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.

1 hour ago, Tom Gram said:

Thanks Mike. You left out some key passages from Laderman’s devastating review, but I think anyone who reads this has enough to see that Laderman‘s criticisms are valid and that Moyar cherry-picked and deliberately misrepresented his sources to push his arguments. 

Uh-huh. You know this is false. Obviously, you have no explanation for the specious arguments that I identified in Laderman's review. I could have pointed out many other invalid arguments in his review, but that would have required many more pages. Every single one of Laderman's alleged examples of misrepresented sources is as erroneous as the ones I discussed in my previous reply. You would know this if you had read Moyar's book and his responses to the negative reviews. 

In the coming days, I will discuss more of Laderman's bogus examples of Moyar's alleged misuse of sources. 

A big problem here is that you really have no business making such accusations against Moyar's book, given that you have not read it, have not read his other books, have not read any scholarly books that support his position, and have read very few books of any kind on the war. One genuine "basic norm of scholarship" is that you do not comment on, much less stridently attack, a book you have not read.  Another "basic norm of scholarship" is that you should read an adequate number of studies on both sides of an issue before forming a conclusion about it. 

The fact that you still call Laderman's review "devastating" after the serious errors I pointed out in it shows that you are not interested in genuine analysis and discussion on the Vietnam War. I suspect this is because your version of the JFK assassination conspiracy requires acceptance of the liberal position on the war.

For the sake of other readers, I will conclude this reply by quoting from Dr. Robert F. Turner's review of Moyar's book in Triumph Revisited. For those who are new to Vietnam War scholarship, Robert Turner is a former professor of international law and national security at the University of Virginia, a former professor at the Naval War College, and the author of two best-selling books on the Vietnam War and the co-author of two other books on the war. Turner served as a news correspondent in South Vietnam in 1968. He then joined the U.S. Army and served in military intelligence in South Vietnam from 1968 to 1971. He later worked as Senator Robert Griffin's national security adviser and, as chance would have it, helped author the language of the measure that created the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, i.e., the Church Committee. He also served three terms as chairman of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security. Here are a few segments from Turner's review of Moyar's book:

          Anyone who cares seriously about the realities of the Vietnam War or wishes to learn its key lessons owes a great debt of gratitude to Mark Moyar, whose new volume is a landmark contribution to the subject. Indeed, it should be mandatory reading for any serious scholar seeking to understand that conflict, as well as any politician or senior aide who seeks lessons for the current conflict in Iraq or future armed conflicts. (p. 102). 

          Moyar has taken advantage of resources that were simply not available when I wrote Vietnamese Communism thirty-five years ago, and by skillfully applying his considerable research and writing talents has given us the first volume of what truly must be viewed as an extraordinary contribution to the history of the Vietnam War. He has wisely drawn from the labors of those who went before him, but a great deal of this volume results from his own original research. From my perspective as a scholar who has been working in this field for more than four decades and teaching seminars on the war at both the graduate and undergraduate level since the 1980s, he has most of it right. (p. 103)

          Another major myth is that the Vietnam War was "unwinnable." Writing in the January/February 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, Yale Professor John Lewis Gaddis—regarded by many as the dean of American diplomatic historians—observed: “Historians now acknowledge that American counter-insurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict; the problem was that support for the war had long since crumbled at home.” Many of America’s most experienced observers made the point that the war had been effectively won by the spring of 1972 if not earlier, including the C.I.A.’s William E. Colby in his Lost Victory, my old embassy colleague Douglas Pike, and journalist Robert Elegant in his superb essay, “How to Lose a War,” in the August 1981 issue of Encounter. (pp. 104-105)

          Many of the most effective arguments against the war pertained to alleged “human rights” abuses. Like virtually every Third World country, South Vietnam had serious corruption problems and its human rights record was far from perfect. But when contrasted with what the communists were offering (and what they later imposed on South Vietnam), there was no comparison. (p. 107)

          Perhaps the greatest myth about Vietnam is that there was no reason to go to war in the first place. Moyar does a great job of puncturing part of this argument—namely, the allegation that Ho Chi Minh was in reality but a Vietnamese “nationalist” who accepted communist assistance when the United States refused to help him free his country from French occupation. Had we simply permitted him to unite Vietnam, it is often alleged, he would have been an “Asian Tito” and a barrier to further Chinese expansion into Southeast Asia. 

          This is an issue I addressed at some length in my 1975 book Vietnamese Communism, in which I observed that Ho spent thirty years outside Vietnam between 1911 and 1941, most of it in the paid service of the Communist International (Comintern). Indeed, numerous Hanoi publications note that when Ho Chi Minh was present at the founding of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930, he was there as the official Comintern representative. Ho’s Viet Minh radio repeatedly denounced Tito as an American spy during the late 1940s, and even when Khrushchev made peace with Tito, Hanoi media continued to denounce him. (pp. 108-109)

Let us look at some of Laderman’s most-questionable criticisms of Moyar’s book Triumph Forsaken:

          Moyar suggested that Ho was, above all else, a willing tool of the Soviets and Chinese, “firmly adher[ing] to the Leninist principle that Communist nations should subordinate their interests to those of the international Communist movement.” Moyar therefore saw in Ho’s professions of global solidarity not Vietnam’s placement at the forefront of a vast wave of anti-colonialism and revolutionary nationalism but, rather, machinations in pursuit of collapsing dominoes. The Vietnamese revolutionaries’ gestures towards the Soviets and Chinese were thus viewed invariably in Triumph Forsaken as genuine and nefarious, while their gestures towards the United States were dismissed as duplicitous and insincere. (p. 92)

This is a variation of Zhai’s and Lawrence’s bogus arguments in Chapters 4 and 14, which Moyar answers in his first and third responses. It is also a sad but revealing repetition of the anti-war movement’s long-debunked falsehood that Ho Chi Minh and his fellow Communists were mainly nationalists who did not really care about Communist ideology or about aiding Comintern goals.

As I mentioned in a previous reply, Zhai's claim that Ho Chi Minh was not a fanatical, dedicated Stalinist-Leninist Communist is astounding and inexcusable. Dr. Lien-Hang Nguyen's book Hanoi's War, Dr. William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life, and Dr. Christopher Goscha's recent book The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam prove that Moyar's description of Ho Chi Minh as a hardcore Communist who had no interest in an alliance with the West is indisputably correct. 

Le Duan, who was running North Vietnam years before Ho Chi Minh died in 1969, and who formally assumed the leadership of the country after Ho died, was even a more fanatical Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist than Ho had been, as Lien-Hang Nguyen documents in Hanoi’s War.

As I also mentioned in a previous reply, in The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam, Goscha shows that Ho and other Communist leaders pretended to be willing to rule with non-communist nationalists and concealed their Marxist agenda from the people as a war expediency to defeat the French. When Ho, Le Duan, Le Duc Tho, etc., felt it was safe to do so, they ruthlessly purged non-Communists from all levels of power, murdering thousands of people and jailing thousands of others in the process.

          It is apparently inconceivable to Moyar that Ho could simultaneously have been both a nationalist and a Communist, or that he or his comrades could have been shrewd individuals willing to make pragmatic accommodations in pursuit of larger national objectives. (p. 92)

Anyone who reads Moyar’s book will see that Laderman is severely misstating Moyar’s research and conclusions about Hanoi’s leaders. Laderman is also ignoring the mountain of evidence, acknowledged by untold numbers of scholars, that Ho and Le Duan et al were hardcore Communists who only made “pragmatic accommodations” that went against Communist doctrine and goals when they had no other choice.

          As for the widespread repression exercised by the Diem government, it is true, Moyar conceded, that Diem was authoritarian. But, whereas Ho’s heavy-handedness was a contemptible illustration of the Communist threat, for Diem it was an asset to be celebrated. (p. 93).

This is perhaps Laderman’s most stunning display of distortion, falsehood, and far-left bias. Laderman fails to mention that Moyar documents that Diem’s regime was far less oppressive than the Hanoi regime. To his great credit, center-left historian Sir Max Hastings, in his book Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, acknowledges that Diem’s government was not as bad as Hanoi’s government. For a detailed examination on this subject, I recommend South Vietnamese historian Tuong Vu’s compilation The Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975: Vietnamese Perspectives on Nation Building (Cornell University Press, 2020).

Now let us look at Laderman’s specious, sophomoric attack on Moyar’s use of sources:

          James McAllister, for example, showed how the only documentary evidence cited by Moyar for his claim that some “high-ranking” U.S. officials were concluding in 1964 that “Tri Quang himself was a Communist” said nothing of the sort. (p. 94)

More distortion and omission. Moyar addresses McAllister’s arguments on Tri Quang in his third reply. I wonder if McAllister even read the sources that Moyar cites. By the way, in an article that McAllister wrote in 2008, two years before Triumph Revisited was published, he admitted that Ambassador Lodge and General Maxwell Taylor came to believe that Tri Quang was a Communist, although he complains that they had no grounds for doing so (LINK, p. 754). Moyar’s 2004 article on the militant Buddhist monks is worth reading for more information on this issue (LINK).

          Gareth Porter, commenting on Moyar’s explication of the domino theory’s validity, accused the author of “violat[ing] the basic norms of scholarship” by, among other things, alleging that the Malay Communist insurgency “never really stopped” when, according to Porter, the allegation is “contradicted flatly by the very source [Moyar] cites.” (p. 94)

Now this is just silly. It is not violating any “basic norm of scholarship” to reach a conclusion that differs from the conclusion of the book or books you are citing. Scholars often quote certain segments of works to support an argument even though those works do not agree with their argument. When I quote selected statements from the Warren Report to make the case for conspiracy, no credible critic would complain that I was violating a “basic norm of scholarship” because the Warren Report rejects the conspiracy position. Porter would never make such a sophomoric argument against a fellow orthodox scholar.

          Edwin Moïse, addressing the alleged attack during the Tonkin Gulf incident of August 4, 1964, expressed his annoyance with “the way Moyar carefuly [sic] selects from my own book only those facts that support” Triumph Forsaken’s argument that the available contemporaneous evidence “strongly supported the reality of the attack”—a point Moïse disputed and said was “very strongly contradicted” elsewhere in his same book. (p. 94)

More abject silliness. Scholars routinely “carefully select” facts from books to support their arguments even though those books reject their arguments. Have Moise and Porter ever taken a course in debate and critical thinking? Just because I quote facts presented by Gerald Posner or Vincent Bugliosi because those facts support the conspiracy view does not mean I am misusing their books or that I am bound to agree with Posner’s and Bugliosi’s view on conspiracy. Nobody but an amateur, or a scholar looking for any excuse to criticize, would argue otherwise.

          And William Stueck, commenting on Moyar’s claims regarding the battle at Dien Bien Phu and the 1954 Geneva Conference, wrote that while Moyar cited for “some specifics” what are arguably the leading sources on Vietnamese relations with China and the Soviet Union, he “ignore[d] other details” in these sources that weakened his position “as well as these authors’ conclusions.” (p. 94)

And still more “you can’t quote or cite a source unless the source agrees with you” silliness, not to mention that Laderman fails to tell the reader that Moyar presents new evidence to support his arguments regarding Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Conference.

          My own brief examination only further reinforced the concerns expressed above.

And we just saw that those concerns are unfounded, to put it gently.

          To cite one easily confirmable example, Moyar wrote that “[i]n Vietnamese Communist parlance, the label ‘reactionary’ was applied to anyone who was not a Communist. Many more ‘reactionaries’ would suffer death during the remainder of 1946, bringing the toll of civilians killed by the Communists during the period of Communist rule into the tens of thousands.” Moyar then provided an endnote in which he added that “[i]ntra-Vietnamese killings, which the Communists perpetrated in greater numbers than everyone else combined, came to a total of as high as 50,000 in this period, according to recent estimates.” In support Moyar cited Shawn McHale’s Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam. Yet McHale did not write that “the Communists” killed “tens of thousands,” nor did he write that they perpetrated killings “in greater numbers than everyone else combined.” In fact, he did not mention “the Communists” at all; his discursion was, rather, about the Viet Minh (a “front organization... led by the communists”) and its opponents “assassinating each other.” (pp. 94-95)

I guess Laderman was assuming that most readers would not bother to check Moyar’s book and then McHale’s book for themselves. When we do, we see that Laderman’s claim is false, and that Laderman had to know it was false when he wrote it.

One, Moyar only cites McHale on the point that the death toll from intra-Vietnamese killings from 1945-1947 was “as high as 50,000,” and McHale does in fact cite this argument:

          Francois Guillemot has suggested that, from 1945 to 1947, from five thousand to fifty thousand Vietnamese were killed. The Viet Minh was not, it should be underlined, responsible for all of the deaths, as other nationalist and religious groups contributed to the carnage. I would argue that at least ten thousand were killed in intra-Vietnamese violence in these years and that the death toll is probably much higher. (Print and Power, p. 193)

Two, Moyar does not cite McHale regarding how many of those killings were done by the Viet Minh, and he does not claim that the Viet Minh committed all the killings (Triumph Forsaken, p. 425). He says the Viet Minh perpetrated more of them than the other groups combined, but he does not say the Communists committed all of them.

Three, on a side note, I can only chuckle at Laderman’s silly point that McHale did not mention the Communists but only the Viet Minh. This is as inane and petty as saying, “Oh, he did not mention organized crime; rather, he talked about the Mafia.” Or, “He did not mention the U.S. Government; rather, he talked about the U.S. Marine Corps.” Moreover, as Laderman surely knew, throughout his book Moyar uses the terms “Communists” and “Viet Minh” interchangeably, as have most other authors who have written on the subject.

20 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

Wow Mike. So you’re now trying to say that these authors don’t understand their own books? If a scholarly reviewer says that Moyar misrepresented a book to push his agenda, and puts Moyar’s claim right next to the cited passage from the book to prove it, plus the actual author of that book says the same thing and is quoted in the review, you’ll still side with Moyar because you can’t fathom that the pro-war revisionist messiah might have twisted his sources to support a bogus narrative? Cause that’s literally what you’re doing. 

There’s a word for that. I think it starts with a D and ends with “enial”. 

"Wow" is right. So this is your response to all the evidence and points presented in my previous three replies? Has it occurred to you that you should read Moyar's book and read the books in question that he is citing, and then compare what he says with what the cited pages say? No, obviously not. You still have not learned your lesson from when you got burned by running with Chapman's vacuous review in the roundtable review. "Denial" indeed.

Let us back up and remember that you started off by making the false claim that even some other revisionists view Moyar as "extreme" and that they say that he sometimes misrepresents his sources. I knew that was hogwash. Thus, when I called your bluff and asked you to name one such revisionist scholar, you could not. Then, you found a scholar who had never written anything about the Vietnam War before but who labeled Moyar's views as "extreme." You failed to mention that she only labeled him "extreme" in reference to two of the areas she was analyzing; you also failed to mention that she said that Moyar is highly qualified. 

You uncritically ran with Chapman's review from the roundtable review, obviously without bothering to read Moyar's response, and then fell silent when I showed that Moyar proved that Chapman's review is not only flawed but petty and unserious, that her errors and false characterizations are so bad that one is led one to wonder if she actually read the book or if she deliberately misrepresented Moyar's arguments. 

Next, you announced that you had found "devastating" reviews of Moyar's book in Triumph Revisited, and you specifically cited Miller's and Zhai's error-riddled reviews as two of those "devastating" reviews (although you could not remember Zhai's name). You did not realize that Miller's and Zhai's reviews are two of the worst, error-packed reviews in the book.

It is apparent that you still have not read the North Vietnamese sources themselves, and that you also have not read any of the scholarly books that support Moyar's position. Nor have you read L.H.T. Nguyen's and Max Hastings' books, which, though not revisionist, support many of Moyar's key arguments. 

Finally, just to give other readers some idea of how Moyar's book has been received among scholars who are not stridently anti-Vietnam War, consider these assessments of Triumph Forsaken:

“a stunning performance”
-– James M. Murphy, The Times Literary Supplement

“one of the most important books ever written on the Vietnam War”
-– Mackubin Thomas Owens, former professor at the Naval War College and the University of Rhode Island, author of Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime and US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain.

“groundbreaking”
-– Evan Thomas and John Barry, Newsweek

“a brilliant analysis”
-– Lewis Sorley, military historian and author of A Better War

“akin to reading Euripides’ tales of self-inflicted woe and missed chances”
-– Victor Davis Hanson, professor of history at Hillsdale College

“a bold, courageous, and brilliant book”
-– Christina Goulter, Asian Affairs

“a landmark contribution”
-– Robert F. Turner, military historian and former professor of history at the University of Virginia, author of Vietnamese Communism: Its Origin and Development and Myths of the Vietnam War: The Pentagon Papers Reconsidered

“Moyar makes so many striking contrarian arguments that one hardly knows where to begin…. This is an important book, a history that serves as a mirror on the present.”
-– Robert H. Scales, Wall Street Journal

“thought provoking, exhaustively researched, highly organized, and above all, outstanding.”
-– Rick Baillergeon, History

“Moyar, who has strong credentials, has an engaging writing style and supports his arguments with dispassionate research, unlike many earlier revisionists’ works… Highly recommended.”
-– Michael O’Donnell, Choice

“Thoroughly researched and richly informative.”
-– George Cohen, Booklist

“The author is an immensely talented academic and writer… Moyar marshals the fruits of his research into a devastating attack on the conventional wisdom about the Vietnam War.”
-– James C. Roberts, founder of the American Veterans Center and an award-winning journalist and author

“[a] definitive examination… It is essential reading for anyone wanting a fresh understanding of one of America’s longest and most misunderstood conflicts.”
–- Charles Melson, chief historian at the Marine Corps Historical Division

“Impressive and scrupulously researched… elevates the arguments of Vietnam War revisionists to a higher, more respected, level.”
-– Karl Helicher, ForeWord Magazine

“the sheer scholarship behind Moyar’s book demands that we take his views seriously.”
-– Ian Horwood, Reviews in History

“Moyar is a fine writer and switches from broad strategic and geopolitical issues to heart-gripping accounts of key military actions…. Triumph Forsaken will go a long way toward vindicating and restoring respect for Vietnam vets and those who supported the war, often at great personal cost.”
-– Robert A. Hall, military historian, Vietnam veteran, and contributing author for the journal Leatherneck

“will prove to be the indispensable history of the Vietnam War.”
-– Scott W. Johnson, Claremont Institute Fellow

“throws down a mighty challenge to orthodox historians”
-– Paul Beston, The American Spectator

“The book is meticulously documented; it draws on the substantial U.S. documentary record of the war, bringing fresh perspectives to familiar evidence. Moyar augments and supports his analysis with extensive use of North Vietnamese archival material, most of which was unavailable to the orthodox historians of the 1970s and ’80s. In sum, Triumph Forsaken is an important book.”
-– James S. Robbins, historian, author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive

“Extensively researched from communist as well as Western sources. . . . gripping.”
-– John M. Taylor, historian, author of Garfield of Ohio: The Available Man

“This is revisionist history at its best.”
-– Christian Nelson, VietNow

“Moyar is refreshingly frank in his appraisals.”
-– Curtis Hooper O’Sullivan, Air Power History

“I know of no scholar more dedicated to bringing a thorough and accurate portrayal of America’s involvement in Vietnam than Mark Moyar. Everyone who is interested in a full picture of that of-tmisunderstood war should be grateful for his effort.”
-– Senator James Webb, Marine combat veteran, author of Fields of Fire and Born Fighting

“Mark Moyar tells how and why the United States did not win its first war in Vietnam, 1954–1965. Triumph Forsaken replaces its predecessors because it shows how the counterinsurgency campaign might have been won at acceptable cost, thus avoiding ‘the big war’ that followed.”
-– Allan R. Millett, Director, Eisenhower Center for American Studies, University of New Orleans

“Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true communist, and that his victory was inevitable. That Ngo Dinh Diem was an unpopular and repressive reactionary. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘domino theory’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. Mark Moyar, a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. It is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.”
-– Max Boot, author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power and The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

“Mark Moyar provides detailed accounts of Saigon politics and of actual battles that are unmatched in any other study. He gives particular emphasis to southern Vietnamese views and experiences, and he encourages us to think about the war in fresh ways.”
-– K.W. Taylor, professor of history at Cornell University

“Triumph Forsaken is a remarkable book. Moyar’s work is the most powerful challenge to the orthodox interpretation of the origins of America’s war in Vietnam. In taking a fresh look at the primary sources, as well as exploiting new materials from the American and communist archives, Moyar has constructed an alternative explanation for the roots of the American commitment. Moyar’s book compels historians to reopen the debate about the meaning of the Vietnam War.”
-– Thomas Alan Schwartz, professor of history at Vanderbilt University

“Such is the quality of this book and the rewriting of history it effects that you will not only see the Vietnam War in a different light but understand current events in Iraq more clearly. That’s quite an accomplishment and makes this the best book you’re likely to read for some time. Grade: A+”
-– BrothersJudd.com

“One of the most important books of the last several years. This book is a must for anyone interested in either the Vietnam War, or in American security policy in general.”
-– George Mellinger, Old War Dogs

“Mark Moyar has joined the company of a select group of serious war scholars, including Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, Colonel Harry Summers, and Colonel H. R. McMaster, who have provided fact- and logic-based analyses of the Vietnam War.”
-– Thomas Snodgrass, The Conservative Voice

“[Moyar] goes to great lengths to stress Uncle Ho’s communist ties and ideals, and he turns the father of his country idea on its ear, making a case that South Vietnamese Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, not Ho, was the George Washington of Vietnam…. His fiercely argued book covering the early years of American involvement in the war is a salvo against what he calls the ‘orthodox school’ of Vietnam war historians…. Moyar marshals a good deal of evidence to make his points.”
–- Marc Leepson, historian and Vietnam War veteran, author of four books on military history

4 hours ago, Tommy Tomlinson said:

Fairly straightforward question, in utter ignorance from someone who knows nothing about firearms.

Could the mechanical part of a rifle like the one found in the TSBD be interchangeable with a different or similar woodstock without anyone noticing? Or are the woodstocks very specifically machined to each mechanism?

My kid came home from school yesterday and told me his History Teacher had been teaching them about the Kennedy Assassination So we had a chat... and in an "Out of the mouths of babes..." moment when we were discussing the rifle, along with me showing him the backyard photos alongside CE139 and the different strap arrangements, he asked me this question?

Could the mechanism from Oswalds rifle (the one bearing the alleged palm print) have been swapped out and put in a woodstock with an inset strap?

I said that I had absolutely no idea, that the thought had never occured to me, and that I would ask some American folks that I know, who probably know the answer to that...

The palmprint was allegedly found on the bottom side of the rifle's barrel, which was only accessible if the wooden stock was removed. IOW, Oswald could not have handled that part of the barrel unless he had first removed the wooden stock.

Also, Lt. J. C. Day, who allegedly found the palmprint, said the print was several "weeks or months" old. 

To answer your question in a general way, yes, most rifle parts can be swapped, IF the rifles are the same make and model. When I was in the Army, we used to take parts from one M-16 rifle and use them for a different M-16 rifle when necessary.

With Savage rifles, you can even swap bolt heads because they are intended to be interchangeable. However, with some types of rifles, you cannot swap bolts without having the bolts fitted and headspaced to the action and barrel, and you must pin the recoil lug.

4 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

 

No Mike, I did read Moyar’s replies. Those reviews are indeed devastating, and I think any objective reader not already wedded to Moyar’s position would agree. 

If you think those reviews are "devastating," then I am left to wonder if you really did read Moyar's responses to them, because he proves that they make one erroneous claim and straw-man assumption after another. Miller's and Zhai's reviews are especially pathetic. Are you going to address the evidence I have presented regarding some of the errors in their reviews? 

Also, you are once again misrepresenting what I said about the North Vietnamese sources. I never once said that Laderman and Miller’s reviews proved that Moyar had misrepresented North Vietnamese sources.

Humm, you are drawing a very fine-line distinction between misrepresenting and exaggerating/misusing. How ever you want to spin your attack now, anyone who reads your previous replies will see that, at the very least, you clearly implied that the North Vietnamese sources do not say everything that Moyar says they say. 

I will not harp on the fact that in this thread you have made a number of demonstrably false claims about Moyar's scholarship and about how he is viewed by other scholars. 

The conclusive examples of Moyar egregiously misrepresenting his citations in those reviews are from other types of source material. Laderman even used quotes from the authors of books Moyar cited that describe how Moyar misrepresented and cherry-picked their work to push his arguments. 

But if you would bother to actually read those authors' books, you would see that Moyar does not misrepresent them to push his arguments. 

What I said about the North Vietnamese sources is that not one scholarly reviewer in Triumph Revisited agreed with Moyar’s massive and unwarranted leap from military progress in ‘62-63 over previous years to decisive progress that could have won the entire war, including the military history review which was otherwise very positive.

And you are telling me that you read Moyar's responses to the negative reviews??? Did you only read every third line or something??? Just the evidence presented in the segments that I have quoted from Moyar's responses shows that Moyar is not making a "massive and unwarranted leap." 

And, needless to say, you obviously still have not read any of the books written by other scholars who make the same argument that Moyar makes about the winnability of the war. I listed several such books in a previous reply, several of which were written by senior military officers who actually served in Vietnam (as opposed to liberal historians who have never spent a day in the military and have no formal training in military tactics, intelligence, logistics, and strategy).

"Decisive progress that could have won the entire war"? FYI, Moyar never says that we nearly had the war won in 1963. No one has ever said that. Moyar does, however, say that the war was going well in 1963, contrary to the false portrayal that liberals have been pushing for decades, and the North Vietnamese sources indisputably verify that the war was going well for us before Diem was murdered.

But, rather than admit this, Moyar's critics pretend that Moyar claims the war was nearly won in 1963 and then accuse him of going beyond what the North Vietnamese sources say.

It is telling that some liberal scholars, faced with the evidence in Moyar's book, now admit that we were making substantial progress until Diem was killed, which is the exact opposite of what liberals had been saying until Moyar's Triumph Forsaken was published. It is also the exact opposite of what JFK was being told by Hilsman, Forrestal, Mendenhall, Ball, and Harriman.

Liberal scholars dread any evidence that we made steady progress in our war effort and that the war was entirely winnable. This is one reason that the North Vietnamese sources sent such shockwaves through liberal academia. It is also the reason that liberal scholars have yet to provide a comprehensive response to all the evidence on this point contained in the North Vietnamese sources. 

Triumph Revisited only deals with the war through mid-1965, since it is reviewing Triumph Forsaken. But the North Vietnamese sources also have plenty to say about progress in the American war effort in the years following 1965, and Moyar's new book, Triumph Regained, presents that evidence, as do the books authored by a number of other scholars (Veith, Sorley, Turner, Kort, Hunt, Tuong Vu, L.H.T. Nguyen, N. Nguyen, N.M. Vo, etc., etc.).

12 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

 

Stone did not say what you are saying he said. And Oliver always insisted that the whole thing about Lansdale was an example of someone who could have been the guy who laid out the plot Mike.

Let's get real. It was reckless and irresponsible to use Lansdale as an "example" of someone who could have "laid out the plot." Furthermore, the movie clearly goes further than just citing Lansdale as a hypothetical example.

And there was no mythical plan, it was a real plan to leave Vietnam.  Its in black and white now with the May 1963 Sec Def meeting and the October 1963 tapes of the White House conferences where JFK and McNamara rammed the plan through.

You are once again using verbiage that is misleading and comparing apples to poison. There was no plan for an unconditional total disengagement from South Vietnam after the election, contrary to what you have been claiming for years. 

There was a plan for a conditional, gradual withdrawal, and that plan called for continued aid to South Vietnam after the withdrawal, as well as for leaving behind some support troops to facilitate the provision of aid. Even James K. Galbraith has admitted this, as I have personally documented for you in previous exchanges.

Fletcher Prouty brought that to Oliver Stone.  Since he had written a long, finely wrought article several years before that on the subject. That article, which Len Osanic has on his site, was essentially Newman's first book in micro.

And Prouty was wrong. I again repeat the fact that even extremely liberal, stridently anti-Vietnam War historians reject your claim that JFK planned on abandoning South Vietnam after the election. The White House tapes alone refute this notion, as Selverstone has documented. 

Now as Tom Gram has shown in his exposes of Moyar's  phony book, and I have shown with my review of Selverstone, any attempt to amend this is ridiculous.  

Nonsense. Tom Gram has not "exposed" Moyar's "phony book." Go read our exchanges in the Top 5 Books on JFK & Vietnam thread, which is the thread where you think he has done this. Tom Gram, who is clearly a novice on the Vietnam War, ran with error-filled negative reviews of Moyar's book without bothering to read Moyar's responses to those reviews. I point out just some of the many erroneous claims made in those negative reviews in the Top 5 Books thread. I also quote sizable segments from Moyar's responses to those negative reviews in which he refutes one false claim after another found in them. 

As for your review of Selverstone's book, as I have noted in replies in this forum, you simply ignore most of the evidence that Selverstone presents, especially regarding the White House tapes whereon we hear JFK repeatedly express his desire to keep South Vietnam free and never so much as hints about any intention to abandon the cause after the election.

Taylor, Bundy and McNamara are all on the record as saying that Kennedy was never going into Vietnam. And Taylor said that it was Kennedy who stopped that attempt dead in its tracks.  Mike, why you insist on denying this . . . escapes me:

I have answered this silly argument at least five times in this forum, but you just keep ignoring my counter arguments. Once again: 

One, JFK increased our military presence in South Vietnam from a few hundred troops when he took office to some 16,000 by November 1963. 

Two, JFK never confronted the kind of situation that LBJ confronted in 1964-1965, because the Hanoi regime vastly escalated their war effort after Diem's death. Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan began sending vastly larger amounts of weapons and equipment and vastly larger numbers of troops into South Vietnam than they had ever sent before Diem's removal, so Kennedy was never faced with having to deal with such a massive escalation. But you keep ignoring this crucial difference in the situations that JFK and LBJ faced, and then you proclaim that you are certain that JFK never would have escalated the way LBJ did because, gee, he did not do this before he died.

Three, in his April 1964 oral interview, Bobby himself flatly rejected the idea that JKF was considering withdrawing from South Vietnam. Bobby even said that JFK may have sent combat troops (i.e., regular infantry troops) to South Vietnam if it became necessary.   

when it ended up in a colossal disaster--in Laos and Cambodia also . . . 5.8 million deaths.

Your far-left extremism is showing again. So I take it you blame America for those 5.8 million deaths and not the Communist aggressors? And there was only a disaster when your anti-war buddies in Congress slashed aid to South Vietnam soon after the Paris Peace Accords.

And I hate to mention this, but I think it bears repeating that you are wholly unqualified to be making claims about the Vietnam War. People can read our exchanges on the war in other threads (such as the Top 5 Books thread) and see how many times you have made embarrassing, inexcusably erroneous claims about the war, how many times you have cited fringe, shoddy sources, and how many times you have proved that your research on the war has been extremely limited and one sided.

Maybe you want to join the Max Boot club?  The guy who never saw a war he did not like.

That is an egregious distortion of Max Boot's views. If you have read Boot's book The Road Not Taken, I cannot fathom how you could so brazenly misrepresent his views.

And let me add, Fletcher did not just do this, he also brought in the Secret Service angle.

Huh? Several authors had discussed the Secret Service angle before Prouty came along. And, in his ARRB interview, he back-peddled all over the place about his alleged role in presidential protection.

But beyond that, Fletcher was in a good documentary on the KIng case, and secondly, he was one of the first people to say that Watergate was not what it appeared to be. Yeah, there is a real cover up artist for you. Huh?

Uh-huh. "Fletcher" also spoke at an IHR Holocaust-denial conference and at a Liberty Lobby convention where he co-chaired a panel with David Duke's running mate, Bo Gritz, after blaming Israel for high oil prices in his convention speech. "Fletcher" also wrote a glowing letter to the editor of the IHR's journal praising the IHR's primary goals (which were and still are denying the Holocaust and bashing Israel). "Fletcher" also said he was "no authority in that area" when he was asked about his good buddy Willis Carto's Holocaust denialism. "Fletcher" also expressed concern about what would happen if a Jewish sergeant were manning a warfare-system computer during military operations (just imagine for a second if he had said "African-American sergeant" instead of Jewish sergeant). "Fletcher" also smeared critics of Ron Hubband and his Scientology fraud and proved he had no clue how to read military service records. "Fletcher" also appeared on Liberty Lobby's extremist radio program 10 times in four years. "Fletcher" also had the IHR republish one of his book and praised Marcellus and Carto for their "vision" and "courage" in agreeing to republish his nutcase book. "Fletcher" also said he wouldn't be surprised if the Secret Team killed Princess Diana, and he took seriously the whacky theory that Churchill had FDR poisoned. 

8 hours ago, Robert Montenegro said:

Yes, once again, I acknowledge, having absorbed every (no exaggeration) bit of media I could find on COL. Prouty, and yes he did some brilliant work—I would not be here doing this research if I didn't start looking at COL. Prouty's work (amongst hundreds of other researcher's & whistleblower's work)—bless you Colonel. 

However, that is not the purpose of this post.

Nor is continuing a pro-COL. Prouty death rant accomplishing anything other than proving we cannot enter into a civilized debate without hitting am impregnable psychic force-field made up of provocateurs like Griffith or "...COL. Prouty is a saint..." echo-chambering from yourself, Mr. DiEugenio (holy-cow, I love you and your work, but this is so painfully obvious).

Your posts border on being schizophrenic and are increasingly diving off the deep end. After pretending to acknowledge that Prouty was a crackpot and a fraud, now you say he did "brilliant work." No, he did not. He made one bogus claim after another, including a number of downright nutty claims. 

FYI, there are several liberal JFK conspiracy theorists, as well as several ultra-liberal anti-fascist activists, who recognize that Prouty was a flake and a fraud. 

6 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Keep it coming Tom, its excellent.

Evidently Mike was so eager to swallow this that he did no cross checking.

Just SMH. Uh, did you not read my responses to Tom's replies? Tom is the one who failed to do any cross checking. Tom obviously did not read any of Moyar's responses in Triumph Revisited before he posted the quotes from Miller, Stueck, Zhai, Laderman, etc.  As he did with the roundtable review, Tom ran with his favorite negative reviews in Triumph Revisited without bothering to read Moyar's responses to them. What is it that you and he cannot seem to understand about the basic need to read both sides before commenting?

The reviews by Miller, Zhai, Chapman, and Stueck are the worst in the book, with Laderman's not far behind. Miller's and Zhai's reviews, in particular, are loaded with embarrassingly erroneous claims and misrepresentations. 

You see, one advantage that I had over Tom is that I had already read Triumph Revisited. Thus, I knew Tom was jumping to conclusions and had not read Moyar's responses when he called Miller's and Laderman's false and misleading arguments "devastating," and especially when he claimed that Miller and Laderman proved that Moyar has misrepresented the North Vietnamese sources. 

2 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Paul:

No one is ignorant of this I think.

In fact, in my first book I talked about it a lot.  I quoted from Simpson.

But to accuse Prouty of what they are accusing him of, I mean its kind of offensive. To a guy who made some really valuable contributions to the case, and to Stone's milestone film.

Especially when there is a benign explanation.  Which Jeff has stated.  And Fletcher has talked about.

Prouty had no credible, believable benign explanation for the actions and statements that I have documented (much of the documentation coming from his own mouth). His "contributions" to Stone's milestone film ruined the film's credibility with virtually every member of the academic community and with most journalists. The film's inclusion of Prouty's obscene claims about Lansdale as a plotter and about the mythical plan to abandon South Vietnam after the election provided low-hanging fruit for critics to destroy.

Prouty made no valuable contributions to the JFK case, and in his ARRB interview, when he had the chance to affirm and defend his case under oath, he back-peddled on virtually every major claim he had been making up to that point. 

What is the "benign explanation" for Prouty's writing a glowing letter to the editor of the Holocaust-denying IHR journal and praising the IHR's primary goals, which were and are to deny the Holocaust and bash the state of Israel? What is the "benign explanation" for his shameful attacks on the principled critics of Ron Hubbard and Scientology? What is the "benign explanation" for Prouty's appearing on Liberty Lobby's nutcase radio show 10 times in four years? What is the "benign explanation" for Prouty's speaking at an IHR conference and at a Liberty Lobby convention and publicly praising Carto and Marcellus? And on and on we could go. 

3 hours ago, Joseph Backes said:

WASHINGTON — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drew strong criticism from several members of his own family on Monday for remarks he made suggesting COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted.”

The pushback began over the weekend, when video surfaced of him claiming that the COVID virus is “ethnically targeted” to attack “certain races disproportionately” — namely, white and Black people — while “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Ashkenazi Jews are Jewish people of specifically northern and eastern European descent.

The remarks, captured by the New York Post at a private event, contained multiple false claims and reference common antisemitic tropes about global conspiracies that benefit Jewish people. They sparked quick condemnation from prominent Jewish groups and others.

That outpouring of criticism included two of Kennedy’s siblings. Kennedy’s sister Kerry Kennedy, distanced her brother from the nonprofit named for their father, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation.

“I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” Kerry Kennedy said in a statement as president of the organization. “His statements do not represent what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stand for, with our 50 [plus]-year track record of protecting rights and standing against racism and all forms of discrimination.”

Another of their siblings, Joseph Kennedy II, also criticized the remarks. He is a former congressman and chair of Citizens Energy.

“Bobby’s comments are morally and factually wrong,” he said in a statement provided to The Globe. “They play on antisemitic myths and stoke mistrust of the Chinese. His remarks in no way reflect the words and actions of our father, Robert F. Kennedy.”

Former Massachusetts Representative Joseph Kennedy III also weighed in.

“My uncle’s comments were hurtful and wrong. I unequivocally condemn what he said,” he tweeted from a personal account. Kennedy III is also serving as President Biden’s envoy to Northern Ireland.

It is not the first time his family has distanced themselves from Kennedy’s conspiracy-laden and often-debunked views, which include misleading and false statements about vaccines, that anti-depressants are linked to school shootings, and that the CIA is responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.

Last year, multiple family members, including his own wife, actress Cheryl Hines, spoke out against him after he implied that people who oppose the COVID-19 vaccine are being persecuted more severely than Anne Frank, who died in a Nazi concentration camp. Kerry Kennedy also did so in April, when his campaign launched.

Kennedy himself tweeted numerous defenses of his comments, including that they were intended to be off the record, misconstrued, and referencing a scientific paper that analyzed theoretical genetic susceptibilities to COVID.

“This cynical maneuver is consistent with the mainstream media playbook to discredit me as a crank — and by association, to discredit revelations of genuine corruption and collusion,” Kennedy said.

Pandemic data has shown significant racial disparities in infection and death rates, primarily worse for Black, Hispanic and Native American groups—disparities that are largely attributed to socio-economic factors and gaps.

Debate remains about COVID’s specific origin, with many scientists believing it jumped from animals to humans, but some assessments pointing to an accident in a virology lab. Still, virtually all who studied it have concluded the virus is not engineered.

I am skeptical of RFK Jr.'s comments, at least as they have been quoted, but I will say this: These family members and others who are attacking him over those comments had nothing negative to say about the senseless, unnecessary, and destructive lockdowns that destroyed tens of thousands of small businesses, ruined millions of people's lives, and arguably did more harm than good in preventing the spread of COVID-19. 

Here are my final segments from Moyar’s responses in Triumph Revisited. One of the segments deals with the bogus claim that Moyar misrepresented the content of his sources and embellished the record:

          In Miller’s estimation, Diem’s land reform was “desultory.” Before the start of Diem’s land reform in 1956, nearly 80 percent of the peasants in the highly populous Mekong Delta owned no land. By 1960, only 44 percent of Delta peasants remained landless.23 How Miller considers this achievement unimpressive is difficult to fathom. Would we consider it unimpressive if the number of Americans below the poverty line in a large and populous area went from 80 percent to 44 percent in four years? (p. 221).

          Miller then claims that I overlooked Diem’s relocation of peasants to the highlands, but in fact I discuss how and why Diem relocated these peasants, as well as their subsequent influence on the war in the highlands (72, 392). (p. 221)

Comment: One wonders if Miller actually read Moyar’s book or deliberately misrepresented it. 

          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.

          In Miller’s opinion, I invoke “an outdated and condescending understanding of the peasants.” He offers no explanation to back up this accusation, although presumably he takes exception to some of the same interpretations as previous contributors. His next bold denunciation, that I possess a “superficial understanding of Vietnamese political history and political culture,” also goes unsubstantiated. (p. 222)

          William Stueck calls into question my assertion that the Viet Minh were in serious trouble at the time of Dien Bien Phu, and argues that unless the communist forces at Dien Bien Phu had been completely annihilated, the communists would have occupied a favorable military position across Indochina after the battle. He asserts that my argument is based primarily on Khrushchev’s memoirs and Janos Radvanyi’s book. But the two endnotes supporting my interpretation (426, notes 63 and 64) cite six different sources. One of the sources is a book by Ilya Gaiduk, for whom Stueck expresses respect elsewhere. Two of the other sources, written by North Vietnamese leader Le Duan and North Vietnamese witness Bui Tin, show that the Viet Minh had sent most of their mobile armed forces to Dien Bien Phu, refuting the view that the Viet Minh had great numbers of troops elsewhere that would have pressed on to victory had the Dien Bien Phu attack failed. Just after the completion of Triumph Forsaken, additional communist sources emerged that showed deep trouble on the communist side in early 1954.

          The early stages of Dien Bien Phu, contends Stueck, were very favorable for the Viet Minh, which he says casts doubt on Khrushchev’s claim that the Viet Minh were in dire straits during the battle. Owing to space constraints, I did not get into the details of this battle in my book, but communist sources, as well as some Western accounts, show that the Viet Minh did suffer major reverses in March 1954. A decade ago, Pierre Asselin revealed that the Viet Minh suffered a whopping 9,000 casualties in the first four days at Dien Bien Phu. Asselin reported that the staggering losses compelled the Viet Minh to turn away from the use of human wave tactics. (p. 63)

Comment: In his recent book The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton University Press, 2022), Dr. Christopher Goscha presents evidence that supports Moyar’s portrayal of the state of the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. For example, Goscha notes that the French recapture of the position named Eliane on April 11 caused a drop in Viet Minh morale, and in a few weeks the situation among the Viet Minh was so bad that Giap ceased operations for three days to conduct mandatory propaganda sessions among the troops:

          Apparently, the French (re)capture of the position they called Eliane on 11 April sapped confidence along parts of the front line. On 29 April, as the third attack got underway, Giap sent strict orders to his political officers in which he criticized widespread manifestations of “rightist, negative thinking” among the troops, cadres, and officer corps. . . .

          In sharp language designed to pull his cadre and officers together and take the fortress in one last attack, Giap singled out for severe criticism and punishment manifestations of this “rightist deviationism.” This was communist doublespeak for troubling cases of insubordination, cowardice, fear of death and injury, exhaustion, and lack of morale:

          “Upon encountering the enemy, they refused to shoot. They had weapons but did not want to use them to destroy the enemy.” This, he told his divisional commanders on 29 April, had happened in “our army.” To fix these problems, the party center organized three days of intensive study sessions, propaganda drives, and rectification campaigns to raise morale, assert party control, and, in so doing, return as many men to their combat positions as possible. Criticism, emulation, and rectification sessions were mandatory for soldiers and cadres.

          Looking through their field binoculars, French officers could see commissars unleashing this on their own troops in the distance—literally, on the battlefield. . . .

          It is hard to convey how desperate the situation truly was on the food front. The People’s Army had already depleted rice reserves in the northwest during its operations in the highlands in 1952–3, triggering famine in large parts of the Tai country where Dien Bien Phu was nestled. Many areas in the northwest were still experiencing famine. . . .

          Despite attempts to hammer them into line through emulation campaigns and heavy doses of propaganda, the communists had to accept the desertion of several civilian teams. Even an official history had to admit that these people were simply terrified of dying in a hail of fire. (The Road to Dien Bien Phu, pp. 562-563, 567-569)

Goscha’s observations about Viet Minh losses and the aftermath of the battle are also worth quoting:

          Glorious though the victory was, Dien Bien Phu came at a great cost for the Vietnamese. The official number of Vietnamese military casualties for the battle is 13,930, with 4,020 of that number listed as killed or missing in action. But French military intelligence estimated that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam lost around 20,000 combatants. The latter number is closer to the truth, in my view. On related fronts where fighting occurred, the casualties on the Vietnamese side totaled 15,004, including 5,833 dead. None of these statistics count the several thousand porters killed or missing in action. During the Dien Bien Phu campaign (November 1953–May 1954), one can safely assume that the DRV lost 25,000 souls in all, men and women, civilians and combatants, in the area stretching from the Chinese border to Zone V [where Dien Bien Phu was located].

          Meanwhile, on another, connected battlefront, Ho Chi Minh had already marched his cadres into villages to launch class warfare on their fellow Vietnamese. Several thousand would die at the party’s own hands by the time this horrifying extension of the war on the civilian front finally ended. This, once again, was Vietnamese War Communism writ large. This was its human cost. This, too, was Dien Bien Phu. (The Road to Dien Bien Phu, pp. 569-570).

On 7/16/2023 at 2:51 AM, Chris Bristow said:

I could only guess as to why they don't show up in Willis 5.  Maybe they reflect enough light to fade into the blotchy grey scale pattern of the fence behind them. Can't say how much the head might be turned towards the light or how much is in shadow.

BDM seems strangely dark but what might be his face is a fairly light shade of grey that is not too far off the background.

It is possible the camera just did not pick them up.

The HSCA photographic experts detected in the Willis photos a human figure behind the knoll with a straight-line object apparently in his hands. That is as far as they would go.

14 hours ago, Toby Kearns said:

Anyone catch this admission from Desantis in an interview from a couple of days ago? Scroll to 23:00 minutes and you'll hear him state it pretty clearly.

Well, most of us, myself included, felt confident that Obama would release all the JFK files, but he did not. I was even more confident that Trump would release all the files, given his friendship with Roger Stone and other factors, but the FBI and the CIA, most assuredly using invalid claims, persuaded him to err on the side caution and not to honor his promise to release all the files. 

I am certain that De Santis is sincere in promising to release all the files, but you just never know what will happen once a candidate gets in office and intel officials swear up and down to him that national security will be damaged if all the files are released.

3 hours ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

For the love of peace and illumination, enough of the personal attacks, I AM NOT SPINNING ANYTHING ANTI-COL. PROUTY, NOR IS IT A CONSPIRACY THEORY!

I am quoting COL. Prouty directly, on topics that have been ignored by elements of the research community, yes, but I am not going to entertain this monkey-shine any further!

It seems you have an axe to grind, so go grind it somewhere else!

For Pete's sake, I reposted the original post I set up, with the intent of getting back on track and here you are again trying to get me to hold your hand in the bash COL. Prouty crowd, which is not at all what I am doing.

Do you, or any of the other deflective clowns that have commented here, have anything to add about Operation BLOODSTONE, or the fact that COL. Prouty had intimate knowledge surrounding it's development, function, deployment and utilization?!

If not, take a hike!

Christ almighty, you guys call yourself researchers?!

And you, Mr. Griffith, did COL. Prouty pee in your Cheerios, or something?

Quit hijacking this post, you provocateur! 

Sincerely,

The author of the post that nobody will engage in proper decorum with. 

What? Huh? Did you not say that Prouty may have known more about the conspiracy than he ever revealed? Did you not say that he was involved in setting up an operation that may have played a role in the assassination? Did you not say these things? And are you not relying partly on Prouty for this stuff? I quote you:

The following passage, from pages 137 & 138 of Christopher Simpson’s “Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy,” which demonstrate that COL. Prouty, by his own admission, was a driving force behind creation of the United States Army’s “Special Forces” units—and that these same units later morphed into assassination teams.

A network of Nazi commandos and assassins that COL. Prouty says he created himself!  

And the information about this network of Nazi commandos and assassins was provided by interviews given to author Christopher Simpson by COL. Prouty personally.

Whether anyone will agree with me or not, I believe COL. Prouty may have known a helluva lot more than he revealed, and took valuable information concerning the real murderers of President Kennedy to the grave...  

So you will have to forgive me for inferring that you are positing a conspiracy theory that involves Prouty as someone who set up an operation that later morphed and took part in JFK's death and/or as someone who knew more about the plotters than he ever revealed. And are you not relying partly on Prouty for this stuff?

11 hours ago, Lawrence Schnapf said:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/16/us/politics/biden-jfk-assassination-papers.html?utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=gnews&utm_campaign=CDAQuIutsvmEp9SfARjB4rql6tjps7QBKg8IACoHCAowjuuKAzCWrzw&utm_content=rundown&gaa_at=g&gaa_n=AfHvTEvwhzIXfXmkkDgU1UPKZOTm7U9TpQ7MMS2h2GwIzQ3GgOF9wREGRK8R9x3xeDf-Sr795ujaTtUWzmXR8IgoBD0M&gaa_ts=64b49867&gaa_sig=OIlADsHpObD5NFzkyJSOxDFlnWmy7XwrghyZkTP2bbBQIKn-7MNiLIZxMZnspJ1cHlSg9hjuHQq4I0JDQJQDHw%3D%3D

It would really help if you would provide a summary of the article's contents, especially since only subscribers can read the article.

48 minutes ago, Robert Montenegro said:

This is the second time you have stated your myopic viewpoints on COL. Prouty, and believe me, I heard you the first time.

I am attempting to open discourse, surrounding comments that COL. Prouty made that, to the effect, appear to indicate that he had intimate knowledge of the most perverse covert operation of the Clod War, Operation BLOODSTONE, and the structural ramifications that may have had on what occurred in Dallas, 22 November 1963.

I could care less about the weirdos in the Church of Scientology.

However, yeas, I did read his responses to the ARRB, and they were comically deflective, to say the least, which adds even more fuel to the fire surrounding his connections to the far-right in the late 1980's, which calls into question what the mission of the 112th Military Intelligence Group, 4th US Army Operations Group, which according to their mission parameters, was

QUOTE—

"...To contribute to the operations of 4th US Army through the detection of treason, sedition, subversive activity, and disaffection, and the detection, prevention or neutralization of espionage and sabotage within or directed against the 4th US Army and the area of it's jurisdiction..."

—END QUOTE. 

Sure as hell sounds like the 112th MIG was targeting people who had a gripe with the government, both on the treasonous far-right and the disenfranchised left.

I do agree with you wholly with your last point, that fact that I cannot get straight answers to my straight deductions is telling you something—COL. Prouty is a golden-calf that for some reason cannot be touched—even when you quote the man! 

That is a limited hangout.

Yes, I get that you are seeking to implicate Prouty in criminal actions, including the JFK assassination, based on some of his own comments. My point is that Prouty was so erratic and unstable and kooky, that it is risky to accept anything he said, much less to build a conspiracy theory around his statements, even if the theory includes him as one of the culprits (direct or indirect, intentional or unintentional). 

I am glad we agree about Prouty's ARRB interview. We have a few folks who claim that Prouty was "ambushed" by the ARRB. I cannot imagine what transcript of his ARRB interview they are reading. If anything, the ARRB interviewers were too gentle with Prouty and did not press him to explain some of his dubious statements. 

And, yes, I agree with you that for some conspiracy theorists Prouty is a golden calf that must be worshipped, no matter what. 

But, you are spinning an anti-Prouty conspiracy theory based substantially on some of Prouty's statements. I am saying that any such exercise is a waste of time if it is based on Prouty's statements, whether partly or wholly. The guy was a crackpot, a fraud, and possibly a disinformation agent (I'm agnostic on this; I see it only as a possibility).

21 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Robert - that is absolutely incredible research. 
Michael Griffith - it seems to me that both Robert and Leslie are buttressing your oft stated case against Prouty, whose latter day associations with Liberty Lobby etc fit perfectly with Prouty’s early military career. I’m not sure what your intention is here, but if it’s to derail this thread you certainly won’t succeed. If I read between the lines a bit it seems like you are dismissing Robert’s post by saying that anything Prouty said to Christopher Simpson is likely to be untrue. But you cannot argue with Prouty’s well placed career. He was in a perfect position to help establish fascist and Nazi incorporation into the US special forces framework. What say you?

My intention here is to say that we must, must, must stop citing and quoting a downright crackpot and fraud such as Fletcher Prouty. The evidence against Prouty is irrefutable. If a lone-gunman theorist had said and done half the embarrassing, bizarre things that Prouty said and did, everybody here, from all points of view, would agree he/she should be repudiated and never cited or quoted.

But, sadly, we have a few hardcore ultra-liberals here who refuse to admit the truth about Prouty because he is their main source for certain myths that they cherish.

And then we wonder why the vast majority of the academic world dismisses and scorns the case for conspiracy.

I happen to know that a number of academic historians monitor this forum. Can you imagine what they think when they see researchers here citing and praising Prouty, and, even worse, when they see researchers here excusing or lamely denying Prouty's close and prolonged association with anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers, his obscene defense of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, his self-discrediting and back-peddling under friendly and respectful questioning during his ARRB interview, his "Jewish sergeant" remark, his warm praise of the IHR's "primary goals," and his nutty claims about Princess Diana's and FDR's deaths, etc., etc.? 

For some folks here, Prouty's version of the JFK assassination has become their religion, has become the paradigm through which they make sense of world events, and whenever that happens, it becomes very hard for the adherents to be objective and dispassionate about Prouty himself.

The evidence that Prouty was a crackpot who made fraudulent claims is too clear and compelling to deny. Anyone who is aware of that evidence but continues to defend and use Prouty is proving themselves to be too ideologically driven to be objective.