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JACK
LUDWIG
Munich, and barely holds himself back from unleashing Chang Kai
what's-his-name. Once, let me recall again, McNamara was an eager
beaver businessman delighted to be part of a team, and put his good
know-how to work streamlining the services, and computerizing materiel
and closing navy yards; now he and Lodge huddle periodically in Saigon,
and the result is another one or two hundred thousand men sent to
interdict, punish aggression, pacify, defoliate or die. Once, too, the Pen–
tagon, the escalation and deterrence theorists, the weapons experimenters,
the lunatics preferring to see their war games played with real rather than
digital men were a rather fierce extreme on the margin of viable alterna–
tives; now reality has shorn them of their dreams: North Vietnam may
soon be, as LeMay hoped, bombed back into the stone ages, and many a
young officer may yet weep that nothing was left for him to burn. Not
even a gentle fuzzy open-minded detailman for ideas could be coun–
tenanced: he had to be classified as Lady Bird's culture boy, not Lyn–
don's, and his place had to be taken by a Philistine like Roche, whose
position on Vietnam, if nothing else, read good-to the CIA if not to
intellectuals and academics he might be expected to liaison with.
Two cliches about Lyndon Johnson are around: one, that he is an
arm-twister, the other, that he has no style (i.e., no Kennedy style ) . He
is
an arm-twister, and he has plenty of style. Blinder than most to civil
liberties, he has accomplished more than any other president for civil
rights. His Gettysburg Address of a few years back was as unambiguous
and passionate a declaration (of the need for justice, and not patience)
as any politician has yet made on the Negro revolution. His attack on the
white backlash a day or so before the recent elections was courageous
and tough. Whether he is or isn't genuine in his feeling for the Mexican–
American and Indian kids he taught and evidently lived with, his tears
have helped push through a poverty and an education program they
and others will benefit from. When his demagoguery calls for the "boys"
to bring back "a coonskin they can nail to the wall," his sentimentality
over "the old folks" helps pass medicare legislation.
I don't know if John Kennedy could have done as well with his
Congress. No one will ever know if the strategy of biding time till the
end of a session neared, and an election was imminent, and the President's
help was needed, and could be guaranteed only by a series of right votes
for his causes-nobody will be able to demonstrate that Kennedy's Con–
gress would have ended (as he thought it would) with a whirlwind of
accomplishments and triumphs connected to a simple causality. You vote
with
me, I campaign with you. Kennedy's style could have no other
strategy, I submit. That mystery I referred to earlier was the essence of
Kennedy's Presidency: he was skeptical, even cynical, hid his hand, kept
