Johnson remembered how the "Loss of China" in 1949 had badly damaged the Democratic administration of Harry S. Truman who was excoriated by the Republicans as "soft on communism" and criminally negligent in allowing the "loss of China", attacks that resonated with the American people at the time. Johnson once told a reporter Joseph Kraft, in an "off-the-record" conversation: "I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day the Communists took over China. I believe that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Joe McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam...I don't give a damn about these little pinkos on the campuses, they're just waving their diapers and bellyaching because they don't want to fight. The great black beast for us is the right wing. If we don't give this war over soon they'll put enormous pressure on us to turn it into an Armageddon and wreck all our other programs". Johnson was fearful that if he allowed the "loss of Vietnam", it would cause a similar right-wing backlash that would allow a "reactionary" Republican to win the presidency and for the GOP to take control of Congress, and together they would end his Great Society program along with the rest of Johnson's civil rights legislation. Much of Rostow's influence on Johnson was due to his insistence that to protect his domestic achievements that Johnson had to fight the Vietnam war, and moreover that the war was eminently winnable provided that the correct policies were followed. For Johnson, Rostow offered him a way out of an unpleasant situation of fighting a war in Vietnam that he rather not fight to protect the Great Society by promising him what Rostow insisted was a path to victory, as Rostow noted that presidents who win wars were usually also popular presidents.