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He didn't just SIGN the bill. He pretty much pushed it through and used the bully pulpit of the Presidency to push it through. If you have spare time, you should read about how difficult it was to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. It was basically "sat on" by the chairman of the House Rules Committee (a southerner) and was only brought out from under Committee by an unprecedented popular vote in the House, which brought it to the floor. Then, it was filibustered in the Senate for like almost 3 months. Kennedy would most likely not have been as effective as LBJ was in getting the bills passed.
Calling for it in speeches is ONE thing. Getting the sh*t passed is quite another. Kennedy was very eloquent much like Obama. Was he really all of that though? I read that he told Sammy Davis Jr to stay away from him because Sammy Davis was married to or dating a white woman at the time. He also had J Edgar Hoover monitor MLK's sexual proclivities with white prostitutes. He shared these with his gold digger wife (Jackie) who bragged that MLK was a perv.
are any of us really all of that? No, there is good and bad in everything and I'm not trying to make a hero out of anyone, that really disgusts me....most people with money and power surcome to the shall we say, not so nice side of life....
Well, if you wanna take it back to Roosevelt, i won't argue.
Ike did more than commit a handful of advisors...he and Truman financed the French war in Indochina.
As for Kennedy's role, you guys have gotta stop letting him off the hook in Vietnam. His killing of Diem GUARANTEED deeper American involvement in Vietnam. When you do as much as we'd done leading up to Johnson becoming our president, war is inevitable.
Again, i'm not exculpating Johnson...but he did exactly what Kennedy would've done.
I'm going to have to agree to disagree with you on that. All we have to work with is history. And history puts the blood of Vietnam on the hands of LBJ. And -- God help us all -- Nixon.
You're completely wrong, cremebrulee…
I'm old enough to have been around back then as a young adult.
Kennedy was the one who first involved the U.S. into the mess in Vietnam, beginning in late 1962 as the Diem regime in S. Vietnam began falling apart.
Jack Kennedy was a Cold Warrior to the bone. His Senatorial voting records show this, and he fully supported the foundation of SEATO, the Southeast Treaty Organization, created by Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Dulles.
SEATO was intended to be the Asian equivalent of NATO in Europe, but it never jelled as a solid anti-Communist bloc of allies, as most of the signatory nations had recently emerged from western colonization and/or were still recovering from their brutal treatment under the Japanese during WWII. Vietnam was the largest nation in the group, and the French had really messed it up trying to hang onto it as a colony.
North Vietnam became the half where the nationalists, who wanted an independent Vietnam fled to when they French went after them in the south. South Vietnam remained pro-French throughout the prolonged conflict.
Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first and foremost. He had been exiled by the French long before, and had returned only after the end of World War II. At first, he tried to seek the United States as an ally against the French, using some of our former OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) operatives as his intermediaries. The men couldn't gain any interest from our state department, who all supported the French.
As a young man, Ho spent years living in France and in the United States, and later, in Moscow. Still later, he spent time in China when Chiang Kai-shek briefly ruled while trying to fight the Japanese.
His time in France made him a nationalist, but he was open to any western belief that would allow Ho to bring about his nation's independence. Ho wanted a socialist democracy for his native land, but wanted it to be built on a U.S. style Constitution. If not ours, then the Communist model would suffice.
Most of all, he wanted wanted arms and aid to drive the French out. After his discussions with our guys went nowhere, he turned to the Russians, who were seeking their own sphere of influence in the region, and they were happy to oblige him.
By the time Kennedy was elected, Ho had created a socialist state built on the Communist model, while South Vietnam fell into a dictatorship. The Diem family were very unpopular from the first, as they were Catholics and oppressed the Buddist majority severely. By the time Kennedy sent in our first troops, all military advisors, South Vietnam was in the beginnings of a civil war. President Diem was assassinated in 1963, and from then on, every South Vietnamese leader was a puppet of the United States.
Within a few months of Diem's death, Kennedy was assassinated.
Johnson was a complete outsider in the Kennedy administration. As a new President, Johnson was in no position to kick out Kennedy's Secretaries, and he had to follow Kennedy's early steps into intervention in Vietnam. For political reasons of his own, he began escalating the intervention into Vietnam in 1965.
Johnson's real desire was the creation of the Great Society, and he managed to get it realized. How much he wanted to win in Vietnam is something that remains unknown, but he was a man of his time, and was also a Cold Warrior. From the viewpoint of the time, Korea's stalemate was a successful stop to the widespread belief that the Communists wanted to take over the world, so Johnson may have thought a similar permanent stalemate would happen in Vietnam.
Whatever his thoughts were, no one in Washington foresaw or understood the resolve of the Vietnamese desire to be independent of all westerners and free to live in their own independent nation. Uncle Ho was not a good man; he was as brutal his his opposition as the Diems were, but he was always the figure in his nation who was the fiercest nationalist, and no nation, not even the United States, could overcome that.
Johnson became mired just as Bush was mired in Iraq, and Nixon did no better than Johnson. The United States simply could not tolerate the thought of losing it's war, ever. 50 years later, we are still suffering divisions that came from that loss.
But that does not make Johnson an evil man, either in his actions during the civil rights movement nor during the conduct of the war.
Remember that Selma is a movie, and movies always have historical inaccuracies. It's also good to remember that MLK was a Republlcan.
I enlisted in 1965 when I was 21 years old and watched it all unfold.
we had a pressence over there, you are right....but we had not yet gone to war with them, until after he died...and then Johnson signed the bill for us to go over there....
In the North, LBJ portrayed Goldwater as a racist, even putting out comic books with Goldwater dressed in Klan robes. In the South, he presented an accurate portrayal of Goldwater as a lifelong advocate of integration. So in other words, LBJ invented the Democratic party's tradition of race-baiting, which is still going strong 50 years later.
Libs will probably excuse it, but I was just a little kid at that time, and even I knew that it was wrong to use that word. He was also known for abusive practices towards staff such as making them follow him into the bathroom and conduct meetings while he was on the toilet. Lyndon Johnson Held Meetings On The Toilet - KnowledgeNuts
He also ballooned federal spending by more than any other prez post-WWII, which to me goes hand in hand with his other actions.
Do you really think LBJ would ever have had a china man's chance of being President if Kennedy had lived?
That hooker gal didn't seem too credible to me after reading the article. Nixon shivering?? One of the articles had detailed itinerary of Johnson on his Texas trip. Johnson didn't even fly into Ft Worth until late night on the 21st. If someone knew something (anything) about who killed JFK, wouldn't they have confessed on their deathbed?
In the North, LBJ portrayed Goldwater as a racist, even putting out comic books with Goldwater dressed in Klan robes. In the South, he presented an accurate portrayal of Goldwater as a lifelong advocate of integration. So in other words, LBJ invented the Democratic party's tradition of race-baiting, which is still going strong 50 years later.
Libs will probably excuse it, but I was just a little kid at that time, and even I knew that it was wrong to use that word. He was also known for abusive practices towards staff such as making them follow him into the bathroom and conduct meetings while he was on the toilet. Lyndon Johnson Held Meetings On The Toilet - KnowledgeNuts
He also ballooned federal spending by more than any other prez post-WWII, which to me goes hand in hand with his other actions.
He said the N word? Oh my! Everything he did should be repealed then.
Johnson signed the bill, Kennedy called for it......
Kennedy did no such thing.
Kennedy was a Ney vote in 1959 and again after he was President in 1961.
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