Is this what we get when Democrats play war? - "Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs In Vietnam" by Monika Jensen-Stevenson & William Stevenson
This book is about a devastating American scandal. In Kiss the Boys Goodbye, two award-winning journalists provide startling evidence that the American government, right up to its highest echelons, knows, and has always known, that American POWs were left behind at the end of the war. More amazingly, it has regularly obstructed the efforts of private citizens to discover the truth.
Monika Jensen-Stevenson, Emmy award-winning producer of CBS-TV's 60 Minutes, and her husband, William Stevenson, author of the best-selling A Man Called Intrepid, have written a heartbreaking account of men sacrificed to American foreign policy and to clandestine operations—some of them highly questionable—concealed from the American public and its elected representatives.
The story began in 1985, when Jensen-Stevenson was developing a segment for 60 Minutes on ex-marine Bobby Garwood, who escaped from Vietnam in 1979 and claimed to have seen countless Americans still in captivity. He claimed, also, to have been a prisoner of war, but the government disagreed and convicted him—with surprising haste—of collaboration with the enemy, burying his story of prisoners along with his reputation. As she examined Garwood's case more closely, Jensen-Stevenson found herself drawn into a world of secret information, anonymous sources, official obstruction, missing files, censored testimony, and thinly veiled threats from highly placed government officials. She met with veterans, families of missing men, disillusioned and outraged government officers—who shared with her the information and documents they had gathered painstakingly over the years. Thus began a five-year investigation that produced some eye-opening revelations about the government's abuse of power and secrecy.
Not only does Kiss the Boys Goodbye reveal evidence of men abandoned and families torn apart, but it raises larger questions that strike at the very heart of democracy. When honorable men and women who ask questions are ignored, ridiculed, or persecuted by their own government, whom is that government serving? When a government uses the cry of "national security" to conceal facts from the public, how can the actions of that government be assessed, and to whom is it answerable? Is there, in fact, a "secret government" of intelligence bureaucrats running the country? Reading this explosive book will forever change the way you view the Vietnam War, the Americans who fought in it, and the government that betrayed them.
MONIKA JENSEN-STEVENSON is a former magazine editor who started her career in TV journalism in Canada as a reporter and producer for CTV. In 1981, she moved to CBS-TV's 60 Minutes as a staff producer, and worked there for six years. She won a Gold medal for Best TV Documentary at the New York International Film and TV Festival for one of her CTV productions and an Emmy for her mini-documentary "In the Belly of the Beast." She writes regularly for the Toronto Star.
WILLIAM STEVENSON first encountered the Far East as a Royal Navy fighter pilot and re-turned to Asia at the outbreak of the Korean War as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, later traveling for the Star in China and South-east Asia and covering the final French defeat in Vietnam. He is the author of A Man Called Intrepid and Ninety Minutes at Entebbe, and his television credits include a period as staff producer and co-host with Alistair Burnett of Dateline, ITV's nightly news program from London, and one as correspondent and producer for CBC-TV.