FACTS, NOT EULOGIES

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The stuff you have been publishing about Lyndon Johnson is nauseating. First in an editorial, then in a supposed summary of the week's news, the Crimson tells us that if only it hadn't been for the war, Johnson would be remembered as a great president because of his wonderful domestic reforms.

I sympathize with the desire to wish the war hadn't happened. But it did. If only it hadn't been for the war, hundreds of thousands of dead people would still be alive, countless villages would be undestroyed, millions of acres of land would be growing rice instead of breeding mosquitos and malaria in bomb craters. Lyndon Johnson actually did bring four years of destruction to an actual country called Vietnam (as well as killing thousands of American Gl's). Let us mourn Johnson's death no more than we mourn those who suffered and died because of his life.

Furthermore, Johnson wasn't tragically trapped into the war, as is suggested in the twaddle you have been printing. U.S. involvement in Vietnam started long before 1964, but LBJ consciously chose to carry out major escalations of the level of violence. While I and many other naive Americans were campaigning for him because he sounded more peaceful than Goldwater, Johnson was planning the Tonkin Gulf incident, a fraud designed to trick us into supporting a massive U.S. role in Vietnam. (This is documented in the Pentagon Papers.) Hitler staged a fake Polish attack on German troops to justify starting World War II. LBJ taught many of us a lesson, which his successor has re-emphasized: our government its not responsible to us; it is not to be trusted.

And Johnson's domestic record was somewhat less earth-shaking than the Crimson has been implying. Most of the current hosannas to the War on Poverty are being issued by people who did not suffer from poverty either before or after the Johnson administration. As I remember those years, poverty was much in the news--primarily because poor blacks expressed their discontent in a series of ghetto riots. LBJ compassionately responded by sending in troops (indeed, there was a unity to his foreign and domestic policy, as someone quoted in the Crimson implied) and by setting up a Study Commission to meditate on the problem.

Riots aside, poverty and urban disintegration looked much the same at the beginning and at the end of the Johnson years: inadequate welfare, no public housing to speak of, mass transit crumbling while highways and airports were expanding, lousy schools and low-paying, deadening jobs for the people of the center cities. (Unemployment was lower in 1968 than in 1963, because of higher war-related employment--a solution to the problem which was neither attractive nor permanent.) In the Johnson years Dick Gregory remarked on the government's failure to institute rat control: "They claim they can't kill the rats. This from the people who killed the buffalo?" I agree with the Crimson, Nixon is even worse than Johnson. But Ivan the Terrible was undoubtedly worse than Nixon. Shall we rejoice for every politician who is lesser than some other evil?

The Crimson is probably correct in saying that history textbooks will remember Johnson as a great leader except for the war. I have no doubt that the historians who, for instance, gloss over the Palmer Raids and the repression of the IWW in telling of Woodrow Wilson's greatness, will similarly beautify their accounts of the Johnson administration. But that is why people who are trying to understand the world, and to change it, have never had much use for the mainstream American rewriting of history. Frank Ackerman