Lyndon B. Quotes
They had just attended a meeting which included the Kennedy appointee as Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara,1916-2009; LBJ remarked that McNamara was clearly the smartest person in the room.
Ironically, the Republican Presidents who had no business experience did much better with the American economy—Nixon, Eisenhower, and Reagan than the Republican businessmen. And the one Democrat who was a successful businessman—Jimmy Carter—presided over a terrible economy. The key variable seems to be business experience which gives leaders a false sense of being able to control things more than is real and develops an empathy with a narrow slice of the electorate—other businessmen—who are much more interested in short term profits rather than the health of the economy as a whole.
Under the Community Action Program, community groups were founded throughout the country. Some of these then tried to unseat the incumbent governors, mayors and city councilmen. Soon Governors were given veto powers on grants within their states.
Had he signed such a treaty in 1968, he would have been pilloried by the Conservatives of both parties for selling out the interests and principles of the United States and shackling the military before they could win the war. The military was lying about their successes and there were very few. Further, our ally whose government we were protecting from armed revolution was totally corrupt and did not support freedom and democratic values much more than the North Vietnamese Communists did. The Vietnamese in the South had little to fight for unless they were proofing from the corrupt government. There was no possibility that American could have won the war under those conditions. When the Nixon Administration signed the treaty, some of the ultra conservatives objected, but Nixon was a Republican anti-Communist and red baiter and this blunted the opposition of the bulk of the conservatives who were seeing a more realistic view of the war. The liberals who hated Nixon, however, supported him on this matter which was then their most important issue.
War and international conflict had become very complicated in modern times. Americans and most other people associated victory in war with unconditional surrender. However, since the unconditional surrender is of WWII, no conflict has ended with an unconditional surrender.
The irony of this statement is that Kennedy then selected Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. Johnson, most experts agree, was able to swing Texas into the Democratic tally, and many of those same experts generally agree with Kennedy’s point but believe that his election was the only exception to the general rule in modern times.
