Casualty of the War

...tyranny...

...they did not care for tax increases as anti-inflationary remedies...

...In Johnson's version of the tale, Bailey said to Rayburn, "I wish I felt a little better, Sammy, I would like to go back to Mississippi and make them one more Democratic speech...

...But the desperately needed policies Johnson promoted under the Great Society rubric urgently required a peaceful decade, at least, to be assimilated...

...And yet there is more to LBJ, even in this book, than the war that consumed him and most of his achievements...

...How far the Great Society might have gone in the absence of Vietnam we cannot ever know...

...To wrap the tax bill in the flag might launch pressures that would widen the war and cut back reforms our society needed...

...How does one know...

...Almost all the book's foreign policy sections, not only those involving Vietnam, read like winning entries in American Legion contests for the best essays on freedom vs...

...The frantic pace at which its elements were pressed upon Congress and the electorate is explained by Johnson's painful awareness that his constituents infrequently support measures to help the poor and the deprived...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman After a season of Richard Nixon, what is one to make of Lyndon Johnson...

...Ah, the middle ground...

...In New Orleans during the 1964 campaign, he told an unappreciative Southern audience the story of a conversation about the economic potentialities of the South between Senator Joe Bailey, a well-known race baiter, and Speaker Sam Ray-burn...

...But no reader would learn from this book that Johnson's decision not to run in 1968 had anything at all to do with Vietnam, Eugene McCarthy, or the sheer hatred that the President had evoked for himself and his policies...

...He knew that only an extraordinary conjuncture of events??assassination, the great good luck of a Goldwater to campaign against, the benign aspect of civil rights agitation in the mid-1960s, the new revenues released by economic expansion, and, again by gift of Goldwater, an exceptionally liberal Congress??made success possible...

...One can only wonder whether Johnson believes his own tall tales...

...It is part of current conventional wisdom that Lyndon Johnson would have been a great President if only he had possessed Eisenhower's skepticism about the extension of American foreign commitments...

...Faithful to John Kennedy's fatuous inaugural pledge to pay any price, bear any burden in defense of freedom, we rushed in freedom's reserves, pursuing no interest of our own save that in the spread of global democracy...

...Congress was also at fault...

...I did not suffer the disadvantage of being considered a 'modern liberal politician.' The closest I came to that description was being called a 'Populist,' which is the term some liberals reserve for progressives who come from the southern and western parts of the nation...

...The impulse that drove Johnson was a genuine hatred of poverty and discrimination, a genuine desire to enact the American dream of equal opportunity...

...By the end of that year, it was plain to numerous economists (myself among them) outside the Johnson Administration that the war was growing in scale, that for political reasons the White House was underestimating its cost, and that the fiscal measure urgently needed was a sharp tax increase...

...On Vietnam, LBJ appears to have learned nothing and forgotten whatever it has seemed convenient to forget...

...Wading through the verbal swamps of this massive memoir, it is fatally easy to recall old rages at the deceptions, brutalities, and bull-headed persistence in error that described Johnson's Vietnam policy...

...Johnson's message is a sad one...

...Still, at his best Johnson possessed a great leader's compassion and vision of a better society...

...Granted the Presidency by chance, Johnson seized his opportunity to clothe his rage for equality in suitable legislative garments...

...So I determined that the Populist politician would be the one who finally gave poor Americans some representation and helped them find their voice and improve their lot...

...The record overwhelmingly demonstrates that, in this strange and cunning political animal, genuine passions for social justice survived decades of compromise with Texas oilmen, agents of other business interests, and congressional barons...

...Nor could I agree that the tax increase should be used solely for domestic purposes...

...Vietnam took away the resources and, even worse, it drained the psychic energies which give life to social improvement...

...It seems they learned to love only that half of Keynesian economics which advised them to accept tax cuts as stimuli to output and employment...

...Though the President's Vietnam policy was expensive, he did not ask for the 10 per cent surcharge until 1967, more than a year too late...

...So he just didn't tell us about the price tags...

...What can a President do...

...The emotion is the easier to recall because Nixon's ruthless use of air-power continues the inhumane tradition of 1965-68...

...Thus in the Dominican Republic, to hear Johnson tell it, the issue was clear: A free people eager to determine its own future was in danger of being thwarted by crafty and aggressive Communists...

...Indeed, wherever Vietnam touches other issues, it is exceedingly hard to accept the Vantage Point version of reality...

...To occupy it LBJ lied about the 1966 cost of the war, fed his own economic advisers this bad information, avoided public discussion of the whole Asian folly, destroyed his credibility, handicapped his most cherished domestic programs, elected Richard Nixon, and allowed the economy to soar off into a dangerous spell of inflation...

...Rayburn on that occasion, 'Poor old Mississippi, they haven't heard a Democratic speech in thirty years...

...Never were our policies influenced by commercial interests, fears of expropriation of American properties, or the imperialism afflicting lesser peoples...

...The Great Society, hasty, inadequate and shoddily designed as much of it was, nevertheless represented the first substantial thrust toward social improvement since the New Deal...

...As events developed, part of the price of this course of deceit was collected by Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire and Wisconsin...

...As a sheer feat of political technique and a sheer exercise of Presidential will, there may be no parallel in American history to the brief flowering of the Great Society during the years 196465...

...Here is a sample: "When economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of our 'affluent society' at the end of the 1950s, he said that 'the arithmetic of modern politics makes it tempting to overlook the very poor'??that because the poor were an 'inarticulate minority,' the 'modern liberal politician' did not align himself with them...

...I was certain to be criticized whatever direction I moved, and each alternative offered peculiar dangers...

...Then Johnson looked over the members of the audience, and gave them the old Senator's final words to Mr...

...Why not...

...The voice of an, if not the, authentic Johnson is equally clear on race...

...At length it is hard not to weep for Lyndon Johnson, and for the rest of us...

...Take the tax surcharge Congress ultimately enacted in 1968, far too late to check an inflation that began to mount in step with Vietnam escalation in the middle of 1965...

...On the occasions when he describes his domestic motives, the tone of his memoir ceases to be official and sounds human, complete with resentment as well as aspiration...

...In two years or so, he pushed through a war on poverty, aid to education, two major civil rights bills, rent supplements, Model Cities, and a host of lesser measures...

...On the one hand, many conservative Democrats were saying to me, 'We'll go along with you on the tax increase, but only if you wrap it in the American flag as a wartime measure and use the revenue solely for military expenditures and not for your Great Society programs.' On the other hand, several liberals were saying: 'We'll go along with you, but only if you use all the revenue to build the Great Society...

...Although he felt we needed both the Great Society and the Vietnam war, he feared that Americans were unwilling to pay as much as these things cost...

...All they ever hear at election time is 'Nigger, Nigger, Nigger.'" It is to Johnson's enduring credit that it is harder to win elections by yelling Nigger even in Mississippi...

...It measures his stature that his failures have for his country been catastrophes...

...I stuck to the middle ground, for I realized that my Presidency would require dealing simultaneously with major military crises abroad and urgently needed reforms at home...

...Well, according to our witness, the voters were partly to blame...

...I feel like I have at least one more left in me...