Oliver Stone's New JFK Documentaries and the Vietnam War

[Joseph McBride]

 Michael is trying quixotically to defend the indefensible

by leaving out many of the key facts, including why

we really were in Vietnam. Johnson himself in phone

conversations with Sen. Richard Russell in the first

part of 1964 admitted the war could not be won but

he was powerless not to expand it. Ask yourself why.

You can hear those conversations online. And Russell,

an expert on foreign affairs who knew about Vietnam,

unlike many others at the high levels in the US government,

correctly predicted the war would take ten years, cost

50,000 American lives, and would be lost. Johnson recklessly

forged ahead anyway, because that's what his backers

in the military-industrial complex put him in office to do. He

knew it was a tragic dilemma, and it wound up costing

him the presidency as well as many of his Great Society

programs. His failure to call for a tax increase to wage

the war until it was too late (because if he did

so, he would have had to admit what we were

doing there and would have exacerbated the

national debate that was belatedly brewing up) caused immense harm to

the American economy. And there were three or four million

Asian deaths for which he and later Nixon were responsible.

Michael should ask herself why Nixon prolonged the war

after being elected on hints (false) that he would end it.

I offered a partial answer earlier that Michael ignores.

Edited August 27, 2022 by Joseph McBride

[Michael Griffith]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

Mike:

Over on the other thread, Coup in Dallas, I answered all these queries you made and produced the documentary record that Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam.

Which is what the USA did eventually anyway.  If you recall, that was under Ford and Nixon.  So why do you make this a liberal v conservative argument? Even Kissinger said we should have never been there.

What happened in Vietnam as a result of our backing of the French, and then our direct intervention was a colossal disaster. From the best estimates I can come up with, about 5.8 milion people perished, along with 58,000 Americans. When it was all over, what happened was the collapse of a puppet government under Thieu, which was the same thing that would have happened when Kennedy withdrew after 1965. Which is the same thing that would have happened if the Geneva Accords had been honored in 1956 with no South Vietnam in existence. That would have been under free elections which Ho would have won which Eisenhower knew. 

IMO, the Geneva Accords should have been honored. It would have saved 20 years of a senseless, hugely divisive and grossly expensive war that could not be won.  Which is why Nixon was withdrawing combat troops--the combat troops that JFK would not allow-- and negotiating his way out.

I fail to see how the Vietnamese taking classes in business and finance, buying ice cream at Ben and Jerry's, and banking at Bank of America equates to a brutal communist tyranny.  You might be confusing Saigon with what happened in Cambodia under the Khymer Rouge

Are you really denying that the current communist regime in Vietnam is a brutal tyranny, just because they let some citizens take classes in business and finance and allow some Western companies, such as Ben & Jerry's and Bank of America, to operate in the country? You might want to read the Human Rights Watch report on Vietnam, part of which I quoted in my reply. Let's read it again:

Vietnam’s human rights record remains dire in all areas. The Communist Party maintains a monopoly on political power and allows no challenge to its leadership. Basic rights, including freedom of speech, opinion, press, association, and religion, are restricted. Rights activists and bloggers face harassment, intimidation, physical assault, and imprisonment. Farmers lose land to development projects without adequate compensation, and workers are not allowed to form independent unions. The police use torture and beatings to extract confessions. The criminal justice system lacks independence. (Vietnam | Country Page | World | Human Rights Watch (hrw.org))

No, I am not confusing what happened in South Vietnam with what happened in Cambodia. Are you not aware that the communists executed over 50,000 South Vietnamese and sent hundreds of thousands of others to reeducation camps? What exactly have you read about the Vietnam War? If you are unaware of the brutality that the North Vietnamese government inflicted on the South Vietnamese after the war, your reading on the subject has been woefully one-sided and insufficient. 

Your comments about the alleged error in backing the French and about the Geneva Accords are another indication that your reading on Vietnam has been very one-sided. Are you seriously suggesting that we should have backed the Soviet-Chinese-backed Vietnamese communists instead of the French? And it was North Vietnam who most egregiously violated the Geneva Accords, not the U.S. or South Vietnam. You might want to read JFK's pre-1960 comments about Vietnam and the Geneva Accords, for starters. This isn't even a close call.

Here is one of JFK's speeches on the situation in Vietnam following the Geneva Accords:

Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at the Conference on Vietnam Luncheon in the Hotel Willard, Washington, D.C., June 1, 1956 | JFK Library

I notice you didn't address my points about the Tet Offensive and the Easter Offensive and what we now know from North Vietnamese archival sources. These two events alone destroy the myth that the war was unwinnable. If Nixon had not been under such tremendous pressure from Congress, the media, and the anti-war movement to limit Operation Linebacker II's duration, and if the operation had continued for another few weeks, the communist government in the North would have collapsed or surrendered. 

With Linebacker II (aka the Christmas Bombings), Nixon took most of the actions that our senior military leaders had been suggesting since 1965, and in less than two weeks we brought North Vietnam to the verge of collapse, and that's why they hastily agreed to resume negotiations, which led to the Paris Peace Accords. Linebacker II proved to any rational person that the war most certainly was winnable. We know from North Vietnamese archives that Hanoi's leaders were panicked and desperate and considering capitulation after just eight or nine days of Linebacker II.  

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks Joe.  Good points. Richard Russell was right on the money.  He said it would be the worst thing that ever happened to America, it would be like throwing money down a rat hole.

 

Mike, look, ever since about the time of Reagan and his "Vietnam was an honorable war", we have been getting these armchair generals, or real colonels, like Harry Summers, who are telling us that OMG, America really won the Tet offensive, or that, hey Nixon just didn't go far enough.

Do you know how many civilians Nixon killed with the Xmas bombing?   How many schools and hospitals he hit? There simply were not that many hard targets in the North. 

And did you also know that when it was all over, Nixon lied about it?  Le Duc Tho did not want to come back to the table.  Nixon had to ask him to come back.  And he still did not want to come back. It was the Chinese who talked him into going back. They told him that Watergate was not going away, so if they waited Nixon out, they would get everything they wanted anyway.   

Does that sound to you like Hanoi was on the verge of capitulating?

Edited August 28, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

As per Tet, as many have said, this was probably the greatest intel failure since the invasion of South Korea. And Shackley should have been fired. Khe Sanh was going on as a diversion, and LBJ actually contemplated using atomic weapons there; he did not.  

The triumph of Tet, as everyone knows, was to show just how vulnerable the south really was.  Tet hit something like 90 outposts and cities.  It showed LBJ that what he said to RFK was baloney.  About six months earlier he told Bobby that the war would be over soon and he would crush RFK and his dove friends.  When Tet happened LBJ was shocked.  He tried to argue that America really won.  When he tried to pass this off to the Wise Men at a meeting, Acheson walked out. When they called Dean at home, he said words to the effect: I am not listening to any more canned reports from the Pentagon. I want to see the raw data.  

So LBJ sent Clifford to the Pentagon.  He spent two weeks there looking at the raw data.  He then questioned the JCS for three days.  When he arrived he was a hawk.  When he got back he told LBJ,: Lyndon, please get out of this war.  America cannot win it.  Clifford later admitted for Peter Davis' fine film Hearts and Minds, that he had been wrong on this for years on end.

As Bobby Kennedy said, if you want to do the Curtis LeMay "bomb them back to the Stone Age" option and turn Vietnam into a waste land;  transform a green and watery country into a great desert, then yep maybe we can win.  But when you have to destroy a country to save it, what sense does that make? And what does that make us out to be?  Maybe Mike likes what happened to Iraq and Libya.  Maybe Mike is a secret Neocon who buys into American Exceptionalism.  I did not and I do not. 

BTW, one night I was at a Vietnamese restaurant in Long Beach.  The manager was talking about his sister, who ives in Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City.  I asked him: do you visit her often?  He said: about every other month.  I said: what is it like? He said, its like Los Angeles.  Its full of McDonald's, American banks, and other franchises.  I turned to my friend and said, what were those two wars all about?  I guess the Domino Theory meant Domino's Pizza.

One last point Mike, I wonder what those Human Rights groups would say about certain congressmen in a certain country who asked the sitting president for clemency because they were helping him prevent the legitimately elected new government from taking office.  I mean only nine people died as a result of that. Over 260 people have been sentenced.  Nice democracy. 

Edited August 28, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Benjamin Cole]

Ditto again on Jim D., and the lost chance to make Vietnam a possible arm's length ally after WWII---would not have been a perfect result, but a few million lives better than the actual result. 

MG-

Re, the "South Vietnamese proved they could fight." Then what happened? 

There were 18 million SV, call it 9 million SV men, maybe half of fighting age. 

An unfair analogy, but there were 40 million Afghanis and 40,000 Taliban. Somehow the Taliban prevailed. I loath, detest and revile the Taliban---but jeez, if the Afghanis want to beat the Taliban, then they should beat the Taliban. 

The Afghanis should take the M-16s, hunker down and track the Taliban and engage, taking and giving heavy losses. In other words, they should be as tough as the bad guys if they want to win. 

The Afghanis decided to run away instead. Afghanistan was defeated by guys in pick-up trucks, with AK-47s, and some RPGs. 

People who want to be free have to be prepared, in some situations, to dig in. 

I loath, detest and revile communist dictatorships (well, any dictatorship).

Funny, Apple, Disney, Tesla, NBA, BlackRock, WalMart, GM, WalMart, Nike---they love Beijing. 

So what was the VW about, if now it is fine and dandy to strengthen and enrich the biggest communist dictatorship of all time?  

Strange: The US is now in a proxy war against a crony-capitalist Orthodox (religion) nation (Russia), and pouring money through purchase and foreign direct investment into communist, atheist China. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

So what was the VW about, if now it is fine and dandy to strengthen and enrich the biggest communist dictatorship of all time?  

Strange: The US is now in a proxy war against a crony-capitalist Orthodox (religion) nation (Russia), and pouring money through purchase and foreign direct investment into communist, atheist China. 

 

Anyone who can make sense of this will have a hard dose of reality. 

[Benjamin Cole]

6 hours ago, Joseph McBride said:

 Michael is trying quixotically to defend the indefensible

by leaving out many of the key facts, including why

we really were in Vietnam. Johnson himself in phone

conversations with Sen. Richard Russell in the first

part of 1964 admitted the war could not be won but

he was powerless not to expand it. Ask yourself why.

You can hear those conversations online. And Russell,

an expert on foreign affairs who knew about Vietnam,

unlike many others at the high levels in the US government,

correctly predicted the war would take ten years, cost

50,000 American lives, and would be lost. Johnson recklessly

forged ahead anyway, because that's what his backers

in the military-industrial complex put him in office to do. He

knew it was a tragic dilemma, and it wound up costing

him the presidency as well as many of his Great Society

programs. His failure to call for a tax increase to wage

the war until it was too late (because if he did

so, he would have had to admit what we were

doing there and would have exacerbated the

national debate that was belatedly brewing up) caused immense harm to

the American economy. And there were three or four million

Asian deaths for which he and later Nixon were responsible.

Michael should ask herself why Nixon prolonged the war

after being elected on hints (false) that he would end it.

I offered a partial answer earlier that Michael ignores.

 

This is an amazing interview with Richard Russell, and he shows a great deal of reticence, and in public no less, regarding Vietnam, and wonders out loud about why suddenly Vietnam and not Cuba? 

LBJ's quixotic venture venture into Vietnam remains inexplicable. There must have been 100 good reasons not to get involved in Vietnam, and no good reason. 

Sure, the US should support human freedoms where possible, and when not in too much conflict with the national interest, as determined not by multi-nationals, but by the broad public. 

On Vietnam, from Richard Russell, to LBJ, to Kissinger, everyone knew it had been a mistake---but wars like VW are tar-babies. After you kill off 25,000 US soldiers and couple millions SE Asians, can you just say. "Oh, la-dee-dah, we made a mistake so we are pulling out"? 

Even getting out of Afghanistan, and nation with 40 million people and evidently not one willing to fire a shot against the Taliban, has caused military revisionists to say we should have prevailed, blah-blah-blah, if only we had done this or that in Helmand province. 

 

 

[David G. Healy]

18 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

[...]

Vietnam’s human rights record remains dire in all areas. The Communist Party maintains a monopoly on political power and allows no challenge to its leadership. Basic rights, including freedom of speech, opinion, press, association, and religion, are restricted. Rights activists and bloggers face harassment, intimidation, physical assault, and imprisonment. Farmers lose land to development projects without adequate compensation, and workers are not allowed to form independent unions. The police use torture and beatings to extract confessions. The criminal justice system lacks independence. (Vietnam | Country Page | World | Human Rights Watch (hrw.org)

 

 

 

 

maybe Human Rights Watch should take a peek at the good old USofA. Have you tried to form a union in THIS country lately? And horrors upon horrors, "police use torture and beatings to extract confessions."  Same here Amigo, and sometimes the perp ends up in the morgue before his/her arrest is complete. Wonder why?

Some things never change. Now Putin is chumming it up with North Korea, he needs bodies don'tcha know. Doubling, Tripling down in Ukraine, Same thing happened with Vietnam, Johnson gave the mil-industrial complex the war they wanted. What armchair conservatives can't grasp is simple, ya can make bucks, BIG bucks off of war... especially if your NOT the one at the point of the spear...

All this nonsense about Vietnam policy is *bs*, makes as much sense as we need to be in the headlines for the next three weeks debating peace talks seating arrangements around the table... Kennedy wanted solutions not war

Even I, a lowly Sp4 knew if the great green machine gets involved here in Viet-nam, we are screwed. And I was one of Kennedys 1000 in 1963...

Read the history of Vietnam's epic battles with China, their kinda like Ukraine! Invaded, pissed off and unyielding and dying in droves... btw: Pre-historic Vietnam was home to some of the world's earliest civilizations and societies—making them one of the world's first people who had practiced agriculture... and, a known history, 20,000 years. Ya think Kennedy didn't know that history?

[Bill Fite]

I think any question about JFK's intentions wrt Vietnam at the time of his death would be put to bed with the memo from the  head of the JCS, Maxwell Taylor on Oct 4, 1963.

Quote

* The precise instructions for withdrawal delivered by Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to his fellow Chiefs on October 4, 1963, in a memorandum that remained classified until 1997.

Taylor wrote:

“On 2 October the President approved recommendations on military matters contained in the report of the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The following actions derived from these recommendations are directed: … all planning will be directed toward preparing RVN forces for the withdrawal of all US special assistance units and personnel by the end of calendar year 1965. The US Comprehensive Plan, Vietnam, will be revised to bring it into consonance with these objectives, and to reduce planned residual (post-1965) MAAG strengths to approximately pre-insurgency levels… Execute the plan to withdraw 1,000 US military personnel by the end of 1963…”

Link to article

 

[Michael Davidson]

13 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Do you know how many civilians Nixon killed with the Xmas bombing?   How many schools and hospitals he hit?

I doubt he cares ...

[David Lifton]

15 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

As per Tet, as many have said, this was probably the greatest intel failure since the invasion of South Korea. And Shackley should have been fired. Khe Sanh was going on as a diversion, and LBJ actually contemplated using atomic weapons there; he did not.  

The triumph of Tet, as everyone knows, was to show just how vulnerable the south really was.  Tet hit something like 90 outposts and cities.  It showed LBJ that what he said to RFK was baloney.  About six months earlier he told Bobby that the war would be over soon and he would crush RFK and his dove friends.  When Tet happened LBJ was shocked.  He tried to argue that America really won.  When he tried to pass this off to the Wise Men at a meeting, Acheson walked out. When they called Dean at home, he said words to the effect: I am not listening to any more canned reports from the Pentagon. I want to see the raw data.  

So LBJ sent Clifford to the Pentagon.  He spent two weeks there looking at the raw data.  He then questioned the JCS for three days.  When he arrived he was a hawk.  When he got back he told LBJ,: Lyndon, please get out of this war.  America cannot win it.  Clifford later admitted for Peter Davis' fine film Hearts and Minds, that he had been wrong on this for years on end.

As Bobby Kennedy said, if you want to do the Curtis LeMay "bomb them back to the Stone Age" option and turn Vietnam into a waste land;  transform a green and watery country into a great desert, then yep maybe we can win.  But when you have to destroy a country to save it, what sense does that make? And what does that make us out to be?  Maybe Mike likes what happened to Iraq and Libya.  Maybe Mike is a secret Neocon who buys into American Exceptionalism.  I did not and I do not. 

BTW, one night I was at a Vietnamese restaurant in Long Beach.  The manager was talking about his sister, who ives in Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City.  I asked him: do you visit her often?  He said: about every other month.  I said: what is it like? He said, its like Los Angeles.  Its full of McDonald's, American banks, and other franchises.  I turned to my friend and said, what were those two wars all about?  I guess the Domino Theory meant Domino's Pizza.

One last point Mike, I wonder what those Human Rights groups would say about certain congressmen in a certain country who asked the sitting president for clemency because they were helping him prevent the legitimately elected new government from taking office.  I mean only nine people died as a result of that. Over 260 people have been sentenced.  Nice democracy. 

I've been a close student of what--for years-- I have called "PAFPS" ("Post Assassination Foreign Policy Switch") -- my original "teachers" in this area being JFK researcher Ray Marcus, the original articles in Minority of One and book(s) by UC Davis Prof. Larry Berman, who invited me to speak at UC Davis.  This thread is most  informative, and loaded with all kinds of relevant data.  The best joke --at least recently -- was DiEugenio's comment: "I guess the Domino Theory meant Domino's Pizza."   As to the comparison between Los Angeles and Ho Chi Minh City, I couldn't agree more.   On this point, my own realization ("OMG, its like Los Angeles!") came when watching a documentary broadcast a few years back.  The night-time scenes of Ho Chi Minh City -- along with the interviews --were just beautiful, and raised the question: What the heck was this war (really) all about?  I'll tell you what I think, but that's another discussion.  (DSL 8/28/22 8 AM)

Edited August 28, 2022 by David Lifton

[Michael Davidson]

[James DiEugenio]

Michael:

Where is this from?

 

[Michael Davidson]

54 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Michael:

Where is this from?

 

Nam by Mark Baker ( 1981 ) Abacus Publishing 

Page 224

Edited August 28, 2022 by Michael Davidson
extra info

[David Lifton]

23 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

 

This is an amazing interview with Richard Russell, and he shows a great deal of reticence, and in public no less, regarding Vietnam, and wonders out loud about why suddenly Vietnam and not Cuba? 

LBJ's quixotic venture venture into Vietnam remains inexplicable. There must have been 100 good reasons not to get involved in Vietnam, and no good reason. 

Sure, the US should support human freedoms where possible, and when not in too much conflict with the national interest, as determined not by multi-nationals, but by the broad public. 

On Vietnam, from Richard Russell, to LBJ, to Kissinger, everyone knew it had been a mistake---but wars like VW are tar-babies. After you kill off 25,000 US soldiers and couple millions SE Asians, can you just say. "Oh, la-dee-dah, we made a mistake so we are pulling out"? 

Even getting out of Afghanistan, and nation with 40 million people and evidently not one willing to fire a shot against the Taliban, has caused military revisionists to say we should have prevailed, blah-blah-blah, if only we had done this or that in Helmand province. 

 

 

Agreed.  An excellent interview.  DSL (8/28/22)