Pierre Asselin
speaker
562 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard yesterday
Pierre Asselin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There's both kind of like international foreign policy considerations and domestic considerations, right?
On the one hand, by the time Johnson assumes the presidency, the U.S.
has essentially been committed to Vietnam for 14 years, right?
Can an unelected president essentially decide to cut bait here?
So there's really this pressure on him to continue.
Beyond that, Johnson is concerned that if the U.S.
abandons Vietnam, that's going to embolden the communists.
It's going to embolden the Chinese.
It's going to embolden the Soviets.
And in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, you really don't want to do that because looking weak in Vietnam could precipitate another kind of Cuban-style, Caribbean-style crisis.
So there's that element.
And then domestically...
Johnson is well aware that as much as he is concerned about sustaining this American commitment and eventually expanding it, he believes that it could really undermine his domestic agenda if he were to pull out of Vietnam.
that it would cause a loss of credibility domestically, which would then make it virtually impossible for him to get conservative support for his very, very progressive agenda.
Essentially, Vietnam becomes an element in Johnson's political game to earn support from constituencies likely to oppose him for civil rights, for Medicaid, for Medicare, and other kind of great society programs.
Yeah.
And remember, this is someone who has this fear of humiliation, right?
And I think people sometimes fail to understand that about American presidents is that, yeah, there's always these immediate considerations, right?
But just like the rest of us, they have their own kind of internal, personal insecurities, right?
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