peace with honor

"This country's ultimate strength lies in the unity of our people.  There is division in the American house now.  There is divisiveness among us all tonight.  And holding the trust that is mine, as President of all the people, I cannot disregard the peril to the progress of the American people and the hope and prospect of peace for all people. . . . With America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home. . . I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.
. . . Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
----------------------------
President Lyndon Baines Johnson said that to Americans in a speech in 1968.  He had come to the presidency November 22, 1963, and then won election in 1964.  He was eligible to run for re-election in 1968 (by that time, presidents had been limited to two four-year terms, [after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four elections to the office kind of bugged some people], and -- really, if Johnson had been re-elected in 1968, and served to 1972, he would have been president for nine years, which would put him one year "long" of the 2 four-year term limit, but I guess the rules with the term-limit must have allowed for that....) but decided to step back -- hard to do for a man who was so very competitive, but then health concerns helped to weigh in on that decision, as well.

In Robert Dallek's second volume of his LBJ biography, Flawed Giant, covering 1961 to Johnson's death in 1973, there's a lot of coverage of the Vietnam War -- oh my gosh, it'd be difficult to come up with anything more tedious.  And I don't mean that the writing isn't good -- it's just -- OMG Vietnam War era was such a tension-building horror, in some ways.  And to read this, and try to have more understanding -- it's like, what stands out is kind of a lack of clarity and leadership on the part of President Johnson (with all due respect) and on the part of his advisors.


The phrase "wishful thinking" keeps coming up.
Wishful thinking.
And people going to Vietnam, looking over the situation, and then coming back and telling Johnson that the war was going well, and then telling their intimate friends and family members that it was NOT going well.
They would tell him what they thought he wanted to hear.
(That's hard to believe, but sounds like that was what was going on....)

Wishful thinking.
Indecision.
and
A failure to communicate successfully with the public about the war, to keep their support.

A "limited war" simply did not have the
clear goal and end-point,
nor the tangible evils
that had been present in, for example, World War II -- so that people really understood what was being fought for....

Saigon, Hanoi, ground-war in the South, bombing in the North -- but not too much bombing, so as not to draw the USSR or China into it, causing potential nuclear holocaust and then we're all gone....
(Not "too much" bombing...
Bombing-Lite. 
Low-fat, gluten-free bombing....)

Containing the spread of communism was a lllllooooonnnngggg tedious job, with some successes along the way, and some flub-ups, and deciding to send Americans into harm's way in the distant jungles was an aspect which just never became popular.

And the polls -- oh my God, this book is like, Johnson had a poll which said 56% of Americans supported this, but 44% were against that, and ... yada-yada...Can you run a war based on weekly polls of house-wives and ministers and Coca-cola bottlers and truck drivers...?  I mean, everybody is like, Sure, we Support Our Men Overseas.  (Who doesn't, right?)
But then these Washington  people would take that poll and say, OK, the people support us, so send in more men...And then they get killed or maimed, and -- the objective (on which people remained unclear, and Johnson could not effectively explain) got No Closer.
It just -- what a nightmare. 

---------------- When I was in, maybe, third grade, we had Washington's Birthday as a Day Off from School -- or maybe it was Lincoln's Birthday, or both.  (I don't think they had declared "President's Day" yet...I think we got them both "off" from school...) -- anyway, I asked my dad, If we get Lincoln's birthday off from school, how come we don't get President Johnson's birthday off from school, too?  Since he's the president now...?

And my dad said, "Oh...we're not so sure we're very happy that we elected him."

And that comment stayed with me in my awareness, because I knew my mom & dad voted for Johnson, in 1964, and so I assumed we "liked him" enough to take his birthday off....But -- seemed all was not happy, and I knew there was a "Vietnam War" and that it would be nice to have it over-with, so that there could be Peace.  But that day I don't think I put Pres. Johnson together with the war, in my mind -- I only absorbed a feeling of All Might Not Be Well and a blank feeling of I Didn't Know And Could Not Impact Or Even Understand Events Or Situations.

That would have been in the same year, or same two-year span when Dallek recounts a story of military advisors meeting with LBJ and when the president left the room, the one guy said to the other three, "I look at you sitting over there & you're like a bunch of buzzards sitting on the fence, sending the young men off to war -- you ought to be ashamed of yourselves."

Reading this book, the author will say, "in the fall of 1965,"  "in the spring of 1967", etc. -- and I wanted to figure out, several times, 'what grade was I in?" -- I wanted to place the events and trends, in time, in my life.

Two of my cousins served in the military during the Vietnam war, but they were in the Philippines, I think.  They came home.

My 7th grade English teacher had a son who was killed in Vietnam.

In 5th grade and 6th grade -- maybe in 4th, too -- we children started drawing "peace signs" on the home-made jackets we created for our school books.

In those years, some men started wearing their hair longer -- and some adults would talk, and discuss, and complain so much, I thought, about the "long hair" or -- calling the actual people "the long-hairs," or "the long-haired hippies."  (If I had known the word "obsession," I would have thought to myself, "What is these people's obsession with hair?  Other people's hair?  Leave 'em alone!"  I remember having feelings and thoughts like that, but not having enough Words to "stick on" them....express them....)

(And when Lyndon Johnson died in 1973, I remember a photograph of him in either TIME or Newsweek that showed he had let his hair grow...!  It was receding in the front, but long in the back.  Like a "hippie."  I remember I thought that was interesting.)

And speakin' of hair -- the "hair"-trigger tempers, on the subject of the war:  while reading Robert Dallek's book, his descriptions of Pres. Johnson having arguments with people who'd been his friends in the Senate, like Senator Fulbright for example, and having it get very heated and personal -- the war made the president very bummed-out and uncomfortable, and hearing anyone talk against the war made him feel like he was being attacked.  And I can remember the impressions I had, when in grade school and junior high -- that the "Vietnam War" was everywhere around you, and yet people couldn't talk about it, sometimes, because someone would get mad or have their feelings hurt.

It would be like -- the person who was anti-war knew right exactly where the "pro" person was coming from, and vice-versa, so neither person needed to talk, they both knew what the other would say, and even without talking or arguing, both could be mad anyway....

At the end of my fifth-grade year in Rootstown, Ohio, there was a student protest against the war, at Kent State University, where my mother took some classes.  The National Guard came, and four students were killed, and others wounded.  That was a very bad day.  I wrote a poem about it, for school.  The poem was also very bad.  My teacher said that it was possible that communists had come in and started the protest.  I took that theory home and was told by my parents that there weren't any communists in Kent, or anywhere in northeastern Ohio, and that some people just got in the habit of, whenever they don't like something, they say communists are "behind it."

(I pictured Russian guys hiding behind things....

Man -- LOL! -- I am scr---d up!  The 60s totally "wrecked" me -- I had "hallucinations" and "flash-backs" without any drugs...lol...)

The main thing I thought, reading the Dallek LBJ bio, is that
Johnson
was
better at being Senate Majority Leader
than he was at being
President.

And I don't say that as a "put-down." 
Being the Chief Executive is a whole different job than being
"chief horse-trader and lobbyist" in the U.S. Senate.

Because LBJ was legendary in his Senate "job" people, I think, assumed (probably including himself) that he would be very good at being president.  But when you read this, it's like -- the misery of the man in that position (of pres.) is palpable -- it stares at you from the page.

Congress is near the White House, but being good at one job does not necessarily lead to being good at the other.

(JFK was the opposite way around -- he was unexceptional and frequently absent, in his House and Senate service, but did well as president....)

[And in my own experience -- most lobbyists I knew who had been state legislators before, did not like lobbying.  I knew one lobbyist who had been a state senator, and hated that. 

(They asked him in committee, "what do you think about this?"

  -- "I didn't hear what they said, I was asleep"....) 

Don't know if there was anyone who loved doing both jobs....]

Herding those senators like a bunch-a cattle down on his Texas ranch, massaging the votes, making the behind-the-scenes deals necessary to work the first meaningful civil rights legislation through the complex, fearful, and stubborn "body" known as the U.S. Senate -- that was Lyndon Johnson's genius. 

The Senate was his "zone."

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