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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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Oakes:

I certainly had conversations with Johnson as president about Vietnam, or to put it more accurately -- I heard him beat me -- almost physically -- to a pulp and certainly verbally on that subject very soon after he became president. I knew Johnson quite well because I had talked to him a lot when he was majority leader, just on my periodic visits to Washington, and I had known him and had certainly talked to him before he became majority leader, as a senator, and I think even farther back, even when he was in the House. Johnson was obviously somebody who really knew what was going on in Washington, and it was perfectly natural that he would be one of the people that I would come to see. And so over the years, particularly the latter senatorial years, I really got to know him moderately well. I don't really recall any conversations with Johnson on the subject of Vietnam while he was vice president. But immediately after he assumed the presidency, I had a visit with him at the White House, which I believe I've described on a previous occasion in this oral history. In that conversation, which was only a week or two weeks, something like that, after he became president -- it was in early December, as I recall -- most of what we talked about, or what he talked about -- it was never a “we” talk; it was always what Johnson talked about -- was his own superiority, in knowledge and experience and everything else, to Jack Kennedy -- and in popularity, in Texas, at least, to Jack Kennedy. And in that first conversation he very much emphasized to me his experience in foreign affairs, because he was very conscious of the criticism, sometimes ridicule, that had been directed his way when he made trips around the world, and he was generally considered, while very savvy on domestic matters, as not knowing anything about foreign affairs. I remember he spent quite a bit of that very first presidential conversation with me on his savvy on foreign affairs. But I cannot say that Vietnam specifically came into that conversation. I don't think it did. It was his own “expertise,” which I put in quotes, on foreign affairs. Subsequently, however, certainly early the next year, in '64, I





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