Word: lyndon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WALTER LIPPMANN was betrayed by Lyndon Johnson, his advisers and the public that condoned American military intervention in Vietnam. Having ridiculed Kennedy's attempt to focus Western efforts against Asian communism on the Vietnamese civil war, Lippmann often declared that the United States could only lose a war fought on mainland Asia. What outraged him was not the misappraisal of American military objectives. But the duplicity of the Johnson administration's selling the war to a gullible nation. His 40-year-old prediction that the tendency to fabricate facts and rely on mistaken public opinion would have dire consequences came...
MERLE MILLER fell in love with Lyndon Johnson when he wrote this book. Lyndon: An Oral Biography is a collection of hundreds of interviews conducted by Miller or dredged from the files of the Johnson library. Miler has attempted a portrait of the man and his accomplishments by seeking out friends, family and aides--and the result is a paean to Lyndon Johnson, American folk hero. Johnson, from all accounts, was an overwhelmingly powerful and dominant man, who prided himself on his ability to manipulate people and situations. Some emanation of Johnson's spirit has gotten at Miller via these...
Political expediency is Miller's chief defense for Johnson's countless votes against anti-lynching and anti-discrimination bills. He writes, "But whatever his interest in the welfare of the Black people and Mexican-Americans, Lyndon knew that in Texas you did not translate that into legislation...So whenever a federal anti-lynching law came up, Lyndon voted against it, and whenever an anti-discrimination provision appeared in any bill, he voted against it." Miller then continues this defense by presenting a lengthy interview with a former congressional colleague who claims that, despite his voting record, Johnson never made anti...
...these tidbits that make this book absorbing reading. But Lyndon: An Oral Biographycan only be viewed as a montage of unconnected remembrances of the president. It offers no interpretation and much bias: it falls far short of the label biography
NONFICTION: Abroad, Paul Fussell American Dreams: Lost and Found, Studs Terkel ∙ China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston ∙ Lyndon, Merle Miller ∙ The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory ∙ The Soul of the Wolf, Michael Fox Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Ronald Steel