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Everything posted by Michael Griffith
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JFK, Vietnam, and General MacArthur
Michael Griffith replied to Michael Griffith's topic in JFK Assassination Debate
Unfortunately, MacArthur's advice was misguided, badly misguided. Eisenhower had correctly warned JFK, as did the Joint Chiefs, that taking a stand in Laos was critical, absolutely crucial, especially for blocking Communist infiltration into South Vietnam. JFK's failure to prevent the Communists from controlling and using southeastern Laos as their key supply route proved to be disastrous. Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs recognized what the North Vietnamese themselves later acknowledged: without the supply route through southeastern Laos, North Vietnam's war effort would have been severely limited, if not crippled. JFK failed to realize this and agreed to a coalition government in Laos, which enabled the Communists to control the southeastern part of the country. Eisenhower was a much better general than MacArthur. JFK should have listened to Eisenhower. -
JFK, Vietnam, and General MacArthur
Michael Griffith replied to Michael Griffith's topic in JFK Assassination Debate
I should add, however, that MacArthur deserves great credit for condemning the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. MacArthur thought that nuking Japan was inexcusable. He later wrote to former President Herbert Hoover that if Truman had modified the terms of the surrender to specify that the emperor would not be deposed, "the Japanese would have accepted it and gladly I have no doubt." This was a very unpopular view at the time, even though many other senior American military officers agreed with it (including Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral Halsey, and Admiral Nimitz). Because of the truly barbaric conduct of the Japanese army and the horrible suffering that Japanese forces imposed on civilians in several countries, not to mention the Japanese army's cruel mistreatment of our POWs, most Americans had zero sympathy for the Japanese. Most Americans believed that the Japanese deserved merciless retaliation. The vast majority of Americans were in no mood to distinguish between the many moderate Japanese who never wanted war in the first place and the Japanese militarists. -
Yet another worthwhile item in Hastings' book is his acknowledgment of doubt about journalist Peter Arnett's famous alleged quotation of an unidentified U.S. Army major who supposedly said, "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it." Several other journalists repeated this alleged quote but changed "town" to "village" to make it sound even worse. This supposed quote became a favorite line of the anti-war movement. However, even at the time, the authenticity of the quote was strongly challenged, and Hastings acknowledges that the quote is now widely believed to be a fabrication. Arnett claimed that one of the four Army officers he interviewed after the battle at Ben Tre during the Tet Offensive made the alleged statement, although Arnett would never name his source. For starters, Ben Tre was not a town or a village but was a sizable city. Furthermore, and most important, Ben Tre did not even come close to being "destroyed." It suffered some damage during the battle, but the damage was moderate and most of the city remained intact. Thus, no Army officer would have had any reason to say they had to destroy Ben Tre to save it. The Army quickly pointed out these facts at the time, but they were ignored by most journalists. I think one major reason that so many anti-war liberals dislike Hastings' book is that, even though Hastings harshly criticizes the Saigon regime, argues that the war was unwinnable, and says that neither side deserved to win, Hastings tells the truth about the Hanoi regime and makes it clear that the Hanoi regime was the worst of the two. I think another reason is that virtually everyone who reads the book will come away believing that South Vietnam's defeat and North Vietnam's victory were terrible tragedies and that the people of South Vietnam would have been far better off if South Vietnam had remained independent.
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Odd JFKA Reference By Right Wing Radio Pundit?
Michael Griffith replied to Joe Bauer's topic in Political Discussions
Wow, this sounds like extremist rhetoric. We don't need this kind of poison in our politics and discourse. Yes, the prosecution of Trump over the Stormy Daniels payoff seems very selective and smacks of partisan prosecution, but this does not excuse Santilli's poisonous rhetoric. -
Didn't Paul O'Connor say it was a cigar? Anyway, I regard Curtis LeMay as a war criminal for his actions during WWII.
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Many of my fellow conspiracy theorists approvingly cite General MacArthur's opposition to using regular combat troops in South Vietnam, and they praise JFK for citing and relying on MacArthur's view. I find this curious because it has been widely recognized for decades that MacArthur was a disastrously incompetent general, not to mention a shameless publicity hound and a gigantic narcissist. Military historians always include MacArthur in their lists of overrated American military leaders and frequently put him at or near the top of the list. MacArthur did a good job administering the U.S. occupation of Japan and overseeing Japan's emergence as a democratic state after the war. On balance, he did a solid, commendable job as the de facto governor of Japan during his time there, and he deserves great credit for this. However, as a military leader, he repeatedly displayed disastrous incompetence--not just incompetence, but disastrous incompetence. MacArthur inexcusably allowed his bombers and fighters in the Philippines to be caught on the ground and virtually wiped out by the Japanese, even though Pearl Harbor had been attacked some eight hours earlier. MacArthur's refusal to follow orders and his fatally flawed deployment of his forces in the Philippines enabled the Japanese to seize the Philippines and led to the needless deaths of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers, not to mention thousands of Filipino civilians. The Philippines could have been held if MacArthur had not blundered so badly and had not disobeyed orders. Holding the Philippines would have markedly changed the course of the war in the Pacific for the better and would have saved many thousands of lives, arguably hundreds of thousands of lives. MacArthur's inept handling of the defense of Australia led to unnecessarily high casualties among Australian troops and nearly enabled the Japanese to seize the Kokoda Track. To this day, Australian military historians fault MacArthur for his handling of Australia's defense. MacArthur's disastrous miscalculations in the Korean War are well known. He ignored clear and compelling intelligence indicators that Red China had a large force in North Korea and was poised to attack. The resulting Chinese assault cost thousands of American and South Korean troops their lives. What is not widely known among non-historians is that MacArthur's supposedly "brilliant" landing at Inchon in South Korea was poorly conceived and failed to achieve the results that could have been achieved if the landing had been done at Kunsan, which was the landing site favored by the Navy, by General Walker, and by the Joint Chiefs. MacArthur's choice of Inchon was a foolish mistake that avoided disaster only because North Korean president Kim Il Sung committed the astonishing blunder of not reinforcing Inchon even though he was warned by the Chinese that MacArthur was going to land there. If MacArthur had chosen Kunsan as the landing site, he could have captured the key city of Taejon much earlier and, more important, could have trapped the bulk of the North Korean forces that were assaulting the Pusan Perimeter. Instead, large numbers of those forces escaped and lived to fight another day. There are other examples of MacArthur's incompetence as a combat leader, such as his handling of the Bonus Army confrontation before the war, but the above examples should suffice to show that he was not the skilled military leader that his defenders claim he was. https://www.pacificwar.org.au/Philippines/Japanattacks.html https://www.pacificwar.org.au/battaust/MacArthurinAustralia.html https://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/WWII/MacArthursFailures https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3074&context=td https://wou.edu/history/files/2015/08/Lahia-Ellingson.pdf https://www.grunge.com/475875/the-untold-truth-of-general-douglas-macarthur/
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I disagree with much of this assessment. I'm not at all unsure about who killed JFK. I think it is clear that highly placed government figures were behind his death. I think it is beyond dispute that senior elements in the military, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the CIA engineered the cover-up, especially of the medical and photographic evidence. I think we have reached the point where we have enough evidence to convince any rational, objective person that the above statements are true. And I'm not at all sure that the plotters wielded the power and influence they thought they would wield after JFK was gone. Consider: If the plotters were motivated by extreme right-wing views, and surely most of them were, they should have prevented LBJ from choosing Humphrey as his VP. If Cuba and Vietnam were two major motives of the plotters, they surely should have knocked off LBJ after he refused to allow JFK's scheduled December coup against Castro to proceed (even though Bobby asked him to do so), after LBJ made it clear he had no interest in overthrowing Castro, and after LBJ imposed unprecedented, ridiculous, and disastrous restrictions on our war effort in Vietnam, thereby dragging out the war when it could have been won in a matter of months. If racism was a major motive for at least some of the plotters, they surely should have taken out LBJ when it became clear he was serious about pushing through massive civil rights legislation. Etc., etc., etc.
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Oh, I forgot to mention two things. One, Hastings provides an exceptionally detailed look at the extreme level of repression imposed by North Vietnam's government on its own people during the war. His treatment of this subject even rivals that of Lien-Hang Nguyen in her book Hanoi's War. The Hanoi regime was so fanatically controlling and oppressive that even the Soviet advisers were surprised by the pervasive and excessive nature of the regime's totalitarian grip. Soviet advisers wrote home and/or later talked about the extreme degree of control that the Hanoi government exercised over the people. Two, in his analysis of the sorry performance of liberal journalists during the war, Hastings discusses the Hanoi regime's extensive propaganda efforts. He discusses cases when the Hanoi regime fed visiting liberal journalists false stories, including faked pictures, about the effects of American bombing. Those journalists uncritically repeated these stories and many American newspapers published them. Hastings spends some time on Harrison Salisbury's infamous 1966 visit to North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese gave Salisbury bogus statistics lifted straight out of one their propaganda booklets, and Salisbury repeated them virtually verbatim in the New York Times. The North Vietnamese also gave Salisbury a fraudulent photo that appeared to show that American bombs had destroyed a Catholic cathedral. Without making any effort to verify the photo, Salisbury ran with it. The photo was later exposed as a fake when photo reconnaissance and ground observation proved that the cathedral was totally undamaged. Hastings notes that liberal journalists frequently repeated bogus North Vietnamese claims about American bombs hitting the Red River dikes and hitting rural areas that were actually never hit and that never even had bombs land anywhere near them.
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John F. Kennedy, Liberal Democrat
Michael Griffith replied to Ron Bulman's topic in JFK Assassination Debate
If you truly admire and respect JFK, you should not misrepresent his beliefs. JFK made the comment you quoted while accepting the nomination of the Liberal Party of New York state, and notice how he qualified the definition of "liberal." Moreover, on other occasions, JFK made it very clear that he was not really a liberal. Even Chris Matthews, an ardent JFK admirer, conceded the point in his biography, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero. “I am not a liberal at all,” Kennedy once told the Saturday Evening Post. “I’m not comfortable with those people.” Journalist and JFK insider Ben Bradlee confirmed it: “He hated the liberals.” The New New Left Is No New Frontier and JFK Was No Liberal (thedailybeast.com) If you transported Nancy Pelosi-AOC-Liz Warren-Bernie Sanders liberals back in time to 1962, they would be fiercely critical of many of JFK's policies. If JFK were alive today, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party would consider him another Joe Manchin or worse. -
The Z-Frame that Disproves the SBT
Michael Griffith replied to Gil Jesus's topic in JFK Assassination Debate
Great post. There are so many Zapruder frames that scream against the SBT. For me, Z190-207 and Z226-232 are the most compelling refutations of the SBT because they clearly show JFK reacting to two bullet strikes, the first being when he freezes his waving motion and begins to bring his hands toward his throat (190-207) and then when he is visibly jolted forward starting in Z226. I just can't fathom how any rational person can believe in the SBT. -
If you ever read just one more book on the Vietnam War, or if you're ever willing to read something other than far-left books on the war, I recommend that you read renowned British historian Max Hastings' widely acclaimed 2018 book Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. Center-left in his politics and usually voting for Labor Party (liberal) candidates in British elections, Hastings was a proud anti-war liberal journalist during the Vietnam War. But Hastings, unlike most other liberal critics of the war, was sobered by the bloody reign of terror that the North Vietnamese imposed after they conquered South Vietnam. The large-scale slaughter and oppression carried out by the Communists profoundly influenced Hastings and led him to reconsider his outlook on the war. No one would accuse him of being supportive of the war, but his book contains much information that sheds important light on the war effort. Hastings' book is so balanced and objective that at times it seems like two very different people wrote it. Revealingly, the book has come under strong criticism from both liberal and conservative reviewers. Some liberals have condemned the book as being too sympathetic toward the U.S. war effort and too critical of the Hanoi regime, while some conservatives have attacked the book for supposedly repeating claims made by the anti-war movement in the '60s and '70s and for understating the U.S. military's achievements and its chances of winning the war. If you're a liberal who is critical of the war, you will find much in the book that you like. But, you will also find much that will challenge your view of the war, such as the following: -- Hastings rejects the liberal myths about the Geneva Accords and documents that the North Vietnamese were the first ones to violate the accords and that they violated them egregiously. He also dismisses the myth that the U.S. and South Vietnam violated the Geneva Accords when South Vietnam refused to hold elections in 1956. -- Hastings takes liberal journalists to task for ignoring or minimizing Viet Cong atrocities and the Hanoi regime's brutality and oppression over its own people. He fully acknowledges the sins of the Saigon regime and gives them no pass for anything, but he admits that the Hanoi regime was worse. -- Hastings debunks the liberal myth that Ho Chi Minh was merely a nationalist who used communism as a vehicle to achieve his nationalistic aims. Hastings discusses much of the evidence that Ho Chi Minh was a hardcore Stalinist and Maoist who viewed Vietnamese nationalism as being secondary to Stalinism and Maoism. -- Hastings notes that the Vietminh were brutal and that the majority of Vietnamese who dealt with the Vietminh soon grew to dislike them. He also aknowledges that the Vietminh seized power by killing or imprisoning most non-communist nationalist leaders. -- Hastings admits that the American media badly misreported the Tet Offensive, that the offensive was actually a crushing, devastating defeat for North Vietnam that came with "catastrophis losses," and that it virtually wiped out the Viet Cong as an effective force. He also admits that the North Vietnamese horrendously miscalculated when they assumed that most South Vietnamese would rebel against the Saigon regime soon after the offensive began. -- Hastings is quite critical of his former fellow anti-war activists. He accuses them of ignoring North Vietnamese and Viet Cong brutality and of holding the Saigon regime to a draconian standard while whitewashing the Hanoi regime's more numerous sins. -- Hastings acknowledges that Hanoi's leaders were among the most ruthless and cruel in history in their willingness to accept staggering troop losses. -- Hastings does not make nearly as much use of the newly available North Vietnamese sources as do authors such as Moyar, Veith, Sorley, and Nguyen, but he does note a few cases where these sources disprove certain common liberal claims about the war. -- Perhaps the most powerful chapter in the book is Hastings' chapter on the reign of terror that the North Vietnamese imposed on South Vietnam. To my surprise, he includes information on the rape of South Vietnam that I had not seen before. Until I read Hastings' book, I never realized just how massively the North Vietnamese looted South Vietnam. Nor did I know, until I read Hastings' book, that the Communists even arrested the Buddhist monk Tri Quang, who had so vocally attacked the Saigon regime. Why was he arrested? Answer: He was religious and didn't like communism. Hastings notes that untold thousands of South Vietnamese remained imprisoned in brutal concentration camps for over 10 years, and that some of them were not released until the 1990s. He notes that thousands died of starvation in the camps, and that "starvation was employed as a psychological weapon." Typically, prisoners were worked for 10-12 hours per day. Hastings points out that a "conservative estimate" of the death rate in the camps is 5 percent. Hastings observes that the North Vietnamese people suffered terribly under Communist rule after the war. He observes that in 1988, thousands of people in the north died of starvation because of Communist mismanagement of the annual crops and the food supply. Finally, Hastings notes that as of the time of the writing of his book, Vietnam's Communist leaders "have shown no inclination either to indulge personal freedom or to sacrifice a jot of the power of the Party." He acknowledges that the regime has introduced some pro-market economic reforms, but he also notes that basic rights are still repressed.
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It is sad to see Newman relying on a hack like Sam Adams, who issued numerous faulty analyses during the war. I am baffled that Newman seems unaware of the crucial information revealed in newly available North Vietnamese sources. This information has been available for at least 17 years, since Dr. Mark Moyar's 2006 book Triumph Forsaken and since Dr. Lien-Hang Nguyen's 2012 book Hanoi's War, both of which make extensive use of the newly available North Vietnamese material. It is also sad to see Newman taking CBS's side in the Westmoreland v. CBS lawsuit. Dr. Moyar discusses Adams and the Westmoreland lawsuit at length in his new book Triumph Regained (pp. 354-360), which, like his first book. Moyar does something that Newman strangely fails to do: he includes the new information from North Vietnamese sources that relates to the issue of VC and NVA strength in South Vietnam. It's important to note that the North Vietnamese disclosures were admissions against interest, i.e., they reflected negatively on the North Vietnamese war effort, which is why this information was kept sealed/private for so long. Dr. Moyar's treatment of this issue is the most up-to-date and comprehensive, but the following online article by Donald Shaw is a good summary of the other side of the story: Westmoreland vs. CBS - Donald P. Shaw, Commentary Magazine Another good article is John Hart's "The Statistics Trap in Vietnam," Washington Post (Op-Ed), 1/6/1985, p. C-7. Hart, the CIA station chief in Saigon in 1967, calls out Adams for his exaggerations and omissions.
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Believe it or not, I actually belonged to the JBS for a number of years, starting when I was 18. By the time I decided that the JBS was no longer for me, I had belonged to three JBS chapters in three states and had attended several large JBS conferences. Virtually everyone I met in the society was very pro-Israeli. I think I only encountered two members who I suspected of being anti-Semitic. In the three chapters that I was in, you could get your membership revoked in a hurry for expressing anti-Semitic ideas, since most members were pro-Israeli and since the JBS leadership voiced opposition to anti-Semitism. As a previous post noted, the California Senate investigated this issue and found “no evidence of anti-Semitism on the part of anyone connected with the John Birch Society in California, and much evidence to the effect that it opposes racism in all forms.” However, the JBS did, and I suspect still does, float some far-fetched conspiracy theories, which was one reason that I left the group. Another reason I left was the group's all-or-nothing attitude. Politicians who did not agree with at least 90% of the society's positions were viewed with suspicion. Some JBS members believed that Goldwater and Reagan were phony conservatives who were doing the bidding of our enemies. I think Marc Thiessen has a point about the need for both liberals and conservatives to repudiate the extremists in their ranks.
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JFK Revisisted, book review by Paul Bleau
Michael Griffith replied to James DiEugenio's topic in JFK Assassination Debate
Any chance of talking Oliver Stone into doing a six- or eight-hour version so as to include more material? And if this happens, how about letting me revise the segment on the Vietnam War?! 🙂 -
Did Jack Ruby expect to get a suspended sentence?
Michael Griffith replied to Gerry Down's topic in JFK Assassination Debate
I think Ruby was led to believe that he would get a light sentence, at the most. I think he began to reveal his knowledge of the conspiracy because he was shocked and angered by his conviction and subsequent death sentence and because he feared the new trial he'd been granted would still end with a conviction and with at least serious jail time. -
It's not that the FBI invented Ruby's Mafia ties after the assassination: it's that Ruby's Mafia ties were suppressed for years and only began to surface thanks to the work of private researchers. Ruby's Mafia connections became impossible to deny after the HSCA investigation. Subsequent research has shed even more light on those ties.
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Fact Checking DiEugenio, re: Tippit
Michael Griffith replied to Bill Brown's topic in JFK Assassination Debate
I think some of your arguments are evasive. I think some are lame. I think some are nit-picky. And I think some are valid. Although Mrs. Roberts did not specify the time of 1:04, her statements certainly support the time of 1:04 for Oswald's departure from the rooming house. The WC had to bend or ignore several facts just to get Oswald to his rooming house by right around 1:00. You are brushing aside serious problems with the Tippit shooting eyewitnesses. There is no valid reason to doubt Acquilla Clemons' account or her sincerity. You surely know, or certainly should now, that Jim is right about the Dallas police lineups. They were grossly, inexcusably unfair. Do you really, really believe that Poe did not mark the shells? Really? Even though Hill told him to be sure to mark them? And when you note that Poe told the WC that he wasn't certain that he marked the shells, you're leaving out some important information, aren't you? You omitted the fact that Poe also testified that he "believed" he had marked the shells, and that Ball clearly seemed to believe that Poe was actually saying that, yes, he did mark the shells, yet Poe couldn't ID the marks as his. Let's read the relevant exchange: Mr. BALL. Did you make a mark? Mr. POE. I can’t swear to it; no, sir. Mr. BALL. But there is a mark on two of these? Mr. POE. There is a mark. I believe I put on them, but I couldn’t swear to it. I couldn’t make them out anymore. Mr. BALL. Now, the ones you said you made a mark on are--you think it is these two? Q-77 and Q-75? Mr. POE. Yes, sir; those two there. Perhaps you see nothing suspicious or unusual about the Tippit shooter being abjectly stupid enough to discard his shells at the crime scene in view of witnesses. I do. Did the Tippit shooter use the same revolver about which the FBI crime lab made wildly conflicting claims? The firing pin was defective and the gun would not shoot vs. the gun fired over 100 bullets without misfiring when tested. Yes, later on Roger Craig made some inaccurate statements, and some of them were arguably fabrications. But his initial statements are credible and well supported. Any analysis of Roger Craig must consider what happened to him in the years that followed the assassination, and must also consider the fact that he had excellent record at the time of the shooting. -
I just finished reading Dr. Mark Moyar's new book Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968 (New York: Encounter Books, 2023). Simply put, the book is magnificent, absolutely magnificent. Of all the dozens of books I've read about the Vietnam War, this is one of the very best, definitely in the top three. The book presents new evidence on Westmoreland's performance, on the charge that Westmoreland was vastly underestimating enemy troop strength, and on McNamara's repeated use of deception and distortion to downplay the effectiveness of U.S. military operations, among many other issues. H. R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, says the following about Dr. Moyar's book: This book is impeccably researched and elegantly written. Mark Moyar availed himself of newly available materials to shed fresh light and understanding on a crucial period of the Vietnam War. Triumph Regained poses a compelling reinterpretation that is bound to make uncomfortable those who contributed to or accepted the conventional wisdom on the war that emerged across the past half century. One major contribution of the book is that it makes extensive use of declassified/newly published North Vietnamese sources that shed important light on numerous issues about the war. Among other things, these sources reveal the following: -- The North Vietnamese suffered a long string of damaging, demoralizing defeats in 1966 and 1967 and began losing their grip on the countryside in mid-1966. Their grip on the countryside decreased even more substantially after the disastrous offensives in 1968. After suffering the horrific defeats of 1968, in some areas the Communists literally had no one left who was willing to continue the struggle, while in some other areas their presence was so vastly reduced that it was meaningless. -- American estimates of North Vietnamese combat deaths were not wildly exaggerated but were fairly close to the numbers revealed in North Vietnamese sources. -- The North Vietnamese launched the January 1968 Tet Offensive because they concluded that they were losing the war, that time was no longer on their side, and that they could not withstand years of continued American bombing raids, even though those raids were restricted from hitting numerous vital targets. -- American bombing raids hurt the North Vietnamese war effort even more than the most optimistic American analyses concluded they did. They did far more damage than Western powers suspected or realized at the time. -- The Tet Offensives in 1968 (Tet I, Tet II, and Tet III) were such devastating military disasters that even the Hanoi hardliners (Le Duan, Le Duc Tho, etc.) agreed to abandon the strategy of engaging in large offensives and to rely mainly on guerilla operations for the next three years. -- Mutinies and desertions in the North Vietnamese army were considerably more numerous than was previously suspected or identified. -- The North Vietnamese assault on Khe Sanh was no feint. It was a full-scale assault that Hanoi hoped would be another Dien Bien Phu. Instead, it ended up being a lop-sided defeat that resulted in enormous North Vietnamese casualties. -- The South Vietnamese army fought well in the majority of cases. Hanoi's leaders were surprised by how fiercely South Vietnamese forces fought in the first Tet Offensive and exercised more caution when attacking them in the next two offensives that year. The publisher's description of the book is as follows: Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965–1968 is the long-awaited sequel to the immensely influential Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. Like its predecessor, this book overturns the conventional wisdom using a treasure trove of new sources, many of them from the North Vietnamese side. Rejecting the standard depiction of U.S. military intervention as a hopeless folly, it shows America’s war to have been a strategic necessity that could have ended victoriously had President Lyndon Johnson heeded the advice of his generals. In light of Johnson’s refusal to use American ground forces beyond South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland employed the best military strategy available. Once the White House loosened the restraints on Operation Rolling Thunder, American bombing inflicted far greater damage on the North Vietnamese supply system than has been previously understood, and it nearly compelled North Vietnam to capitulate. The book demonstrates that American military operations enabled the South Vietnamese government to recover from the massive instability that followed the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. American culture sustained public support for the war through the end of 1968, giving South Vietnam realistic hopes for long-term survival. America’s defense of South Vietnam averted the imminent fall of key Asian nations to Communism and sowed strife inside the Communist camp, to the long-term detriment of America’s great-power rivals, China and the Soviet Union. The book also contains new information from Soviet sources, such as the fact that the Soviets were so fearful of a Nixon victory in the 1968 election that they offered to provide money and other support to Hubert Humphrey's campaign. Soviet ambassador Dobrynin actually met with Humphrey to extend the offer. Humphrey declined the offer.
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I wish more of the Kennedy family were as courageous and outspoken as RFK, Jr. I don't agree with many of his political views, but I admire and applaud his willingness to challenge the official version of his uncle's and father's deaths.