Lyndon B. Johnson

[Americans] have often voted for presidential candidates they thought would keep the nation at peace but instead led the nation into wars and more wars. For example, in the 1964 presidential election Americans overwhelmingly voted for Lyndon Baines Johnson. He campaigned as a moderate peace candidate and portrayed Goldwater as an extremist war candidate. Johnson ended up greatly expanding the American commitment to Vietnam, with some 500,000 troops sent to Southeast Asia. He left office in 1969 as one of the most hated men in America. He wouldn't even attempt to run for reelection.

Lyndon Johnson in particular incurs Kauffman's wrathful prose. LBJ was "the homicidal Texan in the White House." On Johnson's radio ads imploring Americans to support the troops in Vietnam: "That Americans might best 'support our troops' by reuniting them with their families seems never to occur to those who would choke the country with their yellow ribbons." And on the connection between Johnson's war on poverty and Vietnam: "Johnson declared war on poverty, which he apparently intended to win by killing as many poor boys as possible in Vietnam."

President Lyndon Johnson declared in 1965 that the vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men ... During the election campaign the prior year, Johnson had promised, "We are not about to send American boys 9,000 or 10,000 miles away to do what Asian boys ought to be doing to protect themselves." The fact that parents could vote for or against Johnson did nothing to stop him from betraying his promise and sending their sons to die.

[O]n the day the Gulf of Tonkin crisis ignited ... the [USS Maddox]'s commander had wired Washington that the reports of an attack on his ship may have been wildly exaggerated ... But it didn't matter, because this was just the pretext that Lyndon Johnson was looking for. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara raced to proclaim that the attack was unprovoked ... [T]he United States had orchestrated an attack by South Vietnamese commandos on North Vietnamese territory before the alleged conflict began. But Johnson lied and commenced bombing, and Congress rushed to cheer him on.

In a war crimes trial, President Johnson would not be as liable for a particular murder as the person who physically committed the act. But Johnson shares some liability for a vast number of similar acts. His degree of liability for a particular murder may be less, but his range of liability is far greater ... when we say that President Johnson was "more resonsible" for murders than individual bomber pilots, we mean: (1) [he], utilizing the power of his office, made fundamental decisions that set the State apparatus in motion. (2) [he] was responsible, to whatever degree, for a broader range of casualties ...

If that happens, then George W. Bush will complete his metamorphosis into another Texan in the White House who had to deal with an unpopular war: Lyndon Baines Johnson. We'll have "jobs programs" – and, no doubt, "poverty pimps" (remember them?) ... The "angry young men" of 1960s urban America were neither appeased nor bought off ... President Johnson, you'll remember, launched his War on Poverty in tandem with escalating the Vietnam War, and the political rhetoric and objectives of these losing campaigns were remarkably similar. Both were pacification programs, and they failed in Vietnam, as well as in South Central Los Angeles.