The dilemma

Didn't happen then. Won't happen now.

Johnson: And we just got to think about it. I'm looking at this Sergeant of mine this morning and he's got 6 little old kids over there, and he's getting out my things, and bringing me in my night reading, and all that kind of stuff, and I just thought about ordering all those kids in there. And what in the hell am I ordering them out there for? What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country? We've got a treaty but hell, everybody else has got a treaty out there, and they're not doing a thing about it.

Bundy: Yeah, yeah.

Johnson: Of course, if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen.

Bundy: Yeah, that's the trouble. And that is what the rest of that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us. That's the dilemma, that's exactly the dilemma.

But what struck me about this is the reminder -- based on the photos of Johnson during this time and the anguish he expresses on the tapes -- that Johnson was truly conflicted about our role in Vietnam and his role in history. He had doubts. He gave a damn about the dead.

In The New Yorker this week, there's a terrific round up of the recent literature about Abraham Lincoln. In Gopnik's piece, he writes about Soldier's Home, just outside of Washington, where Lincoln spent his summers.

The one place in America where you can get a sense of Lincoln the President at work and at play is the Soldiers’ Home, on the outskirts of Washington, about three miles from the White House. After the death of his son Willie, in 1862, Lincoln used a cottage on the grounds as a kind of retreat, a proto-Camp David, and spent summers there from 1862 to 1864. Every other place associated with him either predates the Presidential years or has changed so much that it is unrecognizable. But Lincoln’s cottage, which has been largely neglected, still resonates with the period. It was an odd location for him; though it was cooler than central Washington in the summer, it was also a soldiers’ retirement home, with a cemetery just alongside, where the Union dead were sent to be buried.

Think of it. The one place Lincoln can go to relax is also a daily reminder of the toll his decision to go to war to maintain the Union took.

Johnson and Lincoln faced and understood the consequences of their decisions. For all the literature that has come out from the various "insiders" at the White House and the "as told to" books by Bob Woodward, I haven't heard of a single doubt, a single regret, a single moment of weariness in our current president.

Take this, for example.

Yet, undeniably, as the war and his Presidency progressed, Lincoln spoke increasingly of God—inserted God, as it seems, into the Gettysburg Address—and evidently had some kind of complicated and rich sense of “necessity” and a supernatural presiding power. The second Inaugural is the most famous instance, with its insistence that “if God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ”

This is a darker vision of Providence, and of God, than is quite compatible with any kind of ordinary Protestantism. In a review of James Takach’s “Lincoln’s Moral Vision,” Lucas E. Morel writes, “Lincoln’s perplexing piety comprised a fiercely independent admixture of Enlightenment rationalism and Calvinist fatalism.” His faith was rooted mainly in a kind of mystical inner sense of predestination, not so far from that youthful doctrine of necessity. He found no serenity in the idea that he was doing God’s work. His point in the second Inaugural is not that he is doing God’s will but that God’s will is going to be done, no matter what Lincoln does. He thought not that God was on his side or the other but that God had determined on this conflict, perhaps as a collective punishment for the sin of slavery, perhaps for reasons permanently mysterious to men. He came increasingly to believe in Providence, but it was a Providence that acted mercilessly through History, not one that regularly interceded with compassion. That was left to men, and Presidents.

Compare and contrast:

This week, the president acknowledged that the violent uprising against U.S. troops in Iraq has resulted in "a tough, tough series of weeks for the American people." But he insisted that his course of action in Iraq has been the correct one in language that echoed what he told Woodward more than four months ago.

In two interviews with Woodward in December, Bush minimized the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, expressed no doubts about his decision to invade Iraq, and enunciated an activist role for the United States based on it being "the beacon for freedom in the world."

"I believe we have a duty to free people," Bush told Woodward. "I would hope we wouldn't have to do it militarily, but we have a duty."

The president described praying as he walked outside the Oval Office after giving the order to begin combat operations against Iraq, and the powerful role his religious beliefs played throughout that time.

"Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. . . . I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness."

The president told Woodward: "I am prepared to risk my presidency to do what I think is right. I was going to act. And if it could cost the presidency, I fully realized that. But I felt so strongly that it was the right thing to do that I was prepared to do so."

Asked by Woodward how history would judge the war, Bush replied: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead."

God help us.