Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Author:Doris Kearns Goodwin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781497683853
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9 / VIETNAM

“LBJ was great in domestic affairs,” elder statesman Averell Harriman once observed. “Harry Truman had programs, but none got through. Kennedy had no technique. FDR talked simply during the crisis, but didn’t act enough later. Johnson went back past the New Frontier all the way to the New Deal. He loved FDR, and it was fantastic what he did. If it hadn’t been for … Vietnam he’d have been the greatest President ever. Even so he’ll still be remembered as great.”1

“If it hadn’t been for Vietnam”—how many times this phrase has been spoken in conversations assessing Johnson’s place in history. For it is impossible to disconnect Johnson from that war, and undeniable that the fighting abroad halted progress toward the Great Society. Indeed, from the beginning, Johnson later claimed, he himself foresaw and weighed the devastating consequences of war on domestic reform, but in the end, felt he had no choice but to escalate the war.

“I knew from the start,” Johnson told me in 1970, describing the early weeks of 1965, “that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.

“Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers: the Spanish-American War drowned the populist spirit; World War I ended Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom; World War II brought the New Deal to a close. Once the war began, then all those conservatives in the Congress would use it as a weapon against the Great Society. You see, they’d never wanted to help the poor or the Negroes in the first place. But they were having a hard time figuring out how to make their opposition sound noble in a time of great prosperity. But the war. Oh, they’d use it to say they were against my programs, not because they were against the poor—why, they were as generous and as charitable as the best of Americans—but because the war had to come first. First, we had to beat those Godless Communists and then we could worry about the homeless Americans. And the generals. Oh, they’d love the war, too. It’s hard to be a military hero without a war. Heroes need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic.

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