2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Anyone here who directly benefited from or was the child of a middle class person during the 50s-70s [View all]wildeyed
(11,243 posts)but he was on the wrong side of history with the Vietnam War. FDR was also a hawk, but nobody questions the rightness of WW2, so he gets a pass on that. I believe that the conflict with Germany was unavoidable, and we should have gone there earlier, like FDR wanted. But the Japanese conflict might have been avoided with better oversight the diplomatic program. Can you IMAGINE how many people would be alive today if we had managed to stay out of the fight with Japan? And how much shorter the war would have been?
Some of LBJs phone calls with MLK were recorded and are in the public domain. Those are FASCINATING to listen to. LBJ was so driven by his ego, you can hear it in his tone. Voting Rights was, to him, a monument to his magnificent political skills as much as a moral choice. He saw the writing on the wall, did the political math and decided that he was going to get it passed. And he did. Amazing man.