In an attempt to justify sending American troops into another small country, the Dominican Republic (in that same month, April, 1965), Lyndon Johnson told the press and the American people that the American Ambassador had said that otherwise “American blood will run in the streets.” (He hadn’t.) He said that the Ambassador had said that he “was talking to us from under a desk while bullets were going through his windows.” He hadn’t. Johnson said that fifteen hundred innocent people had been murdered, some by decapitation. They hadn’t. He said that the revolution had been taken over by “a band
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