In Lady Bird Johnson’s Secret Diaries, a Despairing
President and a
Crucial Spouse
A new book reveals how the former first lady not only provided a spouse’s emotional ballast but also served as an unrivaled counselor who helped persuade Lyndon B. Johnson to stay in office.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/politics/lady-bird-johnson-diaries-lbj.html?smid=url-share
An excellent article by Peter Baker that took me back to the touch and go moment when I thought that I would be posted to Vietnam with my RAF colleagues. Only the intervention of Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, saved Britain from the same fate endured by our US and Commonwealth allies. Serving with US friends later I was shocked by the devastating impact of that war on them, their morale and their health. Until reading this article I considered President Johnson responsible for the Vietnam War and that JFK would not have taken matters so far. I am reading Paul Theroux's "Ghost Train To The Eastern Star" where he revisits Vietnam 30 year after he was there during the conflict. His reflections are devastating and he is clearly still horrified, all these years later, at the carnage inflicted on the innocent by a hugely powerful United States. Nonetheless he found that the Vietnamese people now hold no grudge and made him very welcome. More positively he muses on the enormous strides Vietnam has made compared to Cambodia where a darkness still prevails.
Approaching 70 I am ever more convinced that we must learn the lessons of history if we are to progress in the ways espoused by the thoroughly decent man who now lives in the White House. I look forward to this book with great interest and believe the insights First Lady Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson will bring to our understanding will be profound. Lyndon B Johnson presided over a pivotal moment in history that influences us still.
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