Select language, opens an overlay

Comment

Apr 30, 2018
" to lyndon johnson, the mississippi freedom democratic party was like a gnat to be squashed on his way to the convention, a tiny irritant in a time of great joy, but it would be a symbol of other forces which would have dire consequences." " in front of visiting dignitaries he was wont to put up his feet on jack valenti's lap and use it as a footstool...his close aide walter jenkins in particular lived in terror of johnson, who had borne down on him so often and so hard that there was little left. once when an exhausted jenkins was about to take a brief nap, he told bill moyers to guard the office for thirty minutes. moyers, who like his boss, was an excellent mimic, got in the doorway a few minutes later and did a magnificent imitation of johnson catching Jenkins napping. jenkins turned first from total panic to total anger: ' don't you ever do that again....don't you ever do that again...don't you ever.....' " increasingly it was his own staff that had to fight the military to limit the military, as the military was extremely eager to fight in vietnam." '' jfk was learning again that once a policy starts, there is always the drive for more, more force, more tactics, wider latitudes for force." "this was something, that by dallas, he knew for sure, but could do nothing about, because he had come to dallas, the perfect killing ground." "in arguing against the escalation of the war, ball was saying that it was doomed. he was alone among the foreign policy people saying this, which did not bother him; he felt he needed only one of johnson's domestic people to argue for the domestic side, to say that the american people did not want war, that anti-communism was ebbing as an issue. if only one more voice . . . if. if. . . ball was first and foremost a europeanist; perhaps more than any man in that government, even more than mcgeorge bundy, he was a man of europe./he possessed a singular lack of concern, some of his colleagues in the state dept. thought in the early days of the kennedy administration, for the problems of africans and asians. it was an irony of the war that ball made his first national reputation as a man who had been prophetic on asia, since he had been concerned about vietnam in the first place because he feared that it was going to divert america from its prime concern in the work, which he took to be the european alliance. ball was a stevenson loyalist, a democratic party worker, a good new deal lawyer from chicago who during the height of the mccarthy period was willing to represent henry wallace, a former vice-president of the united states, when no one in washington would. ball had come to washington with a cold and skeptical eye and a willingness to challenge assumptions. he did not, for example, consider it a particularly bad idea for most of africa to go communist, thinking in fact that it might serve the communists right to wrestle with the enormous problems of new countries; it might bog them down a bit, and perhaps not win them many new friends. he was a devotee of traditional 19th century power politics; he felt that power was real, something that is almost tangible and has to be dealt with: thus, stay out of vietnam; do not dissipate power in a situation where it is not applicable; nothing destroys power more than the misuse of it. if he was more hard-line than stevenson and more power-oriented, he was less anti-communist than acheson./ his pre-election relationship with kennedy had been marginal, and he had not been in line for a particularly good job. he existed in something of a no man's land for those first years. he was a man of immense pride, and he regarded much of the kennedy style and dash with considerable skepticism; those snappy young men running around in the white house did not necessarily strike him as brilliant."