Posted on 09/16/2017 7:45:13 PM PDT by Ennis85
Many Americans’ moral vanity is expressed nowadays in their rage to disparage. They are incapable of measured judgments about past politics — about flawed historical figures who were forced by cascading circumstances to make difficult decisions on the basis of imperfect information. So, the nation now needs an example of how to calmly assess episodes fraught with passion and sorrow. An example arrives Sunday night. For ten nights on PBS, Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War, ten years in the making and 18 hours in length, tells the story of a war “begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings,” and “prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions” during five presidencies. The combat films are extraordinary; the recollections and reflections of combatants and others on both sides are even more so, featuring photos of them then and interviews with many of them now.
A 1951 photo shows a congressman named John Kennedy dining in Saigon. There is an interview with Le Quan Cong, who became a guerilla fighter in 1951, at age twelve. Viewers will meet Madame Le Minh Khue, who was 16 when she joined the “Youth Shock Brigade for National Salvation”: “I love Hemingway. I learned from For Whom the Bell Tolls. Like the resourcefulness of the man who destroys the bridge. I saw how he coped with war, and I learned from that character.” As did another combatant who loves that novel, John McCain. Eleven years after his Saigon dinner, President Kennedy said, “We have not sent combat troops in the generally understood sense of the word.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
He’s a bum. But then I never like supercilious.
One friend is missing the tip of an index finger...he will not acknowledge it.
I can only speculate.
As I mentioned in a story I posted last May, I shot a VC in his right hand - took the edge off his hand and his little finger. I felt bad for him because that was really painful for him - but he's lucky: I was aiming for his head.
Bingo! The whole reason that the Left went after Nixon like they did is that they knew that if they took out Nixon, they'd win the war.
The "crimes" Nixon was accused of pale in comparison with Barry Obama's.
I’m thinking this old guy lost it
At a reeducation camp.
He had trained at Kessler AFB 1969
As a Radar Tech. for South Vietnam.
I trained for Radio Tech. same time
and place.He went back to Nam.
I went to March AFB.
He was arrested after the U.S. left
and Vietnam fell.3 yrs.in a camp.
Poor guy. Just one of millions we left to their fate when we left them.
When I went with BLT 1/3 at the last stages of the war in ‘75, we initially had orders to rescue 2 million Vietnamese but the combination of congressional obstruction and Ford’s indecision cut the evacuation to only 20,000.
A very sad chapter in our history.
Just finished watching Ken Burns’ documentary. From the history I’ve studied it was right on.
I Know one thing. I will never argue with anyone who saw combat there. No matter their opinions.
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.
It also uses phrases like "reuniting" Vietnam when there never was a single country of Vietnam before (Annam, Cochin China, Tonkin) and there was only momentary mention of the mass murder in the North when Comrade Ho took over.
It will tell you everything that you could know about how our lack of strategy in Vietnam developed, beginning with blunders by Kennedy and most heavily with the utter deceitfulness of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara.
Johnson and McNamara had no intention of winning that war. The JCS told them before the first combat soldier was sent that it would be a major war taking a minimum of 500,000 troops and 5 years of hard fighting.
Johnson wanted nothing to interfere with his giant Great Society domestic programs so he was only willing to commit enough military effort to put on a "show of American resolve". This piecemeal, "graduated response" was designed by lawyers working for LBJ and it was the disaster that the military predicted it would be, allowing the North to ramp up their own efforts to match ours. It's all in the memos and Presidential papers that McMaster uncovered in his research.
Adding to your good summary, the book basically ends in 1964 saying the die was cast by McNamara’s failures and Johnson’s subterfuge. Everything after that was preordained failure and McNamara knew it.
That’s right. The die was already cast before our first combat troops landed.
Anyone who believes that we had that war won at any point will be sadly disabused of that idea by the information McMaster uncovered in his book.
What they will learn is that LBJ and McNamara never had any plan for winning the war. LBJ had no intention of committing the vast resources that he was told would be required to defeat North Vietnam. It was nothing more than a show to “demonstrate resolve”, brought to us by the likes of McNaughton and the two Bundy brothers, lawyers, who were cavalier about the price to be paid by maimed and killed GIs.
When Nixon inherited the mess his goal was ‘Vietnamization’, training the ARVN to be able to carry on the fighting on their own. We did that, but South Vietnam was dependent upon America ammunition and fuel to do so. This is what the 1972 ‘Watergate’ Congress cut off entirely, dooming South Vietnam to communist conquest two and a half years later.
So many people are not aware that Johnson intentionally did not want the cost and commitment known by the American people as it would interfere with his expensive leftist domestic agenda.
Yeah ... ol’ Meathead just couldn’t resist slipping some leftist propaganda into that otherwise excellent film.
You know, over all these years I've never added two plus two like that ... but now it makes perfect sense.
Johnson and McNamara were both masters of deceit. They repeatedly lied to the JCS and to Congress. No one outside a small inner circle knew what the Administration was doing in Vietnam. They overstated to the JCS what they were willing to do, and they undersold the costs to Congress. The public at large was left in the dark as well. Everything took a back seat to his massive Great Society programs, many of which still plague us.
The true picture of Johnson is revealed by Robert Cato’s massive five volume work (#5 not yet out) and so masterful is its scope and detail that the picture of this vile grasping icon of the Democrat Party.
Even once they had tested their own, the Left continued a campaign to have the US disarm. The original "Ban the Bomb" emblem was what was morphed into the "peace symbol" once Vietnam kicked in. Thus the Left, in it many factions had a solid cadre of activists who had all of the connections, funding, structure, and skills to run an opposition movement.
Hanoi already had a lot of experience with working with the French Communist Party to undermine their efforts during the Indochina War, so working with the American Communists had started even before we actually had ground forces in Vietnam.
During our war in Vietnam, there were two major umbrella organizations: the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ) and the New Mobe (Socialist Worker's Party). Both organizations clustered many other entities together - the National Welfare Rights Organization, Save Our Soldiers, Strike For Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW),assorted Lefty Unions, etc., etc. which diffused where the leadership was and where their direction was coming from. The majority of the rank and file were "activists" who either didn't want to get drafted and fight or people who didn't want a relative to be drafted and have to fight. Their politics were thinner than a sheet of paper and most demonstrations were just a lark to them but they added mass to the actions and camouflaged the real leadership.
Hanoi was leading it all for the get-go: they had communications with the leaders of the movement and hosted some of those leaders in Hanoi (such as David Ifshin, Stokely Carmichael, Ramsey Clark, Al Hubbard, and of course, Jane Fonda). The Soviets and the Chinese provided some propaganda, some printed material, and some money but the NVA directed when and where demonstration would take place, the "thrust" (theme) of the demonstrations, and even suggested which of the umbrella groups would be the most prominent.
As the Left gained steam, the direction of the Movement was towards pushing for an immediate pullout and of course, smearing the men fighting the war as "war criminals" with lots of fictional material provided by the enemy for the use of the antiwar leaders and their friends in the press. (there were actually printed material and movies shipped to the US from Hanoi and distributed on campuses)
Because Hanoi understood that Nixon was an unusually tough leader and couldn't be swayed by their usual tactics, they tried to get Nixon removed from Day One. There was literally not a single day that went by without articles attacking Nixon (reminiscent of the way they are dealing with Trump now). Soon there was the "Milk Fund Scandal" which wasn't anything, and then the "Secret Bombing of Cambodia" scandal which didn't get any traction, and then, at long last, Watergate - which also really didn't amount to anything but the press pitched it in little increments over several months and the Lefty Democrats gleefully piled on. Then, as now, the powder puff Republicans bailed and Nixon was forced to resign. Then unlike the "73 Easter Offensive" which Nixon destroyed through the massive use of airpower, the '75 offensive crushed the South Vietnamese, as Hanoi always wanted.
The FBI knew all about all of this but inexplicably, none of the traitors were ever charged much less prosecuted.
I’ve been pretty much aware of most of that for a long time. That Hanoi (rather than just Moscow) was directing the “anti-war” action specific to Viet Nam explains much. I wasn’t really aware of that.
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