About the Program
James Blight and Janet Lang, of Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, will conduct a day-long workshop on March 21, based on their more than twenty years of research on the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
The morning session will focus on the significance of empathy (and its absence) between the Americans and Vietnamese communists, leading to the escalation of the war in Vietnam.
The afternoon session will consider how presidential leadership can lead a nation into war, or keep a nation out of war, by comparing the decision-making of Kennedy. Johnson and George W. Bush. Blight and Lang will draw on several documentary films with which they have recently been involved, including Errol Morris' "The Fog of War" (2004), and Koji Masutani's "Virtual JFK" (2008).