I. F. Stone, “A Man the Whole World Has Begun to Distrust”, 7 June 1965
After a year and a half with Lyndon Johnson as President, one thing can be said about him with certainty. It is dangerous to trust anything he says. His favorite stance on the platform is that of a country preacher, brimful of Gospel. Events have shown that beneath his corny brand of idealism is a hard-boiled operator who believes in force. The difference between him and Goldwater is that the latter candidly espoused what the former covertly practices. The Arizonian lost because he was more honest and less clever. But there is a limit to cleverness, and Johnson has about reached the limit.
The good will built up by Kennedy for our country in every section of the world except East Asia has been dissipated by his successor. It is no exaggeration to say that Johnson is today distrusted everywhere: in Latin America, where he has destroyed the hopes aroused by the Alliance for Progress; in Western Europe, where he is regarded as impulsive and high-handed; in India, where he affronted Shastri by canceling his visit rather than risk hearing an Asian dissent on our Vietnamese war; and in Eastern Europe, where the Russians had expected a continuation of the detente begun under Kennedy and the satellites had hoped for a continued thaw in the Cold War as their one sure means of liberation. Rarely has one man blasted so many hopes so quickly.
In Mr Johnson’s recent V.E. day address to Europe, he touched on “the dramatic contrast between this twenty years and the twenty years which followed World War I” and said that on 11 November 1938 “Munich was just six weeks old and war less than a year away.” Perhaps he spoke too quickly. Many of his listeners must have wondered whether a general war might not again be only another year away. Others must have recalled that it was behind the Pied Piper banner of anti-Communism that the Japanese began their incursions into China in the thirties and the Germans their mobilization for their second attempt in a generation to rule the world. The League of Nations was destroyed in the process as the United Nations is being destroyed by our own policy of unilateral military intervention. Humanity has long feared that some day a reckless man would his finger on the H-bomb. Johnson has himself to blame if people are beginning to fear that maybe he is that man.In a flurry of recent speeches and press conferences, Mr Johnson has shown himself on the defensive. He is finding his critics much less ready than they were in the campaign to be taken in by sweet talk. He has tried first of all to counteract the widespread resentment in the press corps and in the colleges over his inability to take criticism and his effort to stifle independent reporting and foreign policy debate. He is trying to sound like Jefferson in public while he sounds more like McCarthy in private. He told an entourage of reporters at the White House recently that he knew that Communists were behind the teach-ins. He said he had instructed J. Edgar Hoover to root them out. “How rare is the land and extraordinary the people,” he said at the National Cathedral school, 31 May, “who freely allow, and encourage as I have on many occasions, citizens to debate their nation’s policies in time of danger.” But after so warmly patting himself on the back, he refused to answer at press conference next day when asked whether this meant that he approved “university teach-in techniques”. Even a pretended magnanimity is beyond him. The real Lyndon Johnson is reflected in U.S. News and World Report (7 June) which says: “The White House is known to be concerned about the number of extreme ‘left-wingers’ getting across their views in newspapers and on television and adding to U.S. troubles.” This will be news even to moderate “left-wingers” accustomed to being sealed off from access to major communication media. Apparently any criticism is regarded in the White House as “extreme” left-wing.
[...]
Mr Johnson said at press conference that the other countries in [the Americas] had long ago declared Communism incompatible with the Inter-American system. This does not mean they agreed that the U.S. Marines could march in whenever we thought a government leaned too far left. Just how far offbase we are in Santo Domingo is indicated by the fact that two well known anti-Communist Latin American experts, both violently anti-Castro, have attacked Johnson’s Red scare excuse for intervening in the Dominican Republic: Theodore Draper in the 24 May issue of the New Leader and Robert J. Alexander in the 20 May issue of New America, organ of the Socialist Party. The Administration’s Dominican intervention was not made to look less silly by Secretary Rusk’s defense of it at a press conference, 26 May. “There was a time,” Mr Rusk said, to demonstrate the power of a handful, “when Hitler sat in a beer hall in Munich with seven people.” The Washington correspondent of The (London) Times (27 May) commented tartly, “Apparently, however, tens of thousands of American troops are not to be deployed whenever eight suspicious men gather together over glasses of beer.”
What we found most repulsive in the press conference was Mr Johnson’s unctuous call for plastic surgeons to go to Vietnam. An easier way to meet that need would be to stop dropping napalm on its people.
“Rarely has one man blasted so many hopes so quickly” — though there has been an ongoing competition on that score by most of the Presidents since Johnson.
“[T]he United Nations is being destroyed by our own policy of unilateral military intervention.”
The Socialist Party included members who were “anti-Communist” and “violently anti-Castro”? Shocking.
It’s nice to know that inappropriate Nazi comparisons were already a feature of public discourse only twenty years after the war.
It’s also useful to remember that throwing everyone to the left of the White House under the bus did not start with the advent of DFHs.
“[E]ffort to stifle independent reporting and foreign policy debate” caused “resentment in the press corps”? *sigh*
“How rare is the land and extraordinary the people, who freely allow, and encourage as I have on many occasions, citizens to debate their nation’s policies in time of danger.” Irony has apparently been dead for a while.
irony has been dead, it’s just the relentless spinning in the grave that makes us think that it was alive
Here, in a nutshell, is why I can still say there isn’t a whole lot of difference between Democrats and Republicans. The current administration has just proven itself to be unusually incompetent in the execution of empire.
fish, it’s not just the ol’ imperialism, though, it’s the EPA, FDA, XXY, NNQ, etc. that there are certainly large differences about, also the National Institutes for Chocolate Skittles Research.
National Institutes for Chocolate Skittles Research
think of the sweet government contract money 3B could be rolling in.
it’s the EPA, FDA, XXY, NNQ, etc. that there are certainly large differences about
True, and I will never vote Republican. But, I don’t much like voting Democrat either.
You don’t want government money. There’s so much paperwork involved ( hate timesheets) that its negatives quickly outweigh the benefits.
fish:
There is a big difference between saying “a plague on both your houses” and “there’s no difference between the two parties”.
I agree that both parties are imperialist/corporatist. However, what digby says about the Dems engaging in actual governance while the GOP just loots the treasury is actually true, even if she idealizes things a wee bit.
It’s also the case that while Dems may believe in using US power in an imperialist fashion, they don’t believe that war equals national redemption like the neocon chunderlogs.
While I understand the sentiment and largely agree with it, I think the rhetoric of “there’s no difference between the parties” most often ends up serving the interests of the GOP more than the interests of those saying it. And what’s more you don’t even believe it — as you just admitted.
I think it’s a sloppy and counterproductive meme. There have got to be better ways of expressing the sentiment behind it.
> bonnet.remove(bee)
The diversity of opinion within the Democratic party makes a lot of this difficult to talk about. In saying “Dems may believe in using US power in an imperialist fashion”, I’m failing to abide by my own standards. That belief is far from universal among Dems. And it is almost certainly the case that the largest and most powerful group in this country opposed to that kind policy is contained within the Democratic party — even if that group and its allies are not powerful enough to have many victories.
Johnson himself, despite his weakness for authoritarian delusions on national security — one of our more characteristic national sicknesses — made a profound and lasting accomplishment with the Civil Rights Act, and a meaningful, if in many ways less enduring, contribution with his anti-poverty programs. He was also self-reflective enough to have had sufficient understanding of the depth of his errors by ’68 not to believe he deserved to remain in office.
I know what you are saying about the “no difference” meme. I have held the position for a long time, but I think recent changes in the political climate are forcing me to soften that stance. There are a few points to make though that justifies that position more than I think you allow.
First, I don’t think the current administration can be used as representative of Republican ideology or representative of even conservatism through US history, at least if that word has any meaning anymore. The Bush43 administration is more of an outgroup of profound stupidity, greed, and incompetence. If you compare Bush41 and Clinton for example, I can’t think of a single policy that was substantively different. The differences in positions were only a matter of degree and Clinton’s administration was way more conservative than Nixon’s for example (except for the paranoia thing). Nixon consolidated much of the positive gains of LBJ (expanding social programs, arts spending, and federal regulations on businesses) while Clinton rolled them back. LBJ expanded the war against communism that JFK started (I would use this example to counter your assertion about Democrats and war above), Bush 41 was the president that formed the IPCC to begin to address climate change, while Clinton expanded authority on wiretapping and other invasions of privacy, shepherded NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO (the last two being deeply anti-constitutional) and started his own war. Institutional liberals were in line for the Iraq war until it turned to s**t, then it suddenly became “mismanaged.”
Yes there are honorable individuals in the Democratic party, there are still a few (although diminishing) in the Republican party. I think what we have seen in recent years that is different from the past is that the Republican party out of necessity is pandering to a bunch of crazies and so the message has steadily become more bizarre and twisted. Democrats just have to pander to the middle class and lower class so their messages are relatively unchanged.
It seems like the Republicans over the last 10-12 years have degraded to a point never seen before. Newt lead a charge which is now headed right over a cliff. But it is a recent anomaly ripe for a correction. We will see a correction in the next election and there will (out of necessity) be a reshaping of the Republicans back to Bush41 styles and the corporate/imperialist elites will be pleased again. Huckabee scared the s**t of of them…
This is rambling, and I have no real time to tighten it up, but the short version is that the statement “there is no difference between the parties” was more true pre Bush43 and will probably return to that equilibrium in the future (or our whole system will collapse under the weight of the decay and corruption). Don’t expect a Democratically controlled administration and congress to roll back the civil rights violations, the torture provisions, the war in Iraq, defense spending, or corporate patronage. We will see a little improvement on abortion rights, maybe gay rights, and at least a dialog on healthcare. Not issues to ignore, but thin gruel when our whole system is so profoundly diseased.
I forgot to write after Bush41 formed the IPCC, it was Clinton that first refused to sign Kyoto…
Bush41 didn’t have Congress. Clinton did, for awhile. I would suggest that domestic evisceration likely would have proceeded apace under Bush41, while foreign entanglements would have likely been much less debaclish under B41.
> bonnet.remove(bee)
Wait, was this Python code?
The problem with Stone’s analysis is he looks at Johnson’s foreign policy alone. And LBJ was a throwback to the Truman/Eisenhower mold of Cold Warriorship, where you fought wars by proxy so you would hopefully not have to fight WWIII with the Soviets. As misguided as that was, it was not the same as what hardline conservatives were espousing. Goldwater’s nuclear finger was exaggerated, but you did have people like Curtis LeMay espousing the nuking of Russia preemptively so we could hopefully kill more of them before they could kill more of us.
Domestically, however, there was a world of difference. JFK for all his charisma didn’t really do much for the poor and non-white. He had started coming around on Martin Luther King, but he approached the whole Civil Rights Movement with a conservative, cautious New England air. Johnson was the one who out Kennedy-ed Kennedy, enacting the most sweeping social legislation since the New Deal, a series of programs that the conservatives in this country have been trying to tear down for 40 years.
Ultimately, he was a failed president because Vietnam overwhelmed everything else. But he was not Nixon or Reagan.
DRINK ME
Brando:
Stone’s piece is not a long-term assessment of LBJ, but rather a news article covering his foreign policy actions at a certain moment.
It would be very strange if Stone’s overall perception of LBJ was not more nuanced than is evident here. In fact, I imagine it likely he might provide a wider perspective in other articles in the same issue of his newsletter — a conjecture I unfortunately can not test using the materials I have at hand.
I haven’t read a lot by Stone, but I’ve read enough to be certain he was no one-sided ideologue. And given his reputation, I would have been greatly surprised if he had turned out to be one.
I noted the contrast between LBJ’s imperialism and his domestic programs in a comment above. I didn’t mention them in the post because I assume that 3B readers know about them, and I felt like leaving his imperialism in stark relief.
My real reason for posting this, though, was not so much about LBJ, but how much resonance there is between then and now — how familiar many of Stone’s complaints sound.
Ah, plover, you’re right. I haven’t read much by Stone either, I think that’s why I misread this.
The parallels are really scary. I am always amazed how easy it is to repeat the mistakes of history but not the successes.