Lady Bird Johnson by Julia Sweig

Author:Julia Sweig [Sweig, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

* * *

The Johnsons spent the last few days of 1966 at the Ranch, facing what they felt to be an inexorable path deeper into Vietnam. They saw no face-saving exit. By the end of the year, American troop levels had climbed to nearly 400,000, with 5,008 combat deaths and 30,093 wounded. Still, LBJ showed no sign of relenting and, two days after Christmas, authorized a large-scale napalm bombing along the Mekong Delta. It was a major contrast with the bombing pause he had authorized over the previous Christmas. In her last diary entry of the year, Lady Bird recorded her disappointment that “the press seemed apathetic—dully interested if at all” in interviewing the thirteen young people she had invited to the Ranch to celebrate their environmental activism.28

President Johnson declared 1967 as the “Year of Youth for Natural Beauty and Conservation.” The proclamation sounded dreadfully tin-eared and hypocritical coming from a commander in chief sending American youth to risk their lives in Indochina. But despite the president’s declining credibility with the American public, Mrs. Johnson still possessed the political standing to lead “the fight for conservation and beauty,” and she anticipated, The New York Times reported, a “collision with powerful and entrenched forces” in Washington, D.C., and beyond.29

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.