I was away from my computer most of Friday, didn't catch up on my emaill 
until later.  Seems like it was very busy here on Friday!!  Thank goodness Peter 
has trained everyone on the List so well to use proper headers, OT cautions, 
its easy to know what to open and what to delete when you're playing catch up 
with your mailbox!  

I didn't have time to read much of anything but did see Steve's response to 
the RAINRDROP in which he wrote, "Lyndon Johnson was very, very interested in 
protecting, and enhancing, the USA's share of the world rice market."  And all 
this time, I thought it was the domino theory that was in play back then!  
(That theory had lots of resonance for me, although I was only 13 in 1964.  After 
all, I was separated from my family due to the Iron Curtain.  Even as a 
youngster, it bothered me to think of any people anywhere falling into the clutches 
of a totalitarian regime.  I took Cold War issues very seriously from a young 
age and followed the news carefully.  I even wrote letters of support for the 
Vietnam War which are available in one of the Presidential Libraries.  I 
still have stored in my basement some scrapbooks of newsclippings that I collected 
when I was 12 or 13.  Gee, guess I knew already back then I was going to be 
an archivist and an historian, LOL.)

All joking aside, the best person to speak for LBJ is LBJ himself.  His 
thoughts are available in the materials at the LBJ Library.  Historian Michael 
Bescloss has worked extensively with LBJ's tapes, which were made available thanks 
to a decision by Lady Bird Johnson to start releasing them before the 50 year 
restriction period ended.  Anyone who listens to tapes (LBJ's, Nixon's) 
learns that Presidents definitely are as human as any of us!  Here's what Beschloss 
said at a forum on January 30, 2002 at the JFK Library about what he learned 
from listening to the tapes.     

 "There was a degree of agonizing, even that early, that we didn't know about 
before. And 
> then you get a year later, which is in my second volume on Vietnam. It's 
> after the Inauguration in 1965, and Johnson has to make the biggest, most 
> brutal decisions of all, which are do we escalate in Vietnam beyond the 16,000 
> troops there were at the time, or do we withdraw? And of course Johnson famously 
> made the decision to escalate and go the distance to keep what he thought 
> was the American commitment.
> 
> But from everything I had seen and read, what my assumption was that Johnson 
> knew it would be tough, but at least got us into this war with the 
> expectation that was a war that we could win, in perhaps two or three years time, 
> perhaps sooner. And I began to listen to these tapes, and the tapes tell a very 
> different story.
> 
> What you hear instead is about a week before he beings sending Marines in a 
> big way to Vietnam, in February, 1965, he says about the Vietnam War that's 
> about to begin: "I can't think of anything worse than losing, and I don't see 
> any way we can win." And that's February of 1965. And I heard that. I mean, I 
> was almost knocked out of my chair. Because the meaning of the President 
> sending men and women into harm's way into a war that privately he thinks is 
> unwinnable-- although publicly he's saying "Nail the coonskin on the wall and 
> we'll have victory in one year or two." I mean, it was something that was 
> really almost horrible to listen to. And what I hoped was that this was Johnson 
> just in sort of a momentary moment of pessimism, or maybe trying to get someone 
> to come up with a plan to win.
> 
> As you listen to him week after week, the theme grows all the more deep. He 
> says "I feel trapped. I feel that there's nothing I can do"-- he says to Lady 
> Bird. And Lady Bird was kind enough to give me her tape diaries, which are 
> also in the book. He says to her about Vietnam, "I feel as if I'm in a plane 
> that's crashing, and I don't have a parachute." It's 1965. It's not 1968. And 
> so the result is that you understand Johnson and Vietnam in a very different 
> way, I think, from what we had known before.
> 
> A president who felt he had no alternative but to escalate the war, but from 
> the very beginning of 1965, not only was sending men and women into harm's 
> way without telling them into a war that he thought was a loser, but at the 
> same time doing this knowing-- and he says it more and more as the time goes 
> on-- that this was going to destroy his presidency, it was going to destroy 
> him, and possibly do a lot to destroy this country.
> 
> And it certainly did a lot to hurt his psyche, because you listen to him in 
> the spring and summer of 1965. he's getting overwhelmed. He's exhausted every 
> night. He says to the people in the Situation Room in the White House: "I 
> want to be woken up when the men come back from their bombing mission over 
> North Vietnam. I want to make sure they're safe." He's sleepless, he's tortured.
> 
> He who had planned to be a Franklin Roosevelt or an Abraham Lincoln by the 
> summer of 1965 knew inside himself that this war was going to destroy him and 
> the country, but that there was absolutely nothing he felt he could do about 
> it; it was something he felt was beyond his control. And for a control freak 
> like Lyndon Johnson the worst thing would have been to be involved in an 
> exercise like that that he felt that there was almost nothing that he could 
> influence."  [END FORUM EXTRACT]

For more on this topic and what is on other LBJ tapes, see also http
://www.pbs.org/newshour/conversation/july-dec01/beschloss_11-9.html 

Maarja
> 
> 
    





















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