Henry Redux

Guest Post by Jack

Harry Truman liked to say that "the only things new in this world is the history you do not know."

Thus as the carnage in Iraq rages, taking the lives of more U.S. soldiers in a three day period this week than at any time since the war began three and a half years ago, wailing echoes of voices past, and events of memory, come to mind.

"LBJ, LBJ how many kids did you kill today?" Such were the shouts made nearly forty years ago by protesters outside the White House gates as the war in Vietnam unleashed its domestic fury. It has been reported that inside the White House the epithets could be heard by the anguished daughters of Lyndon Johnson. And so too has it been said that Johnson's great nemesis, Robert Kennedy bitterly bemoaned of the war, "How many boys must die before we see the folly of all this."

As for Johnson himself he would forever be tormented by the agony he had inflicted with his war. One of the most famous photographs of his presidency portrays a deeply dejected man, his head collapsed down on the corner of his desk, glasses dangling from his fingertips as he reportedly listens to news from Vietnam. Humiliated and ailing he went into exile in 1969 at his ranch in Texas. He would live but four more years, a shell of the larger than life figure he had been, growing his hair to the length of the hippies' who had vilified him, and embittered over the obliteration of his accomplished domestic agenda by cataclysms of his own making in a foreign land.

Lyndon Johnson of course had much help in making his war, and one of those who helped was Robert McNamara, the brilliant and some say Machiavellian automaton, who at the age of forty-four became the first head of the Ford Motor Company from outside the family of Henry Ford. Tapped by the dashing John Kennedy in 1961 to head the Pentagon, he enthralled Lyndon Johnson with his brilliance, and became a major figure in America's expanded involvement in Vietnam under Johnson.

As Vietnam dragged on and on, becoming bloodier and bloodier, McNamara himself stayed on and on, all the way to 1968, serving longer than any other Secretary of Defense. So large was McNamara's imprint on the war that as it pierced the nation's heart, it became derisively known as "McNamara's War." He too would forever agonize over his injurious inflictions, publicy issuing his mea cupla in the 1995 memoir, "In Retrospect-The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam."

Prefacing his book, McNamara said, "We...who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation...yet we were wrong, terribly wrong...." Part of the "principles and traditions" was the flawed Cold War policy that communism must be contained everywhere, even in a land and from a people and culture completely unknown to us, half a world away. If not for such containment in Vietnam the naive illogic continued, countries all over the earth would fall like dominos to communism, tumbling inevitably to Freedom's doorsteps here in America. So, hand in hand did Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, armed with their ideology and their backs against the dominos, meet ultimately not the defeat of communism in Vietnam, but instead the full wrath of their own countryman. And though they would leave the stage the war went on.

Today, in Manhattan, there is a new play out about the man and his helper to whom the mantel of Vietnam passed. "Nixon's Nixon's," is a re-enactment of the drunken dialog, which according to legend took place between a distraught and delusional Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, on the eve of Nixon's resignation amidst the Watergate scandals. The diabolical Kissinger, hoping to survive Nixon's fate and continue his employment under Nixon's successor, tells his boss of their nearly finished days together, "happy times...become tragedy...tragedy becomes farce."

Begun with a bungled burglary and culminating in lies and cover-ups unraveled by reels of audiotape, the epic downfall of Richard Nixon, a dominant figure in American life for two decades and the most accomplished politician of his era was indeed farcical. But how much happiness there was before the tragedy must all have been relative, for before Watergate and contributing to it, there was the continuing war in Vietnam with Nixon and Kissinger orchestrating the extension of its failure and its misery upon the American people.

Of their collaboration on Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger would spawn the policy of "Vietnamization," the idea that the South Vietnamese would become trained and ready to defeat the North themselves, and then America would leave. Nixon however, under siege because of the war and understanding that the real hope for an exit was not Vietnamization but a negotiated treaty with the North, finally bombed his way to one in January 1973.

Kissinger, for his part in negotiating the treaty and in a mockery of the word won the Nobel Peace Prize, and Nixon declared that America had accomplished "peace with honor." In reality the peace lasted long enough for America to evacuate. Two years later South Vietnam officially surrendered to the North, and the utter waste of American life, treasure and morale, lay bared. Nearly sixty thousand American servicemen dead. Perhaps a million Vietnamese dead, perhaps millions of Vietnamese dead. We do not really know.

No other dominoes ever fell. And of the four Titans of America's Vietnam, Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, and Kissinger, only Kissinger survived it unbowed, unbroken, and unrepentant. He would last as Secretary of State through the presidency of Nixon's successor Gerald Ford.

So it should be according to Bob Woodward's new book "State of Denial," that Henry Kissinger is back in the home of another delusional president, this time in the House of the Great Decider. Thirty years removed from the events of Nixon's Nixon's, Henry is now counseling the 21st century version of Vietnamization in Iraq, "as Iraqis stand up America will stand down." The wobbly fortitude of the American public which according to Henry precluded his victory in Vietnam, now demands that victory must be the only exit strategy for Iraq.

As for the Decider himself, he like Henry perhaps in part because of him, remains unbowed, unbroken, unrepentant. Iraq after all was spawned in part by a domino theory of its own in reverse, that a free and democratic Iraq would transform the whole Arab world into a democratic oasis. Thus it is stay the course.

It is all working as well as it did thirty-five years ago. The insurgency which began before the Decider pranced before the banner of "Mission Accomplished," has been replaced by a full blown civil war. Death squads masquerading as Iraqi security forces engaged in the terror, mass torture, execution and religious cleansing of their fellow Iraqis, now makes a mockery of Iraqis standing up so America can stand down. Nearly three thousand American military deaths since the fighting began thirteen hundred odd days ago. Tens of thousands of Iraqis, maybe a hundred thousand or more Iraqis dead. We do not really know. The logistical mastermind of all this success, Donald Rumsfeld, will very soon surpass Robert McNamara as the longest serving American Secretary of Defense.

As for the Great Decider his resolute response to all the gloom and doom is to deny its existence and proclaim much progress in the midst of all his hard work. Those who do not share his vision, whether Democrats or the majority of citizens who disagree with him, are denounced one and the same as terrorists or those who would coddle terrorists. This at the same time as a Congress full of Democrats and a citizenry hand to him the charred remains of the American Constitution.

Thus, from the President's own assault on American freedoms and civil liberties, to Iraq's inferno extending the flames of hatred and extremism across the Muslim and Arab worlds, do the dominos of democracy advance not forward but avalanche backward, stripped bare of all democracy as they topple on the doorsteps of America.

Of all the wars the Decider is waging, real and imagined, domestically and abroad, his only successes come at home. His only victories against the Constitution of the United States and the people of America.