Folder 52 Jack Valenti SR 2603 pp. 7, 8

Going to war, what was it like? (from Johnson's perspective)

Johnson, I think, personalized the war because it was a personal agony. If he said my helicopters or my airplanes, it was not in a kind of egocentric way, it was the way he personalized everything that had to do with the war… …And I remember one morning he was on the phone and he looked somber and he put the phone down and looked at me and anguish on his face and said, we lost six men last night…they weren't statistics to Johnson, they were living human beings summoned to their death because he, the Commander-in-Chief had ordered them to Vietnam. And he felt as if it was a cancer and a fungus and an explosive device inside him. Every time he got on that phone and learned of one, two, three, five men killed. Too much, too much.