By H. N. Burdett
The other day I sent a Houston Chronicle article to a number of Potomac Digest recipients. The piece detailed the creative manner in which Texas Governor Rick Perry balances his state's budget. In response, a former international news agency bureau chief wrote:
"Disciple Perry did not invent the Texas hold 'em game. I really think we should let Texas go back to being a Republic. It has given us some of the worst Presidents (LBJ and one and one-half Bushes), is fat on bloated defense contractors and so on. . ."
To which a retired attorney and onetime alternate delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention committed to anti-Vietnam war candidate Eugene McCarthy, responded:
"Not to quibble, but I think that -- setting aside his failure to bring the Vietnam war to a close (or even reduce it in any meaningful way) there was actually escalation during [Lyndon Johnson's] administration and I don't forgive that -- he was surely one of the greatest presidents on the domestic scene this country has ever had. So let's not throw him out with the Bush Bathwater."
Impressive domestic achievements during Lyndon Johnson's presidency are undeniable.
Among these were his leadership in pushing through Congress such landmark legislation as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing segregation in schools and public places; the 1965 Voting Rights Act, prohibiting malodorous restrictions such as literacy tests that had previously disenfranchised untold numbers of United States citizens; the Equal Opportunity Act, which declared "war on poverty," and the Medical Care Act, which enables senior citizens -- most especially those living on fixed incomes -- and others to obtain medical treatment they previously simply could not afford.
For all the Camelot hype, had it not been for LBJ the all-too-brief Kennedy years might have been remembered for little else than the Cuban missile crisis and hordes of beautiful people sailing, playing touch football, and pushing one another into swimming pools.
Through his personal dedication and perhaps unequaled political acumen and ability, Johnson burnished the Kennedy legacy -- a feat it is doubtful Kennedy, had he lived, would have been able to accomplish.
Moreover, Johnson's knowledge of Congress and the legislative process and his legendary persistence and powers of persuasion were perhaps unequaled in the entire history of the Presidency.
Lyndon Johnson may have been at times a crude and rude, a larger-than-life bully. Who can forget LBJ unbuttoning his shirt to show the press a scar on his belly? There may have been times when he was tempted to turn his back on a White House news conference, drop his trousers and reveal another part of his anatomy.
There is a wonderful story about LBJ being confronted by an old friend who had been the incumbent sheriff of a Texas county. During one particularly difficult election campaign, the worried sheriff pulled Johnson aside and told him he was truly concerned that for the first time in years he might be beaten. Johnson said, "Get the word out that he fucks pigs." The sheriff laughed and said no one would believe it. Johnson countered, "Make that sonofabitch deny it."
Whatever else he may have been, Lyndon Johnson was the consummate political animal. He understood the great game of politics for what it is: the art of the possible. And, when it came to domestic policy, the nation benefited from LBJ's skill at that art as much as it did from any President in United States history.
To place Lyndon Johnson in the category of worst American Presidents is so far off base it is not even in the ballpark. In fact, in many respects Johnson may be the most effective President the country has ever had.
But then we have Johnson's 1964 campaign pledge to not send "American boys to fight Asia's wars." The United States was committed to the defense of South Vietnam by earlier administrations. But Johnson intervened massively in that beleagured country to demonstrate American credibility to allies and enemies alike.
Johnson's call for extraordinary war powers which came to fruition with Congressional passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, opened the floodgates.
The vast widening of the so-called Vietnam "conflict" concluded with the combat deaths of 47,355 U.S. service personnel -- exceeding by 5,181 the combined total of those killed in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Korean Conflict -- as well as 53,303 wounds classified by the U.S. Department of Defense as "not mortal." Allow me to refresh memories.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was adopted by Congress on August 7, 1964. The measure moved swiftly through both houses of Congress in the wake of an August 2 confrontation between a North Vietnamese Navy torpedo squadron and the American destroyer USS Maddox, followed by an alleged second engagement two days later. The latter incident supposedly involved another attack by North Vietnamese vessels on the Maddox, as well as the destroyer USS Turner Joy.
The August 2 and the questionable August 4 engagements together are known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
In 2006, The New York Times reported that a de-classified internal National Security Agency historical study revealed that during the reported August 4 engagement there may not have been any North Vietnamese vessels present.
The document states: "It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. . .in truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two boats damaged on Aug. 2. . ."
Only hours following the disputed second attack on the two U.S. destroyers, President Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes -- Operation Pierce Arrow -- on North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases .
In a television address that same evening, President Johnson contended that "the United States. . .seeks no wider war."
Nonetheless, he called for a Congressional resolution "expressing the unity and determination of the United States in supporting freedom and protecting peace in southeast Asia." He said the resolution should express support "for all necessary action to protect our Armed Forces."
Johnson flat out knew better than any President whose name was not Teddy Roosevelt how to use the bully pulpit of the presidency for getting precisely what he wanted: first line up the American people behind you and Congress will have little recourse but to follow.
The result of Johnson's call to arms was the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
During the final months of his 1964 election campaign, the President claimed that the resolution would help "hostile nations. . .understand" that the United States was unified in the determination "to protects its national interests."
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was approved unanimously by the House of Representatives and with only two votes in opposition by the Senate. The only "nay" votes in the upper house were cast by Senators Wayne Morse, D-Oregon, and Ernest H. Gruening, D-Alaska.
Senator Gruening, a former newspaper and magazine editor, eloquently objected to sending U.S. troops "into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is being steadily escalated."
Indeed, the Johnson administration used the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as a blank check to vastly increase U.S. involvement in Vietnam, as well as open warfare between the United States and North Vietnam.
Johnson was later reported to have privately commented about the probably bogus August 4 North Vietnamese torpedo boat attack perpetrated on not one but two U.S. destroyers: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting whales out there."
The historical significance of the resolution is that it provided the President with authorization to do whatever he deemed necessary to assist "any member of a protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty" -- including military force.
In her 1984 book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, Pulitzer Prize historian Barbara W. Tuchman recounted a meeting within 48 hours after John F. Kennedy's death between Lyndon Johnson and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., then the United States Ambassador to South Vietnam.
Lodge briefed the new President on the dire situation in Vietnam that showed no promise of improving. Following the ambassador's clearly stated assessment that hard decisions had to be faced, President Johnson's reaction was, according to Lodge, instant and personal: "I am not going to be the first President of the United States to lose a war." The ambassador said Johnson then added: "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went."
Tuchman enumerated several offers by the North Vietnamese over the next four years to negotiate an end to the carnage. President Johnson declined each and every one of them.
Her book recalls that on March 31, 1968, the President finally delivered a public address to announce: "We are prepared to move immediately toward peace through negotiations. So tonight, in the hope that this action will lead to early talks, I am taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict. . .and doing so unilaterally and at once."
Before finishing his speech, Johnson stunned listeners with his surprise announcement that he would not "permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year," concluding with: "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
Lyndon Johnson not only vastly scaled up and prolonged the Vietnam war, his obstinate refusal to negotiate a settlement with the North Vietnamese established an indelible stain on his presidency.
Secondarily, his stubborn and wrongheaded decisions, aided and abetted by poor advice from his kowtowing top subordinates, led him to remove himself from consideration for a second term in the office he so coveted.
But there are times when more than a few supporters of President Obama fervently hope and pray that he will somehow acquire at least a smidgen of Lyndon Baines Johnson's skill at the art of the possible.
The current President is known to be a "quick study." He would be well served by studying both how Johnson got things done and the mistakes that denied the 36th United States President a second term.
Every President who has ever served knows that the position is a perpetual learning process in which they are confronted with a new challenge virtually every day, if not every hour. Those who absorb the lessons of their predecessors and have the instincts and intelligence to use this knowledge position themselves for greatness.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
CALMING THE WINDS OF UNREASON
By H. N. Burdett
"There's just too much noise," my old friend and onetime colleague Bill Thompson confided in a brief exchange during a gathering of aging news reporters in the bowels of Annapolis' Maryland Inn several months back.
Skip Isaacs and Peter Jay, who earned their spurs covering the state legislature and went on to become Vietnam war corresondents, were there.
As was Gene Oishi, who covered Spiro Agnew's vice presidential campaign among numerous other achievements.
As was Jim Keat, former deputy editorial page editor of The Baltimore Sun and who, in another life when I was employed by a competing daily, 'scooped' me with monotonous regularity.
As was Don Hymes, whom I first met a half century ago when he was toiling for a courageous St. Mary's County weekly that had the cajones to crusade against malodorous slot machine politics, the fumes of which wafted from Southern Maryland and could be inhaled in the State House; he later became Maryland editor of The Washington Post, and, later still, communications director for the Montgomery County school system.
As was Don's wife, Valerie, once the Capitol Hill voice of Westinghouse television and today a tireless activist on behalf of combating recidivism.
To name but a few.
At an even earlier meeting of the Vintage Press Irregulars, Frank DeFilippo told me, "Just look around this room. You have here what could have been one of the greatest newsrooms ever." If there is a Heaven, I would be honored to have a small desk in the farthest corner of such a newsroom. Hell, I'd be honored to serve as a copy boy.
Frank knew whereof he spoke. In the 1960s, he abandoned his Underwood at the Baltimore News American, where he tapped out some of the more colorful political prose of his era, to become Governor Marvin Mandel's head flack and, later, the guv's chief of administration before the fall. He later headed the Rosenbush public relations firm, generously favored by the Democratic state political machine, and now bangs out readable commentary online with his same familiar flair.
The "noise" to which Bill Thompson had referred was not the boisterousness of that estimable company (in point of fact, they were a curiously quiet group), but rather the resounding cacophony that pervades the local and national airwaves and blogosphere, even as newspaper after newspaper vanishes into the ether. If a newspaper shuts down in any American city, does anyone hear it fall? The sound would be easily quelled by turning up the volume on Limbaugh, Maddow, O'Reilly and Olbermann preaching to their respective choirs.
Political discourse has degenerated from the sobriety and solidity of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite, from Walter Lippmann and Murray Kempton to bloviators and bloggers shouting back and forth -- each convinced that victories in the wars to win hearts and minds are won by the loudest rather than by sanity and reason.
Bill Thompson and Frank DeFilippo have written self-published novels. Thompson's "The Waterbusher" focuses on the last lynching on Maryland's Eastern Shore; DeFilippo's "Hooked" is a roman a clef on the Baltimore city political jungle of the 1960s and '70s with a protagonist who remotely resembles the author. I wholeheartedly recommend both.
I'm not above plugging these works even if I felt they were other than damn good reads because both of these long-time friends can flat out write circles around most news reporters, past and present, I've known and read. But I categorically do not feel otherwise. And, for the record, I've also known and read both Gerald Johnson and Murray Kempton, who stand head and shoulders above the rest of us, as Colossus stands above the least visible anthills.
A native of western Maryland, Thompson now resides on the state's Eastern Shore, content to spend his days and nights with the three great loves of his life -- Susan, the Chesapeake Bay and his boat. He indicates that writing these days interests him less than it once did and to drown out "the noise" he has contemplated turning to quieter endeavors, like welding.
All of which brings to mind Duff Badgely. A colleague of many years back, Duff was a terrific young reporter who had both superior instincts as a "truffle sniffer," as DeFilippo likes to call reporters, and the ability to transfer what he'd dug up into formidable prose.
I'm not ready to elevate Duff to a pedestal alongside the likes of Flaubert, Dickens and Twain, but then I doubt that the latter were writing their venerated opuses under daily deadline pressure. Badgely was, and I assume still is, a Quaker -- a man of peace who, as they say, walked the walk as well as talked the talk. Another kind of noise -- that of a protracted bitter union election campaign (are there any other kind?) -- drove him from the newsroom and into, of all things, carpentry.
Duff did not view sawing and planing pine and hammering penny nails as exile, but as contributing more usefully to society than he felt he could by pounding a city room typewriter. To my mind, at least, carpentry's gain was journalism's loss.
I'd run into Duff and we'd have a pleasant chat now and again at Buddy Levy's drugstore of fact and opinion on West Street in Annapolis, a treasured haunt of yore to which I frequently repaired to calm the echoes of dissent and discontent from both left and right, that threatened to push me to the very edge of the abyss. I have since developed numerous guilty pleasures to avoid that fate.
I watch wonderful old movies. I listen to music of various genres. I read a little. Most of all, I spend as much time as I can with friends, reuniting with old ones and luxuriating in meeting new ones. As a young man, I was privileged to have enjoyed the company of wise older folks, who provided the best post-graduate education possible. Now, entering my own twilight years, I am privileged to be tolerated by wise younger people.
If I've learned anything over the years, it is merely what I've managed to retain from listening to and reading those I admire for one reason or another. If I occasionally impart a morsel of wisdom to my younger friends, full credit goes to those giants who kindly stooped down and lifted me to their broad shoulders.
###
"There's just too much noise," my old friend and onetime colleague Bill Thompson confided in a brief exchange during a gathering of aging news reporters in the bowels of Annapolis' Maryland Inn several months back.
Skip Isaacs and Peter Jay, who earned their spurs covering the state legislature and went on to become Vietnam war corresondents, were there.
As was Gene Oishi, who covered Spiro Agnew's vice presidential campaign among numerous other achievements.
As was Jim Keat, former deputy editorial page editor of The Baltimore Sun and who, in another life when I was employed by a competing daily, 'scooped' me with monotonous regularity.
As was Don Hymes, whom I first met a half century ago when he was toiling for a courageous St. Mary's County weekly that had the cajones to crusade against malodorous slot machine politics, the fumes of which wafted from Southern Maryland and could be inhaled in the State House; he later became Maryland editor of The Washington Post, and, later still, communications director for the Montgomery County school system.
As was Don's wife, Valerie, once the Capitol Hill voice of Westinghouse television and today a tireless activist on behalf of combating recidivism.
To name but a few.
At an even earlier meeting of the Vintage Press Irregulars, Frank DeFilippo told me, "Just look around this room. You have here what could have been one of the greatest newsrooms ever." If there is a Heaven, I would be honored to have a small desk in the farthest corner of such a newsroom. Hell, I'd be honored to serve as a copy boy.
Frank knew whereof he spoke. In the 1960s, he abandoned his Underwood at the Baltimore News American, where he tapped out some of the more colorful political prose of his era, to become Governor Marvin Mandel's head flack and, later, the guv's chief of administration before the fall. He later headed the Rosenbush public relations firm, generously favored by the Democratic state political machine, and now bangs out readable commentary online with his same familiar flair.
The "noise" to which Bill Thompson had referred was not the boisterousness of that estimable company (in point of fact, they were a curiously quiet group), but rather the resounding cacophony that pervades the local and national airwaves and blogosphere, even as newspaper after newspaper vanishes into the ether. If a newspaper shuts down in any American city, does anyone hear it fall? The sound would be easily quelled by turning up the volume on Limbaugh, Maddow, O'Reilly and Olbermann preaching to their respective choirs.
Political discourse has degenerated from the sobriety and solidity of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite, from Walter Lippmann and Murray Kempton to bloviators and bloggers shouting back and forth -- each convinced that victories in the wars to win hearts and minds are won by the loudest rather than by sanity and reason.
Bill Thompson and Frank DeFilippo have written self-published novels. Thompson's "The Waterbusher" focuses on the last lynching on Maryland's Eastern Shore; DeFilippo's "Hooked" is a roman a clef on the Baltimore city political jungle of the 1960s and '70s with a protagonist who remotely resembles the author. I wholeheartedly recommend both.
I'm not above plugging these works even if I felt they were other than damn good reads because both of these long-time friends can flat out write circles around most news reporters, past and present, I've known and read. But I categorically do not feel otherwise. And, for the record, I've also known and read both Gerald Johnson and Murray Kempton, who stand head and shoulders above the rest of us, as Colossus stands above the least visible anthills.
A native of western Maryland, Thompson now resides on the state's Eastern Shore, content to spend his days and nights with the three great loves of his life -- Susan, the Chesapeake Bay and his boat. He indicates that writing these days interests him less than it once did and to drown out "the noise" he has contemplated turning to quieter endeavors, like welding.
All of which brings to mind Duff Badgely. A colleague of many years back, Duff was a terrific young reporter who had both superior instincts as a "truffle sniffer," as DeFilippo likes to call reporters, and the ability to transfer what he'd dug up into formidable prose.
I'm not ready to elevate Duff to a pedestal alongside the likes of Flaubert, Dickens and Twain, but then I doubt that the latter were writing their venerated opuses under daily deadline pressure. Badgely was, and I assume still is, a Quaker -- a man of peace who, as they say, walked the walk as well as talked the talk. Another kind of noise -- that of a protracted bitter union election campaign (are there any other kind?) -- drove him from the newsroom and into, of all things, carpentry.
Duff did not view sawing and planing pine and hammering penny nails as exile, but as contributing more usefully to society than he felt he could by pounding a city room typewriter. To my mind, at least, carpentry's gain was journalism's loss.
I'd run into Duff and we'd have a pleasant chat now and again at Buddy Levy's drugstore of fact and opinion on West Street in Annapolis, a treasured haunt of yore to which I frequently repaired to calm the echoes of dissent and discontent from both left and right, that threatened to push me to the very edge of the abyss. I have since developed numerous guilty pleasures to avoid that fate.
I watch wonderful old movies. I listen to music of various genres. I read a little. Most of all, I spend as much time as I can with friends, reuniting with old ones and luxuriating in meeting new ones. As a young man, I was privileged to have enjoyed the company of wise older folks, who provided the best post-graduate education possible. Now, entering my own twilight years, I am privileged to be tolerated by wise younger people.
If I've learned anything over the years, it is merely what I've managed to retain from listening to and reading those I admire for one reason or another. If I occasionally impart a morsel of wisdom to my younger friends, full credit goes to those giants who kindly stooped down and lifted me to their broad shoulders.
###
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