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That bassturd, SeeBS’s Walter Crankcase helped the commies win that one.
We never should have been in Vietnam.
The Vietnam War, in which America was the victor in military battles, is perhaps the most manifest modern example of how propaganda affected the outcome of a war, with much of the mainstream media being an all too willing instrument of such, especially CBS News with Walter Cronkite. Cronkite’s infamous report on the Tet Offensive was suspected to be one of the reasons why then-President Lyndon B. Johnson decided not to pursue reelection.[67]
In an exchange during one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. told his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield,” Colonel Tu responded, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”[68]
The Tet Offensive was portrayed by the New York liberal media as a defeat for the U.S., while in fact, it was an almost disastrous defeat for the North Vietnamese, as General Westmoreland and historians agree. The Viet Cong not only lost half of the 90,000 troops they had committed to battle, but it was virtually destroyed as an army.[69] Some false reports made by biased journalists include claiming the VC managed to overrun five floors of the American embassy, when in reality they never even managed to get past the main entrance, or Newsweek showing 18 out of 29 images depicting Marines either dead or huddled behind cover, neglecting to mention that they were pushing back the NVA onslaught.[70]
British “Encounter” journalist Robert Elegant stated,
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and television screens - never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondent’s own side.[71]
Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, “Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.” In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he asked,
What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?... Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi’s repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won “without the Western press.”[72] Ironically, it was also because of the bias from the Western press, in particular The New York Times, that caused the NVA to undergo their Tet Offensive with overconfidence that they would cause the entire South Vietnamese to embrace Communism and go against Capitalism and Saigon.[73]
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite regularly carried news reports from its Moscow Bureau Chief, Bernard Redmont. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became CBS News Paris Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was that he had been a KGB operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious Silvermaster group.[74] Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow Comintern party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called “the living room war.”
The single most explicit example of such biased reporting is typically seen to be the portrayal of the Tet offensive, as mentioned above, in which Western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the Communists.
Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front, and a minister of justice for the Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - one of the most determined adversaries of the US during the war - stated years later,
The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang, The New York Review, October 21, 1982)
In addition to Cronkite’s biased reporting, FBI documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Yahoo! News offer evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.[75] - https://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal_bias#Vietnam_War
Michael Lind’s unorthodox but well-argued thesis that the “necessary” Vietnam War sought to ensure American Cold War credibility and diverted communist aggression from other more strategically important U.S. allies and vulnerable neutrals.
The latter thesis is typically ignored.
The military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us against needed to sell war materiel to refill they pockets with cash. The FED was in the end to the business cycle and needed to refill the reserves that they had pilfered. The gold backed dollar was holding then back so they got rid of it making trillions in the process and went to the worthless fed one that they could manipulate. Follow the money!!!
I don't, however, see how there can be debate on the lack of our civilian leadership's effort to win. Sadly, it seems as Yogi would say, "It's deja vuall over again" in the Ukraine.
Nixon had the war won in 1972 with his bombings of everything and port minings but by that time all he wanted was the POWs. Had the bombings lasted another week, the NVs would have been finished and sued for peace at our price.
Yes, it could have won if we had mined their harbors and hit them where it hurt most instead of bombing swaths of empty jungle.
Case Closed: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
This article by Capt. Carl Otis Schuster, U.S. Navy (ret.) originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Vietnam magazine. A National Security Agency report released in 2007 reveals unequivocally that the alleged Aug. 4, 1964, attack by North Vietnam on U.S. destroyers never actually happened.
In the first few days of August 1964, a series of events off the coast of North Vietnam and decisions made in Washington, D.C., set the United States on a course that would largely define the next decade and weigh heavily on American foreign policy to this day. What did and didn’t happen in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2 and 4 has long been in dispute, but the decisions that the Johnson Administration and Congress made based on an interpretation of those events were undeniably monumental.
While many facts and details have emerged in the past 44 years to persuade most observers that some of the reported events in the Gulf never actually happened, key portions of the critical intelligence information remained classified until recently.
(excerpted: For a reality look at LBJ’s/?’s lies to Americans re the Gulf of Tonkin. Go to the link below:
http://www.historynet.com/case-closed-the-gulf-of-tonkin-incident.htm
Vietnam 1965: The Day It Became the Longest War
http://extendedremarks.blogspot.com/2006/12/vietnam-1965-day-it-became-longest-war.html
Nevertheless he (Johnson) harbored a natural—and correct—suspicion of his condescending and politically fickle old-time liberal Cold Warriors, especially the fixer Clark Clifford, the former whiz kid Robert McNamara, and the Brahmins Averell Harriman and the Bundy brothers. Yet when it most counted, LBJ ultimately yielded to their flawed, politically motivated reversals, and rejected the sounder realist assessments of his inner circle of Ellsworth Bunker, Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, and Maxwell Taylor. ...
We talk today about “collusion” and “political interference” in our elections, without remembering that Johnson and his subordinates were past masters at it. Most White House discussions about the peace talks and their connection to bombing halts were predicated not just on military efficacy, but on what might play best to the Democratic anti-war base and could win back the American electorate in 1968.
Excellent critique of a Vietnam War book that covers the military and political sides of the war. Worthy of your time.
FR Index of his articles: Victor Davis Hanson on FR
Town Hall: Victor Davis Hanson on Town Hall
American Greatness: Victor Davis Hanson on American Greatness
His website: Victor Davis Hanson
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