Isn't that like saying "If it wasn't for the Depression, Herbert Hoover would be the best Republican President in the last century?"
Apples and Oranges. LBJ had a long list of Domestic Policy successes that were/are overshadowed by Vietnam. What policy successes (foreign and domestic) did Hoover have that were successful?
The point is that Vietnam is far and away the most important and impactful part of his Administration and outweighs any other accomplishment. You can't just handwave it. It's as important to LBJ's story as the Depression is to Hoover or the First World War is to Wilson (neither of whom would want to be identified with either of those crises and both of whom had interests in wildly different areas overshadowed by the gigantic era-defining crisis they're assessed on).
EDIT: Launching a war under false pretenses that involved the defoliation of ancient forests, the mass murder of over a million civilians, the wasteful and pointless deaths of nearly sixty thousand American soldiers and the injuries and imprisonment of far more, and culminated in destabilizing and crumbling a regime in Cambodia that led to the genocidal murder of millions
absolutely outweighs anything LBJ did on the domestic front, by such an order of magnitude that the two aren't comparable.
Poll
