A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

by Glenn Greenwald

  As documented in the first chapter of this book, this Johnson narrative also perfectly describes the tragic rise and fall of the Bush presidency. Both presidents had the opportunity for successes on a historic scale, and for a time, both seemed poised to seize that opportunity. Yet in both cases, those opportunities were squandered by a deeply unpopular and unsuccessful foreign war of choice that seemed to get bloodier and more consuming by the day, yet with fewer and fewer prospects for anything that could be deemed a success, let alone a justification of the war itself.

  That the legacies of Johnson and Bush seem almost identical, at least with regard to their wars, is unsurprising given the overwhelming similarities, on multiple levels, between the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq. The divisions spawned among Americans by the Vietnam War, and the intense unpopularity of that war, are reflected by Johnson’s March 31, 1968, speech to the nation, in which he announced that he would not seek re-election to a second term:

  Tonight I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

  No other question so preoccupies our people. No other dream so absorbs the 250 million human beings who live in that part of the world. No other goal motivates American policy in Southeast Asia….

  For thirty-seven years in the service of our Nation, first as a Congressman, as a Senator, and as Vice President, and now as your President,

  I have put the unity of the people first. I have put it ahead of any divisive partisanship.

  And in these times as in times before, it is true that a house divided against itself by the spirit of faction, of party, of region, of religion, of race, is a house that cannot stand.

  There is division in the American house now. There is divisiveness among us all tonight. And holding the trust that is mine, as President of all the people, I cannot disregard the peril to the progress of the American people and the hope and the prospect of peace for all peoples….

  With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the Presidency of your country.

  Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.

  Johnson’s decision was compelled by his pervasive unpopularity as a result of the war. A 1968 Gallup poll conducted shortly before his announcement revealed that only 26 percent of the American people approved of Johnson’s handling of the war, and the belief that Johnson had misled the nation regarding the war’s progress was so widespread that he had virtually no credibility with the country.

  A poll commissioned by the New York Times and CBS News in late February 2007 found that Americans disapproved of President Bush’s handling of Iraq by an even greater margin: a mere 23 percent approved; 71 percent disapproved. Similarly, a solid majority of Americans have long believed that they were misled into supporting the war in Iraq in the first place and have consequently ceased trusting the president.

  Beyond public opinion, there are striking similarities between the rhetoric deployed by Johnson to justify the Vietnam War and that used by Bush with regard to Iraq. The Bush administration and its supporters constantly claim that the threat posed by Al Qaeda and terrorists is unique and unprecedented. As but one of countless examples, the president in October 2005 delivered a speech on international terrorism and argued that “our time in history will be remembered for new challenges and unprecedented dangers.” And the president and his supporters have sought to justify a whole array of radical policies—from lawless detentions of American citizens to the abuses of Guantánamo to “coercive” interrogation techniques (i.e., torture)—by claiming that terrorists are an enemy whose barbarism and disregard for civilized norms make them unlike any enemies we have ever faced in the past.

  President Johnson and Vietnam War supporters made virtually identical claims about the North Vietnamese. Demonizing the enemy as a unique, unprecedented threat is routine. It is a tool used by every government to justify every war. In his 1965 speech at Johns Hopkins University, President Johnson spoke of what he claimed was the unique Evil of the North Vietnamese (emphases added):

  And it is a war of unparalleled brutality. Simple farmers are the targets of assassination and kidnapping. Women and children are strangled in the night because their men are loyal to their government. And helpless villages are ravaged by sneak attacks. Large-scale raids are conducted on towns, and terror strikes in the heart of cities.

  And in his State of the Union speech of 1967, President Johnson railed against what he called the terrorist tactics used by the North Vietnamese:

  This war—like the war in Vietnam—is not a simple one. There is no single battleline which you can plot each day on a chart. The enemy is not easy to perceive, or to isolate, or to destroy. There are mistakes and there are setbacks. But we are moving, and our direction is forward….

  I think I reveal no secret when I tell you that we are dealing with a stubborn adversary who is committed to the use of force and terror to settle political questions….

  Our South Vietnamese allies are also being tested tonight. Because they must provide real security to the people living in the countryside.

  And this means reducing the terrorism and the armed attacks which kidnapped and killed 26,900 civilians in the last 32 months, to levels where they can be successfully controlled by the regular South Vietnamese security forces….

  And beyond the rhetorical attempt to demonize the enemy as a pure and unique Evil, if one reads virtually any of the speeches by Lyndon Johnson or his top aides regarding Vietnam, it is utterly striking how identical their reasoning is—both in terms of why we must not abandon the war and why we are winning—to the speeches President Bush has been giving for five straight years about Iraq. As just one example, this is an excerpt from Johnson’s 1965 speech at Johns Hopkins University:

  We are also there because there are great stakes in the balance. Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Viet-Nam would bring an end to conflict. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another. The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next. We must say in southeast Asia—as we did in Europe—in the words of the Bible: “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.”

  And in his State of the Union speech in 1966, President Johnson argued that the establishment of a fledgling democracy in Southeast Asia would foster greater peace: “Support of national independence—the right of each people to govern themselves—and to shape their own institutions. For a peaceful world order will be possible only when each country walks the way that it has chosen to walk for itself.”

  Claims that the enemy we face poses an unprecedented, mortal threat—and that it operates beyond all bounds of decency, humanity, and civilized norms—is something that Americans have heard (sometimes accurately, sometimes manipulatively) about all sorts of enemies over the last hundred years. There is plainly nothing new or unprecedented about the magnitude of the threat we have faced under the Bush presidency. Quite the contrary, the language and substantive arguments invoked by President Johnson to justify the continuation and escalation of the Vietnam War are virtually indistinguishable from those upon which President Bush has relentlessly relied in defending the equally unpopular ongoing occupation of Iraq.

  Even the origins of the Vietnam War contain glaring similarities to the president’s commencement and early prosecution of the war in Iraq. As early as 1962, the military was assuring Americans that progress was being made in Vietnam and victory was at hand. In a 1962 interview with U.S. Army Major Robert Ryan, the following exchange occurred:

  Q: Major, how would you say the war was going in your sector?

  A: Well, I think here, latel
y, the…it’s going a lot better; I think we’re beginning to win the people over; our operations are going better. We’re actually getting VC.

  Q: What evidence do you have that the…you’re winning the people over?

  A: Well, we’ve got the “strategic hamlet” program going on. And when we go out on these operations, it seems like the people are more friendly. Several times recently we’ve had people warn the Vietnamese troops that there was an ambush ahead, or something like that. This means the people are getting on our side.

  And in a December 1962 press conference, President Kennedy gave similar assurances:

  There is great difficulty, however, in fighting a guerrilla war; you need ten to one, or eleven to one, especially in terrain as difficult as South Vietnam. But I’m, uh…so we’re not, uh…we don’t see the end of the tunnel; but, I must say, I don’t think it’s darker than it was a year ago—in some ways, lighter.

  During a visit to South Vietnam in 1964, Johnson’s defense secretary Robert McNamara sought to assure the South Vietnamese of America’s willingness to wage war for as long as it takes to achieve victory against the “insurgents”:

  We are here to emphasize that the United States will maintain its interest and its presence in your country. There is no question whatsoever of our abandoning that interest. We’ll stay for as long as it takes. We shall provide whatever help is required to win the battle against the Communist insurgents.

  The same year, the U.S. military misleadingly depicted the Gulf of Tonkin incident as an unprovoked torpedo attack on the USS Maddox by North Vietnam in international waters, a claim which heightened war fever among Americans. Those deceitful claims also led Congress to enact, almost unanimously, the 1964 war-enabling Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

  Thereafter, President Johnson ceaselessly defended the righteousness of the war and America’s unending resolve to wage it. In 1965, he vowed: “We will not surrender. And we will not retreat. We intend to convince the Communists that we cannot be defeated by force of arms or by superior power.” And during a 1967 press conference, U.S. General William Westmoreland provided this sunny assessment when asked how he viewed U.S. progress in the war, one which he had repeated many times before and which he was to repeat many times thereafter: “Very very encouraged. I’ve never been more encouraged during my entire, almost four years in this country. I think we’re making real progress. Everybody is very optimistic that I know of, who is intimately associated with our effort there.”

  Yet Americans began, gradually though inexorably, to realize that assurances by President Johnson of great progress in the war were misleading, even false. More and more Americans came to question the veracity of the claims made at the outset of the war to justify its commencement and escalation. And as it became increasingly apparent that the war was both unnecessary from the start and the by-product of less-than-candid assertions by the president, the country turned against both the war and the president who had become its principal advocate. A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.

  While this dynamic compelled President Johnson to leave office, President Bush has remained in this depleted and discredited state for virtually his entire second term. And in the midst of his lame-duck tenure, Bush’s situation has only worsened, to a point of isolation, abandonment, weakness, and loss of national trust that even Lyndon Johnson did not encounter.

  Yet unlike Johnson—whose standing among Americans was improved by his decision not to seek re-election and his accompanying call for peace in Vietnam—George Bush has become more, not less, committed to the Iraq War as its unpopularity increases. And far from calling for peace, he announced his decision to escalate the conflict almost immediately after Americans turned his party out of office, in November 2006, due primarily to their desire for an end to the war. As a result of his unyielding conviction that he was right about Iraq all along, and his increasingly resolute commitment to the war, Bush’s approval ratings and support have continued to tumble toward the depths to which Richard Nixon sunk immediately prior to resigning the presidency.

  The president’s bizarrely misguided efforts to shape his own legacy will fail. And his and his supporters’ glorifying comparisons of the Bush presidency and those of other wartime presidents, such as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Truman, are simply frivolous.

  The Civil War, which propelled Lincoln’s presidency, was a true existential threat to the nation, one that was fought on American soil and resulted in the deaths of 600,000 Americans (a full 5 percent of the national population) and another 1 million wounded. In today’s population terms, that would translate into the deaths of 15 million Americans. Some weekend battles standing alone resulted in as many as 50,000 casualties. The scope of carnage and national endangerment—again, all carried out on American soil—finds no remote comparison in anything George Bush has faced.

  Similarly, World War II entailed warfare against the most formidable military force in the world, in the form of Hitler’s Germany, which in turn was fueled by the incomparable strength of German industry. That enormous capacity enabled Germany to invade and successfully occupy some of the most powerful countries in the world. And the United States was attacked by a Japanese nation united behind its emperor in an all-out commitment to winning the war against the U.S.

  During World War II, Americans were mobilized behind their president because they believed in the necessity and justice of the battle. Even prior to the Pearl Harbor attacks, President Roosevelt demonstrated the sincerity of his belief that that war was of urgent necessity for the security of the U.S. by arguing for American involvement despite there being very little prowar sentiment. More significant, President Roosevelt repeatedly demanded that Americans genuinely sacrifice for their country. All of America was galvanized into supporting the war by word and deed by President Roosevelt, and he ran for re-election in 1940 expressly on a platform of reinstating the draft in order to enable America to defend itself. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, President Roosevelt said (emphasis added):

  Because of the millions of citizens involved in the conduct of defense, most right thinking persons are agreed that some form of selection by draft is as necessary and fair today as it was in 1917 and 1918.

  Nearly every American is willing to do his share or her share to defend the United States. It is neither just nor efficient to permit that task to fall upon any one section or any one group. For every section and every group depend for their existence upon the survival of the nation as a whole.

  Lying awake, as I have, on many nights, I have asked myself whether I have the right, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to call on men and women to serve their country or to train themselves to serve and, at the same time, decline to serve my country in my own personal capacity, if I am called upon to do so by the people of my country….

  It is the continuance of civilization as we know it versus the ultimate destruction of all that we have held dear—religion against godlessness; the ideal of justice against the practice of force; moral decency versus the firing squad; courage to speak out, and to act, versus the false lullaby of appeasement.

  But it has been well said that a selfish and greedy people cannot be free.

  The American people must decide whether these things are worth making sacrifices of money, of energy, and of self.

  The greatness of President Roosevelt is attested to by the fact that Americans believed in the cause he touted and answered his call to sacrifice. American men willingly accepted the draft and American women entered the workforce and undertook enormous burdens in order to support the country’s war efforts. President Roosevelt did not merely playact as a “War President” (as George Bush once labeled himself), nor did he use wartime rhetoric for political gain while failing to follow his premises to their logical conclusions. Instead, he led the nation in a
cause that he was able to persuade his fellow citizens was so just and so compelling that the nation was willing to devote itself at great cost to its success.

  The contrast between the greatness of Roosevelt’s war leadership and the barren and disingenuous exploitation of War and Enemy rhetoric by President Bush could not be more glaring. And Americans have come to see those stark differences on their own. While President Bush has endlessly exploited the rhetoric of war and America’s alleged struggles to defend freedom, he has lacked the political courage to follow those claims through to their logical conclusions—by demanding, or even requesting, that Americans sacrifice for this claimed overarching struggle against Evil.

  In 2007, when President Bush announced to the nation that he intended to escalate the Iraq War by deploying still more troops, he was implementing the so-called surge plan formulated by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. Yet Kagan had warned that the success of that specific mission, as well as the general ability of the U.S. to succeed in its overall War on Terrorism strategy, was severely jeopardized by a shortage of American volunteers to fight in those wars. As a result, when Kagan, along with retired General Jack Keane, published a defense of the “surge” plan, he warned of the urgent need for President Bush to call for more Americans to volunteer for military service (emphases added):

  Victory in Iraq is still possible at an acceptable level of effort. We must adopt a new approach to the war and implement it quickly and decisively…. This approach requires a national commitment to victory in Iraq:…

  The president must request a substantial increase in ground forces end strength. This increase is vital to sustaining the morale of the combat forces by ensuring that relief is on the way. The president must issue a personal call for young Americans to volunteer to fight in the decisive conflict of this generation.