Omens of LBJ in Vietnam --Bush's Baghdad Pitstop

The Turkey's* (duty-dodging former National Guardsman turned Commander-in-Chief) day--history repeating itself.

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...It was on Oct. 26, 1966, that Lyndon Johnson made his then celebrated trip to Vietnam to visit the troops. The administration at that time was busily touting the line--generally parroted by the American media--that the war was going well, and that there was a "light at the end of the tunnel." Johnson had ramped up U.S. troop levels from 185,000 in 1965 to 385,000, and had increased the size of the U.S. military overall by 1.5 million. North Vietnam was being bombed relentlessly by B-52s.

But, as Johnson's advisers well knew, the war wasn't going well--at least for the U.S. The number of U.S. soldiers killed in action by the time of his "morale-boosting" visit was approaching the 10,000 per year, and would reach over 16,000 in one year in 1968, when over half a million American soldiers would be in Vietnam.

By that time, Johnson's political career had been destroyed by the war, and he had been replaced by Richard Nixon, in no small part because Nixon had promised the electorate that he had a "secret plan" to end the war.

Nixon too, made a surprise wartime visit to Vietnam, on July 30., 1969. Again there was a lot of positive spin coming from the White House about light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, about winning the war, and about Americans coming home. In fact, by that point, American troop levels were at their peak, of 540,000, and the Vietnamese were still winning. (By that time, too, an equal number of protesters could be counted on to turn out at the increasingly frequent demonstrations against the war, and the media were beginning to question the wisdom of continued fighting.) While Nixon spoke of "Vietnamization," that is, of turning the war over to the South Vietnamese Army, nearly as many American GIs were killed during his two terms of office--25,000--as during the entire rest of the war. A total of 58,000 Americans--and three million Indochinese people--died.

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff12012003.html

Guess it was not very important to me and I was married to a service man and he was still in at that date.How soon we forget.

In 1961 Johnson, then vice president, visited Saigon. He assured the South Vietnamese the United States would stand by them. Memorably, LBJ called South Vietnamese leader Diem the "Churchill of Asia."

On October 26, 1966 Johnson visited Vietnam on his first trip as president. The week before anti-war protests had been held in 40 cities in the United States.

At the end of December 1967 LBJ worked in another trip to Vietnam while traveling to Australia for the funeral of Prime Minister Harold Holt, who had died in a drowning accident. Visiting Cam Ranh Bay, LBJ urged the soldiers to "nail that coonskin to the wall."

http://hnn.us/articles/1827.html