50 Years Ago, LBJ Lied, and Millions Died

For Throwback Wednesday, the worst POTUS's worst deception

Ten years ago, I marked a dark anniversary.

“Enjoy” probably isn’t appropriate for this one….

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Distressed that the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives can’t get along? Frustrated over “gridlock”? Pining for the days when bipartisanship was the norm?

Let’s time-travel back 50 years, and examine a fateful measure that Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted with near-unanimous support.

In the summer of 1964, Vietnam’s civil war was escalating. Would the country — bifurcated, north and south, by an agreement crafted a decade earlier — be communist or “free”? Washington’s Cold Warriors, in the thrall of the “domino theory,” weren’t willing to let another nation succumb to the reds. A covert, and largely unsuccessful, campaign was underway to weaken the regime in the north. But the shenanigans raised the pesky issue of congressional authorization. To do more, and openly, the commander-in-chief needed permission.

Stanley Karnow, in his voluminous history of the Vietnam conflict, wrote that by May 1964, presidential aides had composed a rough draft of a “resolution that would serve a dual purpose: by giving Johnson a free hand to conduct the war in Southeast Asia as he saw fit, it would strengthen his international credibility; more important, its passage would assure him bipartisan endorsement and thereby remove the Vietnam issue from the election campaign.” The document was ready, but a pretext for approval was necessary.