You are right. At this late date I confused two important Vietnam votes. One was the Gulf of Tonkin vote in 1964 when Johnson became President after Kennedy’s assassination, and the other was the $700 million vote to fund the Vietnam war in 1965 after Johnson won election. Both were discussed among the people I mentioned. One was a staff member of a NY Congressman, who was among the 3 Senators and 7 Representatives who defied Johnson by NOT voting the money. See link below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/nyregion/john-g-dow-97-early-foe-of-vietnam-war.html
I remember the anger or amusement of people at Goldwater’s comment about “lobbing one (a nuke) into the men’s room in the Kremlin.” This was scary talk to some after experiencing the Cuban missile crisis showdown in October 1962. I know I had been scared then living within 10 miles of Washington, DC. Other vivid memories of the Vietnam War were photos effectively used that turned people against the war. One was the little girl running naked down a road apparently after having her clothes burned off by napalm. Another was a North Vietnam prisoner being shot dead by a South Vietnam officer. The same effective use of horrible photos are currently being used by the pro Palestine people as children and babies are dead and dying while Israel shells places suspected of hiding Hamas terrorists. People are starting to forget the horror of how Hamas started this whole most recent mess.
Rereading your comment, I have no memory of Goldwater talking about using “tactical” nuclear weapons to win in Vietnam. Of course “tactical” may not have been written about much by the East Coast media. I do remember one story exhibiting Goldwater as a lightweight because he liked to play jokes in his office building by sending mice in sealed containers to women through the interoffice tube delivery system.
I think the goal of those who engineered Johnson’s presidency WAS to keep throwing money at the war so the MIC1 would get very rich. Then in 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president, we had Watergate, and Gerald Ford served starting around 1974.
gleeaikin:
"One was the Gulf of Tonkin vote in 1964 when Johnson became President after Kennedy’s assassination,...
I remember the anger or amusement of people at Goldwater’s comment about “lobbing one (a nuke) into the men’s room in the Kremlin.”
This was scary talk to some after experiencing the Cuban missile crisis showdown in October 1962.
I know I had been scared then living within 10 miles of Washington, DC. " In 1964 I was in high school, living near Monterey, California.
I attended primary rallies for both Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
Goldwater's rally was much larger, and he won the primary, though lost in a landslide to LBJ in November.
In the whole state, Goldwater carried only a couple of rural counties.
As I remember it, throughout that campaign the only references to Goldwater and nuclear weapons I saw were those "Daisy Girl" hit-ads Johnson's campaign ran against him.
On the other hand, whatever Goldwater may, or may not have said about nukes, he was not the first one to recommend using them -- that would be Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Korea, who wanted to A-bomb the Yalu River to keep the Chi-Coms out.
It was part of why Truman fired MacArthur.
Anyway, the key point about Goldwater's views on Vietnam had nothing necessarily to do with nukes, but rather with Goldwater's insistence that we shouldn't just go fight in Vietnam, we had to have a plan to actually win the war, and Johnson never had a plan to win.
So Johnson's "Daisy Girl" adds against Goldwater successfully obscured the fact that Johnson himself had no plan to win, indeed, didn't really care about winning.
What Johnson absolutely cared about was gaining the political power to defeat Republicans, and his "Daisy Girl" ad did that for him, actually winning in Vietnam was irrelevant to him.
Anyway, that's how I remember it.
