Posted on 08/07/2004 11:59:31 PM PDT by Steven W.
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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