Oliver Stone's New JFK Documentaries and the Vietnam War

[Tom Gram]

Michael has implied several times that if JFK had withdrawn from Vietnam in ‘65 it would have doomed the South to the exact same magnitude of brutality imposed by the North after the fall of Saigon. 

Like Pat said, yes the North Vietnamese were commies and yes they were brutal, but is it possible that all the executions, camps, etc. were to some extent retaliation for a war in which an unconscionable number of North Vietnamese were killed as a direct result of American military involvement, including hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians - some that were literally massacred by American troops? 

It just seems like a hell of an assumption to think that the behavior of the North toward the South would have been identical under such wildly different circumstances. Surely there would have been some executions and many people would have been taken prisoner, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario with less overall loss of human life than if JFK had gotten out in ‘65. 

[Michael Griffith]

If the liberals of the 1960s and 1970s had been adults during the early 1950s, we would have lost the Korean War, and the entire Korean Peninsula would be controlled by North Korea's barbaric regime.

Those liberals could have made the same immoral one-sided arguments against South Korea that they made against South Vietnam. After all, South Korea's government during and long after the war was a military dictatorship. Of course, honest, rational people would have pointed out that South Korea's government was not nearly as bad as North Korea's government.

But '60s and '70s liberals would have ignored this vital fact and would have demonized South Korea's government, would have whitewashed North Korea’s government, and would have demanded that we "stop propping up a despotic regime" (just as they demonized South Vietnam's government and whitewashed North Vietnam's government).

Indeed, South Korea was ruled by a series of military-run authoritarian governments until the late 1980s. Yet, thankfully, virtually everyone recognized that South Korea, for all its faults, was less repressive than North Korea, and that South Koreans enjoyed more freedoms and a higher standard of living than did North Koreans.

And just look at the economic and democratic miracle that South Korea became and still is. South Vietnam would be another South Korea today, another beacon of democracy and prosperity in Asia, if American liberals had not betrayed her after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords.

Instead, thanks to the American “anti-war” movement, our liberal news media, and the Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress from 1972 to 1975, we failed to keep our promises to South Vietnam and allowed that fledgling nation to fall to communist tyranny. Even today Communist-run Vietnam remains one of the most repressive regimes on the planet.

 

[Joseph McBride]

Brigadier General Lewis B. (Chesty) Puller was the most-decorated

Marine in American history. He won his fifth Navy Cross in Korea

for commanding the rear of the First Marine Division in the epic

retreat from the Choisin Reservoir. When Puller heard the situation

in Korea described as a stalemate with the forces of Communist China,

he snapped, "Stalemate, hell! We've lost the first war in our history,

and it's time someone told the American people the truth about

it. The Reds whipped the devil out of us, pure and simple."

[Michael Griffith]

The liberal-run Congress even refused to honor our promise in the Paris Peace Accords to resupply South Vietnam with military equipment on a one-for-one basis, i.e., one helicopter for one helicopter lost, 20 aircraft spare parts for 20 aircraft spare parts expended, one tank for one tank lost, 100 rounds of ammo for 100 rounds of ammo expended, etc.

Not only did Congress refuse to honor the one-for-one replacement provision, but Congress cut our military aid to South Vietnam from $2.2 billion in 1973, to $1.1 billion in 1974, and then to $700 million in 1975, even while North Vietnam's attacks on South Vietnam were becoming larger and deadlier. The devastating impact of these cuts is discussed in an official history of the Vietnam War published by the U.S. Marine Corps History and Museums Division:

During Fiscal Years (FY) 1974 and 1975, the U.S. Congress slashed budget line items providing military aid to South Vietnam. Although not cut entirely, the funding equaled only 50 percent of the administration's recommended level. During FY 1973 the United States spent approximately $2.2 billion in military aid to South Vietnam. In FY 1974, the total dropped to $1.1 billion. Finally, in FY 1975, the figure fell to $700 million, a trend that was not misread in Hanoi. As General Dung very candidly phrased it, "Thieu [President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam] was forced to fight a poor man's war."

Perhaps more distressing, as far as the recipients of the military aid were concerned, was the fact that by 1975 the dollars spent for certain items were buying only half as many goods as they had in 1973. For example, POL costs were up by 100 percent, the cost of one round of 105mm ammunition had increased from 18 to 35 dollars, and the cost of providing 13.5 million individual rations exceeded 22 million dollars. Considering the steady reduction in funding and the almost universal increase in prices, the South Vietnamese in 1975 could buy only about an eighth as much defense for the dollar as they had in 1973.

In June 1974, just before the start of FY 1975, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Lukeman replaced Lieutenant Colonel Strickland as Chief, VNMC LSB. Almost immediately he began to notice the effects of the reduced funding, less than a third the size of the 1973 budget. In September, in a letter to HQMC, he penned his concerns:

"Briefly, the current level means grounding a significant part of the VNAF [South Vietnamese Air Force], cutting back on the capabilities of the VNN [South Vietnamese Navy], and running unacceptable risks in the stock levels of ammunition, POL, and medical supplies. I am concerned it will mean, in the long run, decreased morale, because replacement of uniforms and individual equipment will start to suffer about a year from now, and the dollars spent on meat supplements to the basic rice diet will be cut way back. At this point, the planners have concentrated (understandably) most of their attention on shoot, move, and communicate but have lost in the buzz words a feel for the man who will be doing those things."

The South Vietnamese attempted to adjust to the decreased funding and rising costs, but each of these adjustments had the effect of placing them in a more disadvantageous position relative to the strengthened North Vietnamese forces. The tempo of operations of all services, most particularly the Air Force, was cut back to conserve fuel. The expenditure rate of munitions also dropped. Interdiction fire was all but halted. The decreased financial support forced the South Vietnamese to consider cutting costs in all areas of defense, including the abandonment of outposts and fire bases in outlying regions.

The overall impact of the budget reduction on the allocation of military monies was readily apparent. In FY 1975 at the $700 million level all of the funded appropriations were spent on consumables. There was nothing left over for procurement of equipment to replace combat and operational losses on the one-for-one basis permitted by the Paris Accords. (https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/U.S.%20Marines%20in%20Vietnam_The%20Bitter%20End%201973-1975%20%20PCN%201900310900_1.pdf)

Of course, North Vietnam had no such worries. When North Vietnam’s economy was on the verge of collapse in 1973 and 1974, it was kept afloat by massive Soviet financial aid. Nor did North Vietnam have to worry about drastic reductions in military aid from its allies.

As a result, South Vietnam fell. The bloody, horrible brutality that the Communists imposed on South Vietnam after the war has been well documented, especially from recent research done by Asian/Australian scholars among the hundreds of thousands of former Vietnamese refugees in Australia. Decades later, Vietnam’s Communist rulers finally implemented some economic reforms that improved living conditions. They also slightly eased their political oppression, releasing the last of the prisoners from the concentration camps that were established in 1975. Yet, even today, according to groups that monitor human rights around the world, including Human Rights Watch, Vietnam remains one of the most repressive regimes on the planet.

 

Edited September 21, 2022 by Michael Griffith

[Pat Speer]

A series of questions for Mike.

1. Who paid for the Vietnam war? The American public? Or the politicians in Washington?

2. Who suffered the loss of or damage to loved ones during the war? The American public? Or the politicians in Washington? 

3. Was the American public committed to spending more money and suffering more casualties in a war whose purpose was unclear to most Americans...that had already dragged on for decades? 

4. Should the politicians in Washington have listened to their generals--and continued the war for the foreseeable future--when the American people had lost the resolve to "win" the war, and were unsure of what that would even look like?

5. Or should they have listened to the public, and looked for ways to exit stage left from what was at that time the longest-running flop in U.S. history? 

 

[Michael Griffith]

Let’s get a few other facts straight about South Vietnam:

-- Under the Diem and Thieu governments of South Vietnam, there were opposition leaders, and these leaders were free to hold news conferences, to give interviews to local and foreign journalists, and to criticize government policies—and they did all three of these actions on many occasions.

Such a thing was unheard of, not to mention illegal, in North Vietnam.

The only opposition that was not allowed in South Vietnam was opposition that supported or defended communism, that supported Communist positions, and/or that excused North Vietnam’s aggression.

-- Under both Diem and Thieu, there was a sizable opposition block in the National Assembly. Until the new constitution was instituted in 1967, the National Assembly was a single body. Under the 1967 constitution, the National Assembly consisted of two chambers: the Senate and the House. The opposition block in the National Assembly was able to publicly criticize government policy and even to accuse the administration of wrongdoing.

There was no such oppositional representation in North Vietnam’s National Assembly. There was never any opposition that dared to risk publicly criticizing government policy in North Vietnam.

-- Most of the cabinet and administrative officials in the Diem and Thieu governments were Buddhists. Approximately 80% of the Diem government was Buddhist.

-- During Diem’s crackdown on Buddhists in 1963, most Buddhist facilities were not raided or shut down. The substantial majority of Buddhists were not affected by the crackdown. The crackdown was aimed only at Buddhist groups and facilities that had engaged in large-scale disruptive activity. We now know from North Vietnamese sources that most of the targeted groups had in fact been infiltrated by Communist agents (see, for example, Geoffrey Shaw, The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam, Ignatius Press, 2015, pp. 194-250. Shaw is a Canadian historian who spent years reviewing original sources and declassified U.S. documents while drafting his book).

-- Although South Vietnam’s government, under both Diem and Thieu, did exercise some control over the news media, that control paled in comparison to the absolute, iron-grip control that the Hanoi government exercised over North Vietnamese news media.

The news media in South Vietnam were essentially free to say whatever they desired, as long as they did not echo Communist talking points, such as calling for a coalition government or defending North Vietnam’s aggression, and as long as they did not reveal vital military information. South Vietnamese newspapers carried surprisingly frank accounts of battlefield defeats, government policy failures, and problems with corruption.

Even in 1975, South Vietnamese newspapers carried detailed accounts of the disastrous collapse of the army in the Central Highlands, complete with interviews with some of the senior officers involved in the fighting. In that same situation, even many Western governments would have suppressed those stories in order to avoid the potential panic they might cause. But, the Thieu administration, though voicing its displeasure at the reports, did not censor them, nor did it take any action against the journalists who had written them.

In contrast, North Vietnamese newspapers would not dare to print stories about battlefield defeats, unless the government’s information bureau told them to do so, which rarely happened (and when it did, the scale of the defeat was greatly minimized). Similarly, no North Vietnamese newspaper dared to print any stories about government policy failures or corruption—again, unless told to do so by the government’s information bureau, and this, too, was quite rare.

-- South Vietnam’s government never tried to dictate or control what was taught in Catholic, Buddhist, or Chinese private schools. South Vietnam even allowed students in Chinese private schools to take their final exams through an education board in Taiwan, and the government did not enforce the regulation that required all instruction be given in Vietnamese:

"Unlike in the communist North Vietnam, there were private schools run by the Catholic Church, nondenominational private schools, and those run by the Chinese community numbering more than 1,000,000 centered in Saigon's twin city, Cholon. Although the Chinese schools were officially required to teach only in Vietnamese, in practice, they did so only in Chinese. They followed the curriculum of the educational system in Taiwan and took examinations conducted by the education board there for graduation." (https://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/1674/Vietnam-EDUCATIONAL-SYSTEM-OVERVIEW.html)

In contrast, private schools were illegal in North Vietnam. In North Vietnam, all schools were controlled by the government, and the curriculum was rigidly micromanaged.

South Vietnam’s government allowed considerable flexibility in its public school system. Separate curricula were developed via significant input from private educators to adapt to the regional and cultural differences of the Mekong Delta, the Central Highlands, the coastal regions, and the capital region.

After South Vietnam fell in 1975, the Communists abolished all private schools.

-- South Vietnam’s judicial system, though badly flawed compared to the American model, was far better, far less severe and more equitable, than North Vietnam’s police state. South Vietnam’s Supreme Court voided some convictions and ruled some excessive laws unconstitutional. No semblance of a check-and-balance existed in North Vietnam’s police state.

If you were accused of pro-communist activity or treason in South Vietnam, your case would probably have been heard by a special military court. Yes, sometimes those courts acted arbitrarily and on thin evidence, and issued unjust or questionable verdicts. But, even those special military courts found many defendants not guilty and released them.

-- One indication of the difference in freedom and oppression between South Vietnam and North Vietnam is what happened when both sides released POWs to comply with the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. Very few South Vietnamese POWs opted to remain in North Vietnam. In contrast, thousands of North Vietnamese POWs opted to remain in South Vietnam.

On many occasions, North Vietnamese POWs who wanted to remain in South Vietnam were intimidated by their fellow prisoners against doing so. In some cases, those POWs would wait until they were at an ICCS (International Commission for Control and Supervision) prisoner processing camp and would run over to an ICCS official or a South Vietnamese soldier and tell them they wanted to stay in South Vietnam, and then their fellow POWs would grab them and drag them over to the North Vietnamese side of the processing point. One such incident was captured on film. The “disloyal” NVA POW was grabbed by his fellow NVA prisoners, dragged to the NVA side of the processing camp, and then beaten in plain view of the cameras.

When ICCS officials demanded that the prisoner be brought back to the central processing tent for an interview, Vietcong and NVA soldiers hovered over the clearly frightened and bruised POW to intimidate him into saying he had changed his mind and wanted to return to North Vietnam after all.

A few hours later at the same ICCS processing camp, another NVA POW broke away from his group and declared his desire to stay in South Vietnam. This time, ICCS officers and ARVN soldiers immediately intervened and took the POW into protective custody, and then he repeated his desire to remain in South Vietnam. Again, all of this was captured on film.

[James DiEugenio]

The sub title of Geoffrey Shaw's book is enough for me to avoid it.

As was the fact he seems to have been associated with the VIetnam Veterans for Factual History. Which attacked the Burns Novick program from the right.  If anything, that show was too mild, and I wrote a four part review to show why.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/ken-burns-lynn-novick-the-vietnam-war-part-one

Is Mike saying what I think he is saying?  That Diem did not benefit from rigged elections; he did not have a government that favored his extended family; that he did not jail and execute his political enemies; that he did not limit freedom of debate?

Does this mean that all those reports about this stuff--say in Bill Blum's book about the CIA, or Donald Duncan's oral history for Ramparts, or Seth Jacobs' biography --that these are all wrong?  That South Vietnam was really a free flowing, thriving  democracy?  If Diem had been the leader that Shaw insinuates he was then the Caravelle Group would not have existed, and the Buddhist Crisis would not have happened and then been extended. 

As John Newman told me, the tragedy of Diem was that he could not control either his brother Nhu or his sister in law Madame Nhu.

And I have to add, that in his characterization of the Buddhist crisis, Mike  reminds me of Nixon in his terrible book No More Vietnams. Reading that book was one of the worst experiences of my entire JFK career. Almost as bad as reading Bugliosi's load of crap.

Edited September 24, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

Here are some of the hundreds of articles about Communist Vietnam’s persecution and oppression of religious groups just within the last 10 years—many of the events discussed in the articles happened within the last two to five years:

The Forgotten Genocide: Hmong And Montagnards Face Violent Religious Persecution — Human Rights Pulse

Embassies in Vietnam Release Statement Condemning Religiously Motivated Violence | Persecution

Catholics in northern Vietnam seek help to end persecution - UCA News

Vietnamese Catholics Blocked from Fencing Off Religious Statue | Persecution

Vietnam - Open Doors USA - Open Doors USA

Vietnam - United States Department of State

Vietnam's religious groups face state persecution, church leaders say — Radio Free Asia (rfa.org)

The Cost of Following Jesus in Vietnam - Radical

Persecuting “Evil Way” Religion: Abuses against Montagnards in Vietnam | HRW

What’s Up With Buddhist Persecution in Vietnam? – The Diplomat

Hmong Christians suffering severe persecution in Vietnam | World News (christianpost.com)

VIETNAM – Church In Chains – Ireland :: An Irish voice for suffering, persecuted Christians Worldwide

VIETNAM Hmong family in Nghe An persecuted for converting to Christianity (asianews.it)

Vietnam: Persecution of Ethnic Montagnard Minorities « World Without Genocide - Making It Our Legacy

Persecution in Vietnam: a Christian human rights lawyer's story (christiantoday.com)

VIETNAM: Persecution Increasing - Dubbo's 94.3 (943.com.au)

[James DiEugenio]

The USA dropped over 7 million tons of bombs over Indochina during the war--including North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

As William Shawcross proves in his book Sideshow, the bombing of Cambodia caused the fall of SIhanouk and led to the rise of the Khymer Rouge.  That initiated what was probably the worst genocide since World War II, about  2 million perished.

The total casualties in Vietnam, mostly civilians, is about 3.8 million according to the latest studies.

So, the combination is about 5.8 million.

And today if you go to Saigon, its full of Ben and Jerry's, American banks, and McDonald's.  Len Osanic will have on his excellent show an American expatriate who is teaching at a college of banking and finance in Saigon soon. (Sounds pretty communist eh?)  He will give us an eyewitness view.

Its pretty clear that Kennedy was correct.

[Michael Griffith]

A few more facts to get straight:

-- Following the end of WW II, the North Vietnamese Communists used intimidation, propaganda, and violence to consolidate their power in northern Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh tasked General Giap, who was arguably one of the worst war criminals in world history, with the job of consolidating Vietminh power, and he did so with a “campaign of terror and intimidation” that resulted in the murder of several thousand people. Historian James Warren, who is no conservative and who adheres to the orthodox version of the war:

While negotiations stalled, Ho and Giap worked feverishly to consolidate their power as the only voice for the people of Vietnam. The task of neutralizing potential nationalist rivals fell to Giap. How could this task be accomplished? Through the tried-and-true Communist method: discredit, discourage, and eliminate rival parties through any means necessary. The chief rivals of the Vietminh were the VNQDD and the Dai Viet parties. Until spring 1946, they had been protected by the Chinese occupiers, who had hoped to use them for their own purposes. Now that their protectors had departed, Giap launched a vicious and decidedly effective campaign of terror and intimidation against these groups. Specially trained Vietminh security units—in effect, Giap’s secret police force—pounced on rival nationalist political figures and their chief adherents, killing several thousand and forcing others to flee north to China. The revitalization campaign cemented Giap’s growing reputation for ruthlessness in the quest to consolidate Communist power. In Giap’s eyes, dissenters, even if they were sincere patriots, were by definition traitors to be silenced for the good of the Revolution. (James Warren, Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam, Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013, p. 3)

Gee, could this be part of the reason that 2-3 million North Vietnamese tried to flee to South Vietnam during the open-borders period mandated by the Geneva Accords from July 1954 to May 1955? (Only about 1 million made it to South Vietnam because the Vietminh used violence, intimidation, and other coercive methods to prevent people from leaving.)

-- Ho Chi Minh and his Vietminh by no means enjoyed universal support from the Vietnamese people when the Vietminh seized power after Japan’s surrender in August 1945, although they claimed to speak for all Vietnamese. In fact, there were large segments of the population, even in the North, that opposed the Vietminh (William Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, Westview Press, 1981, pp. 96-102).

In August 1945, the Vietminh seized power in much of Vietnam, but certainly not most or all of Vietnam. Even then, their seizure of power was mostly the result of the chaos and confusion that reigned in the country after Japan’s surrender. The Vietminh’s authority in Vietnam was “shaky at best,” and most of their supporters did not yet realize that the Vietminh leaders were Communists, notes William Duiker, who spent years in Asia as a U.S. Foreign Service officer and later became a professor of East Asian Studies at Penn State University:

During two frenetic weeks in August the Communists, behind the mantle of the Vietminh Front, had seized political power in much Vietnam. To keep it, however, would be quite another matter, for their victory was more a consequence of the chaos at the end of the war and the temporary disorientation of their rivals than it was a testimony to their power and influence in Vietnam. . . .

Furthermore, the new government’s authority in Vietnam was shaky at best. Although the struggle that had led to the revolutionary takeover had been engineered by the Communists, they had seized power in the name of a board nationalist alliance linked to the Allies’ victory elsewhere in Asia. The Party itself was small. . . . The mass base of the Vietminh Front was broad but shallow, for the Communist coloration of the leadership was not as yet directly evident to the vast majority of supporters. (Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, p. 107)

-- Although North Vietnam put on a great public show of appearing to welcome the 1956 elections stipulated in the 1954 Geneva Accords, Vietminh Prime Minister Pham Van Dong confided to a foreign diplomat that “You know as well as I do that there won’t be elections” (Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, p. 172).

-- The North Vietnamese government’s “land reform” program in 1956 resulted in the death of approximately 100,000 peasants due to “drumhead trials” and “hasty executions,” notes military historian Phillip Davidson:

The program was carried out with excessive zeal and spread terror among the people with its irresponsible accusations, drumhead trials, and hasty executions in which 100,000 peasants were killed. It paralyzed agricultural production, which fell to disastrous levels. Since Ho Chi Minh and the Communist regime could not take responsibility for the failed program, Ho designated Chinh as the scapegoat and Giap as the “hatchet man” to chop him down publicly. (Phillip Davidson, Vietnam at War, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 10)

-- In his famous study on “democide” (murder committed by government) titled Statistics of Democide (University of Virginia, 1997), R. J. Rummel determined that North Vietnam killed approximately 216,000 people. Rummel discusses some of the war crimes that Communist forces committed:

North Vietnamese troops or their guerrilla Viet Cong surely committed more democide than that for which I have been able to find estimates. Throughout the guerrilla period and during the war they shelled and attacked civilians in strategic hamlets and refugee camps, attacked refugees fleeing on the roads in order to create chaos, shelled civilians in most government-controlled cities and towns, and purposely mined and booby-trapped civilian areas (as of mining roads traveled by civilian buses). Moreover, thousands or tens of thousands were abducted to disappear forever, but are not included here under assassinations and executions. The sources give no estimates of these killings and to leave it at this would thus create a large hole in the total democide. Accordingly, I will assume that the additional deaths from these North Vietnam/Viet Cong atrocities and terror amounted to at least 200 a month over the twenty-one years from 1955 to the end of the war. This seems consistent with both sympathetic and unsympathetic descriptions of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong tactics and actions during the war. (Chapter 6)

Rummel explains why he treats North Vietnam’s atrocities in South Vietnam was foreign democide:

As a result of the 1954 Geneva Agreements that formally ended the Indochina War, Vietnam was officially split into North Vietnam and South Vietnam, all be it until Vietnam wide elections were to be held. As the possibility of these elections receded and both Hanoi and Saigon took on all the domestic and international functions of permanent governments, South Vietnam was also diplomatically recognized by a number of countries and carried out formal diplomatic interaction. Moreover, in the Paris Agreement of 1973 signed with the United States, North Vietnam officially recognized the sovereignty of South Vietnam. Thus, North Vietnam's democide in South Vietnam is treated as foreign democide, not domestic. (Chapter 6)

-- The old Communist claim that the Vietnam War was really just a civil war and that we made things worse by intervening is so absurd that it does not deserve serious discussion. For one thing, this argument ignores the meaning of the term “civil war” itself. A civil war is when two factions fight for control of the same government and/or the same country. But South Vietnam never tried to conquer North Vietnam, nor did South Vietnam ever seek to take sole control of a national Vietnamese government, because there was no such government. There was no Vietnamese-run national government in Vietnam before the Vietnam War began, just as there was no Korean-run national government in Korea before the Korean War began. In both cases, the Communists claimed to run the only legitimate government in the country, but their claim was false and dishonest.

[David Cooper]

Like many arguments presented in forums and public venues today, the two sides are having two separate discussions and are not motivated to truly address the other’s points. If either side only read one more source, these contributors seem to say, they would, somehow and suddenly, change their minds and see it according to the opposite point of view. 

Michael wants to prove, it seems to me, two points. 1) That the North Vietnamese government was very brutal as it consolidated its power over decades after the US withdrawal and the fall of the South Vietmamese government. 2) That our military was closer to success than most people knew, and that with a little more public support by Americans and their government, the South Vietnamese/USA coalition could have prevailed. 

As to point #1, of course they were brutal. That is what happens in these situations. Once the power is consolidated the level of brutality may reduce. When you open the box of war terrible things come out. It is similar to the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both cases the escalation of war, by us, led to enormous numbers of people, especially non-combatants, killed. It led to chaos and created opportunities for the brutal to vie for power. The brutality cannot be limited to one side only, and in the case of North Vietnam actually can subside, and this seems to me be to be Jim DiEugenio’s counterpoint. 

Jim presents a case that the whole war, as escalated under Johnson and Nixon, opened up a situation which resulted in the deaths of many millions all over what we used to call Indochina—and, importantly, had this escalation been avoided then these millions of deaths may not have occurred. 

The fear that the escalation would provoke horrible things is what I, and many others, believed—and we acted upon that belief, when we organized protests in 1971 against the widened bombing campaign in Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger. We believed that the US government was acting against both American’s interests and principles by conducting the war this way. 

In retrospect and after years of study, I now see the situation in the US differently. I realize that the protest movement in the US was successful in halting the US involvement in Indochina in large part because parts of the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex were running a secret war, and did not seek or want public approval, funding or even understanding for what they were doing. We were successful because wars, in a country founded on our principles, cannot be fought in secret. 

If you look at the Vietnam memorial in Washington D.C. you see a list of Americans who were killed in the war. It is a very powerful memorial and helps us to appreciate the sacrifice we made of so many American lives. But nothing on that memorial gives anyone the slightest sense of what these Americans were fighting for, or the purpose for which they gave their last full measure of devotion. It is a monolith to pointless death.  

So we shift to Michael’s point #2. Could our military have been close to success on the battlefield as a result of better targeting of our massive bombing? Maybe. But we did not know this then and could not have acted upon it. The consequences of running secret wars  undermined the military’s potential successes.

I remember the horror of people reacting to what American soldiers did at My Lai when the story was reported. I do not believe we know the all the facts to this day, and do not believe that the story was as one-sided as it was presented in the press. But it does not matter. At the time, this type of action by our side could not be justified to the American people and only led to more effective protest and more opposition to the war. 

World War II is often called the “last good war” because we generally had an idea of what we were fighting for. It may have been a simplistic idea, and of course there were many aspects of the war that were secret, but there was a concerted attempt to make a public case as to why we needed to be to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who were fighting had thus far so nobly advanced.

 Doug Horne’s book, “The McCollum Memorandum: A Story of Washington, D.C. in 1940-41” reveals the long-term consequences of running wars, or actually geo-political strategic decisions, in secret. Roosevelt saw, Horne demonstrates, the potential consequences for the US if the poopoo attack on the Soviet Union was successful. He saw that if the Japanese joined the Nazis and attacked the Soviets from the East, then Hitler’s gamble may well have succeeded. The effect of the fall of the Soviet Union would have put the allies, especially the US and Britain, in serious jeopardy. Roosevelt was well-informed that the Japanese faced a choice at that moment: to attack the Soviets or to move south and attack the Dutch East Indies to secure their oil and resources. By cutting off the Japanese oil and his other actions, Roosevelt forced them to choose the southern choice. 

That may have ultimately led to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which Roosevelt may or may not have fully anticipated, but the alternative was far worse. In retrospect, I believe Roosevelt’s actions were right. Yet, and this is my point, Roosevelt could not have made that case in public to the American people.  It had to be made in secret, and that has led to decades of speculations about what Roosevelt knew and if his actions were traitorous. Under the circumstances, perhaps these sometimes quite wild speculations could not have been avoided. 

One of the greatest virtues of the JFKA research community is that, for those who want it, the research opens up an informed discussion about the secret history of the 20^th century and allows us to see what has been done in our name—even if these actions were mostly to serve global corporations rather than Americans. It allows us to see that JFK was the last president to take a serious and honest ‘America First’ approach in the world by understanding that we cannot stand for our principles and have the kind of life we want if we foster injustice, corruption, exploitation and secret dominance of and by our country and others around the world. 

[Sandy Larsen]

22 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

And today if you go to Saigon, its full of Ben and Jerry's, American banks, and McDonald's.

 

Michael, if you doubt what Jim says about Vietnam today, I suggest you do what I did. I searched Quora for what life is like in Vietnam. After reading the responses from several Vietnam citizens, my impression is that life there is pretty good. They can even criticize the government without fear of reprisal. The one thing you can't do safely is be an activist. So just don't demonstrate against the government and you'll be fine.

 

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks David, nice and thoughtful reply.  

Sandy, we will have an American expatriate on Len's show soon to talk about this firsthand.  The kids who go to that banking college look forward to their opportunities in Vietnam.

[Michael Griffith]

On 9/18/2022 at 2:40 PM, Tom Gram said:

 

Michael has implied several times that if JFK had withdrawn from Vietnam in ‘65 it would have doomed the South to the exact same magnitude of brutality imposed by the North after the fall of Saigon. 

Okay, so you are apparently another person who has not read any of the sources that I've linked or recommended. Before the war even heated up in 1965, the Hanoi regime killed at least, at a bare minimum, 110,000 North Vietnamese to consolidate and then maintain their power. Hanoi's terrorist arm in South Vietnam, the Vietcong, murdered untold thousands of people. The Hanoi Communists were killing large numbers of innocent people long before we deployed sizable combat forces in South Vietnam.

Like Pat said, yes the North Vietnamese were commies and yes they were brutal, but is it possible that all the executions, camps, etc. were to some extent retaliation for a war in which an unconscionable number of North Vietnamese were killed as a direct result of American military involvement, including hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians - some that were literally massacred by American troops? 

Gosh, this is just surreal. First of all, not one North Vietnamese soldier would have died in combat if North Vietnam had not invaded South Vietnam. You guys keep ignoring that key fact. South Vietnam was perfectly willing to let North Vietnam go its own way, but North Vietnam was unwilling to let South Vietnam go its own way. 

Two, the North Vietnamese army (NVA) did indeed lose  an unconscionable number of soldiers in their invasion of South Vietnam because their barbaric commanders often used them literally as cannon fodder in human wave attacks. Toward the end of the war, the NVA was conscripting teenagers, some as young as 14. About 99% of NVA soldiers were draftees for much of the war. If an American or European general had used his soldiers in such a barbaric manner, he would have been relieved of command and regarded as a war criminal. Yet, Giap and other NVA generals frequently--not always, but frequently--used their soldiers as cannon fodder throughout the war, especially in some of the final attacks in March and April 1975. 

It is a long-debunked Communist myth that "hundreds of thousands innocent civilians" were killed because of American involvement. Far fewer North Vietnamese civilians would have been killed if the NVA had not used civilians as human shields. The NVA put SAM batteries near heavily populated areas and at civilian airfields. They used city streets for POL storage. They would strap dozens of civilians onto a key bridge, knowing that U.S. and South Vietnamese pilots would not strike the bridge if they saw the civilians strapped to it. They would force hundreds of civilians to march around and among their columns to discourage air attacks. And on and on I could go.

Even Stanley Karnow, who visited Hanoi soon after the war ended, was surprised by the moderate damage that our Linebacker I and II bombing raids had done to Hanoi. Given the wild stories he had heard in our news media and from the Hanoi regime about those raids, he expected that most/all of Hanoi would be in ruins. He was honest enough to admit that the damage to the city was surprisingly moderate. 

Yes, we most certainly were the good guys, and it is sad to see any American say otherwise. 

It just seems like a hell of an assumption to think that the behavior of the North toward the South would have been identical under such wildly different circumstances. Surely there would have been some executions and many people would have been taken prisoner, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario with less overall loss of human life than if JFK had gotten out in ‘65. 

Tell that to the 100,000-plus North Vietnamese who were killed by the Hanoi regime before we even showed up. Tell that to the untold thousands of South Vietnamese who were murdered by the Vietcong long before Johnson deployed regular combat troops to South Vietnam. 

It sounds like you think it would have been acceptable if there had been "some executions" and if "many people" had been "taken prisoner" if we had abandoned South Vietnam in 1965. 

 

Edited September 26, 2022 by Michael Griffith

[Stu Wexler]

Hard to imagine how we "win" the Vietnam War without raining down a level of destructive bombing that would have devastated the civilian population-- already plenty devastated-- to a level that would (rightfully) shame us as a country to the entire world for a generation.