Posted on 08/07/2004 11:59:31 PM PDT by Steven W.
132 Cong.Rec. S3564-02
AMENDMENT NO. 1718
(Purpose: To restrict assistance to the Nicaraguan democratic resistance to humanitarian assistance, and for other purposes)
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The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts is recognized.
Mr. KERRY. Thank you, Mr. President.
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What is worse, Mr. President, is that the Contras bring with them the inevitability of further U.S. involvement. I know there are many in here who said in the last days, oh, no, we do not want American boys down there. We have heard it from the White House-we are not going to widen this war. We are not going to see American troops down there. That is not our intention. How many times have we heard that in the debate?
Mr. President, how quickly do we forget? How quickly do we forget? No one wanted to widen the war in Vietnam. We heard that. Let me remind you of what we said during that period of time.
"There is going to be no involvement of America in war unless it is a result of the constitutional process that is placed upon Congress to declare it. Now let us make that clear." That was the President of the United States in 1954.
"We would not get into a war except by the constitutional process which, of course, involves the declaration of war by Congress." That was the President of the United States in 1954.
"Using United States ground forces in the Indochina jungle would be like trying to cover an elephant with a handkerchief. You just can't do it." That was the Senate majority leader in 1954.
"I would go to Congress before committing combat troops." That was another President in 1962.
"I would oppose the use of United States troops as the direct means of supressing guerrillas in South Vietnam." That was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1964.
"We have no plans at present to send combat troops to South Vietnam"-Robert McNamara, 1964.
"I don't feel expanded use of American ground troops to be an effective addition to the war"-the senior Senator from Arizona, in 1965.
"The commitment of American troops anywhere on Asian soil is a mistake"-the senior Senator from Arizona, in 1966.
"There is a grave danger at the present time that the administration will go overboard in increasing American forces in Vietnam. We might be able to win the war but by doing so we would have on our hands the dependency for a long time to come. That is the wrong way to handle it"-Richard M. Nixon, in 1966.
Those words did not mean anything. Then we got into the war. We began to say, We do not want to widen it. "The United States seeks no wider war"-Lyndon Johnson, 1964.
"We can plainly say we are not escalating the war." That was the Senator from Alabama.
"We seek no wider war"-William P. Bundy.
"We seek no wider war"- White House, February 1965.
"The United States still seeks no wider war"-Lyndon Johnson, 1965.
"We still seek no wider war"-Lyndon Johnson, later in 1965.
"The United States could not win militarily in a classic sense because our national policy of not expanding the war"-General Westmoreland. And so on.
Finally, President Nixon, 1970. "In cooperation with the armed forces of South Vietnam, attacks are being launched this week to clear out major enemy sanctuaries on the Cambodian-Vietnam border."
Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.
I have that memory which is seared-seared-in me, that says to me, before we send another generation into harm's way we have a responsibility in the U.S. Senate to go the last step, to make the best effort possible in order to avoid that kind of conflict.
Mr. President, good intentions are not enough to keep us out of harms way. The danger here is our support of the Contras. Everyone knows the Contras are our Contras. We have a proprietary interest in the Contras. So with that proprietary interest we will raise the stakes, and then will come the commitment of our prestige and worse our pride, our pride. How many battles do we fight for pride? The ultimate vote today on temporary policy to give lethal aid that everyone in this Chamber says is not enough to do the job-the job, I take it, meaning to overthrow the Sandinistas is the ultimate vote.
There is an enormous contradiction in that because we will see people come back to us at the same time next year and say to us, you know, we need more money. Now, I will hear it from the senior Senator from North Carolina, and others: We have backed these guys. We have given them guns. We have given them the hope for freedom. We have given them a stake in their own country. We cannot desert them now.
Kerry implied Nixon was responsible for 36,000 deaths in Vietnam.
I remember a politician who ran for President in 1968 with the secret plan for peace, and he was elected. ... At the time that [Nixon] ran there were only 22,000 or so names eligible to be on the wall down there at the Mall. When he finished, there were 58,000.In other words Kerry is implying that Nixon was responsible to 36,000 Vietnam deaths.
In reality,about 20,000 men died during all the years of Nixon's presidency.
Here are the Vietnam statistics and you can see for yourselves that about 16,000 deaths occurred in 1968, when Johnson was President.
| Year of Death or Declaration of Death | Number of Records |
| 1956-1960 | 9 |
| 1961 | 16 |
| 1962 | 52 |
| 1963 | 118 |
| 1964 | 206 |
| 1965 | 1,863 |
| 1966 | 6,143 |
| 1967 | 11,153 |
| 1968 | 16,592 |
| 1969 | 11,616 |
| 1970 | 6,081 |
| 1971 | 2,357 |
| 1972 | 641 |
| 1973 | 168 |
With these own 2 ears of mine, firmly attached to the sides of my head, I have heard Kerry speak of Mr. Nixons war.
There is no acknowledgement that Vietnam was JFK's project and the dramatic escalation happened under Johnson. Nixon inherited their blunders...
The left has tried and nearly succeeded in placing all the blame at the feet of Pres Nixon. Their primary tactic is obfucation.
The gunner on Kerry's swiftboat was interviewed by Savage. I believe that the gunner said he was with Kerry from Nov to Jan at that time. This guy spoke out against Kerry, and should have info concerning where Kerry was at Christmas that year.
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff, 6/16/2003
The Christmas Eve truce of 1968 was three minutes old when mortar fire exploded around John Forbes Kerry and his five-man crew on a 50-foot aluminum boat near Cambodia. ''Where is the enemy?'' a crewmate shouted.
In the distance, an elderly man was tending his water buffalo -- and serving as human cover for a dozen Viet Cong manning a machine-gun nest.
"Open fire; let's take 'em," Kerry ordered, according to his second-in-command, James Wasser of Illinois. Wasser blasted away with his M-60, hitting the old man, who slumped into the water, presumably dead. With a clear path to the enemy, the fusillade from Kerry's Navy boat, backed by a pair of other small vessels, silenced the machine-gun nest.
When it was over, the Viet Cong were dead, wounded, or on the run. A civilian apparently was killed, and two South Vietnamese allies who had alerted Kerry's crew to the enemy were either wounded or killed.
On the same night, Kerry and his crew had come within a half-inch of being killed by "friendly fire," when some South Vietnamese allies launched several rounds into the river to celebrate the holiday.
To top it off, Kerry said, he had gone several miles inside Cambodia, which theoretically was off limits, prompting Kerry to send a sarcastic message to his superiors that he was writing from the Navy's "most inland" unit.
Back at his base, a weary, disconsolate Kerry sat at his typewriter, as he often did, and poured out his grief. "You hope that they'll courtmartial you or something because that would make sense," Kerry typed that night. He would later recall using court-martial as "a joke," because nothing made sense to him -- the war policy, the deaths, and his presence in the middle of it all.
Yes, I've heard Mr. Kerry call it Mr. Nixon's war too. I was just pointing out that, in his 1986 comments in the Senate record, he does not state that Mr. Nixon was president when he was supposedly in Cambodia.
One thing about the Christmas in Cambodia lie is that it pits John Kerry's stories against John Kerry himself and common sense without the need for third parties to confirm or deny anything. The fact there is added ammunition in the form of Gardner's testimony and records Kerry won't release only increases the credibility gap of Kerry.
so Kerry's saying that LBJ lied about the war to him? hahaha
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