Word: lyndon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Charles de Gaulle looked at young John Kennedy in Paris and told him that he doubted the U.S. would launch its missiles if Europe were invaded by the Soviet Union. It infuriated Kennedy, who felt he would press the button in any showdown, and do it before Nikita Khrushchev. Lyndon Johnson, trying to get his determination across to Aleksei Kosygin at Glassboro in 1967, used the singular method of locking eyes with the Soviet leader and not bunking until Kosygin looked away...
Presidents had to move on instinct. And with every President since Harry Truman, when the orders went out and the troops moved, the U.S. was very much by itself. "Where are my friends?" Lyndon Johnson used to wonder on many a night when he was bogged down in Viet Nam after having been urged on by Asian allies. Richard Nixon, once described as being tougher than a boiled owl, knew better. He never expected much help in anything...
...punish the Barbary pirates, and a century later some 2,500 American servicemen were rushed to China to help put down the Boxers who had been attacking diplomatic missions in Peking. It was in part to protect American lives that Dwight Eisenhower dispatched Marines to Lebanon in 1958, and Lyndon Johnson sent them to the Dominican Republic in 1965. In Washington's most recent use of force, Gerald Ford ordered U.S. units to retake the merchant ship Mayaguez, which had been seized by Cambodia's new Communist regime...
...voter, it is tempting to go into hibernation from now until election day. Campaign promises, after all, have never been an accurate way to predict presidential performance. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for a balanced budget. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won election as the candidate of peace. In 1972, Dick Nixon promised to take crime off the streets. In 1976, Carter--now father of the Department of Education, supporter of the M-X missile and across the board increases in military spending--promised to be a fiscal conservative...
When Helms was named CIA director by Lyndon Johnson, he had been thoroughly schooled in careful handling of Presidents. Nevertheless, writes Powers, Helms may have been too diffident about asserting himself on critical issues. Confronted with varying estimates of the strength of the North Vietnamese forces, he did not consistently back up his own analysts. He tried to compromise between the White House and Pentagon optimism and the more pessimistic CIA projections. As a result, says Powers, the U.S. was unprepared for the ferocity of the 1968 Tet offensive...