Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...result is simply another history of American policy in Vietnam written without villains. War criminals are portrayed as kind-hearted but misdirected men. Johnson is seen as just trying to please everybody by bombing North Vietnam off the face of the earth--with limited targets no less...
...explain an action in the future by citing any random action that occurred in the past. Programs for the advancement of blacks are seen as functions of something his mother said to him earlier about the strong caring for the weak. His decision to "stick it out" in Vietnam is partially explained by an incident when he was disciplined and shamed by his father. The validity of this methodology must be doubted. First of all, we are being asked to trust a man who will probably go down as one of the two greatest presidential liars in history...
Nowhere is the deficiency of the psychological model more glaring than when Kearns is writing about Vietnam. Kearns writes that Johnson feared the "Communist bullies" above everything, and that he stayed in the war to defeat the Communist menace abroad. The answer to a most crucial question--why Johnson chose to escalate his war of aggression in Vietnam by bombing the North in 1965--is explained by this quote from LBJ: "Suddenly I realized that doing nothing was more dangerous than doing something...
Kearns puts forth no serious explanation for Johnson's actions other than the desire for action and his fear of Communism. There is no attempt to provide a bureaucratic explanation as some liberal historians have done. Far worse, she totally glosses over any political explanation for his decisions about Vietnam. By strictly adhering to a psychobiographical analysis, she denies the frame of reference provided by the Pentagon Papers, and their interpreters. A far more logical explanation for some of Johnson's moves--the desire to stave off a defeat through stalemate until the next election, put forward by Daniel Ellsberg...
...husband of Kearns who helped her write the book), former officials under LBJ who try to "objectively judge" the Johnsonian presidency with respect to the war, but end up underwriting "the deceits that have served importantly a sucession of Presidents to maintain support" for the immoral intervention in Vietnam...