Thomas wrote:Setanta wrote: Johnson's eventually response to the Vietnam morass is a polar opposite to the Shrub's response to the Iraq morass, as well.
Can you elaborate on this? I don't know enough about Vietnam war politics to understand what you're getting at here.
The evidence is very strong that Johnson was actually acting in good faith with the push for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Two American destroyers,
C. Turner Joy and
Maddox were "running chase" for cruisers on Yankee Station. Yankee Station was the name the Navy used for the Gulf of Tonkin, and "running chase" means patrolling by destroyers to protect capital ships. A CIA program of covert attacks on the North Vietnamese coast had been transferred to the Defense Department in 1964, and South Vietnamese patrol boats were landing commando teams on the North Vietnamese coast. One of the two destroyers--and i don't recall which one--had been operating in North Vietnamese territorial waters to cover landings made by ARVN (Army of Viet Nam) commandos in August, 1964, when the North Vietnamese fired on the destroyer. There was minimal damage and no casualties. On the succeeding day, a duty officer sent a report to the Navy Department that both destroyers had been fired on in international waters. It now appears that the duty officer had been confused, and had transmitted the previous day's report, but had transmitted the position of the two destroyers on the following day, when the report was sent. It appeared from the false (but not necessarily intentionally false) report that the destroyers had been fired on in international waters. I actually became aware of this in 1965, when i was still in high school, because my brother was a fire control technician on one of the cruisers for which
C Turner Joy and
Maddox were running chase. I did not really understand the significance at the time, and neither would most of Americans have understood.
It now appears that McNamara did not tell Johnson that American naval forces had been operating in North Vietnamese waters at the time of the first incident. More crucially, it also appears that he had asked for confirmation of the second report, and knew when he spoke to Johnson that the North Vietnamese
had not fired on U.S. naval forces on the second day, but withheld that information. I cannot confirm any of this immediately, but i think web searches might give you a good deal of information. Search for "Gulf of Tonkin incident."
I believe that there is a high probability that Johnson was acting in good faith in asking Congress for expanded war-making authority. As it was a Democratic Congress, there was little probability that he would be denied. What happened to U.S. forces in Viet Nam in the period 1964-68, and what happened to American international prestige, i ought not need to explain. By 1968, Johnson was a morally exhausted man. He had managed to pass Kennedy's social legislation--social security disability and survivors legislation, and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights act--because he was one of the nation's greatest politicians, and he knew the Senate and southern Democrats in particular so well that he knew where all the bodies were buried, and he strong-armed the legislation through the Congress. But the Vietnam War broke his spirit. He declined to run in 1968. I actually think he would have pasted Nixon--he was a sitting President with all the advantages of incumbency, and the nation was not yet lined up against the war. Student protest incidents, especially at Columbia University (
The Strawberry Statement is an interesting bit of film which will give you the sense of the times, while failing completely to give a coherent picture of what happened at Columbia University) and San Francisco State College (now SF State University) in which students occupied university administrative offices, had actually alienated much of the population toward the anti-war movement. The Democrats postponed the convention in 1968 in order to celebrate Johnson's birthday during the convention (August 27th was Johnson's birthday, and made the convention "very late"). Eugene McCarthy opposed him in the New Hampshire primaries, but fruitlessly. When Johnson stated that he would not run, his Veep, Hubert Humphrey ran (i met the man and spoke briefly to him during the 1968 campaign, while i was a university student--he always talked too much). Humphrey was initially behind Nixon, but he speedily improved his position throughout the campaign, and many observers felt that if the convention had been held in June or July, Humphrey had a good chance to defeat Nixon.
I do not know if Johnson ever learned that he had been duped by McNamara (am i spelling that name correctly?), but certainly, he was seriously depressed by the course of the war by 1968. I think that he was very concerned about his place in history, and felt that he had done good work with Social Security, Civil Rights and Voting Rights (i agree) and his War on Poverty (well . . . ). I also think that he was haunted by the war, and felt that it would overshadow all the yeoman's work he had done on social issues.
I think the war broke him, and how much worse would it have been if he had learned by 1968 that he had been cozened about the Gulf of Tonkin incident?
