Lyndon Johnson Archives - Page 2 of 2

40 years ago: the fall of Saigon

I knew a guy, Michael, who almost certainly died from Agent Orange exposure in early 1982, just after his daughter was born.

S. Vietnamese in Da Nang struggle to climb aboard ships that will evacuate them to Cam Ranh Ba

I’ve been reading several news articles about the documentary ‘Last Days in Vietnam’, directed by Rory Kennedy, daughter of RFK, which revisits the fall of Saigon in 1975. If I get the opportunity, I’ll have to watch it.

I became actively opposed to the Vietnam war in mid-1968, as much because of a 1967 speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. as anything.

Prior to that – I WAS only 15 -it was more that it was an American war, and I was an American, so I didn’t really need to think about it much.

After that evolution of thought, I actually LOOKED at how the United States, after France’s final defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, ended up in Vietnam, first with “advisers”. Then, after the lie that spurred the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964, there was a much-expanded presence in Vietnam, propping up one failed leadership in South Vietnam after another.

Only much later, I discovered how Richard Nixon sabotaged the 1968 Vietnam peace talks to get elected President, an arguably treasonous act, something that cost the United States an additional 22,000 lives, of the 58,000 US military killed, not to mention those tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who died needlessly.

So when the Americans effectively stopped fighting in January 1973, through a program called Vietnamization – read this and see if it reminds you of the US policy in Iraq this century – it led to the inevitable collapse of the South Vietnam government. “By the end of April 30th, South Vietnam was wholly under the control of North Vietnam who swiftly announced the creation of a united Vietnam. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.”

Yet I felt terrible about those South Vietnamese who were left behind, who undoubtedly felt the Americans would take care of them, but, for the most part, were not able to; an estimated one million people died after reunification. Moreover, I am fascinated by the normalization of relations between the US and a united Vietnam in the past three decades.

One of the legacies of the American involvement in the war the use of the defoliant Agent Orange. I knew a guy, Michael – a good friend of my girlfriend at the time – who almost certainly died from Agent Orange exposure in early 1982, just after his daughter was born. It took nearly another decade before the government acknowledged a link between the chemical and a number of neurological diseases.

Now the U.S. finally accepting responsibility for the devastating ongoing effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam. But is this funding just a way to get USAID in the door to meddle in the country’s affairs?
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From 2015: SamuraiFrog revisits Good Morning, Vietnam.

From 2014: US Government sanitizes Vietnam War history.

From 2012: ‘Napalm Girl’: An Iconic Image Of War Turns 40.

The 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

The notion that we could, or should, as a nation, not only allow, but tacitly encourage, discrimination, based on sexual orientation, is quite troubling to me. That we should use religion as the basis of that discrimination is abhorrent to me.

It was late February, the week between when the Arizona state legislature passed S. 1062, allowing a “religious exception” to provide service to people, presumably gay people, and when Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the bill. I was watching JEOPARDY!, in real time. A clue popped up about the Greensboro Four, the young black men who, in February 1960, sat in at a Woolworth’s “whites only” lunch counter.

Suddenly, the Daughter started singing this song, about it, Rosa Parks, and the Little Rock Nine like events, which I had never heard before:

“Some young men in Carolina sat down at a counter and asked for something to eat
Cause they had a dream, yes they had a dream
And when no one served them, they just kept sitting, they never missed a beat
Cause they had a dream, yes they had a dream
They had a dream that all our children could live in harmony
And go to school together and work in the land of liberty”

It was actions such as the Greensboro sit-in, several retaliatory incidents of violence against blacks and of whites who supported them, capped by the peaceful August 1963 March on Washington, that prompted Congress to take action. From the Senate Judiciary committee webpage:

The House Judiciary Committee approved the legislation on October 26, 1963, and formally reported it to the full House on November 20, 1963, just two days before President Kennedy was assassinated. On November 27, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson asserted his commitment to President Kennedy’s legislative agenda, particularly civil rights legislation.

“No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the Civil Rights Bill for which he fought so long.”

The House of Representatives passed a final version of the Civil Rights Act on February 10, 1964…

After a 54-day filibuster of the legislation, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced a compromise bill. The legislation… was ultimately passed on June 19, 1964, by a vote of 73 to 27. On July 2, 1964, the House voted to adopt the Senate-passed legislation… President Johnson signed the bill into law that very afternoon. The Civil Rights Act paved the way for future anti-discrimination legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Here’s another narrative from ten years ago. Check out Bryan Cranston on playing President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the play All the Way.

President Obama has been saluting the passage of the Civil Rights Act and honoring LBJ for his work to make it so. There is no doubt that the Act irrevocably altered the American landscape, and for the better.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Yet the notion that we could, or should, as a nation, not only allow, but tacitly encourage, discrimination, based on sexual orientation, is quite troubling to me. That we should use religion as the basis of that discrimination is abhorrent to me.

Do we need another Greensboro sit-in, say in Mississippi, which passed a bill, signed by the governor, as onerous as the Arizona bill? Not advocating that (yet), but the thought DID cross my mind.

The Presidency; home alone

I alternate: I read newspapers, work on the computer, clean, watch TV while riding the stationary bike.

Scott is back with more questions: In the first one hundred years of the US, which president do you find the most fascinating?

Who do you find the most fascinating US president after those first one hundred years?

It occurred to me that, depending on how you measure the first 100 years, one could put Grover Cleveland in both chronological camps, since the first President under the current Constitution was elected in 1789, and Cleveland’s terms were 1885-1889 and 1893-1897. Not that I would, but I COULD.

There are a number of early Presidents who I find fascinating: Jefferson, Madison, JQ Adams, Jackson (for the wrong reasons), but primarily for their service before (or in Adams’ case, after) the Presidency. It’s hard to argue with choices such as Washington or Lincoln.

Still, I’ll pick Chester A. Arthur, the 21st President (pictured), who became President upon the death of the assassinated James Garfield in 1881. He was a real patronage guy earlier, but when he moved into the Oval Office, he became a reformer. From whitehouse.gov: “Publisher Alexander K. McClure recalled, ‘No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted, and no one ever retired … more generally respected.'” He was an upstate New Yorker, BTW, though born in Vermont. He died only a couple of years after his term ended.

More recently, it’s probably Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th President, who succeeded the assassinated John Kennedy in 1963. The Texan was SO right on many civil rights issues. Of course, he was SO wrong on Vietnam, and his expansion of the war cost too many lives. He suspected that Nixon was interfering with the peace talks in 1968, yet did not want to weaken the Presidency and kept his own counsel.
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Jaquandor is back:

You are alone for an entire day, as in, your family has to go somewhere and you’re on your own. And it’s your day off. What do you do, and what do you eat?

I alternate: I read newspapers, work on the computer, clean (vacuum and/or wash dishes), watch TV while riding the stationary bike. I’m always listening to music, except when the television’s on.

I’ll make some elaborate omelet, made with whatever I can find in the refrigerator, for breakfast; if I haven’t had any lately, buy Indian takeout for lunch; scour for leftovers – it might be the Indian food again – for dinner.

There are lots of ‘black’ stereotypes. Which one or ones irritate you the most?

It’s what black people are supposed to sound like. My father was very fussy about his children not speaking with street lingo, but rather with standard English. So people have said that I don’t “sound” black. Well, I AM black, and this is what I sound like; ipso facto, I sound black, Jack.

You asked this of me, so I’m turning it back: Are we really in a ‘post-racial’ society, and if not, how attainable IS such a thing?

Oh, goodness, no. In some ways, the myth that the Obama election meant that we as a nation are beyond race, has temporarily slowed progress. The narrative is belied by any number of bits from the last thing I wrote in answer to a question of yours.

Racism, and homophobia, and a lot of bigotry become mitigated only by knowing people who are not like yourself. It gets chipped away a little at a time, like the sea gradually wearing down a sandcastle on the beach. It doesn’t go away at once; sometimes, things get worse before they get better. Maybe in another 50 years?

Are there any countries you think you’d like to visit if not for the fact that you’re pretty sure you wouldn’t find anything you liked eating there?

Garrison Keillor has made me nervous about Scandinavia; all that talk about lutefisk, which I had once and found to be awful.

I decided that I wouldn’t back any more Kickstarter items for a while. Then Elaine Lee and Michael William Kaluta, who had had an unjust run-in with Disney/Marvel not long ago over their creation, Starstruck, are putting out a new Starstruck item. OK, after that one, NO MORE Kickstarter for a while.

Jane Henson 1934-2013, widow of Jim, and a force in her own right.