{"id":14649,"date":"2012-04-17T10:00:59","date_gmt":"2012-04-17T15:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=14649"},"modified":"2012-04-17T10:00:59","modified_gmt":"2012-04-17T15:00:59","slug":"the-us-navys-next-destroyer-will-be-the-uss-lyndon-b-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/04\/17\/the-us-navys-next-destroyer-will-be-the-uss-lyndon-b-johnson\/","title":{"rendered":"The US Navy’s next destroyer will be the USS Lyndon B. Johnson<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I guess they’re happy they don’t have to use that particular name<\/a> on an aircraft carrier:<\/p>\n

\n

Strike one against the U.S.S. Lyndon Johnson<\/em>: the Gulf of Tonkin incident. A confusing episode off the Vietnamese coast on August 2, 1964 resulted in a brief maritime skirmish with the North Vietnamese. The destroyer U.S.S. Maddox<\/em> got shot; one of its aircraft was damaged. It was unclear who fired first. (A claimed follow-on engagement two days later was ultimately determined to have been a fiction.) Johnson\u2019s administration, seeking an excuse to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam, portrayed the incident to Congress as a clear-cut act of North Vietnamese aggression. A decade later, the futile Vietnam war had claimed 57,000 American lives.<\/p>\n

Strike two: Lyndon Johnson\u2019s Naval war record was similarly dubious. As Johnson\u2019s magisterial biographer, Robert Caro, documented in Means of Ascent<\/em>, Johnson\u2019s Naval commission in World War II was the result of string-pulling. (Johnson was a sitting congressman at the time; he sought a commission to bolster his political career.) His military career consisted of a single combat flight over the Pacific for which he received a Silver Star. For the next two decades, Johnson repeatedly exaggerated his tall tale of defying a Japanese Zero.<\/p>\n

Strike three: the U.S.S. Lyndon Johnson<\/em> will be a Zumwalt<\/em>-class destroyer \u2014 a class of ship singled out by good-government watchdogs as an unaffordable boondoggle.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I guess they’re happy they don’t have to use that particular name on an aircraft carrier: Strike one against the U.S.S. Lyndon Johnson: the Gulf of Tonkin incident. A confusing episode off the Vietnamese coast on August 2, 1964 resulted in a brief maritime skirmish with the North Vietnamese. The destroyer U.S.S. Maddox got shot; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[595,30,269,585],"class_list":["post-14649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-military","tag-lbj","tag-navy","tag-propaganda","tag-vietnam"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3Oh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14650,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14649\/revisions\/14650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}