The Wily Filipino

Forty Years Ago.

For tonight, as so many nights before, young Americans struggle and young Americans die in a distant land.

Tonight, as so many nights before, the American Nation is asked to sacrifice the blood of its children and the fruits of its labor for the love of its freedom.

How many times-in my lifetime and in yours-have the American people gathered, as they do now, to hear their President tell them of conflict and tell them of danger?

Each time they have answered. They have answered with all the effort that the security and the freedom of this Nation required.

And they do again tonight in Vietnam.

...

As the assault mounted, our choice gradually became clear. We could leave, abandoning South Vietnam to its attackers and to certain conquest, or we could stay and fight beside the people of South Vietnam.

We stayed.

And we will stay until aggression has stopped.

- President Lyndon B. Johnson, in his State of the Union Address, January 1966

However, as David Levering Lewis writes (in his New Yorker review of Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68):

Still, [Johnson] confided to one of his generals that he felt “a good deal of ice cracking” under his feet.

Posted by the wily filipino at February 1, 2006 10:51 AM