Shows how much the party has changed! RFK and JFK would both be conservative today.
They're still encouraging the enemy today.
They're still encouraging the enemy today.
Given that Robert Kennedy was killed in 1968, and Kerry was still in Viet Nam in 1969, I doubt Kennedy specifically meant Kerry.
Robert Kennedy was dead when Kerry did his treason
'Robert Kennedy stated at the Kennedy library in an interview with CBS (also Ronald Reagan was there) that anti-war demonstrators in the USA were giving aid, comfort and encouragement to Ho Chi Minh.'
ooooohhhhhh, would love to see a video clip of THAT!!!
Robert Kennedy stated at the Kennedy library in an interview with CBS (also Ronald Reagan was there) that anti-war demonstrators in the USA were giving aid, comfort and encouragement to Ho Chi Minh.
True but, eventually, so was the United States Congress.
The Vietnam experience should be a reminder of how opportunistically, deceptively, and tirelessly the capitulation crowd will pursue their agenda: the humbling of America, preferably by blood-splattered third-world thugs.
Aside from the Tom Haden types who openly wanted a communist victory (from whom Kerry fitfully tried to distance himself, even while collaborating with them under the table, and arguing against those who wanted them excluded from the "peace" movement) the capitulators allegedly wanted a negotiated settlement in Vietnam.
They sneered at Nixon's promise of "peace with honor," but only, so they claimed, because they interpreted it as Republican code for continuing and widening the war. (In fact Nixon steadily reduced troop strength in IndoChina throughout his tenure.) Supposedly, again excepting the open communists and ultra-radicals, they would be happy to see the maintenance of an independent and non-communist South Vietnam; they just argued it wasn't possible. Essentially they took the position that the war was lost, South Vietnam would probably go communist, and the best we could do was to secure the return of our POWs in exchange for our unilateral withdrawal.
Those who supposedly wanted a negotiated peace, the extraction of American forces, and the release of POW's should have been delighted, then, when Nixon (via Kissinger) negotiated an agreement that, if enforced, achieved all this and much more.
But they weren't. The truth is they never expected Nixon could pull it off (peace with honor -- an agreement that would end the war for America and give South Vietnam a credible chance to withstand the implacable North Vietnamese hegemons) so it was safe to claim they wanted it.
Instead, without pause or embarrassment, indeed with undiminished if not intensified moral posturing, those who had clamored, voted and agitated for "peace" set about undermining in every possible way the peace accords that had been negotiated. (This wasn't that much of a shift. After all the peace crowd had attempted to hinder Nixon's program of "Vietnamization" at every step, even though it was the necessary consequence of the troop reductions they demand and Nixon supplied.)
The Paris agreement fell short of the original American demands, from the 60's, of mutual withdrawal from South Vietnam. Instead the North Vietnamese would be allowed to keep their deployed troops in country (in effect a ceasefire in place) but would not be allowed to replace men or equipment. All supplies would be checked at border crossings by third party monitors. If these terms were enforced, the North Vietnamese forces would eventually wither away. (The South Vietnamese communists had already been all but eliminated as an effective fighting force in the aftermath of Tet.)
Of course the North Vietnamese never observed the terms of their agreement. Within months their illegal supply lines running through Laos and Cambodia were choked with trucks, troops and even armor headed for South Vietnam. First the capitulationists in America made it politically impossible for Nixon to bomb this bumper to bumper traffic in order to enforce the Paris agreement, but soon (after "peace" candidates packed the Congress in '74) they would literally make it illegal to do so.
Soon we could not fly over Cambodia, have a single military adviser there, nor send the beleaguered government a single dollar that might buy a bullet for their defense. Even non-defense aid was slashed to nearly nothing by those who claimed to be for "peace". The "peace" crowd had the same prescription for South Vietnam itself. Aid was slashed to the point where our allies in South Vietnam, who had fought beside us for decades, to whose defense our country had been solemnly committed under five Presidents of both parties, and under a Democratically controlled Congress, had to fight without artillery and mortars. They couldn't afford more ammo. Some units even ran out of bullets before the end. Congress had been bickering for months over the cost of a (barely adequate) supplemental aid package for South Vietnam when the final collapse came.
The results? America's credibility was shattered. (Thank God for Reagan, who began to rebuild it much sooner than might have been the case otherwise.) Totalitarianism, extremism and thuggery experienced their greatest global advances since the aftermath of WWII. Millions were butchered in Cambodia and South Vietnam.
But, to the capitulationists, this was a small price to pay for humbling American power and prestige, and "getting" a Republican president.
DON'T EVER think they won't be willing to pay that same price, or a much larger one, again. And, as Kerry goes through the motions of "talking tough" wrt the war on terror, never forget that he was a leader of the capitulation movement in the Vietnam era and, not withstanding half-hearted regrets over matters of word choice, still considers those efforts honorable.