We haven't run anything on LBJ in a while, so I thought I would include this Press Conference from June 1,1965, President Johnson's 43rd since taking office.

A number of areas are covered, most notably the situation in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, which was the scene of recent military action. Also covered was the situation in Vietnam and the 20th Anniversary of the United Nations.

A complete half hour of Q&A as broadcast by ABC Radio on June 1, 1965.

Update: As of yesterday, there have been no new donations. This translates as terrible and there is a very real chance both Newstalgia and the Archive from which all these posts come will disappear. Thousands of hours of historic audio, photos and historic papers will cease to exist. That sounds dire, because it is. I need your help. I can't do it alone. I can no longer afford to. Right now, we stand at a little less than half our bare-bones minimum goal of $5,000.00 in order to keep Newstalgia and the Archives afloat. If you can help, make a donation for any amount you are comfortable with. Every dollar and every penny is crucial in chipping away at this emergency. Please donate what you can. It is desperately needed right now. You can make a difference.

A curious mix of optimism and pessimism for this week, ending on April 26th in 1964.

On the optimistic side - President Johnson announced to the world that the U.S. would make substantial reductions in Nuclear Weapons and Uranium enrichment production. Simultaneously, it was announced by Nikita Khruschev via Radio Moscow, that the Soviet Union would do the same thing. The news was greeted with a sense of relief and UN General Secretary U Thant offered an evaluation on what was deemed a hopeful sign towards an easing of Cold War tensions.

On the Pessimistic side - tensions were brewing between the U.S. and Cuba as Cuban Premier Fidel Castro vowed to down any U.S. Reconnaissance planes flying over Cuban territory as it had been doing since 1962.

On the optimistic side - Sec. of State Dean Rusk returned from a fact-finding mission to Saigon and offered an upbeat assessment of the situation in Vietnam, saying the South Vietnamese Army could handle themselves nicely.

On the Pessimistic side - Defense Secretary Robert McNamara conceded it will "take time" for any progress to be made in Vietnam and that the South Vietnamese Army is running a defensive strategy rather than an offensive one. Oh well.

Meanwhile - the four year long negotiations between the Railroads and the Unions was finally at the settlement stage. And just in the nick of time, as the settlement averted a threatened strike.

President Johnson went on a brief tour of the Appalachia region, hitting the towns and cities worst hit by poverty and unemployment, touting his War on Poverty legislation. He was greeted with waves of enthusiasm.

Not so enthusiastic were reports from Capitol Hill saying the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was at a standstill, making the future unclear for passage of the Legislation.

And the much publicized "Stall-ins", threatened for Opening day of the New York Worlds Fair on April 22nd, didn't materialize. But that didn't stop some 300 Civil Rights demonstrators from being arrested from the Fair opening anyway.

All this in one week, ending on April 26th 1964, as reported on the ABC Radio Voices In The Headlines program.

As much as we're heard about the Protest Movement to the Vietnam War in the 1960's there was that just-as-vocal contingent who not only believed the war was justified, but that we were also in the process of winning it. And many of those people were on Capitol Hill.

For example, Sen. Thomas J. Dodd (D-Conn) who served on the Senate Armed Services Committee was a staunch believer in the Vietnam War and was convinced we were winning it. One of the true Hawks in the Senate. But in all honesty, early in 1965 there was a much larger segment of the population who believed the war could be won and believed we were absolutely justified in being in Southeast Asia than who weren't. The Anti-War Movement was just getting started at this point and the sales pitch for the War was much more organized.

Dodd was convinced we were winning, that we had "turned the corner" so to speak. And in this installment of NBC's Meet The Press, he is asked why he is so adamant in that assessment.

Sen. Thomas Dodd: “We’re winning more battles every day. The latest figure I heard was, on an engagement just recently, it was in the ratio of about four to one. They suffered something in excess of 400 losses. Our side had something in excess of 100.The morale of the South Vietnamese is very high. There are more defectors coming over to our side every day. About a year ago, my information is, we were getting about ten a month. We’re now getting over a hundred a month. We’ve got a thousand pilots, about a thousand pilots now in the South Vietnamese Air Force. They’re good pilots, I’m told by our Air Force people, they’re good fighters. As a matter of fact, I was told they do a better job at maintenance than our people do. So there are all these reasons I say we’ve begun to win.”

Hearing the casualty reports, I am reminded of what was later revealed to be grossly inflated enemy body counts, and how early on the war was being manipulated to be portrayed as another cakewalk. What was being conveyed and what was actually happening were two wildly different stories. And unfortunately we had to find out the hard way.

So here is Meet The Press featuring Sen. Thomas J. Dodd as originally broadcast on May 2, 1965.

This week fifty years ago, President Kennedy assessed his first year in office, expressed concern over the drop in graduates in the Sciences in colleges around the country and disappointment that the Test Ban Treaty was a failure.

Other topics covered in this first Press Conference of 1962 were Berlin, the Indonesia/Dutch dispute, the issue of Trade, the Food For Peace Program, Civil Rights, The Common Market and proposed Medicare Legislation. A question was raised as to whether there were troops engaged in combat in Vietnam, and the answer was no.

A fascinating glimpse into the Kennedy Years from January 15, 1962.

And then there was 1968. The year just about everything came unhinged. The Vietnam War escalated and got very personal. The protests escalated accordingly - people who weren't against the war were violently opposed to it now. President Johnson declined re-election, leaving the field open for former Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy to run. The Civil Rights Movement was becoming increasingly violent, culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King. France went on strike and took it to the streets, shutting the entire country down. Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated. Chaos would erupt at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Nixon would emerge as President and that era would soon start.

And beyond all that Apollo 8 made the very first orbit of the moon. A rehearsal for the landing to take place in 1969. Even from outer space, the view of earth from the landscape of the moon gave one the impression Earth was just not a happy place to be.

But we were stuck there.

Those highlights and a ton of other news from that year, all via the BBC and their Radio 1 Year-end retrospect for December 31, 1968 which looked at the year from a world wide standpoint.

And some people say 2012 will make 1968 look like a picnic.

One wonders - at least you have some frame of reference to consider.

Continuing the yearly reviews, we're smack in the middle of 1966. And depending on how you look at it, it was either the tipping point where it all came unglued or we were on the verge of everything changing.

The 1966 mid-year elections and the Republicans were energized from their 1964 massacre. Governorships saw Republicans in office for the first time, including California and the beginning of what was to become The Reagan Years. Nelson Rockefeller took New York. George Romney kept Michigan. Edward Brooke, the first Black Senator and Republican was elected. Charles Percy became the first Republican Senator from Illinois.

All in contrast to the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Hanoi was being bombed, with civilians being reported among the casualties for the first time. LBJ went on a tour of Asia in order to drum up support of his Vietnam policy and came away with mass protests in Manila.

Domestically, violence was getting to be a familiar face around the country. Civil Rights demonstrations turned violent in Chicago and a sense of unease swept over the country in the wake of the goings on in 1965. It was also a year for mass murder, with 8 student nurses murdered in a dorm and 12 students killed and 40 wounded at the hands of a sniper perched on a clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin. Even politicians weren't immune with the murder of Senatorial candidate Charles Percy's daughter at the family home during his campaign.

The economy was heading into Inflation territory, but the Space program was making strides with The Gemini Program continuing and offering high points to the year.

And if all that weren't enough, The Beatles landed in the lap of controversy with John Lennon being misquoted in the press about being more popular than Jesus Christ touching off a firestorm among the unhinged. The innocent answer to a question about the current lack of faith in the world and the irony that a group like the Beatles would be more popular in the eyes of the younger generation than a religious figure got perceived as a boast rather than an indictment and piles of now-valuable Beatles albums went up in flames as a result.

And they didn't call the 60's Insane for nothing.

And here is the recap of that year by way of ABC Radio Program Voices In The Headlines.

Dr. Walter Heller, Economic Adviser to both the JFK and LBJ Administrations, was an architect of the War On Poverty which President Johnson ran with enthusiastically.

In this Meet The Press interview from November 7, 1965 in which he ran down the outlook for the economy in 1966 and beyond.

Dr. Walter Heller: “It seems to me that we have a very basic issue. We’ve had a winning combination of a good private policy and good public policy which has produced a long standing prosperity. And an absolute essential of that has been the fine productive performance of private industry and their moderation. A moderation in their inventories and finance and particularly their moderation in prices. And it seems to me unless we maintain that, we threaten the whole fabric of expansion.”

Only one problem: Vietnam. As the War escalated and as we found ourselves deeper and deeper in a questionable commitment, President Johnson insisted that escalating the war wouldn't require raising taxes in order to pay for it. The result was a spiraling inflation and Heller's optimistic predictions were largely relegated to the dustbin of history. And Heller subsequently resigned in disgust.

But before all that there was optimism and Lyndon Johnson was riding the crest of a very popular wave. And Dr. Walter Heller was largely responsible for at least part of it economically.

Hindsight - that other thing about history.

In July 1967, with all the recent developments in the Middle East, the riots throughout America and escalating dissent towards the Vietnam War, Secretary of State Dean Rusk still maintained the eroding position that the majority of Americans supported the War and it was only a small "marginal" segment of the population trying to end it and get us out of there.

This interview from Face The Nation on July 30, 1967, features a trio of reporters - Marvin Kalb, Murray Marder and Martin Agronsky. They tried for some clarification from Rusk that our Foreign Policy was indeed going in the right direction and that the seemingly rampant violence hitting our cities was only a minor blemish on the bigger picture.

Dean Rusk: “I think they know enough about us to know that these riots have nothing to do with the situation that they face in Vietnam and their ambitions to take over South Vietnam by force. We’ve had some indication that they are becoming a little more sophisticated about the American political system and that they know that these marginal dissents and these minority views do not represent the United States or its policy or its determination. I think it would be a great mistake for them to think they get any comfort out of what has happened here recently in some of our cities. Obviously in their propaganda they are trying to use it to our disadvantage and this is happening also in Peking and Havana and Moscow.”

The only problem was, it was far from true and the level of dissent towards the war was escalating at a rapid rate. It was easy in 1964 to label dissent towards the war in Vietnam as marginal - only a comparatively few people actually knew there was war going on before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. But as the war dragged on and as casualty reports kept coming in (even though they were shaded in number so as to appear not so bad), it was hard to justify being there by 1967. The notion that billions of dollars were being spent on a War in Southeast Asia while our own cities languished in depressed times seemed wildly inexcusable. Despite the fact that a bastion of hawks and supporters of the war insisted it wasn't, the war was quickly becoming lost to the vast majority of American people. Particularly those who had sons fighting, or who were becoming of draft age and were facing the daunting prospects of being another number on the casualty lists.

But they tried to paint a rosy picture and they tried to say it was not what the majority really wanted. And Dean Rusk was somehow stuck propping up a rapidly weakening position.

In the seemingly never-ending task of digitizing the archive (rumor has it I will be finished sometime around mid-Century), I run across items that, although they may not pertain to anything of a current nature, or even of great importance from a historic standpoint, are still interesting to hear as a sort of footprint in time.

Such is the case with this press conference held by vice-President Johnson on his return from a fact-finding mission to Southeast Asia on May 24, 1961. It is pretty much standard early 60's Foreign Policy fare in a Cold War era. Everything was predicated on whether or not there was a Communist influence, acting as competition for U.S. aid. On its surface it seems like a Public Relations tour, were it not for our particular gift of hindsight in knowing what was just around the corner.

However, listening to this press conference, I can't help but think Lyndon Johnson had no clue it would be his cross to bear three years later.

Of course, we all know better now - we didn't know better then. Like LBJ in 1961, we had no clue what we were in for.

It's a debate exactly when the turning point of the Vietnam War occurred. Some say it was around 1966 (the year of this broadcast) and others say it was in 1968 at the time of the Tet Offensive. My own feeling is that the writing was most certainly on the wall as early as 1965 as reports of escalation, draft calls and body counts became a daily segment on most every news program.

It was around 1966 that the mainstream news establishment began looking at the war and questioning its validity, as is evidenced by a special program from CBS Radio News which featured veteran correspondent Eric Sevareid reporting his impressions of that war in this June 21st broadcast.

Eric Sevareid: “We try to apply Western logic and experience to this Oriental land. So we encourage the elections, envisage a Parliament and eventual civilian rule representing groups and regions. My own guess is that this process of democratizing would produces years of political turmoil before stability is reached. It will probably, though not certainly open a whole new Pandora’s box, all the quarrels in the country bursting out into the open. Vietnam, I think myself, is not to be compared with Korea or Greece where we were successful in these respects. A strong national sense and strong leaders existed in those countries. If this proves to be the trend as we try to democratize government in Vietnam then the immediate consequence would be a nightmare for us, for we should then have to involve ourselves deeper and deeper into their politics, their economy and more and more of the fighting and dying will be done by Americans and less and less by the Vietnamese.”

It's interesting that Sevareid brings up the subject of Western logic with reference to establishing our brand of Democracy in other countries (in that case Southeast Asia). A subject being brought to the forefront again in the Middle East with the recent protest movements and overthrows underway and certainly our foray into Iraq. But in 1966 the concern was whether or not Vietnam was winable and what was in store for the future.

I guess the two parts to this post would be listening to a journalist like Sevareid and realizing how far we've gotten away from Journalistic integrity. And the other is how the lessons learned from Vietnam have somehow been forgotten.

We had no idea what the future would be like in 1966 and we certainly have no idea now.

Maybe that's just the way it's supposed to be.