Word: coonskin
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...only with the three Presidents who prosecuted the war but with the executive elites with whom they surrounded themselves, hubristic warrior-intellectuals like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow and Robert MacNamara. Under Lyndon Johnson, at least, there was an odd blending of machismo styles?the President's "coonskin-on-the-wall" Texas mystique with the cooler but no less assertive air of the intellectuals. This "cando" mentality, it may be, suffused the executive thinking, the very traditional American sense that an impelling will in harness to superior technology can solve any problem. That impulse reckoned without the devastating complexities...
...after all, cut our political teeth on Lyndon Johnson, who sent his killers over to nail the coonskin to the wall. Johnson organized us as effectively as any antiwar campaign, for his defiant cowboy style would admit no doubts or hopes for respite: he intended to win no matter how many are killed or who might protest. Nixon learned from Cambodia that the shoot from-the-hip style was a risk. If he told the people what he intended to do they would get angry; so, instead, he lied, couching plans for victory in the rhetoric of withdrawal, calling mass...
...Coonskin Caps...
...given to revolts." While militant protests will not disappear tomorrow-"it is more likely that there will be a long-drawn-out chorus of whimpers"-Kerr believes that political activism on campus may eventually take on a more peaceable form. "The sit-in," he concludes, "will gradually join the coonskin coat as an interesting symbol of a student age retreating into history...
...America has spent six years consuming lives and dollars in Vietnam, but no one is quite sure why we're still there. Goldberg says we are waiting to negotiate. Rusk would like to contain Chinese expansionism and reaffirm the SEATO treaty. Johnson wants to bring back "the coonskin on the wall...