Between You and Me Read Online Free Page B

any president since Lincoln. “But then,” I said, “everything turned sour, Mr. President, and you know why?”
    “Why?” he rasped.
    “Because you let that war get out of hand.” I took a deep breath and then forged ahead, man-to-man. “Vietnam fucked you, Mr. President, and so, I’m afraid, you fucked the country. And you’ve got to talk about that!”
    Johnson glared at me with startled fury and then stalked off. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I asked the question in that manner.
    I suspect my thought process went something like this: Okay, if he refuses to talk about Vietnam, then I’ll remind him, using his own forceful and graphic language, about the terrible damage that war did to him and, through him, to the American people.
    The reactionto my in
    temperate remark was n
    ot what I had
    feared. Eventhough Johnsonwas steamed (to put it mildly), he did not go to Hewitt to complain that I had stepped out of line. Nor did he go through with his threat to send us packing. We proceeded to
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    B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E
    film our story, and whenthe time came for Johnsonto guide us past the exhibits, I honored his request and did not ask about Vietnam.
    But to my astonishment, he brought it up himself. We’d just finished talking about the critical challenges that a commander in chief had to confront in the nuclear age when, out of the blue—without a hint or warning of any kind—the words came pouring out of him in a torrent:
    “Throughout our history, our public has been prone to attach presidents’ names to the international difficulties. You will recall the War of 1812 was branded as Mr. Madison’s War, and the Mexican War was Mr. Polk’s War, and the Civil War or the War Between the States was Mr. Lincoln’s War, and World War One was Mr. Wilson’s War, and World War Two was Mr. Roosevelt’s War, and Korea was Mr. Truman’s War, and President Kennedy was spared that cruel action because his period was known as Mr. McNamara’s War. And then it became Mr. Johnson’s War, and now they refer to it as Mr.
    Nixon’s War in talking about getting out. I think it is very cruel to have that burden placed upon a president, because he is trying to follow a course that he devotedly believes is in the best interest of his nation. And if those presidents hadn’t stood up for what was right during those periods, we wouldn’t have this country what it is today.”
    A few minutes later, after we’d finished shooting and were preparing to leave, Johnson turned to me and said: “Well, god-dammit, Mike, I gave you what you wanted. I hope you’re satisfied.”
    “Oh, I am, Mr. President, I am,” I assured him.
    Johnson’s outburst provided the climax of our story, and when we aired it in a few days, I concluded the piece with the following comment on the man and his presidency:
    “What he hopes most is that he will be remembered for his Great Society and not for Vietnam. But the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson is that, although he accomplished so much for so many while he was in
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    P R E S I D E N T S
    office, historians are bound to write of him principally as the president who bogged his country down in Vietnam. It is some measure of the man, I think, that on that matter—Vietnam—he has not wavered.
    He still believes that he was right, and that history will prove it.”
    As we would later learn, it was not quite as simple as that.
    Throughout the mid-1960s, as he ordered one escalation after another, Lyndon Johnson projected the image of a confident president who deeply believed he was pursuing a course that would ultimately lead to a U.S. victory. All his public statements echoed the smug optimism of his military commanders, who kept assuring us that we were winning the war in Vietnam. Although many of us eventually became disillusioned with Johnson and his war policies, we did not question his credentials. We assumed that his various decisions to expand the war were driven by sincere