Rick Perlstein Quotes
Lyndon B. Johnson thought he'd have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).
Perlstein, Rick. "Obama's LBJ Problem." The Nation, 15 Dec. 2009.
See the Macnama telephone quotation when the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted many more combat soldiers in Vietnam. Johnson felt he had no political choice.
The Vietnam War was certainly not a victory for the U. S. Some saw it as our first defeat. While it was not ended on Johnson’s watch, he must certainly share that responsibility with Nixon and even JFK as these three all were responsible for our Vietnam failure. Johnson, ended up with what he feared most.
This was only 10 months into Nixon's Presidency. He stepped up the war.
Had he signed such a treaty in 1968, he would have been pilloried by the Conservatives of both parties for selling out the interests and principles of the United States and shackling the military before they could win the war. The military was lying about their successes and there were very few. Further, our ally whose government we were protecting from armed revolution was totally corrupt and did not support freedom and democratic values much more than the North Vietnamese Communists did. The Vietnamese in the South had little to fight for unless they were proofing from the corrupt government. There was no possibility that American could have won the war under those conditions. When the Nixon Administration signed the treaty, some of the ultra conservatives objected, but Nixon was a Republican anti-Communist and red baiter and this blunted the opposition of the bulk of the conservatives who were seeing a more realistic view of the war. The liberals who hated Nixon, however, supported him on this matter which was then their most important issue.
Eric S. Perlstein is an American historian and journalist who has garnered recognition for his chronicles of the 1960s and 1970s, and the American conservative movement. The author of three bestselling books, Perlstein received the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Politico has dubbed him "a chronicler extraordinaire of modern conservatism."
