The USA in LBJ's Time
1963-1969
By Mike Donovan
Mr. Vietnam - VP Hubert Humphrey –Southwest Texas State Teachers College – The Great Society - 36 – Westy - The Rose Garden Curtain - Slammed Goldwater in 64. Final score 486 to 52. “The Mongol Emperor” - Rolling Thunder
“If you were a journalist you were against the war because you realized that to write good things about the war would never win you the Pulitzer Prize.”
Johnson on Vietnam
The one good thing that comes through in every one of the 20 or so inside accounts of Lyndon Johnson and his White House, and about his life and career is that he had talent. Lots of it. No one on the inside would ever be so dopey as to suggest that Lyndon was a dope (like Lyndon later did to Ford.) In 1959 John Kennedy told several people that Lyndon was the best candidate for President, the most qualified, the most talented; Kennedy claimed he only ran for office because Lyndon was not electable.
I don't buy the Democratic Kearnsian myth that LBJ was a Mt. Rushmore level social progressive, that his heart bled for the poor and that he was their intrepid champion. Progressivism stood behind empty-vessel Johnson and pushed him forward. He didn't pull it uphill like a child pulling a snow-sled. LBJ was an animal of a politician who made it to the top and did what was expedient when he got there. I think he was cold-hearted.
Could LBJ have had something to do with Dealey Plaza? I don't believe that the CIA assassinated the President of the United States because he was planning on withdrawing from Vietnam, nor that a big mobster would have him whacked over a dame. These of course are the top two theories on who killed JFK. But who had the most to gain from the death of Kennedy? Who had best real motive? No one has poof, but the best evidence is that Best Evidence, one of the best selling books on the Kennedy assassination ends with the words,
'eh tu Lyndon?'
Johnson was the first president I was old enough to have an opinion of. Kennedy was just a guy who interrupted my cartoons. I was 9-13 in Lyndon's time. I supported the war in Vietnam the way a boy who constantly read books about World War II might have been expected to. But I knew how I felt about our President. I thought he was an ugly bore. I felt very strongly about that. I couldn't stand the sight of him or the sound of his voice. I never felt that way about any other President. I thought all the others had charisma and Obama does..
Lyndon Johnson used to have his bed flown ahead of him when he traveled outside of Washington. That’s pretty bizarre and hard to believe but it comes from Richard Nixon who says that he and his wife Pat were aghast when they learned of this upon entering the White House. Johnson’s bed flew more miles than the one in Bed-knobs and Broomsticks. His bed covered more air miles than 98% of the American people. Johnson meanwhile told the poor how his heart bled for them.
Johnson entered the White House on the grim reaper’s coattails. He rode them to re-election in 64. The martyred predecessor made the White House a tough prospect for any Republican candidate in 1964. The Dealy Plaza killer not only put LBJ in the White House, he re-elected him too. (Notice we don’t have to write ‘he or she.’ No one suspects that a second gun-woman might have been present at Dealey Plaza. That might make a good angle for a fiction-retro -movie.)
Johnson was a dreadful orator; all the more so because you can tell he thinks he’s really good. He was a ham with no pizazz.
Lyndon helped the Blacks on Civil Rights issues because the era demanded it, not because he did. He was also the man who in the opinion of many asked our military to fight the Vietnam War with one hand tied behind its back.
Popular vote 1964-------------------------- Johnson 43, 129,000
Goldwater 27,178,000
Woe. That's a shellacking.
A Professor Leuchtenburg interviewed LB in 1965 on the condition that he couldn’t use any of it until after Johnson left the White House. A White House aide also warned Leuchie to definitely not use the things Johnson would surely say about Kennedy.
The material was so unflattering that Leuchtenburg never got around to having it published. American Heritage magazine finally released the interview in 1990.
Johnson called JFK “Joe College man” and said that Kennedy knew as little about how Congress ran as anyone in the House. As far as Johnson knew, Speaker Sam Rayburn only thought of Kennedy as just a young guy who was probably going to die of malaria (Kennedy had been sick with malaria during his Pacific days of WWII.)
Of his supposed idol FDR, Johnson said that Franklin D was like a farmer who sold all his lumber and bought fireworks for Christmas with the dough. “It all went up with a bang.” As for FDR’s achievements with labor and Social Security, Johnson said, “None of it compares to my Education Act.”
Leuchtenburg staggered out of the interview shocked by Johnson’s egomaniacism. He had only managed to get two questions in for the entire 90 minute interview! The President had just talked a blue streak about his own greatness and the smallness of other great men.
And people actually occasionally bother to ask me who my least favorite president is. Two plus two is four and LBJ wins running away.
‘If Goldwater ever gets in there will be a war.’ That’s what they said about Johnson’s opponent in 1964. I later heard this about Reagan. RR got the chance to prove them wrong. Goldwater never did and is still remembered as that guy that “it’s a good thing he didn’t get in, whew.” Yeah, it’s a good thing. We might have even won the Vietnam War, and the great leftist mania, driven by the one great issue of that losing war in Southeast Asia might never have materialized.
With his elderly look, his slow drawl and his boring scripts, Lyndon was the ultimate sleeping pill. He was a man of many words and long speeches. It was nearly impossible to like him.
LBJ was also the man who was going to send me to Vietnam so I could fall into a camouflaged pit with spikes on the bottom, a very real fear for a 13 year old boy, especially when the older kid across the street Jimmy Madden had already been drafted and shipped off to the jungles.
LBJ was the liberal Democrat who created the left-wing opposition of government-hating hippies. I always thought that was strange. The hippies began wearing Nehru jackets and hating ‘the establishment” and saying ‘off the pig’ under Johnson long before the Nixon-Kissinger gang took over. The nation had been Democrat ruled for 8 years and was a maelstrom of unhappy left-wingers demanding change. They hated not “this government” nor “the government” They hated, “government.”
It was a political paradox that Nixon later powered down the war and he was the conservative, while Johnson powered up the war and he was the liberal. Johnson handed the Olympic torch of Vietnam to Nixon, but with only the flame for a handle.
Johnson declined to run for re-election in 1968. In the sad and sadly overplayed “I shall not seek” speech, he gave noble reasons for his decision, but really he was just tired, beaten, knew he could not get re-elected, and had no idea how to get out of Vietnam. There was a lot of death on his conscience and the protesters rubbed it in every day right in front of his house. (“Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did ya kill today! Hey! Hey!…)
BIO
Lyndon Johnson was born near Stonewall, Gillespie County, Texas on the Pedernales River on August 28, 1908. No biographer says he was born in Stonewall so he belongs to his country and his county, but not to a hometown (same as President John Tyler.)
When little Lyndon was five, the Johnsons moved to Johnson City, a town named after his great grandfathers. After he graduated high school in JC, LB went to California to kick around awhile with some friends in a beat up old Model-T Ford. Lyndon had his ups and downs as an elevator operator in California, but that job didn’t last. California was a bust. A Hollywood mogul even told Lyndon that he would have his own sit-com if he stuck around for 20 years, but Johnson was tired of being broke and far from home. If he wanted to be poor he should at least go back to Texas and be poor among family and friends.
Johnson moved back to Texas with holes in his pockets to work on a road construction project for a whopping one dollar a day. (Lyndon in 64 began a run of four presidents who grew up less than rich – LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Carter.)
His mother didn’t have any trouble this time convincing him it was time to think about college. She loaned him 75 dollars to enroll in Southwest Texas State Teacher’s College in San Marcos where he worked as a janitor to help pay his way. A janitor on his way to the White House!
Johnson left beloved STSTC for a year to take a job as principal at a Mexican-American school. In 1931 he graduated from Southwest with a B.S. degree, which would come in handy later when he reported to the nation on the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Johnson, the man from Johnson City, began teaching at James Pearsall High in Pearson Texas, and then became a full time public speaking instructor at Sam Houston High in Houston.
Lyndon entered politics in 1931/2 by managing successfully, the campaign for Congress of Texan Dick Kleberg. For this good work he was appointed secretary to Kleberg. It was Mr. Johnson goes to Washington, the poor dirt-farmer and struggling school teacher mixing with giants. Johnson worked in Klebergs office in Washington from 1932 to 1935 where his quality work came to the attention of his idol, Franklin Roosevelt. King Roosevelt then made Lyndon the head of the Texas branch of the NYO, the National Youth Organization.
Lyndon attended Georgetown University Law School in ’34 but did not graduate. On November 17, 1934 he married Claudia Taylor, a woman America came to know later by her nickname, ‘Ladybird’ Johnson. Few ever knew her real first name. Johnson and Taylor had known each other all of two months when they were wed in San Antonio.
In 1937 a chance for public office opened up in the 10th Congressional District (map). Congressman J Pat Buchanan had died in office and a special election was called to fill the seat. Johnson resigned from the NYO and threw his ten-gallon hat into the ring. LBJ ran as a full-fledged FDR New Dealer, and won the seat with ease. Lyndon won re-election semi-annually until 1948.
Congressman Johnson saw a chance to run for the Senate when death again reared its friendly head. Texas Senator Morris Sheppard, the “Father of National Prohibition” passed away on April 9, 1941 in Washington. Johnson took on conservative Republican Pappy O’Donnell in the special election to fill the vacated seat. LB lost to O’Donnell by less than 14,000 votes. On the morning after Election Day, Johnson stunned a small group of supporters in his hotel room by hurling a heavy glass ashtray through a closed window and then looking at everyone and declaring that whatever it takes, he would never lose another election. He never did; A war, yes, but never again an election.
When Japan attacked America the feisty Johnson showed his true colors by volunteering for combat duty. US Congressman LBJ enlisted on December 9, 1941.
There are conflicting versions of Johnson’s service in World War II. Johnson won a Silver Star for bravery, but was it legitimately earned? The President wore the Silver Star conspicuously during most of his speeches and news conferences on the Vietnam War. We get the message. He wasn’t asking others to risk their lives when he had never risked his own. This is the standard criticism of all presidents who want to use our military power for any reason.
Johnson began his war service with an office assignment until May 1942 at which time he went to the South Pacific as FDR’s ‘personal emissary.’ He made the war scene on May 14 and just over one month later the tour of duty was over.
So what about the Silver Star? On one occasion he was assigned as photographer to an aerial combat mission in the New Guinea theatre. According to Johnson’s 1964 campaign biography Japanese fighters attacked his plane. There were no casualties on either side and the plane came back without completing its assignment. Johnson had showed much courage under fire and General MacArthur awarded Lyndon the Silver Star, the same medal later given to John Kerry for rescuing several men under heavy fire during a river battle in Vietnam. Johnson got his star for gallant fighting that “enabled him to obtain and return with valuable information.”
The cynic wonders what information he obtained since the mission was never completed. And was it not strange that no other members of the airplane crew received a medal of any kind, but FDR’s emissary did. And for doing what? Was it for looking out the window and saying ‘I’m not scared'? That’s the only explanation I can think of.
The only available account of this mission is from the New York Times in 1942. It says that the plane developed mechanical trouble and returned safely. There is no mention of any attack by Japanese planes.
President Roosevelt soon ordered all US politicians on combat duty to return to their old jobs on Capitol Hill. Johnson returned to DC in July. War duty was better suited for men aspiring to be politicians in the future, not the politicians of today. As late as 1996, Bob Dole was the Republican candidate for President running as a World War II War hero. Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Bush all served in World War II.
Johnson as Texas Congressman and then Senator was one of the most powerful politicians on Capitol Hill throughout the 1950’s. He fought hard to win the Democratic nomination for President in 1960. Lyndon Johnson was not a household name in Peoria at the beginning of 1960, but he had been a prominent name in Washington for some time.
Kennedy asked Johnson to be his running mate in July of 1960 but did so in a cold and unflattering manner. At least John wasn’t a phony about it. He needed Lyndon more than he wanted him. Johnson was conservative, Southern and wrinkled. And he had powerful connections inside the hill. Kennedy didn’t make a pretense of friendship but he respected Lyndon, as everyone did.
Johnson’s Southern friends urged him to decline the VP. One oilman from Houston told Johnson to request a private meeting with Kennedy and then “put that Yankee in a headlock and teach him a lesson in Southern manners.”
But Johnson may have known the historic futility of running for President from the Representative branch of Congress and may have correctly figured that 1960 would be his one great chance. The postman always rings twice but opportunity only knocks once
On July 14, 1960 Johnson accepted the offer from Kennedy to be matey to skipper K. The Johnsons should have been happy to hear the news but Lyndon and his wife could not hide their inner downer. One newspaper publisher who saw them that night said that “they looked as though they had just survived an airplane crash.”
Johnson’s cabinet
Secretary of State----------Dean Rusk-----1963-1968
Secretary of Defense----Robert McNamara-1963-1968
Clark Clifford------1968-1969
Sec of Treasury------------C. Douglas Dillon—1963-1965
Henry H. Fowler-----1965-1968
Joseph Barr-----------1968-1969
Att General----------------Robert F. Kennedy—1963-65
N deB Katzenbach----1965-1967
Ramsey Clark---------1967-1969
Sec. of the Interior---------Steward ‘Mo’ Udall 1963-1969
CABNOTES
AG Ramsey Clark is the left-wingers all time favorite recruit from the ranks of conservative power. If you know a left wing group or idea that needs a voice of authoritative support from the “other side” just call this guy. 674,987 times a year you find some left wing story that includes, “Even former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark is” in favor of such and such a radical left idea.
How many times can you milk the idea that here’s a guy from ‘the establishment’ side of things and even he is with us on this one? At some point his staid cabinet credential is revoked. In 2007 Ramsey Clark was assisting in the legal defense of Saddam Hussein who was on trial in Iraq.
This is the same Ramsey Bozo that traveled to Hanoi in 1972 and told the world that our POW’s were being well treated.
Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State was a soft-spoken Rhodes scholar that Johnson inherited and retained from the Kennedy Administration. Deano seldom gets the blame for the Vietnam escalation, but he had something to do with it. Rusk believed that the Communist Chinese were the backbone of the North Vietnamese war effort and for that reason the Communist domination of Indochina must be contested. In other words he had a very simplistic and unsophisticated view of the causes and realities of the conflict. He had the correct one.
Joseph Barr was the grandfather of comic actress Roseanne Barr.
Johnson rejected all of Joey’s suggestions for improving the economy so Barr resigned.
Events
JACK RUBY
24th AMENDMENT
THE VIETNAM WAR
THE TONKIN GULF DECEPTION
THE VIETNAM WAR PROTEST MOVEMENT
FEDERAL AID PROGRAMS EXPANSION
ELECTION OF 1964
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT 1964
VOTING RIGHTS ACT 1965
25th AMENDMENT 1965
APOLLO PROGRAM
THE SO CALLED “GREAT SOCIETY”
RACE RIOTS NEWARK, WATTS AND OTHER CITIES
SIX DAY WAR IN MIDDLE EAST 1967
ASSAULT ON LIBERTY
ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING
ASSASSINATION OF ROBERT F KENNEDY
DEATH OF HOOVER
SEIZURE OF THE PUEBLO
INAUGURATION
Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President on Air Force One on 11.22.63 just before the plane left the Dallas airport for Washington. Jacqueline Kennedy was a few feet away, with JFK’s blood still on her dress.
LB retained the entire Kennedy Cabinet. Few of them liked him. They had loved John Kennedy. AG Robert Kennedy and new President Johnson famously hated each other.
JACK RUBY
We will never get to know who really shot JFK. The obvious suspect was murdered before he could face trial or extensive interrogation.
Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner shot Oswald as he was being transported through an underground garage area of the Dallas Police Department.
Ruby got through the security because he was friends with half the cops on the Dallas PD. No one suspected he was packing heat and ready to shoot the guy that shot the President.
Most Americans had mixed feelings about that one. No one was suggesting that Ruby go free, but it was hard to hate the guy too much.
According to the book, Appointment in Dallas, Ruby had a contract with the Mafia to shoot the patsy Oswald before he got the chance to name names.
The conspirators presumed that the sniper in the window of the Book Depository would not survive the assassination. The sniper would die in a hail of bullets from all kinds of law enforcement. In this case Ruby would get paid for doing nothing. But if Oswald survived, Ruby would have to ice Oswald. Ruby was gambling with his life and lost. That's why when Ruby saw on TV that Dallas police had arrested Oswald, he went into the bathroom and threw up. The book is by Hugh McDonald.
FIRST MOVES
Johnson had one key advantage over almost every other US prez in that he had been a wizard in the Congress for two decades before entering the White House. He knew how to get a deal through Congress as well as any living Congressperson or any living person. So when President Lyndon had a bright idea for a policy or a move, he knew how to turn his dream into reality. There was nothing a shrewd Congressman or Senator could pull behind Lyndon Johnson’s back. He was already the world’s reigning king of the back room parlays and log-rolling.
Henry Clay had a comparable record in Congress in the 1800’s and he won the nomination three times, and lost three times for the Presidency. Clay was the Buffalo Bills of US Presidential Elections.
Most of the great names of Congress hit a glass ceiling in those hallowed halls. Governors, Actors, wrestlers and University Professors have as good a chance of winning the White House as does a Congressperson, much to their eternal frustration. Senators have only a slightly better chance than House members.
In all of American history only two men, John Kennedy, and Barak Obama went from the Congress directly to the Presidency, and both from the Senate. And Kennedy made it more on his family name than his record there. Congresspersons are forever running for President but they never win. They’re always dropping out with three months to go and throwing their support for someone who didn’t stab them in the back on the campaign trail.
So the Congressional big shot as Prez is actually a rather unusual and unique concept in American history and Johnson’s record is interesting for it.
LBJ called cabinet meetings at the end of November 1963 and was often working hard on the budget in the White House while JFK’s body was still in the building.
J took 137 billion in governmental requests for fiscal 1964 and trimmed it to 97 billion, many of the cuts coming at the expense of national defense of course, a standard Dem tradition going back to Tom Jefferson, and one which LBJ embraced. Johnson cut far less from social programs than from military (or as the British annoyingly pronounce it 'militree'.)
POLL TAX ABOLISHED 1 64
In one of the Johnson era’s first political events, Congress passed the 24th Amendment in January of 1964 making it illegal to require the payment of a poll tax to register to vote in any election national or local. This put an end to the use of the poll tax to enforce white supremacy in the South. The passage of this measure helped to generate momentum towards more far reaching civil rights legislation the next year.
PANAMA CANAL RIOTS JANUARY 9 1964
It all started with a dispute over the American versus the Panamanian flag. In the end, 23 people were dead, including four US soldiers.
It all started over which flag could and should be flown over the high schools in the American Canal Zone. The Panamanians insisted that both countries should fly their flag high over Panama High. The American students insisted that only the American flag should fly over their school. If this situation had been entrusted to a bunch of 10 year olds or 40 year olds, it might have passed. But to put any hot political topic in the hands of a bunch of 17 year old boys is a volatile formula. The high schools started invading each others territory on missions of violence. The young adult violent left joined the Panamanian high schoolers and confronted the American garrison. The US troops pulled a Boston Massacre and opened fire. 17 Panamanians were dead or dying on the ground. Fighting went on for another two days. January 9 was a key point in the US-Panama story, a stepping stone on the way to the Jimmy Carter treaty. January 9 is still known as Martyr’s Day in Panama.
THE GREAT RHETORIC
On May 9 1964 Lyndon gave a speech in Atlantic City in which he first introduced the term “great society.” The jive piled up from there. It was just rhetoric and became a catch phrase for the ages. It meant whatever anyone wanted it to mean, which meant it meant nothing.
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964
It began as the Civil Rights Act of 1963 and Kennedy had initiated it. In the spring of 1964 the law was still moving its way slowly through the processes of the Hill. Now it became Johnson’s Civil Rights Act.
The only way to pass it would be to enlist some Republican support. The Southern Democrats were a virtual untied front against it. The old boy guard of Southern white racists Senators were going to go down with the ship if they had to, but they were ‘not no way not no how’ going to pass a law that allowed the Federal government to guarantee that Negroes could use the same toilets as Whites in Birmingham. And in private they didn’t use the word ‘Negroes.’
There were reasons why it was taking the CRA so long to pass. Firstly the racist Congressmen were using the filibuster. They had been doing this for more than a hundred and fifty years to promote racism in America. If a bill came up that was in any way progressive on the black and white issue they would just speak endlessly for weeks on the floor of the House or Senate, never yielding the floor until the Bill expired, or the speakers (see Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for the edifying Jimmy Stewart movie example.) The filibuster is a completely horrible and nauseating feature of our imperfect governmental system. It condones petulant obstructionism without decent purpose or morality. Its like a teen-ager asks dad if he can go to the dance tonight and the father gives a seven hour answer until the dance is over and then he says ‘maybe.’ That's a fatherbuster analogy.
The other reason why the Civil Rights Act took such a long time to come to a showdown was that the supporters of it had to use caution. If the supporters of the Bill brought it to a vote when they were a nickel shy of passing it, they would regret their call to action. To override a filibuster required a 2/3 majority and they almost had the votes but not quite. The margin of error rested with Republican Everett Dirkson, an Illinois veteran Congressperson of renown and influence. If they could convince the old goat to vote their way, Dirk could persuade five or six more. Besides, the country was changing its feelings on the issue on a monthly basis. Racial strife in the South was creating headlines in Northern newspapers. People outside of the South were beginning to realize that this was not a Southern problem anymore. The headline hunting media, so often condemned for its nature but in this case a savior, was driving home to the entire country that this was a simple matter of a moral outrage, a matter of right versus wrong in terms as simple as black and white. The national conscience could not sweep southern segregation and oppression under the rug anymore.
The churches of the nation became more involved politically than at any time in the 20th century. Pressure from church activism helped change the momentum for the bill. The church did a fine job putting pressure on Congresspersons to repent and stop being racist sinners.
The old guard of 20 racist senators were hurt by their elderly age. These mummies were having trouble physically maintaining the filibusters. Seventy seven year old men can’t give nine hour speeches on their feet in the Senate. Their tendonitis-riddled ankles couldn't support their filibusters, and they had less and less support outside of Washington with each passing day. The writing on the wall was clear enough for the centrist forces in the country. And the center always decides the game.
The Civil Rights Bill was finally put to the vote in the Senate on the 19th of June 1964. All 100 of them voted, something that doesn’t happen very often in that august body. The yeas had it 73 to 27.
After the vote, Senators Ted Kennedy and Birch Bayh caught a small plane north. It crashed. Bayh suffered minor injuries but initial reports came in that Ted Kennedy was dead. It turned out that he survived but was severely injured. Kennedy was bedridden in a hospital for many weeks.
UNCIVIL RIOTS OF 1964
On July 16th 1964 a New York City police officer shot and killed a 15 year old black youth named Jimmy Powell. The boy was attacking the cop with a knife and had cut the officer in the arm when the fatal shot was fired.
A massive riot followed, the blacks protesting the evil cop. No justice no peace. Justice seems to mean that a cop should be an understanding social worker in all situations involving blacks, but a person doing his duty in other situations.
Another NYC riot on the 18th of July started with trouble at 125th St. and 7th Ave. A protest march of blacks surrounded a New York precinct police station. What could possibly go wrong? Fighting with police led to general indiscriminate looting, the victims (as in 1992) primarily being hard-working honest black store-owners. For two more nights it was bedlam in Haarlem, and the next three nights after that there were riots in Brooklyn where it was Bedlam-Stuyvesant. Similar riots erupted that summer in Jersey City, Rochester, Chicago, Boston, and Brigantine.
The FBI reports and journalists alike agreed that the NYC disturbance was not in actuality a ‘race-riot’ in the sense that the young black men were rebelling against all authority and order, not against white people. In any case the riots were a new problem for the candidates of both parties. They helped George Wallace of Alabama who ran in the Northern Democratic primaries in 64, a prelude to his serious challenge for the White House in 1968. The so called “backlash” from the ghetto riots generated scared white votes for Wallace in the North in scary numbers. In white suburbs where there had been no rioting Wallace put up some impressive numbers.
VIETNAM OVERVIEW
As a boy in the Johnson Vietnam years I thought we were winning and I was rooting for our guys in this one on TV while reading World War II books at home. Every week there was a graph bar showing something like 924 Viet Cong killed and a little graph bar at the bottom showing something like 24 GI’s killed. I can still see Cronkite 500 times telling me how much we were winning. I don’t recall any sense of media negativity towards the war but I might have been too young to be aware.
Although Vietnam involved several US Presidents, it is generally considered to be Lyndons' war, or sometimes ‘McNamaras' War’. When LBJ took office there were 16,000 USA troops in Vietnam. When he left office there were over 600,000.
Coincidentally when he entered office the approximate size of a big campus protest against the Vietnam War, and ‘the bomb’ was 16,000. By the time he left office a good demonstration in the war tallied about 600,000 people.
The arguments about Vietnam are endless and hopeless. There are two historian camps, both absolutely sure of themselves.
The majority of about 96% “know” today that the war was wrong, that the protesters were right, and the US was the bad guy in Vietnam. They don't think it, they know it. There’s nothing to discuss. Only a pathetic igoramus could look back on the Vietnam War and come to any other conclusion.
The minority camp of 4% is miffed because the war was not conducted with victory in mind. They feel that Johnson conducted the war with a mixed message of powerful yet carefully limited military force combined with diplomatic and political weakness. This group feels that we fought the war “with one hand tied behind our backs.” They are astonished that Johnson never thought to occupy enemy territory as a sound military and political strategy, and are amazed that we were just there to take hits, not give them back. One Vietnam Vet put it this way, ‘We were not allowed to cross the 50-yard line.’ That is tough on the morale of soldiers. This 4% believes that the stop and start quality of the bombing campaigns was a blunder.
While both sides may well concede the hopelessness of the quagmire, only one side also believes that the cause was noble. These people believe that our soldiers behaved far better than the enemy, just as surely as did our GI’s in WWII compared to the Japanese and the Germans.
In his first weeks in office President Johnson gave much consideration to withdrawing from Vietnam, but like Kennedy he didn’t want to jeopardize the 1964 Presidential election by losing Southeast Asia in the Cold War. Withdrawal or escalation could have hurt his chances in 1964. It is no coincidence that Johnson escalated American involvement in 1965, not 1964. His fears for 1964 were confirmed in 1968 when his escalations in Nam cost the Dems the White House.
The successor to the assassinated South Vietnam President Diem in late 1963 was a man named Huong who didn’t last four months. There were ten regime changes in the two years after the November 1963 coup that iced Diem. Downing Diem created a leadership hole in South Vietnam that the United States had little choice but to fill. To stand back and do nothing would be to invite disintegration and defeat for South Vietnam, and also meant a few billion US bucks down the Mekong drain.
The North Vietnamese Communist cause was set back by the assassination of Diem in an ironic way. Indigent local rage at the Diem regime came to a screeching halt and suddenly a lot of peasants who had been sympathetic to the Viet Minh wanted nothing more than to get back to rice farming. The entire revolution in the South was suddenly stalled. The North Vietnamese as a result decided to send in regular army troops to the South to destabilize the improving situation and give chaos a chance.
The introduction of regular NVA troops into South Vietnam changed the entire dynamic of the war for Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, Bundy and the rest of the military think-tank. Without Diem's strong hand, the South Vietnamese army and police were now less effective. With this weakness combining with NVA infiltration, the situation was becoming precarious. As Washington perceived it, the war might be flat out lost if the USA did not intervene in force.
Johnson was in the same bind as John Kennedy. Lyndon was trying to be an oxymoron, a liberal hawk. Complete liberal withdrawal might have been a productive solution in the long run. Aggressive military intervention might have been a productive solution in the long run. The worst choice, the one he made, was a middle ground of limited military intervention. This pleased no one on the left or right and set up a war without end in Indochina.
Johnson should have listened to Ike, who abhorred the concept of limited warfare. While LBJ played it half way, Ike asked him, “When do you go after the head of the snake, instead of the tail?” Johnson went after the tail for five years in Vietnam and as a result in the end America left with its tail between its legs.
Historian Michael Lind disputes this analysis of the war, which is my own view generally. Lind happens to think that the middle ground was actually the only choice available to Johnson and that LBJ made essentially the right call. What is even more annoying is that he argues his case so well. After all, it is a pleasure to look down on the Vietnam performances of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, especially Johnson. Don’t be a spoil sport, Lindy.
Lind’s logic is that a withdrawal would showcase a democratic and American global retreat both politically and militarily. On the other hand trying to win the war would have been a burden not worth the cost. The aftermath of administrating conquered communist southeast Asia would have been a nightmare. Johnson according to Lind, had only one option and he took it. It is a radical, yet simple argument.
NAMPOLS
The Vietnam War produced the presidential candidates for Generation X. The Nam soldiers were tomorrow’s politicians.
The first fighter ace of the war (five or more planes shot down = ace) was a Mr. Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham. DC was the first person in history to make ace through missile fighting, as opposed to machine gunning. Cunningham served in the US Congress for many years. In 2005 it was revealed that Cunningham was cunning enough to take millions of dollars in bribes. He resigned from Congress upon his conviction in November 05.
Navy lieutenant John Kerry volunteered to command a swiftboat and saw much fighting during his short service up close in Vietnam. He spent Christmas of 1968 a few miles short of the Cambodian border, deep up the dangerous Mekong River. Kerry had begun his tour of duty in the South China Sea on a Navy cruiser.
Bob Kerry has been a United States Senator for about two decades now. He was wounded in Vietnam. It was revealed in the late 90’s that he had played a small role in some atrocities over there, but he had some mitigating explanation that fended off the political damage. Kerry has been re-elected since. I shook his hand once as a tourist in the Capitol Building. He told me to “Buzz off.”
Democrat Max Cleland picked up a live enemy grenade in Vietnam in 1968 and lost three of his four limbs. He was elected to the Georgia Legislature at the age of 28 in 1970. Cleland went to Washington as U.S. Senator in 1996, but lost his seat to a Republican in 2003 by a Republican.
Democrat Bill Clinton entered the ROTC for a couple of weeks but withdrew when he received a low number in the draft. He then became part of the college anti-war movement, especially during his months at Oxford England.
Republican John McCain crashed his wounded fighter-bomber in North Vietnam and lived out the war under brutal conditions at the Hanoi Hilton. The VC beat him and tortured him for seven years. McCain is one of the influential politicians of our time and his name is synonymous with Arizona. McCain was the Republican nominee for President in 2008. Obama shot down his jet.
George W. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard and has been accused of being a no-show for several months of that service. In any case he did train to fly fighter jet aircraft and in this alone, he risked his life for his country.
Democrat Al Gore enlisted in the Army in 1969 and was in the jungle as a war correspondent for 141 days. He carried an M-16, but he didn't shoot anyone, except for one peasant who told him that global warming was a myth.
Admiral James Stockdale was the Vice Presidential running mate of third party (Reform Party) candidate Ross Perot in 1992. Stockdale, like McCain, was a brave flyer who was shot down and captured by the NV. They beat “Stocky” and tortured him for 7 years, four of those years in solitary confinement, while Jane Fonda and Ram Clark told the USA from Hanoi that our guys were being well treated.
NY WORLD’S FAIR 1964
In Queens, New York the great World’s Fair opened in Queens the spring of 1964. I went to it and so did my wife. We didn’t know each other at the time. I was nine and she was two. We might have passed like toy ships in the night. I had a wonderful time at the Fair and I thank Mrs. Mayo for taking me there.
On the eve of the Fair’s opening the Black radical community planned a “stall-in” a motorized version of a “sit-in.” The angry black protestors would take their cars on next to no gas to key points in the city arteries and then pull over and run out of gas. Stalled cars at the intersections of tunnels and bridges would bring the city to a grinding halt and cost everyone in money, time, and productivity.
The city prepared for the worst. Fleets of tow trucks were waiting with police escort at key intersections near bridges, tunnels and other choke points. But the protest never materialized, possibly because the city was prepared for it. The World’s Fair opened without home-grown sabotage. I will never forget going through the “It's a Small World” ride. Unbelievable.
DEATH OF HOOVER 10.20.64
On October 1964 former President Herbert Clark Hoover became the third president to pass away in New York City when he died at the age of 90. Hoover had been ill for a couple of years. He died on one of the upper floors of the Waldorf Towers in New York City. Monroe and Arthur were the other two POTUS DOA NYC.
(map )Deathplace of Herbert Hoover 1964
The word ‘deathplace’ is not in the dictionary but birthplace is, which is hardly fair. In 1959 at the age of 85 Hoover wrote his best book, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson. Hoover died in his suite on the 31st floor of the Waldorf Astoria towers in New York City on October 1964. He was a great person and a great Republican. As far as a great president, well that’s hard to sell, but it’s doubtful if any person could have prevented the onslaught of the Great Depression for which he is blamed.
EVENTS IN VIETNAM 1964-5
Most histories blame the United States for all of the escalation. George Herring writes of 1965, “North Vietnam matched U.S. escalation of the war.” Oh. So the USA did the acting and they did the reacting.
The US feared that South Vietnam would either lose the war or make a separate peace. There was such a rotation of leadership in South Vietnam in the aftermath of Diem’s demise that the US was afraid that one of the new regimes would ask America to simply leave.
Billy Bundy was an important Johnson advisor on Southeast Asia. BB was against a plan being tossed around to ‘neutralize’ Vietnam.
Michael Maclear’s book, The Ten Thousand Day War and the video it is based on are a very important test plates for all V-War debates. The book is not extreme leftist by Nam standards, but nevertheless holds a standard liberal bias on every page and was a popular work.
According to Mikey-Mac, it was the United States that was responsible for the NVA attacks on the south. He takes a statement by Bill Colby of CIA about mutual troop movements in 1964 and extrapolates it into Colby blaming the USA as war instigator. If that is Maclear’s opinion, and it is throughout his book, I can respect that, but don’t play writer games and place Colby in a left column he clearly was never a part of. MacLear writes,
In fact, North Vietnam was not “renewing” any
military intervention because it had not yet begun
any, according to CIA’s William Colby. His
intelligence shows that North Vietnamese
main forces did not start moving South until late
1964, or several months after the fifty percent
increase in US troop levels. It was only then that
Colby assessed that the Communists ‘would
probably win the war by the end of 1965.'
William Colby never did and never would suggest that the North had never begun any aggression. I've read his book, Lost Victory and you are definitely misrepresenting him through one quote taken out of his context and placing it cleverly in yours.
Notice that MM plays stat juggler with the ‘fifty percent increase in troop level’ part. He doesn’t want to state the number of increased US troops because it is small in truth, and not proportionate to the response to it by North Vietnam. But by calling it a ‘fifty percent’ increase, our deployment is made to seem more provocative than it actually is.
In 1964 South Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked installations along the North Vietnamese coast with the logistical support of the CIA and the Army advisors. Maclear uses Daniel Ellsberg as his mouthpiece, condemning America as the provocateur, as though these attacks were not in response to Communist aggressions of the past several years,
Ellsberg would come to consider these commando raids
as a provocation and the fuse for all-out war.
Mighty Maclear then mocks Bundy for thinking these raids were no big deal, then adds editorially,
Bundy does not state whether he considered the US
response a breach of international law.
All of a sudden the test for all becomes strict respect for international law, as if the Communists all over the globe had not been brazenly breaking international law on a steady basis since the last weeks of World War II (none of which aroused leftist anger by the way.) Maclear has no indignation at any point in his book for the torturing of our prisoners of war in North Vietnam, but when PT boats attack storage depots on the North Vietnamese coast in a rare case of taking the fight to the enemy he has a few choice words of scolding for Colby and the CIA’s insensitivity to legal international strictures.
BLAME AMERICA FIRST
I wish the lib historians would make up their mind as to which event in the Blame the Anti-Communists History of the Vietnam War we are supposed to understand was the real trigger. One book says it’s the French refusal to recognize Ho, then another book says it was the shelling of Haiphong Harbor in November of 46, then it’s the endorsement of Bao Dai, then it’s the endorsement of Diem, then it’s the assassination of Diem, then it’s the deployment of more American advisors, then it’s the torpedo boat attacks by the South Vietnamese Navy that started the Vietnam War. Each is the cause of the war. But one thing is consistent. It’s never the fault of the Communists.
The basis of western apologism for Communist behavior is that they are always only reacting to something bad the west did. For an example read professor G. C. Herring’s story of Ho Chi Minh joining the French Communists in Paris in the early 1920’s,
Departing Vietnam in 1912 as a cabin boy aboard
a merchant steamer, he eventually settled in France
with a colony of Vietnamese nationalists, and when
the Paris Peace Conference rejected his petition for
democratic reforms for Vietnam, he joined the
French Communist Party.
Oh, brother. Look how our hero was pushing for democratic reforms! You see, he never would have joined that silly old Communist Party but he was forced to join because the evil bums at the Peace Conference put his noble petition into the shredding machine and laughed. Deep down he wasn’t really a Communist. He was just a Vietnamese nationalist using Communism as an expedient vehicle for achieving an independent Vietnam. And I’m the King of Portugal. Nixon woke me up to the real biography of Ho in his book No More Vietnams. Now that I’ve read his side of it I am noticing slippery apologism in western writing for everything in Ho’s life in far too many works. I just want all the facts presented and both points of view examined. Then we can each choose sides and argue. To only cite favorable facts for your team’s side is dishonest, that is unless of course your goal is not honest debate and the search for truth but only partisan vindication per se.
SEABORN ASSAULT JUNE 1964
In the spring of 1964 the Johnson war team asked a Canadian by the name of Blair Seaborn of the ICC (International Control Commission) to go to Hanoi and meet quietly with Vietnamese leaders and warn them that the United States was going to step up the war effort if North Vietnam did not compromise while there was still time. This scarcely veiled threat was Johnson's idea at the time of giving diplomacy a chance to work.
The ICC and the left in America wanted a negotiated settlement ending with a Laotian style neutrality for South Vietnam. Great idea if you can do it.
Seaborn met with the charming Prime Minister of North Vietnam Pham Van Dong, and it turned out that Dong too wanted a neutral status for South Vietnam. All that was required was for the United States to withdraw completely from Southeast Asia first and then a neutralist coalition government would be set up. Seaborn mentioned the danger that a minority of militant Communists would then take over the government. That had happened about 12 times in this century in similar situations in other countries. Of course it would never happen in Vietnam because the gentle Ho and the soft spoken and articulate Van Dong assured Seaborn that it would not.
Johnson and the JCS had decided to start bombing the North in strength soon but they hoped that by warning the North of their intentions they could achieve a diplomatic power-down of the entire battlefront and avoid having to carry out the bombing threat. It was not to be.
Van Dong was just like all the other VC leaders. He was only interested in the oxymoronic goal of compromise through total victory. Give us your total surrender and then we will compromise diplomatically. This was the North Vietnamese stand throughout the war. LBJ and Nixon had hearing damage from all the shouting to “try diplomacy, not war.” They tried it and all they got was, “Withdraw all American troops and aid to South Vietnam and then we will sit down and begin talks.”
Seaborn did not relish his job of threatening Van Dong, the man known in NV as ‘Ho Chi Min’s favorite nephew,’ but he delivered the warning. If a settlement wasn’t reached soon the North was going to suffer a great deal. Van Dong scoffed at the warning and noted that the heroism of the VC warriors ‘exceeds the imagination.’ US bombs could not match VC guts. “Bring it on,” taunted Dong.
Dong warned Seaborn that North Vietnam had plenty of friends, meaning of course the USSR and China.
MacLear quotes Van Dong’s counter warning in French,
Nous sommes un pays socialiste, un de pays
socialistes, vous savez, et le people se
dressera.
which is rude, since I don’t speak French and The Ten Thousand Day War is supposed to be an English language book. Now I have to see my chiropractor, Dr. Andrei Bolougne so he can translate it for me. Just as well, since my neck has been bothering me lately from the strain of carrying home all the 500-page left wing Vietnam War books from the stores.
I’ve been to Paris twice so I have a vague idea of what this is saying. Essentially Dong is admitting unwittingly that the Sino-Soviet split is a hoax, and that the ‘historical enmity’ between China and Vietnam is a lame smokescreen to blind the west. He’s telling America that if we bully him, he will get his big brothers.
Seaborn’s mission failed, but it gave the Bundy-Mac gang a license to claim they had given diplomacy a chance first before bombing North Vietnam. Before the summer ended, a North Vietnamese torpedo attack on a US Navy ship gave Johnson the opening he needed to implement an offensive military plan he’d had in mind for some time.
TONKIN 8 64
With the regular North Vietnamese infantry units joining the Viet Communist guerillas in 1964, Johnson and Rusk had to decide on whether to escalate in return, hold the line, or begin thinking about some sort of withdrawal from a losing cause. Secretary of Defense McNamara, who revised the history of what he said at the time every nine years, weighed in too. It was time to escalate, big time. But before the public would accept a large increase in US military commitment, the enemy should be provoked into firing the first escalatory shot.
US Navy destroyers frequently patrolled provocatively close to the North Vietnamese mainland. On August 2, 1964, one of them, the USS C Turner Joy was attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Two days later the NV Navy assaulted a second US Destroyer the Gary Maddox, near the North Vietnamese coast.
Lyndon was outraged. The US retaliated with air strikes against select North Vietnamese targets. But that was not enough.
On August 7 the Congress considered the Southeast Asia Congressional Resolution, Citing the attack, the SACR gave the President almost a blank check for increases in military deployment in Southeast Asia. SACR stated that the independence of South Vietnam was vital to our ‘national interests and world peace.’ It was hard for anyone in Congress to vote no. It would look like they were soft on Communism and the flag. If they didn’t support the President they would be voted out faster than a Kennedy can drive to a liquor store.
The ‘Tonkin Gulf Resolution’ as it is known to history, passed overwhelmingly. The House vote was 416 to 0. the Senate vote was 88-2. Lyndon could go to war. He would wait until after the 1964 election before he did it, but from now on he knew he could go to war. Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernie Gruening of Alaska were the only two that showed any liberal guts.
The first attack almost certainly took place, but the second attack on the Maddox may have been a disinformation plot to garner support for the war.
In response to the Tonkin attacks, the United States and South Vietnamese forces launched large retaliatory attacks against targets inside North Vietnam, primarily against their PT boat bases along the coast. The JCS and the Administration had been some time debating whether it might be time to begin taking the war to where the enemy lived. Tonkin gave them the excuse to implement this sea change in military strategy.
Critics charge that in assaulting the Maddox, the North Vietnamese were justifiably responding the recent covert aggressions by our side against targets in North Vietnam, neglecting to consider that our covert operations equaled one hundredth of the aggressions of the North against the South up to August of 1964. The left writers also fume that Johnson misled the Congress about the nature of the attacks because he did not inform it of these covert operations we had long been committing against the North. How were Johnson and the CIA to keep these covert operations covert if we had to tell the entire US Congress about them?
Senator Fullbright led the Democratic majority in steering this Tonkin Resolution to passage. The Senator later admitted that his primary considerations were political. Barry Goldwater was gaining strength by criticizing Johnson’s wimpy prosecution of the War. By displaying high-profile resolute military action, Johnson took the issue away from Goldwater. Many analysts felt that the Tonkin Gulf affair sealed the victory for Johnson in the election of 1964.
Johnson and the military were planning on instituting a bombing campaign of the North in gradual increased amounts to send a message to Hanoi to desist or else (as Seaborn had indirectly warned.)
LBJ was set on waiting until after the election. The attack on the Maddox and the support he received from the nation at large made him change his mind. His approval rating had jumped almost 30% in a few days when the Tonkin Gulf resolution was proposed and passed. Lyndon now believed that bombing the North would no longer have a large political risk domestically.
The US air attacks along the North Vietnamese coast were ostensibly retaliatory raids for the Tonkin Gulf attacks. But in reality they were the beginning of a sustained air campaign of bombing above the 17th parallel, one of two major bombing campaigns of the North in the Vietnam War. The second under Nixon would be named ‘Linebacker.’ The first under Johnson was titled Operation Rolling Thunder. Unfortunately there was a multi-year lull between the two campaigns, which gave the VC the impression (correctly) that our resolve to take the offensive was indecisive, inconsistent and scatterbrained.
The gang of left historians are quite certain that United States bombing raids in response to Tonkin (and other later incidents used as pretexts) were the only reason that the North Vietnamese Communists backed by the Soviet Union and China decided to send regular NVA divisions into the south to do battle. It was all the fault of the United States that the war escalated. I guess there was no desire on the part of the North to conquer the South militarily until America began its evil bombing raids on the admirable and courageous North. That is the tone describing the events by historians later and by leftist observers at the time. The few conservative voices who try to offer another point of view are reduced to a nosebleed seat in the bleachers by ridicule and scoffing dismissal. Historians clearly say that if not for our bombing campaign, which began slowly after Tonkin and increased gradually over the next two years, the North Vietnamese Army would have stayed where it was in the North and would have completely respected international boundaries. Our bombing only motivated the North to take justifiable revenge.
On November 1, 1964 just two days before Election Day, VC guerillas attacked the American air base at Bien Hoa near Saigon. They killed five American airmen, but more importantly, they destroyed five B-57 bombers. It was one thing to kill a few mere human beings, but you destroy our bombers, you looking for trouble. The Bien Hoa attack would be avenged (‘used as a pretext’ in liberal language), but not of course until after the election.
GRANDMA'S NIGHTIE
LBJ knew how much power that Congress gave him when it passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. He smugly told reporters that “This mean's sky's the limit. The Tonkin Resolution is like grandma's nightie; it covers everything.”
Please Lyndon, I just finished my pancakes. You're very old to begin with. I don't need visuals of your grandmother in her nightie.
He was properly offended when Congresspersons years later protested his actions. He sniped that they should have been so high and mighty when “these same folks” signed the Tonkin Resolution to begin with.
COLD WAR
In spite of the seriousness of Vietnam, it was not the number one issue for most Americans as the election year evolved. It wasn’t the Civil Rights battle either. No, it wasn’t the economy either, stupid.
Gallup and Harris polls in 1964 consistently turned up the Cold War with Russia as the number one issue with voters. If there was one thing more important to voters than their pocketbooks it was their hides. The USSR and the USA were building up a horrible nuclear capability. For the first time people were becoming aware that not only were there enough nuclear bombs to destroy the world, there were now the ICBM delivery systems to make that bad dream come true or very short notice. The poison icing on the cake was that the two teams with all the nukes were consistently saying mean and threatening things to and about each other. They were having international disputes in several hot spots around the globe. It should be no wonder that this was the most important issue to Americans in 1964. It was also the issue that made the Republican candidate seem so dangerous.
ELECTION OF 1964
Essentially there were only three issues in the campaign of 1964. War and peace, big government, and was Goldwater a nut or was he not a nut?
Would Johnson stay on in Vietnam and was he tough enough on Communism? As for big government, the Democrats saw it as the solution to America's social problems while Goldwater and his running mate Miller saw big government as the problem itself.
Johnson was a lock for the Democrats, but the Republican was a wide open field. The front-runners in late 1963 were Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. NR was that oxymoron, a ‘Liberal Republican.’ By 1964 standards he was a RINO (Republican in Name Only.) Rocky was liberal on the black issues and voted each issue according to personal analysis. He voted against Party lines if he felt like it.
Rockefeller was a bit like a Kennedy, the elite rich charismatic friend of the poor, jumping back in the limo from a frank talk in the ghetto saying “Jeeves, lets get the hell out of here!” Rocky had homes in Seal Harbor Maine, a 5,000 acre family-owned gated community up in Pocantico Hills, NY up the Hudson and a posh pad in Manhattan on 54th St.
Rockefeller probably would have won the nomination from Goldwater but he pulled a Woody Allen and that was the difference between victory and defeat. Woody Allen can dump his wife for a young scandalous new gal and still go back to making movies filled with racy jokes. A politician that dumps his wife in 1964 and then breaks up the marriage of a family friend to score his new wife can’t go back to elections without consequences. Rocky was ahead in the polls until his second wedding day. The next morning he was behind for good.
The story goes like this. Rocky married Mary Toddhunter Clark of Philadelphia in 1930. She was a well to do and brilliant woman and they had five children. But this RINO was also in a MINO, a marriage in name only. All his friends knew that their marriage was rocky. Mary helped him win the campaign for governor of New York in 1958. It was in November of 1961 that Rockefeller went public that a divorce proceeding was under way. This part the public could handle and they forgave him with a landslide reelection vote in 1962.
Now the plot thickens. Dr James S. Murphy was a scientist working for the Rockefeller Foundation and a very successful one. He was close to old man Rockefeller, Nelson’s dad. Murph had a pretty young wife named Margaretta, whose nickname was ‘Happy.” The Happy couple was part of the social scene up in Seal Harbor, where Maggie went for long walks with old man Rocky and was a popular member of the fireplace crowd even when her husband was away studying slides.
The Murphy’s were so loved by the Rockefellers that they were given permission to build their own house on the Rockefeller woodlands at Pocantico on the Hudson. Nelson also just happened lived on Pocantico grounds and had met the Murphy’s many times before. Now it just so happened that Nelson had a great personal interest in housing designs and the building trade. He began to hang around the Murphys as they planned their new home. Then one day when Jimmy Murphy was away the mouse did play. Margaretta studied the drawing intently. Nellie leaned over her shoulder at the blueprint for the new house and showed Happy where the third bathroom should be placed. Then she leaned back with a long look and said “Where should we put the playroom?” You know the rest.
Happy asked Rob Murphy for a divorce and the Irishman said, “Sure, no problem. When the Cleveland Indians win three consecutive World Series I’ll be glad to grant you a divource” A few months later Rob dropped the impossible conditions and the divorce went through.
This foursome was a very public affair, the talk of the gossip world. The Governor divorces his wife, then starts up with the wife of one of his top employees, forcing them to divorce and then starts shacking up with the divorcee But Rocky wanted more. He wanted to make his fling the real thing. He wanted a Happy marriage. He couldn’t be happy without her. His advisors pleaded with him to wait until after the election. America could barely handle the number of offenses so far. The final blow of marriage to the poor guy’s ex-wife was pushing it. Nelson said “I’d rather fail at politics with a woman in my bed than succeed in politics without one.”
On May 4 1963 Happy and Rocky got attached. Nelson Rockefeller instantly dropped steeply in the polls for Republican nominee for President. He had been the front runner for the months leading up to May 4 1963.
As for Robin Murphy, he never got over the humiliation and the loss of his Happy wife. In a 1984 interview with Esquire he is quoted as saying, “John Kennedy wasn’t the only man assassinated in 1963.”
Rockefeller wanted the presidency and had sought it openly in 1960. He always seemed pretty likeable to me. Most of the memoirs of his era speak very well of him, and since that it the top back-stabbing forum on earth (wait till I write my stand-up comedy memoirs!) that speaks very well of “The Rock.” After Nixon lost in 1960, Rockefeller commented that in light of the close vote and Nixon’s negatives, he would have won if he had won the nomination for the Republican Party. John Kennedy said the same thing! Jack felt that he would have lost a close one to Rocky if Nellie was the ellie (R elephant.)
In November of 1961 Rockefeller confessed that he and his wife Tod were on the rocks and a divorce proceeding was under way. This part the public could handle and they forgave him with a landslide reelection NY vote in 1962.
Goldwater was another oxymoron (some libs would not include the oxy.) He was a iconoclast and a conservative. Barry was a also Major General in the United States Air Force Reserves. If he became President and started World War III, like so many people feared he might, then he could have called himself up for duty to bomb the Kremlin in a B-52. Goldwater was slightly to the right of electable.
Being a member of the military reserves, Goldwater was comfortable with blunt simple talk about nuclear warfare and weaponry. He consequently created news bulletins and alarms as he casually discussed nuclear war to the press with the same calm as talking about a chicken sandwich on rye. The Democrats and even most radical conservative Republicans were more dramatic, or euphemistic in their nuclear danger phraseology.
Other Republicans in the hunt early on were Governor George Romney of Michigan, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, and William Scranton of Pennsylvania.
Governor Romney’s son Mitt, ran running for President in 2008 as the sitting Republican governor of Massachusetts. George Romney in 64 was, like Mitt, a first term governor and thus didn’t really have the credentials, George didn't even have the definite desire, unlike Mitt who definitely had the desire.
Hank Lodge was the Ambassador to Vietnam, had been Nixon’s losing mate in 1960, and was expressing no desire to run for President from a political base in Saigon, 5,876 miles from D.C. But “The Lodger” (as Roger Hillsman called him) was an obvious possibility for his name recognition and venerable life of public service. Lodge had a small but determined group of supporters organizing his campaign for president while he truly had absolutely nothing to do with any of it. William Scranton from Scranton was the good-looking young candidate, the Republican Jack Kennedy. He was a war hero, had served as a very popular and effective governor of his Keystone state, had the support of Eisenhower, and was popular with the big banking Republicans of the East coast. The one thing Scranton didn’t have was a firm desire to run for president and this frustrated supporters and reporters.
These three were long shots. The heavy favorites for the Rep nod were Rocky and Goldy.
But the old guard Eastern Establishment did not favor either of these two. Rocky might have had a banker’s name, but he didn’t have the politically correct attitude to be an old school Republican candidate. Relative to his party in 1964, Nellie was a liberal. He was a New York Banker in name but not in spirit. Rockefeller was long up the Hudson from Wall Street, and his riches notwithstanding, was more of an Albany man than a Manhattan man.
To the New York City snoot scene, Goldwater was even worse. He was simply a southwestern cowboy who had no business thinking he should even fantasize about being president, let alone take a serious run at it. Arizona was even farther in spirit from New York City than it was in miles. The Republican old boy NYC club had been dictating who would run for President since at least 1940. Their guy didn’t have to be from New York City, (it looked better actually if he was not) but he had to be acceptable to them in order to have their support. Both Goldwater and Rockefeller were therefore heading for a brick wall at 90 miles per hour. They were the front runners for a Republican Party that would have a tough time winning in 64 if it were fully united behind a candidate with all the emotional and financial backing of the rich Republican eastern power base. These two individuals were facing the prospect of running without that base. They could drive past the nomination flag, but not the checkered.
The Brooks Brothers set had to stop Rocky and Nellie somehow and their only hope was Ike. The former President was the only man with enough power and influence to stop the disaster train and get the Republican machine re-tooled for victory with a new and fresh (not as in young fresh but as in fresh to the race) candidate. Only Ike could bury these whippersnappers who had no chance, and help install an old square who might have half a chance to unseat Johnson.
Ike wasn’t the most political president of all time but he had his opinions. He wasn’t big on Goldwater. The former Prez was against Rockefeller for personal reasons. Rockefeller’s intimate friend Larry Hughes had written a very negative account of the Eisenhower presidency called The Ordeal of Power. The book was a big-seller. Ike felt that Rockefeller was implicated by proxy in the nasty book, and he could not forgive nor forget the insult.
Ike had his own list of candidates he would like to see run for president in 64 including General Lucius Clay, who had been in charge of occupied Germany after the war, and his brother, Milton Eisenhower. The Republican old guard liked 'Uncle Milty', but since they were planning on criticizing the Kennedy nepotism, they didn’t want to look like they were throwing stones in a glass house. Bobby Kennedy cancelled out the political career of Milton Quentin Eisenhower.
The Establishment Reps planned an important meeting in late 1963 between old guard mavens and Ex-President Eisenhower in New York City to plan a way to birth and bankroll a new and less offensive candidate than Nelson or Barry. The date set for the meeting was November 23, 1963.
The assassination of John Kennedy canceled the meeting and any hope that anyone but Rocky or Goldwater would be the Republican nominee. By the time the political smoke had cleared from Dealy Plaza and the country started to get back to normal it was January of 1964 and the two front-runners were so far over the top that they had reached the enemy barbed wire. The New Hampshire primary was about to take place and it was too late to stop a sure defeat. The shots that killed Kennedy also killed the Republican alternatives, while at the same time giving Johnson a halo of Dem sainthood. The election of 1964 may have been held on November 3 1964 but it was decided on November 22, 1963. If an ideal Republican candidate had run a flawless campaign in 1964 he still would have lost to Johnson in a somewhat closer contest. That's my opinion.
Few leaders in the Republican Party took Goldwater seriously enough until it was too late. When he secured the nomination, BG essentially pulled off a right-wing coup within the party The wise men in the Party knew damned well that this extremist could never win an national election against any Democrat, let alone Saint Lyndon riding Saint John's bloody coattails. They didn't do enough to stop him early on because they presumed that his extremism would also preclude him from winning the nomination of their own party. He was just a train in the distance until it got too close.
The first Republican primary in New Hampshire was set for March 10. Goldwater led Rockefeller in the early polls, but Goldwater made the mistake of campaigning hard there. The more he talked the more he kept putting his cowboy boot in his mouth. The press had a great time jumping all over every indiscreet comment Goldwater made. The Arizona senator was taking his wild west 'say as you please' approach into tight lipped Yankee New Hampshire, and the more he talked the more he dropped.
Rockefeller let Goldwater do his campaigning for him. Goldwater would say for example, that if only we dropped a few tactical nukes on North Vietnam that mess over there would clear up in a hurry. He might have been a little facetious as he spoke but in print it came out like a genuine foreign policy suggestion. Even conservative Republicans in New Hampshire were gasping for air when they read statements like this. The garrulous affable south-westerner was having fun with stylish overstatements, intended to bemuse (he was witty), but he was speaking to a region where the way to speak was through understatement. In Arizona ‘I’m gonna kill ya’ means I’m mad at you and I’m not really going to kill ya. In New Hampshire 'I''ll kill ya' is a genuine death threat. Goldwater was in essence saying he was gonna kill all the Commies and the Yankee voters were hearing it at face value. Barry Goldwater presumed they knew better than to take it literally.
He made equally incendiary remarks about education, social security, race relations and federal spending. Barry was having fun with his clever big mouth and kissing an Arizona rattlesnake.
Rocky led Goldy in the polls at the last hour, but a falling rock awaited them. Four dedicated supporters of Henry Cabot Lodge had been ringing doorbells in New Hampshire for a year. They were working endlessly with mailing lists, phone calls, offers of rides to the polls, and all the other accoutrements of political grass roots labor. HC Lodge wasn’t on the ballot and wasn’t even in the country. His base was Saigon. The four Lodgers, two men and two women, never dreamed they could actually win. But they sincerely believed in their candidate and they were having a great time campaigning. It was more fun than it was work, partly because they didn’t take their chances seriously and no one else did either. Neither Rocky’s people nor Goldwater’s were conducting any ‘stop Lodge’ activities. But four determined people, count em four, managed to pull off one of the greatest political upsets in US history. Henry Cabot Lodge, a write-in candidate who wasn’t running, a man who wasn’t even in the country, won the 1964 New Hampshire Republican primary. The final score was (in thousands) Lodge 33, Goldy 20, Rocky 19 and Nixon 15 (also a write in candidate.
The victory of Lodge as a neighboring state favorite son of a gun destroyed Rockefeller. Most of Lodges votes would have gone to Rockefeller and he would have won handily in New Hampshire.
The next primary was Oregon on May 15. Rockefeller won big here 94 to 79 over Lodge (dislodging him for good), with Goldwater scoring only 50. Even Nixon who was not running almost beat Goldwater in Oregon scoring 48 thousand.
So the Republican Party woke up breathing easier on the 16th. The threat from that kook Goldwater was over. Staid Republican establishment leaders could go back to their lives and stop fretting over the Arizona Senator who was as unelectable as he was intemperate, and because he was.
The California primary was coming up on June 2. Goldwater had been anathema to hippie Republican farmers in Oregon, and would in turn supposedly have little appeal to northern California mellows. But Southern California is loaded with rednecks. And they weren’t understated Yankee New England conservatives who might betray him for someone elsed. Barry was a hero in an Orange county that was close in color to Gold. Here was Barry's Goldwater’s chance.
Most east coast people think of Southern California as laid back lefty land, but they either have never lived there, or they judge all of Southern California by the West Hollywood crowd they run with. There’s a giant voting block of right wingers in Southern Cal that don’t take no backseat to any southern fire-eater in Alabama or Idaho. Try burning the American flag at a shopping mall in Garden Grove and you’ll get the point.
It was a close fight and voter turnout was heavy. Most of the pre-game polls gave Rockefeller a slight advantage, but it was obviously going to be close. The Rockefeller campaign was bogged down by its riches. There was a fear that if his billboards were too numerous and large, and his radio ads were too frequent, then the voters would be turned off that he was Richie Rich buying the election with family dough, a Republican Kennedy without the cutie pie looks and charm. So Rocky fought in California with one hand tied behind his back. He couldn’t use his best weapon, big money. He could have, but fear of a backlash led to a decision not to.
Goldwater won by a fraction of 51%. He got 1,120,000 votes to 1,052,000 for Rockefeller. So Lodge had won New Hampshire, Rockefeller had won Oregon, and Goldwater had won California. But Goldwater was way ahead in the states that did not hold primaries, states where candidates were chosen by caucus. His people had been working harder than any other candidate’s forces in these states. Mr. Goldwater was further ahead than a singular marginal win in California might indicate.
The public might not have been aware of this big edge Goldwater had in the non-primary states, but his Party did. There was a panic party in the Party. The mainstream party troops and the old guard leadership had two reasons to panic. First of all BG wasn’t electable. The second reason was that if Goldwater won the nomination it would be a severe defeat within the Party because it would change its constitution. The extreme right had taken over the party like a Bolshevik coup, a minority of a party claiming a majority through bold leadership and aggressive politicking.
Was it too late to stop Barry? Eisenhower hoped there was still time. The General had been annoying every other Republican candidate for two years with his fence-sitting, almost endorsing a guy, then pulling back and denying his official support. After California, Ike may have well wished he had picked a team and rode the wagon early on. If Ike had long endorsed Romney, Lodge, Scranton or even Nixon, one of these could have at least beat Goldwater. It’s possible that none of the four could have beaten LBJ anyway, but they could have at least saved the Party from losing it’s soul to its extreme right.
The conservative conservatives turned to Governor Scranton of Pennsylvania to jump into the race and maybe stir up a storm in the nick of time to give the Party back the ‘Eastern Establishment.’
Ike and the “Eastablishment” were further displeased with Goldwater for his voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Scranton jumped in and fought hard but couldn’t get ahead of Rockefeller or Goldwater let alone beat them both.
The Republicans held their convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Goldwater had the nomination locked up before the Convention began but the stage was useful for his opponents. Goldy-haters of both Parties demonstrators demonstrated against him from inside and outside the Palace. Outside the arena, demonstrators of all sorts performed for the news cameras. Sarcastic signs read “Goldwater for President – Jefferson Davis for Vice President” or “Goldwater; Courage, Integrity, Bigotry.” Fellow republicans let him have it from within.
Virtually all the powerful leaders of the Republican Party either openly opposed or supported only lukewarmly, candidate Goldwater. They damned with faint support the Election of 1964 in order to save the Party from becoming the instrument of its right wing. Many made defiant speeches at the convention and were booed by the Goldwater supporters. It sent a bad signal to the nation, undermining the image of unity so vital to success. It was one thing for Democrats to call your candidate a bum, but when your own party is doing it, it is much more damaging. Republican Pat Buchanan can testify to that based on his disgraceful tearing down of President Bush in the 1992 primaries to satisfy his own lust for power.
The Scranton campaign sent Goldwater a nasty letter of condemnation on the eve of his nomination. Goldwater knew Scranton and could tell that his signature was faked. Barry correctly surmised that Scranton’s subordinates had lost temperance when they took on an assignment to write this letter and that Billy Scranton would never have approved it as written. But Goldwater did have copies of the letter (in paragraph 11 Barry was called a “wild turkey”) distributed all about the Convention. This mean missive turned the Party all the more against Scranton and creating a rush of support for Godlwater.
Scranton and Rocky still made defiant speeches at the convention and the Goldwater supporters booed them as they talked. It made great TV and blasted Rockefeller out of the water at his own victory party.
Goldwater won the nomination and in his speech made what is now properly considered one of the most famous verbal blunders in American political history. He knew he was being called an extremist all the time so he thought he’d embrace it and build a house with the bricks other people threw at him. He said,
“Extremism in the name of liberty is no vice!”
The crowd cheered, but cheered with some hesitation. They cheered because there were being cued to cheer by the structure of the speech, the oratorical tone, and because of the moment in place and time. But you can hear some “did he just say what I think he said?” in the tone of the cheering. It is exactly the same cheer that Mike Dukakis got in 1988 when he said incompetently, “This election is not about ideology .. it is about competence!”
Goldwater piled on with a follow-up aphorism for the ages,
“Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
This time there was no hesitation. The crowd went berserk. A thousand and more angry faces directed screams of hatred at the press box in the middle of the floor. Some members of the press later claimed that they felt genuinely threatened. John Chancellor was arrested near the stage for violating the boundary rules for reporters. He signed off with, “This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.” It was the one time in his career he wasn't boring.
Extremism in the name of anything is of course a vice, and moderation is a virtue, period. Goldwater had uttered two of the most idiotic things ever said on this planet, let alone by a guy running for President in his acceptance speech. What a way to start the race. Goldwater was likely to go down in flames in 64 anyway. He didn’t have to start out by dousing himself with Zippo lighter fluid.
Goldwater's victory sent Scranton and the Eastablishment down with the ship in 1964. The liberal wing torpedoed their own Loose-lip-itania liner rather than see it fall into hostile hands. Their sabotage was a cry to the American people that this is not what this party really stands for. The saboteurs also correctly rationalized that they weren’t damaging an electable candidate so they were only throwing away a shot at the White House they didn’t have.
Goldwater had two main slogans.
One was “A Choice Not an Echo.” Not much fire in that one. I couldn't figure out what the hell it meant until I read more about it. A Choice not an Echo meant that Eisenhower, that so-called Republican, had recently given us 8 years of watered-down big government FDRism, not real Republican conservatism. Ike’s Fifties were therefore just an “echo” of the New Deal. But with Goldwater you had a choice between the big Federal government of the past 32 years, or something new and old-fashioned conservative. You had a choice; either Johnson liberalism or true conservatism. A stupid slogan really, but that’s what it meant.
The other slogan was “Goldwater; In your heart, you know he’s right.” That’s bad because it implies that on the surface we all think he obviously sounds wrong. The “in your heart” part is an indictment of his electability. 'We know he sounds like a lunatic cracker that wants to start a war but in your heart, you know he’s right.' You’d never say, “He’s totally qualified, a born and proven leader and a great thinker, but in your heart you know he’s right.” That doesn’t even make sense. It reminds me of the banner that used to hang in the baseball stadium in Minneapolis, “We Like it Here.” You'd never see that in New York or Chicago because it goes without saying.
LBJ staffer Bill Moyers joked of Goldwater, “In your heart you know he’s extreme right.”
I have an idea that could have saved his candidacy. A TV ad to hook them. Use a song parody to catch everyone's attention. Switch the Goldfinger song to Goldwater. That James Bond movie was released in 1964. The excellent title song by Shirley Bassey could be changed to sing,
“Vote for Goldwater. He's man a man who's smart and tough.
We've had enough.”
Goldwater’s campaign was a little like Jimmy Carter’s in 1976. It was a great campaign, a grass-roots hard-work upset by the underdog, and a true case of Jacksonian Democracy at work. But Carter was electable because he leaned to the center of the board and he was running against Gerald Ford. Goldwater leaned towards one of edges on the board and was running against LBJ and the ghost of JFK.
It was Barry the unelectable against Lyndon the unlikable, and it was one of the most not even close races ever. Johnson had a huge early lead in all the polls and never looked back. 64 made Dole-Clinton look like a cliffhanger.
Now for the Veep. The Party chooses its candidate but the candidate usually chooses the Vice President. Front runners for #2 in the Democratic Party think tanks were Adlai Stevenson and Bobby Kennedy. Mrs. Johnson had a lot of influence on her husband on this one. To Mrs. Johnson, the choice was which liberal Senator from Minnesota should it be? The very liberal one (Humphrey) or the very, very liberal one (McCarthy.) Gino McCarthy was too liberal for Ladybird's husband, so he was out.
Millions of Americans would have welcomed Robert Kennedy on the ticket. The Kennedy name and Bobby’s close relationship to Jack would have meant votes. But all polls indicated that Johnson was going to win even if he named Jack the Ripper as his VP. So Bobby was not needed. Johnson was trying to establish himself as president on his own. He had been unable to win the nomination over John Kennedy in 1960 and now he was free of them. Did he really want to get right back into the shadow of the Kennedy greatness less than a year after he shook them off? The fact that Lyndon personally hated Robert Kennedy might influence his decision making process also. The fact that Bobby Kennedy had been opposed to Lyndon being named Vice-President in 1960 factored in just a bit too.
Lyndon called Bobby into his office on July 29 1964 at 1 p.m. and told him frankly that he was not going to name him for Vice President. Robert handled it with class and offered his support to help Lyndon win. Johnson later told the press with glee how Bobby had “just gulped.” When Johnson told reporters the story he mocked that gulp in imitation. Johnson had deliberately taken the press into his “confidence,” telling them an off the record story about how he had humiliated Kennedy, knowing full well the story would be leaked. Later Bobby confronted him on the stories coming out in the press about their private 1 p.m. meeting, and Lyndon swore up and down that he had not told a soul.
Lyndon won the battle but lost the war for his party. Sure, he didn’t need no ‘little pip squeak’ like Bobby Kennedy to win the election. But what about 1968?
Lyndon picked Hubert Humphrey instead of Kennedy in 64. Lyndon did not want Humphrey on the ticket either. Humphrey was a threat to Johnson's ego, just like Bobby, but without the extra personal element. Humphrey was the star liberal of the democratic Party and LBJ had a fantasy that he was. He wanted to win completely on his own if he could.
Most of the Party advisors told Lyndon that he needed Humphrey but he gt grouchy whenever anyone said that. Johnson kept pushing the idea of lesser lights that he could control as VP. The name of Senator Mike Mansfield came up a lot.
Robert Kennedy helped get Humphrey chosen against Johnson's will by letting the leaks hang around that he might make an open challenge for the VP spot at the Atlantic City DNC unless Johnson made an open commitment to pick Humphrey. Bobby wanted to throw his hat into the NY Senate Race as soon as possible, and he didn't want to make it look like he was accepting the senate as a consolation prize only when LBJ didn't pick him in AC. But Powers and O'Donnell convinced Bobby to not announce for NY Senate just to scare LBJ into making an open choice for Humphrey because Humphrey was the only candidate in the field who represented heart and soul of the John F Kennedy political bent. Johnson chose Humphrey to keep RFK at bay, and then RFK went of to run for NY senator. Johnson never knew until it was too late that RFK never would accepted the VP under Johnson even if had been offered up on a platter. He hated Johnson as much as Johnson hated him.
Turned out Humphrey could not beat Richard Nixon in 1968 with a strong economy. Johnson sabotaged the party in 64 by neglecting the man who could have won in a waltz in 1968 if he had been the sitting vice-president. And the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a freak incident of precise circumstances surrounding a hard working candidate without Secret Service support, probably would not have happened if he was the sitting VP with a diplomatic schedule.
Johnson informed the public at a press conference that he was not going to consider any sitting member of his cabinet for the post of Vice-President and with that the name of RFK was out of the hunt.
Now who? Future Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was a strong candidate, but party loyalists disapproved of him because Mr. Mac had been a Republican until only just recently. It didn’t seem fair to the Party to have him a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Sergeant Shriver of Peace Corps fame who just happened to be John Kennedy’s brother-in-law was considered. But Johnson rejected him because he just happened to be John Kennedy’s brother-in-law.
At first the Democrats thought they might have to pick a 'noreaster. They might need some support in the Northeast if a popular Eastablishment guy like Rockefeller or Scranton won the nomination for the Republicans. But when Goldwater became the Elephantine flag bearer, Johnson was free to pick from any part of the country he chose to. The Democrats had the northeast in the bag.
Johnson didn’t need another Southerner either, so he looked to the Midwest where two good choices held senate seats from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey. Gino McCarthy was a liberal’s liberal and a Catholic too. The idea of balancing the Protestant Johnson with a Catholic McCarthy VP was appealing to some strategists, a reversal of 1960, but for the same goal.
But Johnson thought that was insincere. “Religious McCarthyism,” he snapped. Johnson chose instead the senior Senator from Minnesota. Humphrey was one of the most talented, capable, and sincere Senators in the country and everyone knew it. Both Johnson and Humphrey had moved to the Capitol Building in 1949. Hubie battled for progressive Civil Rights legislation throughout his career, whereas Lyndon had been a redneck segregationist in his voting record until 1960 when he changed his tune expediently with the times. Humphrey balanced Johnson’s red neck with his own blue collar.
Hubie would not only help with the black vote, he was the best friend that labor could ever see on the ticket. President Johnson asked the president of the AFL-CIO to name his top three preferences for Vice President. He replied, “Humphrey, Humphrey and Humphrey.”
FANNIE LOU HAMER AND THE MFDP
The Democratic Convention of 1964 took place in Convention Hall, Atlantic City, home of the Miss America contest. But in 1964 it ended up holding the ‘Ol Miss. America contest’. The Convention challenged Mississippi to abandon its ol’ racist ways.
A black activist group called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party invaded AC and forced America to face the racism in the South and the responsibility of the Democratic party for the lion's share of it.
In 2007 I was in AC with my mother-in-law and when we passed the famed Convention Hall I mentioned that the Democratic Convention was held there in 1964.
“Fannie Lou Hamer,” she said without missing a beat. It was a name I had never heard of.
Hamer was a young black woman from Mississippi and the keynote speaker for the MFDP. Her moving story of personal abuse at the hands of racist cops in the South was a spotlight moment in American history. It was one thing for a do-gooder white liberal to write an article about these issues in the Village Voice. It was another for Hamer to send out to every street in America the voice of a woman whose story was as bad as Rodney King, yet her only crime was that she wanted to vote! Fannie wasn’t some big masculine felon who got drunk and charged the police. She was a young black woman who wanted to vote and that was all. That was her crime for which Southern policemen beat her in her cell. The cops then forced a black male prisoner whom they had already beaten, to beat Miss Hamer some more, a sadistic crime worthy of an SS prison. It must have been a little bit satisfying for her to indict Mississippi on national TV. She could never have foreseen this from her cell with her wounds still fresh.
It should be emphasized that by 1964, most of the states of the South had thrown in the racist towel. Places like Tennessee and North Carolina were liberalizing at an acceptable rate. But the two stubborn flags were those of Mississippi and Alabama. It was 'you and me against the world, Bama. Rite on, Ol’ Miss.'
The MFDP was not authorized by the Democratic Party to use the D word in the title. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party did not have formal delegates to the convention and had not been funded or supported by the white Democratic leadership. MFDP challenged that leadership to accept a protest against themselves as a way of indirectly supporting the goals of their ostensible adversaries. It was like when the liberal family bought Dred Scott to help him sue them for his legal freedom. The Dems welcomed the MFDP protest because they supported their goals and feared their wrath if they had been kept out on the Boardwalk in the hot sun.
The MFDP demanded recognition and the Dems had to plead that they could not give it. They would however allow a speech by Hamer to the floor. Two delegates from the MFDP were accredited in the end but not after a tough argument with Mississippi and Alabama.
The Miss-Bama delegations were all white, and were criticized accurately for being an exclusive racist bunch. They had the power but not the moral momentum. The MFDP delegation was an extralegal organization with no formal power within the Party but the Democratic Party supported it. They had the morals and the mo. The racist states had the power cord but not the juice.
The two delegates were a compromise between what the blacks wanted and what the racist whites wanted. But Mississippi and Alabama had to pay a price even for the compromise. In agreeing to not seat the full MFDP delegation, the Party included a new rule that beginning with the next election and all to follow, “no delegations would be seated from states where the Party process deprived citizens of the right to vote by reason of their race or color.”
MORE ATLANTIC CITY 64
The MFDP story settled down as the Convention progressed. The race issue had been addressed enough as far as Johnson was concerned. In fact, both candidates had a gentlemen’s agreement from hereon in to leave the race issue out of the campaign and they stuck to it. The two nominees only spoke of the race issue once each on the post convention campaign trail. The agreement to not discuss the race issue has historical similarities to the pre-Civil War elections in which the candidates agreed to avoid the slavery question in the campaign, the one issue on every American’s mind.
The 64 gag rule on racial unrest hurt Goldwater much more than Johnson because Goldwater had already voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the public had reacted to him accordingly. He had nothing to lose by taking on the issue and trying to clarify his positions in a way that reduced his redneck image. Johnson had nowhere to go but down if the race issue were brought to the forefront, since his past was not good, and since he was the signer of the Civil Rights Act, silence on the subject was to his advantage.
Johnson made sure that Bobby Kennedy would not address the convention until after the nomination of President and VP. He didn’t trust Bobby and Bobby in turn once told a colleague that he hoped Lyndon would “stumble off a cruise ship on a stormy night in the icy North Atlantic.” It wasn't a good relationship.
Once he had the nomination and the Mississippi controversy in control it was 'Milk the Ghost” night in AC. They showed a sentimental film about the John Kennedy and then Bobby made a speech in which he quoted Shakespeare. Something about the “garish night.” I don't like Shakespeare.
In any case the speech by Bobby and the film about Jack was an emotion earthquake. Just about everyone in Convention Hall was in tears. Janitors who didn’t speak a word of English were crying. A stray cat got in from the Boardwalk and it too, was crying. It knew the audience was being milked and it wanted some. American TV viewers following suit by the million. It was one of the saddest nights in American history as Johnson exploited the Kennedy death for his own selfish purposes.
Just after midnight Teddy White was walking along the Boardwalk. He passed a flashing neon billboard of Goldwater and that dreadful slogan “In your heart you know he’s right.” Then Ted spotted someone he recognized as Pierre Salinger, the former Press Secretary for JFK and later the famous news correspondent for many years on ABC news. Salinger had worked for LBJ in the same capacity. Just days earlier Salinger was appointed US Senator from California after death had opened up a vacancy there. Pierre would be running on the same ticket indirectly with Johnson in November but would lose the California seat largely because of accusations of carpet-bagging. He’d only recently moved to the left coast.
White tried to talk to Salinger but Pierre apologized and had to turn away. He was obviously crying like a baby. The film and the speech had really shook him up.
Johnson campaigned on the contradictory issues of prosperity and poverty. He emphasized that he was going to enlist maximum federal support for a war on poverty in America. But LB also emphasized prosperity, boasting that he and Kennedy had given the country four years of prosperity.
What chance does any challenger have against a sitting President in a boom period of economic happiness? The Dow Jones Industrial Average was 733 on the day before Kennedy was shot in Dallas. When the Democrats held their convention in Atlantic City the Dow was up to 851 after a steady climb. (the Dow is the collective price of one share of the top 30 stocks. When you include the halo of the Kennedy torch and Johnson’s political skills it is really hard to imagine a Republican who could have beaten Lyndon in 64.
DAISEY SPOT
I was nine years old in 1964 and I distinctly remember seeing the famous ‘Daisy Spot,’ a commercial made by the Democrats that showed a little girl picking daisies while the audio overdub was a voice of a nuclear missile countdown to launch. The ad ends with a nuclear explosion, and solemn plea to vote for Johnson because the stakes are too high to risk on untested Barry G. leadership.
The Daisy spot was going for the Gold jugular. There was not a single adult I ever overheard talking in politics in 1964 that did not say with absolute certainty to another adult or to me, “If Goldwater gets elected we will have World War III.” I heard this probably 200 times, and never heard any opinion to the contrary. Naturally I believed it. If somehow this nine year old had been allowed to vote, I certainly would have voted for Johnson out of fear of Goldwater. I used to wonder how the country allowed such a lunatic to even run for president.
By the way the Daisy Spot was only shown one time. I remember seeing it. I watched a lot of TV back then.
Lyndon Johnson Throws the Republican Out of the Ring, 1964
In 1964 LBJ (who liked to use the three initials moniker because he worshipped FDR) took Senator Goldwater down hard, but really he was riding the coat tails of the man he hated. The snipers in Dealey Plaza won the election of 64 for Johnson.
As for Vietnam, I have to give the liberal historians credit where it is due. When it comes to their zeal to Blame America First, they do not single out the Republicans. They go after Dem Johnson with bare knuckles. MacLear and Herring both condemn Johnson for not telling the American public that while the D campaign painted Goldwater as a dangerous irresponsible chauvinist hawk that was going to escalate the war in Vietnam, the Johnson team was secretly planning to do the exact same thing as soon as they won the election.
Goldwater later reflected on the election with the valid excuse and observation, “The country simply wasn’t ready for three presidents in two and a half years.”
Gentiles rarely are aware of a white person being Jewish or not, although Jews don’t always believe us. I’d studied the 1964 campaign many times over the years and lived through it as a boy. I never knew until I was 52 that Goldwater was a Jew. I should have added up the Goldberg Goldstein Goldwater connection. But not until Teddy White’s mini-bio mentioned that his grandfather was a Polish Jew from Konin by the name of Mike Goldwasser did it dawn on me that BG was a major Jewish candidate for President. In 2004 when Al Gore named Joe Leiberman as his VP candidate, the news networks 2004 focused singularly on his Jewishness and the historic moment of a Jew running for such high office. “Not since John Kennedy in 1960 has such a controversial religious choice been made at the top of the ticket.” Many younger reporters simply did not realize that Goldwater in 64 was a Jew that ran at the top of the ticket and Lieberman was not breaking any new ground.
The Election of 1964 was the only one in my lifetime in which a decisive number of Republicans refused to support their own candidate. Perhaps it was Henry Lodge that was mostly to blame. If he had insisted on withdrawing from the New Hampshire primary to make room for a Rocky victory, then Nelson would have won even bigger in Oregon and almost certainly would have continued on to victory in the California primary. With California’s delegates Nellie probably would have overcome the Goldwater effort in the non-primary states too.
The bottom line for the election of 1964 is best summed up by a sign on the floor of the Atlantic City Democratic Convention. It read, “Goldwater. In Your Heart You Know He Might.” Meaning, he might use the bomb and start WWIII.
The VP also-ran for the Republicans was William Miller. His daughter, Stephanie Miller is now a divisive acerbic unreasonable and hateful left wing talk-show host who could never get to first base as a political pundit without her name, her previous experience as a normal TV show presenter, and her extremism style. I would hope that her father is rolling in his grave with each of her unfair selectively informed at best tirades. Political extremism in the shrewd pursuit of personal career gain is a vice. Miller claims to be the anti-dote to all those hostile right wing talk show hosts. That’s true. There are plenty of first class nasty jerks in the right-wing talk show field and this divider matches their horrible hatreds tit for tat. I've listened to her work many times on the radio and on TV.
Lyndon Johnson told reporters during the 1964 campaign of how in his youth he used to tell his opponents to “go to hell,” but with age came wisdom and his slogan evolved full circle into Isaiah’s “Come, let us reason together.” I have heard the shrill Stephanie many times and she is a sad commentary on these two opposite approaches. There’s no one shriller than Stephanie Miller.
In 2008 Stephanie Miller was the VP nominee on a phony ticket called 'Goldwater-Miller for President.' Sue Goldwater, the ticket’s Pat Paulsonian presidential candidate was the granddaughter of Barry Goldwater. Their premise was that since George Bush is completely unqualified to be President and only made it because of family name, they would do the same thing. I guess these two women were both once acting governors of a major state.
VIETNAM 65
Many called it “Westy's War.” General Westmoreland was the lead voice calling for more troops. MacNamara asked him how many he needed early in 1965 and Westy said 40,000 more for starters. Mac said “consider it done, and in the future, tell me what you need.” MacNamara denies making it that open-ended but that's what Wild Bill says in his fine book, If You Hippies Only Knew.
1965 was the year in which the United States made the decision to truly go to war in Vietnam. 20,000 American military men were in Nam on New Years day 1965, and 22% of these were still pretending to be “advisors.” On New Years's Day 1966 there were 278,000 soldiers and a few advisors in South Vietnam.
What was more important was they way Nam things were being discussed, written about and decided at the highest levels. Johnson was giving his military everything it asked for and pledging to keep doing it. There were virtual commitments in place for another three hundred thousand there in the near future! If the American people knew about all of this, the huge anti-war protests might have started before a half a million troops were over there.
The decision to intervene in force was made for a number of reasons which altogether added up to a green light.
First and foremost, the Americans on the ground in South Vietnam both civilian and military, were warning Johnson that the South Vietnamese Army was in danger of being overrun on the battlefield. Without US intervention in force, the war would simply be lost. If that happened, the United States would have put ten years of effort into Southeast Asia only to see complete defeat of its key ally. The goal of stopping the advance of Communism in Southeast Asia would be an abject failure.
Johnson kept asking his military leaders how many troops were needed as the year 1965 went on. The answer came back over and over, ‘as many as it takes until the situation is at least stabilized.’ The military wasn’t even asking for enough troops to win! They were asking only for as many troops as it took to stabilize the situation on the battlefield.
The Cold War was in full swing and the perception of most people in the world at the time was that the US and the Soviets and Chinese were fighting a hot war by proxy in Southeast Asia. It was Korea II but in disguise. There was Cold War morale on both sides to sustain this for some time, even in the United States. Political gains outweighed the risk of political cost, at least in 1965.
M-14
The famous GI rifle of the Vietnam War was the M-16. That is fairly well-known. What it less well known is that during the first two years of the full-scale Vietnam War, 1965-1966, most of the soldiers had antiquated M-14's. There weren't enough M-16's to outfit the vast majority of American troops until 1967.
In the meantime, even the better M-16 was no match for the VC rifle of choice, the Russian-made AK-47. It pains me to even think that our average soldier was outgunned in Vietnam in a one to one rifle fight with a VC. That hurts. But it's the truth. The M-16 was more accurate. But the light AK-47 spread out a burst of fire that would have been the envy of any WWII machine-gun platoon, creating a killing field from which few could escape. The AK-47 made the worst shooter on the team tied with the best shooter on the team. A blind man could take out a running rabbit with a 47 at a hundred yards, while each US soldier had his skill or lack of it with his 16 heater.
I would love to say that the M-16 was far more reliable, but it wasn't. 16 jammed up plenty of times and cost men lives. It was also much more complicated to break down for cleaning and repair than the user-friendly AK-47. Bad people are still using the AK-47 today. No one is hijacking embassies with M-16's.
MINUTIONS COMPANIES STARTED THE WAR
I don’t think there is any truth to the charge that the big munitions companies were pushing the US government into the war. War leads to more government regulation and big business hate that the most. They said that about World War I. The liberal scholars said that big munitions companies deliberately caused World War I because they wanted their profits to go through the roof. They say it about Nam. I just can't believe that and I won't believe that. I'm just telling you that they say that.
PLEIKU 2-65
On February 7, 1965 the VC attacked an American airplane base at Pleiku and a helicopter base four miles away. Seven Americans died and over seventy were wounded. In 1968 this would have been just another day in Vietnam but in February 1965 this was big news. Several US aircraft were destroyed and a dozen helicopters seriously damaged.
Johnson responded to the Pleiku attack by authorizing a bombing campaign against North Vietnamese targets titled OPERATION FLAMING DART.
Liberal histories of the war say that the Pleiku attack was a mere excuse for a policy of air war that Johnson and his team of advisors were itching to put into action anyway. Other historians do not agree and say that the aggressions of the North sparked US responses, with Pleiku as a key milestone in the process. There is probably some truth to both extreme versions with a blend of the two being the real truth. Its almost silly to take one side and condemn the other as a lie. Yet 98% of the historians do it.
The next major US escalation came in March of 1965. The situation on the ground was deteriorating and the ARVN was losing one battle after another to the fanatical Viet Cong fighters.
On March 8, 1965 3,500 Marines were deployed to Da Nang South Vietnam ostensibly to protect the US airbase there. This was the first open commitment of our fighting forces. These men were not arriving as advisors. Few would have guessed that this was the beginning of a gradual escalation that would top a half a million men and 72 women.
The liberals writers love to mock this Da Nang Marine landing by depicting them wading ashore in full battle gear with fixed bayonets while the only enemy there to meet them were friendly young Vietnamese women in grass skirts smiling and waving. All right, this probably did happen and it was probably an embarrassing scene. But do these writers suggest these men weren't doomed to fight the deadly fights soon enough? Do the liberal Namtorians ever cite stories of American bravery in combat in Vietnam? No. Never. They only praise the enemy, telling us what tenacious fighters they were. They quote American commanders only when they praise the courage of the VC, but never ever quote an enemy source praising American skill or tenacity.
Dean Rusk later said that the reason the build-up was so gradual was because he did not want to provoke a reaction from Hanoi’s ally in Moscow. He did want to have to force the Soviets into
“an orgasm of decision-making based on world-wide strategic considerations.”
That's ruske language, Dean.
So the USA under Johnson was not only afraid to attack North Vietnam for fear of provoking the Chinese, wee also fought Nam afraid of the Russians. The USA lost the chance to gain advantage in the Cold War with a spotlighted show of force because of fear of provoking the Russians or the Chinese. All over the world the Russians and the Chinese provoked us wherever, however, and whenever they wanted, but we dare not ever provoke them. Maybe Johnson should have scrapped the NASA space program out of fear of provoking India.
Johnson, Rusk, McNamara and others concluded in July 1965 (the Rubicon as more than one author calls 7-65) that without a large commitment of US troops, South Vietnam would lose the war outright within a year or two at the most.
One of the orthodox historical opinions on Lyndon Johnson and the decisions he made on Vietnam is that he was afraid to make open commitments to Vietnam because he was afraid this would ruin his visionary dream of the “Great Society.” This is largely the work of Doris Day Kearns Goodwin Baxter Birney who sold this grand angle in her famous book on Johnson. Now a sadly large number of people buy this. Can a man who is needlessly cruel to waiters and his own wife in public really be that full of humanitarian motive? History, controlled by Democratic university liberals buys his expedient song and dance about his great compassion. The Goodwin two-shoes version of LBJ goes like this.
Johnson was an unbelievably caring liberal who lived for one thing and one thing only; to see the poor helped, to see civil rights granted to blacks and to help the less fortunate in every way. But Vietnam could cost the government so much money that there was no bread left for his “Great Society.” Johnson could not afford to lose the political capital he had at the Capitol and Vietnam could cost him that too. How could he expect Congresspersons to support his Great Society if he had to first ask them to support a vaguely popular war? So for these reason he increased our commitments in Vietnam without explaining things directly to the American people. He brought us into a war by the back door because he knew it was the only way he could still hold on to any dream of his Great Society.
I don't buy that at all. The Great Society was a mere slogan, like “The Fair Deal” of Truman, or the “New Covenant” of Bill Clinton. Actions are measured individually, not against some grandiose slogan scheme. Johnson was not a genuine liberal and never was. Comedian Lenny Bruce addressed an audience of 2,000 Berkeley students in 1966 and spoke of Johnson in head-shaking terms, suggesting that after he became president it took Lyndon six months to learn how to say ‘negro.’ The crowd howled and applauded. There must have been a reason why the audience howled and applauded. Johnson was a redneck Texan with an old fashioned racial attitude, who was politically wise enough to know what positions to take officially once he climbed the powerful Democratic ladder. He also felt the rush of change pushing him from behind.
There was no reason why the US could not support a war abroad and social reform at home, both financially and morally. His plea to Doris Kearns that this was the essential dilemma with his Vietnam policy holds no weight at this particular typewriter, even if it does at hers. What’s sad is not that she bought it, that is to be expected. What’s sad is that history has bought it.
'CROSSING THE RUBICON - JULY 1965
Johnson summoned his think tank for a series of dramatic meetings. The inner circle debated and Johnson did more listening than talking. In the end he decided for massive escalation.
The hawks were Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara and General Westmoreland. These two men were formally asking the president for another 100,000 troops for South Vietnam in 1965 and probably as many more in 1966.
Their views on the need for this escalation was backed up by most of the other important players, including the head of the CIA, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
The domino theory ruled at these meetings. Everyone agreed that there was a threat to our chance of winning the Cold War if we let the Communists take over Southeast Asia. Even those who opposed this escalation, and there were only two, did not deny the domino theory. The opponents simply felt that this was was not winnable, and we should cut our losses and take a stand against the Communists somewhere else. This was no Korea. Vietnam wasn't surrounded on three sides by international waters, like in Korea. The U.S. couldn't use its naval might with strategic impact, as it did in Korea. The South Vietnamese government we supported was not reliable, nor very democratic. The longer we stayed, the more the American people would turn against it.
The two men who tried to tell Johnson that the Vietnam War was a loser were George Ball and Clark Clifford. Ball was Deputy Secretary of State (Under) and Clifford was a Special Council to the President. SCP was a close friend and brilliant powerful person who got to hang around the President and whisper in his ear all the time. Harry Hopkins had that job with FDR, Mike Deaver had that job for a while with Reagan, and Hillary had it with Bill Clinton.
Michelle is the brain in Obama's ear too.
In a series of dramatic meetings in Washington in July of 65 the proponents and opponents of escalation in Vietnam argued their cases to the President.
George Ball argued for withdrawal, even allowing that this was essentially a cut and run. It was unusual for an Undersecretary of State to espouse a point of view on an important subject that was not in sync with the views of his superior, the Secretary of State. But Deano Rusk welcomed respectful disagreement from his number two. Rusk was secure enough to want to have a talented number two who was not a rubber stamp for the Boss' views.
Ball and Cliff were opposed by all the other military and civilian advisors as well as two Ambassadors to Vietnam. Johnson accepted the majority conclusion.
Politically, Johnson had been afraid to withdraw or make a major escalation in 1964 until the election was over. Now he would have three years to repair the damage from the right if he withdrew, and from the left if he escalated. Either way he could make a call and survive.
The heads of the Armed Services backed McNamara. But he wanted opinions on what 100,000 more troops would and would not accomplish.
All of the war wizards were still a little intoxicated from the victory over the Soviets in the Cuban missile crisis. After staring down the great Soviet Union in a nuclear showdown the idea that a little country like Vietnam could defeat the United States was remote. This wine of the Cuba victory might have left the decision makers still a little high when looking at Indochina.
Johnson had decided to bomb the North. But he would have to send in at the very least enough troops to protect our airfields while we did that. The carriers couldn't do it all and land-based air wars need protected airfields to work from. So bombing the North meant ground troops even if the idea of using air power was to avoid ground troops.
The military men consistently avoided telling Johnson this connection between air power and ground troops. The President often entertained the idea of air strikes alone to turn the tide in Vietnam, while the military never advised him of the required ground support needed for effective air strikes.
Near the end of July 1965, Lyndon addressed the nation and announced that 50,000 US combat troops were going to be sent to Vietnam. The war was on. He added that additional troops would probably be required before the end of the year. He did not say how many.
The Johnson team decided that an air campaign would commence against North Vietnam. US bombing would increase gradually, giving the North an opportunity at any time to cry uncle Ho, and ask for a negotiated settlement. It was a strategy designed to reduce the ‘shock and awe’ effect of bombing, not maximize it. By increasing the bombing in careful dosages, the United States gave the North Vietnamese time to develop counter-strategies to cope with the bombing, such an elaborate tunneling system that enabled guns, tanks and families to live underground safely during the next raids.
Russia and China gave the North Vietnamese free of charge all the anti-aircraft weapons that could be deployed effectively at any and all locations, especially around Haiphong where the Soviets delivered supplies by ship.
The White House closely monitored the air campaign. Johnson told the press that there wasn’t an outhouse in North Vietnam that could be bombed without his specific approval.
On the ground it was different. The jungle war was much more complex and General Westmoreland was given an independent hand in conducting ground ops. The more he got the more Westmoreland wanted. Soon the US would be spraying Vietnamese jungles with toxic chemicals to remove the hiding place for the enemy. Westmoreland met with Douglas MacArthur who told Westy to “scare the Orientals with artillery, and by all means defoliate.” The General asked LBJ for more men, more guns and more agent orange. Westmoreland wanted to waste more land.
Support for the tall president was fairly strong at this point in time. The Congress, the press and the public at large were still on board. The cold war by proxy was an accepted fact in the national consciousness. The Korean War was the legal precedent overshadowing the Vietnam War from the start. Unpopular while it was being fought, the Korean Conflict was enjoying a revisionist comeback as a victory for the good guys, which it was.
Rostow at the State Department wanted the US to bomb North Vietnamese industrial centers, but Johnson rejected this. We don’t want to give the enemy the impression that this is a war, now do we? Incredibly, the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong was not employed throughout the war partly because the threat of doing it was considered a political bargaining chip worth holding on to.
The trump card in Vietnam was the Chinese border. Johnson had Yalu fever. He was afraid to fight the war the old-fashioned way, to attack and win, because he was afraid of Chinese military intervention. He saw the northern border of North Vietnam as Truman saw the Yalu River, a hot zone to beat all hot zones. It was as if the USSR was fighting on one side in a civil war in Mexico. The northern boundary of North Vietnam was such a dangerous political hot zone that it ruined our ability to properly fight the war from a military standpoint. We were always afraid to occupy enemy territory. If that was to be our attitude, we should have withdrawn from Vietnam.
When Ball tried to explain his 'out now' argument with McNamara, he was asked if withdrawing from Vietnam would make it easier or more difficult for the USA wage the Cold War elsewhere in the world in the immediate future. Ball had no quick answer. McNamara even conceded that the war might not be winnable, but he gave a good argument that fighting a partial war to stabilize the situation in South Vietnam was the least worst of all the bad choices, even without disputing any of the objections of Cliff and Ball.
CIVIL WRONGS ACT 1965
Johnson signed the famous Civil Rights Act in 1965, the greatest deed of his years in power. It was really designed to correct civil wrongs that had been directed against African-Americans for 100 years. From now on, blacks could not be strong-armed out of their right to vote by devious laws, such as the poll tax. Blacks nationwide would benefit from the law, but the real target of the revisionism was the segregation and discrimination in the South. When he signed the law in the presence of Martin Luther King and other prominent black leaders, Johnson quipped to one of his close friends that ‘this will kill the Democratic Party in the South for a generation.’
He was right. Only two southern Democrats would win the White House after him. With one stroke of his pen, Johnson finished off the ‘Solid South’ as an American political tradition. The good news was, after 100 years of racism the Southern Democratic Party was finally free to reacquaint itself with the better values of that liberal party.
The term “Solid South” is reappearing today in American politics. But this time it means solid Republican.
SNAP, CRACKLE AND POP - THREE SELF-IMMOLATIONS AGAINST THE WAR 1965
In March of 1965 an 82 year old woman in Detroit set herself on fire to protest the Vietnam War. Her name was Alice Herz. This was an imitation of the Buddhist monk that set himself on fire in 1963 in Saigon. In her farewell note Alice specifically pointed to the action of Quan Tri or whatever his name was, the Buddhist guy that shook Kennedy up when he set himself on fire at Saigon Crossing in the fall of 63.
The Herz suicide accomplished a great deal of nothing. You have to have other things going wrong in your life to do this sort of thing. Then you use a high-publicity suicide morality-play to make you look like a super person when in reality you were a big mess. You found a way out that makes you look like a success in the finale.
On November 2 1965 Norman Morrison did the Buddhist monk impression just below the window of the office of Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara. Bob was going over death figures at his desk when he stopped, sniffed, and asked an aide, “Do you smell something burning?”
Mac looked out the window to see a Saigon 63 crackling below his window. He went back to work, saying, “I hope someone puts that poor misguided fellow out.”
Just one week later, Roger Allen LaPorte set himself on fire in New York City to protest the Vietnam War. He died the next day, November 10. Cause of death; he set himself on fire. These people would have had a 1,000% higher than the average person likelihood of committing suicide sooner or later if there had never been a Vietnam War. It’s one thing to have true courage and run into a burning building to save a child that isn’t even yours. When that hero dies it’s an act of love beyond words. These 65 clowns were ticking time bombs that found an excuse in the Vietnam War to go off. Life is way too good to go out in a Texas A&M bonfire you set on yourself, just to make a political statement. No way that’s an option. No way. They are taking a short cut in the race for personal greatness. It’s an act of supreme egoism.
For what it’s worth, I have no memory of these stories on the news and I was paying reasonably close attention to the war in Vietnam. I only learned of these fire-starters recently. This would indicate that the conservative media of 1965 made the least of these events.
VIETNAM 1966
The year 1966 started with a Time Magazine cover proclaiming General Westmoreland as “Man of the Year” for 1965. The nation was not yet angry about the Vietnam War, even though American casualties were piling up.
The generals had an ambitious offensive for the beginning of 1966. The idea was to clear out all the Communism by force from a key province in the central lowlands, Bihn Dihn. It was a search and destroy operation on a scale not used by US forces since the Korean war. This was the first really big US campaign of the Vietnam War.
The title proposed for the operation was OPERATION MASHER. Johnson told the brass that the name was too violent and unfriendly, and that it was not going to help win any hearts and minds on either side. One general then said, “How bout OPERATION BLOODY BURGER.” Johnson looked at him in shock until the guy laughed and said he was only kidding. Johnson shook his head at the general's arrogance but let it slide. Clark Clifford suggested adding something to the title to tone it down a bit. “How bout OPERATION MASHER/ WHITE WING?” Johnson said, “Clark, that's exactly what I was looking for.”
Some of the troops called it OPERATION MASHED POTATO.
By whatever name the major mission got off to a good start on January 24, 1966 and lasted three months. A significant number of South Korean troops participated in some very hot zones to show the world that this war was an effort of many united nations, even if it didn't have the sanction of the United Nations.
Did it work? Were the Commies of Bihn Dihn Province ground into mashed potatoes? Who knows? We do know that the US Army declared it a major success. The body count of bad guys was tallied at 2,380 at the end of March. Some sources say half that much, but most of the tallies claim the 2,380 figure. It was the first time in the war that the huge B-52 bombers were used to kill VC. Nearly 400 US soldiers died in the mission.
Communism was not cleaned out of BD Province because you can't blow up an idea with B-52's.
General Westmoreland was getting about as many troops as he asked for but there was one small problem. ‘Westy’ was not allowed to attack to the westy into the Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos. Here was a career soldier who had fought in World War II and Korea and he was ordered to not pursue the enemy to the best of his army’s ability. The first rule of warfare was being violated. The destruction of the enemy’s fighting forces is the primary goal in any war, and we made it worse than secondary. We were fighting in Vietnam with military force in order to win only political goals. The General was frustrated because he was being asked to fight with one hand tied behind his back. Johnson had promised the American people in an earlier speech that he was not going to ask his military to fight with on hand tied behind their backs.
This expression became popular in political circles for the next several decades. In 1991 George Bush stressed publicly that he was going to use the military in full fashion in the Gulf War and was going to put ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ behind us and that he was not going to ask the American military to fight with one hand tied behind its back.
Those who say that Nixon and Kissinger in 1970 were fascist murderers when they bombed and invaded the Cambodian sanctuaries in 1970 should at least bear in mind that Westmoreland was begging for permission to do this four years before Nixon and Special K gave the go ahead to do it. It was a logical, not a radical idea. The left later called this a radical and insane idea because everyone wanted to hate the Republicans in power. That was fun.
Johnson continued to use American air power in stop and start fashion, hoping with each halt that the Communists would be ready to negotiate. But the Communists were always ready to negotiate, just as long as the USA withdrew completely from Vietnam first.
This year 1966 marked the turning point in support for the war at home. When 1966 began the Johnson Administration had more to fear from the anger of the hawks than the doves. We weren’t prosecuting the war vigorously enough. By the end of 1966 Johnson had more to fear from the angry doves who were saying that the war shouldn’t be waged at all and that the United States should get out. There were too many American dying and the situation seemed to be a stalemate at best.
The opinions of about 380 naïve historians notwithstanding, North Vietnam still had the full and united support of China and the Soviet Union, which made the war un-winnable even if we had decided to fight it without one hand tied behind Westy’s back.
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER 1965-1968
Johnson gave the go ahead to a bombing campaign against North Vietnam. It lasted from mid-1965 to mid 1968. It was not a strategic success. Maybe it was sometimes a tactical success, but it would be hard to say it had a beneficial effect on the overall allied war effort.
Like everything else in the US Vietnam War effort, Rolling Thunder had a bad news name but a half-baked and less than bad news payoff.
This first mistake in Rolling Thunder was in its conception. It was supposed to be strictly retaliatory in nature. It wasn't so much that the United States felt that it needed to bomb North Vietnam to help the situation militarily. It was more a matter or Johnson wanting to send a signal to North Vietnam to stop infiltrating the South or else this is what is in store for you in retaliation.
That's not a really good reason to use US bombers, and demonstrates Johnson's complete ignorance about military weaponry and foreign relations. North Vietnam wasn't supposed to be damaged as much as it was supposed to be spanked.
The only way that might have worked is if the bombing was massive and hit home sweet Hanoi home. If B-52's had leveled the entire Hanoi neighborhood where Van Dong and Van Lau were having their dinners, the concept might have worked (and I'm not endorsing that idea.... well maybe.)
US fighter-bombers in 1965 were used to strike three targets a week, and all of them were below the 19th parallel. Hanoi and Haiphong were off limits. The capitol city and the only important seaport were not to be touched. And in the meantime LBJ went around bragging that,
“I just chopped off Ho Chi Minh's sausage.”
Typically crass LBJ, and, if anything, he had chopped off his own. Rolling Thunder cost the United States all the moral backlash of the world in exchange for tiny military gains. It was the worst trade in the history of the war.
For the next three years college students all over the world demonstrated against Johnson as a war criminal. North Vietnamese citizens were dying under the rain of US bombs. If anything, the demonstrators gave Thunder more credit than it deserved. If the United States was indeed wiping out one village after another with fascist air raids, something might have come out of it. The United States was presenting the image to the world of doing that when it wasn't. It was using F-105's and F-4 Phantoms to take out a bridge here, an ammo dump there, a truck stop here, a PT boat dock there.
The damage was not decisive, and therefore not remotely intimidating. We were giving NV the “Auntie Helen”slap.
That one needs explaining of course. When we were kids at my grandma's summer cottage in Wrentham Mass (home of Senator Scott Brown,) my Dad occasionally let Auntie Helen baby sit us. We were a little bit afraid of her. She was big, loud, and maybe a bit gruff. We were afraid to be let alone with her because we knew we would misbehave often enough and so sooner or later she would probably have to hit us, and had permission to. Sure enough we crossed the line once too often and we were lined up for punishment. Each of us got a slap across the cheek. But it was so gentle that we realized that underneath it all, Auntie Helen was a real cream puff. She was loud, but she was a doll. We never feared her again, and thought so much more of her from that day on.
That's what Rolling Thunder meant to North Vietnam. It was an Auntie Helen slap across the 17th parallel. North Vietnam only became all the more bold and confident as a result of an air campaign that was supposed to intimidate and make them think twice about starting any more trouble in the south.
ORT wasn't big enough to make a difference. North Vietnam was receiving more supplies from Russia and China on a monthly basis than it was losing to the F-4's. ORT wasn't mean enough to make a difference. The homes of the NVC leaders were safe havens. The entire top half of the country was a safe haven.
When the North Vietnamese began construction of a series of Surface to Air Missile (SAM) sites, Johnson forbade the F-4's to hit them. He knew that the SAM's were supplied by the Soviets and were constructed with the help of Russian workers. LB did not want to deal with an international incident because the United States Air Force had killed Russian construction workers in North Vietnam, even though they were building weapons to kill Americans. However, once the SAMS became operational, the USAF was allowed to hit them. That's a bad story.
BOMBING ESCALATION 1966
In 1966 the United States stepped up the bombing of North Vietnam. The Navy actually did more damage than the Air Force. Carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin carried more that 50% of the load. The Hanoi Hilton had plenty of Navy pilots. In July of 1966 the US hit targets in the Hanoi and Haiphong area for the first time. But there was always a lot of caution in striking these places because Hanoi had too many Soviet and Chinese diplomats and other official personnel, and Haiphong had Soviet and Chinese freighters in port. LBJ’s team didn’t want to have a WWIII crisis to deal with because an A4 mistakenly blew a Soviet tanker to smithereens.
New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury went to Hanoi for a rare glimpse inside enemy lines in late 1966. The NV showed him bomb damage in many locations. The town of Phuly had been wiped off the map. There was nothing at all left of it after repeated air raids. The town of Nam Dihn suffered similarly. Salisbury reported the taking off the map of these two towns as a clear case of bad bad USA and there was a backlash against him personally and against the Times for publishing this incendiary report from Hanoi.
Salisbury’s book on his trip, Behind the Lines - Hanoi, was a very popular one. His articles played a part in the constant anti-war pounding in the media that fueled more demonstrations which fueled more articles. His descriptions of life in North Vietnam are very useful to the struggling historian. He’s not the kind of eye I would want there to represent the US but his account is still rare and important.
In 1966 North Vietnam everyone and everything revolved around the presumption that being bombed from the sky just about every day was now just a lifestyle. Their worked habits adapted accordingly. All vehicles were camouflaged all the time. Everyone, and I mean everyone, including young children, walked down the street in camouflage hats. Hundreds of thousands of one person bomb-shelters were to be seen everywhere. They had a heavy manhole cover for protection. The city streets were lined with them so that 200,000 people could one momet be walking down Hao Ba Main Street, and 40 seconds later be pulling the manhole cover over the one-person shelter they just leaped into. The people of Hanoi and Haiphong talked casually about what they would do next step once Hanoi and Haiphong had been wiped off the map. They just presumed that the United States was soon enough going to give these two cities the Phuly treatment. NV officials were planning a new capitol in the jungle, complete with massive camouflage from where they would continue on. They had quite the Churchillian attitude.
On top of that the USAF and CIA had a major bombing campaign running out of Vientiane Laos. These mission were sort of a secret but they were conducted on a serious scale. Much of North Vietnam and Communist controlled northeast Laos took a pounding from US warplanes lifting off from “VABL” (Vientiane Air Base Laos.)
In the daytime, life slowed down in North Vietnam. At night everything came to life. The entire North was on the graveyard shift. Thousand of trucks and bicycles, and a few trains and boats headed steadily south. It was a mass military migration of troops and supplies leaning down on the South. The infiltration past the 17th parallel had its origins in the higher parallels. A million ants marched South in the darkness every night.
The US would destroy a bridge or wipe a portion of a road, but the Ho-lovers would patch these problems up in a time span that made the bombings strategically almost worthless. Even if the Pentagon knew this, they would not have stopped because the attacks were designed to intimidate. The air war failed both militarily and psychologically. Salisbury spent the whole trip scratching his head wondering why the USA was bombing tiny villages off the map and hitting roads that could get fixed up in three hours. He didn’t quite get it that the targets didn’t have to be tactically important. It was all about inimidtaion. In a way, it was terror bombing.
The North Vietnamese were not intimidated. If anything they probably became more determined.
Now a little sidebar here about this classic argument; that air bombing is always counterproductive because it only increases the fighting morale of those you bomb. Well it depends on the target, the terrain, and the larger military and political situation. In this case the argument is valid. The jungle protected Charlie too much, the targets were not big and concentrated, and the enemy had a limitless rear of protection politically and militarily in the USSR and China. However, when people make the same argument about WWII I do not agree. The bombing results of WWII were disappointing, true, but were hardly counter-productive, as some lefty historians assert. To say that wiping out a Nazi factory in Schweinfurt that produced a zillion ball bearings had no bearing on the war effort is unbearable.
APOCALYPSE NOW
The blockbuster movie by that title includes a scene where a bunch of Vietnamese hack a bull to shreds in slow motion while the Doors sing a grim tune overdub. Awful stuff. I tried not to look at the screen.
A story I read in Hugh Shelton’s book sheds some light for me now on that bloody scene, and says a bit about the culture gap between the Yanks and the Vietnamese.
Shelton was in the Green Berets and he was working in a Montegnard village trying to protect it from the Viet Cong and use it as a forward base for the Army’s attempts to slow down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was the summer of 66. The Montegnards (the highland people of Vietnam) had a huge party, a native festival in which they all laughed and cheered as they took turns stabbing a bull until it fell dead. Which way the bull fell dead was a big deal. Like groundhog day, it meant something for the future whether the dying bull fell to the east or to the west.
When the bull finally falls, the winner of the recent “Vietnam’s Got Talent” contest gets to cut the bull’s throat. Then the people line up and fill their glasses with bull blood and drink it ...and say “yummy.” People, I wish I was making this up. Now for the Joe Rogan part. The Americans had to drink the blood too and pretend they enjoyed it. Otherwise the Vietnamese would have been greatly offended. So the Green Berets had to do this and they all did. More than once.
Yet another moment among many, when I realize I could never have made it as a Green Beret. I can’t eat beets, let alone a tall glass of warm bull blood.
This is from General Shelton’s memoir, Without Hesitation. And there’s a great epilogue. After he drank the blood, the village chief gave Captain Shelton the gift of a not bad looking Montegnard woman and, with a wry smile, pointed them to an empty hut. “We want to thank you for protecting us.” Married man Shelton beat it with a fast excuse. Bull’s blood? No problem, but a woman after two years alone in Vietnam? Hey, that’s where Hugh draws the line.
Shelton went on to become Chairman of the JCS under Clinton and W. He rips into Wes Clark pretty good. I like that.
CHRISTMAS IN HANOI 1966
Salisbury in Hanoi on Christmas Eve 1966 went to a Catholic Mass. The place was jammed. The North Vietnamese wanted him to see that North Vietnam was not atheist. The West knew the tale of the mass exodus of Catholics from the North to the South. The West believed that the Communists persecuted the NVC’s, the North Vietnamese Catholics. They gave Salibury a night on the town at Catholic Christmas celebration. Here is a clip from page 75 of his unforgettable Behind the Lines - Hanoi,
“At midnight I bade farewell to my hosts and left the Christmas party. As I started up the staircase to my room, the vice chairman of the Vietnamese Cultural Committee hurried after me. ‘I hope you see Santa in your dreams,’ he said. ‘Good night.’ ”
Salisbury missed his cue. He should have responded,
“Ho Ho Ho.”
Two out of three Americans would have thought to make that joke. But Salisbury was too much of a snob to think of it. Harrison’s best-seller about his little trip to Hanoi was the final of a result shrewd play by Hanoi. Harrison wasn’t going to get a visa to go to Hanoi as a reporter until Anne Morrison stepped in and wrote a letter to the North Vietnamese leaders asking to allow Salisbury in to see the death the US bombs are inflecting on the NV people. This letter opened the door to Hanoi. Anne Morrison was the mother of the guy who set himself on fire in front of MacNamara’s office. Her son was a legend in North Vietnam. Schoolchildren learned of his heroic tale. An American who killed himself in the name of the heroic victims, the Vietnamese people. Who could be more lovable?
Salisbury foolishly wonders why they allowed him in when they allowed no other American reporters in. It never crossed his mind that they might let anti-American American reporters in.
They took Salisury to all the places where US bombs had killed Vietnamese civilians. They told him these bombings had been deliberately designed to kill civilians. Harrsion doubted that, but he thought the bombings were wrong and played his part for Communist propaganda and returned to the states in January to write a quick paperback denouncing the USA by describing what he saw, even though he technically did not denounce the USA.
The US air force showed great restrain in not bombing Hanoi during the war. Some missions did some damage but the United States fought the war with one hand tied behind its back and not bombing Hanoi to the stone age was an act of restraint in war. They showed the NYT reporters the damage that was done to Hanoi. No act of imagination could show him the damage that could have been done if the Navy and Air Force had wanted to half try to.
Mr Salisbury makes note of all the American atrocities around Hanoi. He makes no note of the half a million South Vietnamese villagers the Communists had murdered since 1954.
ARAB-ISRAELI WAR/ATTACK ON LIBERTY 1967
It's easy to get the two big Arab-Israeli Wars confused. There is the Yom Kippur War and the Six Day War. Both were wins for Israel against tough odds. Both were short and rough and fought with passionate conviction on both sides.
The best way to remember them is that the Six Day War was the Six-ties. It was fought in nineteensixdayseven. The Yom Kippur War was the other one, the one on the seventies.
Some history books say that Israel attacked the Arabs in June of 1967. Other books say that the Arabs attacked Israel. Both are wrong.
The situation was unique and can only be labelled as it happened specifically. The Arabs were planning to attack Israel. It was overwhelmingly obvious to any who could climb a tree on the Israeli side of the border line. The Israeli armed forces had prepared long and hard for such a contingency and had a pre-emptive attack plan ready to rumble.
The Israelis attacked first, but it was within minutes, not hours, of when Egypt and Syria were going to attack. The lead squadron of the Egyptian Air Force was in the air and heading to the Israeli border to strike the Jews when it was attacked and overwhelmed by a larger force of Israeli jets on their pre-emptive attack. That was 7 a.m. on June 6 1967 and the pilot of the lead fighter was Field Marshall Abdul Hakim Emer. That fact should settle that argument about who started it. The Arabs started it.
These weren't two 17th century European armies fighting one day in one coalition, the next day on the other, just doing their job as professional soldiers. These guys hated each other.
In 1967 a full-scale war broke out between Israel and its 3 nearest Arab neighbors. History remembers it as “The Six Day War.” It actually lasted 11 days. It was Egypt, Syria and Jordan against Israel. Iraq, Libya and the USSR supplied and supported the Arab trio. Kuwait, Iran and Saudi Arabia helped the trio with money. It was a united Arab effort to destroy the Jewish menace.
The Arab states surrounding Israel were determined to wipe the Jewish state off the map. None of Israel’s neighbors recognized it as a legitimate nation. They claimed political grievances against Israel. But the real reason for the war between the Arabs and Israeli’s in 1967 was simple visceral rank Islamic anti-Semitism, disguised as geo-military-political grievances.
Instead of wiping Israel off the map, the Arabs should have let Israel live in peace. The Arab states lost the war. Israel gained former Arab territory in the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights of Syria.
So who started the war? Technically it was Israel that started it. But Israel attacked because it was obvious that it was about to be attacked. The Arab states surrounding Israel were about to invade and conquer. So Israel struck out for strategic opening advantage. In that sense, who started the war? If you sucker-punch a serial burglar stalking your house, are you the aggressor?
For the last decade prior to 1967, the Israeli's had not been instigating terrorist raids into Arab territory, nor was it racist in its official state documents. Israel did not make it a matter of state policy that the Arab neighbors had no legal right to exist and had to be destroyed. Yet that was the position of the Arabs with regard to Israel. And the Arabs had been killing Israeli civilians for their cause for years. So in that sense, who started the war?
Recent documents released after the fall of Communism in the Gorbachov era indicate that the Soviet Union used disinformation to help start the war. The leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria were flown to Moscow in May of 1967 and told that Israel was about to invade Syria, which it was not. Syria then mobilized to attack Israel.
Israel saw that Syria was about to attack so Israel attacked first. So in that sense who started the war? The answer probably lies in the Kremlin archives that were shredded before the archives were opened. Partial answers found in the released secret archives (secret archives can be scanned and filtered before being discovered or revealed)
The USSR was like a schoolyard instigator telling two different parties, “Did you hear what he said about your mother?” when in fact no one said anything. Then when the fight starts he goes to their locker and robs them blind.
The Soviets selfishly wanted to see its client state of Syria supreme in the Lebanon, and wanted to deliver a knockout blow to American influence in the ME.
The United States supported Israel but declined to intervene militarily. The Israeli Air Force intervened against the United States instead.
The Arab states suffered more than 8,000 killed in action, the Israeli's less than one thousand. The Israeli military forces destroyed more than 900 Egyptian tanks. The Israelis lost less than 100. The Israelis gained a lot of territory in Syria and the Sinai. The Arab states gained nothing. The balance of power in one week had shifted dramatically.
ATTACK ON LIBERTY - JUNE 67
On June 8, 1967 the USS Liberty was cruising in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea when Israeli fighter jets attacked the ship. It was the Panay all over again but this time we were being attacked by an ally. The Liberty was clearly marked with United States flags. The attack continued for some time. It wasn’t enough to attack the US ship with Mirage fighters. The Israelis then sent in several torpedo boats to continue the attack.
Liberty was badly damaged but did not sink. The Israeli Defense Force had murdered thirty-four American sailors. Seventy-five were wounded, including Commander McGonagle who continued to relay details of the attack back to base while down and bleeding on the bridge.
[picture] Israel attacks Egypt and the USS Liberty 1967
The Israeli government apologized for the attack, but never adequately explained why it happened. Was this revenge for our refusal to take Israel’s side in this war, or payback for US betrayal in the Suez Crisis of 1956?
The Israeli’s claimed that they mistook the ship for an Egyptian horse freighter that had a similar silhouette. What a bunch of horse freighter.
If they did do it deliberately, the next obvious question is why? Why attack the one nation on earth that had always supported Israel both politically and materially?
The answer may be very diabolical. Several observers swear that unmarked planes delivered the attack.
The conclusion is inescapable and inexcusable. The Israelis wanted to make it look like an attack on a US ship by Egyptian planes. In this way they hoped to draw the United States into the war on the side of Israel. They hoped to sink the ship and leave no survivors to tell the story. Liberty foiled their plan by staying afloat and hobbling back to port.
Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State never accepted the Israeli explanation of mistaken identity. There are a few hundred other expert opinions that also doubt Israel's veracity. Only Robert McNamara seems to have believed their explanation, which is perfect since McNamara has made a life long career out of being wrong on everything (on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War he warned Congress that we were going to suffer “thousands and thousands and thousands of casualties!”)
There is no statute of limitations on the crime of murder. Several Israeli participants have admitted that it was not an accident.
The Israeli government to this day of course insists that the attack was an accident. Liberty was allegedly in the vicinity where an Egyptian ship had recently been shelling Israeli troop positions in the Sinai. The attack was explained as in response to that big gun attack from sea to shore, and the American were mistaken for the Arab enemy.
The case is mysterious. It is easy to imagine a callous political decision being made to do this by Israel’s top officials, but it is hard to imagine that so many individual members of the Israeli Defense Forces would knowingly attack a loyal ally as part of a fantastic disinformation operation.
All this doesn't change my feeling about the 1967 War. Little Israel picked up all the Arab bullies at the same time and threw them out of the ring. Tremendous. Right triumphed over wrong. Sometimes life really is like a fairy tale.
VIETNAM 1967-68
CREDIBILITY GAP
Johnson sold the American public in 1967 on how well things were going in Vietnam, and it backfired on him during the Tet Offensive in January of 1968. A lot of conservatives blame the media for misrepresenting the Tet offensive as a defeat for America when in fact that famous military offensive was a major defeat for the VC and the NVA.
That is a legitimate complaint, but Johnson and the hawks have largely themselves to blame.
If the Johnson administration and the military leaders had been more straightforward with the American people in 1967 about the difficult struggle in Vietnam, about how it was actually hanging in the balance, then the Tet offensive of 1-68 might have been seen for what it was, a critical strategic battle that ended in a victory for the forces of South Vietnam, America, and democracy. But since the public and the media had been told that the war was being won throughout 1967 when it was not so, then the very fact of a major attack on several cities in January 1968 by the VC, NVA, NLA or whatever the Communist were calling themselves that month, created an overwhelming reaction in the states against the war.
After Tet the war might have been won in the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people but it was lost in the hearts and minds of the American people. The fact that is was a military victory became irrelevant. The credibility gap took a strategic military victory and turned it into a a strategic defeat.
“HEY HEY - LBJ - HOW MANY KIDS DID YA KILL TO-DAY”
That was one of the favorite chants of the anti-war crowd. Pretty well written. But Johnson could afford to ignore the hippies with placards if he wanted to. He was an arrogant sort of fellow, so that was easy enough. But he couldn't ignore the protest of short haired Congressmen with $2,000 suits.
Leading the charge against the Vietnam War at home was Senator William Fullbright of Arkansas. On his staff was a young intern named Bill Clinton who worshipped Fullbright.
In 2004 historian Clinton's autobiography My Life mixed in quite a bit of polemic U.S. history telling in the process,
Fullbright thought Ho Chi Minh, who was an
admirer of Franklin Roosevelt because of his
opposition to colonialism, was primarily
interested in making Vietnam independent of
all foreign powers. He believed that Ho, far
from being a Chinese puppet, shared the
historic Vietnamese antipathy for, and
suspicion of, its larger neighbor to the north.
… He supported an attempt to “neutralize”
Southeast Asia, with American withdrawal
conditioned on agreement by all parties to
self-determination for South Vietnam and a
referendum on reunification with North
Vietnam. Unfortunately, by 1968, when
peace talks opened in Paris, such a rational
resolution was no longer possible.
So Ho admired FDR, eh. Is that supposed to make us realize how wrong we were about Mr. Minh? So maybe Hitler admired Abe Lincoln. Perhaps Sadaam thought Mark Twain was a fine writer. What does that have to do with the price of eggs in Togo or the atheistic violence, determination to bury capitalism, and totalitarian suppression of human rights that represented the Asian Communist movement in the 1960’s?
The sentence about Ho’s ‘antipathy for and suspicion of China’ is a joke. China supplied, bankrolled and inspired the North Vietnamese Communist movement. Ho lived and studied in Communist China.
Every time I see a documentary on Vietnam Fullbright is always there sanctimoniously demanding ‘a diplomatic solution to the Vietnam conflict.’ Well thanks, for the tip, King Solomon. If only someone else had thought of that, a diplomatic solution.
Fine. I demand a negotiated settlement to the crime problem. Lets sit down and negotiate with all the thugs on the streets of New York and Boston and LA. We’ll arrange a diplomatic solution and when all parties sign the documents there will be no crime.
You can’t arrange a diplomatic solution with a group whose only starting condition for even beginning the negotiations is complete concession on all points that are to be negotiated. US withdrawal from Vietnam and installation of a Communist dominated government in South Vietnam were not goals that the Communists were aiming for at the bargaining table. They were the preconditions to begin negotiations! Thats what Rusk and Kissinger were up against all those years, while the demonstrators condemned them for not being men of peace who understood diplomacy. It was easy for Fullbright to say because he didn't have to sit down with Le Duc To and come out with nothing to say. US negotiators in Paris went in with Le Duc To and came out with Le Duc tape.
The Arkansas Senator consistently insisted that he was not in favor of simple unilateral withdrawal. He wanted ‘negotiations’. He demanded a ‘diplomatic settlement.’ But the VC terms were impossible and insulting; complete US withdrawal from all of Indochina as a condition to even begin discussions. Fullbright’s position was therefore an untenable naive illogical net-zero idea. His famous anti-Vietnam War book was appropriately titled ‘The Arrogance of Power.’ You should know. Fullbright in the 60’s reminds me of Senator Dodd of Connecticut in December of 1990 demanding a negotiated settlement to get Sadaam out of Kuwait, while Secretary of State Baker tried in vain to ask exactly what sort of diplomatic solution he had in mind.
The same ‘We prefer diplomacy’ garbage was hurled at President Reagan for 8 years for not negotiating with the Soviets for arms reductions, when in fact the USSR demanded every concession that could possibly be won in the negotiations as a condition to begin those negotiations. Even when this insulting formula was explained to them, the liberals still demanded negotiations, and condemned Reagan for his truculent behavior towards the admirably progressive Russians.
In Nam, LBJ and Nixon were under strong domestic pressure to negotiate, and the enemy was using this domestic pressure to win what they could not win on the battlefield.
Now lets listen to the late [2010] Howard Zinn, the king of the lefties. No one speaks for the left more often or better than Zinn. He is a formidable scholar, no matter what subject he is wrestling over. In his 1967 book Vietnam, The Logic of Withdrawal, Zinn provides a transcript of Senator Church grilling Secretary of State Rusk over the continued presence of US troops in Korea. Since Rusk is cornered into ‘admitting’ that the North Koreans have not attacked the South since 1953 then, concludes Zinn, the presence of US troops there is not to stop North Korea, but rather to show our brazen enmity towards China.
Church then put words in Rusk’s mouth to the effect that if the Viet Cong and the NLF had attacked South Vietnam without the support of China, then the United States probably would not have intervened at all.
From this Zinn concludes that,
“we maintained military forces in Asian countries
not because of “aggression,” but simply because
of the presence of China on the Asian continent.
No. The Korean War began when North Korean forces under Soviet guidance and with Soviet equipment, overran a weakly armed United States ally. The aggressors almost knocked South Korea off the map forever.
The United States maintained troops there after the war to protect its ally and itself from a similar war experience. It didn’t matter to the USA what combination of North Korean, Chinese, and/or Soviet forces might in the future attack South Korea. We simply did not want to lose 50,000 killed in action again if another invasion took place, and we did not want to have to start the counterattack in a desperate situation like the one we had to work from in the Pusan perimeter of 1950. We stayed in Korea to play defense, not offense. The Zinn charge is Blame America First.
The point about Chinese support for North Vietnam is more difficult to fend off because the charge is basically true. If China were not behind the North Vietnamese aggression then the United States would not have intervened to save South Vietnam. If an indigenous North Vietnamese Communism, with Tito level of maverick independence, free of any Maoist or Leninist soul had been the essence of the war against South Vietnam the US would never have put 200,000 troops there by 1966..
Yes, Howard. But this accusation proves that Zinn is fully aware that the Chinese were behind the entire operation, something the left always denied! So they admit Chinese complicity only when it’s convenient and deny it when it is not. Zinn is also proving that Fullbright and Clinton were/are wrong about Ho’s supposed enmity towards China.
The North Vietnamese were of course never remotely in the intellectual or political vanguard of Communism. Zinn theorizes about an independent North Vietnamese Communist movement that we wouldn't have reacted so forcefully to. But such a thing did not exist nor could it have existed. All the international Communism of the era came from the USSR and China. How we would respond to a purely North Vietnamese Communist threat is inadmissible for discussion and theory. North Vietnamese Communism was a pet dog of the Chinese and the Russian. Communists of the world looked to Moscow as Mecca because that's where the money came from, and that's where it won 'The Big One' in 1917.
They were the philosophical aggressors long before they became military ones. Whose propaganda preached as a first step that all of the nations with a capitalist philosophy must be undermined, destroyed from within and then reconstructed? Did Zinn ever read any of the Communist books about their grand scheme of world domination, the ones that all schoolchildren living in Communist countries had to read and know by heart? I did. I lost a of months out of my life reading them and I concluded that the Communist desire to rule the world under atheism was real and that the American and European leaders who reacted to this threat as Cold Warriors should not go down in history as pinheads but rather as wise heroes.
THE ANTI-WAR DEMONSTRATORS
Thoughts are deeds. Hatred is violence. The antiwar protestors are always described as non-violent peaceniks, a spin-off of their predecessors the beatniks. The left thinks they stand for love while they think that conservatives stand for hate. It’s the way the left thinks now.
But no one hates like a lefty with a cause. The anti-war demonstrators chanted “off the pig” as a standard rally-cry for years. That meant kill all policemen, for cops represented the establishment. My father was a policeman. How was I supposed to feel? The lefties carried peace and love signs while hating anyone that disagreed with them. The hippies advocated love towards each other but hate towards the squares. They casually advocated the random murder of police officers on revolutionary general principles. But after shooting cops they were were supposed to hold hands on the grass and listen to Joan Baez sing about justice. Shooting cops can be very tiring and you have to sit a spell, have some wine, sing some songs and write poems before another long exhausting day tomorrow setting cop cars of fire and breaking the windows of government buildings. That's about the size of the hippie hypocrisy for me.
At Columbia and Berkeley, to name two Universities, the left wing righteous brothers seized control of key Administrative buildings and held the building hostage until the United States got out of Vietnam. Very Violent.
Oh, and by the way doyeeeeee!
Your algebra Professor did not send out boys over to Nam to die. Politicians that did that. These things your parents paid thousands of dollars to for you to go to these places that are called ‘schools.’ It is not fair that because a college lets the government recruit students in the ROTC program, this means they are to blame for the Vietnam War. Did the students really believe that destroying school property and holding conservative professors at knifepoint would get us out of Vietnam? That was very stupid and very violent. And what did it accomplish? Zero. Most of them got expelled.
Burning the American flag and chanting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” while hundreds of other hippies cheered (and try and tell me that never happened); that wasn’t violent?
The hippies were wrong about many things. No, I take that back. The hippies were wrong about everything except music. And a thousand are our political and cultural leaders today. They have old photos with hippie haircuts but look average now. And they continue to perpetuate the myths and lies about Vietnam. The newcomers are brainwashed. No hip young adult with a University education is going to defend the US involvement in the Vietnam War. She or he has been taught all the myths and lies and opinions as if they are facts that are not debatable.
The number one charge against the War was that is was un-winnable. Nonsense. We never tried, so we’ll never know. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. But we never tried, so we'll never know.
The next one was that the South Vietnamese government we supported was just as corrupt as the one we were at war with. Wrong again. There is no doubt that an educated leftist can argue this point of view effectively because the South Vietnamese regime was corrupt especially by today’s standards. South Vietnamese brutality and corruption provides enough material for any good lawyer to argue that they were just as bad as the North. But the South was not to be compared evenly to those atheistic, brutal murderous Communists under Ho and Dong. Who do you think did that Killing Fields movie plot? Khmer means red.
Mostly the demonstrators were wrong about the Communist ideology in form and in practice. The left had no hate for Communist incidents, but American atrocities proved that the United States military was a force for evil.
Communism in Asia was relaxed about mass murder and genocide. That’s who and what we fought over there. Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and then Ho; these men mass murdered in ways that would have made Himmler say, “Damn, I should have thought of that!”
Communism is a legitimate political ideal, a formidable force, and these people really believed in the global dream of it, some schisms here and there notwithstanding. Most hippies did not exactly embrace Communism but they praised it with faint damnation while damning our own way of life pitilessly. The founding mothers and fathers of the Blame America First movement didn’t even bother to give the USA a token damn with faint praise. There was no praise at all, except perhaps a compensatory praise for what America could be someday if we change to the left.
The domino theory was probably correct. The Communists were legitimately trying to take over the whole world. The old nations would remain autonomous within the Communist global empire, but Communism would rule the world. It might take fifty or two hundred years. The process might well be very gradual, but that was their goal.
The left then and now still mocks our mission in Vietnam as though it was naïve in concept because everyone knows that all the anti-Communist business was lame.
It wasn’t lame. It was right on. Those people we fought over there were terrible. Good soldiers, but sad bad people under the sinister spell of an morally cruel philosophy.
Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a Communist, not a Vietnamese nationalist. He left the country in 1921 and lived in France for most of his adult life. He was a founding member of the French Communist Party and lived in Moscow for three or four years as a graduate student at CCIT, the Communist College for International Troublemaking.
What if the USA had never supported South Vietnam and the Communists had overrun Vietnam Laos and Cambodia by the end of 1964. How would that have played out on the global stage? Would other Communist revolutions have been inspired by the success in Indochina? Would other states in Asia, Africa and Central America been motivated by the clear momentum that Communism was demonstrating? Would the cause of freedom and democracy suffer a set-back? Would the fall of Communism that was so celebrated when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 have indeed taken place in 1989? Or would its fall have been delayed or prevented if Indochina had fallen to the Communists?
How can we know the answer to these questions when the fact of the matter is that we did intervene and, even though we lost, the triumph of Communism in Southeast Asia was delayed at least ten years? Can it not be argued that Democracy in fighting this delaying action, both slowed down the momentum of Communism and gained time with which the western states could improve their own democracy, a democracy that could then be shown to the world as that much better a way of life than Communism?
For those fatherless sons who lost their dads in Vietnam, it is worth considering that maybe the man died for a noble cause. They fought for the same cause that liberals and conservatives alike celebrated wildly when Communism crashed in the period of 1989-1991.
TET OFFENSIVE AND OFFENSIVE COVERAGE 1968
The tourist who wishes to visit Vietnam today is advised to avoid the Tet holidays at the end of January and beginning of February. The hotels are overbooked and the entire country comes to a standstill while celebrating the special holiday season. It is their Christmas. At the end of January 1968 the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) was almost entirely on leave. Few Vietnamese would ever think that the VC would launch their biggest attack of the entire war at the exact moment of the Tet holiday. They did. It was Yom Kippur East. The VC hoped to incite a popular uprising at the grass roots level by co-ordinating an outside attack with an attack with massive sleeper cell military force.
The most spectacular element of the Tet Offensive was the partial and brief capture of the American Embassy in Saigon, an event which was exaggerated when it happened by the media and still often is. It was portrayed as if the VC had completely taken over the American Embassy and held out against a fierce counterattack for several days before being overcome.
The facts were that in the middle of the night of January 29/30th 1968 a few VC had blown a hole in a wall of the American Embassy and had occupied about half the building for a few hours before being blown to pieces to a man. They held out from three to nine am. That was it. But we never hear the end to this day about how the Communists “overran” and “took over” the American Embassy.
The red arrows mark areas where the CF (Communist Forces) launched diversionary attacks preparatory to the attack within the cities that was the real goal of the Tet Offensive. ARVN and US forces went west to meet these challenges, falling for the bait. This opening strategy was a success. When Tet broke out in the cities of South Vietnam, the defense forces were undermanned, the best troops off on a road game.
For the Communists, the Tet offensive was the attempt to take the war from passive subversion to the attack mode.
Tet was Christmas to the ARVN soldier. Too many of them were home for the holidays when Tet broke out. The South Vietnamese forces were scattered in their homes and huts in the countryside. They were the sailors with a hangover on Ford Island when the Japanese attacked in 41. The Communists had chosen the Tet date on purpose. Typical. Even in 1979, they just had to attack Afghanistan on Christmas.
US forces were also deployed on the road and to the west of the cities. For these reasons the South Vietnamese cause was badly prepared. Tet was a sudden burst of offense from behind enemy lines and it was aimed at the cities, not the jungles. The cities just erupted in a revolutionary guerrilla war.
Tet scared the living ink out of the media politically because it scared them personally. There were far more press people embedded in the cities than in the distant hamlets, and this time they heard the bombs and smelled the gunpowder. The film from Tet was especially good because the media was already there when it broke out.
The VC tactical successes did not make up for the most important strategic failure. The population of the cities of South Vietnam did not rise to support the rebels. Ho Chi Minh did no better than John Brown in inciting a slave uprising. This time there simply was no popular support. The South Vietnamese people did not consider themselves living under the slavery of capitalism and reactionaryism. At least Brown failed because his support system was in chains.
Tet was a definite military failure for the NV cause. They held some important buildings for a few days and took Hue in the North, where they murdered thousands of unarmed civilians after the battle was long over. But the VC Tet attack fizzled after a few days and soon the streets of Saigon and most of the other cities were completely secure. Hue was re-taken. It was status quo ante-Tet.
The US media however, reported the Tet offensive as if it had been a complete military victory for the Communist. They saw it this way; if the North Vietnamese can attack the South Vietnamese cities, then we are losing the war, because previously they only could attack in the countryside. The liberal reporters ran with that and that was the end of it.
But the North Vietnamese had in reality lost the Tet Offensive. It was supposed to have succeeded militarily. Its primary mission was not propaganda for the American home front. The VC had expended the better part of its military resources in a failed campaign. They were spent. After Tet the VC were considerably less capable of the countryside attacks they had been launching for the previous years. They had gambled all their resources on Tet and lost. Their army of sleeper agents had emerged from underground in the assault and many had been killed, wounded or been captured. Tet took its toll on these double agents. Charlie was low on ammo and food. The Vietnamese Communists were temporarily incapable of following up with a renewed attack.
More than 1,100 US soldiers died in the first two weeks of the Tet offensive. More than 10,000 Vietnamese civilians are estimated to have perished also. 5,000 died in Hue.
Hue was the ancient capital of Annam and the second most important city in South Vietnam. But it was perilously close to the DMZ and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When the VC and NVA attacked the city of Hue, there was a protracted battle which I followed intently on the news each night. During the week or so of occupation the Communists executed 2,800 Hue civilians. These were confirmed by the discovery of fresh mass graves when the Americans entered the city. It was like Bradley liberating Dachau in 45. Another 2,000 South Vietnamese citizens were missing and were never found. I don’t think the average lefty tie-dye high school student knows about this, but they surely learned about My Lai and agent orange.
The media snatched defeat from the jaws of victory at Tet. Coverage became based on self-fulfilled analysis. We in the media are against the war because it is immoral and un-winnable. Now here we see an event that we can interpret in many ways. We will choose to interpret this military event in the way that most supports our opinions as we have expressed them thus far.
The media excitedly maximized the initial success of the Tet offensive, but minimized the implications of the vigorous counter-attack. The blood spilled by our GI’s was washed down the drain by the biased analysis.
A winning battle usually pushes the fence-sitters back home to the right. But now the fence sitters fell off to the left. The violent doves rubbed their hands in triumph. After the misrepresentation about Tet, it was much easier for our national legislators to come out in the open against the war and demand our withdrawal. Oh, excuse me, to demand a negotiated settlement, meaning an intellectual rationalization for surrender.
SEIGE OF KHE SANH – JANUARY TO APRIL 1968
If there was one glorious battle for the good guys in the war it was at Khe Sanh in 1968. Khe Sanh was under way for two weeks when the Tet Offensive erupted on January 31 1968. The two campaigns were related politically even if they weren't strictly coordinated militarily by the North.
A force of vastly superior numbers of North Vietnamese troops surrounded the US Marines and their South Vietnamese allies at a remote outpost in NW SV. By hanging on and not surrendering, Khe Sanh was one of the few arguable victories of the war.
Khe Sanh was in the top left corner of South Vietnam, near where the three countries of Laos and the two Nams meet. There wasn't any real great reason for America to fortify the Khe Sanh stronghold high ground near Khe Sanh village. It was almost a Westy style bait. General Westmoreland liked to establish firebases on hilltops and then send patrols out to bait the enemy to attack smaller units. Then the powerfully armed firebase choppers would swoop down on the spot where the VC had attacked. Khe Sanh was a little like that except that the hilltop itself was the bait for huge air strikes against whoever tried to take it down. Some people thought it was dumb to occupy Khe Sanh and dare the enemy to attack. They advised against it.
There were 4,000 US Marines and 2,000 South Vietnamese troops holding Khe Sanh when 30,000 black pajamas surrounded it and began to hit it with mortar fire near the end of January 1968.
It was one of the worst places to be in the world for 77 days as the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air killed 780 Americans and another 200 ARVN friends. More than 2,000 more were wounded. Almost half of the men at Khe Sanh were casualties before it was over.
It was a similar situation to Dien Bien Phu in 1956, except that this time the outcome was better. America had more air support than the Phu fighters could have ever dreamed of. Plus a relief expedition fought its way there in April and broke the siege completely.
America watched the siege of Khe Sanh. I remember it it but I didn't get too caught up. I thought the overall Vietnam body count graph bar behind Cronkite was the bottom line. If Khe Sanh fell it still didn't mean all that much as long as the body count every week was averaging 918 to 17, a dum dum attitude.
LBJ was obsessed with the Siege of Khe Sanh and had a model of it built in his den at the White House so he could be informed down to the kilometer how the battle reports were coming in.
The airstrip ot Khe Sanh too enough hits that the larger C-130's could no longer land and the smaller C-123's were sent in instead. The planes devised a system where they landed and slowed down while rolling the supplies out the cargo door, staying in motion and then resuming speed and taking off again. One soldier who had officially finished his tour of duty but was stuck at Khe Sanh decided to hop a ride home the way my friends used to do during a snowstorm when they ran up to trucks and snow skied on city streets hanging on the back. He ran up to one of the C-123's at the slowest point of his drop off and take off run and tried to jump into the cargo hold just after it dumped its last item. He hung on for a moment but then fell off. He wasn't going to get out of Khe Sanh after all, at least not now. Then he looked up and saw the plane lift off and take an enemy shell and explode. It was a moment out of one of the Final Destination films.
A couple of writers think that the Communists deliberately didn't overrun the Americans at Khe Sanh, because they wanted to keep everyone focused there while they spread the rest of the Tet offensive across the land. As long as the Yanks were pre-occupied with saving Khe Sanh, they would delegate less firepower to stopping the various elements of Tet. The idea that Charley had the option of taking Khe Sanh and didn't take it to play mind games with the larger strategic war effort is not tenable to me.
SMALL MAC ATTACK
John MacNamara, the Secretary of Defense who had designed the Vietnam strategy for the USA in Vietnam since 1963, decided in early 1968 that the war was going wrongly. I would hesitate to say (as some have) that he got a conscience and decided that the war was wrong. I say Mac decided it was going wrong, not that it was wrong. MacNamara decided he had to resign.
Since I can’t stand the sound of his rambling voice saying nothing at all ever, you shouldn’t take my opinions of him unquestioningly. JM’s resignation was about a vaguely defined as that of Edzo Shevernadze in 1991 when he resigned from Gorbachov’s dictatorial Soviet Politburo, warning that “A dictatorship is coming.”
Mac resigned on February 29 1968. He split (in 68 parlance) from the hot seat leaving behind countless dead people who paid for his windbag in-concrete theories.
Mac’s big problem was his fear of nuclear war. That is always a risk at the top levels of superpower reality, but he wanted to play conventional war while hamstringing the entire effort because under no circumstance should the USA do anything that could run a .01% risk of a nuclear conflict. Mac was maybe still too shook up from the Cuban Missile Crisis. So The USA and SV could never take Haiphong or openly invade across the 17th Parallel, because there was a chance that the Russians and or the Chinese might get mad. And they each have nukes! No!
Is this any way to run a war? Denying the superior force the chance to exploit its superiority? If Mac should had stuck with running the Ford Motor Company there would have been 376 people at my last show instead of 375.
Bob left the post at D to take a job at the World Bank, and I don’t even know what that is, but it sounds like a place far more suitable to his pinstriped skills. Johnson spoke of Mac’s impending resignation in public, making it seem as though Mac was going to the WB network to help promote Johnson’s Nam policies from there. But that wasn’t true. MacNamara wanted to call Johnson out on this, but didn’t want to go out like that. Instead Mac resigned like a 22 year veteran baseball player saying good bye and choking up at the microphone,
“I would like to tell you what is going through my heart right now
Mr. President. But being a Christian, I think it’s best that I say nothing.”
Then MacNamara walked away wiping the tears from his eyes and the blood from his hands.
GENERAL LOAN AND PRESIDENT CLINTON
Throughout the war, the media minimized the atrocities and murders of civilians by the Viet Cong, and that’s being generous. It was unfair enough to argue that at times we were just as evil as they were. At least that sort of admits that the evil deeds of the Communists are the starting point. But listen to how historian Bill Clinton explains Tet and the famous General Loan incident.
He reluctantly admits that the VC might actually have been every bit as murderous and cruel as we were; as if American atrocities are the starting point from which to examine Communist ones.
In February [1968], two events in Vietnam further
hardened opposition to the war. The first was the
impromptu execution of a person suspected of being
a Vietcong by the chief of the South Vietnamese
Police, General Loan. Loan shot the man in the head
in broad daylight on the street in Saigon. The killing
was captured on film by the great photographer, Eddie
Adams, whose picture caused more Americans to
to question whether our allies were any better than our
enemies, who were also undeniably ruthless.
From My Life c) 2004
So the starting point is that we are undeniably ruthless, but, hey, we must admit that maybe the VC were also ruthless. The fact of the matter is that in 1962 while Jack Kennedy was courting Marylyn Monroe and Bill Calley was pumping gas in Arizona, the Viet Cong were systematically assassinating all civilian village leaders who did not succumb to their demands. This policy was employed on a mass scale and was supported and indeed demanded by the top political leadership of the Communists. The Communists were the first-strike authors of Vietnam atrocities. They drew first blood. We came along and reacted to them years later.
As for the shooting by General Loan, which is still shown more often on TV in this country than footage from the moon landing, Mona Charens’ research tells another side to the story,
The photo of South Vietnamese general Nguyen
Ngoc Loan executing the Viet Cong prisoner
made the rounds, and the history books, as
evidence of the brutality of the South Vietnamese
government America was defending. Photographer
Eddie Adams of the Associated Press won a
Pulitzer Prize for the picture, and he knew the
truth of the matter – namely that the Vietcong
prisoner had only moments before murdered a
Vietnamese policeman along with his entire
family. Adams regretted that this photo became
a rallying point for discrediting American
participation in the war.
Clinton’s version of the story was not exactly a lie, but was a typical slick liberal spin on the Loan information, tossing to the editing room floor what is not convenient and stressing what is.
President Thieu responded to Tet by initiating an expanded draft for South Vietnamese men. From late 1968 on, all men between 16 and fifty would be drafted. The oldest and youngest did not have to serve in the regular army, but rather would form the nucleus of a People’s Defense Force, a militia for the villages. The PDF was something like the American militia of 1775, an unpaid but armed force of patriots opposing outside oppressors. These minute rice men of South Vietnam would grow into a force of over two million grass roots fighters by the time the US began major withdrawals from Nam.
But don’t ever bother trying to find any western journalists describing the bravery of South Vietnamese troops. It is next to impossible to even find any reporting for the bravery of American troops, let alone SV. But if you want to read compliments about the tough fighting qualities of the VC, now you’re in business.
The most common method is to interview an American commander for three hours. He talks for two hours about the courage of his American soldiers. Then he talks for 45 minutes about the bravery of his South Vietnamese allies. Then the liberal reporters push poll interview him about the courage of the enemy. The American of course concedes that the VC are a tough opponent, even fanatical at times in their near suicidal efforts in combat. The commander has been set up to say what he doesn’t mean. Then we see an isolated 14 second clip of an American General praising the courage of the enemy, and that's all we see.
The VC were such tough fighters. I’m sure the 1st Marine Division from Guadalcanal or the men of the Big Red One division from Europe would tremble at the thought of taking them on.
Why were they such hardened fighters?
Most of the VC were poor and homeless. That had nothing to live for or fight for except their cause. The cause gave them a meal, a home and an identity. Communist philosophy was the choice because only that one side was offering free room and board and a pillage license. These were the proletarians and the landless peasants who had embraced Communism because it gave them a free hand to seize the property of those who had earned it. It had given them authority to imprison or shoot anyone who had land or money. The South Vietnamese farmer and the American soldier already had a life. They didn’t gain dignity the day they signed up to fight. But that was the case with Charley. It explains his admirable élan.
MY LAI 4 – 3.16.68
March 16, 1968 was a sad day in US history. On that day the 30 men of Charlie Company of the US Army’s Americal Division entered a small hamlet in northern South Vietnam and massacred approximately 300 unarmed civilians, mostly women, old men and children.
The news of this Nanking-like slaughter would not leak out until the next Administration. When it did it, two American soldiers would be arrested for war crimes. The My Lai trial would be the most spectacular and controversial trial of the Nixon years, even more than any trials of the American radicals.
GO WEST OLD MAN
General Westmoreland was recalled back to the states in the spring of 1968 and was replaced by General Abrams. Johnson felt bad for him and wanted the poor guy to stop being the military scapegoat for everything that was going badly in Vietnam. General Westmoreland took the 5,000 mile flight back West to head the Army at home and write a very good book. He sued CBS in the 1980's for defaming his role in Vietnam in one of their slanted documentaries. He lost. CBS has a right to its slant.
A SAD POLICY
Acronym's can work well or they can fail. The US tactical policy of 'search and destroy' began as a simple and fair minded plan to go to rural villages, find the enemy fighting forces, then return to base leaving the villages in a safer and more productive condition. That seemed like a logical goal in 1963 when the term was first used. But by the middle of Lyndon's war that plan was out the window. The villages were simply dangerous places. There were VC disguised as civilians ready to ambush well-meaning GI's. Little kids and old ladies might walk up to an American and offer then a glass of lemonade. Then as the guy drinks up and drops his weapon to facing the ground two VC open up from behind a bush and kill the guy before he quenches his thirst. The VC presence in the rural areas in 1967 was much stronger than it was in 1963, so even if the US troops could find the VC fighters, which was so rare they were referred to as “ghosts,” the village would return to VC control one way or another within 24 hours after the Americans left.
The search and destroy policy evolved over four years into a new interpretation of the term 'destroy.' Now it meant to go to a village controlled by VC and destroy the village itself. Since the VC fighting forces were ghostlike, the old axiom that the goal of war is to destroy the enemy fighting forces no longer could apply. Now it was search and destroy VC villages. But don't worry, there was a humane element included. The villagers were to be relocated in safer areas closer to good-guy lands near the cities. It didn't factor in all that much that these people called these villages home and people who are forced out of “home” are traumatized. That didn't matter much. Do I have to tell you that overall the policy failed?
By the end of 1967 the Allies had 17,000 VC in POW camps. At the same time, search and destroy had created more than one million displaced Vietnamese people. These million refugees weren't praying before candle-illuminated icons of LBJ in their huts at night.
This doesn't even get to the other issue of American atrocities, and the horrible image of GI's lighting huts on fire as old women cried in the background. That hurt bad on the home front.
The search and destroy policy added up to the acronym “sad” and people began calling it the “sad” policy of the US Army.
ROTATE
The United States did not ask too much from each soldier in Vietnam. Uncle Sam asked each man to serve one year in the jungle. It was one and done. They called it rotation, and it led to frustration.
This guaranteed that the USA would fight the entire Vietnam Wr with green troops! This seriously hindered Allied combat effectiveness for what I presume are obvious reasons. America was rotating the troops out of Vietnam as soon as they started getting good at it and replacing these men with troops who weren't good at it. The VC meanwhile were lifelong soldiers of immense dedication. With each passing year they got better and we stayed the same green newcomer mediocre. In a way this was humane but it a way it was cruel.
During WWII many famous units fought on and on for the entire war. The Big Red One division saw years of fighting. Studies showed an awful disproportion of the WWII casualties in the same division, while some green divisions saw little or no fighting. A few choice regiments had 80% casualties while others had 2%. Vietnam was supposed to even that injustice out.
But how unjust was the old system. Overall, you asking for more casualties by the constant rotation of the seasoned out and the green in. Some division were asked to make the greater sacrifice but overall it was humane, not rotten.
Studies showed that in the regiments that took 50% or more casualties in the war, there was a hidden stat of significance. Once those decimated regiments gained two years experience, they spent the next battles showing an astonishing lack of casualties compared to any other regiments in the same battles. The more they fought, the less they died. So if this is all true, then in theory, 50,000 US troops with two plus years experience might have made a difference greater than 525,000 rotators. The 50,000 would probably know some of the Vietnamese language by then for starters. Most US troops knew so little Vietnamese that it hurt the relationship.
The officers had the benefit of rotation too. The majority of officers had to serve in Vietnam only six months and then never had to go back. The idea was to place lives first and winning the war second. Again, to save lives in one way, the USA was endangering them in another. This was such a foolish system that the troops at the end of their year usually knew more than their commanding officers.
Rotation was one of the major blunders of the VW.
THE SULLIVAN FREEWAY
That was one of the nicknames given to the Ho Chi Mihn Trail that climbed down the side wall of Vietnam through Laos and upper east Cambodia and made victory impossible for the US. This jungle trail was they way the men in the black pajamas won the war. The trail was too deep, too jungle thick, its trails too small and well maintained to disappear because Phantoms or B-52's bombed it a hundred times a day. Trying to stop the infiltration down the Sullivan Freeway was like trying to stop a rain-flow down a gutter with popsicle sticks. You could stop it for a moment but the water found its way around the sticks easily enough every time.
The only way to possibly stop it would be to invade and occupy a massive strip of territory across Laos. William Sullivan was the Ambassador to Laos during the Johnson years and he strongly advised against a proposed invasion in force to stop the infiltration of the enemy down the trail. Westmoreland had mixed feelings about a Laos but he did say that if he went in he would like to do it in “corps strength” which means three divisions or more. Such a 30,000 men invasion of “neutral” Laos would not be politically manageable in the view of Johnson and MacNamara. “Sully” was even more against the idea than Washington was, partly because he knew how many innocent Laotians would die in the campaign, partly because he knew it had a tiny chance to succeed if everything went perfect. So a lot of Nam folk began to blame Ambassador Sully first for the lack of a strategic offensive into Laos, and for the continued flourishing of the HCMT. They gave the trail the disdainful blameful nickname the “Sullivan Freeway.”
The Vietnam history books are so left biased that only the United States gets called out for violating Laos neutrality. These authors can't deny that the Communists were violating Laos neutrality so they just praise with absent damnation when mentioning Communist activities on the trail, then condemn openly with extra emotionalisms the deeds of the Americans who are forever violating Laos neutrality. The best you will ever get is a once-per-book quote from a right-wing buffoon general complaining that “The Communists also violated Laos neutrality.” But the authors will never say that directly about the Communists and will say it directly about the Americans 30 times per book. They play slick with the facts. They don't lie openly or invent facts.
“CIA funded” operation in Laos are always mentioned. That's a fabulous weasel-word, “funded.” It is a word that is never ever never never used when the Communists are discussed. North Vietnam “supports” the NLF in the South. The books might even admit that the USSR “supplies” the Communist effort, or “provides” tanks and rifles and trucks to North Vietnam. But they will never use the word “funded.” The USA is inherently the bad guy because it uses money as a weapon and the left hates the rich and America means mean money. But if China or Russia provides billion to the North Vietnamese cause, it is never called “funding” or “bankrolling.” Those are polemic selectively enforced weasel-words reserved for the bad-guys, the Americans. And if they do admit with slick bias that the USSR “supports” or “supplies” North Vietnam, they only mention it as often as a lunar eclipse. The Soviet and Chinese funding of the North Vietnam war effort is the most underreported fact of the entire war. Most of yesterday and todays morally superior lefties have no idea of the extent of big Communist power funding and bankrolling of little Communist insurrections and wars.
CRUEL WORLD VIETNAM
Big Sam meant well. The United States gave more than $7 billion worth of non-military aid to Vietnam during the war years. America wanted to avoid civilian casualties although sometimes it happened, while the VC oftne wanted civilians to be the very targets of their attacks, and sometimes it happened that they had to fight our Marines and GI’s instead. General Westmoreland states,
“Never in the history of warfare, certainly never in the history of the use of American arms has more attention been given to the avoidance of civilian casualties than we did in Vietnam.”
There are certainly people who would not agree with the General but it is an opinion worth considering.
PUEBLO CRISIS - 1968
On January 23 1968 North Korean warships seized the US Naval Intelligence gathering ship Pueblo in waters of disputed legality. North Korea claimed that Pueblo was on Korean waters and the US said no, our ship was in international waters.
One American sailor died in the short firefight and the crew of 88 were taken prisoner. The US demanded the release of the captives, and the crisis was on. Which side was right has never been proven.
Johnson was concerned that South Korea would withdraw its forces in Vietnam to help out back on the farm. Lyndon ordered and additional 14,000 USA troops to South Korea but did not draw Korean or America troops from Vietnam. The new troops were called up and sent to Korea from home reserves.
Johnson did not respond militarily to Pueblo, and we all wondered why. We would defend another country but not our own guys? Johnson was in a bind because the Tet offensive was in full swing in Vietnam and in a US election year he could not afford a second war in Korea. As with Vietnam, he feared Chinese intervention in Korea.
The Administration had already been fearful of an impending invasion from North Korea. A major assassination plot against the South Korean President Rhee had only recently been prevented in a dramatic last minute gun battle. The hit men were from North Korea.
The solution was a classic Democrat 'negotiate until we all grow old' plan. I guess it worked, but the Pueblo crew missed the ’68 World Series. That December, the commander of the ship Captain Bucher signed a statement that his ship was a spy ship in international waters when captured, and that he and his crew were a bunch of bad guys. In exchange for this self-flagellation, the crew was released. Upon returning to the states the men, supported officially by the administration said that the confessions were not valid and obviously had been given under severe duress.
Not a day went by in 68 that America didn’t see a news story on the national news about the latest on the Pueblo. It was much like the Jimmy Carter hostage crisis of 1979-1981. The history books and documentaries do not give justice to its importance. Pueblo was unresolved on Election Day and probably helped elect Nixon. Along with Tet, the length of the war, race riots and protest movements, Pueblo enhanced the image of Johnson as losing control of the country.
So the Pueblo men came home in December of 68 after LBJ was a lame duck and Nixon was president-elect, a scenario similar to the 1981 Iran hostage release as Reagan prepared to take office.
Johnson says very little about the Pueblo incident in his memoirs, which is surprising since the event was such a sensation. It was a big event in my life but somehow, not in Lyndon Johnson’s. People were talking about the Pueblo in diners and around office coolers. I was just shy of my 13th birthday and was very much caught up in the Pueblo. The nation was angry and so was I. Now its treated as a passing footnote in American history, small compared to the historical significance of Elvis Presley’s drug problem, or Joe Namath.
KING AND KENNEDY KIA 1968
On April 4, 1968 in Memphis Tennessee a lone sniper shot and killed Dr. Martin Luther King the greatest African American leader of his time. This charismatic and beloved man (and fabulous orator) was gunned down on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, which is now a Museum of the Assassination.
A cracker racist on the lam named James Earl Ray was arrested and pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 99 years.
Some intelligent people have done a lot of research and they think that Jimmy Ray did not kill King and that it was the result of some kind of government conspiracy. Mark Lane is one of them. Lane Code Named Zorro, which suspects the FBI. Lane was also the lawyer for Jim Jones of Jonestown, so....
The country experienced some race rioting after the shooting. Robert Kennedy gave a dramatic speech in which he asked blacks to forgive the whites. His brother had also been “killed by a white man” so he knew what they were feeling. It’s a genuine, moving and compassionate speech. It’s also a fairly lame offering that his brother was killed by a white man, since his brother was white and race obviously had no role in Dealy Plaza.
RFK RIP
Less than 2 months later on June 5, 1968, just minutes after winning the California Primary, Robert Kennedy was walking through the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shaking hands with well wishers when he met his destiny at the hands of an ill-will-wisher. An assassin stuck out his arm to shake the Senator's hand but instead emptied the 8 rounds of his Iver-Johnson 22 calibre revolver into Kennedy and the walls of the pantry. A round hit Robert in the head, leaving him bleeding and unconscious in the floor, never to revive. Bystanders tackled the rat to the ground, including Roosevelt Greer, a defensive lineman for the NFL who was good at it. But it was too late to save Kennedy.
The shooter was a Palestinian-American named Sirhan Sirhan. RFK died the next day, the sixth of June. The police later found Sirhan's diary in which he wrote repeatedly that “RFK has to die,” but it wasn't clear why.
Sirhan is still on death row in a California prison and says he doesn’t remember committing the crime. His story has changed often.
There is no death penalty in California and Sirhan still comes up for parole every few years. Sirhan has testified in his defense that if RFK were alive today he would forgive him and approve his parole. A comedian responded to this with, “What a shame. The one guy that would have defended him, and he had to go and shoot the guy.”
There are many conspiracy theories about the shooting of Robert Kennedy. They “prove” that there was a second gunman in the pantry and that the killing was a government conspiracy. Charts, diagrams and testimonies prove that there had to be more than one gunman in the pantry. The fact that no one saw the guy doesn't mean much to the conspiracy nuts, (like the large numbers of people all over the world who think that no planes actually hit the World Trade Center on 9/11/01 and that it was trick photography to mask an international conspiracy to take over the Middle East.)
Sirhan's Iver Johnson 22 revolver was one of many of its type that carried the nickname of “suicide special.” That's because it misfired often, causing injury to the shooter. You can buy a working antique IJ-22 today for about $36 at a southern flea market. If the assassination of RFK was a conspiracy of the CIA or the US military, it seems odd they would give the main assassin one of the worst pistols available to do it with.
The most important thing about the event was not who did it or why. The breathtakingly important thing about is that Robert Kennedy definitely (and we do mean d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y) would have won the Election of 1968 and that all of American and perhaps world history would have been different. Instead of Nixon we would have had Robert Kennedy in the White House for four and probably eight years, America would have almost certainly been out of Vietnam by the spring of 1970, there would never have been Watergate, the resignation of Nixon, no Ford, and no Jimmy Carter in 1976 coming in from the side door and picking up the pieces of a disheveled Republican reign. Ted Kennedy probably would have been too busy in the RFK Administration to be galavanting on Martha's Vineyard in July of 1969 and he quite likely would have continued the Kennedy Dynasty in 76.
It's horrible that an assassin can change history like that, but Sirhan has to go down as having done so with the same evil power as that commanded by Gavril Princip and Dr. Carl Austin Weiss.
IRAQ TAKES A BATH
In 1968 the Baath Party overthrew the government of Iraq and took over power in Baghdad. one of the leaders of the Baathists was a kooky sort of fellow named Saddam Hussein.
AFTER OFFICE
LBJ in the last months of his life let his hair grow very long, like a high school hippie. There are very few photographs of him like this as he became reclusive on his ranch in Texas. He may by way of hair have been sending an apology to the left for sending so many young men to their deaths. Long-hair on men had a lot of political meaning back then. Today it’s just a way to get over with women, and matter of personal style. Back then it was political statement.
Lyndon Johnson died in December of 1972. Had he been re-elected in ’68 he would not have finished his second term. It seems a cruel fate that he died and one month later the Vietnam War ended in a Peace treaty.
CONCLUSION
As for Vietnam, there is one thing that all sides of the argument can agree on; Lyndon, you messed up.
The one thing that most disturbs me when I read about Lyndon Johnson is the consistency of the reports that he was a bully. It’s creepy that a man with that much power still needed to intimidate people. Bullies are usually small people, and that’s why they are bullies. But the image of the President of the United States, acting like some bully from the office or factory is hard to accept. I always wanted not to believe it no matter how many times I read accounts of just such behavior.
CBS news show 60 Minutes ran a 30-Year anniversary special and producer Don Hewitt spoke on camera of an encounter with Lyndon Baines Johnson,
Lyndon took me and another reporter for a ride around
his ranch at some very high speeds. The limo pulled over
in the middle of nowhere by an abandoned building. Lyndon
was in the front seat chewing a candy bar when he handed
back the empty wrapper to me, of all people. Then he asked
me to throw the wrapper away into that old trash barrel.
I wanted to say no but here he was, the President of the
United States, so I got out and threw the wrapper into the
ash can, and off went the limo. Gone.
Don didn’t finish the story to my and your frustration, but that tale says enough for me about Lyndon Baines Johnson the man and the President.
After office Johnson wanted to tell and sell his side of his presidency to the right reporter. But whom should he give this prized plum to. Hmm.
According to biographer Robert Merrill, LBJ always tried to change the minds of his worst critics by making their personal acquaintance and trying to convert them to his side. The first thing his worst critics could expect was a call and a friendly invitation to spend a couple of days with him at the Presidential ranch. Who could say no? More often than not it worked. And why not?
Aesop said accurately that, ‘acquaintance softens prejudice.’ Disarming the enemy is cheaper, easier and wiser than fighting him, and converting him is far far better than disarming. The goals were worth it. It was a sneaky technique that shrewd observers resented and the gullible fell for. One critical reporter spent days with Lyndon and then had the moxie to remain an opponent after leaving the ranch. Lyndon was livid.
Early in 1968, before Johnson had announced that he would not run, a young journalist named Doris Kearns wrote a tough article drawing up a political map of how the Democrats could manage to dump Johnson from the 1968 ticket and run a progressive like Kennedy or Gino McCarthy in his place.
Later in the year when he was a lame duck, he spotted Kearns at a Washington gala and asked her to dance. While dancing, he told her that she had him all wrong and said that he wanted to tell his entire life story to her and to her alone. Doris was star struck and who could blame her? It was a reporter’s dream-come-true.
Kearns ended up spending more one-on-one time with Lyndon at his home than any reporter ever spent with any President in American history. The result of these endless interviews was her acclaimed book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. Doris also helped Johnson write his White House memoirs along the way. They were writing each other’s book.
Kearns bought everything he said, hook, line and sinker. He made a complete fool out of her, and then she sold his jive story to the American people making fools of them. Doris had read a lot of books but had evidently neglected to keep up on her Aesop. She went from a healthy cynic to a sycophant through acquaintance.
The gist of her book is that Lyndon was a great warm guy with a heart of gold, feeling lonely and misunderstood. The guy cared about blacks and the poor so very much, but that stupid Vietnam War ruined all his plans for The Great Society. He couldn’t sleep at night while the less fortunate people in America were sleeping in homeless shelters or being discriminated against in the South. And now the war protestors were saying mean things about him, but all he had ever wanted to do in politics was help the less fortunate. He was a genuine progressive liberal and now they were calling him a war-mongerer. His dream was broken and now, so was he.
Johnson turned his presidency into a chick-flick and sold it to Doris. No guy would have bought it, and no tough conservative woman would have either. Doris is neither. That’s why he chose her.
I have seen Doris Kearns Goodwin interviewed on television at least 200 times. She is based in Boston so I see her on both local and national news programs. She doesn’t have a hostile bone in her body. Rarely is she placed against a TV opponent. Her interviewers are deferential at the least and loving at the most. The few times I have seen her in an adversarial debate her opponent got the best of her too often in my opinion. She is adored as an historian and is a friend to all in the media at all levels.
It is understandable. Kearns has a very likeable look, demeanor, and personality. It is not surprising that she married a very important man, Richard Goodwin, speechwriter and advisor to John F. Kennedy.
But Lyndon Johnson wrote a revisionist nonsense version of his presidency and sold it to the nation through her.
Interesting that she says that her interviews were usually conducted in his bedroom. Hmmm. She got up at dawn and then Lyndon would have some breakfast and then slip into his bed and do the interviews from under the sheets. I kid you not.
There isn’t something a little sexual going on there? Of course there is. At face value Lyndon was an ugly old man. But power is always sexy to a woman (seldom matters either way to a man - a hot chick is a hot chick whether she’s bagging groceries or singing at the Palladium) - The president is sexy, period. Henry Kissinger was only a little more handsome than a discarded peach-pit but he was always recognized as one of the sexiest men in America. He was close to the President and held great power through his talent and hard work.
On Lyndon’s end it had to be sexual. Doris Kearns was a little cutie. She was short, didn’t wear make-up, had golden shoulder length hair straight with bangs, brains and a soft charming little voice. Doris couldn’t sound shrill if she lost her temper and screamed. She was attractive in a very housewife disarming way. Lyndon dug her. I can see the bedside interviews in my head right now. He was a very old man with two heart attacks under his belt. He was having a great time. His heart was tickled. The sexual act itself is only one of the many thousands of sexual acts in our everyday lives. I’m surprised Lady Bird even allowed Doris in the door.
When I was a radio talk show host in 2006 I met Doris for just a few seconds. I didn’t give her anything more than a nod because there were a lot of people being introduced to her. I wanted to argue with her over something she said on NBC on election night 2004 concerning the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, but it wasn’t the time or place.
Doris Kearns Goodwin currently has a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Abraham Lincoln on the best-seller list.
The problem with being a conservative on the Vietnam War is that it’s hard to pass the hot-seat test. Okay, you’re the President in 1965. What do you do about Vietnam? Pick another year in the Vietnam War. Where are the good options?
For a consistent extreme liberal on the other hand, it’s easy to pass the hot-seat test. America from 1946 on gets out of Southeast Asia and stays out of Indochinese affairs completely. If the war is inherited from another Administration, the US should get out of Vietnam immediately and completely, and should stay out. Trouble is, no liberal advocating this could get elected. Just ask Dennis Kucinich. An hard-core hippie might get to the Senate out of Vermont, but not to 1600 Pennsylvania, not in 65, and not now.
Liberals JFK and LBJ tried to be conservative on Vietnam and then conservative Nixon tried to be liberal on Vietnam. All were trapped in paradoxes. No American Administration ever ‘picked a team’ in Vietnam.
SOURCES
The Accidental President C) 1967, by Robert Merrill -
AC is a hatchet job on poor Lyndon the unlikable. Very good read by a lively journalist, but Merrill goes too far even for this reader who doesn’t like Johnson at all. It’s too dripping with venom even for my taste. That should tell you plenty.
Air War – Vietnam, by Drew Middleton – c) 1978
America’s Longest War, The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975, c)1986 (revised edition), by George C. Herring.
All praise for the courage and excellence of the Communist warriors. None for US combat troops or the sacrifices of the ARVN soldiers. Zero. All the Americans get in this book is condemnation. I read very last Blame America First page. A totally disgusting book. ALW was a mainstream successful work that is as good a place as any to take a sampling of the “reporting” on the history of the war.
The North Vietnamese soldiers are all super-heroes. This guy has his nose so far up Ho Chi's hole he can see out of his beard.
Behind the Lines - Hanoi, December 23 - January 7, by Harrison E. Salisbury of the New York Times - c) 1967 - Harper & Row
Jane Fonda with a valise. I have read about one third of several of his books. I don’t like his writing and I don’t like the way his mind works. That he went to North Vietnam and looked around with lib-colored glasses and the financial backing of the New York Times and several anti-war activists, just finishes his portrait for me.
The Congressional Medal of Honor Library: Vietnam, The Names, the Deeds. c) 1984 – Moving accounts of every man who won the Medal of Honor in this losing cause. It would be a fine thing if more Americans knew these stories instead of the tales of American atrocities.
Counsel to the President, A Memoir, by Clark Clifford – c) 1991 – Cliff was the Secretary of Defense under LBJ at the height of the Vietnam War.
This is a great book in spite of (maybe even because of) Clark's insufferable ego. CP is smart but easy to read, a smooth flowing work of political literature that I have enjoyed so much that I feel sad that it has to end (on pg 447 right now.)
Cliff was the one who finally confronted Lyndon with the truth that that Nam was a dog and it was best to cut our losses and get out. But he downplays how much he had to do with getting us stuck in the mud in the first place.
This guy knows how to write! He is everything that Michael Moore is not, a real intellectual with a brilliant insight into everything, and a real player to boot. I absolutely love this book.
A Country Made by War – by Geoffrey Perret – c) 1989 – His Vietnam chapter is called “Withdrawal Pains.” Perret has a talent for finding in short chapters, some important point missed by full books on the same subject.
The Enduring Vision – A History of the American People, by Paul Boyer, Clifford Clark, Joey Kett, Tom Purvis, Harvard Sitkoff and Nancy Woloch, - c) 1990 – Left wing propaganda that has some nerve calling itself a history of the American people. It's a polemic. The chapters on Vietnam are about what I expected them to be, except worse.
Exploring American History, by John R. O’Connor, c) 1991 – This colorful textbook is for the junior high school student. I enjoy reading history at this level. It’s very relaxing.
Here’s a quiz for the student-reader on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 7.64,
‘What did Congress mean when it said
South Vietnam is vital to our “national
Interests?’
That’s a tough one for a 60-year-old university professor to answer, let alone some poor seventh grader. This book is commendably even-handed on Nam, but p.c. to a fault on too many other occasions.
From Hiroshima to Glasnost, At the Center of Decision, by Paul Nitze – c) 1989 – Great book by a man at the center of decisions. He was making some of the US Navy decisions in the Vietnam era. The chapter The Vietnam Imbroglio annoys me because I'm never sure how to pronounce imbroglio.
In Retrospect, The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, by Robert MacNamara – c) 1995 – The beleaguered Defense Secreatry and arch-villain of the War tells his side of it. MacNamara writes as he speaks. There's never quite anything to grasp on to.
IR was a big-deal best-seller when it came out in 95.
Lightning Out of Israel, The Six-Day War in the Middle East, by the Associated Press, c) 1967 – Good short general history from the era – Very pro-Israel
Lost Victory, by William Colby – c) 1989 – CIA man heavily involved in the whole mess of Vietnam tells his side of it. He casually in passing mentions that most of the “Sino-Soviet Split” was disinformation and that the two were closely co-operating to win the Vietnam war for its ally South Vietnam. I wish he had elaborated further on this crucial point.
The Making of the President 1964, by Theodore H White, c)1965 – Whites books are a pleasure. This is a guy I rip off. It's the highest compliment.
White admires Johnson and gives him every benefit of the doubt on sincerity, courage, and effective decision making to date. But White concedes that Johnson lacked warmth and had few if any real friends. ‘Lyndon the unlikable’ from yet another source.
White sometimes tries too hard to be clever and creative in his style and an will go off the deep end on some minor point until you begin to question his sanity.
My Brother Lyndon, by Sam Houston Johnson, c) 1969. Sam blames Kennedy’s leftover advisors like Bundy, Rostow, Fortas and McNamara for the mess Johnson left behind in Vietnam. Samuel is just doing his duty as a brother, I hope. He can't possibly really believe these things, can he?
My Life, by Bill Clinton, c) 2004 for the material on his mentor Fullbright and for Clinton’s slanted mini-history of the Vietnam War.
Clinton couldn’t wait to recognize Vietnam as soon as he became President. I have a wonderful photograph of him in Hanoi smiling broadly while standing beneath a 70-foot bust of Ho Chi Minh.
To Move a Nation, by Roger Hillsman – c) 1967 – Fine work by a Kennedy man about Nam in the Kennedy years. It provides an excellent background of what JFK handed off to LBJ in Vietnam
The National Experience - Part Two A History of the United States since 1865 – by John M. Blum, Edmund S. Morgan, Willie Lee Rose, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Kenneth M. Stampp, and C. Vann Woodward – c) 1981- HBJ NY(first edition was 1963 – It's really more of a 1963 book in tone)
I like the textbook, but I don't love it. I thought I would love it with this line-up. Schlesinger's books are always slow as mud, so I should have been prepared if he had his hands in this.
Edmund Morgan wrote bios of Roger Williams and Ben Franklin. Morgan got a Pulitzer for lifetime achievement as an American historian in 2004.
New Lies For Old, by Anatoly Golitsyn - c) 1983
The Soviet defector explains why the Sino-Soviet split was a hoax. The most important political book of the second half of the 20th Century.
Out of Many – By John Mark Faragher (Yale), Mary Jo Buhle (Brown), Danny Czitrom (Mt Holyoke) and Susan Armitage (Washington State University) c) 2005 – Prentice Hall
College freshman learn the left wing version of American history through this book while not being told honestly that it is just that and nothing more, certainly nothing even attempting to be fair. It is a great physical book, colorful and glossy, and fun to handle.
Out of the Cold, by Robert McNamara, c) 1989 – You know that short book you ‘read on the plane?” – This one you can read on the cab ride. It’s his analysis of the Cold War, and the aftermath of its end.
The Path to Power, by Bob Caro is 900 pages on Lyndon’s early life and ends with his reaching the vice presidency in 1961. Too daunting for me in scope. I only made page 50. I always give books the 50-page test. On page 50 I circle the number and put in an up or down arrow indicating whether I should continue. PTP is not a bad book but I had to give page 50 a down arrow. When they invent the 58 hour day I'll try to finish it.
The Pentagon Papers, The Defense Department History of United States Decision Making on VIETNAM – c) 1971 The Senator Gravel Edition – Four volumes – The political storm over the public publication of this material is more historically important than the material itself. What a storm when these papers were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times.
Presidential Campaigns, by Paul F. Boller, Jr. of Texas Christian University - c) 1984 – Oxford University Press.
Great Society Johnson presided over a healthy economy. Maybe that’s part of why the US got involved in Vietnam. It could afford to.)
Boller quotes a Republican politician saying,
“This is the first time a President has poverty and prosperity working for him at the same time.”
A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garraty of Columbia – c) 1977 (Fourth revised and abridged) Harper & Row
Do you think Garraty voted for LBJ in 64? Or was it Goldwater?
“Johnson was an idealist at heart, a compromiser of means but seldom of ultimate values.”
JAG, you are really too kind.
The Ten Thousand Day War, by Michael MacLear, c) 1981 – The Ten Thousand Day War PBS - a 10 volume video documentary based on this book. Most of those interviewed are now dead and it is a great thing for history that the doc was made. Both the book and the TV series have a ludicrous liberal bias (what a surprise!), which they try and pass off as the accepted verdict of history, when in truth, many of the opinions and conclusions are wide open for debate today just as they were at the time. This book drips of unfair.
Just to cite one example of style = substance; on many occasions Mikey Mac mentions some “elite” North Vietnamese army division, but a word like 'elite' is never used for an American division. A very important example of liberal history of the war, as this was a very popular book.
The Two Vietnams, A Political and Military Analysis, by Bernard Fall – c) 1964 – Whenever an author starts out in the preface explaining that he has no axe to grind and just wants to tell the story objectively, you know that the opposite is true and the reader is in for a violent polemic. Fall is pro-North Vietnam, pro-France and anti-United States. He worships the black pajama gang. His prejudice against America is extremely offensive.
The United States Air Force, A History, by Herbert Malloy Mason Jr, - c) 1976 – Last chapter on the “War Without End” is sad in tone, the defeat still fresh in the patriotic author's mind.
The Vantage Point, by Lyndon Baines Johnson - c) 1972 I saw a review of this book in which the writer thought LJB shouldn't have even bothered to write it since it was so shallow and superficial. I could not disagree more. I think he put a lot of work into it and gave us his best. Vietnam coverage is divided into four separate chapters. It makes a great Nam short history book if one chooses to read only those chapters.
Vietnam, The Logic of Withdrawal, by Howard Zinn, c) 1967 – I like Zinn and all I ever do is disagree with him. He died in January 2010 while doing laps in his swimming pool. That gives me a good excuse not to use mine. I don't want that to happen to me.
Vietnam at War, The History 1946-1975, by Lt. Gen. Phillip B. Davidson, USA (Ret.) - c) 1988 – Very thorough, and all business. Its not often that I pay a lot for a book, but when I spotted this one I knew I wouldn't see it floating around at some flea market later on. This is especially useful for the military account of the years 1946 to 1960.
Vietnam Witness, by Bernard Fall, c) 1966 - French journalist Fall wrote two excellent books on Vietnam before stepping on a mine there in 1967. His books are helpful to say the least. But it’s not fair that he gets a free pass just because he died. Fall is cited so very often by Namtorians, yet they never cite his over the top anti-American bias.
When Presidents Lie, A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, by Eric Alterman, Professor of English at the City University of New York c) 2004 Viking
Eric has a 70 page chapter on LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Eric is relatively gentle to Democrats who slip and fail, and extra mean when Republicans to the same. He is completely partisan, and I hope he doesn't delude himself into thinking this book is fair to both parties. He wrote another popular book called, “What Liberal Media?”
Nuff said.
FILM
Going Upriver – I saw this film about three weeks before the 2004 election. There was controversy at the time over Kerry’s Vietnam service. Some were challenging the story and the image of Kerry as a fighting tiger saving his mates in close calls. Going Upriver is a testimonial movie putting as positive a spin as possible on Kerry’s war record in an election year. It was the film version of a campaign book, a polemic disguised as a full-length documentary. It also worked. It convinced me that Kerry was a genuine Vietnam War hero.
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