NY Times story of LBJ saving America from nuclear war in Vietnam is wrong

[Douglas Caddy]

NY Times story of LBJ saving America from nuclear war in Vietnam is wrong

 

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/10/24/sensational-story-lbj-saving-america-nuclear-war-vietnam-wrong

[Cory Santos]

Lol the times wrong again. What a surprise. 

[James DiEugenio]

Well, that makes three of four administrations that oversaw the war who considered using atomic weapons.

Foster Dulles wanted to use them at Dien Bien Phu, but Eisenhower vetoed it.  Dulles then offered them to France to use.

Nixon contemplated using them twice, once part of the aborted Duck Hook operation, and once during the Easter offensive.

This would have been a nice observation for Ken Burn's to have mentioned.  He crapped out of course.  Because that is who he is.

[W. Niederhut]

3 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Well, that makes three of four administrations that oversaw the war who considered using atomic weapons.

Foster Dulles wanted to use them at Dien Bien Phu, but Eisenhower vetoed it.  Dulles then offered them to France to use.

Nixon contemplated using them twice, once part of the aborted Duck Hook operation, and once during the Easter offensive.

This would have been a nice observation for Ken Burn's to have mentioned.  He crapped out of course.  Because that is who he is.

I read somewhere that Nixon talked about using nukes in Vietnam as a kind of "Mad Man" bluff tactic.

As for Ken Burns, my question is, "Why?" (As with Halberstam.)

Are they simply bad historians, or is it something worse?

 

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

Oh no, it was not a bluff on those two occasions.  It was a bluff on another occasion when he wanted to simulate  nuclear alert.

Duck Hook was going to be a huge offensive in the fall of 1969. It  was supposed to bring the war to an end with a Korea style settlement.  Nixon planned on using atomic weapons over the Ho Chi Minh trail, (See America Divided by Kazin and Isserman p, 265)  It was pushed back and then scrapped because of the giant moratorium.  (BTW, Burns never mentioned this in his multi part series.)

During the Easter Offensive, when Nixon wanted to bomb the dikes, Kissinger told him that would kill two hundred thousand people. Nixon then suggested an atomic bomb.  Kissinger walked out of the room and said he was not going to do it anyway.  This is on a tape that Jeff Kimball got from the Nixon Library.  Kimball wrote two books on the subject that are the best out there on Nixon and the war.  I agree with Ambrose about Nixon, he was really a bit unbalanced about Vietnam.

According to Ellsberg, Kissinger suggested using them over a supply pass between China and the north.

I really do not have an answer as to why Burns and Halberstam were so bad on Vietnam.  I suspect it was to curry favor.  It sure as heck worked if that was the reason.  Halberstam's book today is not just bad, its pernicious.  And I have a hard time believing he did not know better.  It is just very hard to buy that he got so many things so utterly wrong. But what made that all worse is that he never went back and tried to correct it.

Edited October 28, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

On 10/27/2018 at 7:57 PM, James DiEugenio said:

Oh no, it was not a bluff on those two occasions.  It was a bluff on another occasion when he wanted to simulate  nuclear alert.

Duck Hook was going to be a huge offensive in the fall of 1969. It  was supposed to bring the war to an end with a Korea style settlement.  Nixon planned on using atomic weapons over the Ho Chi Minh trail, (See America Divided by Kazin and Isserman p, 265)  It was pushed back and then scrapped because of the giant moratorium.  (BTW, Burns never mentioned this in his multi part series.)

During the Easter Offensive, when Nixon wanted to bomb the dikes, Kissinger told him that would kill two hundred thousand people. Nixon then suggested an atomic bomb.  Kissinger walked out of the room and said he was not going to do it anyway.  This is on a tape that Jeff Kimball got from the Nixon Library.  Kimball wrote two books on the subject that are the best out there on Nixon and the war.  I agree with Ambrose about Nixon, he was really a bit unbalanced about Vietnam.

According to Ellsberg, Kissinger suggested using them over a supply pass between China and the north.

I really do not have an answer as to why Burns and Halberstam were so bad on Vietnam.  I suspect it was to curry favor.  It sure as heck worked if that was the reason.  Halberstam's book today is not just bad, its pernicious.  And I have a hard time believing he did not know better.  It is just very hard to buy that he got so many things so utterly wrong. But what made that all worse is that he never went back and tried to correct it.

Has anyone ever tried to uncover and document CIA-linked payments to "historians" like Halberstam and Bugliosi?

I read Carl Bernstein's Church Committe-related Rolling Stone article about Operation Mockingbird, but I don't recall any references to David Halberstam.

(Incidentally, I went to a lecture Halberstam gave at Brown when I was an undergrad in the late 70s, which he, jokingly, called the "Charles Colson Honorary" guest lecture, in reference to that notorious Brown alumnus.)

I imagine it would be virtually impossible to trace funding for pseudo-historical publications to the Company.

In his book, Regicide, Gregory Douglas published a list of CIA-affiliated writers in an appendix, from his CIA source-- possibly bogus material.

 

[James DiEugenio]

Well, David Phillips did know Bugliosi.  And they did exchange letters.  That is in my book on Bugliosi.

 

As per Halberstam, I have never seen anything showing he was an asset, although in my series on the Ken Burns special I did note that he was close to the CIA station in Saigon once he got there. But I cannot prove any direct quid pro quo on that.

[James DiEugenio]

Here is what I wrote about Halberstam and his bad book years ago.

I would be even harsher today.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/halberstam-david-the-best-and-the-brightest-part-1

[W. Niederhut]

21 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Here is what I wrote about Halberstam and his bad book years ago.

I would be even harsher today.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/halberstam-david-the-best-and-the-brightest-part-1

Great article.  Very illuminating.

So, in the absence of footnotes, it is impossible to know who was giving Halberstam his false history of JFK's intention to get out of Vietnam, and/or directing him to falsify history.

It seems fairly obvious that the Cold Warriors who wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam -- Bundy, Rostow, Lemnitzer, Dulles, Lansdale, LBJ, et. al. -- were also very invested in distorting the true history of NSAM 263 and its radical reversal after 11/22/63.

And David Halberstam was their principle mythologist.

 

[Ron Bulman]

They still sell Bugliosi in the sixth floor Oswald did it museum gift shop.  But nothing about/by Jim Garrison, Unspeakable, Larry Hancock, Jim Di Eugenio, Gaeton Fonzi.

Nobody advises visitors to check out the view from behind the fence on the grassy knoll.

Says a lot about their perspective.

[Micah Mileto]

2 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

They still sell Bugliosi in the sixth floor Oswald did it museum gift shop.  But nothing about/by Jim Garrison, Unspeakable, Larry Hancock, Jim Di Eugenio, Gaeton Fonzi. 

Nobody advises visitors to check out the view from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. 

Says a lot about their perspective. 

A lost opportunity for the whole building to be a museum of not just history, but art as well.

[W. Niederhut]

13 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

They still sell Bugliosi in the sixth floor Oswald did it museum gift shop.  But nothing about/by Jim Garrison, Unspeakable, Larry Hancock, Jim Di Eugenio, Gaeton Fonzi.

Nobody advises visitors to check out the view from behind the fence on the grassy knoll.

Says a lot about their perspective.

And people buy this falsified history, unfortunately-- even some highly-educated people I have known.  When mythology is promoted by the mainstream media, it is very difficult to dislodge it.  

No wonder LBJ's public-relations expert, Bill Moyers, has been so enthusiastic about the "power of myth..."  👺

[James DiEugenio]

15 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Great article.  Very illuminating.

So, in the absence of footnotes, it is impossible to know who was giving Halberstam his false history of JFK's intention to get out of Vietnam, and/or directing him to falsify history.

It seems fairly obvious that the Cold Warriors who wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam -- Bundy, Rostow, Lemnitzer, Dulles, Lansdale, LBJ, et. al. -- were also very invested in distorting the true history of NSAM 263 and its radical reversal after 11/22/63.

And David Halberstam was their principle mythologist.

 

 Well that is an interesting question.  Who the heck did Halberstam rely on the most?  And why?

Plus, didn't he see the problem he was facing?  By this time, 1972, Vietnam was pretty much seen as a debacle that we had to get out of one way of the other.  Example:  that lying fruitcake Nixon always said that he was honoring the commitment that Kennedy and Johnson had made.  

LOL 

When in fact, he was the first administrative official to ever propose that we commit American troops there.  This was during the siege of DIen Bien Phu back in 1954.  Then he was part of the effort to create this fictional country that did not exist before i.e. South Vietnam.  He was also part of the effort to subvert the Geneva Accords which would have united the country after the French colonial war.  This began the whole American commitment with Lansdale, the phony elections, the scaring of the Catholics south to prop up Diem, the beginning of an American military commitment and the backing of the despotic regime of the Nhu brothers.  And this was the mess Kennedy was left with in 1961.

As I wrote in that article I posted, it was essentially Kennedy, Galbraith, Ball and Bowles who held out against just about everyone else not to send American combat troops to save the faltering Diem regime. And it was Galbraith who started Kennedy down the path to withdrawal.  It is really hard to buy that Halberstam never talked to Galbraith, for the simple matter that the guy was easy to find and he liked to talk about Kennedy.

The other part that Halberstam utterly screws up is McNamara.  Halberstam is the guy who started the whole myth about Vietnam being McNamara's War.  This is simply not sustainable today, and it was not back then.  Vietnam was really the LBJ/Walt Rostow war. Kennedy moved Walt Rostow out of the White House.  LBJ brought him back in as his National Security Advisor.  I really think Walt Rostow was probably a big source for Halberstam.

 

Edited October 30, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

A related question is WHY this JFK/Vietnam history was deliberately falsified by Halberstam's sources.

Was it done;

1) to deflect blame for the Vietnam War debacle, or

2) to hide a significant motive for JFK's assassination?

[James DiEugenio]

It may have been both, but I would go with Number One.

See, one of the major themes of Halberstam's book is that somehow, Vietnam was an unavoidable tragedy, like the Civil War.  And that only people hidden in the lower rungs like John McNaughton, were resisting this trail of disaster.

That is a false paradigm.  But if Halberstam did then show what NSAM 263 was about, and how it was changed by 273 and then reversed by 288, he would not have a book.  Or at least the book he wanted to write and made him rich.

Another part of the story he misses is just how bad LBJ was on the war in 1965-66.  When Humphrey wrote a memo saying we did not need to escalate, LBJ ostracized him from any future meetings on the war.  Humphrey took it back and then when RFK proposed a peace plan in 1966, Humphrey attacked him.  When Fulbright stated his gripping senate hearings on the war, LBJ used the FBI to surveil him for communist influences.  

You will not find those in Halberstam's book either.