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MILITARY RELATED ARTICLES AND INFORMATION
WELCOME TO OUR OPEN FORUM.PLEASE FEEL FREE TO POST ANY INFORMATION YOU HAVE ABOUT ANY WAR'S AND/ OR VETERANS.
EAGLE HEART'S 173RD.FLIGHTLINE MAINTENANCE

'Reaching for Glory' -- By GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, 14:43:44 01/01/02 Tue

'Reaching for Glory': The Workings of Lyndon Johnson's Mind
By GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS
Oct. 14, 1964, is a very bad day for Lyndon Johnson. With only three weeks left in his race against Barry Goldwater, his personal lawyer, Abe Fortas, calls to report that the president's longest-serving aide, Walter Jenkins, has been arrested for performing oral sex on another man in the basement pay toilet of a Washington Y.M.C.A. An incredulous Johnson immediately takes charge of damage control. He directs Fortas to force Jenkins's resignation and to spirit damaging files from Jenkins's White House safe; orders the F.B.I. to produce an official report declaring that Jenkins is not a national security threat; asks the Pentagon to scour Jenkins's military reserve file for positive comments from his commanding officer, Barry Goldwater; urges the attorney general to intensify a bribery investigation of Goldwater's running mate, William Miller; coaches the first lady on how to secretly assure the Jenkins family that its financial future will be secure; and commissions a poll on the scandal's impact from his private pollster. Johnson suspects a Republican frame-up and fears the Jenkins arrest will cost him the presidency. ''Every farmer in the country is upset about it,'' he tells Fortas. ''It could mean . . . the ballgame.''

Of course, it didn't. Thanks to the first Chinese nuclear test, the fall of Nikita Khrushchev and Goldwater's reluctance to press the issue, the Jenkins story was only a blip in Johnson's 1964 landslide. Thanks to his penchant for recording his personal conversations and his family's generous wish to preserve the historical record, his tour-de-force display of political skill, ruthlessness and paranoia can now be observed in ''Reaching for Glory,'' the second volume of Johnson's White House tapes, edited by the historian Michael Beschloss. (It can be heard as well: cassette tapes at $26 and CD's at $32 are available from Simon & Schuster.)

Between November 1963 and January 1969, L.B.J. secretly taped 642 hours of conversations and dictation. Volume One, ''Taking Charge,'' begins the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination and ends shortly after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, passed in August 1964. ''Reaching for Glory'' covers September 1964 through August 1965 -- a period Beschloss calls the ''pivotal'' year of Johnson's presidency, in which he pushed his Great Society programs through Congress and plunged the country into Vietnam.

It is well-plowed ground, most memorably in Robert Dallek's biography ''Flawed Giant'' and Joseph Califano's memoir, ''The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson.'' But even the most polished work of history can't match the thrilling intimacy conveyed by these transcripts (to which Dallek and Califano did not have access). Better yet are the recordings themselves, on which you can hear the voice, roughened by years of Cutty Sark and cigarettes, often hoarse from exhaustion and overuse. His press secretary, George Reedy, once said that when Johnson called, it felt as if he could ''crawl through that wire'' to talk to you. Reading these pages gives you the chance to crawl right up the line with Johnson -- to feel him bully and flirt, lobby and whine. When Nixon needed to think, he picked up a legal pad and wrote outlines. Reagan composed letters. Clinton played solitaire. When Johnson needed to think, he picked up the phone. It was his all-purpose political tool. ''Reaching for Glory'' provides an incomparable portrait of a president at work, and the workings of a president's mind.

They also reveal, as Beschloss puts it, a man of ''ostentatious contradictions.'' The day after the 1964 election, Johnson is complaining to Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago about how the Republicans were running ''kind of a Klan operation'' to keep blacks from voting for him; hours later, he is joking with an old Texas friend about using similar tactics to keep whites from voting against him. Aides are saintly sons one minute, self-serving incompetents the next. But the starkest contradiction is the gulf between his mastery of the home front and his muddling in Vietnam.

Johnson was a cunning political strategist and peerless parliamentary tactician. It is easy to imagine Adam Clayton Powell pulling the phone from his ear as Johnson browbeats him for failing to push an education bill through his committee. Perhaps the Clinton White House fund-raising mess could have been averted had one of us on staff read about Johnson's refusal to hold a fund-raiser for the Kennedy Center at the White House. ''I didn't want to start raising funds at the White House -- even for the Red Cross or United Fund,'' he tells ABC's president, Leonard Goldenson, ''because one person . . . in the room could . . . have something pending in Congress, and they'd say that he was buying his way into the White House.'' Vice President Hubert Humphrey gets strict marching orders on how to pass the president's legislative program: ''I want you to be walking down the halls . . . having the administrative assistants telling you what's happening and getting the gossip.''

That's what Johnson had been doing since his days as a young Congressional aide in the 1930's. His supreme confidence in domestic politics was built on this bedrock of experience. But when discussing Vietnam with the Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, he confesses, ''I'm no military man at all.'' It shows. Dealing with domestic policy, he gives orders; on foreign policy, he seems to take them. In his conversations about Vietnam, he is tentative, full of doubt, wary of his military advisers but unwilling to take them on for fear of looking weak. Early in 1965, he tells Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, ''I don't see any way of winning'' in Vietnam. The next month, he sends two Marine battalions into battle; a year later, he calls up more than 600,000 additional troops.

But if Johnson didn't have the courage to act on his doubts, neither did his closest advisers. In these conversations, McNamara and the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, offer no convincing alternative to incremental escalation. ''We're drifting from day to day here,'' McNamara admits as he and Johnson discuss the decision to send in the Marines. ''I'm just telling you that the field commanders recommend it and can't think of any other solution.''

Of all the president's counselors, the most prescient turns out to be his old mentor, the conservative chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Richard Russell. He thinks victory is impossible and consistently urges Johnson to find some way to ''get out with good grace,'' like encouraging the installation of a government in South Vietnam that ''didn't want us in there.'' The senator's methods may have been unsavory, but his mind was sharp. Reacting to the passive performance of the South Vietnamese Army, he tells Johnson, ''If they're going to try to fight that kind of war, I'm in favor of getting out of there.''

So was Johnson. But he wasn't willing to risk the personal humiliation, or the possible loss of American power and prestige that he feared would follow a Vietnam pullout. Over and over again, he indicates that he knows the war is unwinnable. Yet he digs in deeper. ''Vietnam is getting worse every day,'' he tells Lady Bird in July 1965. ''It's like being in an airplane and I have to choose between crashing the plane or jumping out. I do not have a parachute.''

''When he is pierced, I bleed,'' she reports to her tape-recorded diary. Mrs. Johnson has given Beschloss permission to supplement her husband's tapes with entries from her diary, and they provide a poignant counterpoint. Early on, she worries that her husband is sleeping too little or eating too much; their exchanges are sweet and light. She grows more tense as Johnson becomes distraught over Vietnam. Aides like Bill Moyers and Richard Goodwin consult with psychiatrists because they're so concerned about the president's wild mood swings.

But Aug. 27, 1965, is a happy day in Lady Bird's diary. It is the president's 57th birthday, and the White House chef has made a cake decorated with symbols of his Great Society programs. ''He was like a man riding on a crest of achievement and success,'' she says. ''He was also a happy and relaxed man.'' Deservedly so. A generation later, the programs Johnson had enacted that frenetic year -- Medicare, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act -- continue to strengthen America. Vietnam, of course, still shadows us. So the judgment that lingers, and stings, is Johnson's self-criticism, as recorded by his wife: ''I'm not temperamentally equipped to be commander in chief.''

George Stephanopoulos, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, is the political analyst for ABC News.

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Agent Orange hotspots located, -- Brooke, 14:33:08 01/01/02 Tue

I found your new forum and decided to post my news here instead of your guestbook. I hope this is ok to do.

Agent Orange hotspots located, by BBC Science's Helen Sewell

(EXCERPT) Scientists investigating the effects of Agent Orange in
Vietnam have found that people living in a so-called hotspot have the
highest blood levels of its poisonous chemical dioxin ever recorded in
the country.

Agent Orange, which has the dioxin (TCDD - short for
2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin) as one of its constituents, was
last used in 1973.

But today, some residents of Binh-Hoa, near Ho Chi Minh City, have 200
times the normal amount of dioxin in their bloodstreams.

Agent Orange was widely used by the US military during the Vietnam War
as a defoliant so that Vietnam's dense jungle could not provide cover
for Viet Cong forces.

'Startling' results

It was when US veterans started to become ill with a variety of health
problems that investigations suggested that Agent Orange could be
involved.

The most dangerous ingredient was the dioxin, a pollutant that stays
in the environment for decades.

There are still about 12 dioxin hotspots in Vietnam, in areas where
very heavy spraying took place.

Scientists from the United States have been working with the
Vietnamese Red Cross in these areas, testing residents to see whether
they are suffering any ill effects.

The lead scientist, Professor Arnold Schecter of the University of
Texas, says they are "very startled" by the results.

Export worry

In a paper to be published in the journal Occupational and
Environmental Medicine, he says that in Binh-Hoa, 95% of people
sampled had elevated levels of dioxin in their bloodstream, and some
had 200 times the average amount.

Dioxins, which include TCDD and other related compounds, can cause
cancers and problems with reproductive development, the nervous and
immune systems.

It is thought the high levels of dioxin found in Binh-Hoa residents
result from the chemical leaching into watercourses where it is
absorbed by fish and ducks, which form part of the Vietnamese diet.

The issue is very sensitive for Vietnam, which exports these foods all
over the world.

See also:

03 Jul 01 |
Asia-Pacific Deal reached on Agent Orange 15 Nov 00 |
Asia-Pacific Agent Orange's toxic legacy 29 Mar 00 |
Health Agent Orange link to diabetes Internet links:

US Air Force health study

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