Hello, Gentle Reader!
I've done a huge amount of research already, into many aspects of the Swinging Sixties. But there are some issues I've not yet been able to nail down, and I'm hoping someone out there in Webworld may have some answers.
I'll no doubt be adding to this section as time goes by.... Hope to see some great new info soon!
"LBJ! LBJ! How many kids d'you kill today!"
I'm usually pretty careful as a researcher, but this time I blew it. I read somewhere that in a book by a former adviser to President Johnson, the author told how he repeatedly warned the Administration that Vietnam was a quagmire, that the US could not win the war it had started there, and that the cost in human suffering, and depletion of the nation both financially and morally, would be unbearable. He kept pestering LBJ, sending memos and reports, and getting no response.
Finally the adviser went to LBJ in person, and stubbornly gave his pitch in favor of ending the war by any means possible. LBJ got sick of listening, and thumped his fist on the desk, yelling "I can't end the war - my friends are making too much money out of it!'
The Problem: I can't find the reference! Can anyone help!
Thanks in advance,
Richard.
I think that it is probably a made-up statement. I found a very few references to the statement (and variations on it) in a Google search; none provided a reference. I ran a DeepDyve search and came up with nothing. At http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/lbj-transcript/ it is reported that George Ball, then Undersecretary of State, advised Johnson in a 75-page memo that the war could not be won. The memo was not ignored, but it appears that Johnson was more concerned about what effect an acknowledgment of defeat in Vietnam would have on his "Great Society" legislation in Congress.
ReplyDeleteOkay, as a follow up, I've come across a reference that William Pepper (http://www.williampepper.com/) in a speech (see http://archive.org/details/William_Pepper for a video of the speech) reported that Colonel John Downey (supposedly Johnson' briefing officer, not the CIA operative who was imprisoned in China at the time) reported the alleged statement. I haven't looked into it enough to verify, but I suspect that PBS would have reported it in their documentary if it could be verified.
ReplyDeleteThanks Eric, I'll look into those links. (I presume you're the Eric I know?) One of my themes for my book “The War On The 60s” is that PBS runs from controversy (a weasel-word meaning "mainstream opinion might find this uncomfortable") Indeed, it was a PBS Documentary series "Making Sense of the Sixties", that first gave me the idea for the book!
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