and by their pretensions, but by their mercy to the poor and their understanding of the weak,” he proclaimed to the Society of Newspaper Editors. “I tremble for our people if at the time of our greatest prosperity we turn our back on the moral obligations of our deepest faith.”3Like freedom, democracy, and free enterprise, compassion was not divisible. “We made a basic national choice,” Johnson told a group of clergymen visiting the White House. “We chose compassion. We put our faith in man—in the dignity and decency of individual man.”4

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