PBS Video: Bill Moyers On Obama & LBJ, A Path To War -- Aired November 20, 2009
This is remarkable footage; some of Moyers' best. Worth setting aside some time.
Part 1: Bill Moyers considers a President's decision to escalate troop levels in a military conflict. Through LBJ's taped phone conversations and his own remembrances, Bill Moyers looks at Johnson's deliberations as he stepped up America's role in Vietnam. Bill Moyers Journal airs Friday nights at 9 pm on PBS.
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Part 2
Link to complete transcript at PBS >>
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More on this broadcast from the Nation
One point of the program, he explained, was to offer viewers "an insight into the mind of one president facing the choice of whether or not to send more and more American soldiers to fight in a far-away and strange place."
But another point was to offer Obama and his aides, who seem to be determined to surge more troops into Afghanistan, a caution that only a few wise and worldly senators provided Johnson back in the mid-1960s -- chief among them Oregon's Wayne Morse, about whom Johnson says on one of the tapes: "outside Morse, everybody I talk to says you got to go in..."
Moyers was not making crude or casual analogies.
"Granted," he explained early on, "Barack Obama is not Lyndon Johnson, Afghanistan is not Vietnam and this is now, not then. But listen and you will hear echoes and refrains that resonate today."
The tapes of Johnson were indeed eerie and resonant, especially those where the former president says of the battle to which he is about to commit what he calls "the flower of our youth, our finest young men": "I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out. And it's just the biggest damned mess that I ever saw."
But even more powerful was the recognition that the man playing them was a witness to history who had learned from his experiences. For Moyers, there was something deeply personal and yet profoundly public about the statement he was making; before it aired Friday, he told me he saw the program as "one of the most important I've done in years."
So it was.
And the most powerful part of a remarkably powerful program came at its conclusion, when Bill Moyers looked into the camera and said:
Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war.
But once again we're fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.
And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he's got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.
And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.
We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.
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