![]() When people mentioned Kennedy's many affairs, Johnson would bang the table and declare that he had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose.Īcknowledging the failure of a policy that by 1969 had cost 30,000 American lives was more than someone with so fragile an ego could manage. Sexual conquests also helped to fill the void. Feelings of emptiness spurred him to eat, drink, and smoke to excess. Johnson had "an unfillable hole in his ego," Moyers says. The opposition provoked in the United States by the expanding war spoke to Johnson's hesitation and forebodings, but criticism made him more rather than less reluctant to consult his own doubts. True, you can 'bear any burden, pay any price' if you're sure you're doin' right. It didn't have that 'We'll make it through this one win or lose, it's the right thing to do.' So, uncertainty. It was just pure hell and did not have that reassuring, strong feeling that this is right, that he had when he was in a crunch with civil rights or poverty or education. ![]() The one he wanted was on poverty and ignorance and disease, and that was worth putting your life into." She added, "It was just a hell of a thorn stuck in his throat. "He had no stomach for it," she told me, "no heart for it it wasn't the war he wanted. Lady Bird Johnson remembers the President's pain over the war. "We don't even have a tunnel we don't even know where the tunnel is." "Light at the end of the tunnel?" he told his press secretary, Bill Moyers. combat troops in Vietnam in July of 1965, Johnson expressed doubts that he had done the right thing. What is it worth to this country?"Īfter increasing U.S. I don't think it's worth fightin' for and I don't think we can get out. it looks to me like we're gettin' into another Korea. When, in May of 1964, Senator Richard Russell told Johnson that Vietnam was "the damn worst mess I ever saw," LBJ replied, "That's the way I've been feelin' for six months." Shortly after, he told McGeorge Bundy, his national-security adviser, "The more I stayed awake last night thinking of this thing, the more. At the same time, however, he could see the makings of the quagmire ahead. He believed his own rhetoric about the need to fight in Vietnam. First, I discovered that even as he decided to escalate the war, Johnson had deeper and more clairvoyant doubts about Vietnam than contemporaries could possibly have imagined.
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