LBJ's 1965 Vietnam Speech Echoed By Bush Today

[bigtree]

With the press debating the merits and wild distortions in President Bush's speech today linking the Iraq conflict to the war in Vietnam, here is how Lyndon Johnson expressed some of the same sentiments -- in 1965. Eight more years of war, and more than 50,000 American deaths, followed.

By Greg Mitchell

(August 22, 2007) -- With the press debating the merits and wild distortions in President Bush's speech today linking the Iraq conflict to the war in Vietnam -- he all but used the Nixonian phrase "we can't bug out" -- I thought I'd take this opportunity to roll out, as food for thought, the words of another president caught up in a catastrophe not nearly in its final throes. Here is a speech delivered by Lyndon B. Johnson on April 7, 1965, one year after the Gulf of Tonkin incident sparked the beginning of our true commitment of men and resources to Vietnam.

Few then thought our massive involvement in the war would last for eight more years and that more than 55,000 Americans would die.

While the U.S. troop presence in Iraq is not quite one-third the top number ever in Vietnam, the same syndrome -- things will surely turn around in a few months if the critics in Congress and the press will just shut up -- seems very much the rule. Bush today very much sounded the same alarms voiced by Johnson about the dangers of an enemy that will spread its venom elsewhere if we don't stand up, no matter how long it takes.

"The confused nature of this conflict cannot mask the fact that it is the new face of an old enemy," Johnson said. "The contest in Viet-Nam is part of a wider pattern of aggressive purposes....The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next."

A chilling phone conversation between LBJ and McGeorge Bundy a year earlier, in May 1964, came to light just this year. It included Johnson saying of Vietnam, "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....And it's just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw."

The 1965 Johnson speech, delivered at Johns Hopkins University, and his first major speech on Vietnam, follows. Shortly after that, he significantly upped the number of U.S. troops sent to the war zone. By the end of that year there were about 200,000 Americans in Vietnam . . .

Johnson speech: http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003629456


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[LosinIt]

1. ..And George Aiken's advice echoed by his distant cousin, me

declare victory and get the hell out.

[Adsos Letter]

2. Ah yes...

..."what's gonna' happen to all the other little countries?"...or words to that effect.

[roamer65]

3. "Hey, hey...LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

Reading this reminded me of that anti-war chant.

[phillysuse]

4. I picketed Lyndon Johnson's speech at Hopkins in 1965

with Students for a Democratic Society.

How depressing that 42 years later, we are doing the same thing - trying to extract our country from a war we should not be involved in taking place in a faraway land where the Americans are the occupiers!

The differences: jungle versus desert.

We will be eating in Iraqi restaurants owned by the Iraqi refugees who fled here after we left in 20 years just as the Vietnamese who fled openned restaurants in the United States.

Instead of "boat people", there will be ?camel people?

Forty years from now, will Iraq be a big tourist destination?

Will Iraq have favored nations status for trade in 40 years?

Will they make our shoes as Vietnam does now?