The front page story in the New York Times on February 14th was titled Rescuing a Vietnam Casualty: Johnson’s Legacy, about Lyndon Johnson and how the Vietnam war obscured some of the President’s great achievements in social and racial issues.
In E Train to Masada, one of the main characters is a President of the United States in the year 1968, and how this fictional President is on the verge of a breakdown because of his inability to halt the Vietnam tragedy. The NYT story and my President are eerily similar, perhaps an example of art imitating life. Because of the bizarre request the fictional President makes of the Mad Man he drafts to write his farewell speech, some have wondered if new information has been revealed about the Johnson administration during those tumultuous 60’s. Perhaps. Perhaps not.