W's PR Offensive Is a Sign of Desperation

By late 1967, President Lyndon Johnson's failing war in Vietnam had pretty much driven him bananas. He remained determined to win an unwinnable ground war he had bamboozled Congress to support, leaving the contradiction to exhaust his composure. War critics and reporters persisted in asking disturbingly fundamental questions - such as "Why are we there?" - convincing answers to which the commander in chief did not possess. The pressure to justify the unjustifiable became unbearable.

So bananas he went. According to historian Robert Dallek's Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, in one off-the-record meeting with a few nagging reporters the president completely wigged out. The journalists were persevering - Why, why are we there? - and finally the frustrated president "unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ, and declared, 'This is why!'"

In the end, when all rationality had been spent to no avail, Johnson defended a senseless foreign policy on the grounds of mindless machismo. Odd, is it not, that LBJ's unbalanced exhibitionism that day was likely the most rational explanation, however perverse, he ever offered. Johnson confined such honesty to private meetings. Publicly he did what all deceitful pols do: he launched a well-crafted public relations campaign whose simple design was to confute the obvious - which happened to be that we were in big trouble in South Vietnam and the trouble was getting even worse.

Were we in a hopeless fix? Not at all, proclaimed the p.r. drive. Indeed, quite the opposite. America was doing South Vietnam a world of good; progress was everywhere to be seen. We were repairing roads, building schools, providing heath care to children, introducing democratic processes to a backward nation and, of course, whipping the enemy. The public, said the Johnson administration, was unaware of this good news only because of the media's fixation with the bad kind.

In its conception and execution, the administration's domestic good-news campaign was chocked full of strident wishful thinking and deliberate self-delusion, cynical to the core. It achieved some short-term positive bumps for LBJ, but clever politics and misleading hype could not, did not, change reality on Southeast Asian soil. Vietnam's turmoil contradicted and ultimately trumped Johnson's Madison Avenue politics. In short order his reelection hopes for the following year were cooked.

In all this lies the one true - or at least hopeful - analogy to Iraq.

In its international and military complications for the United States, the Vietnam fiasco differed hugely from the present-day Middle East fiasco. In this, critics of the often-attempted Vietnam analogy are correct. It is a hard case to make since so many variables, well, varied from today's situation. Yet politically the comparison is perhaps valid. The politics seem to be playing out in similar and, better yet, accelerated motion.

Nearly two-and-a-half years of overseas misery, fiscal squander and ill-conceived intervention went by (ground troops were committed in 1965) before Johnson felt politically weakened enough to command the obscuring of reality with a transparent, even ludicrous, good-news public relations campaign. In George W. Bush's case, its necessity has taken only a few months. W.'s effort "to go over the heads of the [media] and speak directly with the people," as he put it, has been no less cynical in purpose than LBJ's. It has earned him a political bump, but the persistence of inconvenient reality in Iraq, as in Vietnam - wasted American lives and misspent billions - is likely to soon reverse that trend and keep it reeling.

The evening news belied Johnson's p.r. b.s. and crowbarred him out of the White House. The 36th president was as politically slick as they come, but undeniable reality abroad crushed his administration at home. All the king's men and all their public deception couldn't prevent it.

W.'s fast-forwarded reenactment of Johnson's good-news ploy is encouraging. It reveals the administration's inner sense of desperation and self-imposed lack of options. That W.'s frantic jump to public relations over reality comes so soon is the actual good news, for the political ramifications next year - election year - may yet spare America another long-term tragedy.