I was 10 in 1968. I read 3 newspapers a day and numerous weekly and monthly magizines. My sense that the war was nuts came not from Cronkite or the Hippies or Fonda but from the comments of the politicians and generals prosecuting the war. They ALL were talking mush-brained bullshit from start to finish. When, one day, I heard President Nixon say, over the radio “Obviously we could win the war in an afternoon, but...” I knew that I wasn’t “missing something”, that these people were stupid.
This STUPID cost us 50 something thousand souls and the blighted lives of the innumerable walking wounded. Fifty thousand dead at a time, against all of history,when simply being alive, in America, represented unimaginable good fortune. The men who administered that giant, deliberate clusterfeck the Vietnam War, deserve nothing less than eternal hell.
I loathe McNamara. He admitted that he knew the war could not be won the way it was being executed yet he said nothing while thousands more were killed. If I was his judge he’d be burning in hell.