“The Democrats now not only repudiated the Kennedy-Johnson Vietnam policy but actively sought the defeat and humiliation of the U.S. in the war into which they had plunged it.”
The U.S. commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, committed the greatest military
blunder in U.S. history (surpassing even Donald Rumsfeld’s demobilization of the 400,000-man Iraqi army and police, while leaving them with their arms and munitions as they set out looking for new employment). He ignored the advice of Eisenhower and MacArthur by only closing the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos. It would also have been necessary to build up ARVN, clean out the enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia, shut down any military inflows through the harbors at Haiphong and Sihanoukville, and inflict 1,200 air strikes every day on North Vietnam, as Nixon did during his visit to the USSR in May 1972 (to leave his Kremlin hosts in no doubt of his seriousness).
The war was not explained or authorized properly, so draftees were supposed to risk and give their lives in a non-renewed one-year combat term (against six months for officers, not a great morale booster for the GI), for no apparent reason and in pursuit of something, no one quite knew what, less than victory.
Somewhere there is a quote of William Jennings Byran around 1900 when asked why he voted as a Senator to get America involved in the Philippines that he now opposed. He pretty much stated that he knew that we was going to get involved in a nasty guerilla war that would hurt the Republicans politically.
If you read what Byran and the Democrats was saying about the war and the troops it was pretty much the same hope for the defeat of America, spit on the troops stuff we have seen from them in recent wars.
The Democrats hasn’t been taken over by radicals, they have always behaved like this.