Real History

 

Reading Jill Lepore in the the New Yorker about plans for the Bicentennial, has given the Phantom pause to think about his prior bumps with historical commemorations.

In 1976, the Phantom and his new girl friend walked from the East Side of Manhattan to the wild and wooly West Side to see the "tall ships" sail up the Hudson, and then fireworks. 

The war in Vietnam was over by then, and the Republic seemed safe enough, apart from Cold War threats. But nobody was talking about the end of democracy or the collapse of the rule of law or apocalypse.

History seemed to have moved on.

Years later, the Phantom got into the habit of listening to the Lyndon Johnson tapes, which played on public radio as he drove out to the nearest batting cages in Drainesville, Virginia, along Georgetown Pike, past the CIA campus in Langley.

Listening to those tapes, to Johnson's voice was living history, a backstage view previously unavailable to the Phantom, and it confirmed the inferences the Phantom had drawn about LBJ: He was just as clueless and unsophisticated as he appeared on T.V.

He had one conversation which stuck with the Phantom, as LBJ spoke with the one person he clearly trusted and liked, Richard Russell, a deeply conservative Dixiecrat. LBJ was thinking about his options about pulling out of Vietnam or trying to push the war to a victorious conclusion. He actually said he was afraid of becoming the first U.S. President to lose a war, as if Madison had not actually lost the war of 1812. On the other hand, he did not fully trust the rosy assessments of his generals, and he wondered how long the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong would fight on.

"Well, you know, Mr. President," Russell told him, "You don't want to stay in Vietnam forever. We don't do colonies. We want to get out. Maybe do some business later. But, eventually, we do not want to be there."

"Yup," LBJ concurred.

"Well, those Cong, them boys in Hanoi--they know that, too."

And I thought, "Yes! You dumbass. It's obvious. So get out."

But then, on the other hand, there was a phone call from some young guy who had been sent to find out what was happening with a farm bill LBJ was interested in.  The young guy was out of the White House, some legislative liaison office.

"Well, you see, Mr. President, they are arguing over 3 cents a pound for beef and it's holding up everything. I mean, 3 cents! And neither side will give in, and the whole farm bill is being held hostage to the beef farmers, over 3 cents a pound!"

"Well," LBJ rejoined, "A head of cattle weighs maybe two thousand pounds, so that's $600 a head and you got a herd of 1000 head, that's $600,000, which is not chicken feed to a rancher."

When I saw my father I mentioned the tapes to him.

"I mean, LBJ sounded just dumb as a brick, when he's talking about Vietnam, but when it came to that farm bill, he was much sharper than this young staffer they sent over to Congress."

"Oh, Johnson was very bright," my father said. "I'd say maybe even brilliant."

"What? How would you know?"

"Well, they sent me over to brief him once, before a press conference, where they knew he was going to get grilled at length, and in detail, about some legislation concerning older workers, who, it turned out, were actually less likely to miss work, and who were more productive than most of the younger workers everyone was so eager please. 

And he listens and I keep pausing, so he can take some notes on his little index cards, but he writes nothing down, and just says, 'Yes, keep going.' So, I keep going and fifteen minutes later he says. 'Okay, got it.' And he goes out to the podium in the press room and they grill him and he hits them with everything I had just given him, no notes,  like it's all stuff he knows backwards and forwards. Mind like a steel trap. He was no slouch, mentally."

"Wait!" I stopped my father. "You went to the White House?"

"That's where he hung out. Sure. Had to go through all these tunnels with guys asking my name ever fifty yards."

So, it was no surprise to my father LBJ knew farm bills and anything else not foreign to his world.

But you take a guy who knows Texas ranches, cattle, domestic programs, and you put him on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Vietnam, and he is, figuratively speaking, lost at sea. He is just not smart enough to know what questions to ask, not widely enough read to think about a foreign culture.

When the Phantom picked up his wife at Logan airport upon her return from her holiday in Vietnam, forty years after the end of the American war there, she handed him her bag and she did not say, "Oh, good to be home!" or "I missed you!" 

She was, actually, the same woman with whom the Phantom had watched the tall ships celebrate the Bicentennial in 1976.

She said, first words out of her mouth, "There was no way in Hell we were ever going to win that goddamned war!"

Well, nice to see you back, too.

She had been given a tour of the underground "tunnels" outside Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City.) Tunnels is a gross misnomer: These were several levels deep, with hospitals and ammo dumps and plumbing and venting and HVAC and whatnot. They spread out in concentric circles for 20 miles. Those underground facilities were mute testimony to the determination of the Vietnamese to prevail.

After all, they knew Americans weren't going to stay. 

They, on the other hand, lived there.

As Richard Russell told LBJ, "And they know that, too."