"a chilling 1964 phone conversation between President Lyndon B. Johnson and one of his top aides"

[ProSense]

Bill Moyers, LBJ, Walter Lippmann -- and the Vietnam/Iraq Link
I figured Moyers would be interested in this transcript of a chilling 1964 phone conversation, since he was LBJ's press secretary -- and more sensitive than most to how nations go to, and stay in, losing wars. Sure enough, on his PBS show Friday night, Moyers offers a brief segment on the conversation.

By Greg Mitchell

(June 01, 2007) -- Earlier this week, I sent Bill Moyers a link to an article I had written about a chilling 1964 phone conversation between President Lyndon B. Johnson and one of his top aides, McGeorge Bundy. The subject of their conversation was the growing fear that the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war would be hard to halt, with the cost in lives staggering in years to come (a fear fully realized, and then some).

I figured Moyers would be interested in this transcript, since he was LBJ's press secretary, and more sensitive than most to how nations go to, and stay in, losing wars.

Sure enough, on his PBS show Friday night, Moyers offered a brief segment on the conversation (and mentioned E&P), augmenting his reflections with the actual tape recording of the conversation. It followed a vigorous but depressing interview with Bob Kerrey, the badly wounded Vietnam vet, who continues to defend a major U.S. presence in Iraq, indefinitely.

The Moyers segment on the LBJ chat is up online at You Tube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM2QTimBoeo

Here is my original article and the transcript. Moyers closed his segment by adding: "That was May 1964. Two hundred and sixty Americans had been killed in Vietnam by then. Eleven years and two presidents later, when U.S. forces pulled out, 58,209 Americans had died, and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese."

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[Wetzelbill]

1. you should put that you tube link in the political videos section

It'll probably get more views and plays there. :)

[dave_p]

2. more...

Some more comments here

[Warpy]

3. So they knew what was going on. Who was pushing them

into making such a hideous, vicious, tragic mistake? Was it the same type of Pentagon wonk who insisted on Iraq? Who?

Obviously Johnson didn't want it and Bundy didn't want it. Who did, besides MacNamara?

I'm sure the answer to this question would answer a whole lot of other questions, as well.

[ingac70]

5. McNamara didn't push it...

Ever seen "The Fog of War"? There are audio transcripts of conversations between Johnson and McNamara. Johnson wanted war, period.

I'm sure Johnson had a hard-on for Vietnam, because there was tons of $$$$ to be made by the military-industrial complex.

[struggle4progress]

6. Johnson merely calculated too cleverly by half. He was a brilliant politician

and thought correctly that involvement in Vietnam would prevent the rightwing from successfully red-baiting him as insufficiently anti-Communist. While he reckoned that point accurately, he completely missed the larger moral questions that came into play when the Vietnamese resisted more effectively than the bean-counters expected. And when the Ds split over the war, the Rs red-baited them as insufficiently anti-Communist and hence captured the WH in 68

<edit:typo>

[pink-o]

20. Don't forget..Kissinger helped sabotage the 1968 Paris Peace talks

...Dr Strangelove had a contact, a Chinese woman (I'll find her name and get back to you) who fed info to the North Vietnamese that caused them to walk away from the table in the middle of the talks in 1968. If the Dems in power had been able to do something positive to end the war (getting deja vu, yet???) Humphrey might have won the election. Nixon and Henry Strangelove certainly couldn't let that happen.

Darth Cheney, Rummy et al learned their tactics from these sociopathic bastards--and when Watergate took them down, they just went underground, waiting almost 30 years for the right time to rise again.

[pink-o]

21. Found the link!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,352224,00.html

[ProSense]

22. Thanks for the link.

I added it to this thread

[dave_p]

11. McNamara blamed Johnson

... on a "The buck stops here" basis. But then he would, wouldn't he?

Truman, Eusenhower, Kennedy, Johnson... each presided over a deepening US engagement. War by irresistable attraction?

Was it Rusk's influence that swung LBJ? Even Bundy seems to have been more hawkish when the decision was made to bomb.

And what the hell kind of name is McGeorge anyway?

[DemBones DemBones]

12. I would think that McGeorge is a surname, very likely Mr. Bundy's

mother's maiden name, or grandmother's maiden name. Lots of people have surnames as first names.

It's easier than being named, for example, "Richard McGeorge-Bundy" but passes on a family name.

Besides, hyphenated surnames didn't catch on in the US until the Seventies, and McGeorge Bundy was born long before then.

[dave_p]

13. I guess so

I'd assumed his dad was George, but he was Harvey. It always struck me as odd. I know it shouldn't, but those guys are fair game!

[DemBones DemBones]

15. I couldn't think of any other famous examples before but just now I've

thought of two authors: Reynolds Price and Flannery O'Connor.

Somewhere back in McGeorge Bundy's lineage there would presumably be a George with a son named McGeorge, as you were thinking.

[venable]

18. he was called Mac by his friends.

I was able to have a few conversations with him before he died. he led quite a life. as a young man against the Vietnam war, I was very anti-Bundy. When i met him many years later, I thought of him as a very decent, very strong, very smart man who found himself at the cutting blade of history and did his best.

[CGowen]

14. Lyndon B. Johnson: [to the Chiefs of Staff in the White House] Just get me the election; ...

I'll give you your damn war.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102138/quotes

[ingac70]

4. Like LBJ really gave two flips...

I heard he made millions in his investments with war profiteering companies.

[John Q. Citizen]

8. He never lived to spend much of it. He didn't run a second term. By 1968

he was pretty well over and done.

So I think he lived to regret it instead of to prosper from it.

[Beausoleil]

19. War profiteering Brown & Root

for one. Became Kellogg, Brown & Root, then just KBR (now owned by Halliburton). They made a lot of money off Vietnam and built most of the big American military bases there.
Another Vietnam/Iraq "coincidence".

[madfloridian]

7. That just made me cry....58,000 died just on our side.

Because LBJ couldn't get his head out of his you know what to care enough to do something.

[defendandprotect]

9. Moyers is a question --

Good for Moyers in making known the info you called to his attention.

On the other hand, his programming style doesn't seem exactly intended to get people up off the couch to do something.

Johnson, himself, and many of the people he was closely associated with are questionable in character.

McNamara made clear that they knew the war wasn't winnable, but went forward anyway.

Also, Moyers and -- as I recall it, it's Pierre Salinger -- were one of many, evidently, acutely aware that LBJ had become clinically psychotic . . .

and did nothing to alert the public.

Salinger has spoken out about it a few years ago.

[shraby]

10. Don't forget the role General Westmoreland played

which was unforgivable..he should have been court martialed for it.

[DemBones DemBones]

16. Kick!

:kick:

[AX10]

17. K & R!