The Museum Didn't Surprise Me at All..

I am into history and wars and all that happy stuff so I was looking forward to this. I expected what was dealt. The museum's rhetoric was obviously in his favor and gave off this glow that I ignored. What surprised me at first was the wall of pins that were worn back during his presidency. There were ones that were for his presidency, then there were those few scattered that said, "Johnson for Ex President" and "Do Away with LBJ". I was surprised that they had the negative ones, but that negative feeling left very quickly when I continued on.

The museum started by introducing him through his childhood, good grades, and accomplishments. Childhood is childhood. Then it went into his life as an officer in the U.S. naval reserve union and his silver star form Roosevelt. This is an intelligent way to start off their way of idolizing LBJ. Saying like, "Hes been there in his life and knows what it's like to fight" came into my mind because that's what they wanted us to think, but it simply faded in mine. Then I was noticing how he was constantly contacting the president Truman trying to 'help' him with decisions. He was itching to get in there! I saw it as just trying to start controlling things, but the museum made it look like he was trying to help since he was 'such an amazing president'. The museum includes such small details that puts LBJ on a pedistole.

What surprised me the most was the Gulf of Tonkin section. I knew what was coming before I even started reading. All the images of him shaking hands and smiling told me that this was not going to be what I learned. They wrote that after the Tonkin "only after he is given firm assurance that the attack occured, the president orders retaliatio against N. Vietnam". They make it sound like he had perfect reason to fight. It continued on that they were sent to send economic support and have 'advisors' sent over there to keep an eye on the North. If I had never seen teh documentaries that I have seen, I owuld have belived this. Who wouldn't believe what was written on the walls? Then it went into how they SELECTED targets in N. Vietnam when we know that villages are not targets and poisoning a village is not a target. It made me upset to read this because it makes me question what is written in my history books.

Being that this was a museum already gave off a strong ethos, but the great pictures of him and all the 'facts' that were in his favor just topped it off. No I don't know all the facts, but I'm pretty confident about what I have learned and that the museum was just trying to make him look like the nearly perfect prsident that was "just trying to do right for them [Americans] and thier children. But they couldn't see that". The final section showed that quote trying to give off that last good feeling of LBJ having the best intentions for our country. All I thought of was, "He didn't do what was right for the Vietnamese children and women." This museum does a great job in making LBJ look like an ideal president that had great intentions, intelligent, and just seemed to fit, but there is a lot behind the walls that the museum covers up. We can use this in our film and contrasting truth from the museum's perception somehow.