Obama Is No LBJ

As Afghanistan starts to resemble Vietnam, Barack Obama is being compared to Lyndon Johnson, "a president who aspired to reshape America at home while fighting a losing war abroad."

Such parallels must be irresistible to historians and journalistic Big Thinkers, but they overlook the reality that Obama and LBJ are as dissimilar as two presidents could be in every way that counts--temperament, personality and approach to power.

Even the comparison has its roots in the current president's reflective nature as opposed to Johnson's self-assertion and certainty, going back to a recent off-the-record dinner with historians in which Obama "expressed concern that Afghanistan could yet hijack his presidency."

Self-awareness and modesty are traits that could serve him well as Afghanistan threatens to become the kind of quagmire that resulted from LBJ's often-asserted refusal to become "the first American president to lose a war."

If hubris was Johnson's Achille's heel, however, caution is Obama's counterpart.

“We must never forget,” he said in a speech last week. “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.”

Maybe so, but in LBJ's time, the domino theory about the spread of Communism seemed just as compelling and proved to be flawed. The question now is will Obama reconsider that "necessity," as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and others have been urging.

Depressed and defeated in retirement, Johnson was still trying to understand what went wrong, and I heard him give an assessment of his successor Richard Nixon.

"Not much here," LBJ said, pointing to his head and then his heart, "even less here," before lowering his hand below the belt. "But enough down there."

Unlike Johnson, Obama is not so obsessed with such distinctions that they will cloud his ultimate decisions about changing direction in a war that Americans no longer want.

If he stays true to his own nature, he can avoid LBJ's foreign policy disaster and keep trying to match his achievements in working toward a Great Society.

Iraq and Vietnam, Bush and LBJ

Now that the Decider is invoking Vietnam as the touchstone for Iraq, he may want to consider the fate of the man who presided over that war.

Like Bush, Lyndon Johnson believed passionately in the necessity of his conflict, in the domino theory that losing Vietnam would lead to the fall of Southeast Asia, just as this President is certain that success in Iraq will determine what happens in the whole Middle East.

Johnson was wrong. We lost. Southeast Asia did not go Communist. Bush went to Vietnam last year and at a banquet offered a toast to “strengthening our ties."

The President should look at what happened after LBJ left office. He lived the remaining four years of his life in a depression so deep that he couldn't write his memoirs and died of a heart attack the day his successor, Nixon, admitted defeat and withdrew from Vietnam.

Had LBJ survived, he would be marking his 99th birthday next week and might have some advice for Bush, his fellow Texan. A misbegotten war can undo a lifetime of achievement such as a landmark Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty.

But then, Bush would have no idea of what Johnson was talking about. In six and a half years so far, his domestic achievements have been zero, unless you count tax cuts for the rich and denying health care to poor children.