From "(Re)Sublimating the 60s"

Abstract

With an imperiousness worthy of Norman Mailer and an apocalyptic sealing of the envelope, I had just written President Johnson letter advising him not do so, when it was announced that the United States was mining the rivers of North Vietnam. President admitted the possibility of errorthe land might be flooded and people starved-but he stressed (publicly, not to me) the terrible loneliness of decision-making and the earnest consciousness behind it. He quoted Truman: The buck stops here. He quoted Lincoln: a band of eagles swearing wouldn't prove him right if he was wrong. He was acting out of combination, in single figure, of modernism and populism: an inviolate self, autonomous in its ambiguities and paradoxes, yet guided by consensus and analysis.... Every such act seemed to narrow the chance of exemption from the horrors we were, in the ecology of slaughter, storing up for ourselves and which-like grain in the other silos, filled to overflowing-are still pending. President was convinced he was teaching aggression lesson. aggression of the 60s was to teach the President lesson. But does aggression ever learn? On either side of such instruction? seeds of confusion