Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

While Kennedy and his Democratic Party primary rival Senator Eugene McCarthy were anything but friends, a factor owing more to disparate personalities and approaches rather than competing political philosophies, they cohered on the issue of preventing a runaway executive from asserting itself in the realm of foreign affairs.  

A wily President Lyndon Johnson, who knew the whys and wherefores of the legislative process based on years of experience as senate majority leader, manipulated the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution through a tragically unsuspecting Congress and before long the U.S. had sharply escalated its commitment in Vietnam.

The pivotal year of 1968 was a watershed historical point.  In the upheaval following the assassinations that year of staunch Vietnam War opponents Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, a Richard Nixon who came to office falsely proclaiming that he had a plan to end the unpopular conflict, which he later conceded was bogus, allowed it to drag on.

Nixon was ultimately compelled to end the Vietnam War in the wake of his own emerging Watergate difficulties that eventuated in his ultimately becoming the first U.S. chief executive to resign.

Barack Obama is aware of the Vietnam syndrome and apprehensive about too many Americans connecting the sad history of that conflict to current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The other day he sought to distinguish Afghanistan from Vietnam by claiming that in the current conflict numerous nations have voiced support for our effort.

In the buildup to the Vietnam involvement President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked his administration's creation of an Asian military-political alliance to the U.S. that existed mainly on paper through the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.

The military commitment began under his successor John F. Kennedy.  According to many historians Kennedy was prepared to pull out the U.S. forces and advisers in Vietnam after the 1964 election.  

Instead he was assassinated and, after Johnson had gained widespread support in his campaign against the outwardly hawkish Senator Barry Goldwater by running in the manner of a peace candidate, implemented the kind of plan that his opponent had articulated during the campaign.

During that era the domino theory was invoked.  If the U.S. did not stop Ho Chi Minh and the Communist regime of the north that ultimately it would have to deal with the Chinese regime of Mao Zedong and Zhou en lai.

Now the same domino effect is being invoked through stated concern that the terrorists of Osama Bin Laden will directly threaten the U.S. as 9/11 is invoked while any independent investigation of the Twin Towers tragedies is resisted.