Lyndon Johnson's Lies about the Vietnam War

Much more dangerous was the situation when President Lyndon B. Johnson was hiding unfavorable information from the public about the course of the war in Vietnam. Johnson was the successor to President John F. Kennedy assassinated in 1963, but in 1964 new elections were to be held. During the election campaign, his rival from the Republican Party, Senator from Arizona Barry Goldwater said that he was ready to use atomic weapons to win the war. Johnson took the opposite position. "We are not going to send American guys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what the Asian guys have to do for themselves." However, after winning the election, making sure that you can win the war only by sending troops to Vietnam, Johnson sent people there for several years. As a result, about half a million American guys have been there and more bombs were dropped than in the entire Second World War.
Johnson believed that a strong position in the negotiations on an acceptable end to the war was provided to him only if the North Vietnamese believed that American public opinion supported him. Therefore, Johnson personally selected information that should be communicated to the American people about the course of the war. The military command, having guessed that Johnson seeks to present the successes of the United States in the most favorable light, and the defeats of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong in the darkest tones, after some time began to transmit only positive information from the scene ^[258] . But this farce ceased in January 1968, when, during the holiday of Tet, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched a crushing offensive, and the Americans, together with the whole world, learned how far America was actually from winning this war. This offensive took place just in time for the campaign to prepare for the election of a new president. Senator Robert Kennedy, who put forward his candidacy from the Democratic Party against Johnson, said that this offensive "broke the mask of official illusions under which we hid the true state of things even from ourselves." A few months later, Johnson announced that he was withdrawing his candidacy and would not be re-elected for a second term.
Under a democratic system of government, it is impossible to deceive another nation without deceiving your own people, therefore with a long-term use of the deception policy, it becomes very dangerous. Johnson deceived the American people not for a day, not a week, or even months. Creating the illusion of near victory, Johnson deprived the electorate of the information necessary to make the right political choice. Democracy is not viable if one political party can control the information that comes to the electorate and has a decisive influence on the voting results. As senator Kennedy has already noted, I suspect that as a result of this deception, Johnson and at least some of his advisers themselves almost believed in their own lies. Not only state officials can fall into such a trap. I believe that the more often a person lies, the easier it turns out. With each new deception, his doubts about the admissibility of lies are less and less frequent. After repeated practice, the liar begins to deceive so calmly that sometimes he does not even notice that he is lying. And he remembers this only when his information is questioned and verified. Nevertheless, although Johnson wanted to believe in his own false reports about the course of the war, and at times he might even have considered them true, I still doubt that he ever managed to completely deceive himself.