THE PRICE OF PRIDE: PRESIDENT JOHNSON’S VIETNAM GAMBLE

President Johnson had a unique way of doing things. He’d go down to the basement war room of the White House in his pajamas as if the whole thing were a game. The map of Vietnam spread out in front of him, and Johnson would move the pieces around — troops, Navy, air support, and the whole mess — like kids at a board game. He didn’t know anything about war, or its root cause, but he liked playing General.

The map didn’t mean anything to the President — not really. He wasn’t a soldier. He was a politician. The men around him, like McNamara, said Vietnam was tiny so that it wouldn’t stand up to the United States. He said peace was out of the question, and the U.S. had to win, no matter what, because that’s what strong men did. And so, they kept the war going. They kept sending men to die. McNamara and Johnson became locked into that belief, and General Westmoreland did what they wanted, like a man with no mind of his own, just following orders.

They sent over two and a half million of us into the war. They sent us into the jungle, into the fire. And when it came time to stop it, to end the madness, they couldn’t. They wouldn’t because backing down was a weakness. So, the war went on for eleven years.

It wasn’t logic, bravery, or courage. It was stubbornness. It was something worse than stubbornness — a…