The Last Tyrant

I've always thought it kind of odd that, when we have -- allegedly -- "transparent" government, and government of, by, and for the people, every retired president winds up with a "library" whose main job is to guard a mile-high pile of top secret, kill-self-before-reading "papers" that, should they ever made public, would surely threaten the survival of the Republic. What I suspect is that most of the documents in question would do no more damage than to show, conclusively, that that particular president was just another in a long line of freakish, neurotic power junkies, i.e. that he was no exception to the rule for politicians. But aside from this total yawner of a "revelation", some intriguing details occasionally come to light. One example is the release, yesterday, of some "tapes", i.e. tapped phone calls, from the Johnson administration, and they show an "eerie resemblance", on many counts, between the last days in office of our first president from Texas and the last days in office of our second president from Texas. (Note to myself -- pray that there's not a third!)

The news item describes LBJ as having been "embattled" back in March of 1968. Well, there was a lot of "embattlement" going on in the country at that point, and in fact the fun was just beginning. (Of course, I was sitting in a psych lab in Athens, Ohio at the time running experiments on small rodents, frogs, and turtles, so what did I know?) But to go on with the story -- LBJ "...faced a commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam who wanted more troops..." Check. And "... a Congress that wouldn't pass his tax bill to pay for the war..." Non-check! The Congress LBJ faced had gonads -- the one Bush faces doesn't. (And electing Hillary would just remove two of the few it does have.) So LBJ is fretting about the war with his Secretary of State -- but, reading between the lines, you can tell it's all about political impact and not principle. Ultimately, he was perfectly content dropping the whole mess into Nixon's lap; but that's another story. (Bush will be more than happy to drop the Iraq debacle into the lap of whoever wins in November; you can be sure of that.) LBJ wanted to make sure that "Hanoi won't think I'm running out or caving." That certainly has a familiar ring to it. He also compared the idea of immediate withdrawal from Vietnam to Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler; how many times have we heard that comparison made in the current situation? Of course at that point the "domino theory" was alive and well, and international communism was assumed to have virtually limitless resources, not to mention fanatical determination and loyalty and... well, kind of like Al Qaeda, in fact. Al Qaeda is, for the current crop of politicians, what communism was for their predecessors -- not only their raison d'etre, but the justification for any and all disastrous military ventures, economic bloodletting, and suspension of rights on the domestic front. "Any port in a storm", and I promise you that if Al Qaeda disappeared this evening we would find a new, implacable enemy on the horizon at morning's light. Finally, to add a rim shot to the whole business, the library's senior archivist said (concerning the late LBJ era) "It seems like every day, there's a crisis." Well, this time we don't even have to update any of the words. To call the Bush administration "crisis prone" is like calling the guys in "Jackass" "accident prone". Of course, we can take some comfort in the fact that, in both cases, the vast majority of the crises were self-inflicted.

But we should comment, at least briefly, on why "I knew LBJ, and you, sir, are no LBJ". Johnson was the last president -- in my opinion -- who really was in charge. He took names and kicked ass, as the saying goes. He was a mean, vengeful SOB who granted no quarter and expected none. And he really did strike fear -- up close and personal -- into the hearts of everyone who worked for, or with, him. In short, he was a tyrant, and as such he could have set the tone for everyone who followed, except that none of them, either by temperament or ability, has proven willing or able to follow suit. Our current King From Texas, in particular, is the anti-LBJ. Far from micromanaging the Vietnam war or trying to build the "Great Society", Bush is a reed in the wind, a sock puppet who perpetually dances to tunes being played by other people, and whose reputation is, and will ever be, justifiably in the dungeon as a result. He doesn't "run" anything, and has no real responsibilites, unlike LBJ who did, at least, take responsibility for the war in Vietnam, even when it became clear that it was the greatest foreign policy debacle ever for the U.S. Yeah, I guess he felt a bit squeezed, at times, between the generals, the military-industrial complex, the economy, the left wing of his own party, and the fact that the country was on the verge of a total social meltdown. But he hung tough until he decided that he'd had it. There is a certain distorted, fractured nobility in all of that which, while not admirable, is also not trivial or pathetic. It is the stuff that tragedies are made of. Whereas Bush's record is that of the perpetual loser who just can't, or won't, realize that he was never really allowed to play with the big dogs. They were just pretending, and so was he. They let him play because he had the bat, the ball, and the glove. But when the team lost it was all his fault, and the other guys went off to have a beer and poor Georgie was left to shuffle home, kicking up dust all the way.