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Clipmarks | Vietnam Clips
Advice, But Often No Consent
clipped by: diodisegno
clippers remarks: The more things change...
Advice, But Often No Consent
Dec. 6, 2006 - America was mired in a frustrating, seemingly endless war. An election year was approaching, and the president?s own party leaders were terrified that their recent crushing midterm congressional defeat would be repeated in the coming race for the White House. To blunt the war?s unpopularity, a commission was proposed to measure the crisis and give the president political cover for finding a way out.
The time: January 1968. The war: Vietnam. The president: Lyndon Johnson. Half a million Americans were fighting in Asian jungles, and LBJ was considering requests for hundreds of thousands more. Johnson warned against what some people were calling ?cut and run.? He disdained antiwar Democrats?like his nemesis, Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York?for turning ?on their leader and on their country and on their own fighting men.?
Six years later, besieged by the Iran-contra scandal, Reagan appointed a bipartisan group headed by Texas Republican Sen. John Tower to suggest how to revise White House management to exclude the future possibility of unauthorized covert operations. By promptly accepting the Tower Commission?s wise recommendations and admitting his mistakes, Reagan helped to save his presidency.
One reason the Tower findings were so briskly accepted was the expertise of the commission?s staff director, who knew how important it was for the president to take its report seriously. This was a young lawyer named Stephen Hadley, who has gone on to become President Bush?s national-security adviser. We are now about to see whether Hadley will take the same approach now that he is on the inside of the White House.
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