ON TO WORLD WAR IV?
Dugger, Ronnie
QntoWorldWarlV? Still AU the Way with LBJ AN EXCERPT FROM The Politician The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson BY RONNIE DUGGER We have a natural tendency to think of the Presidencies or the...
...For Americans, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made the matter even simpler...
...It was named "collective security...
...Increasing talk since the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House that nuclear war can be in some sense survived and won suggests that while much has happened since Johnson, nothing has changed...
...His doctrine of military strength was rooted in the simple idea of national preparedness for self-defense...
...Declaring World War III, Nixon took the ultimate rhetorical step to persuade Americans once again to ratify whatever military spending and whatever military adventures President Reagan and his successors might wish to undertake...
...Neither, obviously, did American Presidents or international corporations...
...After the defeat of Germany, the United States committed itself in the United Nations Charter to the doctrine of international self-defense, the idea that nations must defend each other against aggression...
...This third one now, from Watergate to Ford to Carter to Reagan, is perhaps our first national psychological depression...
...Johnson knew well throughout the 1950s that in supporting the military, he was short-changing the kind of Federal spending for social and educational programs that he advocated later for his Great Society...
...It follows that we do not have flexibility of foreign policy contrary to these contracts, even though we now live in a world in which the inflexibility of a great nuclear power can close down civilization in half an hour...
...Myth-norms are the rhetorical crystallizations of profound, collectively experienced, tested, and remembered needs and decisions...
...This is the firm and irrevocable commitment of our people and our nation, whatever the risk and whatever the cost...
...Under the open-ended doctrine of national power to protect, the United States protects anything far enough right of center in the world that the Administration in power decides to protect...
...In retrospect, little may seem more calamitous in world history than the accident that as the United States emerged from World War II Russia was ruled by a murderous tyrant...
...Then the on-rushing darkness of the period overcame him, and his war and his programs were ridden out to their demoralized consequences by his eventually disgraced or defeated successors...
...A month after ordering the bombing of North Vietnam, he said, "Of course an American's spine tingles when he looks at the Stars and Stripes...
...In practice, because of the great-power veto at the United Nations, this meant little at first, but the principle was established and accepted at San Francisco...
...During the discussions in Washington concerning U.S...
...The most dangerous tendency in the American Presidency now (perhaps because it has also been the most dangerous tendency in the prevailing national psychology) is the application of the personal ideas of patriotism, honor, and courage to foreign policy if the present national and international situation is even remotely similar to personal situations...
...with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society...
...Lyndon Johnson took honor for granted the way church was taken for granted, or burying the dead...
...he had told the Texas legislature in 1941...
...Detente was a vague phrase that worked because it was too difficult to discuss ending a world war that had not been declared...
...Far from having subsided as a result of "the lessons of Vietnam," the misconceived American crusade once again controls the White House and therefore the Pentagon...
...The Warsaw Pact nations faced off against NATO, and self-defense was regionalized...
...Eisenhower charged that the government was communist-dominated, but the evidence is stronger that the provocation was Guatemala's expropriation of more than 200,000 acres of the United Fruit Company's holdings on the Pacific slope...
...In wartime, his meaning was clear...
...Stalin had widened his rule in Europe and his influence in Asia, Poland had nationalized her basic industries, even beloved Britain had nationalized coal and railways, Hungary and Romania were taken over by the Soviet Union, as was the very country whose dismemberment was sanctioned by the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia...
...We are at war...
...We must do whatever must be done to insure our success," he told Congress in 1965...
...As President he left the superpatriots nothing to add...
...In thirty minutes or so, perhaps an hour, civilization can be razed...
...A President who, consciously or unknowingly, put his personal honor ahead of humanity's right to live would have put himself ahead of everyone...
...An evolutionary maladaptation that can cause the use of nuclear weapons is closely analogous to physical maladaptations that have driven animal species into extinction...
...The first was the economic one,' 'The Depression...
...Johnson's knowing but saturnine presence haunts our continuing disarray...
...In one of its strangest events, however, former President Richard Nixon declared World War III after he left office...
...Republicans who posed as Democrats in the Texas Democratic convention have the comfort of knowing their consciences are clear...
...But the heritage of this and any other nuclear nation that compels mankind toward the nuclear holocaust is the enemy...
...We continue to accept, in nuclear times, the imperative element of its pre-nuclear content: "We gave our word, we have to...
...He said in 1950 that the Korean War was "the first battle of a greater struggle," and "we must accept this fact and understand what it means...
...Detente, which began to emerge with the nuclear test-ban treaty in 1963 and gathered strength and its name in the 1970s, was the euphemism used to describe openings for peace and trade...
...honor, as much a question of the way a thing looked as the way a man was inside...
...honor: dishonor...
...The Congress was in the hands of a conservative coalition more than two-thirds of the time, as it still is to this day...
...Before Vice President Johnson pledged to the West Berliners "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor," President Kennedy approved...
...This would be, not honor, but ultimate vanity...
...We may be at war for ten or twenty years more...
...The country's first leap in doctrine from the unarguable right of self-defense, at first the new idea seemed to be just a logical extension of the old one...
...The door has never opened and I have never looked upon any faces that I didn't think would like to trade citizenship with me...
...Eternal and international vigilance is the price of our liberty at home...
...or near-majority in Congress, their accomplishments were real, but they have certainly been exaggerated by partisans of Roosevelt and Johnson...
...In 1944, Texas oil people and conservatives began a revolt within the state's Democratic party...
...But by never bringing into doubt the extent or the purposes of the military and by championing universal military training and the keeping of men under arms without a ceiling on their number, he became, in effect, the Senator from the Pentagon...
...I have seen the sun rise on Mont Blanc...
...There was one kind of psychological wisdom in this general blindness...
...The blood of the sons of South Carolina is strewn throughout many nations because they have carried that flag many places in the world and they have brought it back without a stain on it...
...Our leaders have more choices than they admit or even realize and higher liability for history than they will accept when things go wrong...
...Johnson did not seem to know what to do to avoid having to "mash the button...
...Johnson also argued that Eisenhower had bound the United States to Vietnam by a letter he sent to the then president of South Vietnam offering assistance in "developing a strong viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means...
...Visiting the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, he spoke of the flag there displayed that flew through the bombardment of Baltimore in the War of 1812 and inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner...
...But even as the sophistry in Johnson's arguments for honor must be disallowed, it must be conceded that he also believed he was speaking for the nation when he said honor required his policies in Vietnam—and he may have been...
...He meant, and he said he meant, that we had no choice: "We are there because...
...Through time, in complex mixings of many considerations, motives, and interests, there has been a sleight of hand to it, a magic, a trick...
...with decayed and degraded systems of government...
...Expecting to be forgiven their political self-interest, they do not keep enough in mind how paltry that motive is when we can all die together in a thirty-minute war...
...In general, concentrations of fighting have been perceived as separate wars in national arenas, when in fact they were just battles in the world war...
...Gus Tyler has described what he calls "the Roosevelt Era that ran from 1932 to 1968...
...The creators and transmitters of the patriotic heritage—historians, teachers, preachers, and parents-had better think this thing over...
...Well, then, a man must be willing to die for honor or he is nothing at all...
...As chairman of the watchdog committee during the Korean War, Johnson badgered and bullyragged the services...
...If the holocaust comes and if there is still a human history, the global American hawkery of the Johnson Period will be understood as a principal cause of World War IV...
...Nations that are without honor die, too, but without purpose and without cause...
...courage: cowardice...
...The leader of a nuclear nation now needs the courage to break all rules and codes, if he must, to save life on Earth...
...But our course is charted always by the compass of honor," he said...
...In a 1980 book, The Real War, Nixon, sounding very much like the Johnson of the early 1950s, wrote: "During all of my presidency we were engaged in 'war' with the Soviet Union...
...As Lyndon Johnson schemed to achieve the Vice Presidency, the position from which he believed he had the best chance for the Presidency, he all but declared that the United States was at war with Russia, and he rallied the majority of the Senate Democrats behind the militaristic program which the Republican hawks desired...
...Johnson used it so often to justify and validate the war in Vietnam, his mind became so rigid about it, American foreign policy under him became a dependent function of it...
...In my opinion, President Johnson had not thought this matter through and very well might have responded to a nuclear crisis as a Westerner defending his country, his honor, and his manhood to the death of civilization...
...Applied to events later than mid-1950, the Cold War is a misnomer that has misled the world's population about the realities of the sporadic but very hot worldwide war—World War III—that has continued now for nearly a third of this century...
...Yet we do what we must...
...The peculiar character of World War III—battles that appear to be local—is caused by nuclear weapons...
...The power of a myth-norm to move people to action abides as much in its negative as in its positive content...
...MacArthur responded with evasion...
...President Jimmy Carter proclaimed the doctrine that the United States will use force if necessary to protect U.S...
...It has such a long, one must say, such an honorable, history, we habitually think about it in terms of itself...
...In fact, the SEATO treaty did no such thing...
...Johnson said, "Ike has made a promise...
...Few paid much attention to what he said as Vice President, but calls to the colors rippled through his oratory...
...They came in the thousands and tens of thousands, just to touch the hands of an American," he said of his first Asian tour...
...Patriotism and military adventures abroad blended together in his mind...
...First, above all else, we must evolve a long-range, overall global plan of strategy for the war to which we are now committed...
...No heritage can be or should be cast off lightly...
...Yet here we still are...
...Though it was wartime, the "Texas Regulars" refused to pledge to back FDR if he was renominated...
...After a few years there was Watergate, criminality in the White House, corrupt Presidential connivance with major corporations, impeachment hearings—the resignation...
...Patriotism seemed to be the remedy he thought would cure the ailments of American society, too—the racism, alienation, dropping out, and turning on...
...The Supreme Court had important effects, but not on the continuously centralizing economic structure...
...The second was the cultural and political demoralization from 1963 to 1968, from assassination to assassination...
...Desperately, the New Dealers fiddled with this condition as if handouts could humanize it, as if antitrust suits could control it, as if pilot programs could redeem it...
...Actually, though, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Eisenhower years, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the New Majority, Jimmy Carter's fumblings, and Ronald Reagan's retrenchments have been one long and exhausting era, a period of palliatives, a half-century of collapse, improvisation, reaction—war, prosperity, injustice—rhetoric, privateering, and degeneration...
...The nation can be blown away in fifteen minutes...
...But it is likelier that, unless there is a general peace—that is, a detente—the present World War III will explode into a nuclear World War IV...
...Just as with personal honor, national honor, in the final extremity, means we will keep on with it, no matter what...
...About this time the Central Intelligence Agency, with Eisenhower's approval, helped overthrow the government of Guatemala...
...In South Carolina during the 1964 elections, he said, "There is not a boy in that crowd that wouldn't gallantly march down to that railroad station and put on that khaki uniform if he thought this flag was in danger tomorrow...
...He projected himself as a specialist in the military...
...oil supplies in the Middle East...
...A person's willingness to risk loss and death or to die for a belief or others is one of the meanings of personal honor...
...No longer just Americans and the national territory...
...As a little boy," he said, "I learned a declamation that I had to say in grade school...
...Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, all of them acting without once asking the people's Congress for a declaration of war, supplied American men by the tens of thousands in this endeavor...
...For instance, Johnson said in the fall of 1947, "if it becomes necessary to stop aggression, we must act promptly and boldly...
...The myth-norms are generally accepted without question among the citizenry...
...The lessons of Vietnam" have faded...
...Arriving in Washington at the beginning of his era, he was himself—in his origins, the plastic aggression of his passion and ambition, his real but expendable compassion, his subordination to his corporate sponsors, his jingoism, McCarthyism, and militarism, and his renascent idealism about the blacks and the other poor—the embodiment of the events and the shapes of power that have become our present situation...
...Joe being the boy at the front—Johnson said the convention's resolutions committee rejected an expression of confidence in the commander-in-chief of the American armies...
...What would it gain a President to save his honor and destroy his nation...
...What would you do...
...These considerations come new upon us, and old values cling fast to our feelings...
...What would it gain a nation to prove its courage and destroy life on Earth...
...Only the clearest thinking about this can get us through...
...The courts will enforce a contract, but honorable men do not need such compulsion, because honor requires them...
...Their salient characteristic is their power, when invoked, to suspend thinking and carry themselves into public action...
...In 1965, during the brief but dazzling burst of progressive legislation under President Johnson, all this sank into the pit of the Vietnam war, dragging us down into its strangeness and immorality...
...Reprinted by permission of the publisher, W.W...
...Step by rhetorical step, the American people were misled and misused by right-wingers, jingo-ists, geopoliticians, corporations with interests abroad, and militaristic Presidents...
...Churchill had been right...
...we had to defend ourselves...
...The dream of a democratic world had become a strategy for global combat...
...He knew, of course, that he had chosen for his main arena a subject of maximum publicity and minimum controversy—doubters and critics could be damned as pinks and isolationists...
...The ideas that control us are no longer matched up to objective reality...
...He thought patriotism would cure all our ills Raging around the White House under political siege on Vietnam, Johnson may have overstated the importance of honor in his own mind, and he certainly overstated the case that the United States was bound to Vietnam by an unconditional commitment of honor made before he became President...
...But just as there is enormous danger in the prevailing general psychological denial of the terminal horror of nuclear weapons, there is enormous danger in the failure to perceive accurately a worldwide reality that can at any time explode into a nuclear holocaust...
...If you do not, they take you for a weakling and a fool and crush you...
...President Reagan announced, quite casually, that the United States will not permit another revolution like Iran's in Saudi Arabia...
...I kind of take industrial growth and its complications in my stride...
...But the most beautiful vision that these eyes have ever beheld was the flag of my country in a foreign land.' " A Congressman functioning within the magnetic field of Franklin Roosevelt, he served through thirteen years of an era that proved strong Presidential rule was necessary to cope with economic and military crises...
...I believe the time is approaching for the birth of a democratic world—a world with common ideals—a world without barriers...
...The difficulty for the citizen reflecting on the heritage in action through Johnson's Presidency (and by extension through any Presidency) is guessing, or divining, how a President thinks...
...In Korea, he said, we were at war not only with China but also with all the "resources behind the Iron Curtain...
...Copyright © 1982 by Ronnie Dugger...
...Roosevelt set an example for the young Congressman in the uses of patriotism to support his own purposes...
...It was the lesson of Munich that dictators do rise who are wholly without scruple or honor and that the only way to cope with them is to prepare to fight...
...During the Vietnam war, by his relentless appeals to national and personal courage for support for his policies, Johnson should have taught us that courage, too—even a President's insecurity about his own courage or his fear of being called a coward—just might drive him into sacrificing hundreds of millions of lives for a pre-nuclear form of a great human value...
...A person's life is not so dear that any price should be paid to go on living it...
...Eisenhower's offer, however, was conditioned on the Diem government "undertaking needed reforms," which of course it did not do...
...He had incorporated military preparedness into his own political future, and as he achieved the leadership of the entire Senate, the unarguable rhetoric of self-defense shaded ever more profoundly into the highly arguable rhetoric of making the United States the policeman of the world...
...We had to be prepared, and now there was just one way to be really prepared, with atomic bombs...
...Ten years later we had no choice...
...We hate war...
...Johnson sometimes liked to ask, and it was a fair question...
...My plane," he said in 1964, "has landed in many continents, touched down in more than thirty countries in the last three years...
...Serving on the naval committee of the House, its committee for postwar planning, and the Senate armed services committee, presiding over the Senate's preparedness subcommittee, he became, in effect, a political general...
...It was reassuring, as we entered the postwar period, that the U.N...
...In Korea, Vietnam, Berlin, he said that men died together regardless of race or religion,' 'protecting our flag...
...I defy anyone to look at that flag above me and not feel in his bones and in his heart an inexpressible pride and excitement...
...My hope and belief is that the same undying courage, the same love of freedom, the same unconquerable spirit which raised the flag of independence over Texas, one day will raise it over a democratic world...
...There is the Do (the myth) and the Don't (the norm...
...and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried...
...The idea of honor is still the Southern and Western idea in the service of which otherwise rational men gravely risk and in foreseeable circumstances will commit upon humanity the hideous crime of nuclear war...
...Korea and Vietnam were battles in the war, as were the coups that brought Soviet satellite regimes to power in places as remote as Afghanistan and South Yemen...
...He was a victim, a victim of his heritage, his energy, his gifts, his ambition, his cynicism, and the forces of his times, but there was what one writer has called "the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson" only in a sentimentalizing personal sense...
...He carried his sense of this conflict with him into the White House, where he said in 1964, "more than twenty years ago I was in the war, and for more than twenty years I have been in the Cold War...
...World War III is the first truly global war...
...In San Diego, during the period when he was considering the decisions which were to lead to his sending half a million American boys to Vietnam, he recited again, but as his own, his schoolboy peroration that "the most beautiful vision that these eyes ever beheld was that American flag in a foreign land...
...Because the fighting has been local (that is, merely national or regional) and has often been covert, people living during this period have not usually understood that this is a world war...
...The United States is now in a position of world leadership where it must act affirmatively to preserve peace...
...If, as Nixon says and Reagan may seek to enact, there is no substitute in World War III for victory, then there is no substitute for nuclear holocaust either, because one cannot plausibly imagine the United States or the Soviet Union accepting military defeat and occupation of its homeland without resorting to nuclear arms...
...Even so, on a number of occasions the war could have become nuclear...
...I have to keep it...
...In short, "They love America...
...It went something like this: 'I have seen the glory of art and architecture...
...In these present nuclear times, American Presidents are animated and controlled by pre-nuclear formulations of ideals like patriotism, honor, and courage...
...This is the only way World War III can be fought without destroying at least half the species...
...In 1962, in the world's closest brush with terminal holocaust, the crisis over Soviet missiles in Cuba almost escalated into a nuclear exchange...
...True, "there is a world to be helped...
...Yet we can see that if we had had, at this place of power, at that particular time, a different person, or if the man there had chosen, rather than the course he did, another one that lay latent in him but he let go for some reason, why, then!—the whole period, the very world, would be different...
...That is a hard thing, no doubt, for a President to bear personally, but he must, and that is what he should be expected to do...
...We continue to accept, in nuclear times, our governance by the element in the idea of honor that compels our conduct, not because a situation actually compels us, but because our word is given...
...But how was this lovely world to be achieved...
...World War III has gone on now for a third of a century, since those closing days of World War II...
...he finally seized and worked, all by himself, the levers of national power...
...To protect what...
...Our ancestors have built a democratic country...
...During the Middle Eastern crisis of 1967, after Nasser of Egypt had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israel, Theodore Draper was authoritatively told that former President Dwight Eisenhower was telephoned and asked what commitment he had made in 1957...
...with decayed and swinish forms of religion...
...A commitment of honor made in 1957...
...Johnson said, "A man publicly acknowledges his allegiance to his country and to his church and to his party...
...After decades more of secret and open warfare in many far corners of the world, former President Nixon declares the World War III which the Truman-Acheson-Johnson Democrats, for the American side, inaugurated...
...With cataclysm possible and, within the span of a few decades, probable, World War III, misperceived as merely a series of local wars, was almost a relief instead of a continuous demoralizing terror...
...If anyone had brought [the treaty] up, we'd have laughed...
...In a radio speech entitled "What Shall I Write Joe...
...Tirelessly after the war, Johnson drummed out again the prewar theme, Be Prepared, the Boy Scout axiom scored in a few basic variants until it became a jungle beat, we must prepare, we must prepare, we must prepare] But now this rhetoric had a heavier burden...
...It is an American, not a political foreign policy that we have in the United States," he said in 1948...
...The Johnson of the early 1950s and the post-Presidential Nixon rhetorically declared World War III because national preparedness had lost its credibility as a theme—it will not cover what has been wrought in its name...
...When he had 14,000 American troops in the Dominican Republic and felt he was "the most denounced man in the world," his mind turned back to that schoolroom...
...with that expected, battles in local nations seemed small cheese...
...The Korean battle over, Johnson continued in this view...
...I didn't have any control over things...
...All this wasn't anyone's fault—who had control...
...we remain fixed on the pursuit of freedom as a deep and moral obligation that will not let us go...
...If America's commitment is dishonored in South Vietnam, it is dishonored in forty other alliances or more," he said...
...Whether a nation, too, must be willing to die for honor, this has become the subject before us...
...Since Hiroshima, people have been thinking, too, that the next world war would be the detonation of the Earth...
...His Presidency enshrined into law new standards of civil rights for all and social compassion for the poor, but it was also responsible for the general calamity...
...Our national honor required us to pursue the course of conduct that we have followed...
...Questioning General MacArthur after Truman broke him, Johnson said, "There is a school of thought which believes that we should confine the bulk of our ground forces to the continental United States and that we should provide other nations with nothing but sea and air support in the battle against communism...
...He answered forthrightly," Draper wrote, "that he considered it a 'commitment of honor' for the United States to live up to his assurance to former Prime Minister Ben Gurion that the Straits would be kept open," and thereupon Johnson affirmed that the blockade was "illegal and potentially disastrous...
...After the war, patriotic antifascism was readily convertible into patriotic anticommunism...
...actions to intervene against revolutionaries in Guatemala, he said the United States should go on "the offensive" against "soft spots in the Communist system...
...Surely the idea of honor is as old as the expectation that "a man will keep his word," but the business ethic about contracts reinforced the concept...
...Johnson left the super-patriots nothing to add...
...One place the fire will go out, continuing there as a smouldering, then fire breaks out at another place, then another...
...Johnson's affection for the homely examples of self-defense arose in this period...
...As much as any other leading politician of the period, Johnson was preoccupied with military hardware and military policy...
...Before World War II, the American debate on war and peace harked back to George Washington's hostility toward foreign entanglements...
...In 1952, President Truman considered all-out nuclear attack on Russia and China...
...World War III began before World War II ended...
...Neither has this been the era of the transitional Truman or the decent, muddled Eisenhower, nor of the amiable, moderate Kennedy, nor of the Presidential perverter of the Constitution nor of his pardoner, nor of the Georgian breaking his most important promises, nor of the Radical Avenger, blowing up the social works of the period one after another...
...These last five clustering decades from Roosevelt to Reagan are best understood as the Johnson Period because Johnson, more than any of the other Presidents of the time, helped generate the values and participated in and then presided over the trends that ultimately prevailed...
...But the same objective considerations that permit one to understand that World War III is in progress can lead either to jingoistic outcry for victory or to sobered hope for a detente that means peace among the nuclear powers...
...It looked like the 1930s all over again, except for the one salient fact that Stalin's troops were not marching on the West...
...which do not contribute to our survival...
...We said we would—or he said we would—he gave our word—we have to...
...What really matters is the social degeneration over which Johnson was his period's chosen impresario...
...Each myth-norm has a powerful obverse—for instance, patriotism: treason...
...They send you there to defend that flag, and you go...
...Even, say, to the deaths of whole nations, including our own...
...Like Eisenhower in 1957 addressing himself to the Straits of Tiran, American Presidents again are giving their word— therefore, the nation's—and committing their honor—therefore, the nation's—concerning the use of force on the other side of the world...
...Johnson as President seldom discussed that question in public...
...Charter was still firmly grounded in defense against aggression— that is, in self-defense...
...We love peace...
...Instead, "They came and said, 'Look, we're losing.' There was a lot to it, but that's what it came down to...
...Pressing home the meaning—giving the answer he wanted from the general—Johnson continued, "Then you would not favor legislative straitjackets that would place a limitation on the number of ground troops that could be supplied...
...His well-placed ally in the press corps, William S. White of The New York Times, wrote in mid-1950, "The Texan has specialized in military legislation during his thirteen years in Congress and has always been close to the military establishment...
...Italics provided...
...The vague but governing ideals of a nation, its myth-norms, arise from evolution and the nation's own cultural and political history...
...This is a question of patriotism, not politics...
...We, not Russia, must decide where we shall fight and where we can fight...
...He seemed to want to mean that the Lebanese, Cypriots, Iranians, Turks, Greeks, and Italians were American patriots—there was prevalent "almost a fanaticism for our way of life and a deep gratitude for what we have done for them...
...he led the Congress into militarizing the Government...
...and Presidential flags, but also, clockwise away from his desk, those of the Navy, Marines, Army, Air Force, and Coast Guard, all bedecked with the battle streamers of the major engagements of U.S...
...In this, he was carrying forward his own intense regional experience of an ideal norm that is little examined, but nationally accepted...
...Brushing aside the afterthought Presidents, Ford and Carter, Reagan came then to do vengeance...
...To think of the half-century since the New Deal as the Roosevelt Era, climaxing in the social legislation of the mid-1960s, gives our time too cheery, too gallant a glow...
...The Vietnam escalation was based on "our word," which we had given, that we could not be "disloyal" to "our treaty obligations," he said in 1967...
...Running for the Senate at Roosevelt's request in 1941 meant, in effect, running as an advocate of American participation in the war in Europe...
...Johnson's patriotism began in his childhood when his father was having him name off the Presidents and he was pledging allegiance in class...
...The rhetorical shift was subtle and seemed, at first, all right...
...In President Johnson's mind there were certain myth-norms that coerced his thinking: Patriotism, Honor, Courage— especially, not to be a coward...
...Perhaps the best way to think about all this is by imagining one's self in the President's place...
...So, too, have been the struggles to keep Communist parties from taking control in Italy and Portugal, and to contain Castro's export of revolution in Latin America...
...Again and again, justifying, justifying, justifying the war, he spoke of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the pact that bound us in honor...
...He served as President during the turbulent confluence of the failure of the western American heritage in our militarized foreign policy, the failure of the New Deal even as it was accomplishing the last of its goals, and the disappearance of the confidence that the democracy is based on an economic system of small-unit competitive free enterprise...
...The anti-Roosevelt Democrats, he said, were marching under a false banner "toward secret, hidden goals...
...A President needs the courage to break all the rules and codes, if he must, to save life on Earth But the next year he said atomic power had become "ours to use, either to Christianize the world or pulverize it...
...As the consummate militaristic politician of the period, Johnson understood that he was participating in what he took to be a war...
...A President who mistook his concern for his own honor as his concern for his nation's would be guilty of an unforgivable confusion...
...National preparedness for self-defense having become national preparedness for collective security, the postwar doctrine then evolved, under the global Presidents, into the idea of national power to protect...
...In 1964, in secret testimony later released, the same Rostow had told Senators that while the SEATO treaty had been "a substantiating basis for our presence" in Vietnam, "we are not acting specifically under the SEATO treaty...
...Still AU the Way with LBJ AN EXCERPT FROM The Politician The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson BY RONNIE DUGGER We have a natural tendency to think of the Presidencies or the slogans of the Administrations as the spans of recent history...
...The one idea which, as an idea alone, does have the power to bind our minds absolutely is this very Southern-Western notion of honor...
...In May 1953, author Joe Goulden has informed us in his book, Korea, The Untold Story of The War, the National Security Council approved the atomic bombing of China...
...troops and bomb the North, and "I never heard any person say to President Johnson that we had to do this because a treaty required it...
...What were we going to do about that contract—just tear it up...
...Collective security became embodied in the NATO Pact, which held that "an armed attack against one or more of [the twelve signatory nations] in Europe and North America shall be considered an attack against all...
...Once, though, he did say that men like the black hero Milton Olive "die for honor...
...Here still and here again was Mark Twain's Sir Walter Scott with his fair ladies and gallant knights, his adventures and enchantments, setting the world "in love with dreams and phantoms...
...Johnson's national security adviser, Walt Rostow, misrepresented the facts about SEATO, too, claiming, in 1966, that the U.S...
...Johnson was not one to take bankruptcy the first time he got in debt...
...We who elect Presidents have to try to decide what values we want in the White House...
...Perhaps people who understood the nature of nuclear weapons have been so frightened about them that they have not wished to know that the world is at war...
...When the strafing and invasion of Guatemala were occurring, Johnson declaimed on the Senate floor, "We have got to be for America first," to "cut out this distrust and hatred of each other which certain ones have been fomenting...
...Eleven long years later, six months into the Korean War, the same Johnson proclaimed, "We are at war...
...In the two spells, 1933-1936 and 1965-1966, when progressives had a majority Ronnie Dugger is the editor and publisher of The Texas Observer...
...The increasing hostility between China and Russia and the proliferation of nuclear weapons among nations suggest that World War III could be supplanted by a war between Russia and China or could roll on into nuclear World War IV caused by single-nation provocations that would not themselves necessarily be perceivable as aspects of World War III...
...The ideal of a United States of the World lay curled in Johnson's mind from way back, as perhaps it lies curled in the imagination of the country itself...
...After that war, we lived through a twenty-year scramble of incorporated commercialism, maldistributed prosperity, anticom-munism as a shield for rapacious corporate power at home and abroad, and an increasingly bristling and independent militarism...
...MacArthur ducked again, but Johnson, in his own career, enacted the answer that he wanted...
...In his patriotic alarm early in the Korean War, he even said outright, "We must not permit the tax money which could go for defense to be depleted by unjustified demands for Government programs...
...But these needs and decisions can become obsolete long before the myth-norms do, and this can cause evolutionary maladaptations...
...Now that the great nations have weapons that can destroy civilization, the question penetrating everything is not whether men want to use these weapons (they of course do not unless they are insane) but whether they adhere to ideas that they think might require them to...
...Honor, which the group had the power to say you had or did not have...
...To protect "the free world," the dictatorship in South Korea, "American interests abroad," the shah of Iran, "the national interest," the dictator Somoza, "every nation's sacred right of self-determination," the dictatorship in South Vietnam, "the United States and our allies," the military junta in El Salvador...
...To protect us from communism, of course...
...Norton, Inc...
...In the late 1940s some Americans and others wanted a preventive war to destroy Chinese installations with nuclear weapons...
...He adapted himself ideal-istically, pragmatically, radically, cynically, above all opportunistically, to the New Deal, the War, and the Reaction...
...and Eisenhower's Secretary of State sent word to Chou through Nehru that unless the Korean War ended, the United States would bomb China and had perfected nuclear artillery shells...
...After visiting Europe and the Middle East, he said—while breaking ground for a new dam at Somerville, Texas—that "everywhere I have gone the people came running and cheering after the American flag...
...In 1974 J. Paul Getty, probably the richest man in the world, said, "Things burst and the devil drives...
...In his victory statement on Roosevelt's reelection he accused the Regulars of trying to "sabotage democracy...
...See the Editor's Memo, Page 4 of this issue...
...When the United States went into Korea, House Speaker Sam Rayburn wrote a constituent of his, "everybody in Washington, members of both parties, said that we had to go in to keep our word...
...What would it gain the flag to blow away the continent over which it flies...
...obligation under its terms "has from the outset guided our actions in South Vietnam...
...Honor, as we have received it from the preHiroshima heritage, compels us, not because it proceeds from a situation that objectively compels us, but because it is regarded as mandatory in itself...
...The Cold War lasted five years, from the end of World War II to the outbreak of the Korean War...
...A President who paid with his people's whole life and being for his conception of their beliefs and interests would have committed the terminal "arrogance of power...
...Eased for a little while, the Depression returned savagely, only to be erased and replaced by the larger calamity of World War II...
...If you let a bully come into your front yard," he was still saying late in his life, "the next day he'll be upon your porch, and the day after that he'll rape your wife in your own bed...
...Self-defense meant essentially defense of the national body, the territory of the United States...
...So, our hope and our purpose," the President said, "is to preserve our honor without a world in ruins...
...This article is excerpted from "The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson...
...From the first, Johnson identified with Roosevelt's hostility toward isolationism and appeasement...
...By the time Lyndon B. Johnson arrived in Washington as a Congressional secretary in 1931, the United States had already become the world's leading Corporation Society...
...When they lead your boy down to the railroad station to send him into boot camp and put a khaki uniform on him to send him some place where he may never return, they don't ask you whether you are a Republican or Democrat," he said in Pittsburgh...
...They did not take, and refused to take, the pledge of allegiance...
...Americans had to be persuaded to prepare, not to defend themselves and their territory, since this was not under attack, but to fight in wars that would occur entirely elsewhere...
...That is quite a change, indeed, from national preparedness for the self-defense of the United States...
...Six years later, still putting down politics as a noisome thing, really beneath the contempt of serious patriots, he said that "the politics of partisanship must be subordinated to the politics of patriotism...
...As Johnson argued the case, support of President Truman's aid to Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan was required by patriotism...
...Mounted around the wall of his Oval Office were not only the U.S...
...history...
...Out in Pocatello, Idaho, during the 1966 election, he said that when you start feeling sorry for yourself and think, before you turn over and go to sleep, that no one loves you, just ask yourself who in another nation you would trade places with, "which flag you would rather exchange for ours...
...During the first dark years of Johnson's career in public office, the United States was engaged in the necessary use of force to defend itself against violent aggressors...
...Yet personal honor assumes the life continuum: even in dying we commit our own mortality to the memory and reality of others...
...We are still mired in the third great depression of the period...
...The Times routinely called Johnson "a Congressional specialist in military affairs...
...To a Texas reporter he said the United States had to go on a "diplomatic offensive through measures short of open war...
...And a President who killed another nation on behalf of his idea of the honor of his own would never be forgiven by the human race or history...
...If politicians and the prevailing psychology of the people require decisions to use the new weapons in some situations whatever the consequences, the life of the species has become hostage to ideas handed down to us from the recent but radically different past...
...Richard Goodwin said that, as a Johnson staffer, he sat in on the discussions where the decisions were made to send in U.S...
...The global American Presidents, from Truman to Reagan (possibly excepting Carter), have sought to use the awesome power vested in them to teach and convert the world...
Vol. 46 • June 1982 • No. 6
