My Grandmother's Involvement In Vietnam

My Grandmother was a young mother when Lyndon B. Johnson came to the presidency in a way that shocked the entire nation. Understandably, she most strongly remembers the image of young Jackie Kennedy standing on Air Force One, covered in her husband’s blood, as she watched Johnson take the Oath of Office. She also remembers various conspiracy theories at the time, claiming that after feeling held back by America’s Golden Boy, Kennedy, Johnson took it upon himself to have Kennedy assassinated. Aside from that, my Grandmother mostly remembers the horror that Johnson inflicted upon her own personal life with his involvement in the Vietnam War, or as my Grandmother still refers to it, “A war we knew we could not win.”

As the middle of fourteen siblings, my Grandmother had a life filled with hard work in her rural town outside of New Orleans, Louisiana. Her parents worked as subsistence farmers, growing only enough food to feed their large family with little leftover to sell in town. Her upbringing leads her to have conflicting views regarding Johnson. As a person, she remembers him as a bullying politician who “dropped more f-bombs in one conversation” than my Grandmother had heard in her young life. She remembers his ruthless personality and ability to control the conversation, but also the side that

During Johnson’s presidency, she held the most frustration with the new Social Security system. As she recalls, Social Security kept public taxes from going to other work projects, like fixing up the roads of New Orleans, a city in constant need of repair. Furthermore, she believed he had good policies in the beginning, however claims that the Vietnam War shrouded his entire