Listening to music tonight (it soothes the savage breast), I stumbled on a song from the sixties.
A time when the Country was being torn apart by the Vietnam war and the insistence of Lyndon Johnson, our president, to press on despite the mounting evidence that we were embarked on “a fool’s errand” and worse, a killing field for us and countless other human beings.
It is against this background which I lived through – In Washington and in Vietnam – that the song has resonance. Perhaps, for you who may not have lived in that area, it may ring a cord for today.
Yes, indeed, and today, if that is possible, is more frightful. The “wind” is more terrible.
In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson following his two predecessor’s policy, sought to prevent Communism from overtaking South Vietnam.
In fact, the Vietnamese had been separated by us – by our own Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at the Geneva Treaty of 1954 – when the French had to give up their attempt to reclaim their Vietnamese Empire of pre-WWII existence.
Dulles divided the Country between the communist North and a new entity in the South, which we called South Vietnam. And Lyndon Johnson, coming to office after Dwight Eisenhower and John F Kennedy, did his best to prevent a Northern communist takeover of South Vietnam.
But the Vietnamese were one people and they wanted to live together. And so, after all our efforts, after all those “How many, Times,” they did.
Lyndon Johnson, no longer president, gone to ground on his Texas ranch with long white unkempt hair, died in 1972, of a final heart attack.
Broken.
He was a good man who perused a terribly flawed policy (read Robert McNamara’s apologia).
But today?
Today, the President of the United States is not following his processor’s flawed policy. He is making up his own terrible policy – to border immigrants, to our NATO allies, to our neighbor friends Mexico and Canada, to our global trading partners, to our fellow citizens in need, and to so much more.
For Donald J Trump there is no excuse that he is following U S policy. There is no excuse that he is trying something new for the benefit of all his fellow citizens.
But what will be Donald J Trump’s excuse?
I can’t imagine he will offer one.
Blowing In The Wind!