The Vietnam war has put a kind of plexiglass barrier between the politics that went before, and what came after. The baby boomers were just a few years to young to have lived through the McCarthy period. It was terrible. I had fine teachers whose careers were either ruined or hamstrung by the purges. It was especially true of East Asian studies where people like John Fairbank, and Arthur and Mary Wright and others kept their heads down in the early 60s when the Vietnam business really got under way. There was tremendous political pressure not to ‘lose’ Vietnam the way McCarthy said that Marshall and Acheson ‘lost’ China. That charge was still potent in the early 60s, and that is the context in which Kennedy and Johnson let themselves be pulled into a fruitless war.

Also cold warriors. Walt Rostow was a great economic historian, but he probably bears as much responsibility for the disaster as anyone. McGeorge Bundy ditto.

It’s a complicated history, but the bottom line is that the Democrats were blackmailed into doing the Republicans dirty work, and then got blamed for the inevitable failure. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

I was never so happy as when LBJ announced that he wouldn’t run. Little did I know that we’d get Nixon and years more of war.

I was a few years older, and shuddered at what would likely (and did) happen. The horrors were roughly an order of magnitude greater than Iraq, both for our troops and for their victims. And, like Iraq, it was a war of vanity. Once the muslims did their slaughter in Indonesia, the domino theory was dead. From then on, we we fighting only for “bragging rights.” And, John McCain and his contemporaries haven’t got over their loss of bragging rights. They lost to a bunch of under-equipped *****, and they’ll never get over it. They are convinced that they were stabbed in the back and robbed of their hard-earned bragging rights by treasonous liberal politicians, who hate America. And, to them, Iraq is their opportunity to redeem themeslves, but only if we don’t quit again.

Pardon me, while I puke.

~~~ModNote: As contextually correct as certain terms may be, please keep them clear of here.~~~

He also created the civil rights legislation that has guided growth in Civil Rights- and led to the gooper domination of the south.

You have to ask yourself – would you trade your political party for the civil rights movement?

He also created the civil rights legislation that has guided growth in Civil Rights- and led to the gooper domination of the south.