LBJ

Went to the Ten Cat last night.  I guess it has been open for a week or two already, but this is the first time I went.  Pretty empty, there was plenty of room to social distance.  The bartender wore a mask and used what smelled like a pretty strong antiseptic between drinks.  But four of my beer-drinking buddies were there and the conversation, as always, was clever and heartfelt, and the beer was cold and wet, and I left with a spring in my step and a song in my heart just like I did three and a half months previous, and thus far no dry cough or ache in my muscles.

Well back to Lyndon Johnson and the unpopular war.  Back in the time when the draft was breathing down my neck, I thought the war was just plain evil and so therefore the people who were running it and their supporters were just plain evil.  But then one day it occurred to me that maybe they just thought differently.  When I did the math in my head it always came out that the war was evil, but maybe when they did the math it came out as a just war.  It made me a little uncomfortable because everything was clearer when I considered the hawks to be evil, but if they were merely misguided that made things more complicated.

And worse still, if they, many of them were as intelligent as I thought I was and with better education than I had, then maybe I was the one who was misguided.  I did the math often and I listened to what the hawks had to say, and read a little history, and the war still came out as evil, but maybe they were doing the same thing and coming out with the war was just.

Now this book was written not long after LBJ resigned.  Doris stayed out at the LBJ ranch for like six months and talked to LBJ like every day.  She had been a minor functionary on his team, but she had always been openly antiwar, so maybe one of the reasons that he had wanted her to write the book about him was to use his immense powers of persuasion to win her over.  

Johnson never understood why the people had turned against him.  Hadn't he done great work for civil rights and given people the great society?  

He was never a big fan of the war.  He complained to Doris often that his true love was the great society and now the war was draining the money that he would rather have spent on the great society.

But he couldn't abandon the war.  He believed in the domino theory, and maybe more importantly he didn't want to be the first president to lose a war.  He also thought of himself as something of a moderate.  The hawks were always on him to like bomb Hanoi, and he held back from that, thinking he will give them this and that instead and thereby avoid a larger war.

That's all of today, the balcony beckons, it's still a little cool this morning but we have like seven ninety degree days ahead of us.