What if LBJ quietly de-escalated and withdrew from Vietnam after being sworn in?

[Cory]

Point of Order: Pol Pot was a Maoist who would not have been tolerated especially by a Pro-Soviet North Vietnam that wins an easier victory against the South.

The Viets probably won't leave the Monarchy in place but the communist government they install would be orders of magnitude better than Pol Pot's madness.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

LBJ would be a two-termer, defeat Reagan in '68 and we see either HHH or Nixon elected in '72.

You see medicare/medicaid expanded compared to OTL in the late 60s/early 70s with possible naitonal healthcare under LBJ, more likely under his successor.

4-6 more SC spots filled by LBJ, though so the supreme court tilts left of OTL. You likely see pornography legal outside of california(instead of OTL's situation where it's only legal there), a firmer and more consistent Rooe v. wade that's more legally sound(read: making it a matte of it being the women's choice) and sodomy laws ended by the SC by the mid 70s.

agreed with most of this.

[dead0man]

Perhaps if he had earned his medals in WWII instead of having them (lots of them) handed to him by the Good Ole Boys Club he would have understood that war is hell, instead of the game he seemed to think it was.  He was a bully to subordinates and peers.  He was just a sh**tty human that did one good thing that was going to get done anyway.

[(no subject)]

In assessing LBJ as a domestic policy president, I take my text from St Paul's Cathedral. I translate the inscription on the black marble slab to Sir Christopher Wren:

Si monumentum requiris circumspice.


If you are searching for a monument, look around.

[Frodo]

The Vietnamese communists in the early seventies will want a protective girdle of satellite states around them so i can't see them tolerating an unreliable non-communist monarch like Sihanouk for long.

Didn't Vietnam invade Cambodia to depose Pol Pot?

They only did that because he tried to reclaim historically Khmer territory around the mouth of the Mekong River in what is now southern Vietnam.  Had he not, his regime would still be ruling Cambodia (or, as they called it, Democratic Kampuchea) to this day.  And in a way, it still is, considering his former followers still rule the country.