The First Victim
You can’t find your place in history when someone shuffles the pages
From washingtondecoded via historynewsnetwork comes a new interpretation of Lyndon Johnson’s decent into Vietnam: LBJ, the Best & the Brightest’s first victim.
“What Did LBJ Know About the Cuban Missile Crisis? And When Did He Know It?” pivots on the fact that Johnson was cut out of the final deal which settled the Missile Crisis. Johnson was somewhat involved in Kennedy Administration policy making during the events, but nobody told LBJ the US pulled it’s missiles from Turkey in trade for Soviets taking theirs from Cuba. Then or later.
Leaving the Sage of the Pedernales to buy the hype: cool, calm JFK masterfully staring down the blinking Russians. 
Que Vietnam! 
“False history led to mistaken lessons, including a belief in the efficacy of calibrated force, which helped prevent Johnson from seriously entertaining the concessions necessary for a negotiated political solution to the Vietnam War… not only was LBJ deliberately shut out as vice president, but the tape recordings show that he was still in the dark years after he became president, when he was presumably entitled, and urgently needed, to understand the knowable truth behind Kennedy’s spectacular success…. LBJ’s unspoken presumption was that the same men who were at Kennedy’s side in October 1962 would surely see Johnson through to a similar, unmitigated victory, regardless of the differences. And if they could not, conversely, that suggested something LBJ did not want to countenance: that the only real difference was in the president who led this assemblage of the best and the brightest.”
