How We Got Into Vietnam (David Halberstam)

Finished "The Best and The Brightest" book by Halberstam on Vietnam. I'm glad I got to the end. He talks about LBJ's failed decision-making on Vietnam. LBJ looked to the past and the Cold War to try and understand Vietnam:

"The forces at work in the fifties were very real to him. If Jack Kennedy was a man who knew more about where the sixties were headed but whose intellect preceded his courage, who stepped forward gingerly, then Johnson was more a man of the past. He reacted to what he thought the country was; the country which twice defeated Stevenson for the Presidency, where the powerful people on the Hill seemed primarily to be hawks, where the dominant figures of journalism were proud survivors of the worst of the Cold War, and where American universities had also given willingly, too willingly in fact, of their talent and support to the Cold War." (p. 592)

And here is how LBJ got us so deeply involved in the war, using his astute political skills, for subtly escalating the War, while missing the boat on the sixties revolution brewing and about to explode:

"That would all come later: perhaps another politician might have sensed it, if not clearly identifying the change. But Lyndon Johnson did not sense it, rather he sensed that he had position on everybody else, he had control of the center, he had moved all opponents to the extreme. He had handled the Congress, signed it on without really signing it on: he had handled the press by slicing the salami so thin that they are never able to pin him down, and he handled Ho by making it seem as if Ho were attacking him at Tonkin. He was using force but using it discreetly, and he was also handling the military. They were moving toward war, but in such imperceptible degrees that neither the Congress nor the press could ever show a quantum jump. All the decisions were being cleverly hidden; he as cutting it thin to hold off the opposition." (p. 593)

This poses some interesting questions for me on how public policy lurches forward-- often based on the prevailing, conventional wisdom, based on the leader's beliefs about his peers and what they will find acceptable, as rational behavior. Of course, our Vietnam policy does not appear rational in retrospect, but LBJ operated within the paradigm he knew and had experienced.

What do we believe now-- based on a present-day conventional wisdom that is actually totally inaccurate and misplaced? People think we need to get industry back to America? Is there any likelihood of that? How might our energies and resources be used to improve the situation in our country? I'm sure there is much confusion on the subject, and some of our unlikely Presidential candidates (Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders) have risen because of confusion around where the country should be heading. Not sure any of the candidates has proposed anything of substance. Mainly its emotion-- Make America Great Again, Stop the 1%....  Obama has kept a cool head. He didn't come out with a "New Deal" or anything on a grand scale. I doubt there would have been support for that kind of thing in this environment. The candidates kind of imply that they will achieve something on a grand scale. That seems unlikely.

Income Inequality-- real or imagined?

Listened to Sirius radio today as I drove around my hometown of Austin, Texas. Caught a public radio discussion from New York City on the election of Bill de Blasio, the new mayor of New York.  Mr. de Blasio wants to get free pre-school education for all New Yorkers in an effort to level the playing field as regards income and opportunity inequality. He's concerned about affordable housing. Only the rich can afford to live in Manhattan these days. But he's careful not to hurl invective at Wall Street, the place oozing money and wealth and a big source of the city's economy.

Income inequality has been with us forever. Is it really that different than it has ever been before? Everybody will scream in response-- yes, the numbers indicate clearly all the gains in wealth have been made at the top of the pyramid, the "top 1%," a group nobody claims to be part of. The oft-repeated truism states all societal gains have fallen into the laps of the very rich. But, as my hero Marshall McLuhan, the media philosph, states-- "it is wealth that creates poverty."  That's not a direct quote despite the quotation marks. The level of wealth has become more visible thanks to the power of modern communications and we do not like seeing how poor we are by comparison!

The perspective of a 19th or 20th century analysis does not suffice. The digital revolution has changed the world. The Arab Spring occurred because the Middle East could see their plight more clearly and didn't like what appeared before their eyes. The dictators shivered as the citizens tweeted out their feelings and societies went up in flames. The situation is messy and painful, no doubt, but the revolution has begun. Not only is the revolution being televised... it's being streamed or tweeted or whatever.

Meanwhile back in the United States... every kid has a cellphone and doesn't want to lose that connectivity. Hence, crime rates are way down because nobody can abide by the thought of going without a cellphone in a prison cell-- no matter how great the police departments think they are doing.

The next chapter is mysterious no doubt. One expert on employment stated there are two distinct economies and employment pictures--1)  the high tech economy, where things are humming and companies need more workers, and 2) the rest of the economy, with high unemployment and people looking for work.

New York City may or may not reflect an American reality or even a global reality. Wealth will follow on the heels of knowledge and education and eventually get distributed more evenly. The extreme productivity and wealth of our society has to go somewhere. Nature abhors a vacuum. Dealing with wild amounts of accumulated riches is a problem we can solve. Other, very real problems like climate change threaten all of humanity. The climate problems demands unprecedented levels of global cooperation-- a challenge posing risks more precipitous than anything previously experienced in human history.