And yet more evidence (as if it were necessary) that nothing in today’s news is new:
In October [1967] the formation of an anti-antiwar group was announced by WWII hero General Omar Bradley and former senator Paul Douglas.[…] [Members of the new Citizens’ Committee for Peace with Freedom in Vietnam] included Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. They said they were speaking “for the great ‘silent center’ of American life.” Douglas said he’d come up with the idea himself and emphasized, “We are not supporters of a president or of an administration.”
__
He lied. The committee had been invented by a White House aide, John Roche, who promised in an “EYES ONLY” memo to the president, “I will leave no tracks.”… The ruse succeeded. The media reported the group as spontaneous. Letters to the editor gushed, “The riff-raff have held center stage long enough and the performances grow more sickeningly disgusting with each added publictiy stunt… ” Maybe the letters had been manufactured at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Roche had promised the president “letter-writing squads.”
Shades of No Labels, as well as you-know-which-group(s)!
Not to mention poor dumb George Romney getting assailed by ‘mysterious pamphlets‘ asserting that “Supreme Court Declares Romney Not Qualified Under the Constitution” because he’d been born while his American parents were living in Mexico. Birtherism, a meme to be raised against whatever this election cycle’s variety of “exotic un-Americanism” might be…
What struck you about these ‘new paradigms’? What do you remember from those days?
(Tech note: You can edit your comment by right-clicking on the ‘Edit’ button to open a new tab/window and working from there. Another FYWP glitch… )
Nicole
I wasn’t alive then, so I can’t comment on personal memories of 1968, but what struck me was the depiction of Bobby Kennedy as one of the “sons of bitches.” Having been born after the 1960’s, my understanding of RFK was an an idealist cut down for his ideals, not the political animal he seems to have really been. So I’m really aware of how politicians’ histories and characters are rewritten by people years later (hello, Reagan?) usually for political advantage.
licensed to kill time
Well, in the everything old is new again context, it always strikes me how willing Nixon and the ‘fed-up-niks’ were to do whatever it took to divide and conquer (i.e. win elections), regardless of what it meant for the country as a whole.
We are seeing that again in the current Republican tactics. They just don’t seem to care about policy or governance, just winning the cycle. And still they lie, and they lie and they lie.
Nicole
I’m also really thinking about the line “Here would be the New Politics’ tragic flaw: everywhere it recognized only enthusiasms.” That seems to be a legacy of some liberalism that carries through to today- a refusal to recognize politics as the art of the possible.
I think the Right, which was long immune to that in any major sense, is now seeing it with the Tea Baggers, and I wonder how that is going to play out in the long game for them.
geg6
@licensed to kill time:
Yes, it’s quite discouraging to see, once again, how they never, ever change. I knew this back then and I know it now. I just forget every now and again and have to be reminded. And I’m one who pays attention. It explains why the average person forgets even more easily and, unlike me, is willing to give them chance after chance with the same depressing results.
Linda Featheringill
Hi, Guys. Late, but here.
Mike E
I thought the Bonnie and Clyde bit was very interesting–along with other period movies that were certainly signs o’ the times.
Also, is it me or have the attempts by conservatives to place their own mass media markers in the game, in “competition” to “liberal” pop culture stand outs, have they not gotten any more sophisticated or subtler in decades hence? With the possible exception of The Green Berets, of course… that one was brilliant parody. Wait… what? It wasn’t?!
Linda Featheringill
I don’t remember 1968 politics very well. Daughter was born in 1967. I separated from my then husband in 1968. So my attention was pretty much turned inward.
Linda Featheringill
@Mike E:
Green Berets. LOL. No. It wasn’t a parody. Which makes it even more interesting. :-)
Damned at Random
@licensed to kill time:
I keep thinking that the whole one election at a time strategy reflects the next quarter’s earnings mentality in business. Long term consequences be damned.
Nixon intimated that he had a solution to the Vietnam quandary then hoped not to get called out on it until after the election, while simultaneously hoping Johnson didn’t kick his legs out from under him by actually achieving a settlement. And the press plays into the game by superficial horse race coverage that does nothing to educate the public about policy proposals. I was struck by the mayoral candidate who issued 40 position papers and lost to the macho blustering of the incumbent. And this happened when people still read newspapers.
Linda Featheringill
@Mike E:
Bonnie and Clyde: That movie was the first illustration of police use of really excessive force that I had ever seen. It was shocking. And of course, I wasn’t the only one who was shocked.
Mike E
@Linda Featheringill: Funny you’d mention that, my parents went to out and out war c. 1968 and were divorced soon after. I was about 5 then.
Linda Featheringill
@Damned at Random:
Macho sold. Just like sex sells. And macho still sells to some people. Well, maybe to a lot of people.
Nicole
@Mike E: I liked the Bonnie & Clyde mention, too, and have it on my list of movies to watch this week.
You reminded me of my 8th grade Social Studies class, when our teacher played us “The Ballad of the Green Beret” followed by “Eve of Destruction” to try to illustrate the two camps in the 1960s. I think “Eve” is a pretty clunky song, in that earnest way some liberal screeds can be (“My blood’s so mad, feels like coagulatin'”? Really?) but remember being very affected by “hate your next dark neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace.”
Music, which is generally belongs to the young, does not strike me as a great area for conservatives, but they do okay with TV. 24, anyone?
SBJules
I was one of the riff-raff in 1968. But I worked in a bank. Bobby Kennedy was an idealist, I thought then and still do. He came to Santa Barbara to campaign & my department of the bank got permission to leave early so we could go see him. He was killed a week later. I have always remembered 1968 as a terrible year. High School friends getting killed in Vietnam, Bobby being killed, Nixon winning.
Linda Featheringill
In politics, I sometimes think it’s true that “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Politicians have been running “long cons” for probably as long as cities have been in existence.
licensed to kill time
@Damned at Random: Your comparison to the quarterly business cycle is apt. Say what they will about the pipe-smoking, elbow patched liberals, at least they were thinking deeply about the future and putting forth plans. The other side was putting out slogans and lies.
Just like today.
BGinCHI
Evidence Nixon-era bullshit still in force?
Frank Luntz has a regular column at HuffPo.
Assholes.
Davis X. Machina
@Linda Featheringill:
Any political party based on an appeal to the worst in people begins every cycle half-a-lap ahead.
Vegas — or is it Augustine — says “Take the inherent depravity of mankind and give the points.”
Mike E
@Nicole: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA comes to mind here, too. But aside from photo ops of entertainers and their president (Carpenters?) I wonder if there’s been another successful “conservative” opus in recent years. 24 seems to me like an old school formula that got co-opted by the wingers.
Damned at Random
I’m struck again by the presidential nominating process in ’68 – a handful of primaries and a lot of state primary conventions where the “wise men” of the party pour over chicken entrails to come up with a first round candidate, followed by the spectacle of the party conventions where the real horsetrading happened. (I haven’t read ahead and am eagerly anticipating the next chapter). Are we better or worse served by the current primary-heavy system followed by the big stage-managed convention pageant?
stuckinred
1968 started for me in earnest on January 19. I was stationed about 2 miles south of the DMZ in Korea when the North Koreans launched the “Blue House Raid”. Shortly thereafter they seized the Pueblo and took the crew hostage. We spent weeks out in the field with very little information except that a full scale war could break out at any time and we had diddly shit to fight back with. Later that spring MLK was murder when were out on a”field problem”. I’ll never forget one of the militant brothers from Chicago saying “I can’t believe it took them so long to shoot that uncle tom”. Needless to say I was stunned. Fast forward to the summer at Ft Lewis as the unit I was in prepared to ship out for Vietnam. Seattle was a wild scene and we’d get there every chance we could to score on “the Ave”. I remember the posters warning people not to go to Chicago because it was a set-up. The first time I dropped acid we were in Seattle and took the bus back to the fort. It was late when we got back so we took a radio into the laundry room to listen to rock and roll. The news came on that Bobby was killed. Later we watched the convention in our barracks and were stunned to find out it was true, it was a set-up. It was down hill from there. Of course I was still only 18 so I couldn’t vote for another three fucking years so I just watched the Trickster win from the sidelines.
And that is the short version.
Damned at Random
@Davis X. Machina:
“Take the inherent depravity of mankind and give the points.”
I may get that engraved on my headstone
Linda Featheringill
@Damned at Random:
With the old nomination system, Obama wouldn’t have had a chance. Too many state apparatchiks would have said, “I like Obama but he doesn’t have a chance in the general election.”
Mike Kay (True Grit)
How do fans of LBJ feel about this covert/astrotuff hippie-punching that he was personally involved in?
I can only imagine how today’s LBJ fans would freak out if one of Obama’s aides called bloggers “riff-raff”.
Nicole
Although, horse racing nerd that I am, I do have to take issue with Perlstein’s description of McCarthy as a “stalking horse- the steed who ran at the front of the pack to tire the competition while the favorite hung back staying fresh until it was time to make his move.” While that is a very real racing tactic, the horse sent to the front right away to tire out the competition isn’t a called a “stalking horse”; it’s called a “rabbit.”
And in racing, as in politics, they can also screw things up. In 2005, the owners of the favorite in the Kentucky Derby, Bellamy Road, also entered a rabbit, Spanish Chestnut, to ensure a suicidally fast pace. Spanish Chestnut did, but Bellamy Road, instead of hanging back and making his move later, ran right along with him. First and second place went to the two longest shots in the field, neither of whom were particularly great racehorses.
Okay, back to the 1960s…
Linda Featheringill
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
riff-raff. :-)
stuckinred
@Mike Kay (True Grit): Fuck LBJ, then, now and forever.
“Oh, but he passed all that great social legislation”
spit
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: Have you seen “The Anderson Platoon”?
Available streaming on Netflix. It’s raw footage with almost no commentary from Vietnam in ’66, following a platoon with a black Lt (Anderson) who was a WP grad.
It’s really amazing stuff, about an hour long.
Anne Laurie
@Mike E:
My parents’ ‘legal separation’ (they were Catholics)was implemented around 1967. Although the proximate causes had nothing to do with politics, my mom was an enthusiastic McCarthy supporter (all his worst political flaws made him her beau ideal) and my dad was a grim LBJ upholder who then switched to Bobby Kennedy, largely because of RFK’s son-of-a-bitch aspects…
As people started saying at the time: the personal is political. I’ve been thinking about Gail Collins’ When It Changed: the Amazing Journey of American women from 1960 to the Present as the next choice for our BJ Book Group, because it’s a different & more hopeful take on the same era.
Mike E
@Mike Kay (True Grit): Cue Louis Rennault from Casablanca: I’m shocked, shocked to find out that there is politics going on here!
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Anne Laurie: Anne, aren’t you a big LBJ fan?
Nicole
@Mike E: That’s a good point, except that Joel Surnow, the co-creator of 24 is a very vocal conservative. He was shopping around a 10-hour Kennedy miniseries that was reputed to be very unflattering. Did it ever get made, does anyone know?
“God Bless the USA”- good call. Who could forget that one? Heh.
And of course, that makes me remember Reagan’s attempt to use “Born in the USA” for his re-election campaign. Heh heh heh.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: Yep, got my copy. Check “The Face of War” as well. I saw them as a double header in Seattle that summer.
Linda Featheringill
@stuckinred:
So 1968 was a helluva year?
I was not aware that some folks understood that Chicago was a set up ahead of time. So when it happened, I was totally shocked.
I do remember that Genet wrote a piece for Esquire that kind of put the whole thing into perspective. I looked for that essay online but couldn’t find it.
“Those thighs. God! Those thighs!”
Omnes Omnibus
I turned four in August of 68, so my thoughts of that time are filtered through the stories of my parents who were on the fringes of a lot of interesting things. I can say that, as I read this book, I am glad I was a small child at the time.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@stuckinred: where you drafted or did you volunteer?
stuckinred
A Face of War is on youtube.
Anne Laurie
@Nicole:
Yeah, but ‘us liberals’ got there first! As a proud first-gen Trekkie, I have to cite Gene Rodenberry saying about his pilot “They told me I could have an alien regular or a female second-in-command, but not both. So I kept Spock and married the woman (Majel Barrett, who did get to play Nurse Chapel) because in California it was illegal to do it the other way around.” Not to mention Whoopi Goldberg reporting her first reaction to Lt. Uhura: “There’s a Black lady on the teevee and she ain’t no maid!“
SBJules
@SBJules:
Oh my, I forgot to say that Martin Luther King was killed in 1968 too. Awful year.
stuckinred
@Mike Kay (True Grit): I was given my choice between the Army and jail. Went in on my 17th birthday. That is why I went to Korea first, you had to be 18 to go to the Nam. I actually got out 2 months before I turned 20.
Mike E
@Anne Laurie: My mom wore a yellow star in WWII, and her family escaped to (of all places) Asti region of Italy to avoid the Holocaust. Her stories of writing telegrams to LBJ and Nixon, to implore them to stop that shit, really resonated with me. Actual war experience apparently means as much today as it did then.
She was also big into our local League of Women Voters–I’d be interested in reading your suggested book!
Damned at Random
@Nicole:
Re: Reagan’s use of “Born in the USA”
I always wondered if anybody ever read him the lyrics.Or was he too demented to follow them?
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: Thanks!
Was about to say “Doesn’t seem to be available anywhere….bummer.” Couldn’t find it to watch or buy.
stuckinred
@Linda Featheringill: There was a great deal of agent provocateur action and I think that is what folks meant by set-up. There were many people who were totally non-violent but things were really changing in that year.
Nicole
@Anne Laurie: Oh, I never said liberals didn’t do well with TV (what a great quote from Rodenberry- I’ll show that to my husband who is a HUGE classic Trek fan); just that it’s one medium where conservatives manage to turn out a quality product from time to time, even if I disagree with the message the product is selling. While in music, their efforts are usually just pathetic.
I remember seeing an interview with William Shatner where he talked about the interracial kiss that the network wouldn’t show- I loved hearing him talk about being told he was going to have to kiss Nichelle Nichols and his reaction was that of, I’m sure, every other straight male who saw her in that little skirt would be- “GREAT!” But the network feared the reaction from the public.
Svensker
@stuckinred:
Wow, you just gave me a whole truckload of flashback.
I was that hippie girl you saw on “the Ave” with waist length hair, wearing an African robe and carrying a guitar. Heavily into the protest song scene. And incense.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@stuckinred: Did you spend time in vietnam?
Nicole
@Damned at Random: I imagine he looked at the lyric “go and kill the yellow man” as a positive thing.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
funniest part about Lee Greenwood is he’s an evangelical who’s been married 4 times.
They love to talk about family values, but none of them can stay in a family.
stuckinred
@Mike Kay (True Grit): Yes, 11 months. I got a 30 day drop to go to the University of Illinois. Not bad for a GED!
Damned at Random
Also, stuckinred- were you infantry?
Nicole
@Mike Kay (True Grit): And that is a cognitive dissonance peculiar to the Right that I will never, ever understand. The absolute inability to apply their own personal journeys to the world at large.
stuckinred
@Nicole: And “got in a little hometown jam” is a reference to how many of us ended up there.
Anne Laurie
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
Yeah, but that would come later, partly in response to the weasels & nematodes that have since disgraced the Oval Office and partly from reading up on LBJ’s back-story. In 1967/68, I was not-quite-a-teenager, and insofar as I had any honest political choices I was a Mary McCarthyite: “A benevolent monarchy, with ME as the monarch.” I was reading a lot of Finley Peter Dunne & H.L. Mencken, to supplement Mark Twain’s essays (with a side of Swift & Alexander Pope). When I progressed from s-f reader to full-scale Fan Girl, it was partly Star Trek making the boys’ club a little more gender-friendly and partly the pessimism that only a full-scale break with
realitythe existing political paradigm would save us from full-scale nuclear annihilation.Mike Kay (True Grit)
@stuckinred: is there a vietnam film(s) you like in particular?
licensed to kill time
I started out thinking LBJ was a pretty good guy when I was a pre-teen because all I heard about was Ladybird planting flowers by the roads and his Great Society programs. A few years later, as I became more aware of the Vietnam war and his awful policies there (teenager by then) I was one of those people chanting “Hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today?” outside the White House.
I actually felt a (teensy weensy) bit of sympathy for him reading these chapters, because he so desperately wanted to continue his Great Society vision and got so derailed by the Vietnam war. But that tiny bit of sympathy evaporates when you realize that he kept escalating for political reasons, not wanting to be the guy that lost Vietnam.
So many screwed up things happen because of that focus on the short term political advantage.
stuckinred
@Damned at Random: Negative, REMF truck driver in the Arty in Korea and Signal in the Nam. Scroll about half-way down this page, I’m on the jeep with the 60.
Nicole
@stuckinred: I didn’t know that- that’s really interesting. I was young when that song was big so I didn’t get a lot of the references. The first real awareness I had of Vietnam was when Platoon was released. My brother and I tried to sneak into the theater to see it, but the ticket seller wouldn’t let us in, so it became a family movie trip a few weeks later.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Anne Laurie: so how do you feel about the Roche hippie-punching he okay-ed.
Nicole
That is, we tried to buy tickets, but it was rated R.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@stuckinred: hey, ya not such a bad looking guy.
stuckinred
@Mike Kay (True Grit): What was mentioned above, The Anderson Platoon, A Face of War, also 84 Charlie MoPic and Go Tell the Spartans. And don’t forget Winter Soldier about what has been described here at BJ as “the totally ineffective VVAW”. My picture was on that site but they took it down.
Mike in NC
@Nicole:
It got made all right but the History Channel disowned it. Several cable outlets have passed on it as well.
Apparently it was a wingnut fantasy piece, like the infamous “Path to 9/11”.
stuckinred
@Mike Kay (True Grit): Like this better?
Nicole
@Mike in NC:
Well thank goodness for small favors.
Damned at Random
@stuckinred:
Glad you were REMF. The guys I knew who were in infantry mostly came to bad ends – suicide, alcohol and the likes
Anne Laurie
@SBJules:
I agree, he was an Irish idealist, which means he was simultaneously a cynical son-of-a-bitch.
Didn’t want to get ahead of the reading, but my dad’s first reaction to RFK’s assassination was “I knew they’d have to kill him, as soon as they told us King had been killed.” The parties behind those collective pronouns differed, but a bunch of my neighbors and some of the (mostly Irish, some Italian) teachers, including the nuns, at my parochial school were saying the same thing. JFK was an anomaly, MLK was a horror, but ‘making it a trinity‘ with RFK really confirmed a form of political paranoia for a lot of blue-collar Americans, I think.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: I think you had more hair then…..
Mike E
File this under “Brushes with Kevin Bacon” or some such: I lived in Charlotte and went to a soiree about 20 years ago put on by a real blue-blooded Southern couple. They proudly displayed a set of crystal glasses given as a wedding present from none other than Gen. Westmoreland, a family friend in S. Carolina. Said the wife, “he wrote in the card, ‘enjoy these dozen fine glasses’ but we only got 9.” Few people back then got the joke, though.
Anne Laurie
@BGinCHI:
Heck, Roger Ailes — introduced as a newly-molted political imago in these very chapters! — has a whole godsdamned media empire.
stuckinred
@Nicole: The Boss was great to Nam vets, he gave a good deal of dough to start the Vietnam Vets of America. He had a great deal of conflict with his dad about not going and then his old man had a change of heart when he realized how stupid it was.
stuckinred
@Damned at Random: It’s a very fine line. Just like there, when you get home it’s a roll of the dice.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: It’s in the drawer upstairs!
Omnes Omnibus
I have to say that, as well written and informative as this book is, I am not really enjoying reading it. It pisses me off to look at our worst impulses as a people as they bubble to the surface, it enrages me to see how people like Nixon and his henchmen took cynical advantage of those impulses, and, finally, it scares me more than a little to see many of Nixon’s people as well as their spiritual heirs out in today’s world doing it all again.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: I read it a couple of years ago and there is no way I was going to do it again. I chatted with Rick when he did a gig at FDL back when I annoyed people there instead of here. Good dude.
gnomedad
@stuckinred:
Just wow.
Anne Laurie
@stuckinred:
Seriously: I hope you’re writing down / recording your long-form stories where future generations will be able to access them. You do such a wonderful job here on the quick bits, I want them to be available for all the readers they (you) deserve.
jwb
@Damned at Random: Or it shows you just how unimportant the lyrics actually are. Sort of the same way Reagan would set up those press photo-ops in scenic places in order to sign orders eviscerating environmental regulation.
stuckinred
@gnomedad: I remember his name and even have a picture of him. He was a bad-ass south side of Chicago brother that gave this nickle-dime juvenile delinquent from the suburbs a real education.
stuckinred
@Anne Laurie: My chair let me use some of this as my “theoretical framework” so it is buried in my diss!
Nicole
Ah heck; I gotta go to a dinner party. It was great fun finally being home on Sunday to be part of the discussion this week. Looking forward to next Sunday.
licensed to kill time
@Omnes Omnibus: I second that emotion.
Mike E
@Omnes Omnibus:
Gotta drive the stake through their hearts; otherwise, it’s nothing but zombie lies from these sons of Nixon.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: Seconded, my mom’s older brother lived one hell of a life, Navy for years, mining, you name it. He was possibly the best story teller I have ever known. He managed to have just enough truth in his bullshit and enough bullshit in his truth that you never knew, but you always hung on every word. He was going to write down his experiences, but never got around to it. As a result, after he died, those stories were gone.
Phyllis
@Anne Laurie:
That’d be a great choice. While so much seems to be ‘same sh*t, different day’, there really has been a lot of progress in a remarkably short period of time.
Anne Laurie
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
Well, this ‘LBJ fan’ assumes that at least one Obama aide has done so, just not in front of a public mic. Given how dedicated Obama has been to working with the Republicans and the Blue Dogs, I don’t see a scenario where he and LBJ would have been anything other than cordial with each other. The two men seem to have had a lot in common, actually.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: Have you read Tim O’Brien’s work? “How to Tell a True War Story” will rock you.
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred: No, I haven’t. I will look for it.
Damned at Random
I was born a cynical 40-year-old and never much into hero worship – but as a Catholic I understood the power of martyrdom. I’m not sure if the third son (RFK) was an idealist or if he had the mantle thrust upon him and saw it as a route to power. I suspect his empathy for the poor in America was genuine, but doubt that he would have taken a less realpolitic approach to Vietnam than LBJ or Nixon. I think that disaster was more about our national insecurities than LBJ’s personal demons
stuckinred
Also, there are many who do not want to read “war” books. For you there is “Remembering Heaven’s Face: A Moral Witness in Vietnam” by John Balaban.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s a chapter in “The Things They Carried”.
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred: One of those books that is perennially on my list of must reads…
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: Read “If I Die in a Combat Zone” many of the same stories but shorter. Stay away from Going After Cacciato if you are pressed for time!
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: FFS, put down your computer and get a copy of The Things They Carried right now!
Don’t make me come up there.
Mike E
@Damned at Random: I agree, though LBJ’s propensities didn’t help alleviate things much. Speaking of movies, Donald Moffat’s portrayal of LBJ in “The Right Stuff” as a megalomaniac really stood out for me.
ETA oops, forgot to type movie title
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: You read his “In The Lake of the Woods”? A murder mystery that jumps back and forth from My Lai to the Little Big Horn!
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Anne Laurie: so ya gonna give LBJ a pass for his covert astroturf hippie punching? Shame on you, I though you had principles.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: Read all of it. He’s a great writer.
I miss Larry Brown. Poor fucker.
stuckinred
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
I got no class
and I got no principles!
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: I ODed on Vietnam memoirs in my early Army days. That was one of the ones I hadn’t gotten around to reading when I moved on to Kundera.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@stuckinred: You were in the Allman Brothers – Cool.
Mike E
@Mike Kay (True Grit): Dude, be nice to the thread lady. She’s filling in for the author, also. Too.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: You know this? He’s English faculty at Alabama.
Late Thoughts on an Old War: The Legacy of Vietnam [Hardcover]
Philip D. Beidler
stuckinred
@Mike Kay (True Grit): Saw Duane 3 times.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@stuckinred: funny how hippie bloggers give the great LBJ a free pass on domestic spying, Astrotuff hippie punching, and COINTELPRO, but boy-o-boy, Obama’s press secretary says one wrong word, and the volume goes up to 11 with calls for impeachment.
Damned at Random
@Mike E: LBJ seems like such a tragic figure. He achieved the highest office in a manner that left him to suspect he didn’t actually earn it – whereas if he had remained Majority Leader, he would be remembered as one of the great leaders of that institution. He followed the charismatic martyr- his “Great Society” was largely considered Kennedy’s legacy but the Vietnam fiasco was all LBJ’s
Mike E
@stuckinred: I’m curious about your thoughts on Stanley Karnow’s tome.
Anne Laurie
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
That it was a stupid idea which didn’t (couldn’t) keep the reality of the failure of the war off the front pages. If LBJ hadn’t dropped his bid for re-election, and if he hadn’t been replaced by the Un-Indicted Co-conspirator, there might have been more attention paid to the tactic by future political operatives. But in the real world, it was a short-term tactic of interest only to historians. I think LBJ was a flawed human being, an excellent legislator, and a better-than-average President — not a little tin god.
And I’m quite sure there will be unflattering stories about the Obama Administration emerging over the next 40 years, but they won’t destroy my faith in politics and/or the Democratic Party either. I hope you are equally blessed.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike Kay (True Grit): Are you going to play matoko_chan on this issue? The book thread two weeks ago was almost entirely about Johnson.
Mike E
@Damned at Random: And the pure pro that was Richard M. Nixon reveled at the opportunity to lay him bare. Tragic complexities are what Repubs eat for breakfast seemingly.
Ruckus
@Damned at Random:
I thought that Bobbie was a pretty political animal then but have mellowed quite a bit about him over time. Don’t really know why.
stuckinred
@Mike E: I loved it along with “A Bright Shining Lie,” by Neil Sheehan and Fire in The Lake by Frances Fitzgerald. Full disclaimer, I have an exhaustive Vietnam library from Bernard Fall to Karl Marlantes. I’m still trying to figure the whole thing out!
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: O’Brien is? Maybe just a visiting? Martone has been there for years. You’d like him; great midwestern writer.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: Beidler
http://english.ua.edu/04_faculty_staff/faculty/beidler_p.htm
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: Karnow’s book was required reading in the 80s when I was an undergrad. Had a great class and that was a centerpiece.
That war produced some great art and scholarship.
Damned at Random
Annie Laurie-
Thanks again for hosting. I missed the last 2 weeks-the first because my grandbaby was taking a nap on me and the second because I was in urgent care for the sinus infection and pink eye I got from the grandbaby taking a nap on me. Sigh.
I read the thread even when I don’t participate and enjoy being part of the community
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: He’s a smart guy. They have an amazing faculty for a state full of such dipshits.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: Try “In Pharaoh’s Army” by Tobias Wolff.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ditto, but — Forewarned is forearmed. I really want this book to be widely taught & read by high school & college students, so they can see where today’s Masters of the Political Universe came from and know how gruesome the world can be.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Anne Laurie:I’m just looking for consistency.
Remember, i’m the pragmatist here, not the ideologue. I’m a relativist, not an idealist. I’m not the one who believes in ponies.
Sadly, most bloggers are inconsistent. They say one thing, then excuse or apologize for their favorite (ie Edwards and his war vote).
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: Here’s a killer. In Late Thoughts he is describing an especially crazy time in his post-war life. He’s at a party and keep dropping the needle on “Up against the wall, motherfuckers” from the Airplane, Volunteers. I used the very same line in my diss. We discussed it by email and he said, “my story is your story”.
Mike E
@stuckinred: My sister married a Vet who did a couple tours and is probably 4 yrs older than you. He will not talk about any of it. We agree on most other topics concerning more recent unnecessary conflicts; kills me that I can’t have this conversation with him though.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Write down what you remember, while you still remember it. Future generations will be grateful.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: Oh, I am reading it and I am learning. It is just that it is a hard, painful read and I need to leaven it with something more cheerful like the Collected Poetry of Hospice Care in Soviet Gulags.
Anne Laurie
@Mike Kay (True Grit): If I call you an O-bot, will it make you happy?
stuckinred
@Mike E: It’s the WWII model, stuff it. The notion of “Rap Groups” and “Self Help Groups” came from the VVAW where vets felt they could only trust other vets.
stuckinred
OOOOOWEEEE, got the red beans and rice, gumbo, fresh collard from the garden and grilled chicken comin right up!
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Anne Laurie: no, but if people like you displayed intellectual honesty, that would make me happy. disagreements are fine, inconsistency and intellectual dishonesty are not.
Mike E
@stuckinred: Yep, that generation of soldiers own it, fairly or not. They don’t owe me a thing, but I owe them my gratitude.
BGinCHI
@Mike E: My uncle did two rough tours in the infantry, 1969-70 (purple heart, etc.).
The first time we talked about it was an all-night drinking session in 2003.
We weren’t even allowed to watch war movies when he was around when I was growing up. Serious fucking PTSD before there was any such thing.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: Beam me down there, for god’s sake.
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred: As far as that goes, my grandfather who fought in WWII never talked much to his children or my grandmother about the war. As soon as I went into the Army, he was bursting with stories, advice, and observations.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Try When Everything Changed, it’s a lot of the same years from a totally different perspective. I’ve only skimmed it, but it helps as a reminder that many things have gotten better for many of us since the time when, as mentioned in Nixonland, people wouldn’t vote for a ‘colored’ Republican Senator because ‘it would only encourage them’. Yes, Roger Ailes still runs Fox News, but (to paraphrase Ms. W. Goldberg) we have a colored man in the White House and he ain’t no janitor!
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: Makes sense, no?
Omnes Omnibus
@stuckinred:Makes sense, yes. Plus advice to a very middle to upper middle class, brand new 2LT from WWII combat vet sergeant on how to handle sergeants really came in handy.
Anne Laurie
Thanks to all who participated. Next week, same time (don’t forget Daylight Savings Time!), same place?
My impulse is to go with just the one chapter, “The Sky’s the Limit”, because (spoiler) it’s kind of a hinge point. What’s the group concensus?
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: Sounds good to me. Thanks again for running this thing. It is a great idea. There are a lot of good minds with interesting perspectives bouncing around this blog.
licensed to kill time
One or two chapters, either is fine. Think Rick will be here next time?
Thanks, Anne Laurie. I always learn something from your comments.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@stuckinred: I met Tim O’Brien (and Don DeLillo, fwiw) when we had them to our annual fiction festival in my undergrad life as an English major. Intense guys, both.
M. Bouffant
@stuckinred:
Awreet! I too was “scoring on the Ave.” in those days, but you had about three or four yrs. on me.
Jim, Once
Story 1:
I was working as continuity writer at a Midwestern television station when we learned that Martin Luther King had been shot. Our station manager (North Carolina native) came into our office carrying a piece of teletype saying, “Ladies, ladies, I’m sure y’all will be in tears when I tell you that Martin Luther Coon has been shot day-ed.” Then he literally cackled.
Story 2:
One of my co-workers at said TV station was a big, sweet college kid who was the only child of a woman whose husband had died just two years earlier. When he got his draft notice, and told he would be going to Vietnam, he admitted to me privately that he was terrified. He was convinced he wouldn’t survive, and what would his mother do then? His helicopter was shot down his first day in country. He did not survive.
It was a terrible, terrible time. But I feel that this time is worse, in many ways.
mclaren
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
Obama’s press secretary engaged in some flagrant hippie-punching not long ago when he bloviated about the “professional left.” So we already know how liberals feel about that kind of thing.
LBJ was a conflicted and tragic figure. He accomplished a lot of things that he’s hardly ever gotten proper credit for — in particular, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. It’s highly unlikely that JFK could have gotten that legislation passed, but Johnson, with his mixture of bribery and congressional expertise and intimidation and blackmail and idealism, managed to get it done. In the process, LBJ lost the “south for a generation” for Democrats, as he himself remarked at the time. But he did it because it was the right thing to do, and he deserves credit.
Johnson also championed the War on Poverty and it was under Johnson that medicare was passed. It’s notable that since LBJ, we haven’t had such a high water mark for idealism: today, the effort to entirely eliminate poverty in America seems almost hallucinogenically idealistic, but every piece of evidence shows that Johnson believed deeply in the Great Society, it wasn’t just a political ploy.
Yet LBJ was a grotesquely corrupt politician who won his first senatorial election by crass ballot-box-stuffing. LBJ was a cruel man consumed by ambition who destroyed a New Deal bureaucrat for sport by accusing him falsely of communist sympathies in order to gain momentary political advantage in the dark days of McCarthyism.
Source: book review of Robert Caro’s “The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path To Power” by Robert Caro.
As Robert Caro wrote:
Consider LBJ’s naked lying and conniving in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which he essentially confected the entire pretext for the war in Viet Nam out of thin air — not discernibly different to the way in which we were lied into the Iraq war in 2003. And now contrast that with LBJ’s genuine heartfelt desire to alleviate poverty in his Great Society programs, the epochal arm-twisting and bribery he used to get the Civil Rights act passed. And now stir in the gross corruption of Johnson’s congressional career, in which he raised the pork-barrel earmark to a level of corruption seldom seen before or since:
LBJ was a tragic figure, a mixture of brutal corruption and sadistic naked ambition with deep empathy for poor people and minorities and a genuine willingness to go out on a limb to help others.
Someday someone will write a Greek tragedy about LBJ. He’s a grotesque mixture of profoundly idealistic good with viciously self-serving evil, and even as a small kid I realized that when I studied the facts about his career.