Burying this news permitted the myth about Lyndon Johnson to continue being spread. For example, nearly two months after Mr. Shane's report, and at a time when the public's approval of the nation's Iraq invasion/occupation was reaching new lows, Ivan Eland, a syndicated news columnist from the conservative Independent Institute, headlined "Bush's Presidency Most Resembles that of LBJ," and he said, "The greatest resemblance of the two administrations " may be their deceptions about the need to conduct foreign wars, which later turned into quagmires. In 1964, LBJ used an alleged attack by a North Vietnamese patrol boat on a U.S. destroyer off the coast of Vietnam to push through Congress the open-ended Gulf of Tonkin resolution. " In the same way, Bush exaggerated the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to get initial public and congressional support for invading Iraq." However, it wasn't actually "in the same way" at all.
This conservative myth, that Lyndon Johnson had lied to initiate the invasion of Vietnam, just as G.W. Bush had lied to initiate the invasion of Iraq, helped to neutralize the impression of Bush's evil, as if to say, "This isn't a partisan matter at all -- Democrats aren't any better." Maintenance of public support for the Republican Party depends heavily upon the faithful public's belief in such "historical" lies, as that all human government is corrupt; only God's Government is not; and The New York Times played its part, even as it was implicitly reporting (though burying) the truth to the exact contrary of this very same conservative myth.
News is buried by its being neither in the headline, nor in either the lead, nor the end, of the given news report. The end is almost as important as the lead, because it's the reader's final takeaway-impression from the story. In this case, here is the Times story's takeaway -- the very end: "Dr. Prados said, "If Mr. Hanyok's conclusion is correct, it adds to the tragic aspect of the Vietnam War.' In addition, he said, "it's new evidence that intelligence, so often treated as the Holy Grail, turns out to be not that at all, just as in Iraq.'" If George W. Bush had been the reporter (or the editor) on this story, he couldn't possibly have done a better job producing it than the NYT did here. It confirms Bush's constant claim: that the reason he invaded Iraq was bad intelligence. But that's not true at all.
There is no historical foundation for believing that LBJ was intending to invade North Vietnam and start the Vietnam War when he entered the White House. But there is considerable evidence that George W. Bush was intending to invade Iraq when he entered the White House -- well before the intelligence community changed its tune and started producing the bogus type of "intelligence" that he was seeking. Some of this is documentary evidence.
CBS "60 Minutes," on 11 January 2004, headlined "Inside the Bush White House," and Ron Suskind discussed his new The Price of Loyalty, which was quoting Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, as coming out of the first Cabinet Meeting, on 30 January 2001, saying (p. 75), "Getting Hussein was now the administration's focus," this just ten days into Bush's Presidency. As O'Neill told Lesley Stahl, "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go." Suskind chimed in: "From the very first instance it was about Iraq, it was about what we can do to change this regime." Then, Stahl said, "O'Neill told us the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later." Suskind noted, "There are memos. One of them, marked "secret,' says "Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'" Stahl: "Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peace-keeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq's oil wells. ... Suskind obtained this Pentagon document dated March 5, 2001, entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts.'" Those things that Bush did were international war crimes, violations that would even have been prosecuted under the laws of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal.
Russ Baker, in a 27 October 2004 article, "Bush Wanted to Invade Iraq if Elected in 2000," wrote: --He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,' said author and journalist [Bush's ghostwriter] Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief." And he said, "My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it." He said, "If I have a chance to invade " if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed, and I'm going to have a successful presidency".'"
Yet another conservative lie even blames Democratic President Kennedy for Vietnam. In Imprimis, (the propaganda organ of the far-Right Hillsdale College), the "historian" Paul Johnson headlined in December 2007, "Heroes: What Great Statesmen Have to Teach Us," and he said, "My guess is that Eisenhower would have decisively rejected any direct U.S. involvement [in Vietnam]. ... Unfortunately, Eisenhower was in retirement when the time for decision came. John F. Kennedy agreed to enter the war, and Lyndon B. Johnson agreed to extend it." On the opposite side, there are leftist "historians" who think that JFK would have removed all troops from Vietnam. Oliver Stone and others cite Kennedy's 11 October 1963 National Security Action Memorandum No. 263 (NSAM 263) which stated that, "The President ... directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963." But Leslie Gelb was probably correct when he headlined in The New York Times, on 6 January 1992, concerning this memo, "Foreign Affairs; Kennedy and Vietnam," and said: "As for Mr. Kennedy's underlying thinking about the war, that is a murky matter. In the last weeks of his life, he gave sharply diverse signals as befits a President trying to keep open his options, especially before an election." There is unfortunately no way of knowing what Kennedy would have decided to do in the event of a failure by the South Vietnamese government to win the support of its people. JFK hadn't reached that Rubicon, and he left no clear indication of how he would deal with it if he were ultimately to face it. What is known for certain is that the political pressures on the President to invade Vietnam came from the Republicans and from the Dixiecrats -- in other words, from the conservatives -- and that both Kennedy and Johnson greatly feared being tagged by them as capitulating to "the communists." Barring this political threat against them, which was coming from the Right, none of the documented political pressures leading to the invasion of Vietnam would even have existed. Both Kennedy and Johnson were obsessed by their fear of the Republicans, a more immediate political fear than their military fear regarding the Soviet Union. Kennedy wanted to "Vietnamize" the war, but no one can possibly know whether he would have abandoned the war once Vietnamization failed -- as it ultimately did. The basic motivations for the U.S. invasion of Vietnam came entirely from America's political Right. That invasion was a politically necessary concession to America's conservatives -- Republicans and Dixiecrats.
But there's more: On 15 March 2013, the BBC headlined "The Lyndon Johnson Tapes: Richard Nixon's "Treason'," and David Taylor reported that Nixon tapes -- never yet reported in the U.S. press, and which had been declassified only at the end of the George W. Bush Administration -- showed that the Johnson Administration had been about to announce an agreement between North and South Vietnam, to end the war, in 1968, but that Richard Nixon, then running for the Presidency against Hubert Humphrey, sent "Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser ... to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal" from him. Promptly, and "on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out." So, the Vietnam war continued on, for another seven years, to no other point than Nixon's election, and his wanting to wait long enough for his campaign promise of "peace with honor" to become forgotten, by the time of our ultimate quitting. Seven more years needlessly extended this bloodshed and fiscal drain.
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