No, Kerry was wrong. He estimated that the North Vietnamese would execute maybe 5,000 enemies if they took over. The real number was twenty times that and the Vietname boat people exodus inflicted misery on many more. The problem is that the press never seems to look at what the North Vietnamese did when they took over and since, nor to they mention what happened in Cambodia, after Senate Democrats made the same sort of "it's better to just let the Communists win" argument and stopped supporting the Lon Nol government with aid.
Our attitude toward the Vietnamese, the people for whom we were presumably fighting, was uniformly contemptuous. If we did not kill them indiscriminately, we ruined their country with bombing and the moral degradation that occupying armies always inflict.
And the Communists didn't do anything to ruin the country and morally degrade the people when they took over? Compare the status of Japan, bombed, nuked, and occupied by the United States, with Vietnam. Compare the status of South Korea, which suffered the same sort of war and occupation that Vietnam did, with Vietnam. Now remember that Johnson and others offered massive economic aid packages to North Vietnam if they'd just stop attacking the South. Now tell me again how the Vietnamese people are better off under Communist rule and how their problems are all America's fault.
Kerry's World: Father Knows Best***These conferences reinforced Kerry's belief that the preservation of the Atlantic alliance and the creation of a new Europe should be the overriding priorities of U.S. foreign policy. But the reality of U.S. policy was far different. For most of the Eisenhower administration, America's prime objective was containing communism. And, unlike the administration he served, Kerry believed that cooperation and diplomacy, rather than militarism, should resolve these tensions. In The Star-Spangled Mirror, he condemns the United States for "lecturing" European allies about the horrors of communism and accuses it of "bad manners" and "spoiled behavior." He writes, "At times we expected the allies unquestioningly to follow our leads; sometimes we failed to consult them in advance before reversing policies; at other times we ignored their requests." ***