Lots of people have made comparisons between the Viet Nam War and the situation in Iraq. I think that most of these are pretty ill-conceived: there’s no Ho Chi Minh or General Giap nor is there a Soviet Union or Communist China openly supplying the opposition. And it’s certainly no war of national liberation: a quick thought of how the insurgency ruled Fallujah or Tal Afar should disabuse anyone of that.
However, there’s something that I haven’t seen mentioned too often that’s absolutely similar in the two conflicts: Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush were both elected to state-wide office in the state of Texas.
Is there something about Texans? Nearly everything that people complain about in GWB (fairly or unfairly) are characteristics that LBJ had in spades. Intensely partisan? Check. Crony capitalism? Check. Political dirty tricks? Check. Not above buying a few votes with massive giveaway programs? Check. No problem with living on borrowed money? Check.
There is no doubt in my mind that forty years ago anyone with the political beliefs that President Bush has would have obviously been what was referred to as a “bidness Democratâ€, a specific brand of populist nationalism most common in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and my own home state of Missouri.
Both also made the mistake of going to war without engaging the American people. Whether the liberation of Iraq will survive that mistake remains to be seen.
Even as they made fun of his way of talking and his frequent gaucheries Lyndon Johnson repeatedly triumphed over his political opponents right up to that point in 1968 when it was obvious that the country had turned against him. How will Bush fair?
LBJ knew through most of his Presidency that America had little hope for victory in Vietnam (he said so several times on White House tapes that were released a few years ago), but he felt at the time that he couldn’t withdraw for a variety of reasons. I sometimes wonder if the same is true of President Bush. I wonder what our President really believes is achievable in Iraq.
Andy:
Good point. Many thousands of American soldiers died so LBJ and later Nixon could avoid accepting defeat even while knowing that victory was impossible. At least the numbers are smaller in Iraq.
One of my earliets political memories: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party . . .” Say what you will about how bad things are now, back then we had Vietnam, race riots, tanks in the streets of American cities, the assassinations of two Kennedys and MLK, the cold war, Kent State, the Mayaguez, the Pueblo, the 1967 and 1973 wars, and impeachment, all in the space of a decade.
Ah, good times, good times.
I don’t buy Andy’s argument, because in a military sense we did win. It’s just that as soon as we won, and long before we realized it, we withdrew from the field. We had beaten the insurgency, and fought to the point where the government of South Vietnam could keep the insurgency down unassisted, but could not protect themselves against a conventional invasion. Then we refused to protect them from teh conventional invasion that came two years after we withdrew.
We lost Vietnam politically, not militarily, although it’s also fair to say that the political loss was caused by military failures between 1964 and 1968.
It’s baffling to me how it became “Nixon’s war”.
MT, perhaps it’s because I came from an intensely political family but my earliest political memory is Eisenhower’s 1956 campaign.
Jeff,
I wasn’t really trying to make an argument, just point out something to think about. Whatever the reality, LBJ privately believed we could not prevail in Vietnam. I’m just curious if President Bush’s thoughts on our winnability in Iraq have changed since 2003 or are different from his public persona.
I’m not sure that’s what President Johnson thought, Andy. What I think he thought was that it had become politically impossible from the standpoint of domestic politics. It’s a subtle difference and I’ve frequently made the point that whatever’s politically impossible is impossible, period.
I guess we’ll never know.
Presumably, what’s made me start thinking along these lines is all the ads for the HBO Goldwater feature I’ve been seeing lately. It certainly appears to me that the present Republican leadership is basically comprised of “bidness Democrats” and would appear pretty foreign to the Republicans of the 1960’s. That’s probably why William F. Buckley and other paleocons are so disaffected.
Dave:
You know, when I think about it I guess my earliest poltical memory is of JFK. I just don’t somehow categorize it in my mind as “political.”
I was in school in Rochefort France, 9 years old, the equivalent of 4th grade, I suppose. Got to school and the kids were saying, “Michel, ton president est mort.”
It was weird because normally these kids refused to believe I was American. When I’d speak English they’d accuse me of talking gibberish. And then suddenly on November 22, 1963 I was “l’Americain” again.
Ike would have been a bit early for me. At age 2 I wasn’t exactly politically aware.
MT, I continue to be amazed at our many similarities. We’re contemporaries. I started learning French at age 9. We’ve both been in hospitality (I did some waiting and a heckuva lot of short order/breakfast); we’ve both been antique dealers. And we’re both, er, politically eclectic.
BTW have you noticed what a significant proportion of the centrists in the blogosphere are rough contemporaries of ours? More than coincidence I suspect.
I’m an eclectic centrist myself but wasn’t born until 1968. Ford was really the first President I remember.
Back to LBJ for a moment, here’s an interesting quote from him that I believe was recorded by his wife in early 1965:
”Vietnam is getting worse every day…It’s like being in an airplane and I have to choose between crashing the plane or jumping out. I do not have a parachute.”
Here’s an interesting review of Bechloss’ book that describes the tapes in detail:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E3DA103EF933A05751C1A9679C8B63&pagewanted=print
Dave:
We share incipient old-fartism. Andy there’s “the kid” at, what, 38?
You know what, I’ll bet you could find a correlation between experience waiting tables or similar and political centrism (for lack of a better term.) The job breeds skepticism.
M.T. Believe you overstated it a bit with “tanks in the streets”. To my knowledge, no tanks were ever deployed in America’s streets. Tankers and other troops, yes. I returned from Vietnam to serve with a tank battalion at Fort Hood, Texas, that had been deployed to Detroit during the riots. But they deployed as riot control troops, not as tankers. Basically, they stood by and were never put on the street. Sister units from the same armored division stood by in Chicago during the civil unrest there, and they likewise left their tanks behind. I assume by tank, you are referring specifically to either the M-48A1 (of which my battalion was the last), the M-60 series, or the M551, all of which had turrets and large calibre high velocity cannons. I’ve never seen either a photo or account of any of these in America’s streets. By the way, some very good points in the article that spawned these comments. I’d have to add that both wars were fought adjacent to countries which, while officially neutral, offered passage and safe haven to the opposing side, and were effectively immune from operations by U.S. military forces.
p.d. Nous sommes proche a la fete de St. Michel, patron des parachutistes. Bonne anniversaire!
Texas and Texans seem a little strange, but think what were the alternatives. Gore and Kerry were/are strange political animals with a lot of baggage. Goldwater and Eugene were not centrists. We were left Nixon. And he gets blamed for what he did not create.