It would be easy to enumerate the differences between Lyndon Johnson
and George W. bush on the basis of well-known fact. Bush came from money
and, while Johnson was hardly a pauper, his family had not been
Eastern/Texas establishment power brokers for decades as Bush's family has.
But perhaps the most significant difference between the two is that while
Johnson inherited his war from his assassinated predecessor, Bush created
It would also be easy to draw comparisons between George W. Bush and
Lyndon Johnson to support the theory, expressed by Sen. Edward Kennedy,
that "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam. Iraq has developed into a quagmire."
[i] The comparison could be drawn on the grounds that both Bush and
Johnson are from Texas, and both have two daughters. Both men had a taste
for alcohol, although while Johnson got himself through the Vietnam debacle
on Cutty Sark, [ii] Bush apparently stopped drinking after the drunk
driving incidents reported during his first campaign for the presidency,
but now apparently all but forgotten by the media and the public.
Despite Sen. Kennedy's statement, however, it doesn't look as if the
war in Iraq will be another Vietnam. At the present, it appears that it
could be far worse in many significant ways.
First of these ways is, arguably, the way the two presidents feel about
their respective wars. While Johnson worried about the effect dissent
about the war was having on his country, often asking himself before he
went to sleep at night whether he had done everything he could to unite the
country,[iii] Bush seems infinitely more concerned with getting re-elected,
no matter what happens to the country to do it. When reporters asked him
if he had acted correctly concerning the Iraq problem even if it cost him
his job, he did not respond, exactly, to the question. He said, instead,
"I don't intend to lose my job. Because I'm g...