I highly recommend that you read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 before reading Part 4 of this series. Also please check out my updated Life Experience’s: Advertisement Campaign if you would like to help each other out.
Today in Part 4, I’m going start domestically and then head abroad to Vietnam. Its going to be a 1200 word journey through some pretty interesting times in American history. The Great Society will consist of a bunch of smaller parts broken down by each law. At the end, I’ll give a brief critique of the results that we see today. After that, we will hit the jungles of Vietnam. Okay, not literally. I want to discuss the reasons for going into Vietnam and the bigger picture of why Vietnam mattered so much for the Cold War. A bit of this discussion will touch on the military industrial complex because in my understanding it plays large role. Lyndon B. Johnson or LBJ has a bipolar presidency, in one part he pushes his domestic vision quite successfully. In the another part, he manages to escalate a war that he can’t win. Unfortunately for me, despite his sweeping domestic legislation, all I see is a great politician but not great results from his work. If only presidents were measured by how much they did, President Trump seems think that is how it works too. I hope he knows that LBJ has him beat.
The Great Society: Immigration
Unlike our current President, LBJ wasn’t a big immigration fan. However, there was law passed for immigration reform. All it did was remove the origin quotas. Which might sound small, but the quotas really kept numbers down especially for certain countries. Now depending on your perspective this could be both good and bad. In general, my feeling is that this was a good thing. There isn’t any reason to block any certain origin or ethnicity. Plus the economy can thrive with plenty of lower wage workers or even better more high skilled ones.
The Great Society: Gun Control
My stance on gun control is well-documented throughout this blog. It doesn’t work. That being said the passage of this particular sweeping gun control measure was in demand because of recent assassinations. However, let me point out that banning guns doesn’t stop criminals from getting them or using them. Ronald Reagan had an attempted assassination in the 1980s. So unfortunately LBJ’s gun control act was in vein.
The Great Society: Education
Everyone can related to this bill. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act gave us federal funding for schools and colleges. You are probably aware of the billions of dollars in student loan debt that exist today. Well, you can thank LBJ for that. This bill had really great intentions, make school affordable for everyone. Unfortunately, when one artificially inflates the amount people who can afford college, then the price of college goes up. Its pretty simple economics, basically colleges saw that more students could afford to go college and raised their prices. Therefore, it was a win-win for colleges because the government pays them to take on students and they can make huge profits. Which is problem we have today, college is very expensive. The education act really just saturated the market for college graduates and gave us a ton of debt. Thanks LBJ.
The Great Society: War on Poverty
In this piece of legislation, LBJ accomplished very little. He created things like minimum wage, medicaid, medicare and various other unsuccessful programs. Granted, he didn’t realize that fast food workers would protest for higher wages. Let’s be honest, government run healthcare isn’t that great, just ask one of our veterans. Aside from the obvious flaws of minimum wage and government run anything, this War on Poverty did nothing but increase poverty. I’ll give LBJ a break because they didn’t do studies on any of this. In hindsight, this wasn’t a good bill. Don’t worry, there is a positive one coming!
The Great Society: Voting Rights Act
This was by far one of LBJ’s most successful bills. In part because it was written by Martin Luther King Jr. The voting rights act removed most of the barriers set by Jim Crow laws and other racist laws to give people of color the right to vote. Its actually hard to explain how big of a step this was. LBJ and Martin Luther King Jr. had a fairly good relationship. Unfortunately King Jr. was assassinated not long after its passage, about 3 years later. This act had a lasting impact on civil rights. I keep saying that LBJ has good intentions and this bill proves it.
The Great Society: Not great, but just barely decent.
Overall, I would give LBJ a C+ on the Great Society because if your looking at the results, most of them not that great. This isn’t even a personal attack on LBJ, I’m only judging the policies. His voting rights act really carried him on this bundle deal. Unfortunately over the past 54 years its been proven his economic policies are junk. Yet somehow, here we are today with AOC and Bernie Sanders pushing the same junk with a new fruity socialist twist. If you came here for the Vietnam discussion then get ready to lock and load my dudes.
Back in ‘Nam, We didn’t have Starbucks.
Just a little joke to lighten the mood. I mentioned in a previous part, that JFK had sent “advisers” or special forces to help the south Vietnamese. Over the course of the 1960s, first JFK sent as many as 16,000 advisers to Vietnam, then by 1967 there was over 500,000 troops in Vietnam. Over the course of LBJ’s presidency, he was advised by Robert McNamara, his secretary of defense. McNamara encouraged many of the troop increases and bombing campaigns.. He also oversaw many of the weapon development programs. I think its safe to say that we didn’t win the Vietnam war. The guerrilla war fighters managed to out maneuver and out-strategize the greatest military power in the world. In order to understand why the US went into Vietnam, we need to look at NSC-68.
NSC-68 and the Military Industrial Complex
I have rarely given any outside sources because this isn’t a research paper or even an academic essay its a story. However, I believe that NSC-68 is important enough to have an outside source. Here is that source, click on this. NSC-68 in a short summary is a document which was written during the Truman presidency for the purpose of guiding US foreign policy. In no uncertain terms, it says that the US has to build up a substantial war chest of nuclear weapons to keep the Soviet Union from taking over the world. The document created the basis for the national security council which has since advised every President since. The NSC-68 created within the government the actual competition between the US and the Soviet Union. It was made real and it was followed closely. The military industrial complex is that thing Eisenhower warned about in his farewell speech. Unforgettably that warning was not heeded. I think it was outright ignored in fact. In many ways, the Vietnam conflict presented the perfect opportunity for government contracted weapons R&D companies to take advantage. Companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Halliburton…just to name a few.
On the next part I will finish explaining how Vietnam was shaped by these war profiteers. I will also explain how the Vietnam war represented a battle over communism vs. capitalism similar to Korea. You could say that the peak of the Cold War erupted in a hot war with Vietnam. Thanks for reading! Tune back in for Part 5!
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Vietnam has so many parallels with the second Iraq war. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a phony event, ghosts on a radar screen used by the MIC to justify going beyond the advisory role into troops on the ground. It was the 60’s equivalent to Saddam Hussein’s supposed chemical weapons. Ultimately the United States did lose the Vietnam war, however the US did win the battles. The NVA were on the verge of defeat when the US pulled out. The US abandoned their ARVN allies who we were treaty bound to protect. Ultimately the US defeat had much to do with the disillusionment of the American public with the war due to the anti-war movement. It should come as no surprise that the Communist sympathizers of the radical left anti war movement in the 60’s such as SDS, the Weather Underground and associates are the forefathers of the current socialist/communist movement that’s becoming so chic. Convicted terrorist and radical leftist Bill Ayers of the Weatherman was Obamas mentor, for example. But it wasn’t just a bunch of dirty Commie hippie radicals that led to defeat. Even in the 1960’s left wing bias existed in the Media. News anchor Walter Cronkite, ‘the most trusted man in America’ pronounced his opinion that the war was unwinnable and this was considered a seminal moment, the turning point of public opinion. America did not learn from history in becoming involved in Vietnam in the first place, France lost 100,000 troops in Indochina culminating in the disastrous massacre at Dien Bin Phu. They told us not to go, that it was unwinnable. Just like the US not learning from our own history in Vietnam and proceeding into the quagmire of Iraq. History dosen’t necessarily repeat, but it certainly rhymes, and the echoes of the complex politics of the Vietnam era continue to resonate to this day.
I don’t hold LBJ in particularly high regard. Before the Great Society, most African Americans voted Republican, as it was the party of Lincoln. The welfare programs of the Great Society did more to destroy the black family in America than the southern Democrats KKK ever did.
It does. I was gonna get there eventually. I wanna talk about the Soviets foray into Afghanistan because they had little success there just like us. The problem with history repeating is that people died and new generations forget to study it or learn from it.
Oh me either but I like to talk about LBJ because he is the father of today’s broken system. He learned from FDR and made it worse. People dont talk about it.