3 – The Carrot and the Stick
President Lyndon B. Johnson greets crowds, USSS Agent Rufus Youngblood is behind him.
By the spring of 1965, pressure is building on President Johnson to make his case for the war to the American electorate. He resists, preferring to manage the conflict without public scrutiny, but finally agrees to go public, in a speech at Johns Hopkins University. The strategy behind the speech: a little something for everybody. A look at how that strategy works out, and what it reveals about LBJ’s congenital bias for secrecy.
Featured commentator: Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam and Professor of History and International Affairs at Harvard University.
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