It is amazing to me that a guy who calls himself a Conservative (and perhaps I’m being too generous here) wanted normalized relations with Vietnam above all else. What was the damn rush fella? We lost over 60,000 men and had hundreds of thousands wounded in that fight. The Vietnamese government that executed hundreds of thousands of it own people, was the one we cozied up with, not even twenty years after we left Vietnam. Excellent. Our hundreds of thousands of casualties were expended so we could turn our backs on those vets and cozy up with the very people we asked them to fight against. It boggles the mind what could have posessed our leaders to expend efforts on this cause so soon after the war.
You come here to slander the families and verterans groups as some sort of ‘Rambo Loving’ dilusional malcontents, and seem to expect me to glom on to that as insanely as you have. Not gonna happen.
If the families of the POWs and the veterans groups of the day were against it, I’m sure as hell not going to betray them by labeling them as you have.
There are no words to explain away this betrayal for many of us.
The hearings were unusually open and had unprescedented access to previously classified documents. Robert Gates (then at the CIA) threw his weight behind the process, Rumsfeld and Cheney and Kissinger testified. Any cover-up or conspiracy would have had to involve five Presidents including Reagan) and literally tens of thousands of knowledgeable federal employees. The DIA and the DOD gave full cooperation.
Nations move in their own self-interest. Vietnam plus twenty years had seen the world change. The Soviet Union was in ruins and China nascent. The bill for normalization passed the Senate 88 to 12. Except for a couple flakes like Bob Smith do you know why the twelve voted the way they did?
Catfish.