Well, LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin incident were part of me growing up and beginning to understand the world.

LBJ ““I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

TONKIN: One of the Navy pilots flying overhead that night was squadron commander James Stockdale, who later gained fame as a POW and then as Ross Perot’s vice presidential running mate. “I had the best seat in the house to watch that event,” Stockdale said years later.

“Our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets — there were no PT boats. There was nothing there but black water and American firepower,” he added.

If Stockdale’s claim wasn’t damning enough, here’s what President Johnson said in 1965: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”

Then Lee Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”