A Speech for Lbj

A Speech for Lbj by Howard Zinn

"A Speech for LBJ" is the closing chapter of Howard Zinn's 1967 book *Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal*, published by Beacon Press, with later editions carrying an introduction by historian Marilyn B. Young. The chapter takes the form of an imagined presidential address: Zinn drafts the speech he believed Lyndon B. Johnson should, but would not, deliver to the American people, announcing the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. The piece is less a conventional essay than a rhetorical performance — Zinn assumes Johnson's voice and public authority in order to make the case for withdrawal sound as plausible, patriotic, and presidential as the actual justifications Johnson was giving for escalation. In doing so, Zinn inverts the logic of Cold War foreign policy: rather than framing withdrawal as defeat or appeasement, the "speech" presents it as clear-eyed realism, moral responsibility, and a return to America's own professed values. The imagined Johnson of the speech walks through and dismantles the standard rationales for the war that Zinn had spent the rest of the book refuting: that Vietnam was a Munich-style test of resolve against aggression, that a communist victory in Vietnam would topple neighboring states in a "domino" chain, and that containment of communism required an American military presence in Southeast Asia regardless of the war's origins or cost. The speech instead frames the conflict as a civil war rooted in Vietnamese nationalism and the anti-colonial struggle against France, one artificially divided at the 1954 Geneva accords, in which the United States had installed and propped up a succession of unpopular, unrepresentative Saigon governments. It argues that Ho Chi Minh's movement drew its strength from genuine popular support and the memory of resistance to foreign occupation, not merely from Chinese or Soviet direction, and that no amount of American bombing or troop commitment could manufacture legitimacy for a government that lacked it among its own people. The speech also addresses the human and moral costs of the war directly: American casualties, the devastation inflicted on Vietnamese civilians and countryside through bombing and defoliation, and the corrosive effects of the war on American democracy itself, including deception of the public, the distortion of national priorities away from domestic reform (a pointed jab at the gap between the promise of the Great Society and the reality of wartime spending), and the erosion of trust between citizens and government. Zinn has "Johnson" acknowledge that the initial commitments to Vietnam were made in good faith but based on mistaken premises, and that admitting error and reversing course is a mark of strength and leadership rather than weakness — a direct rebuttal to the "credibility" argument that held the U.S. could not withdraw without damaging its standing with allies and adversaries. Practically, the speech lays out withdrawal not as a slow, negotiated, face-saving process but as a prompt, unilateral act: an announcement of a ceasefire and troop withdrawal, an end to bombing, and a turn toward diplomatic and humanitarian engagement rather than continued military "victory." This was, at the time, a radical position — in 1967, even most war critics called for negotiated settlement or gradual de-escalation rather than immediate exit, and Zinn's book is frequently cited as the first full-length work to call explicitly for unconditional withdrawal. As a literary device, the imagined speech lets Zinn do two things simultaneously: model the counter-argument in the very genre (presidential address) used to sell the war, and expose by contrast how thin and question-begging the actual justifications for escalation were. It also implicitly indicts Johnson personally, since the fictional speech shows a path of honest reckoning and reversal that the real Johnson refused to take, deepening American involvement instead through 1965–1968. The chapter's tone throughout is not satire aimed at mocking Johnson but a sincere, almost hopeful counter-proposal — Zinn wanted it to be read as a genuinely deliverable presidential statement, persuasive on its own terms to a general American audience, not merely a polemic aimed at the antiwar movement already convinced. That ambition — to write the speech of the war's actual end before that end had happened — is what gives "A Speech for LBJ" its distinct place in Zinn's body of antiwar writing and in the broader literature of Vietnam War dissent, and why it continued to be reprinted in later collections of his work, including the retrospective collection introduced by Marilyn B. Young, herself a leading historian of the Vietnam War and U.S.–Asia relations.

By Howard Zinn · First published 1967 · Genre: Political Commentary, Oratory, Historical Writing · 2,555 words

First lines

It is a common occurrence in American politics that critics of a certain policy, while fervently declaring their allegiance to moral principle, nevertheless say they can "understand" the reluctance of the president to act on such principle because of the "realities" of politics, that he cannot "afford" (a word I always associated with dire poverty and not with the occupant of the White House) to go against "public opinion. " This is almost always a feeble rationalization for a deep lack of principle, and when the same argument for "realism" was put forth against the idea of withdrawal from Vietnam, I decided to challenge it. It seemed to me that public opinion was usually ahead of the national government on moral issues, that in any case such opinion was extremely volatile and movable by reasonable argument. My method was to write a speech for Lyndon Johnson which would persuasively explain to Americans more than ready for such an explanation, indeed eager for it as the bodybags of their sons were returning home in great numbers, why he was immediately withdrawing our military machine from Vietnam. I ended my book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal with that speech. A businessman bought six hundred copies of the book and sent it to every member of Congress. The speech was reprinted in full-page ads in newspapers in various parts of the country. The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran simultaneous articles by Congressman Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, urging escalation of the war, by Senator William Fulbright, calling for gradual de-escalation and negotiations, and by me, agruing for immediate withdrawal. The paper then took a poll of its readers and 63 percent voted for immediate withdrawal. A columnist for the Plain Dealer wrote: "Howard Zinn, a professor of government at Boston University, who served as a bombardier in World War II, has written a speech for Lyndon Johnson which, if he delivered it, would make the President one of the great men of history in my opinion. " But Johnson did not deliver that speech. He did start negotiations with the Vietnamese in Paris, and announced he would not run for president in 1968. The war continued, and the antiwar movement grew, and in 1973 the United States finally withdrew; 55,000 Americans had lost their lives, Vietnam was devastated, and two million of its people, mostly civilians, were dead. Here is the speech I wrote in 1967.

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political criticism · anti-war · Vietnam War · American foreign policy · presidential critique · social commentary · protest literature · historical analysis · civil rights era · political rhetoric · Cold War · government accountability

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