Some of our best evidence as far identifying suspects points to Carlos Marcello as a major player in the plot. It is odd that he is not mentioned in the datebook.

8 minutes ago, Gerry Down said:

It seems the CIA were heavily dependent on Castro being poisoned in the run up to the BOP. When that failed to materialize, it was too late and the momentum ensured the BOP was then going to happen regardless. Had Castro been done away with, the BOP might have succeeded. And we'd be here talking about how astute JFK had been in the whole operation. 

If we had intervened with a full-scale air, naval, and ground operation, Castro most likely would have quickly capitulated and would have sued for peace on almost any terms. Similarly, once the Cuban military saw that they were facing a large-scale American intervention, they would have quickly lost the will to fight and may have even ousted Castro as a means of getting on our good side. 

On 7/14/2023 at 10:41 PM, James DiEugenio said:

In preparation for the upcoming film on Oppenheimer, I am reading American Prometheus, probably the best book about the famous Manhattan Project leader.

The authors of that book, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, have also produced some excellent scholarship on the immorality of our nuking of Japan. There was absolutely no need to nuke Hiroshima, and there was doubly no need to nuke Nagasaki. The nuking of Japan and our subsequent treatment of radiation victims in Japan constitute one of the most shameful stains on our history and honor. 

My website The Pacific War and the Atomic Bomb presents some of the evidence that nuking Japan was wholly unnecessary and unjustified.

19 hours ago, Larry Hancock said:

I'm going to do this one more time...well probably more since few seem to listen to my objections on this subject.  I document in my book In Denial, from actual government records, that JFK violated a number of guidelines JFK himself had set before the landings at the BOP - new orders issued to try and support the Brigade while they were on the beach.   He allowed American pilots to fly bombing and ground attack strikes in Brigade aircraft, he authorized extended night time air drops to supply the beachhead with American personnel in the transports  - and actually approved Air Force transports to carry out resupply missions, the CIA was just too unprepared to handle it.  He authorized ground attack strikes with American aircraft to cover the evacuation of the Brigade - he had ordered plans for that before the landings - but the Navy had not prepared any such plans, the Brigade had not been prepared for such an eventuality and the Navy screwed up the timing of the air strike so badly it was totally ineffective (and so late that the American pilots over the beach in Brigade aircraft were shot down). 

This does not even go into other orders that he gave which would have prevented the disaster but which the CIA officers appear simply to have ignored - or as an alternative, Bissell never passed them on to those officers.

This goes along with my other post about historiography being necessary to correct what initially goes into the "establishment" histories. 

True, but in the eyes of the military and the CIA, those actions were too little, too late. Few people talk about the angry confrontation between JFK and the legendary Admiral Arleigh Burke when Burke pressed JFK for decisive intervention to save the operation. 

JFK was concerned that large-scale U.S. intervention in the invasion would trigger a Soviet move against West Berlin. I would have been tempted to say, "So what? Let the Soviets have West Berlin. It's deep inside East Germany anyway, and its loss would be tactically meaningless." I would have been tempted to exchange West Berlin for a free Cuba, assuming the Soviets would have in fact grabbed West Berlin if we had toppled Castro.

54 minutes ago, Gene Kelly said:

Michael

The following paper by Derek Shildler of Eastern Illinois University in 2008 provides a good description of the orthodox/revisionist positions and their advocates: "Vietnam’s Changing Historiography: Ngo Dinh Diem and America’s Leadership."  Here is a summary:

Three scholarly views have arisen and become increasingly heated. Orthodox scholars follow the traditional doctrine that America’s involvement in the war was unwinnable and unjust, while the revisionists believe that the war was a noble cause and Vietnam, below the 17th parallel, was a viable and stable country, but policies and military tactics were improperly executed. The heated debates have focused on two central issues—Ngo Dinh Diem and his reign over South Vietnam and poor leadership by American presidents and top officials. Orthodox scholars argue that Diem as a corrupt tyrannical puppet, while revisionists believe Diem was an independent leader who knew what was necessary to allow his young country to survive. According to the orthodox scholars, American presidents John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson and other top officials did their best to control the situation in Vietnam, though the war was doomed from the beginning. Revisionists do not believe the war was lost on the battlefield but was lost due to poor decisions and lack of attention to the war. Recently, another group of scholars have weighed in on this subject. These scholars, post-revisionists, do not even admit defeat—arguing that the United States won the war by late 1970.

Gene

Gene, I would say Shidler is about 75% correct. There is much more variation/divergence among each camp than his general summary describes. I would keep in mind, also, that Shidler is not a Vietnam War scholar. He has dabbled in it, but he does not specialize in it.

The key sources to read are the North Vietnamese sources. They have proved to be a game-changer; they have provided a great deal of historic new information that sheds crucial light on the major issues regarding the war.

You will find very little information about the North Vietnamese sources in liberal books on the war. The authors who have provided the fullest presentation on the important disclosures from the North Vietnamese sources are Mark Moyar, George Veith, Michael Kort, Lien-Hang Nguyen, and Lewis Sorley, followed by Max Hastings and Harry Rothmann, then followed by Pierre Asselin. (Note: Nguyen, Hastings, Rothmann, and Asselin are not considered to be revisionist scholars, but their writings contain a wealth of information that contradicts the orthodox view.) Sorley played an important role in Merle Pribbenow's translation of the official history of the war published by Vietnam's Ministry of Defense.

I summarized many of the key disclosures from the North Vietnamese sources earlier in this thread.

19 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Now, that is five high level administration witnesses that I named to attest to Kennedy's getting out policy.

Yet Selverstone says, its hard to say what JFK would have done?

Even when Kennedy said he knew what would happen after?  Like he said to O' Donnell and Powers?  When he told Schlesinger that if Vietnam became a white man's war we would lose like the French had lost?

Kennedy decided to accept defeat at the Bay of Pigs.

But he is going to go to war in a place that was 8,000 miles away?

This is why I think Selverstone, as I pointed out, distorts the picture of Kennedy at the beginning of his book, making him into a kind of conservative Democrat.  And he fails to delineate the differences between LBJ and JFK e.g. during the Missile Crisis.  If one understands this, then the rapid changes Johnson makes to Kennedy's policy are more understandable. 

This is your answer to the first-hand evidence from JFK himself and from Bobby that I presented???

You just keep repeating your arguments and ignoring the evidence that refutes them.

Kennedy decided to accept defeat at the Bay of Pigs. But he is going to go to war in a place that was 8,000 miles away?

What??? I am not sure what planet you are talking about, but down here on Earth, JFK went to war in Vietnam in a major way: He increased our troop presence there from a few hundred in January 1961 to 16,000 by October 1963. He provided a huge increase in military equipment and weaponry to South Vietnam. He authorized air strikes against the Viet Cong in support of ARVN operations. And he authorized the defoliation of jungle areas used by the Viet Cong. Good grief, even Stanley Karnow admitted these facts in his famous leftist book on the war (Vietnam: A History).

And JFK did all these things when facing a Communist escalation that was far smaller and far less threatening than the one LBJ faced in '64 and '65.

Furthermore, as I documented in my previous reply, JFK made it as clear as language can make something that he believed that pulling out of Vietnam would be a "great mistake" and that he was determined not to let South Vietnam fall under Communist tyranny. Bobby confirmed these facts in his April 30, 1964, oral interview, as I also documented in my previous reply.

As for the Bay of Pigs, we have known for years now that JFK never ceased his efforts to topple the Castro regime. And, when JFK learned that the Russians had lied to him about not putting missiles in Cuba, he remarked, as recorded on the White House tapes, "It shows the Bay of Pigs was really right, if we had done it right."

10 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Here is another administration witness, U Alexis Johnson on Kennedy's policy in Vietnam.

Because the line Kennedy drew on the “no combat troops” issue in 1961 was indelible. In fact, U. Alexis Johnson, Dean Rusk’s Deputy, said for the record that “the line has clearly been drawn in Vietnam.” (Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 371)

This is a misleading, invalid argument, as I have explained to you before. Being very reluctant to deploy combat troops is not the same thing as being determined to completely disengage from South Vietnam after the election, which is the myth you keep peddling. You keep assuming that a reluctance to use combat troops somehow equals an unconditional withdrawal after the election, as if JFK's reluctance to deploy combat troops somehow proves he would have abandoned South Vietnam in '64 or '65. LBJ was likewise very reluctant to deploy combat troops.

Let us read first-hand statements from JFK himself, most of them made in the last months of his life, regarding his views about staying the course in Vietnam:

In a March 6, 1963, letter to Bobbie Lou Pendergrass of Santa Ana, California, whose brother had been killed in action in January, JFK wrote,

          “Americans are in Viet Nam because we have determined that this country must not fall under Communist domination . . . Your brother was in Viet Nam because the threat to the Vietnamese people is, in the long run, a threat to the Free World community, and ultimately a threat to us also. For when freedom is destroyed in one country, it is threatened throughout the world.”

In a July 17, 1963, news conference, Kennedy said,

          “We are not going to withdraw from that effort. In my opinion, for us to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Viet-Nam, but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there.”

In an interview with Walter Cronkite, broadcast on CBS News on September 2, 1963, Kennedy said,

          “I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. I know people don’t like Americans to be engaged in this kind of an effort. Forty-seven Americans have been killed in combat with the enemy, but this is a very important struggle even though it is far away. We took all this—made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate—we may not like it—in the defense of Asia.”

In an interview with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, broadcast on NBC News on September 9, JFK said,

          “What I am concerned about is that Americans will get impatient and say because they don’t like events in southeast Asia or they don’t like the government in Saigon, that we should withdraw. That only makes it easy for the Communists. I think we should stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw.”

In a September 12 press conference, Kennedy said,

          “We have a very simple policy in that area, I think. In some ways I think the Vietnamese people and ourselves agree: we want the war to be won, the Communists to be contained, and the Americans to go home.”

We could also quote JFK's statements on the war in the speech he delivered on the morning of his death and in the speech he was going to deliver that afternoon after the motorcade. In both speeches, he expressed his determination to check communism in Southeast Asia. This was on the very day he died.

Yet, you brush aside all of the above first-hand evidence and rely on convenient statements made years later by some of JFK's aides and associates.

You dismiss the fact that in their first two memoirs, Schlesinger and Sorenson said nothing about any plan to abandon South Vietnam after the election, and that JFK's own Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, expressly rejected the claim that JFK planned on an unconditional withdrawal after the election.

You also brush aside what Bobby Kennedy said in his April 30, 1964, oral interview, when he specifically rejected the idea that JFK was thinking about pulling out of Vietnam, and when he said that JFK was determined to stay and win:

          Martin: There was never any consideration given to pulling out?
          Kennedy: No.
          Martin: It's generally true all over the world, whether it's in a shooting war or a different kind of a war. But the president was convinced that we had to keep, had to stay in there . . .
          Kennedy: Yes.
          Martin: . . . and couldn't lose it.
          Kennedy: Yes.

Tellingly, we also see JFK's determination to win the war in the JFK White House tapes, as Selverstone documents.

You keep assuming the false choice of LBJ-like escalation or total disengagement, as if JFK would have had no other options. You do so because your far-left version of the JFK assassination conspiracy maintains that JFK was killed because he was going to hand over South Vietnam to the Communists. 

In my view, this is the best book on the issue of Kennedy and Vietnam.  This version is even better than the original one.  And like Howard Jones, John is a conservative.

Newman certainly does not talk like a conservative. Indeed, he has made several statements that employ the same verbiage used by far-left authors. For example, he said McNamara was "responsible" for millions of deaths in Vietnam. That is far-left nonsense that blames America for the war and ignores the fact that there would have been no war if North Vietnam had not invaded South Vietnam.

In his book JFK and Vietnam, Newman repeats the liberal myth that the war going badly in '62 and '63, fails to deal with any of the new information that has come from North Vietnamese sources, wrongly assumes that JFK's liberal advisers were giving him accurate information about the war, wrongly assumes that his conservative advisers and senior military officers were giving him false information about the war, and uncritically relies on the McNamara "secret debrief," even though McNamara himself did not cite it in his memoir, even though McNamara never mentioned it in any of the White House tapes, and even though none of McNamara's aides said a word about the alleged debrief (neither in their memoirs, nor in internal memos, nor on the White House tapes).

Howard Jones was a conservative? He called the war "unwinnable," wrongly claimed that JFK had decided the war was hopeless (when in fact he approved the conditional, gradual withdrawal precisely because the war was going well), and peddled a modified version of the unconditional-withdrawal myth. 

Part of the problem, again, is that what little reading you have done has been almost exclusively in liberal sources. I hate to keep pointing this out, but it is a recurring problem, and you seem unwilling to do anything about it (i.e., by reading several books that give the other side of story and objectively weighing the evidence and arguments they present).

In your non-review "review" of the one non-liberal book that you say you have read, Selverstone's The Kennedy Withdrawal, you simply ignore most of the evidence Selverstone presents and misrepresent or ignore several of his arguments.

There was a withdrawal plan, but the plan called for a gradual and conditional withdrawal, and it would have continued the provision of economic and military aid to South Vietnam even if conditions on the ground permitted the withdrawal of the bulk of American troops from the country. JFK was not about to let South Vietnam fall under Communist tyranny on his watch.

12 hours ago, Gene Kelly said:

 

I am now reading Marc Selverstone's book and find much of what he says to be thought-provoking.  I am not as well-versed as you and others in this topic (the "great what-if" as it's called) but I am performing my due diligence. While not a student of military history, I lived through Vietnam and - thanks to your thread and challenges - have become more interested in what might have happened in a 2nd Kennedy term. 

I am glad to hear you are reading Selverstone's book.

I believe that each newly elected president inherits the decisions/policies of the previous administration (both good and bad).  As John Newman writes, Kennedy had a lot on his plate ... 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.  Nonetheless, JFK 'inherited' the Vietnam conflict similar to the Cuban Bay of Pigs from Dwight Eisenhower, who initially chose in 1954 to stay out of the French conflict (and not American commit troops). When Kennedy took office, Diem’s government appears to have been faltering. As Edward Cuddy wrote in 2003 in "Vietnam: Mr. Johnson's War or Mr. Eisenhower's?”:

After the partition of Vietnam into a communist North and pro-western South, Eisenhower chose to invest huge sums of money and prestige in transforming South Vietnam into a showcase of a new “free Asia.” Spending billions of dollars, sending military advisers, supporting the increasingly brutal tactics of the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem—all this effort would help create a pro-American bastion in Southeast Asia and halt Communism. Yet it also left a terrible decision for his successors.

Dwight Eisenhower managed to avoid an American war in Vietnam during his two terms, but he invested so much American prestige and effort in the success of South Vietnam that by the end of the 1950s, America had become deeply invested in its fate. Eisenhower created an American Vietnam, and his successors would wage a bitter – and failed – war to keep it. Unfortunately, Eisenhower chose to ignore the Geneva Accords, committed America to South Vietnam, and played a major role, during and after his presidency, in creating the heavy pressures that shaped Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam decisions.

I think Cuddy's analysis is deeply flawed and some of his history is just wrong. For example, Ike had nothing to do with the huge North Vietnamese escalation that Johnson faced. That escalation was a direct result of the disastrous Hilsman-Lodge-Forrestal-Harriman-pushed coup against Diem in November 1963. We know from North Vietnamese sources that Hanoi's leaders were thrilled with Diem's removal, and that the political instability in South Vietnam following Diem's death led Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan et al to decide to vastly escalate their war effort. 

If you are interested in all sides of the debate and a good weighing of the pros/cons of this topic, I would refer you to Mark White's November 2020 essay in American Diplomacy entitled “Without Dallas: John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War”, where he opines:. . . .

I have already read White's article. He makes a few mistakes in the article, and I disagree with his conclusion, but he does a decent of presenting both sides of the argument and does not pretend that he knows what JFK would have done in '64 and '65.

What I have learned thus far is that this "What-If" is a subject of fierce debate among historians, and there's no shortage of books, articles and opinions. What some conclude (notably Selverstone) is the best historians can do is to speculate about JFK’s real intentions in Vietnam.

Selverstone is undoubtedly correct. I am not aware of a single recognized historian who disagrees with the self-evident fact that we can only speculate about what JFK would have done if he had faced the same kind of massive North Vietnamese escalation that LBJ faced. Unless someone claims to have supernatural powers to divine what JFK would have done in that situation, a situation that he never came close to facing during his presidency, there is no way anyone can do more than theorize. 

I'm not sure what you infer by the "liberal/orthodox position on the war", but I remain open to all views and input.  Gene

It is a bit complicated. In terms of the civilian academic world, the view that the Vietnam War was wrong and unwinnable is the "orthodox" position. This position is held by most civilian academic scholars on the war, and the vast majority of those scholars are liberals. Scholars who disagree with the orthodox view are often called "revisionists" and their viewpoint is called revisionist/revisionism. Their view is the minority position in the civilian academic world.

In the military academic world, i.e., the military war colleges and historical divisions, the situation is different. Among Vietnam War veterans, the overwhelming majority believe the war was morally justified and winnable--we know this from a great deal of polling done by the DoD and by other institutions. 

All this being said, in the civilian world you have many Vietnam War scholars (1) who support the orthodox view but do so with crucial qualifications, or (2) who lean toward aspects of the revisionist view but who reject other aspects of that view. You also have some Vietnam War scholars who focus on certain aspects of the war without expressing a firm view on its morality and winnability. 

On 7/23/2023 at 4:20 AM, Cory Santos said:

It would have been more valuable as coming directly from Sen.  Cooper and not another party.  I understand what you are getting at but it will not quiet a wc person because they will say it is repeated by someone else.  

Oh, I know. WC apologists readily accept second-hand/hearsay statements that support their case, but they look for any reason to reject hearsay statements that contradict their case. 

We can put it this way: If a long-time associate of Lee Harvey Oswald were to report that when he visited Oswald in jail, Oswald confessed to him that he shot JFK and Tippit, and if it were confirmed that this person was a long-time Oswald associate and did visit Oswald in jail, you can bet that WC apologists would be trumpeting this hearsay statement far and wide. 

28 hours ago, @Gene Kelly said:

Jim 

I've been following this extended debate and discussion about JFK, Diem and Vietnam.  I am also now reading Monika Wiesak's fine book, "America's Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy".  My question is, in your estimation, why did Foster Dulles and company originally back/support Diem?  Was it because they felt he was a controllable puppet?  Or perhaps a Catholic leader they thought could unite the north and south? 

Surely, they must've known how flawed and weak he was. But they had Edward Lansdale continue to prop him up as a leader.  What was their end game here? 

You should have directed these questions to someone whose research has not been so limited and one sided. 

Who says Diem was "weak"??? The standard complaint is that he was too forceful, too aggressive. Are we talking about the same Diem who crushed the Binh Xuyen (the South Vietnamese Mafia), subdued the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, and decimated the Communist movement in South Vietnam?

Diem's flaws paled in comparison to Ho Chi Minh's and Le Duan's flaws. 

And, FYI, Lansdale had very good reasons for supporting Diem, and he was by no means the only American official who thought highly of Diem.

Ike and John Foster Dulles opted for Diem because they believed he was the best anti-communist leader available, and they were right. 

On 7/22/2023 at 4:27 AM, @James DiEugenio said:

That is a good question.  

Because even Bao Dai thought that Phan Huy Quat was a better choice.  (Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, pp. 18-19) And Quat was both anti French and anti communist.

Phew! "Even" Bao Dai? "Even"? Once again you show you have no clue what you are talking about. Some relevant facts:

One, the indolent and corrupt Bao Dai disliked Diem because Diem was not a yes-man and because Diem would not go along with his corruption schemes. Two, when Diem began his crackdown on the South Vietnamese Mafia (the Binh Xuyen), Bao Dai tried to halt the crackdown because he was getting huge payoffs from the Binh Xuyen. Three, Phan Huy Quat, though a genuine anti-communist, did not possess half the leadership skills and force of character that Diem did. Four, Bao Dai supported the disastrous 1963 coup against Diem. And, five, at the prompting of the Hanoi regime, Bao Dai issued a statement in 1972 (from his home in France) calling for the withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam but not for the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops. 

Sheesh, "even Bao Dai." This is as discrediting as saying "Even Allen Dulles thought that Nixon was a better choice than JFK in the 1960 election."

I reviewed Selverstone.  

You did not really "review" Selverstone's book. You wrote a specious hit piece on it that ignores most of the evidence Selverstone presents, as anyone who reads his book and then reads your "review" can see. 

Really not worth reading.  

Leaving aside the fact that you have done only a small fraction of the research that Selverstone has done, why do you suppose that scholars from all across the spectrum have praised Selverstone's book? Why do you suppose you cannot cite a single recognized scholar who supports your fringe rejection of Selverstone's book? 

He actually said in an interview that it is hard to say what Kennedy would have done.
 
Uh, yeah, he "actually said" that because he, unlike you, is a credible scholar who recognizes the obvious fact that JFK was never confronted with the kind of massive North Vietnamese escalation that LBJ faced in '64 and '65. I have pointed out this fact to you many times, but you just keep ignoring it. As I have also pointed out to you, even Arthur Schlesinger Jr. likewise noted that we simply cannot say for sure what JFK would have done if he had been faced with the situation that LBJ faced. And, as I have further pointed out to you, in his April 1964 oral history interview, RFK himself indicated that JFK may have sent in combat troops if South Vietnam appeared to be on the verge of collapse ("were about to lose it").

Bundy, McNamara, and Taylor have all said that Kennedy was never going into Vietnam.  Those were his three major defense advisors. So why is it hard to tell?  Taylor even said that Kennedy was the one guy who stopped American intervention.

I refuted this collection of falsehood and distortion just a few days ago, yet here you are repeating it again. We both know that if you repeated this stuff in a forum of Vietnam War historians, even the liberal historians would strongly reject it. Even a fire-breathing anti-war historian such as Edwin Moise has flatly rejected this garbage. But you just keep peddling it.

18 hours ago, @Gene Kelly said:

Jacobs wrote that, following the removable of the emperor Bao Dai, the nation was led by a Confucianist authoritarian Ngo Dinh Diem, who gave preference to a Catholic minority (of which he was a part). 

Jacobs' book contains a lot of valid information, and I agree with much of what he says. However, he is wrong in repeating the myth that Diem favored Catholics at the expense of everyone else. Actually, the substantial majority of the members of Diem's administration were non-Catholics, and most of the generals who supported him were also non-Catholics. In addition, Diem did a great deal to help the Buddhists. 

You will get a more balanced view of Diem in such books as Tuong Vu's The Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975 (a compilation with chapters authored by numerous Vietnamese scholars) and Canadian historian Dr. Geoffrey Shaw's The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem. Some of the Asia scholars who have praised Dr. Shaw's book include Thomas Marks, Nghia M. Vo, Andrew Finlayson, and William Stearman.

While interesting to consider, Marc Silverstone's thesis doesn't convince me.

It sounds like you have no intention of reading Selverstone's widely acclaimed book, or any other book that challenges the liberal/orthodox position on the war. 

It's simply not credible that JFK would've escalated similar to LBJ in the ensuing years. 

Exactly why is it "simply not credible" that JFK would have escalated similarly to the way LBJ did when faced with the same massive North Vietnamese escalation that LBJ faced in 1964 and 1965, given the fact that JFK escalated dramatically from 1961 through 1963 when faced with a far smaller North Vietnamese escalation than the one LBJ faced?

You realize that JFK increased our military presence in South Vietnam from a few hundred troops in January 1961 to 16,000 troops by late 1963, right? (They were not regular infantry troops but were armed troops nonetheless, and hundreds of them were specialized combat troops, i.e., various kinds of special forces troops). 

A New York Journal of Books review states that "Silverstone speculates about JFK’s real intentions in Vietnam, suggesting that Kennedy and his national security team would probably have acted on the basis of the military situation on the ground as it evolved over the next several years". But the reviewer also points out that most of the people advising Johnson on Vietnam after Kennedy’s death were Kennedy’s people. 

The fact that LBJ escalated our involvement when most of his adviers were JFK's people should suggest that JFK had no intention of abandoning South Vietnam after the war, should it not? This is especially logical given the fact that the LBJ White House tapes reveal that never did any of the LBJ's former JFK advisers say anything like "hey, we should not escalate because JFK planned on withdrawing unconditionally after the election!" 

In one very revealing recording, LBJ is criticizing McNamara for having announced a withdrawal shortly before JFK's death, yet not once does McNamara attempt to defend the withdrawal announcement by saying anything such as "Hey, I'll have you know that JFK himself told me that he was going to pull out of Vietnam after the election no matter what." Neither McNamara nor any other former Kennedy adviser ever uttered one word on the White House tapes about any intention to abandon the war effort after the election. 

20 hours ago @James DiEugenio said:

Wow, this is pretty bad:

On 7/20/2023 at 6:30 PM, @Tom Gram said:

What Moyar did is even worse than that, since he actually misrepresented the textual content of sources by inventing imaginary conversations out of non-verbatim memos. . . .

Let us take a closer look at this lame, misleading criticism. I have already noted Moyar’s point that other scholars have likewise treated meeting notes (aka meeting minutes) as verbatim transcripts. I have also mentioned my own experience on this issue as a professional technical editor: I have observed that at two of the agencies where I have worked, meeting notes were quoted in other documents as if they were verbatim transcripts. 

But, let us examine the specific example that Tom is referring to here, i.e., the example from Miller’s review regarding a conversation between Diem and General Harkins during a July 1962 meeting (Triumph Revisited, pp. 205-206). The first thing that should be noted is that the “memorandum” in question, as Miller admits, was a “memorandum of the conversation.” In other words, we are clearly talking about meeting minutes/meeting notes—this becomes obvious when we read the memorandum, which we will do in a moment. With this understood, let us continue. 

As support for his charge that Moyar “dramatically embellishes the available record” of the Diem-Harkins conversation, Miller observes that Moyar relates the following about the conversation: 

          Diem admitted to Harkins, “I am concerned over the number of senior officers who have reached the height of their potential and who lack the education and initiative required in higher grades.” 

          “Such men should be eliminated,” said Harkins. 

          “The situation was inherited from the French, who were too easy and made colonels and lieutenant colonels who had no real capability or training,” Diem explained. “One of the difficulties in identifying incompetent officers lies in the fact that my generals do not want to recommend the separation of officers who are old friends.” Despite the problems involved, Diem said, “I am considering the thought of elimination.” (p. 205) 

Now, let us take a look at the segment of the meeting minutes/memorandum that Moyar cites as his source, which Miller himself quotes: 

          [Diem] then added that he was concerned over the number of senior officers who have reached the height of their potential and who lack the education and initiative required in higher grades. In response to General Harkins’ remark that such men should be eliminated, the President commented that the situation had been inherited from the French, who were too easy and had made colonels and lieutenant colonels who had no real capability or training. He was considering the thought of elimination. General Harkin’s [sic] suggested that there might be an examination given and that those who failed to qualify would be eliminated. President Diem commented that one of the difficulties in identifying incompetent officers lies in the fact that his Generals do not want to recommend separation of officers who are old friends. (p. 206) 

Uh, where is the “embellishment”? Where is it? As anyone with two functioning eyes can see, there is none, not one little bit. Moyar’s use of the meeting notes as a verbatim transcript accurately represents the memorandum’s version of the Diem-Harkins conversation in every essential detail. Indeed, Moyar could have just as effectively related the conversation by merely quoting the memorandum, but he chose to use the meeting minutes as a verbatim transcript simply as a matter of style, just as other scholars have done.

Finally, I conclude this reply by again quoting Moyar’s response to Miller’s attack on his use of meeting notes as verbatim transcripts:

          Miller then asserts that I “misrepresented” the “textual content” of sources, which “dramatically embellishes the available record” and “raises worrisome questions about whether and how frequently he plays fast and loose with his sources.” Miller seems to be asserting that I seriously misrepresented the meaning of sources, but when he gets down to specifics, it turns out that he is discussing something of much less significance, which begs the question of why he used such ominous and inflammatory language. What he is discussing is merely the use of meeting notes as verbatim transcripts—a matter of style rather than content, upon which reasonable people sometimes disagree. Other historians have employed this same method without incurring invective. Richard Reeves, for example, used it extensively in his highly acclaimed President Kennedy, which won best non-fiction book of the year accolades from Time Magazine and P.E.N. (p. 222)

23 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

 

OMG, the USA should have launched a full scale invasion of the north in 1964? With what?  All we had were advisors there. Was the ARVN supposed to invade?  That would have been a debacle.

Are you so unread on military matters and military history that you do not understand that we could have had a large force in Vietnam in a matter of weeks? You see, we had these things called Navy ships and Air Force transport planes, and they could transport enormous amounts of equipment and personnel in matter of weeks or days. You can Google it, if you do not believe me.

You ignored all the points I made about a '64/'65 invasion and Chinese intervention and responded with this stuff. How can you be so unread and uninformed on these matters and then pretend to be any kind of an authority on the war, much less pretend to be qualified to review books on the subject?

And I see you are still inexcusably running with the long-debunked myth that ARVN was usually an unwilling, ineffective fighting force. You still have not read a single one of the sources I have recommended on ARVN's performance, have you? Have you? No. Just as I suspect you have not read any of the sources I have recommended on the Winter Soldier garbage, on Nick Turse's historically pornographic book, and on the winnability of the war, right? Right? 

In 1964, Johnson was reversing Kennedy's withdrawal and forming his escalation plan while spreading propaganda that he was not going to send American boys to do what Asian boys should. 

As I have pointed out to you before, it is misleading and irresponsible to make this claim because JFK was never faced with the vastly escalated situation that LBJ faced in 1964 and 1965. You keep ignoring this crucial fact while also repeating the Stone-Newman-Prouty myth that JFK was determined to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election. As I have also noted, even most liberal historians reject your unconditional-withdrawal-after-the-election myth.

To launch a full scale invasion of the north, under those conditions, would have been both militarily and politically not possible.  Because it would have been such a stark break with what JFK was doing.

Actually, the exact opposite is true. At the time, polls showed overwhelming public support for the war effort, and invading North Vietnam was not only entirely militarily feasible but would have been a wise tactical move that would have put us in a stronger position, if not caused the murderous Hanoi regime to collapse. Are you aware of what some North Vietnamese sources say would have happened if we had invaded North Vietnam in 1964 or 1965? Do you care? 

The more you talk about him Tom, Moyar sounds like a clown.

You and Tom sound like two D-grade high-school students who are getting your clocks cleaned in a debate with a professor and who are trying to comfort each other with juvenile comments.

I think it is worth recalling that in your amateurish smearing of Dr. Selverstone's widely acclaimed book The Kennedy Withdrawal, you were unable to cite a single legitimate scholar who agrees with your attack on the book, whereas I was able to cite numerous recognized scholars who have praised the book. You cited far-left author Michael Swanson, whose obscure book on the Vietnam War is not only loaded with embarrassing errors but repeatedly displays a poor command of English (e.g., Swanson twice misidentifies McNamara as the Secretary of State and commits numerous grammatical errors). 

I have been waiting to present Moyar’s response to Laderman’s review because I have been waiting for Tom to post more quotes from Laderman’s review, but I think I have waited long enough. You will notice that Moyar uses sharper language in his response to Laderman than he does in other responses, at one point calling one of Laderman’s attacks “poor and irresponsible.” Here is Moyar’s entire response to Laderman:

          The ranks of those on the Left concerned about Western erosion of foreign cultures do not include Scott Laderman, because he does not acknowledge the presence of great cultural differences between Vietnam and the West. Laderman states that I present no evidence of an authoritarian political culture in Vietnam. He overlooked a great deal. For instance, in the elections held in both North Vietnam and South Vietnam, almost everyone voted as the government told them to vote, and very few became upset when the government’s preferred candidates won by overwhelming margins or when nonpreferred candidates were allowed to win but relegated to meaningless offices (17, 54–55, 75–76). The Communists and Diem’s nationalists both mobilized the peasantry effectively without holding democratic elections in the villages (71, 158). No one would claim that these same behaviors were prevalent in the United States during the mid-twentieth century.

          The book also shows that most Vietnamese differed from Westerners by choosing their political allegiance on the basis of the armed strength, prestige, and charisma of a political leader or group, rather than political ideology or political programs (16–18, 43–44, 52–55, 62–63, 80–81, 93–94, 136, 152–153, 160, 169, 209, 216, 232–233, 316). In Laderman’s view, American support for the bombing of North Vietnam shows that Americans have the same respect for power as the Vietnamese. Using force against a foreign country is, however, quite different from using force within one’s own. Americans, unlike the Vietnamese, have long abhorred the use of force against political oppositionists within their own country. Laderman adds that Vietnamese concerns about prestige and face were similar to U.S. concerns about credibility. There are some important similarities, but also important differences. Certain events that caused a devastating loss of face in Vietnam, such as public protests against the government, would not have had the same impact in the United States (46, 62–63, 216, 230–232).

          In denouncing my portrayal of an authoritarian culture, Laderman brings up Diem’s discussion of democracy in the October 1955 referendum. As I explain in the book, Diem paid lip service to democracy and took some superficially democratic actions merely to please the United States and the small South Vietnamese intellectual class (75).

          Laderman goes on to claim that my assessment of Vietnamese mass culture “echoes much too closely the racist suppositions of American policymakers in earlier decades.” Laderman’s unsubstantiated insinuation of racism is a poor and irresponsible substitute for dispassionate analysis. I never raise the issue of race in discussing Vietnamese political culture, nor do I say that authoritarian cultures have historically been peculiar to Asia or other non-Western regions—most Western countries have had authoritarian cultures at some point in their past. Most Vietnamese agree with my interpretation of Vietnamese political culture, which is one reason why my books are very popular among Vietnamese-Americans.

          Laderman approvingly cites Gareth Porter’s dispute of my claim that the Malayan communist insurgency never stopped. But numerous accounts show that Commonwealth forces continued counterinsurgency operations against Malayan communist guerrillas after the “Emergency” was officially declared over in July 1960.1 Porter was also wrong when he alleged that one of my sources, Chin Peng’s memoirs, stated that the Malayan insurgency ended in 1960. In actuality, Chin Peng stated that although the Malayan Communist Party had demobilized many guerrillas after July 1960, its guerrilla strength did not fall below 300 prior to the 1961 decision to accelerate the armed struggle.2

          The claims of Edwin Moïse concerning the Tonkin Gulf that Laderman cites largely concern minute details of no significance to the big picture, such as Moïse’s criticism that I referred to some North Vietnamese naval bases as torpedo boat bases—Moïse acknowledged that torpedo boats were present at the bases at the time in question, but claimed that they should not have been called torpedo boat bases because the torpedo boats were only there temporarily and had a permanent base elsewhere. Here, I will include only the segments of serious historical import.

          Moïse wrote: “On August 4, on a dark night in poor weather, the Maddox and another US destroyer, Turner Joy, believed themselves to be under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Moyar acknowledges that in retrospect the evidence does not support the reality of this attack, but he gives a misleading impression that the men on the destroyers had better reason to believe themselves under attack, at the time, than they actually had.”

My response:

          Moïse fails to explain how my description produces a misleading impression. The facts I cite—such as the reports from the Turner Joy’s crew of enemy gunfire and an enemy searchlight—are mentioned in Moïse’s book. I mention these facts simply in explaining why the destroyer commanders, Admiral Sharp, and the Joint Chiefs became convinced that an attack had occurred. Moïse acknowledges in his book that, in the first two days following the August 4 incident, “There was considerable information coming from the Turner Joy that suggested a real attack.” (Edwin Moïse, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, p. 144) He further states, “Captain Herrick and Commander Ogier both state at the time they wrote their replies to the JCS on August 7, the review they had made of the sighting reports had left them convinced that the attack had been real.” (Ibid.)3

          Laderman disputes my assertions that the Vietnamese communists killed tens of thousands of people by the end of 1946, and killed more in 1945 and 1946 than all other Vietnamese groups combined. In his description of Shawn McHale’s writings, Laderman neglects a key phrase of McHale’s upon which I base my assertions: “tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed.”4 The available sources on this subject, which I summarized on pages 17 to 19, make it clear that the communists were the principal killers during 1945 and 1946. According to David Marr, the communists killed several thousand “alleged enemies of the revolution” in late August and September 1945 alone.5 François Guillemot notes that “revolutionary purification” took between 4,000 and 8,000 lives in Quang Ngai and that the communists massacred significant numbers of Hoa Hao and Cao Dai believers.6  And in 1946, the communists killed large numbers of people in overrunning several provinces held by the Vietnam Nationalist Party (19).

          Next on Laderman’s list is my citation of a former communist land reform cadre who said that the communist land reform campaigns killed 32,000 people. According to Laderman, I do not give any explanation as to why this person should be trusted, but the fact that this person had been a land reform cadre, which I stated in the text, is a very good reason.

           Laderman goes on to complain that I did not mention the fact that this individual was questioned by someone who was not an experienced interrogator, or that the questioner thought that only “most” of the rallier’s answers were truthful, or that the rallier did not explain who compiled the figures in question, or that David Hunt had doubts about the testimony of ralliers, or that ralliers were frequently tortured, etc.

          If Laderman really believes that such considerations should be spelled out for every source in a book, he has no understanding of the limitations inherent in a publisher’s word count. Had this document been challenged in the years after Arthur Dommen first cited it in his 2001 book, then perhaps its validity would have been worthy of elaboration in a footnote, but between 2001 and now, no one has challenged the document, or Dommen’s manner of citation, which is very similar to mine.7

          Some of the issues Laderman raises about this document do not merit significant attention from historians. David Hunt’s objections, for example, do not carry much weight given that he wrote an entire article in Radical America that was based on the statements of ralliers.8

          Other issues Laderman cited, however, do deserve the scrutiny of historians, and I did scrutinize them before I chose to include this source in the book. The historians should consider what topics the rallier might have been inclined to lie about. Having read hundreds of similar rallier debriefings, I have a good feel for the likely topics. For reasons of self-protection, the individual might have been inclined to lie about his personal involvement in atrocities against South Vietnamese personnel, or about the participation of his family members in insurgent activities. He might have spoken more positively about the South Vietnamese government or the Americans than he really felt, in order to ingratiate himself with them. Many other defectors displayed such tendencies.

          But there was no compelling reason for him to fabricate a story about the number of land reform deaths. Ralliers rarely commented on such large issues, and I have seen no evidence that the South Vietnamese or Americans tried to pressure them into making false statements on such subjects. In addition, a variety of elements of his testimony support his claim to have been a land reform cadre, and the figure of 32,000 seems reasonable based upon what else is known on the land reform program.

          Laderman proceeds to state that he is not persuaded by my dismissal of Edwin Moïse’s estimate of deaths in the communist land reform campaigns. Rather than address the substance of my critique, Laderman merely contends that Moïse is more reliable because he spent seven pages making his case while I rebutted it in a single sentence. I remain convinced that one sentence suffices to call Moïse’s calculations into doubt, for it takes but one sentence to state that his data came from a perennially untrustworthy and partisan source, the Hanoi government.

          Laderman invokes William Turley and Alexander Kendrick to argue that the South Vietnamese government killed “as many as 75,000 persons” in the 1950s. He neglects to mention that Kendrick’s book The Wound Within was Turley’s only source, and that The Wound Within itself does not state its source for the 75,000 figure.

          I would be suspicious of anything contained in The Wound Within, considering that it contains no footnotes and it espouses some of the most egregious fictions concocted by the anti-war movement, such as that the Hue Massacre was a myth and that My Lai was “a typical incident in the war.”9 In Triumph Forsaken, by contrast, I cite a communist complaint that the anti-communist campaigns took 4,971 lives through January 1959, which may well be an overstatement given the communists’ track record on such matters (65).

          Laderman alleges that I wrote Triumph Forsaken to promote a “militaristic foreign policy.” It would have helped if he had clarified what precisely he meant. In the academic world, “militarism” is often used carelessly to mean something along the lines of “the glorification of warfare and the wanton use of force to impose a country’s will on others,” as exemplified by the militarists of Germany and Japan during World War II. I do not know of any influential Americans today who advocate that type of militarism.

          The term militarism does have other meanings: according to my American Heritage dictionary, it can mean “The glorification of the ideals of a professional military class”; “predominance of the military in the administration or policy of the state”; or “A policy in which military preparedness is of primary importance to the state.” All three of those definitions have their virtues and vices. Most societies glorify at least some of the ideals of the professional military class, such as persistence and self-sacrifice.

          The American military has played a predominant role in administering Iraq and Afghanistan, even under the Obama administration. And military preparedness often deters aggressors or leaves countries in a better position when war breaks out, as Franklin Roosevelt’s preparations for war before Pearl Harbor demonstrate. A country can cause great harm if it goes too far in these directions; as with most things political, moderation is preferable to extremism.

          With his references to “militarism,” Laderman may be accusing me, as others have already done, of supporting a foreign policy that involves frequent recourse to military force in service of the interests of the nation and/or large corporations and/or conservative white males.

          Let me first point out that Triumph Forsaken was written as a history, not as a vehicle towards promoting a specific present-day foreign policy agenda. The words “Iraq” and “Afghanistan” and “George W. Bush” do not appear in the book, which cannot be said of some recent orthodox histories like that of John Prados.

          As far as foreign policy is concerned, the idea that American conservatives simply wish to use force at every possible moment is a fantasy that could be believed by intelligent people like Professor Laderman only if they had no real exposure to American conservatives. It is true that the Right tends to be more skeptical than the Left about the utility of nonviolent means of coercion and persuasion, and to attach more value to military preparedness and threats to use force. But most American conservatives of recent memory have not sought war eagerly, viewing it instead as a perilous last resort. (Triumph Revisited, pp. 144-149)

49 minutes ago, Cory Santos said:

Thanks but what was the actual evidence?

Uh, the statements that Morris Wolff has revealed that WC member Cooper made to him regarding the WC investigation. 

WC apologists have long said that "someone would have talked," but then they turn around and look for any excuse to reject the accounts given by insiders who have "talked." 

In his new book Fighting for Justice (Post Hill Press, 2022), attorney Mark Shaw reveals new evidence provided by a Warren Commission whistleblower, Morris Wolff, who is a former White House aide and a former aide to WC member Senator John Sherman Cooper.

Wolff served as a White House aide to JFK and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Wolff said he relayed messages between the Kennedy brothers because they feared that J. Edgar Hoover was tapping their phones. A short time later, Wolff became a legislative assistant to Senator Cooper.

Wolff has reported to Shaw that Senator Cooper told him that he did not believe that Oswald acted alone, that he did not believe the single-bullet theory, that there was corruption in the WC, that they knew about Jack Ruby and organized crime but did not care, and that true believers on the Commission said they were acting for “God and country”:

          Wolff then trusted me with a secret: that Senator Cooper, who called himself a “maverick” politician and was what Wolff called a “man of the truth,” became “very skeptical of the slipshod job being done by the commission staff and its rush to judgment” regarding the final report issued. Further, Wolff disclosed that Cooper, a staunch civil-rights activist despite being a Republican senator from the conservative state of Kentucky, uttered strong words during the times Wolff actually rode with him in the senator’s car to the hearings. Those words included “[the Commission] doesn’t get it, it’s more than Oswald, but Warren [Chief Justice Earl Warren] keeps pushing the Oswald-alone idea.” (pp. 350-351)

          Wolff recalled the senator telling him, “There’s something very wrong going on with the Commission.”

          Among the other recollections Wolff divulged to this author were that Cooper told him, “My own views are different than the Report conclusion.” The senator then added, “They say this [Oswald alone business] is good for God and the country, but there is internal corruption, and I don’t know why.” Cooper also told Wolff, “They [the Commission] knew about the Ruby connection to organized crime, but they don’t want to touch it but instead stick to the single bullet theory.” (pp. 351-352).

So this makes three WC members who did not buy the Commission's key conclusions. One of the two others was Senator Richard Russell:

          With these points before him, Richard Russell forced a final Executive Session of the Warren Commission. His main agenda was to present his prepared dissent and to refuse to sign the Commission Report unless his dissent was included. After presenting his concerns, Russell was joined in his dissent by Senator John Sherman Cooper and to a lesser extent Representative Boggs. In an oral history conducted late in his life, Senator Cooper recalled that Russell’s well-reasoned opinions “had great influence” on Cooper’s own conclusions. Like Russell, Cooper was impressed by the strong and compelling testimony of Governor Connally and thus was willing to follow Russell’s lead in rejecting the “single bullet” theory. (Dani Biancolli, The First Dissenter: Richard B. Russell and the Warren Commission, Master of Arts thesis, 2002, William and Mary University, https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5464&context=etd)

And:

          In his final television interview, Russell stated that he “never believed that Oswald planned that altogether by himself. There were too many things, the fact when he was at Minsk, and that was the principal center for educating Cuban students. There were 600 or 700 there. He was very close to some of them and the trip that he made to Mexico City and a number of discrepancies in the evidence as to, or conflicts in the evidence as to his means of transportation, the luggage he had, and whether or not anyone was with him, caused me to have doubts that he planned it all by himself. I think someone else worked with him.” (The First Dissenter, https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5464&context=etd)

Hale Boggs was the third WC member who had doubts about the Commission's conclusions. 

As of a few months ago, Wolff, an octogenarian, was still alive but in poor health.

17 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

 

Right? Another key element of Moyar’s thesis is that the US would have been in a “better strategic scenario” had they initiated a full-scale invasion of the North in ‘64:

“The United States would not have won the war quickly had it invaded the North, but it would have faced a far better strategic scenario than the one it ultimately accepted by not invading.” - Moyar from QA session on Triumph Forsaken 

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/30490.html

I suspect you do not care and that this will go in one ear and out the other, but, just FYI, virtually every senior military officer who served in Vietnam and who wrote about the war likewise argued that, at the very least, we would have been in a stronger position if we had invaded North Vietnam in 1964. If you want to read about this, you could start with Admiral Sharp's book Strategy for Defeat and General Davidson's book Vietnam at War. Admiral Sharp was the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), and commanded the air war in Vietnam through mid-1968. Davidson was MACV's chief of intelligence under both Westmoreland and Abrams.

Of course, for Moyar to be able say this, he has to argue that China would not have intervened.

I called you out on this blundering argument in my July 13 reply (LINK). You never responded to the points and facts I presented in that reply. And now, here you are again repeating the debunked claim that China would have intervened if we had invaded North Vietnam in 1964. Let me quote what I said about this argument in my July 13 reply:

Yikes. You obviously do not realize how badly you are blundering here. Where to start? For starters, as a boatload of scholars have pointed out, China was in no condition to intervene against a U.S. invasion of North Vietnam in 1964.

Guess who said this regarding China's intentions:

          Mao signaled to Washington that Beijing would only enter the war if Chinese territory were attacked. The chairman was only willing to fight the Americans down to the last Vietnamese. 

What "extreme revisionist" made this statement? Dr. Lien-Hang Nguyen, a professor of history at Columbia University, in her widely acclaimed 2012 seminal study Hanoi's War (p. 75). She is not really a revisionist, by the way, although her book contains a large amount of material that contradicts the orthodox view.

Are you aware of the fact that the North Vietnamese and the Chinese explicitly agreed on October 5, 1964, that if the U.S. invaded North Vietnam, the Chinese would not intervene, and the North Vietnamese would not even try to keep the Americans out of North Vietnam but would retreat from the coast and engage primarily in guerrilla warfare? Why do you suppose that the two scholars who assail Moyar on this issue, mostly Qiang Zhai (the Chinese scholar whose name you could not recall), say nothing about this fact, not to mention the other facts mentioned above? Why?

Does this refresh your memory? Reasonable people are going to wonder about the candor behind your repetition of your attack on Moyar on this point while you have ignored the above-quoted points and facts that were presented to you over a week ago.

As shown in Triumph Revisited, Moyar’s evidence for this claim is highly dubious, since he relies heavily on a single comment made to (a reporter?) while ignoring several other statements and Chinese sources that indicate that China would have indeed entered the war in response to an American invasion in ‘64. 

One, see above. Two, Moyar's evidence on this issue is only "highly dubious" to left-wing idealogues who can never admit error and who still have not come to grips with the North Vietnamese sources. 

Why did you not tell our readers who made that "single comment to a reporter" and who the reporter was? The reporter was Edgar Snow, a proud communist sympathizer and an adoring fan of Red China's mass-murdering dictator Mao Tse Tung. And the person who made that "single comment" was none other than Mao Tse Tung. So, uh, yeah, any rational person would place great importance on the fact that Mao expressly told Snow, for the record, that "China's armies will not go beyond her borders to fight" and that "only if the United States attacked China would we fight."  

By the way, not one of the negative reviews mentions this fact. But you just do not care, do you?

If you had read Moyar's Triumph Forsaken before stridently attacking it, you would know that he spends three pages examining this issue (pp. 360-362).

I don’t have the dates in front of me, but even Moyar acknowledges that by 1965, China was committed to entering the war if the US invaded North Vietnam. One of the reviewers points out that this limits Moyar’s effective invasion theory to a six-month window….

Say what??? You have no clue what you are talking about. For starters, Mao made his no-intervention declaration in January 1965. 

Your gaffe here is another indication to me that you have not actually read Moyar's responses to the negative reviews, because he spends two pages dealing with the issue of potential Chinese intervention in his first response (pp. 69-70). 

Despite months of pleading from Hanoi, Mao did not even dare to send support troops into the northern part of North Vietnam (just to help with logistics) until May 1965, and this was only after LBJ had foolishly declared to the world that he would not invade North Vietnam. And what did Mao do in 1972 when Nixon unleashed the devastating Linebacker I and II bombing raids on North Vietnam, which included bombing bridges next to China's border, attacks on Chinese ships near North Vietnam's coast, and the mining of Haiphong Harbor? Huh? 

All the doves and anti-war activists who had screamed for years that large-scale bombing of Hanoi and mining Haiphong Harbor would provoke China to enter the war fell silent when China failed to enter the war in 1972 when Nixon not only bombed Hanoi and mined Haiphong Harbor but attacked Chinese ships and destroyed bridges right next to the Chinese border with North Vietnam. 

You know, you would not keep blundering and embarrassing yourself if you would take a few weeks off and read Moyar's Triumph Forsaken and Nguyen's Hanoi's War, and also actually read Moyar's responses in Triumph Revisited.

5 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

 

You keep misrepresenting things I’ve said.

No, I do not. You keep writing gaffes and then falsely claim I've misrepresented you when I call you on them. 

I am still waiting for you to post what you regard as the three most "devastating" criticisms in Laderman's review. I suspect you have not done so because you fear I will refute them.

I did read Moyar’s review replies, and have said so multiple times in this thread.

Then you must have read them with dark sunglasses on and must have only read every third word. You have repeated a number of attacks that Moyar soundly refutes in his responses.

Even though you uncritically embrace everything Moyar writes as gospel, and have tried valiantly to pass off his lawyerly excuses to valid, incisive criticisms from top experts as some sort of proof the reviewers were wrong,

One, you have not read enough to be able to credibly judge the negative reviews and Moyar's responses. Two, you have not pointed out a single error in Moyar's responses or in my critiques of the negative reviews. Three, all you keep doing is using appeals to authority, as if to say, "Gee, I cannot explain the errors you have documented in the negative reviews, and I have no answers for the points Moyar makes in his responses, but you and Moyar must be wrong because 'top experts' wrote those negative reviews." 

not one thing Moyar said in those replies invalidates the hard evidence provided by the reviewers in Triumph Revisited

"Not one thing"??? Really??? What utter hogwash. You must know this is false. I guess you are hoping that nobody who is reading this thread will ever read Moyar's books and Triumph Revisited.

that Moyar deliberately cherry-picked and misrepresented source material to support his thesis.

You can repeat this falsehood a hundred times, but that will not make it come true. You still have not explained the evidence I have presented that Laderman falsely accused Moyar of misusing McHale as a source and that Laderman surely knew this when he made the claim. I keep asking you if you are going to explain Laderman's false claim, and you keep ducking the question. 

Part of your "cherry-picked" claim is based on the uneducated repetition of the complaint that Moyar cited/quoted some sources to support arguments even though the sources reject those arguments. Uh, yeah, scholars do this all the time. All the time. We conspiracy theorists do it all the time, such as when we cite or quote Warren Commission materials to support arguments that the Commission rejected, or when we cite HSCA studies to support arguments that those studies rejected. 

You see, there are innumerable times when Author A includes information that does not support Position A, even though he presents it as evidence for Position A because he misinterprets it or fails to realize its actual implications, and then other authors will cite or quote that same information from Author A's book to support Position B even though Author A rejects Position B and argues for Position A. If you do not know that this is done all the time, then I must wonder about your level of education. 

It doesn’t get any clearer than putting a claim and a citation right next to each other and demonstrating conclusively that they don’t match up. 

Again, repeating a falsehood over and over will not make it come true. I already addressed your bogus examples that supposedly prove Moyar did this, and I showed they prove no such thing. 

You are still dodging the point made by Laderman et al. that accuracy and verifiability are of the utmost importance in such a controversial book.

This is the kind of unserious strawman claim that a frustrated teenager would make when he knew he was losing an argument. Nobody denies that accuracy and verifiability are important in any book, controversial or otherwise. 

As Laderman (I think?) pointed out, the choice of using block citations, which requires the reader to search through several different sources at a time to verify specific cited claims is suspect, when paired with the fact that Moyar provably twisted, misrepresented, and cherry-picked his sources to support his arguments.

LOL! This is clown material. Using block citations is never suspect under any circumstances. It is a common practice used in hundreds of thousands of books.  And, again, you have not proved that Moyar misrepresented or "cherry-picked" his sources to support his arguments. On the contrary, I proved that Laderman's prime example of alleged misuse of sources is bogus, and that Laderman must have known it was bogus when he wrote it. 

Complaining that other authors do it too without invoking the same level of criticism is not a valid excuse.

No??? This is more clown material. The fact that some of the negative reviewers fault Moyar for using block citations and for treating meeting notes as verbatim transcripts only proves that they are so desperate to attack Moyar that they will stoop to using juvenile methods to do so.

Is it really “juvenile” for Laderman to suspect that a deliberate obfuscation of the peer review process in a book that makes such extraordinary claims might be more than just stylistic preference,

Yup, it is juvenile. It is also dishonest and ridiculous.

And let us keep in mind that Laderman, whom you keep holding up as a top expert, endorses Zhai's ludicrous claim that Ho and his fellow Communist leaders were mainly nationalists, a myth that even many non-revisionist scholars have debunked. Laderman also makes the long-debunked assumption that Diem's government was just as oppressive as Ho's government, a fable that was destroyed many years ago. A few sources that prove these claims are inexcusably outdated are Dr. Lien-Hang Nguyen's Hanoi's War, Dr. William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life, Max Hastings' Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, Nguyen Van Cahn's Vietnam Under Communism, Bui Tin's Following Ho Chi Minh (do you know who Bui Tin was?), and Pierre Brocheux's Ho Chi Minh: a Biography.

especially after discovering that many of Moyar’s claims were not even remotely supported by his citations?

How many times are you going to repeat this falsehood, while still refusing to address the relevant points in my previous replies and while still peddling the juvenile nonsense about block citations, the treatment of meeting notes as verbatim transcripts, and the use of sources for arguments that the sources reject? 

Yeah, I don’t think so, and I think anyone who reads Triumph Revisited - except you, of course - would at least want to check Moyar’s sources in detail before believing anything he says. 

Ouch. Yowzah. Well, that is a mighty bold and petty comment to be made by someone like you, given that you have not read Moyar's Triumph Forsaken, i.e., the very book that Triumph Revisited reviews, and given that you have not read any of Moyar's other books or any other scholarly books that support the revisionist position. 

1 hour ago, Tom Gram said:

 

The point Mike, which is articulated by the reviewers in Triumph Revisited much better than I can, is that precise historical accuracy and verifiability of sources is critical in such a controversial book that explicitly defines its goal as debunking every core tenet of the orthodox view of the Vietnam War. 

You really should stop bluffing and posturing as though you know what you are talking about. You have read next to nothing about the Vietnam War. You uncritically embraced the negative reviews in Triumph Revisited (obviously before you read any of Moyar's responses therein); you have ignored Moyar's responses to those reviews; and you have ignored the numerous positive reviews of Moyar's book in other scholarly sources.

Instead, Moyar invented a fake conversation out of a State Department memo for dramatic effect, which also happened to help support his argument, and did the same thing at least one other time; 

I already addressed this vacuous attack. You just keep repeating claims from the negative reviews and ignoring my responses to them and ignoring Moyar's responses to them. Has it not occurred to you that attentive readers will wonder why you keep declining to answer the points made in responses to the claims you keep repeating? 

cherry-picked and misrepresented sources while deliberately omitting contradictory information, 

I already addressed these false claims as well, but you just keep repeating them and ignoring the facts I have cited that challenge these claims. I would note that you still have not explained Laderman's demonstrably false claim that Moyar misrepresented/misused McHale as a source. I have proved that Moyar did no such thing, and that Laderman had to know this when he wrote the accusation. I have asked you several times now to defend Laderman's attack in light of the evidence I have presented, but you still refuse to do so.

and chose a citation style [block citation] that makes it exceedingly difficult for anyone to verify his claims. 

LOL! You are even doubling down on this juvenile complaint??? Block citation is a standard, recognized style that is used in literally hundreds of thousands of books. And just exactly who finds it "exceedingly difficult" to verify a claim because the documentation for the claim is given in a block citation? A vision-impaired person? I mean, this is just comical. 

These are not my opinions. These are the opinions of top credentialed experts on the Vietnam war, so your repeated condescending comments towards me only reflect your rabid bias for Moyar and the revisionist view.

You keep trying to hide behind the authority of the negative reviewers in Triumph Revisited and in a handful of other sources, yet you still decline to address the many errors and distortions in their reviews that Moyar points out in his responses and that I have discussed in this thread. You also continue to simply ignore the fact that many other "top credentialed experts on the Vietnam War" have praised Moyar's books.

You are in the same predicament as a newcomer to the JFK case would be if he had read very little on the case and had only read pro-WC material. The JFK newcomer, if he were unaware of basic critical thinking principles, would get on this forum, would remind everyone that the vast majority of academic historians support the lone-gunman theory, and would then stridently reject the conspiracy view. When conspiracy theorists would start pointing out the plethora of errors in the writings of those academic historians, the JFK newcomer (if he were not inclined to reconsider and do more research) would use appeals to authority to dismiss or ignore the facts being pointed out to him by conspiracy theorists.

Lastly, would it be less offensive to say something like “the vast majority of experts vehemently disagree with every single core argument”? I think “think it is total nonsense” covers it just fine. 

You seem to have a very hard time admitting error. You said that the vast majority of Vietnam War experts regard Moyar's books and the revisionist view as "total nonsense." Now you are trying to weasel-word your way out of defending that ridiculous statement. 

Even your weasel-worded revised verbiage is inaccurate, as anyone can see just by reading the negative reviews in Triumph Revisited. Indeed, non-revisionist scholars have written books that present evidence that strongly supports a number of Moyar's core arguments, e.g., Max Hastings, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Nguyen Van Canh, Christopher Goscha, and Tuong Vu. 

12 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Wow, this is pretty bad:

"What Moyar did is even worse than that, since he actually misrepresented the textual content of sources by inventing imaginary conversations out of non-verbatim memos, plus he attributed information to sources that don’t actually say what he claimed they say. "

Humm, I take it you did not bother to read my reply in which I addressed this phony charge and quoted Moyar's response to it? I realize that you will rubber-stamp anything Tom says, even though he has done even less reading on the Vietnam War than you have, but one would think you would at least bother to read my replies before endorsing Tom's amateurish attacks. Tom likewise has simply ignored Moyar's response to Miller's sleazy claim.

In a nutshell, Miller claims that Moyar markedly embellishes the record because he treats meeting notes as verbatim transcripts. Citing Miller, Tom goes even further and accuses Moyar of "inventing imaginary conversations out of non-verbatim memos." This is more of Tom's amateurish nonsense. As Moyar points out, using meeting notes as verbatim transcripts is a matter of style, not content, and other historians have done the same thing:

          Miller then asserts that I “misrepresented” the “textual content” of sources, which “dramatically embellishes the available record” and “raises worrisome questions about whether and how frequently he plays fast and loose with his sources.” Miller seems to be asserting that I seriously misrepresented the meaning of sources, but when he gets down to specifics, it turns out that he is discussing something of much less significance, which begs the question of why he used such ominous and inflammatory language. What he is discussing is merely the use of meeting notes as verbatim transcripts—a matter of style rather than content, upon which reasonable people sometimes disagree. Other historians have employed this same method without incurring invective. Richard Reeves, for example, used it extensively in his highly acclaimed President Kennedy, which won best non-fiction book of the year accolades from Time Magazine and P.E.N. (p. 222)

I can speak to this issue from my own professional experience as a technical editor who has worked at four government agencies. At the two agencies where my duties included taking meeting notes (aka meeting minutes), those meeting notes were treated as verbatim transcripts. When quoting statements from meeting minutes in other documents, we would use quotation marks as if they were a verbatim record of what the meeting participants said.

14 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

 

Once again, you’re trying, and failing, to shoot the messenger. You’ve got several professional scholars saying that Moyar’s approach is deceptive and unethical, and providing concrete, indisputable examples of egregious misrepresentation of their own books.

Wrong. On the contrary, I have already addressed several of these alleged examples and have proved they are bogus. I notice you are still declining to explain Laderman's false claim that Moyar misused McHale as a source on the 1945-1957 intra-Vietnamese killings, when I proved that Moyar did no such thing. 

What Moyar did is even worse than that, since he actually misrepresented the textual content of sources by inventing imaginary conversations out of non-verbatim memos, plus he attributed information to sources that don’t actually say what he claimed they say.

Still more amateurish nonsense.  You can repeat these false charges over and over but that will not make them come true. Are you ever going to quote what you believe are the three most "devastating" criticisms in Laderman's review that I have not addressed? 

One of your silly examples of alleged misrepresentation/misuse is the common practice of quoting statements from a source to support an argument that the source rejects. You obviously have little or no background in serious scholarly research or else you would know better than to repeat this sophomoric, juvenile attack. The fact that some of your darling liberal historians in Triumph Revisited repeat this silly attack should tell you something about their bias and reliability. 

As I have noted, WC apologists would have a field day making this same silly attack against conspiracy theorists. Does it not tell you something that very few WC apologists have stooped to using this bogus attack? 

Moyar’s use of block citations may be used by some other authors, but when you misuse various sources in various ways and deliberately make it more difficult for people to attribute specific claims to specific citations, it’s pretty obvious what your motives are, and objective scholarship isn’t one of them. 

Holy cow. This ridiculous rant leads me to question your level of education. FYI, many, many books use block citations, and every major style guide includes guidance on using block citations. Block citations are often used because they save space, by the way.  How can anyone take you seriously when you embarrass yourself by complaining about the standard use of block citations? 

There’s a reason that so many historians and Vietnam experts think that Moyar’s books, and the revisionist perspective in general, are total nonsense.

Just pure hogwash. You have no clue what you are talking about. Even most orthodox historians do not claim that Moyar's books and the revisionist view are "total nonsense." Indeed, even most of the negative reviews in Triumph Revisited do not make such an extreme claim. 

Such statements show that you have no business even talking about this subject in a public forum. Jim and a few other ultra-liberals will uncritically gobble up whatever you say, since they have not read Triumph Revisited and you have (at least parts of it, anyway), even though you have done even less reading on the war than Jim has (and that is saying quite a bit). 

While I am waiting for Tom to post what he views as the three most “devastating” criticisms in Laderman’s review that I have not yet addressed, I will take the liberty of quoting, mainly for the sake of others, a few more segments from Dr. Robert F. Turner’s review:

          Triumph Forsaken is often described as a “revisionist” history of the war. Moyar himself asserts that he is carrying on “a relatively small, but strong, tradition of revisionist literature that dates back to the mid-1970s.” In an accompanying footnote, he identifies nine volumes as “the most significant of the early revisionist books,” of which my Vietnamese Communism (1975) is the oldest.

          I am not sure it matters, but I have always viewed my own scholarship on the war as “counter-revisionist,” on the theory that the original orthodoxy was the support for “containment” that led to America’s involvement in Vietnam. There were a number of books supporting this view, among the best being Frank N. Trager’s Why Vietnam (1966), Dennis Duncanson’s Government and Revolution in Vietnam (1968), and Wesley Fishel’s Vietnam: Anatomy of a Conflict (1969). But the modern verdict seems unanimous that the views of my late friend Bill Colby (Lost Victory, 1989) and Guenter Lewy (America in Vietnam, 1978) are “revisionist,” and in that spirit I am honored to be in their company. (pp. 102-103)

          Take, for example, the issue of Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s controversial president, who was assassinated on November 1, 1963. Moyar views American encouragement of the anti-Diem coup as the greatest blunder of the war, and I could not agree more. War critics were fond of noting that Diem had served in the early 1930s in the French colonial administration and had lived in New Jersey during the final years of the French–Viet Minh war. They failed to appreciate what Bernard Fall in The Two Viet-Nams called Diem’s “reputation for ‘all-or-nothing’ integrity.” Because of his unparalleled reputation for competence and integrity, Diem was admired even by his political rivals and sought as a figurehead leader by Bao Dai, the French, the Japanese, and even Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh. But he refused to be anyone’s lackey, and his unwillingness to take instructions from the arrogant American proconsul, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, helped seal his ultimate fate.

          Perhaps my most revealing experience on this issue resulted from a casual remark I made to Bui Cong Tuong, one of the most senior defectors in the war who had served as director of propaganda, education, culture, and training for what the Viet Cong called Ben Tre Province and we called Kien Hoa. He told me that when they heard on the radio that Diem had been killed, they thought it was some sort of American trick, because surely the Americans would not be so foolish as to allow anything to happen to Diem.

          Tuong explained that senior party officials viewed Diem as a great patriot—in the same league as Ho Chi Minh—but because Diem would not follow the party’s leadership they had to try to destroy his reputation with the people by branding him an American puppet and traitor. And surely if there is one clear message from the Pentagon Papers it is that Diem was far less willing to take instructions from the Americans than Ho was to follow instructions from Moscow and Beijing. I certainly share Moyar’s view—one also shared by Bill Colby and other leading experts— that promoting the coup that overthrew Diem was America’s greatest blunder in the war. (pp. 103-104)

          The campus debates about Vietnam in the 1960s were filled with mythology and misinformation. The United States did not violate its commitments under the 1954 Geneva Accords—as the Pentagon Papers document, we refused to sign or verbally agree to anything at Geneva. Along with the noncommunist “State of Vietnam,” we opposed partition and expressly declared that reunification elections should be supervised by the United Nations to ensure that they were conducted fairly. (In contrast, Molitov and Pham Van Dong objected to international supervision as interference in the internal affairs of Vietnam and insisted upon “locally supervised” elections—the kind that routinely gave Ho Chi Minh 99.9 percent of the votes in the more populous North Vietnam. (p. 105)

          One of the most common assertions in the more than one hundred debates, teach-ins, and other programs I took part in between 1965 and entering the Army three years later was that even President Eisenhower had admitted that Ho Chi Minh would have defeated Ngo Dinh Diem in a free election had the United States and South Vietnam not refused to permit the July 1956 elections required by the Geneva Agreements. Critics would routinely quote from page 449 of Eisenhower’s Mandate for Change, but from my experience they never even finished the sentence—much less the full contextual quotation. I have set in italics the language quoted time and again by anti-Vietnam critics:

          I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for.

          As is apparent from the full quotation, Eisenhower is not discussing a possible 1956 election between Ho and Diem, but rather an election “as of the time of the fighting,” which ended in 1954, between Ho and the hated French puppet Bao Dai, whom Diem easily defeated by a far greater margin. His message was not that Ho Chi Minh was the preference of most Vietnamese, but rather that “the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese” was that “they had nothing to fight for”—they did not want communism or French colonial rule.

          In the belief that he was being misquoted, around the end of 1967, I sent a letter to President Eisenhower attaching a copy of a two-page circular I had prepared titled: “Vietnam Cliché Series: Eisenhower Admitted that Had the 1956 Elections Been Held, Ho Chi Minh Would Have Won by 80% of the Vote.” The circular sought to rebut the assertion that the quotation addressed the likely outcome of a 1956 election between Ho and Diem. An individual named Samuel S. Vaughan, from Doubleday & Company (publisher of Mandate for Change), responded on behalf of President Eisenhower on February 16, 1968, that my reading of the passage was correct and President Eisenhower was addressing only the issue of a possible election between Ho and Bao Dai: “No further great conclusion should be drawn from the statement.” (pp. 106-107)

          On March 5, 1956, the New York Times featured an editorial supporting South Vietnam’s decision not to participate in unsupervised elections, declaring: “To attempt to settle the fate of the free Vietnamese without even consulting them is monstrous. To suggest a ‘free’ election in a Communist territory is to presume the possible existence of conditions and safeguards for which there is neither assurance nor precedent.” On April 11, the Times noted that the government of Great Britain had the previous day sent a diplomatic note to the Soviet Union—the other co-chair of the 1954 Geneva Conference—“recognized that South Vietnam was not legally bound by the armistice agreements since it had not signed them and had protested against them at the Geneva Conference.” (p. 107)

          There were hundreds of bookstalls around Saigon where I found writings of Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, and even Chairman Mao himself. (That is not to say selling communist literature was legal, only that the booksellers did not live in apparent fear of government repression.) As Christian Science Monitor Bureau Chief Daniel Sutherland observed in a September 18, 1970, article:

          Under its new press law, South Vietnam now has one of the freest presses in Southeast Asia, and the daily paper with the biggest circulation here happens to be sharply critical of President Thieu.... [S]ince the new press law was promulgated nine months ago, the government has not been able to close down Tin Sang or any other newspaper among the more than 30 now being published in Saigon. . . .

          The so-called “tiger cages” were another propaganda victory for Hanoi, and at least some of the American anti-war activists who made frequent reference to them apparently knew the story was false. When I informed friends in the anti-war movement that I would be allowed to visit Con Son Prison during a May 1974 congressional staff delegation to South Vietnam, they immediately downplayed that option and suggested that instead I insist on visiting Chi Hoa Prison. (I actually measured the so-called “tiger cages,” which were 3 meters tall, 3 meters long, and 1.5 meters wide— roughly 10 × 10 × 5 feet in size. And the widely repeated assertion that they were too short for Vietnamese prisoners to stand erect in was preposterous—I’m 6′ 4″ and I could not come close to reaching the ceiling with my arm fully extended.) (pp. 107-108)

          I think the American media deserves a great deal of responsibility for misleading and often incompetent coverage of the war. (It is not by chance that public opinion polls show that Vietnam veterans support the war by more than twice the level of the American public—we saw what was going on without it being filtered through the news media.) I strongly concur in the analysis of prize-winning journalist Robert Elegant, whose article “How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam,” was published in Encounter magazine in August 1981. It is available online at [LINK], and I highly recommend it to anyone who has not yet read it. (pp. 110-111)

36 minutes ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Mark Chapman murdered John Lennon - the end.

I figured you would ignore the parallels between Lennon's death and the deaths of JFK, RFK, and MLK. Consider:

-- Lennon was shot while standing up. So were RFK and MLK, and JFK was standing up before he got into the limousine.

-- Lennon and JFK had the same first name.

-- All four victims were males.

-- All four victims were shot while wearing clothes--and shoes.

-- All four victims died of gunshot wounds.

-- All four victims were Democrats.

-- All four victims had spoken in front of large crowds.

And on and on we could go. Let me guess: You dismiss all of these parallels as coincidences, right? 

17 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

I doubt that Tucker has ever met a fascist or a misogynist he didn't like.

That is a patently absurd statement. Utterly kooky. Not to mention irresponsible and baseless. 

5 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

 

Yea, I don’t think so. When you post blatant examples of Moyar cherry picking and misrepresenting multiple sources, and include quotes from the authors of books Moyar used slamming him for misusing their work, then respond with “that’s silly” and try to spin it like that’s somehow a normal and acceptable practice even though you’ve got something like five professional historians saying the exact opposite, that’s not an argument. It’s apologia and making excuses, just like Moyar’s review replies. Why waste my time trying to counter something that any reasonable person can figure out on their own? 

This polemic is further evidence that you are not to be taken seriously. It is most certainly silly, not to mention illogical and amateurish, to attack a writer for quoting statements from a book to support an argument that the book's author rejects. "Any reasonable person" can figure out that this is a comical, ridiculous criticism.

I repeat that scholars routinely quote from books to support arguments that the authors of those books reject. They do so because they believe that those authors have misinterpreted, minimized, or even overlooked the quoted evidence. I do not understand how any educated person can be unaware of this fact.

For example, many JFKA conspiracy theorists have justifiably cited the WC's exhibits on the Commission's rifle test to make the case that Oswald could not have performed the alleged shooting feat, even though the Warren Report concludes that Oswald did the shooting and that there was no conspiracy. Who in their right mind would argue that this constitutes "misrepresenting" or "misusing" the Warren Commission as a source because the Warren Report says Oswald shot JFK and rejects the conspiracy position? 

Another example: In making the case for a multiple-shooter scenario in the JFKA, many researchers have quoted the Warren Report's admission that it is unlikely that the alleged lone assassin would have missed the entire limousine with his first and closest shot. No serious person would argue that citing this admission "misuses" or "misrepresents" the Warren Report as a source, or that it constitutes "cherry picking," because the Warren Report rejects the conspiracy view. 

And what about Laderman's bogus claim that Moyar misuses McHale's book as a source regarding the 1945-1947 intra-Vietnamese killings? As I proved in my long reply on Laderman's review, when we actually look at what Moyar said, look at the point for which Moyar cited McHale as support, and then look at what McHale said, we see that Moyar did not misrepresent or misuse McHale as a source in the slightest degree. What we do see is that Laderman misrepresented both what Moyar said and what McHale said. I would note that you still have offered no explanation for Laderman's false claim.  

And what about Laderman's inexcusable support for Lawrence's and Zhai's bogus portrayal of Ho Chi Minh and other Communist leaders in Hanoi as mainly nationalists who actually cared little about Communist ideology and who only aligned with the Comintern because the U.S. spurned their approaches? Even Max Hastings and Lien-Hang Nguyen blow this myth to pieces, and the North Vietnamese sources likewise destroy it. Yet, Laderman and a minority of other ultra-liberal historians still peddle it.  

And what about Laderman's stunning claim (indeed assumption) that Diem's government was as oppressive as Ho's government? This claim would have been inexcusable in the 1980s. Read center-left British historian Max Hastings' Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy and then come back and tell me that Laderman's attack on Moyar on this point is valid. 

You did leave out some of the best stuff [from Laderman's review] though.

Oh, hogwash. As I said, I could have pointed out many more errors in Laderman's review. You think the parts that I did not address are "some of the best stuff" because you have not done enough reading to realize that Laderman's criticisms are invalid and are in many cases apparently dishonest. 

Again, I’ll transcribe some more quotes when I have the time, but I haven’t had a lot of time lately. 

How about if you post what you think are the three most "devastating" criticisms in Laderman's review that I did not address? To save you some time so you do not have to transcribe them, you can just tell me in a message the paragraphs that contain those criticisms and I will copy and paste them into a reply, since I have a digital copy of the book--and then I will address them.

One is left to wonder what else Prouty would have had to say and do to cause his adoring fans in the research community to repudiate him.

I mean, you have some researchers here who will automatically attack an author and reject what he has to say on the JFK case or the Vietnam War if that author has written for conservative journals and/or has appeared on conservative TV programs and/or has worked at conservative university centers.

Yet, these same researchers brush aside the fact that Prouty appeared on Liberty Lobby's Holocaust-denying, pro-white supremacy radio show 10 times, that Prouty spoke at one of Liberty Lobby's conventions, that Prouty spoke at an IHR Holocaust-denial conference, that Prouty praised the IHR's primary goals, that Prouty had the IHR republish one of his books, that Prouty recommended Liberty Lobby's extremist rag The Spotlight, that Prouty made scurrilous attacks on critics of L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology fraud, and that Prouty floated undeniably nutty clams about FDR's death and Princess Diana's death, etc., etc.

14 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

     It's depressing to see that Ron Johnson is only U.S. Senator openly acknowledging that JFK was assassinated in a U.S. government conspiracy.

     He's right for once, of course, but, unfortunately, no one takes anything RoJo says seriously.  

     Where are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, et.al., when we need them to step up?

Ron Johnson Floats JFK Conspiracy Theory

July 19, 2023 at 3:46 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 96 Comments

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said it is “certainly possible” government agencies were involved in the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Said Johnson: “I think it’s certainly possible, yeah. The American public deserves the truth, and we haven’t gotten it.”

He added: “There’s so many unanswered questions, so many witnesses that just died, so many leads that weren’t followed up on, so much evidence that obviously should have been collected that people have been prevented from collecting.”

Why in the world would you make such disparaging comments about Senator Ron Johnson while quoting his defense of the conspiracy view on the JFK case? I know why: because Senator Johnson is a conservative Republican.

Blind, rabid partisans such as yourself may not take anything Senator Johnson says seriously, but plenty of other people do. 

Once again, we see the rabidly partisan and harmful attitude that if someone supports the view that JFK was killed by a conspiracy, his arguments can only be taken seriously if he is a liberal.