Opinion of Lyndon B. Johnson?

Exactly... so when you say Johnson micromanaged the war, what you really mean to say is that he micromanaged the bombing of the North?

 

I can only point to the results that it did obtain. In 1959 we were basking in the glow of post-war prosperity.... and in 1979 we were an economic basket case. Yet the poverty rate in 1979 was half of what it was in 1959. How do you explain it?

 

That's because on February 15, 1986 President Reagan said...

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Correct.

 

Well, okay then... if Reagan said it, it must be true.....so now we're going to blame Johnson for the sexual revolution?

 

Okay.... so let's say Johnson didn't micromanage Rolling Thunder and he took the gloves off and let the Generals bomb wherever they wanted whenever they wanted - do you seriously think the benefits would have outgained the potential risks? And keep in mind that when I talk about potential risks, I'm talking about possibly sparking off World War III. What could we have bombed that we didn't bomb? What real difference do you figure it would have made to the situation on the ground? Are we talking interdiction here? Because if we are, why not stop bombing North Vietnam completely and just focus all of the bombing on the Ho Chi Minh trail?

 

Some had the fear of the chi-coms entering the war. No China wouldn't have.

It was the Soviet Union who was behind the Vietnam War not the chi-coms. But many remembered when the chi-coms came pouring over the border during the Korean War.

President Eisenhower being a former five star general studied the French Indochina war. He saw all the mistakes the French made, a whole bunch of them and the French rejected America's military advice until it was to late.

Eisenhower studied the maps and concluded to stop communist expansion in Southeast Asia, it had to be done in Laos. No way could supplies for the VC come across the 17th parallel (DMZ) and no army could invade the south across the DMZ, it can be defended. I was up on the DMZ and Eisenhower was right.

The only way arms, munitions, supplies could make it down to the South would be what would become known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. If you control Laos you can deny North Vietnam access to the Ho Chi Minh trails.

Eisenhower believed along with his military advisers that a conventional war could be fought and won in Laos but not in South Vietnam. (May not make sense, a land lock country but I'm not a general.)

It was the Soviet Union who was arming the Pathet Lao in Laos. The CIA was already fighting a secret war in Laos during the Eisenhower administration.

Things started heating up in Laos forget which year, might have been 1958 ??? Eisenhower moved a Marine Regimental Landing Team to Thailand from Okinawa and the Soviets asked Eisenhower are you planning to deploy combat troops into Laos ? (Should be remembered that the Soviet Union was in awe with Eisenhower as a military strategist and military leader, they feared him but highly respected him.) Any ways Eisenhower said what do you think. The Soviets backed off and reduced their shipments of arms and supplies to the Pathet Lao and things quieted down until there was a new POTUS in 1961.

When outgoing President Eisenhower met with incoming President Kennedy on that january morning in 1961 Eisenhower warned Kennedy and advised Kennedy on a few things.

If you want to stop communist expansion in Southeast Asia, it has to be done in Laos, not at the 17th parallel.

Do not try to do business with the Diem regime, it's to corrupt.

If you ignore my advise and find yourself in a war in South Vietnam, it has to be fought as a "total war."

(Total War: America has only fought two wars in it's entire history as total war. The "Great Rebellion" aka "The American Civil War" and the Second World War.)

As usual JFK ignored the advice of those who were older and wiser than he was and instead listened to his Harvard buddies he surrounded himself with who were known as the "Young and Brightest."

COIN (Counter Insurgency Warfare) comes into play. Rand Corp tells JFK you can win in South Vietnam with a few Green Berets.

Regime change in South Vietnam. Kennedy signs off on the CIA backed military coups removing President Diem from power. It backed fired, Diem was murdered.

From that day on, America owned South Vietnam.

The world watched, what will JFK do ???

If SEATO fails, NATO is Likely to follow suit.

Three weeks later JFK met the same fate as Diem in Dallas Texas.

The rest is history on what followed.

Lets remember that the North Vietnamese government didn't recognized the PLAF (VC) until I believe around 1964 and NVA troops didn't cross over the border into the RVN and engaged in actual combat until 1965.

 

How do you know they wouldn't have? Like I said, all it would have taken was one word from Mao to make it happen...

I've always loved what Eisenhower did to Kennedy as he was going out the door....Well, Laos is a mess - you should really go in there and take care of it.... never mind the fact that I've done SFA to fix the situation, but I know what I'm talking about. Oh Yeah... I've just spent eight years gutting the army and putting all the money into submarines, bombers and missiles, so you'll probably want to do something about that too.

 

He was a get and weld power for the sake of it politician who ended up in over his head in the Presidency. I don't think the man truly had an ounce of soul in him. Everything was a political calculation. That is not to say that I don't believe he did not stumble onto the right side every now and then, just that he had no moral compass.

 

His domestic policy is why we are in the mess were in now . He sucked at everything

 

I have read a couple of bios. Fascinating figure.You got me beat with your twenty years of study. Got a couple of questions. How much of a racist was he? From what I have read, he was almost entirely Machiavellian with respect to race and segregation throughout his career at least that is one dominant interpretation of his actions both in support of the 'institution' for decades to gain and keep his power base in the Senate, and his evolving opinion.in the 60's when he could not gain the Presidency without evolving fairly quickly. Then I read anecdotal stories before his political career, that suggest an empathetic attitude toward minorities.

Do you have a sense of what his views of race and segregation really were, in the quiet of his mind? Did he really believe in that civil rights act or was it yet another ploy?

 

Nixon met with Mao, Mao signed off on Nixon bombing North Vietnam.

Nixon's visit to China was a chess move on the Cold War chessboard. It drove a wedge between Sino-Soviet relations. Kinda knocked China out of the Cold War. China was never really into expanding communism throughout the world.

Even though China and Vietnam have always been natural enemies, China's support of of North Vietnam was luke warm. No way would have the chi-coms would have allowed American troops on their border.

In late 1967 the Soviet Union was suggesting that North Vietnam should throw in the towel and negotiate an end to the war. The American soldier can't be defeated on the battlefield.

It was the chi-coms who suggested giving it one more try with a massive assault. That would be the Tet Offensive of 1968. The VC and NVA were pulverized, the VC would never recover.

Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Giap were actually discussing of a conditional surrender but then Walter Cronkite went on the air and lied to the American people making it sound that America was defeated during Tet and that the war couldn't be won.

Anyone who was in-country at the end of Tet knew that the light was at the end of the tunnel.

North Vietnam came up with a new strategy and tactics. The war still could be won, won on the streets of America with help from the counter culture movement in America. Many of the "New Left" are honored today in the war museum in Hanoi, John Kerry, "Hanoi" Jane Fonda, the SDS. Without their help, there would be two Vietnam's today.

The new tactic was no longer taking ground and holding it. A war of attrition. NVA forces would cross over the border from their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia, kill as many Americans as possible and "didi" haul ass back to their sanctuaries. Eventually the American people will get tired of the war and demand that American troops come back home.

 

That's a good question.... I actually don't think he was racist at all, especially when you go back and look at his time as a teacher at the Mexican school in Cotulla or as state director of the National Youth Administration in the New Deal. There's lot of anecdotes from that time about how he went out of his way to make sure minorities got fair treatment, which - considering the times - was totally against the grain in Texas. Even as a Congressman you saw the same thing. It was only when he became a Senator that you saw more of the other side....he knew that nobody could hold statewide office then and be against Jim Crow. And he also knew where the power was.... with Dick Russell and his crew - they had the seniority and they controlled the committees. You weren't getting anything done there without their consent. So I think as far as civil rights goes, he became a sheep in wolf's clothing.... he played the segregationist because that was the way the game was played - but even then, he still managed to move the ball when it came to civil rights. People to this day attack him for gutting the 1957 Civil Rights Act.... but I think it was amazing how he managed to get around the Southern caucus and get that bill to the floor. Admittedly, it was a pretty watered-down bill.... but the point was that it was a bill - for the first time since reconstruction, a civil rights bill was passed - it pointed the way to what could be done.

I remember watching an interview with James Farmer and he was talking about a meeting he had with LBJ in the White House and he had asked the President, how he could go from being a segregationist to being a champion of civil rights and Johnson sat back for a second and he looked around the Oval Office and then he said, "There's a quotation that answers that, and when I say it, you'll recognize the author immediately....'Free at last, free at last... Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last!' "

 

There were so many opportunities to move earlier, after he was safely ensconced as Majority leader. He showed absolutely no courage, until he began to seriously think of his behind in that oval office chair and there was no way the liberal wing would tolerate a segregationist on the ticket.

 

Yes, but that was 1972.... I'm talking 1965. If we had taken the gloves off of Rolling Thunder and mined Haiphong and everything else....wouldn't we have run the risk of actually healing the Sino-Soviet rift? If we had done the kind of unrestrained, Linebacker style bombing that you're talking about, how do you know the Soviets wouldn't have brought their own Air Force units into the picture? How do you know Mao wouldn't have turned the Cultural Revolution south when it started eating itself? There were just too many unknowns there to go around risking World War III.

 

Today the cycle ends at the end of September.

Are you telling me it changed since Johnson.

But pardon me for calling it the Nixon budget.

Corrections accepted.

 

How safely ensconced do you think he was? The Northern wing had no great love for him and if the Southerners abandoned him, what would he have had left? It was futile to move before the White House was ready anyway - if he got out too far on civil rights, the Republicans could have just cut him off at the knees. You can't lead the country from the Senate - not on an issue that big.... the leadership is always going to have to come from the White House.

 

I believe the FY 1976 Budget was the last one we had that began in July.... then there was a Transitional Quarter before the FY 1977 Budget started in October.

 

Jack Kennedy took Johnson in order to get the nomination. Joe Kennedy never had trouble raising money, so the idea that Jack needed LBJ for taht is silly.

You're probably on Medicare.

 

Lyndon Baines Johnson ranks as the worst president in my lifetime for myriad reasons (the Marx-Obama Healthcare & Citizenry Control Act can be and will be repealed). Yes, he ranks below the the peanut farmer from Plains and the current ideologue wasting space and our money at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Johnson was so bad, and utterly loathed by the majority of voting Americans in 1968 that even he and his political party knew running for reelection that year was futile. Johnson and company gave us Nixon.

On my bucket list is visiting the sorry SOB's grave site and relieving myself. If it was good enough for that uncouth socialist deviant and war monger to do it in the Rose Garden, then it's good enough for me to reciprocate.

Rot in hell, LBJ.

 

So I guess we'll put you down as undecided?

 

LBJ did his best to kill me and most of my friends for no reason. We are still paying for Vietnam, both directly and in continuing blunders in foreign policy. His economic and social policies would have happened anyway and he may even have retarded rather than advanced even them. Either he was a flat out evil bastard or a total idiot and probably both

 

In 1965, 66 most of the U.S. Army was in Germany not in South Vietnam.

I seriously doubt the Soviets were going challenge the USAF and Navy in the air with Soviet Migs with Soviet pilots. Infact that would result in the USA and the USSR being in a shooting war and the Vietnam War was a proxy war and just one battle of the Cold War. There might have been and very likely Soviet pilots sitting in the cockpit of North Vietnamese Migs. There were Soviet advisers on the ground in North Vietnam.

The Soviet military during the 1960's wasn't capable of conducting conventional combat operations outside of the Soviet Union except in Europe. The Soviet navy didn't become a blue water navy able to operate surface warships thousands of miles from it's shores until the mid 1970's.

Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cuban blockade ? All the Soviets had to respond with were submarines.

 

He lied our way into the Vietnam War. The Gulf of Tonkien was a false flag.

 

On one hand you tell me the Soviets wouldn't send soldiers into Vietnam and on the other you post a story that says they actually did. Why is it so far of a stretch to say that if we escalated they wouldn't as well? You remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? Everybody said the Soviets would never send MRBMs to Cuba, or they weren't capable, but they did.