We'll let you decide whether the song itself can fairly be called "anti-American" (Pete Seeger called up the editor of the Times and let him know his views on the matter). Winkler, To Everything There Is a Season: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song, 120). Seeger sang "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" to the group of students, and within days, a piece came out in the New York Times with this headline: "Seeger Sings Anti-American Song in Moscow" (Allan M. He helped a New York Times reporter, Peter Grose, slip into a student concert in Moscow with him. Seeger was on tour in Europe, and he went to Russia for a spell. The first thing that happened after Seeger wrote the song was actually quite absurd. "It was an allegory," Seeger told a biographer, "and a very obvious one" (Alec Wilkinson, The Protest Singer, 98). Johnson forced MacNamara's resignation, playing the role of the captain who plows forth despite the words of his closest advisors. And, although Seeger didn't necessarily know this at the time, the "Nervous Nellie" might have been Robert MacNamara, the Secretary of Defense who had urged Kennedy towards war but later changed his tune, urging Johnson to ease up on the bombing of North Vietnam in 1967.
Johnson, who seemed to be plowing knee deep, then waist deep, then neck deep into the war in Vietnam despite drooping popular support. And just after that, the captain is devoured by quick sand. "Don't be a Nervous Nellie," eggs the captain. The platoon follows their captain into the middle of the Mississippi river in the middle of the night, even though the sergeant questions whether this is really the best way to go. "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" is a story about a training platoon in Louisiana during World War II. In 1967, he came back with another album, and a more subtle, more far-reaching anti-war message. But most people saw him as a long-time leftist and former Communist not to be taken too seriously. Actually, that's an over-simplification: he wrote a whole album about it in 1966, just as anti-war sentiment was starting to pick up around the country.
So, he sat down and wrote an allegory about it. But protest singer Pete Seeger thought otherwise. The decision was presented as inevitable, and some people would still argue that Johnson didn't really have a choice.
Just a few months into his presidency, he did exactly that. During the elections, President Johnson promised that he would not deploy ground troops in Vietnam. Johnson had taken over after President Kennedy's assassination in 1963, and when he was re-elected to the post in 1964 many had high hopes for Johnson's ability to navigate the country out of Vietnam before the going got bad. He'd seen it all: World War II in the 1940s, red-baiting and McCarthyism in the 1950s, and now a big war against guerilla fighters in a tiny country marked by a growing death toll back home. "But every time I read the papers / That old feeling comes on / We're waist deep in the Big Muddy / And the big fool says to push on." – Pete Seeger, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," 1967 That is why it is vitally important to every American family that we stop the Communists in South Vietnam." – President Lyndon B. We will have to fight again someplace else-at what cost no one knows. "If we allow the Communists to win in Vietnam, it will become easier and more appetizing for them to take over other countries in other parts of the world. We shall neither act as aggressors nor tolerate acts of aggression." – President Lyndon B. "We must be strong enough to win any war, and we must be wise enough to prevent one.
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