ABSTRACT
Waiter Lippmann knew that Johnson wanted to go down in history as the true descendant of Franklin Roosevelt and the man who actually achieved the great reforms that John F. Kennedy had only promised. Lippmann elaborated his suggestion for a "peace offensive" — one that he had laid out for the public in the column he wrote that morning — and urged that the President make a declaration, something along the lines of Wilson's Fourteen Points. Having confronted head-on the accusation of isolationism, Lippmann explained that it was as "abnormal" for the United States to be in Saigon and Seoul as it was for the Russians to be in Berlin and Prague. Lippmann's attention was focused almost entirely on Vietnam. In the 1950s he saw it as the scene of an anticolonial struggle against the French, then as a battleground of great-power maneuvering, later as part of China's "orbit," and ultimately.
