Wojtek wrote:
>The managers of the US empire was fighting the war in Vietnam with a
>conscript, racially segregated army that was increasingly
>demoralized and fragging their own officers.
>They were losing not only ground but also their "battle for hearts
>and minds." Race riots at home was the last thing they needed at
>that time. The brewing tension would further undermine their war
>effort. So they come up with War on Poverty.
Both fragging and escalation of the war in Vietnam come after "they come up with War on Poverty"
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/vietnam/us/movie.html
"During the years of 1969 down to 1973, we have the rise of fragging - that is, shooting or hand-grenading your NCO or your officer who orders you out into the field," says historian Terry Anderson of Texas A & M University. "The US Army itself does not know exactly how many...officers were murdered. But they know at least 600 were murdered, and then they have another 1400 that died mysteriously. Consequently by early 1970, the army [was] at war not with the enemy but with itself."
http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change-Viet2b.html
As a domestic policy innovator, LBJ hit the ground running in 1965. His legislative accomplishments included securing congressional passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act and numerous great society programs including Medicare. Again, to avoid the tradeoff between "guns and butter," decisions about Vietnam were not highly publicized. Nonetheless, there were several decisions made in 1965 that would essentially "Americanize" the war and increase the commitment to levels that were feared in the policy discussions of the early 1960s.
The "story" of decision making throughout the remainder of the Johnson term was the escalation of American involvement. As the following graph demonstrates, the number of troops stationed in Vietnam steadily climbed in the years from 1965 to 1968.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society#Major_programs
The centerpiece of the War on Poverty was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs....
The War on Poverty began with a $1 billion appropriation in 1964 and spent another $2 billion in the following two years. It spawned dozens of programs.... The most important educational component of the Great Society was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965,... The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 offered federal aid to local school districts in assisting them to address the needs of children with limited English-speaking ability