Johnson often claimed he feared Congress would use Vietnam as an excuse to underfund his Great Society programs. But he himself saw his two wars as complementary, not competitive. Since each took the same approach to an intractable reality, success in one was a warrant for success in the other. Johnson frequently described the war as a New Deal–style project and even launched a Mekong River Redevelopment Commission to industrialize, as far as possible, the vast, ramifying waterway that entered the South China Sea south of Saigon.
