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Joey
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Re: The New and Improved Joey? thread
Reply #7917 - Aug 14th, 2012 at 9:18pm
" The great questions about the Vietnam War -- including the questions of whether Lyndon Johnson had feasible choices other than the ones spelled out in that telephone call ; of whether it is true , as one of his biographers say , that " no President , especially an unproven , unelected one , could simply have withdrawn without some real hope that the South Vietnamese could have held off a Viet Cong - North Vietnamese takeover " ; of whether , if other feasible options existed , Johnson pursued them with sincerity ; and of whether , had John F. Kennedy lived , United States policy would have been different from the policy Johnson pursued -- these questions are among those that that must remain to be examined in the next volume of this work . However , two aspects of the early decisions on Vietnam , early steps on what was to be a very long road , that Johnson took during that Christmas vacation on the ranch , are clear : first , whatever steps he took during that vacation , he took as well steps to conceal them , to keep them secret from Congress and the American people ; and , second , the steps he took had , as their unifying principle , an objective dictated largely by domestic -- indeed , personal -- political concerns . "
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