The Times had sacralized a Nixon con job. The fuse had been lit. And now, the fireworks began.
Why there are book groups: It’s getting harder and harder for me to keep reading, because for all his multitudinous flaws, I’ve always had a soft spot for Lyndon Baines Johnson. We won’t see a dispassionate LBJ biography until after the men who still remember their draft lottery numbers are no longer in charge of the universities and the publishing houses, but if Harry Truman can be rehabilitated, I can still hope to live long enough to see the 20th century’s most underrated President re-evaluated as he deserves…
“Fooling the people has become the name-of-the-game for a good many Republicans in Congress,” Johnson said, craning out his neck. “They have no constructive programs to fight inflation. They have no program to ease racial tensions. They don’t know what to do about crime in the streets, or how to end the war in Vietnam. But they do know that if they can scare people, they may win a few votes!”
Swap out the relevant clauses for “crime on Wall Street”” and “end the war in Afghanistan“, and the only difference is that today’s Republicans have the marketing research to know exactly how win votes by scaring people. Speaking of depressing — 45 years and counting, and the Low Information Voters among us are still stampeding staunchly into the slaughterhouse through whichever chute the Republican flaggers spook them.
What do you think?
Scott P.
I’d just like to reiterate that I find left-wing contempt for the electorate just as repugnant as right-wing contempt. Voters are people, with real-world concerns, who take out time from their lives to go to the polls and exercise their Consitutional right to vote for their representatives. You are perfectly free to disagree with their choices, but they are not sheep, and I don’t care to see them dehumanized by comparing them to such.
licensed to kill time
Heh, Anne Laurie I had bookmarked that exact same passage. The more things change….
Phoebe
I think if it weren’t for this book club I would have put the thing down it’s so depressing around now. Which is wrong of me, I know, I’m just weak. Maybe if there were happy pet rescue stories in between each chapter…
I’ve never read the three books about Johnson by Robert Caro that my mom loves [she hates Johnson]. Have you read them, Anne Laurie, and if so, do you think they’re unfair?
morzer
@Scott P.:
Linda Featheringill
Hi, Guys.
This week’s reading reminded me of the old joke about how you can tell if a politician is lying [his/her mouth is moving].
On LBJ: If he could have just turned loose of Vietnam, just let it go, he probably would have been remembered as one of the greater presidents of all time. History would have forgiven him of occasionally being uncouth.
Jack
Hmmm… I’m not reading Nixonland, so perhaps I shouldn’t comment here, but there’s a great multi-volume biography of LBJ that I think is relatively even-handed, although I haven’t read the last couple of volumes yet.
LBJ did manage to get the landmark Civil Rights Act passed, and I find that amazing, considering he was from Texas, which isn’t exactly the home of progressive and liberal thought. I’ve driven past his ranch several times traveling from Austin to the “Texas Wine Country” and lived in Austin when his wife died and they renamed “Town Lake” to “Lady Bird Johnson Lake” because she didn’t want that kind of recognition so they waited until she died to do it (it’s complicated…).
I think, eventually, LBJ will be regarded much higher as a President than he is now.
Hunter Gathers
Back then, voters punished the Democrats for giving blacks full and equal rights. Now, voters are punishing the middle class and the poor for voting for a black POTUS. Jack shit has changed in 40+ years. The Blackberries and big screen LCD TV’s are nice, though.
Anne Laurie
@Phoebe:
No, ‘fraid not, apart from excerpts in magazines. All the interviews w/Caro seemed to emphasize that he loathed LBJ and intended his books as hatchet jobs — scholarly hatchet jobs, of course. Sometimes I’ve thought I should at least try, but they’re not, shall we say, compelling reads even if one agrees with Caro’s bias.
Linda Featheringill
I do think there would have been a backlash against some of the stuff that the Dems got passed under Johnson, regardless of how the Republicans behaved.
In fact, I don’t think that you can understand the US until you accept that Backlash Happens.
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
I also noted your block quoted passage as an ideal illustration of how much is exactly the same, just a different era. Sigh. It is disheartening, but necessary to read.
Tappen
Did Nixon really need that personal recognition by LBJ to elevate him? It seems like his team had already managed to get him seen as leader of the party, if the Times was republishing his letters on the front page without comment. Were there many other potential leaders for ’68? Ones with real Conservative support, as opposed to the media-annointed Republican Liberals like Romney and Percy. Nixon also seems to be very in control, at all times. Can you imagine any of the current conservative leaders holding back on such a exploitable issue as the white backlash just to build up their prestige?
Linda Featheringill
@Hunter Gathers:
Yup. That is part of it anyway. Can’t convince me otherwise.
Omnes Omnibus
Johnson was as good a president domestically as we have ever had. Unfortunately, he had Viet Nam. I think he handled the war as poorly as it could have been handled, but I also think there was virtually no way he could have made it work. Nixon just pisses me off in these two chapters. What an amoral, vicious bastard he was.
@Scott P.: How would you characterize low information votes who vote their fears?
Phyllis
@Phoebe: My sentiments exactly. I read this through the first time during campaign summer 2008. I had to put it down for about a month at one point because I could no longer resist the urge to scratch out Nixon & scribble in McCain in a lot of places.
So little has changed; the horserace reporting, the village taking care of its own (Safire using his connections with Salisbury) and the ‘fight’em over there so we don’t have to fight’em here’ rhetoric.
Linda Featheringill
Anne:
As I was raised on a little barely-making-it ranch, I really appreciate your imagery.
frosty
@Phoebe: I’m with you. This is a book I’ve meant to read for years, but it’s very difficult to open it up. The tactics haven’t changed, the players haven’t changed, the anger hasn’t changed since Dick Nixon stirred the pot in the 60s.
Tappen
@Omnes Omnibus: What struck me was how little choices Johnson seemed to have. Even such a limited plan for withdrawal that he came up with was pounced on by Nixon as caving to the enemy. And exactly, Nixon has no plan, he doesn’t care at all what happens in Vietnam, so long as he can benefit from it.
morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
Human, All Too Human perhaps?
Phoebe
@Anne Laurie:
Does Rick Perlstein loathe Nixon? I think he said somewhere that he tried to be even-handed, but I think that just translates as hatred/contempt for Nixon’s pompous/naive opposition. If Caro loathes LBJ after studying him more than I’ll ever study anything, then it might be a pretty informed loathing. Or it might be three books worth of confirmation bias. But the loathing in itself wouldn’t — for me — disqualify his credibility.
frosty
Anne: What do I think? Here’s one thing. I should be used to this and I’m as cynical as they come, but I am astounded at the level of lying to win an election!! Much worse than I remembered (p138, hardback):
This is in 1965, just after the first combat troops arrived in Vietnam:
And tens of thousands of draftees, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, would have to be killed and maimed. In a war that Nixon knew could not be won.
astrodem
I’m not currently reading Nixonland, but I have read it (and Perlstein’s other book) before. I’m always struck by how so much of what happened in the 1960’s and 1970’s really set the template for modern American political culture. I agree with your comment that we won’t get a fair treatment of Johnson until after the people who remember him have mostly died off.
Napoleon
Phoebe, I have read the first two Caro LBJ books and am 1/3 through the 3rd and I think they are fair and fine. The fact is that LBJ was a liar and a scoundrel. You can not get around it. I recall sometime either in the Ford or Carter years there was a poll of the DC press corp (I know, I know) who said LBJ was more dishonest then Nixon. Think about that.
Linda Featheringill
@Phoebe:
We all have biases and these are influential no matter what we try to do. I think it’s important to admit openly what your biases are and then go ahead and say your piece.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tappen: He had very few choices and some of those that he did have (e.g., declaring victory, leaving, and letting those who disagree howl) were impossible for him with his insecurities and concerns about his legitimacy. Like I said, I don’t think he handled it well, but I don’t know if it was possible for him to have handled it well.
Linda Featheringill
If Johnson had possessed a crystal ball, he might have found an option for getting out of Vietnam. The way we actually got out of there had no dignity and no honor.
I do have a question though: I have wondered through the years if waging war is addictive. Waddya think?
Mark S.
@frosty:
That’s probably what surprised me the most from both of RP’s books: the elites knew Vietnam was unwinnable so early on.
Elia
I’ve gotta say, I think the CW on Johnson is more-or-less spot-on.
Domestically, a remarkable record; no doubt. You can’t discount the enormous political capital that JFK’s murder provided him, but at the same time you have to give him all the credit for using that capital to great effect. That said, his shenanigans with the economy near the end of his term, before he knew the game was up, were in part responsible for the ensuing malaise which helped Nixon so greatly.
Of course, he was playing those games to cover up the enormous cost of that other definitive Johnson “achievement” — Vietnam. The stunning, gobsmacking lack of integrity, humanity, or morality that it took for him to do the various things he did to prolong and escalate that conflict can’t and shouldn’t be minimized or waved over. Besides being so horrifying from a moral standpoint, his Vietnam policies were also myopic and based upon unexamined assumptions about American politics; what I mean to say is that it was stupid, politically, too.
So I’ve got to respectfully disagree with the idea that Johnson somehow is deserving of a more thorough rehabilitation. Of course, he was better than Nixon; but if reading Nixonland did anything for me, it confirmed my belief in DougJ’s maxim: we are ruled by sociopaths.
morzer
@Napoleon:
Sometimes a liar, and sometimes a scoundrel. Like all of us, including you, Monsieur Bonaparte. As for the press corps, I wouldn’t give them the p*ss off my johnson.
Mary G
My mom graduated from Austin high school in 1940. The commencement speech was given by the new congressman from the district, Lyndon Batines Johnson. when I found the newspaper about it, I asked her what she thought of the speech. She said she didn’t remember anything, but Johnson was known as a lying wheeler dealer and that after he signed the Civil Rights Act, his name was mud in the neighborhood. I had an uncle who was a truck driver, who also chewed tobacco. We learned not to mention LBJ when he was around because we didn’t want to get sprayed when he started ranting and raving.
Anne Laurie
@Napoleon:
Part of my bias in favor of LBJ is that the Very Serious Media absolutely hated the man. Of course the ‘elitists’ considered him a jumped-up hillbilly trailing his shit-kickers across the sacred lawns of Camelot; the (nominal) leftist/progressives distrusted his not-necessarily-impeccable deal-making and “warmonging”; and the Republican fReichtards/Talibangelicals/Robber Barons had every reason to fear & despise him. Hell, can you imagine another president — even the current “IslamoKenyan usuper” — where the Serious Conventional Media would applaud an explicitly Socialist chapbook like MacBird, just because it confirmed their prejudices?
Comrade Scrutinizer
Caro’s biography is masterful. He doesn’t hesitate to point out LBJ’s overwhelming ambition and his willingness to do whatever it took to achieve his ambition, but at the same time, he applauds LBJs essential humanity, and his very real desire to lift up the poverty stricken. Caro describes two threads, one light, one dark, which ran through LBJs life. LBJ worshipers despise Caro, but I think that his treatment of Johnson is even-handed, even though he pulls no punches.
Zuzu's Petals
@Phoebe:
I listened to them on tape, during long drives. Fascinatin’ stuff, and I doubt I would have attempted it in the dense written version.
Svensker
@Linda Featheringill:
Well, yeah, a tragic figure. But somehow “sorry about all the dead people” isn’t really a great excuse. Yes he did good stuff, for which he should get credit. But people died because of his actions and lies. A lot of people. And, Annie Laurie, saying we have to wait until we folks who KNEW some of the dead people die off ourselves before we get an honest assessment of LBJ? Well, fuck you very much. Sorry if all the rotting body parts get in the way of making the complex real man a simple hero.
Linda Featheringill
@Mark S.:
I wonder how many know that a war in Afghanistan can’t be won.
JGabriel
Anne Laurie:
I always think of LBJ as the one president who legitimately belongs in the lists of both 10 best (domestic) AND 10 worst (VietNam) presidents. ‘E was a man of extremes, our Lyndon was.
.
MikeJ
@Anne Laurie: LBJ came in and trashed the place, and it wasn’t his place. Or so the village would have you believe.
Napoleon
Comrade Scrutinizer, perfectly put.
Those books are excellent. LBJ is the only Pres. in my lifetime that did something I think is truly heroic, the Voting Rights Act. At the same time he was a complete lying sociopath, and Caro is hardly the first one to point it out. The guy would lie about something just to lie and for no other apparent reason. And lets not forget that he upped our involvement in Vietnam on false pretenses.
frosty
@Mark S.: The “elites.” They knew it was unwinnable, and yet they still sent us in there.
They threw my generation into a meat grinder, and did it with the draft in such a way that they divided us for the rest of our lives into two groups: the ones that could find a way to slip out of the net and the ones that couldn’t. That’s the heart of the culture war right there.
What they did to the guys who joined up to do their patriotic duty for their country was worse. They made their honor and sacrifice a complete mockery and a sham.
ETA: wordsmithing
morzer
@Svensker:
Well, one thing the biographers seem to agree on about LBJ is that he agonized over Vietnam night and day, wanted desperately to find a way out, and simply couldn’t. This was the age of domino theory, remember?
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s a point worth repeating:
LBJ handled Viet Nam badly, but really there was no option to handle it otherwise.
And LBJ was a nasty SOB, but that doesn’t negate that he was a good domestic president – in part because he used his abilities as a nasty SOB to accomplish some very good things.
gnomedad
I kept having to remind myself I was reading about 1966 and not 2011. Page 166 (said of Edward Brooke): “It’s nothing personal, but if he got in, there would be no holding them down; we’d have a Negro president.”
See? SEE?
Anne Laurie
@Svensker:
I take your point. Of course, then we have an earlier version of the “President Palin” argument: Badly as Johnson handled Vietnam, and for all the people who died needlessly as a result, would there have been fewer “rotting body parts” if Goldwater had won in 1964?
Tappen
@gnomedad: It’s nothing personal, I just don’t like who he is as a person.
Phoebe
@Omnes Omnibus:
Nixon had insecurities too. And RP says both of them had the same socioeconomic source [with Kennedy nemeses]. There’s always a reason for people to be cowardly sacks of shit who get other people killed for nothing, and I’m always interested in what that reason is, and I’m always happy if they do something decent in their lives, and prepared to give them credit for it, but I don’t see history smiling on Johnson’s presidency once the generation that he sent to Vietnam [KNOWING it couldn’t be won] is dead. Was/is that generation irrational because they were so affected, or does it have a point? It’s really murder, unless I’m missing something, and I don’t see how history is going to gloss over it. Or why it should. Am I missing something?
Linda Featheringill
@morzer:
Sorry. Don’t think that agonizing over your sins makes them all right.
Besides, how much did he gain by dancing with the War day after day? Politically? Very damn little and probably none at all. He was a smart cookie. He should have been able to see that.
frosty
@morzer: It may have been the age of the Domino Theory, but anyone who knew any of the history of Southeast Asia knew that China and Vietnam were enemies for centuries and that there weren’t any dominoes. And there were plenty who knew that.
The ones making the decisions didn’t care, they just wanted to avoid being tarred politically with “Who Lost Vietnam”.
Rational behavior, based on observed facts vs. Stopping The Red Menace. Gee, which one do you think is gonna win out in the USA?
Linda Featheringill
@Anne Laurie:
I don’t know if Goldwater would have used nuclear force. But he might have. And he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to close up shop in Vietnam and bring the boys home.
licensed to kill time
@gnomedad: That sentence leapt out at me, too. As if a “Negro President” would be the end of civilization as they knew it. Sadly, that seems to hold true for far too many people today whether they admit it (even to themselves) or not.
Anne Laurie
@JGabriel:
I fully expect a Media Meme where President Obama is likened to the anti-LBJ — a too-good-for-backroom-dealmaking elitist who’s got all the right global moves and all the wrong domestic ones. Especially if he actually manages to ‘draw down’ a significant percentage of US troops in Afghanistan without too much subsequent blowback…
Svensker
@morzer:
I know he agonized. You could see it in his tragic face. But fuck the domino theory and fuck the war mongers. They knew there was no way to win but it wasn’t politically kosher to say so out loud. LBJ let people die, get maimed, have their lives wrecked, because he didn’t want to upset the status quo. My friend was killed on the last day of the war. The last fucking day. Years after LBJ retired from office. Had LBJ had the courage to do the right thing, my friend’s kid might have had the chance to have met his father, oh, at least once.
Linda Featheringill
I was upset by the memory of many people using Vietnam, with all of its death and damnation, just any old way to gain political advantage.
Sigh.
Maybe the anarchists are right.
Samnell
I have been struggling in reading these chapters and the ones before with my own pure loathing of the exact kind of person Nixon is and the kind of voter he’s appealing to. It’s all so profoundly abhorrent that I keep wanting to put the book down and never return. If I were a religious man I would say that the protagonist of Nixonland was pure evil somehow distilled into a human form.
I’ve read about the Nazi party. I’ve read about the Holocaust. I’ve read about more atrocities than I really care to count. Yet I’ve never had this profoundly negative a reaction to them. This is absurd, since while both are almost infinitely far beyond the pale genocide certainly beats shamelessly using white supremacy to win elections.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what made Nixon and his supporters worse to me this past week, and I think I’ve figured it out. For practical purposes nobody defends Hitler today. No one will come out, aside for some nutcases when you open the Hebrew Bible, and say they’re in favor of genocide. It’s not a going concern. This brand of evil still is.
Svensker
@Anne Laurie:
And I take your point. But the fact that the voters had a choice between the lesser of two weevils doesn’t excuse the choices the weevil makes.
Linda Featheringill
@Svensker:
I am sorry for your loss. And for the boy who lost his dad.
And it still hurts, doesn’t it.
Suzan
I started this book twice but never finished it. But decided to try again because of this “club”. I finished it just now (Audio book). Keep reading, it is fantastic.
As to the Caro books, I’ve only read Master of the Senate and it is well worth the read. Maybe next “month’s” choice? I’d actually love to read it again and I love LBJ (but its a kinky kind of love).
While it is depressing to see what Nixon did to politics and discourse in this country, it is oddly reassuring that it is no different today and we survived.
As one of the protesters in the 60s, its odd to realize how hated and feared we were. I was insulated from that hatred I suppose and we were so goofy. A bunch of stoned hippies trying to levitate the Pentagon was scary?
Anyway, I loved the book and am delighted this book club got me to finish it. I’ve also got three others reading it. Well done Anne and B-J! Thanks.
Omnes Omnibus
@Phoebe:Did I say that history would gloss over the war? No, I did not. Did I imply that history would gloss over the war? No, I did not. Johnson had a bad hand to play and he played it poorly. People died, lots of people who would otherwise have lived productive lives. The time to have handled Vietnam was around the time of Dien Bien Phu or earlier. We just have recognized Ho as a left leaning but democratic leader and provided aid and support. The thing is, we did not play that way in the 50s, so Johnson was well and truly fucked by Vietnam. He could have been fucked without killing a bunch of other people, he could have been fuck by nuking the North, or could have been fucked by doing what he did. He was fucked though.
marshstars
@frosty
The “elites.” They knew it was unwinnable, and yet they still sent us in there.
They threw my generation into a meat grinder, and did it with the draft in such a way that they divided us for the rest of our lives into two groups: the ones that could find a way to slip out of the net and the ones that couldn’t. That’s the heart of the culture war right there.
What they did to the guys who joined up to do their patriotic duty for their country was worse. They made their honor and sacrifice a complete mockery and a sham.
Your words are powerful. Yes, all war is a meatgrinder. But I am thinking, LBJ, Nixon, all the way down the line to NOW. How is our generation’s war (VN) different from the wars now? They are still culture wars. Now the poor and disenfranchised go. No jobs, no way out or up. And their deaths are about honor and patriotic duty. Their maiming? Not so much — not a whole lotta money going towards those vet benefits anymore. Fight for every cent in medical care and service connected disability. Still a mockery. Still a sham.
morzer
@Linda Featheringill:
Talking about sins in the context of political reality isn’t much help to understanding how things happened. I didn’t say that Johnson’s mistakes were justified, but I do say that he didn’t feel any happiness about Vietnam, that it wasn’t easy for him to do what he did, and there’s no evidence that he wanted Vietnam to happen. These things ought to be remembered, rather some caricature of Johnson as a deranged war-monger. Liberals blame Johnson largely because they see him as the man who lost Vietnam – and who lost America for liberalism. In reality, yes, Vietnam was his choice and it was the wrong choice, but we shouldn’t make him worse than he was, or subscribe to the fictions that his enemies and disappointed liberals constructed during and after the events of his presidency.
Villago Delenda Est
The Republican party, from Nixon to the present, is about one thing, and one thing only:
Getting power, and exercising it for the sake of power itself.
The people Orwell warned us about.
Svensker
@Linda Featheringill:
Yup, it does.
Linda Featheringill
@Suzan:
I should have invited you to join my world. The hatred for the anti-war people was definitely in my face.
However . . . I have outlived most if not all of those assholes. :-)
frosty
@Anne Laurie:
Would we have gone into Vietnam at all if Nixon had won in 1960? I put a lot of the blame for the war on Kennedy’s tough-guy persona, along with the need to avoid the next McCarthyite attack. Nixon may have been able to see the geopolitics more clearly, and he was obviously protected from attacks from the right.
Discuss.
Mark S.
@frosty:
You know, people make arguments sometimes that if we had a draft we wouldn’t get into so many bullshit wars. I’m not so sure about that, and it’s a lot easier to argue when you’ve gotten old enough to not get drafted.
Linda Featheringill
@morzer:
I’ve always thought that the Civil Rights legislation lost the country for liberalism. But he pushed it anyway, bless his heart. And yeah, I’m proud of him for that.
morzer
@Svensker:
But LBJ didn’t know that there was no way to win. The generals kept demanding troops, kept making promises, and kept telling him what would happen without more soldiers. Come to that, plenty of the political analysts and columnists of the day were just waiting for a chance to accuse him of losing Vietnam the way that China had been lost. Look, I am sorry your friend’s family lost someone in the war, but that doesn’t mean I can agree with demonizing LBJ the way too many people are trying to do on here. I don’t think he was a saint, I don’t think Vietnam was a good war or the right strategic choice by any means – but there were pressures on him that we simply cannot understand. We’ve never been in that position, with a good part of the American people waiting to attack you as soft on Communism/the person who lost Vietnam etc etc.
kyle
@Anne Laurie:
The first Caro volume on LBJ is one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. The second is worthwhile. Never read the third, mainly because I’m not much of a reader.
Caro admires Johnson for his civil rights legislation, but he does consider the guy a bully and conniver. Makes a good case for it too, though Sidney Bluemthal did a takedown of the second volume’s accuracy in the New Republic 20 years ago.
All I can say is, give the first volume a sustained chance, like read 100 pages no matter what and then see if it’s grabbed you. Some people think Caro goes overboard with the details, but they add up. You get a picture of life and events as they were lived. Once the effect clicks in, it’s hypnotic.
Mark S.
@frosty:
Interesting question. I do think Nixon would have been a better president if he had been elected in 1960 than in 1968. He would have been less of a seething mass of resentments.
Linda Featheringill
To Rick Perlstein:
We missed you today. Maybe you can join us next time.
Omnes Omnibus
@frosty: We were already in VN in 1960. Ike and Dick put troops in. South VN was a client state. “Who lost China?” was too recent in the minds of the leadership of both parties to let South VN go under. Given that, escalation was inevitable. No president wanted to be the first one to “lose” a war. Thus, the war probably still happens.
morzer
@Linda Featheringill:
I think it lost us the South, and part at least of the white vote in the North. But I do think a lot of people want to see Johnson as the man who lost America for liberalism by going into Vietnam, because it makes it a lot easier, rather than admitting that there was more racism in our white fathers and grandfathers (and their wives and sisters etc) than we care to face.
fashionOfChrist
@Jack:
When you said you think LBJ will be regarded higher than he is now (I took liberties – sorry)
I can get behind that because
a) I generally agree with the thrust of what you said
b) We seem to be getting a pretty bad crop of leaders since 60’s (with a notable few exceptions).. if the trend continues, in a couple of decades I fear we’ll regard #43 as an actual statesmen. (Look at what #43 did for #41’s legacy – hell I even missed #41 after #43)
frosty
@Mark S.: I can’t answer your statement with data, but I have anecdotes. First, I think the draft fired up a lot of the anti-war movement. It petered out in the early 1970s, from a number of reasons, including the draft lottery in 1971 which took away the worries of 3/4 of the potential draftees.
Second, my mother, who was on the fence, came out against the war when I pulled a 34 in the lottery.
Third, my own increasing objection to Afghanistan, knowing my son, who joined the National Guard, is likely to get deployed.
Phoebe
@Omnes Omnibus:
No, that was Anne Laurie, in the original post, and maybe some commenters agreeing with her. That’s what that part was responding to. Actually she didn’t say exactly that, just that history will be kinder to him than his contemporaries were, once the people who were draft-age then are dead. And also that this would be more just.
You were saying Johnson had no choice, due to his insecurities and all. That’s why I started it talking about Nixon’s insecurities. That was responding to what you said. And now I respond to this:
[emphasis mine]
Yes! He was dealt a shit hand, politically. But if you’re going to be fucked [politically], then why not pick “fucked without killing a bunch of people”? And even if you’re fucked UNLESS you kill a bunch of people, you should pick the fucked-w/not-killing option. Or you will be judged harshly by history. And deserve it.
morzer
I’ll say one thing that really gets to me – people throw around these accusations that LBJ was a bully and a conniver, and yet, within a month, those same people will turn around and blame Obama for not being like LBJ and getting votes and passing legislation and getting us all magic unicorns that fart gold dust and so on and so forth. Just how do they think LBJ got the votes he needed? By being sweet and gentle and writing polite notes on fancy bits of paper with pressed flowers in them?
frosty
@Omnes Omnibus: , @Mark S.:
I tend to agree with both of you on this. Yes, less a mass of seething resentments, and yes (probably) to Vietnam. It really did look all optimistic and winnable at the beginning.
Carol
As an Af-Am, I find myself thinking of LBJ as a mixed bag: a lot of guys from the hood went to Vietnam, but thanks to him our community get help and the vote. In addition, he was friendly to Martin Luther King at least until Vietnam.
If you are descended from an Asian/African/other immigrant, you can thank LBJ too. He ended the old quota system from 1924 that favored Northern Europeans (who definitely weren’t coming by the 1960’s, and ended the exclusionary policies that kept Asians and Middle Easterners out. Immigrants have made America more interesting and more advanced than otherwise.
I’m not sure Nixon would have been better on Vietnam. I’ve always thought he was a hard-ass with no feelings, and if anything, more insecure than LBJ, who had at least some confidence from time to time. I think he would have jumped into Nam with both feet because of the need to surpass Eisenhower. Yes, he knew it wasn’t winnable military, but I doubt he would have cared all that much as long as it got him a second term.
realbtl
I think Caro had/has a deep hatred of LBJ but what comes through in the books is a kind of grudging respect.
Linda Featheringill
@Phoebe:
I have been trained to not use standards of morality when analyzing events, but I agree with you. Completely.
Sometimes people are put into spots where there is no good way out. But they should at least try to pick the least horrible way.
[Edited because my grammar, she is ailin’.]
Anne Laurie
@frosty:
I’m just a little bit younger (Nov. 1955)& probably a little more ‘coastal elitist’ than you, but I remember seriously, seriously worrying that Nixon would not hesitate to “nuke Hanoi” after 1972. That’s what I meant about the historical rehabilitation of Truman — back in the 1960s/70s, it was a lot easier for the fReichtards to throw around Dr. Strangelove scenarios, because “we” had already dropped two bombs — and under the direction of a putatively liberal Democrat, no less.
There’s sort of a CW Consensus that “nobody” wants to “risk” nuclear warfare, except possibly some deranged third-world ragheads or nepotism-enabled dictators outside the range of Sensible Discourse. But from the first political discussions I can remember in the early 1960s until post-Gorbachev, there was a real fear that the MAD (mutually assured destruction) balance would tip because the big, important, serious geopolitical powers — namely US — had already gone for that option, twice.
I have a vague memory of Kurt Vonnegut discussing this possibility somewhere: the alternate world where Nixon won in 1960 and then implemented his “sane” yet “manly” geopolitical credentials by using nuclear weapons to tidy up the situation in Vietnam. And, of course, that is the one possible way that China-slash-Russia would have been “dominoed” into World War III.
Omnes Omnibus
@Phoebe: I wasn’t saying Johnson had no choice; I was saying that given who he was he the choices he made were probably inevitable. I do not think they are the choices I would have made, but then Johnson was a US Senator for several years by the time he reached the age I am now.
History will judge him harshly for what he did in Vietnam, but Anne Laurie is correct, history will not be able to make a rational assessment of him until at least my generation (born 1964) is gone. Too many emotions and too much pain are in the way.
marshstars
@ frosty
about the draft lottery — precisely. It was Nixon’s brilliant strategy. It put a stake through the heart of the anti-war movement. Suddenly it all about The Number. If your number was high enough, your fervor against the war was diminished. It was a direct correlation.
I could feel it happen during the actual lottery process and the days that followed. It was palpable. The guys that didn’t have to worry anymore weren’t gonna be marching in DC anymore. Sad, but true. And Nixon knew it.
Davis X. Machina
@morzer: The eyeopener for me in this part of the book wash the stuff about Chicago — not just the convention, but the general milieu. One assumes it was the same in Milwaukee, the Twin Cities, Cleveland, right across the Old Northwest and the Great Lakes — what was about to become the Rust Belt….
Carol
@Linda Featheringill:It sounds easy-but remember that people were terrified beyond reason about Communism. Either Communists were going to invade, or take us over from within, or something. It took utter failure in Vietnam before we finally left that place. If Johnson had decided against military intervention beforehand, he might have lost in 1964 to someone who probably would even be more hawkish. People weren’t ready to hear otherwise, especially after all the propaganda.
Anne Laurie
@morzer:
Good point. “We” good well-educated suburbanites don’t hate Johnson because he ripped the scab off the Confederate Reconstruction, we hate him because he was a death-dealing warmonger, unlike the presidents before him who sent those American “advisors” into the Big Muddy.
frosty
@Anne Laurie: Regarding the nukes, you have a point. I wonder if the attitude about using them changed after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it looked like we really were going to use them?
Dunno if you remember fallout shelters, but I remember seeing one that a friend’s dad had built in their basement. They were all over the news, and thinking about them certainly concentrated the mind.
I still have some of my school notes from Jr High and High School. It’s astonishing how many mushroom clouds I drew while I was doodling!
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
@morzer: I think your point is a good one. It’s hard to face how much racism there was in our forebears. And I think also Nixon would have been less a mass of seething resentments in 1960 and thus a better president than he was in 1968, et seq. He was still a nasty lying SOB, though, without LBJ’s humanity, and whether Viet Nam could have been avoided is an open question.
morzer
@Davis X. Machina:
Well, here in Boston we had dear old Louise Day Hicks, so I think it’s fair to assume that the Rustbelt wasn’t precisely a model of enlightenment and harmony either.
JGabriel
@Anne Laurie:
That’s an interesting observation on Obama’s media dynamic. I like it.
.
MonkeyBoy
Law and Order
I’ve been doing some research on what order means. Like a lot of moral or evaluative notions like liberty, honor, patrotism, etc. many people use it as if it has one true meaning while in actuality such terms can be quite fuzzy and different people can have conflicting notions. For example Fischer in Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America talks about the 4 main early British colonial groups that emigrated to the US and their markedly different notions of what “liberty” meant.
I’m sure the same is for “order”. In “Law and Order” I think one strong meaning part was about position within a hierarchical authority structure where people were supposed to know their place and act according to their station. Negros wanted to rise above their condition and many whites didn’t like them getting “uppity”. The hippies were generally not considered “uppity” (except those who were seen as lecturing their betters), instead some rejected this notion of social order which in itself made them appear disorderly.
I still haven’t gotten my thoughts straight on this but I feel the “order” in “law and order” carried a lot of implicit meaning which was never really articulated at the time.
morzer
@Anne Laurie:
Well, in some ways his great crime was to spend all those lives – and lose. Victory covers an awful lot of mistakes and suffering with spurious glory, defeat, on the other hand….
policomic
I vehemently disagree with Anne Laurie’s implication that LBJ deserves a Truman-style rehabilitation. (I don’t think Truman–nuking the 2nd Japanese city, kick-starting Cold War fear-mongering, playing tough with labor–deserved it that much, either.) A fair assessment would indeed give him credit for his domestic policies, especially on Civil Rights, but his handling of Vietnam ranks among the most disastrous failures of leadership in American history. I agree with Elia: this is the CW on LBJ, and it’s pretty much right–and fair.
It’s been a while since I read Nixonland, but part of what Perlstein illuminates is how left-of-center America fractured during those years, and the LBJ dichotomy (domestic vs. foreign policy) goes a long way toward explaining how that happened. Nixon and the GOP shrewdly and cynically reaped the benefits, just as they did with the Democrats split over Civil Rights.
Which is not to say the anti-war left was wrong to opposed Johnson’s handling of Vietnam. His continuation and escalation of the war, knowing what he knew (or certainly should have known) about the Tonkin incident, the government of South Vietnam, etc., etc., was not just misguided, it was criminal.
As to whether Perlstein “hates” Johnson or Nixon–are you guys reading what he’s writing? I think one of the great strengths of the book is that there’s little in the way of either hero-worship or demonization. Perlstein is interested in their individual flaws insofar as they fit into the larger shifts that occurred: party realignment, the disillusion of liberalism, the emergence of the Silent Majority/Reagan Democrat/Tea Party/scared honky voting bloc. It’s not a heroes-and-villains kind of story–history rarely is.
By the way, I nominate Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery as a future bookclub selection. Lincoln is certainly more worthy of hero-worship than Johnson, but as Foner shows, he was both a complex human being and a politician, neither perfectly wise nor perfectly virtuous, nor even perfectly honest.
Janet in Virginia
I am having trouble continuing to read the book; it’s so darned depressing knowing what comes in the 80s, 90s, and now. Republicans can’t win without demons and they’ve become expert at making demons. “Those darned union members, wrecking our country!! And don’t get me started on those awful teachers!” (that’s an imaginary conservative, not me)
It’s hard to see how a divided society can continue to prosper once the middle class is wiped out.
I know LBJ did many great progressive things but right now I’m pretty mad about how he handled Vietnam.
I guess if the rest of you keep reading I will too.
Phoebe
@morzer:
That would be the only possible excuse for what he did in my eyes. There does seem to be disagreement on whether or not that is the case. If it is, I withdraw all my bitching.
If he legitimately feared that it would be worse for the world if we pulled out instead of escalating, then then he’s just guilty of being wrong. My suspicion is maybe he thought that at first, but that at some point he threw troops at the problem in a hail-mary attempt to win somehow, against overwhelming odds, because defeat there would have meant political defeat for him [and the glorious liberal agenda]. And that would not be excusable by me, but as I say, I don’t know the facts. They appear to be in dispute and I haven’t read the Caro books.
4jkb4ia
I am utterly grateful that EW, Sara RIP, and my mom all ganged up on me and made me read “Master of the Senate” during the health care interlude. It was magnificently written and gave you a sense of many more of the personalities in official Washington during that time than just LBJ and how important personal relationships were as opposed to Senate rules. But I have no hunger for the first two.
Because “Master of the Senate” ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1957, you get the sense that LBJ was really a magnificent bastard. With all his flaws, and the possible dubious nature of his being there at all, this was his hour. No one else could have gotten that through.
I vote for LBJ as tragic figure who knew that Vietnam was utter folly and did it anyway. But that’s Taylor Branch’s picture of him.
(LBJ died before I have any memory of much of anything)
morzer
@frosty:
I’ll say this – walking around Somerville with my wife, we constantly see fall-out shelter signs on schools, libraries etc – and we are always amazed by how many of them there are. Even our local pizza joint has one! That’s a pretty sobering reminder of just how seriously people took nuclear annihilation back in the day.
Mike G
Rational behavior, based on observed facts vs. Stopping The Red Menace. Gee, which one do you think is gonna win out in the USA?
Loud and stupid trumps truth way too often. It’s the basis for the tealiban and the Repuke party.
Villago Delenda Est
@frosty:
Frosty, the need to be “tough on Communism” is what kept LBJ in Vietnam as well. LBJ couldn’t see a way out without being accused of “losing” Vietnam. Never mind that Ho admired the US and and wanted to be allied with it.
General Stuck
@frosty:
Ha! Yes it did, but confirmed the fears of us remaining 1/4. I went from one day getting dragged out of campus admin building by my feets, to a few months later, those feets marching double time carrying a plastic assault rifle. Big twist on the head, to put it mildly. Luckily god created good and cheap drugs n those days.
And despite LBJ doing great works with civil rights leg and medicare and The Great Society programs, he fucking lied through his teeth to enter this country in to a long bloody war. That might make him even, but surely does not put him in the plus column, imo. And remember, much of what he accomplished came in the wake of national grief upon losing the beloved JFK, as did Bush have an advantage after 9-11.
Obama inherited two fucked up wars and an economy teetering on the brink of collapse, and a Friedman Unit, or two, MAYBE, to fix it all, and a country generally nearing a second civil war. I have said it before, but for anyone not experiencing the gratitude, we are lucky to have this particular president, at this particular fucked up time. And I don’t care if presnits wheel and deal and lie out their asses inside the DC sausage grinder, but they lie to the general public at their own peril. Especially about getting us into a war.
morzer
One general point on Domino Theory and the Red Menace – think how the GOP still uses the threat of Soc.ialism/Communism to fire up its old white base. If it still gets them going now, think how bad it must have been back in Johnson’s day. As for dominos – well, the Middle East is being cast as a domino situation by the GOP for all they are worth.
Phoebe
@Omnes Omnibus:
Fair enough. Now I think our only point of disagreement is —
— that I believe the emotions and pain are rationally based, and that they should inform the assessment and are not in the way of it.
@MonkeyBoy: yeah.
@policomic:
I know! It’s a knaves-and-fools story, which is why it’s such rough sledding, and because we know it doesn’t end well. I’m sticking with it, and will foist a copy I just bought on my brother, but it is GRIM!
stuckinred
Hey Hey LBJ
How many Kids did you kill today?
fuck him, then, now and forever.
catdevotee
Nixonland is fascinating, but so depressing. I had forgotten so many of the events – the bombings, the snipers, the numerous riots, the armed gangs of all political stripes.
It looks like Nixon was even more of an evil SOB than I already knew him to be. Amazing that in some circles, his reputation is being polished as a “statesman”.
stuckinred
@catdevotee: I haven’t forgotten very much but, having read it last year, there is no way I could stomach it again to be able to participate much.
MonkeyBoy
I think one of LBJ’s problems with Viet Nam is that he was re-elected in a large part because of sympathy about Kennedy’s assassination and was given the mandate of carrying on what Kennedy started.
While Kennedy had he lived might have been able to say there was no way to win in Vietnam, and to reverse his involvement, Johnson if he tried to back out would have been seen as a traitor to Kennedy’s memory.
Teri
Sorry to get in late, changed timezones and was basking in sun and warmth. LBJ was very ambitious and determined. There was a very good television biography on a while ago starring one of the Quaids. It depicted LBJ as a very earnest and sincere but wily politician. I remarked how alike he was with Dick Nixon in terms of fitting in with the “power elites”.
licensed to kill time
@efgoldman: We had to do those drills when I was in grade school. We were told to drape our sweaters over our heads and duck under our desks. They forgot to tell us the part about kissing your ass goodbye.
Scott P.
At some level, we’re all low-information voters. But my main objection to the characterization is that it sets up a dichotomy between the “sheeple” and the cognoscenti, who are sharp enough to understand the true nature of things. (Of course, whenever anyone sets up this dichotomy, they include themselves among those in the know).
And if the electorate is a bunch of ignorant animals governed by base emotion, well then, they hardly deserve to run things, do they? They’ll just make a mess of everything, don’t you know. The best thing is for their intellectual betters to run things for them, since “we” know what’s in “their” best interest. That’s the line of argument that anti-democrats on both the right and left have always used.
My manifesto is simple: Nobody can tell what is in a person’s best interests better than she herself can. Nobody has a monopoly on truth, or good government. The best way to find the right path for our nation is to give everyone an equal voice in the running of it. People who disagree with us politically aren’t stupid — they may hold stupid beliefs, but on the whole they are as smart as you or I and I guarantee you that we hold stupid beliefs as well. We are all motivated by emotion, prone to leaps of illogic, and subject to irrational biases. Our only hope as a nation or species is that, together, we can struggle towards a better future, one step at a time.
Teri
@licensed to kill time: The nuns used to herd us into the basement shelter, those along with fire drills were the highlight of the school year. We didn’t have the fear so much in the late sixties, early seventies but we still had the drill.
stuckinred
@MonkeyBoy: He was a loudmouth chickeshit bully. He wore a fucking silver star he weaseled for being on a plane that turned around before it came anywhere near action. Fuck him.
Omnes Omnibus
@Phoebe:I don’t disagree that the emotions and pain are based on real traumas and I think the pain caused by that war will always be central to his legacy. I just think that it is impossible for people who lived through events to form a clear picture of those events. One is always going to be affected by one’s own experiences. It necessarily colors and distorts. Historians will have access to a broader range of information; memoirs, declassified documents, film archives, etc. will allow a more nuanced view. This view could end up being even more harsh than the view expressed by many on the thread (stuckinred is the exception; i doubt that any historian could have a harsher view of the man than he does).
morzer
@Scott P.:
After 30 years of Reaganomics, and heaven knows how many pointless wars, I really feel that the “people” have made a mess of everything.
I am open to an argument that this has all been a glorious triumph of adult self-education, if you’d care to make one.
Teri
@Scott P.: Ah but half the battle has been lost already because we have been systematically dumbing down our population. The empahsis on bread and circuses (American idol/reality shows and overly cheap processed foods) has changed our population. Just look at the fish in the hudson that have adapted to the pcp’s that we have dumped. Do you know how many women in the US have PCP’s in their breast milk? We are chemically altering our people and deliberately undereducating them.
Davis X. Machina
@morzer: Boston I know — I was born in Dorchester, and it’s still my real home. My wife gets confused when I make Pixie Palladino references.
(Ask me about busing sometime. My dad was a BPS school principal, and my mother’s people were all in ROAR…for five years we had no family Christmases.)
Not many Americans are as insular as Bostonians can be. The East Coast I eventually came know — school in the Carolinas, taught in Atlanta, almost married a Montgomery Co. girl, and did marry a Newark one. The rest of the country, not so much. The Rust Belt-to-be stuff was a revelation because it wasn’t home. So a lot of Nixonland for me was a sort of travel book.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: sorry, it’s personal
licensed to kill time
@Teri: We also had an air raid siren that went off every day at noon for all the years of my childhood. I guess they had to test it every day in case the bombs started falling. It added an eerie sound of doom to the lunch hour.
stuckinred
, was never attacked. Nothing.”
This isn’t me, this is a “historian”.
Omnes Omnibus
@Scott P.: Oh, for fuck’s sake. What a load of self-righteous twaddle.
morzer
@Davis X. Machina:
Well, I spent a decade in New Haven, and to say that the Italian community there are not quite color-blind would not be an over-generous assessment. They tend to supply the mayor as well, for some reason. I suspect John DiStefano will probably still be mayor at the age of 100. He’s now in his 9th term of office, having succeeded Biagio DiLieto, so you get my point.
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred: I know and I understand. I was not criticizing you.
Phoebe
@Scott P.: I agree completely, and feel pretty hopeless as a result. Except for tiny things. Like if they actually hire Ricky Gervais to host something again. That would be fun.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: I know, I should just stay out of these.
Phoebe
@Omnes Omnibus: Now we agree completely [dusts hands].
eemom
What a great discussion. I haven’t read the book and don’t know much about history, so I haven’t had anything to say, but really appreciate the insights that have been shared.
The smart commenters are why I read this blog.
That said, I take issue with the gentleman who takes issue with the rest of us for characterizing bigoted, hate-driven, WILFULLY obtuse idiots who DO vote against their own self interests as sheep. That’s exactly what they are — at least, according to the traditional understanding of sheep behavior, which recently has come into question, such that if there’s anything unfair about the comparison, it’s unfair to the SHEEP.
In general I oppose comparing any despicable human quality to the animal kingdom, for that very reason. Animals of all species DO have the sense to act in their best interests, and they are incapable of evil or malice.
Teri
@ Annie Laurie, same time next week? Two chapters. I gotta go to a Luau in a few. I will read comments later. Have fun one and all.
morzer
@eemom:
Well, that depends on how you define evil and malice. Chimpanzees rape, and commit cannibalism, not to mention eating other species alive. Do they think of it as evil or malicious? Do they get their kicks from it? We don’t honestly know.
eemom
@stuckinred:
no, you should not, because your perspective from having been there is an essential part of the discussion.
“Unbiased” analyses of history certainly serve a purpose, but that doesn’t mean the righteously “biased” should be silenced.
morzer
On the topic of adult literacy and political awareness by implication, this is somewhat interesting, and rather alarming:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2009/04/literacy_and_direct_democracy/
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom: I agree completely. For historians to have a full view of LBJ, voices like stuckinred’s need to be part of the conversation.
morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
One thing that would help would be some idea of what’s eating stuckinred so badly. Why is it personal?
eemom
@morzer:
well, I’m not a zoologist anymore than I am a historian, but my understanding has always been that violent animal behaviors are programmed through evolution as means of survival — or the result of humans fucking with them (e.g., pit bulls).
At least with respect to the animals most commonly cited in criticisms of human behavior — pigs, for example — the insult to the animal is undeserved, afaik.
btw, were you a Yale prof or something at some point? I graduated from there in 1984.
Omnes Omnibus
@morzer: A year in Vietnam, I think, is the primary thing.
morzer
@eemom:
Well, I agree we tend to use animals unfairly in our imagery, but that’s been going on for millenia, so…
It’s probably true that animal (and by implication our) behaviors are programmed, but we don’t really know what, if anything, is their vision of that behavior. Does a chimpanzee see what would be cruelty in our terms as cruelty?
And no, I wasn’t, although I did grad work at Yale.
frosty
@licensed to kill time:
Wish I could have been a fly on the wall in the teacher’s lounge. We kids didn’t know any better, but I’m wondering if our teachers thought it was all complete bullshit.
Don K
@Tappen:
Yes, unfortunately LBJ had no good choices when it came to Vietnam. If he kept going he enraged a large part of the Dem base, and if he withdrew he would have faced a Rep in ’68 asking “who lost Vietnam?”.
I suppose I can see this now in retrospect as I couldn’t for a long time after the 60’s ended.
Arundel
It’s aways a peculiar thing when someone starts a sentence with, “My manifesto is..”.
Someone above asks if Nixonland is even-handed, and I’d say it surely is. In fact, reading it two years ago my own DFH biases led me to be a bit irked at how even-handed it was, in early chapters. But Perlstein pretty masterfully lets the dirty deeds and awful facts speak for themselves, like a proper historian does, I think. He doesn’t have to editorialize, the history he presents leads one to draw one’s own conclusions- it’s Nixon and his associates that damn themselves here, not RP. Nixonland reminds me of some of the great popular histories written by William Manchester in that way. Respecting the intelligence of the readership, letting the well-researched facts of a fascinating story stand on their own.
(A funny thing: I bought the book at a Sam’s Club, and it was surrounded by at least a dozen books by right-wing authors, the usual bunch. Not a “progressive” political book in sight, nor Obama’s bestseller biography that campaign summer. I like to imagine that lots of Tea Party sorts bought Nixonland thinking it was a hagiography. Again, it’s very evenhanded book, but as the ugly facts pile up in the narrative, I wonder what they thought. )
kyle
@morzer: Not me or Robert Caro!
morzer
@kyle:
I thought Caro’s book on Robert Moses was better than his work on LBJ, but that’s just my take on it.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Too late to the party as usual [sigh].
Here’s my observation on LBJ and his split legacy (domestic and Vietnam): they are two sides of the same coin.
Today we don’t necessarily have a great deal of faith in utopian social re-engineering projects (one of the things which is so disturbing about today’s right wing is that they are the major exception to this rule). In the early 60s that was not yet the case, something which shines through in biographical accounts of not just LBJ but of a lot of his contemporaries and advisors. A lot of smart people back then thought that you could solve difficult social problems just by picking the right technocratic solution to the problem and then ramming it through. In part this is the legacy of the New Deal and WW2 era, when we did achieve remarkable things in remaking both domestic and foreign societies.
LBJ’s domestic achievements in pushing through the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 could not have happened without this sort of attitude being widespread, not only with him but also amongst the other elites of his era. This was an attempt at a 2nd Reconstruction in the South, an act of epic hubris when you look at how long of a struggle it was to make good on the promises implied by those laws (a struggle that is still going on today a half century later) and yet something demanded by their sense of morality and justice. And the political consensus behind it came unglued completely when Northerners found the same standards being turned on them, as in clear from the account of MLK’s attempt to desegregate housing in Chicago narrated by Rick P. in Nixonland.
Our attempt to create the pseudo nation of “South Vietnam” in a grotesquely ahistorical fashion came from the same wellspring of technocratic hubris. If you have the self-confidence to think you can remake domestic society with a few strokes of a pen and well intended follow-up in the form of detailed programs to implement the reforms you’ve dictated, then it is almost inevitable that planners and decision makers will apply the same thinking when looking at another country’s society.
Today we look back at LBJ and wish that he had been able to separate his utopian impulses so as to distinguish between domestic social re-engineering (doable, but only via the commitment of massive resources to a long and painful struggle) and foreign nation making (not doable, not even in the long run, not even with the commitment of massive resources of blood and treasure). I don’t think many folks are that good at compartmentalizing. LBJ certainly wasn’t. An LBJ who would have written off the Vietnam policies of his predecessors as a sunk cost probably would not have had the vision or the mania to achieve his Civil Rights victories either. But such an LBJ would belong to our era, not his, because the lessons of humility and care and limited expectations when it comes to attempts to remake society which we’ve learned since his time were learned through his failures.
Rick Perlstein
Thank you, all, for giving me an enjoyable read for when I returned home from my (I shit you not!) Bible study.
RP
Scott P.
Ah, yes, should mention that I also find left-wing apocalyptism as repugnant as right-wing apocalyptism. Sure, we have lots of problems, but things weren’t better 30 years ago, they were worse, and they were also worse 50 years ago, 70 years ago, 100 years ago, etc. And I mean overall, not in every conceivable detail of life. There have been pointless wars, but there were pointless wars in the 1960s, the 1920s, the 1890s, etc. etc. We muddle along, as humans are wont to do, and gradually, painstakingly, make things better. We are not engaged in a titanic struggle for the fate of humanity; such struggles are rare, and even when they occur, they never actually resolve things.
It’s human nature to see the present as special in some way; I’m an archaeologist, and I see this all the time in history. Here is an Egyptian poem from c. 2000 B.C., describing events of the recent past as if they were prophecy.
What should not be has come to pass.
Men will seize weapons of warfare,
The land will live in uproar.
Men will make arrows of copper,
Will crave blood for bread,
Will laugh aloud at distress.
None will weep over death.
Those were some pretty hard times, much harder than times today. Yet the people survived, Egypt survived, and 4000 years later, the people rose up and deposed Mubarak. Did the people make a mess of things 4000 years ago? Maybe they did, maybe not. Either way, they dug themselves out of the mess. That’s what we should focus on — digging out of our messes.
Neldob
What continues to amaze me about Nixon is how he doesn’t think about what could be best for the citizens of the US, he cares only about winning the presidency, having that power and status without any broader vision of what this country is besides its resentments and anger.
morzer
@Scott P.:
It’s hardly “left-wing apocalypticism” (what a nice long, bright, shiny ten-dollar word though) to feel that this country has some serious problems and has compounded or created them by fighting numerous foolish wars. I know it’s always tempting to take the Pangloss line and regard all as being for the best – but the world really isn’t that easy.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Rick,
I have a Nixon question (LBJ seems to have dominated this thread, but what the heck): the Nixon you describe giving his foreign policy seminar to the Buckleyites at the Shoreham Hotel in August 1966 (pp 130-133 in Ch. 6 “School Was in Session..”), is that as close as we get to a glimpse of the inner Nixon, the man he really wanted to be and enjoyed being, with the veils of duplicity and calculation stripped away just a little bit to show something of his inner personality?
Because it seems to me from my memories of and reading about that era that one of the things that Kissinger and Nixon shared in common which they bonded over is that they both wanted to play at being Metternich (the object of Kissenger’s doctorial dissertation) and the other victors at the Congress of Vienna, redrawing the map of the world and setting all the crowns and thrones back in place better than before. And that that particular ambition of theirs was spectacularly ill-suited for what they were actually tasked with, namely leadership of a democratic republic with limited executive power and rather different expectations (than those which prevailed in early 19th Cen. Europe) regarding the relationship between statecraft and public opinion, which contributed to their obsession with secrecy that was Nixon’s downfall in the end.
eemom
“There is nothing new under the sun.”
I’m no more of a Bible scholar than I am a historian or zoologist, but I’m, like, TOTALLY into Ecclesiastes. Dude knew his shit.
morzer
@eemom:
As Tutankhamun once remarked in an email to me…
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Scott P.:
Agreed, but my take from reading a fair amount of US history is that this strain of thinking has been particularly strong here from the very beginning of European colonization and is embedded very deeply in our cultural DNA. “shining city on a hill”, “last best hope of mankind”, “arsenal of democracy”, etc, etc. Not that other nations haven’t suffered bouts of messianic fever from time to time, but with us the virus seems to recur more frequently than it does with others who have longer memories and have learned better the hard way.
morzer
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
But the problem with Scott is that he swings wildly between waffling on in terms of yes, no, maybe.. and rebuking others for thought-crimes that he has largely invented. That’s why it’s impossible to extract anything particularly insightful from what he appears to be trying to say.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@morzer:
My question is more along the lines of “yes, but aren’t you applying an ahistorical standard of historicism here?”. We Americans, we like our crusades.
morzer
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Well, if you want to go all left-wing apocalypticist on him…
Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Though I still don’t see what his “manifesto” has to do with this thread.. or anything, come to that. ‘Tis a most hesitant and timid document. Not Nixonian at all. No, sir.
Rick Perlstein
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ Stay tuned.
General Stuck
@Scott P.:
Apocalyptism is a bit strong to describe what many of us see as a reckoning in this country on the horizon. Whether that reckoning is distant or near, it is real. And it has only tangential relationship to Reaganonics, of the changing tides of left versus right, conservative versus liberal in this country. You are correct that those things normally work themselves out, or have over the 200 plus years of our countries existence.
We have had more than our share of pointless wars, but the one we fought amongst ourselves was hardly pointless, and in fact, is the point of a foundational conflict and chasm of belief that is the cause of my pessimism, a deep and unrelenting disagreement that has always existed in this country, that transcends stupid superpower flings in far off places.
The Civil War settled the slavery issue it was fought over, but the basic divide in world view that created the stubborn insistence on maintaining that evil, to the end of the enormous bloodletting it led to, remains. With all the attendant gripes of our southern brethren still in tact, boiling beneath the surface in a cauldron of resentment. And the new issue of slavery this time is reversed in the southern mind. It is they that feel genuinely threatened to be the ones in chains , albeit not literal chains, but relative to the white supremacy that has always been in this country, and the fear of it’s loss as the last straw.
Maybe these folks will soon take a giant leap of social evolution in the near future and we can all live peacefully ever after. But short of that, some of us see serious internal conflict certain, and the only question is how it will play out.
Gus
@morzer: Bullshit. He agonized because it cost him politically, not because he cared about how many people were dying needlessly. He escalated under false circumstances and kept escalating knowing virtually the whole time we couldn’t win. He’s got as much blood on his hands as George W. Bush does. Which isn’t to deny him the credit he deserves for his domestic policies.
mclaren
@frosty:
Compare with:
“And tens of thousands of
drafteesgullible enlistees, and hundreds of thousands ofVietnameseAfghans, would have to be killed and maimed. In a war thatNixonObama knew could not be won.”Eye-opening, isn’t it?
mclaren
@Neldob:
Why is this amazing?
Absolutely typical for sociopaths. And Nixon remains a classic sociopath, the perfect stereotypical example of that particular pathology.
mclaren
@Scott P.:
You’ve gullibly bought into the “greatness of the American people” con job purveyed by the grifters and scammers in the Republican party.
Read the Federalist Papers. You’ll find an astounding amount of contempt and fear and loathing and wariness by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton for the bulk of the voters — and with good reason.
There’s nothing sacred about a majority. Large numbers of people believing the same thing doesn’t make that belief suddenly wise or insightful. Throughout history — and the founders of America knew this — large majorities of people have burned witches, indulged in tulip-mania, signed away their earthly possessions because they believed the world would end on January 1 1000 A.D., ad nauseam.
In my lifetime I’ve seen the following epic waves of mass insanity sweep across America:
[1] The Domino Theory — “if we don’t defeat the commies in Vietnam, soon they’ll invade us from Tijuana!”
[2] The Missile Gap (didn’t exist).
[3] The fifth columnists among us (didn’t exist) working to subvert America for the commies.
[4] The Bell Curve (AKA the “marching morons” — a 1920s eugenics myth that keeps coming back: “the poor have more kids than the rich, and since the rich are smart and the poor are dumb, soon we’ll be drowning in stupid people!”)
[5] The Satanic child molestation panic (didn’t exist).
[6] Water fluoridation scare (pure bullshit).
[7] Nitrites in bacon scare.
[8] Food preservatives scare.
[9] Artificial sweetener scare.
[10] Nuclear bomb tests cause changes in the weather! (I’m just barely old enough to remember this)
[11] Global warming is a hoax.
[12] Going off the gold standard destroyed the U.S. economy.
[13] Evolution is a hoax.
[14] Masonic conspiracy (the eye in the pyramid on the back of our currency is a weird underground conspiracy!).
[16] Obama scary mooooooooooslim caliphate conspiracy (doesn’t exist).
[17] Obama birther scare (pure bullshit).
…And the list goes on.
And on.
And on.
A crowd is a beast with a million heads and no brain. The more people gather together collectively, the lower their collective IQ becomes. There’s good reason to fear and despise and look down on vast numbers of people collectively energized by some (usually stupid) belief.
frosty
@Scott P.: Interesting long-term perspective. Thanks.
Although I can think of a couple of screeching halts to human progress: the Dark Ages, when the West sorta forgot all about what the Greeks and Romans had done, come to mind.
frosty
@General Stuck: Gen’l Stuck. May I recommend a book to you? Albion’s Seed, by David Fischer. His thesis is that the cultural divides in the US go back to settlement by the Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers, and Borderers, and that the cultures of these groups stem from differences in England between East Anglia, SW England, the northern counties, and the Scottish border. Down to the language and slang you hear in different US states, which he tracks back to England in the 17th centyr.
In the end, we’re no different than the Balkans. We’re fighting wars that started 400 years ago.
frosty
@mclaren: Yes. I ain’t too happy about this either. However, Obama isn’t Nixon, and on that slender thread, I hang whatever hope I have.
General Stuck
@frosty:
Yes, that book is on my list to purchase from Amazon Kindle, when I get through with several others already purchased, but not yet read. And thanks for the recommend.
Batocchio
On LBJ and Vietnam, it’s well worth checking out this Bill Moyers piece:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11202009/profile.html
The picture that emerges from it is that, on Vietnam, there was strong bipartisan agreement in Congress that the situation absolutely stank but America had to stay. That was wrong. But then as now, the range of “serious” opinion was pretty narrow and very poor for far too long. I haven’t read Caro’s books, but the films The Fog of War (doc) and The Path to War (historical fiction) are both fascinating, as is the LBJ who emerges in Nixonland. Both LBJ and Nixon were complex figures.
Phoebe
@frosty: That sounds great! I’ll put it in my queue. I wish the library worked the way Netflix worked; one book leave before one book enter.
Neldob
Can anyone tell me if there was a Bill O’Reilly type during the 1960s? Who filled the niche of mean avuncular know-nothing in the mass media?