Daily Inspiration Quote by Lew Wasserman

Power doesn’t just lose wars; it loses the story about the war. Lew Wasserman’s line lands with the weary authority of a Hollywood producer describing a president trapped in a crisis that can’t be cut into a coherent script. He frames Lyndon Johnson’s downfall as less about a single decision than about a communications dead end: Vietnam wasn’t merely unwinnable on the ground, it was un-sellable in public.

Wasserman’s intent is diagnostic. He isn’t exonerating Johnson so much as identifying the governing assumption of the era: if you can explain policy, you can manage consent. Johnson, a master legislative tactician, believed in persuasion as a political technology. Wasserman suggests that Vietnam broke that technology. The subtext is brutal: the “real issues” couldn’t be communicated not because the White House lacked talent, but because the truth sat in a contradiction. The war’s aims were complicated, shifting, and morally ambiguous; its costs were vivid and televised. “If there was a way” reads like a producer’s lament about an unworkable premise. No amount of message discipline can make a muddled mission feel necessary.

Context sharpens the point. By the late 1960s, credibility itself was a battleground: body counts, optimistic briefings, then Tet. The public didn’t just doubt the war; it doubted the narrators. Wasserman, a kingmaker who understood image economies, is naming a moment when media saturation didn’t clarify events, it exposed their incoherence. “There was just no way to communicate” becomes less a complaint about optics than an admission that the available explanations were politically fatal.