An Inclusive Litany

2/1/93

Syndicated columnist Carl Rowan, praising Bill Clinton's diverse cabinet choices on "Inside Washington" in December, opined that Lyndon B. Johnson might not have escalated the Vietnam War had there been fewer white males in his Cabinet. Rowan recalled that when he became director of the U.S. Information Agency in 1963 and was invited to sit in on a Cabinet meeting, he saw nothing but "all male, white faces. And I have to ask myself today, if there had been some diversity in that Cabinet, maybe Lyndon Johnson wouldn't have gone with all those macho soliloquies and gotten himself destroyed in the Vietnam War."