PBS The Vietnam War

[Blackjack200]

I've been learning a lot more about the war - confirming it was a wrong war that killed millions for no good reason but a misguided pursuit of power.

I'm reading Daniel Ellseberg's "Secrets", and recommend it highly - an amazing inside view of the war's start.

It was murder. It's an absolute joke for the US to call any other state a "sponsor of terror" after what we did there.

 

[K1052]

well, it is now on Netflix

This is how I'm watching it. I only do an episode a week as it's...a lot to digest.

 

[Ns1]

Curious, what did you family tell you about the war?

Sorry for the Necro. I am watching this series currently and I enjoy the discussions here on subjects like this.

it sucked and when they finally left vietnam, they could see the waterline through whatever window they were looking at. I didn't figure out my grandma was a saigon bride until I was like, 20. My "Uncle Jack" made more sense then - no masturbation jokes before noon please.

I didn't realize that my aunt and Mom had different fathers until some significant time after that, which I suppose makes sense given the war...

They settled in Camp Pendleton; I think it was thanks to my Uncle Jack's connections that they were able to get out, but TBH not sure. They don't speak a lot of the war.

 

[Craig234]

It was murder. It's an absolute joke for the US to call any other state a "sponsor of terror" after what we did there.

Thanks for the comment. I wish our country more universally understood the history, but we don't.

The history has largely been re-written to, 'noble cause - we TRIED to help others be free, but our politicians were incompetent at running the war, and the Vietnamese people not grateful enough and trying hard enough to help us help them, so our noble sacrifice went to waste. We should have given the military carte blanche and always should.'

No understanding, no learning from mistakes, no accountability or guilt or appreciation of the harm done and not much to make sure it doesn't happen again. It's a good example of 'not learning from history' leading to the danger of repeating it. Not exactly of course, but the basic errors. It's an inability of a country to understand when it does wrong.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

I've been learning a lot more about the war - confirming it was a wrong war that killed millions for no good reason but a misguided pursuit of power.

It wasn't even a pursuit of power. We had nothing really to gain and if we had been involved at all we belonged on the other side. We were the self-appointed protectors of oppressed counties that wanted to shake off European colonialism since we had done exactly that.

The whole thing started as a way to fight communism. We were not trying to grab Vietnam or set up a bases there to enrich ourselves or better allow us to project power in that part of the world. We just refused to allow them to become commies even though that's what they wanted. And once we were in it was pure ego that kept us in. From Eisenhower on every president knew we couldn't win. We just kept throwing away lives because we were too cowardly to admit that we were losing. A misguided pursuit of power I could almost understand. That's how we got to be where we are, we wanted to be the kingpins and we went out and took it. While not exactly noble at least there's an objective and a method to the madness. We wanted power so others could not make us kneel to their power. But Vietnam we wanted nothing. No power, no oil, no bases, no economic benefit, no allies that needed protecting. It was all us attempting to bully them.

 

[Craig234]

It wasn't even a pursuit of power. We had nothing really to gain and if we had been involved at all we belonged on the other side. We were the self-appointed protectors of oppressed counties that wanted to shake off European colonialism since we had done exactly that.

The whole thing started as a way to fight communism. We were not trying to grab Vietnam or set up a bases there to enrich ourselves or better allow us to project power in that part of the world. We just refused to allow them to become commies even though that's what they wanted. And once we were in it was pure ego that kept us in. From Eisenhower on every president knew we couldn't win. We just kept throwing away lives because we were too cowardly to admit that we were losing. A misguided pursuit of power I could almost understand. That's how we got to be where we are, we wanted to be the kingpins and we went out and took it. While not exactly noble at least there's an objective and a method to the madness. We wanted power so others could not make us kneel to their power. But Vietnam we wanted nothing. No power, no oil, no bases, no economic benefit, no allies that needed protecting. It was all us attempting to bully them.

We should understand that we'd largely always supported brutal European colonization right up through Eisenhower, and it was largely JFK who really turned the tide on that. We'd talked the talk on being the force for democracy, but in fact I think we'd prevented more democracy than we'd empowered.

You're right that we 'should' have been for Vietnamese independence - ironically, Ho Chi Minh understood that better than the US did. Ho Chi Min believe in American values more than our leaders.

Ho Chi Minh had lived in the US, and when he became an advocate for Vietnamese independence, he appealed to President Woodrow Wilson for US support - we didn't even reply.

When the Japanese drove out the French as the occupiers in WWII and then were driven out when they lost the war, Ho Chi Min saw the chance for independence, and again contacted the US for support against the French returning - even issuing a Vietnamese 'Declaration of Independence' based on the US original. The US ignored him again to support its ally, France.

In fact, the US not only supported French re-colonization politically, but so much that we paid up to 90% of the cost of France's war.

That's when he saw the only road to independence was military victory, and he began the successful war on the French occupiers.

Tragically, when the French were defeated, the rest of the world was ready to accept Vietnamese independence under Ho Chi Minh, who had overwhelming Vietnamese support, but the US was headed by rather radical so-called 'anti-communist' leaders, who fought tooth and nail to find a way to deny the Vietnamese independence, and succeeded.

It seems to me the heart of the issue is that the US at time fought for global domination in the name of opposing a largely false monster of communist global domination, caused by a variety of factors from the basic 'interests' of our country for power, to a hysteria, to the quirks of individuals in power, to the recent history of WWII, to the political needs of US politicians.

(I've argued that when the Republicans were devastated politically by the Great Depression and FDR having great popularity, and then more popularity winning WWII, that the Republicans were without a strong political issue to run on, and found one in anti-communism, whether it resulted in McCarthyism for some or the support for a cold war for others.)

And that led to a dark period in US history, when the US went around overthrowing good governments, democratically elected governments, and installing brutal, right-wing regimes that would claim to be strongly anti-communist and pro-US while violating democracy and limiting freedom, typically with a lot of corruption.

The US public was unaware of the actions mostly, fed false propaganda about them, with stories that the US was defending freedom and democracy, and often that the overthrows had nothing to do with the US when they were US plans and policies.

Vietnam was never even really about communism - that was just a popular option at the time as an alternative, the real issue was their independence, that's all the people cared about.

In 1954 was when the US lost the best chance for justice in Vietnam, simply accepting the Vietnamese victory against France (and our money). Instead, we pushed a plan for a 'short-term' division of Vietnam into north and south, with elections to re-unify the country within a couple of years.

When it was clear Ho Chi Minh would win the election with about 80% of the vote, we cancelled them.

One of our operations was to spread propaganda in the north to terrorize them into fleeing south - and then using their movement for propaganda that they were fleeing tyranny in the north.

It was in that action, in rejecting independence, that the US really got locked in to opposing the people of Vietnam even while claiming to support them, and the issue became more and more about US politics with presidents not wanting to 'lose a war' and going further and further not to do so.

The summary of Vietnam could be the war between the independence of the Vietnamese people, 80% who supported Ho Chin Minh and nearly all independence from the colonization the US had supported, and the US's desire to 'win' against Ho Chi Minh and to have a US puppet government ruling the country while claiming it was fighting for the Vietnamese people.

No wonder, then, that the experts saw the policy as futile and doomed, but were unheard by Washington leaders committed to victory, why those supporting the goal of victory against all evidence were promoted and those opposing victory banished, why the history of a lack of enthusiasm by the South Vietnamese and lies about 'body counts' showing victory and so on.

The exception was Kennedy, but his administration is complicated to discuss.

One quote, which by its nature is unverified, told by his close aide Kenny O'Donnell and re-quoted here by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., summarizes his views and the politics thouogh of the only president with the views and strength to choose Vietnamese independence over 'victory', though politics pushed him to wait until after an election:

"That spring, JFK had told Montana Sen. Mike Mansfield, who would become the Vietnam War’s most outspoken Senate critic, “I can’t do it until 1965, after I’m re-elected.” Later that day, he explained to Kenneth O’Donnell, “If I tried to pull out completely from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy Red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m re-elected.” Both Nelson Rockefeller and Sen. Barry Goldwater, who were vying to run against him in 1964, were uncompromising Cold Warriors who would have loved to tar JFK with the brush that he had lost not just Laos, but now Vietnam. Goldwater was campaigning on the platform of “bombing Vietnam back into the Stone Age,” a lyrical and satisfying construct to the Joint Chiefs and the CIA. “So we had better make damned sure I am re-elected,” JFK said."

As David Talbot wrote:

"Vietnam was another growing source of tension within the Kennedy Administration. Once again, Washington hard-liners pushed for an escalation of the war, seeking the full-scale military confrontation with the communist enemy that J.F.K. had denied them in Cuba and other cold war battlegrounds. But Kennedy's troop commitment topped out at only 16,000 servicemen. And, as he confided to trusted advisers like McNamara and White House aide O'Donnell, he intended to withdraw completely from Vietnam after he was safely re-elected in 1964. "So we had better make damned sure that I am re-elected," he told O'Donnell.

Fearing a backlash from his generals and the right—under the feisty leadership of Barry Goldwater, his likely opponent in the upcoming presidential race—Kennedy never made his Vietnam plans public. And, in true Kennedy fashion, his statements on the Southeast Asian conflict were a blur of ambiguity. Surrounded by national-security advisers bent on escalation and trying to prevent a public split within his Administration, Kennedy operated on "multiple levels of deception" in his Vietnam decision making, in the words of historian Gareth Porter.

Kennedy never made it to the 1964 election, and since he left behind such a vaporous paper trail, the man who succeeded him, Lyndon Johnson, was able to portray his own deeper Vietnam intervention as a logical progression of J.F.K.'s policies. But McNamara knows the truth. The man who helped L.B.J. widen the war into a colossal tragedy knows Kennedy would have done no such thing. And McNamara acknowledges this, though it highlights his own blame. In the end, McNamara says today, Kennedy would have withdrawn, realizing "that it was South Vietnam's war and the people there had to win it... We couldn't win the war for them.""

John Newman wrote a good book arguing that JFK had drawn a hard line against combat troops in Vietnam. Arthur Schlesinger reviewed it helpfully, in part:

""JFK and Vietnam" is by no means, however, an apologia for Kennedy. Beyond demonstrating that Kennedy was opposed at every point to the dispatch of combat units, Mr. Newman is continually critical of him for his lack of "clear understanding of the nature of the Vietnamese society," for his failure to undertake a systematic examination of fundamental questions, for the consequent corruption of policy by competing bureaucracies in Washington and Saigon, and for a policy he describes as haphazard, nearsighted, incoherent, "more of a reaction against using combat troops than a well-coordinated political, economic and social response to the problems in Vietnam."

In extenuation, Mr. Newman observes that the situation was "well out of hand" by the time Kennedy became President and that "the hope, enthusiasm and vigor he symbolized only helped to forestall serious consideration of the true nature of the problem and the long odds America faced." He might have added that Kennedy had other things on his mind. Vietnam in the early 1960's was a marginal issue compared with problems regarding Berlin, Cuba, Mississippi, the nuclear test ban treaty and Capitol Hill. Even Lyndon Johnson hardly mentioned Vietnam in his 1964 State of the Union Message and gave it little more than a hundred words a year later.

Mr. Newman is most critical of the disconcerting gap between Kennedy's private doubts and his public statements in support of the domino theory and in opposition to withdrawal from Vietnam. In this "public duplicity," he writes, Kennedy "besmirched his own reputation and that of the office he held."

It seemed more complicated at the time. Kennedy wanted to give the Saigon Government a chance to succeed. Little would have more quickly undermined that Government than going public about withdrawal. Moreover, the American mood in 1963 was overwhelmingly hawkish, as expressed in such influential organs of opinion as The New York Times and The Washington Post. According to a Louis Harris poll that summer, Americans by a 2-to-1 margin favored sending in troops "on a large scale" if the Communist threat grew worse. Americans still believed, in those faraway days, that they could work their will around the planet.

Eleven years before, the Republicans had made "Who lost China?" a powerful issue in a Presidential election. No Democrat wanted to run in 1964 against "Who lost Indochina?" Kennedy told Kenneth O'Donnell, "If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm re-elected."

This course, Mr. Newman properly observes, raises basic questions about American democracy. "When is it permissible for the President to mislead the public about his intentions with respect to war? With respect to anything? Is there a higher end that justifies these means? If one President may deceive to stay out of a war, cannot another do likewise to go into one?" Kennedy, he argues, would have done better to take his case forthrightly to the people. That is an understandable retrospective judgment, perhaps a correct one. Still, Mr. Newman's course might have resulted in the election in 1964 of a Presidential candidate who agreed with Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force that North Vietnam should be bombed back to the Stone Age. Unfortunately, Kennedy's contradictory legacy on Vietnam permitted Lyndon Johnson to plunge into the escalation and Americanization of the war honestly believing that he was doing what Kennedy would have done."