Johnson Despairs In 1964: ‘It Looks Like We’re Getting Into Another Korea’

[babylonsister]

At least Johnson had the brains to be worried...

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/02/korea-johnson/

Johnson Despairs In 1964: ‘It Looks Like We’re Getting Into Another Korea’

The White House announced this week that it “would like to see a lengthy U.S. troop presence in Iraq like the one in South Korea,” where U.S. troops have been stationed for 50 years. Defense Secretary Robert Gates endorsed the “Korea model” on Thursday, and Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who oversees daily operations in Iraq, called it a “great idea.”

Such enthusiasm for a protracted U.S. presence modeled after Korea is grimly ironic. Back in 1964, when “the war in Vietnam was only a small dark cloud on the very distant horizon,” President Lyndon Johnson privately told National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy that “getting into another Korea” was the very thing he feared:

I just stayed awake last night thinking of this thing, and the more that I think of it I don’t know what in the hell, it looks like to me that we’re getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don’t see what we can ever hope to get out of there with once we’re committed. I believe the Chinese Communists are coming into it. I don’t think that we can fight them 10,000 miles away from home and ever get anywhere in that area. I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw.

PBS’ Bill Moyers recently highlighted this conversation between Johnson and Bundy in a feature called Listening to History. Watch it at link~

As Moyers noted, “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.”

[Octafish]

1. Wonder why LBJ changed his mind and went along with the Gulf of Tonkin?

...besides the gunpowder he remembered smelling in Dealey Plaza?

Tonkin Gulf Intelligence "Skewed"
According to Official History and Intercepts

Newly Declassified National Security Agency Documents Show Analysts Made "SIGINT fit the claim" of North Vietnamese Attack

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/press20051201.htm

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. He didn't "despair" nearly as much as the millions he killed.

I have no more sympathy for LBJ's "grief" than I do for Bush's crocodile tears over "the troops".

[Maccagirl]

3. I saw this last night on PBS

It played at the end of the Moyers/Bob Kerrey interview. There was real tension between Moyers and Kerrey-riveting stuff.

[dave_p]

4. deja vu all over again

LBJ: Of course, if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen

Now where've we heard that before... I mean since.

LBJ: It's damn easy to get into a war, but if it's going to be awful hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in.

Yeah, tell us 'bout it.

[Bucky]

5. Hard to believe LBJ was that out of it. Vietnam was a Soviet client, not Mao's

I guess this happened before the CIA had sussed out the Peking-Moscow split. Amazing how we tend to fantasize that all our enemies as united together against us. Like that opening scene from Naked Gun 2½

[dave_p]

6. Hanoi was still steering a middle course

... but the split had gone public in 1963 (and become common knowledge by 1960). Ho & his lietenants were worried about splitting the party & the resistance (and they wanted China to go on allowing Soviet rail shipments), so they stayed on good terms with both sides into the late 60s. So fear of Chinese action wasn't entirely nuts. But agreed, it was pretty unlikely.