Posted on 02/13/2008 3:47:36 PM PST by Richard Poe
| by Richard Lawrence Poe Wednesday, February 13, 2008 |
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AMERICANS FACE a grim anniversary this month. Forty years ago, on February 27, 1968, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite pronounced the Vietnam War a hopeless cause. His forecast was premature. Saigon did not fall for another eight years. What possessed Cronkite to raise the white flag so far in advance?
We now know that Cronkite was simply parroting the CIA line. Agency analysts had been churning out gloomy reports about Vietnam by the ream since 1963.
Sadly, they were not content to issue classified reports through proper channels. They went further. They sought to turn public opinion against the war, using press leaks and disinformation campaigns.
Ironically, it was the CIA that got us into Vietnam in the first place. The military wanted nothing to do with it. In a May 26, 1954 memo, the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared Indochina "devoid of decisive military objectives." The only way to stop communism in Southeast Asia would be to destroy its supply sources "in China proper", the Joint Chiefs concluded.
The CIA ignored this advice. In June 1954, it sent Col. Edward G. Lansdale to Vietnam to begin paramilitary operations.
CIA strategists believed they could fight wars more effectively than the Pentagon. Their technique was to dispatch CIA advisors to hot spots, whereupon they would raise armies of local mercenaries. Such operations had borne fruit in Iran (1953-54), Guatemala (1954), the Congo (1960-61) and Laos (1960-62).
Vietnam provided the ultimate testing ground. The CIA was given a free hand there from 1954 through 1964. The experiment failed catastrophically.
In a memorandum of October 19, 1964, CIA officer William Bundy informed President Johnson that the situation was hopeless. America should flee Vietnam and "shore up the next line of defense in Thailand."
Appalled by such talk, President Johnson turned to the military. In early 1965, he ordered bombing raids on North Vietnam and sent the Marines into Da Nang.
The CIA made a fateful choice. Rather than accept President Johnson's decision, it resolved to stop him.
For this it was well-equipped with a powerful propaganda network. While heading the CIA’s covert operations division from 1948 to 1956, Frank Wisner recruited hundreds of U.S. journalists at virtually every major newspaper and broadcast network in America. He boasted that he could play the media like a Wurlitzer pipe organ.
Long after Wisner left, his "Mighty Wurlitzer" played on. President Johnson felt the full effects of its wrath.
CIA-friendly journalists Walter Lippmann and James Reston began savaging Johnson's war policy. The New York Times ran a major feature on March 15, 1965 praising the New Left and glorifying Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
A group called the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) had launched SDS in 1959. Socialist Party bigwig and LID co-founder Norman Thomas helped shield SDS from critics. Thomas' Institute of International Labor Research was later exposed as a conduit for CIA funds.
Prior to 1965, SDS focused on poverty and civil rights. In April 1965, it emerged as America's leading anti-war group, sponsoring a "National March Against the Vietnam War" which brought 20,000 protestors to Washington.
CIA contract consultant Allard Lowenstein established the “Dump Johnson” movement on April 2, 1967. He persuaded anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy to challenge Johnson in the Democratic primaries.
Meanwhile, the Viet Cong were on the ropes. Communist forces in Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive in January 1968. It was a desperate, suicidal assault on hundreds of cities and towns in South Vietnam. The attack failed. Communist forces met ruin and slaughter on every front.
Nonetheless our media portrayed Tet as a U.S. defeat. Walter Cronkite declared on February 27, 1968:
"We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. ... we are mired in stalemate... it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."To this, President Johnson responded, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America.” On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection as president.
The CIA had made its point. Communist victory was still eight years away. But its seeds were sown.
Americans must learn from this dark episode. Even now the "Mighty Wurlitzer" plays. We must never again dance to its tune.
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Richard Lawrence Poe is a contributing editor to Newsmax, an award-winning journalist and a New York Times bestselling author. His latest book is The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Siezed Control of the Democratic Party, co-written with David Horowitz. |
Youtube is back up!!!!!
All I know is that I have a very good friend who happens to be a distinguished professor of history at a major university who has also written several books and one on the subject of Viet Nam.
After reading Dr. Moyar's book I asked my friend if he had seen it and his comment was "No but I can tell you that the young man who wrote it is having a hard time finding a job because of it."
And then I found Mark Moyar, Historian of Vietnam, Finds Academe Hostile to a Hawk which confirmed what my friend had told me. It's a damned SHAME!
I remember William F. Buckley, Jr., saying nice things about Allard Lowenstein when Lowenstein died.
It is he! I read this when this article was published. I will have to get the book. It sounds wonderful.
The nazis used to drop prop leaflets from tall buildings.
With telebizion the buildings just got a lot taller!
So it is!
Thanks!
refresh my memory please -
entry into Vietnam, I thought, had to do with SEATO (?)
the treaty among South East Asia countries and the US, in which we guaranteed protection of them from the spread of communism.
That is correct. However, the Pentagon believed that it was foolish to carry out military operations in Vietnam while leaving the Chinese free to supply the enemy with impunity.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff said that any U.S. forces operating in Vietnam should be free to attack supply sources in China. This permission was never granted.
so the Pentagon wished to unilaterally break the treaty??
We lost VietNam because the likes of killer kennedy and the rest of the wealkling democrats didn’t have the will or the courage to win. They withdrew the funds from our military and the SO Vietnam gov’t, and we had to leave. We left behind a few million Vietnamese loyal to freedom and they were killed by the communist No Vietnamese. Blood on the hands of the DemocRATS. This CIA BS is just trying to move the blame from our so called leaders to the CIA. War is not a perfect plan, and the CIA agents are not Sunday school teachers, so the Americans took what information they could and determined which was better at that moment. Plans change in a war, sometimes from hour to hour and sometimes day from day, war plans are not always perfect and war is not won, except by the backing of the government and people back home. This is one thing that was lacking in VietNam. Our elected “royals” did not have the brass “knuckles” nor the will to win. Our presstitutes of the screaming media, those who never served a day in uniform, and those who sat in Siagon at the Brinks Hotel and restaurant wrote out their daily war reports for the news media they worked for. Sam Donaldson who used to stand outside his shower stall and wet the bottom of his “fatigues” and pretend he’d spent the day trudging through the swamps of VietNam, but he never got any leaches.
Had it not been for the likes of our elected “royals”, the likes of media reporters like Sam Donaldson and Cronkite who the day of the Tet Offensive, told America we had lost the war, the like of VietNam “Heros” like Heinz-Kerry, we would have won, because we were winning, until the killer kennedy group pulled the rug from under us by denying us the funds to continue and win the war.
This is the same thing the democRATS are trying to do to us and our troops and the Iraqi people. They are not friends of America, the democrats and their ilk are anit-America.
And tried to reenact their antics on President Bush via the 'global players' using Wilson and his gal Val, to save Saddam for his oil contractors ... same puppeteers who used Vietnam to spread their dying root system.
Cronckite may be looking for a job as ole broadbeam’s press secretary....He’ll be back in the lime lite, lime lite, everyone will HEAR his words of wisdumb again, and again and....and....Never could stand that communist.
Cronckite may be looking for a job as ole broadbeam’s press secretary....He’ll be back in the lime lite, lime lite, everyone will HEAR his words of wisdumb again, and again and....and....Never could stand that communist.
for later
Sounds like my Mom when she was making a POINT.
Yeah, I got it and reposted, so my post may appear twice. Oh well.
Sat Cong...
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