John Newman Discusses JFK, Vietnam, Fake Analysis on VC Strength

[Michael Griffith]

On 3/21/2023 at 8:52 AM, Michael Griffith said:

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.

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. 

[James DiEugenio]

For the record, if you read Newman's book he did not rely on Adams for that main thesis of his.

He discovered it through Don Blaczak. (See Foreword to 2017 edition.)

Adams supplied him with others to talk to about what was going on in 1962, these were people like Bill Benedict.  (ibid)

Sam Adams was not a hack. Sam Adams stood up to all the other guys in the Pentagon who were submitting false intel estimates for Westmoreland.

CBS did a show around him, Westmoreland sued and the general lost.  Westy was forced to settle.  You can look it up.  But this was at a later interval in the war than the one Blaczak was talking about.

If you want to read a hack, read this Selverstone guy MIke exalts.  I am just about done with his excruciating book.  He more or less accused as prevaricators all those 19 people who JFK told that he was getting out.  He also says that Kennedy used NSAM 263 as a PR device.. 🤮

I wish I was kidding, but I am not. 

 

Edited March 25, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

On 3/24/2023 at 10:44 PM, James DiEugenio said:

For the record, if you read Newman's book he did not rely on Adams for that main thesis of his.

He discovered it through Don Blaczak. (See Foreword to 2017 edition.)

Adams supplied him with others to talk to about what was going on in 1962, these were people like Bill Benedict.  (ibid)

Sam Adams was not a hack. Sam Adams stood up to all the other guys in the Pentagon who were submitting false intel estimates for Westmoreland.

CBS did a show around him, Westmoreland sued and the general lost.  Westy was forced to settle.  You can look it up.  But this was at a later interval in the war than the one Blaczak was talking about.

If you want to read a hack, read this Selverstone guy MIke exalts.  I am just about done with his excruciating book.  He more or less accused as prevaricators all those 19 people who JFK told that he was getting out.  He also says that Kennedy used NSAM 263 as a PR device.. 🤮

I wish I was kidding, but I am not. 

Sam Adams was indeed a hack, a total hack, who repeatedly issued deeply flawed analyses.

As for the CBS documentary that relied heavily on Adams' bogus claims, I strongly suggest you read the other side of the story. Westmoreland was not "forced to settle." That is long-debunked left-wing spin. 

Two readily available sources that give the other side of the story are Dr. Mark Moyar's long section on the Westmoreland v. CBS trial in his new book Triumph Regained, and Donald Shaw's article in Commentary:

Westmoreland vs. CBS - Donald P. Shaw, Commentary Magazine

Selverstone questions the accuracy of the belated claim that JFK intended to abandon South Vietnam after the election because he presents mountains of evidence that JFK had no such intention. It will be truly sad if you ignore all this evidence and repeat the discredited claim of an intended pullout and abandonment. There is a reason that this claim met with such widespread condemnation from scholars all across the political spectrum after the JFK film was released.

This dubious claim and the bizarre claim that Lansdale was a key figure in the assassination were the two flaws that critics pounced on. These two unfortunate flaws were used by many critics to dismiss the entire movie.

The best and earliest evidence on JFK and Vietnam points powerfully to the view that JFK was determined to keep South Vietnam free on his watch and that he had no intention of handing South Vietnam over to Communist tyranny. He made this clear in statements that he made literally hours before he was killed, and those statements echoed similar statements that he made in the months leading up to Dallas. Bobby himself made it clear in April 1964 that JFK had no intention of abandoning South Vietnam. 

I again point out the telling fact that McNamara said nothing, not one word, about his alleged "secret debrief" with JFK in his 1996 tell-all, mea culpa memoir. Not one syllable about it, not even in his section on JFK's withdrawal plans.  Nor did any of McNamara's worshipful, adoring aides say a word about this alleged debrief, which would have been a truly historic debrief had it actually occurred, not even in their diaries. Given what we now know about how utterly dishonest and two-faced (if not three-faced) McNamara was, I truly can't understand why anyone would use him as a source, unless he were speaking against his own interests. 

We must distinguish between a plan for conditional withdrawal and a plan for total abandonment. There is a huge difference between the two. JFK did want to withdraw from South Vietnam IF he could do so without handing over the country to the Communists. I suspect that many of the people who later claimed that JFK told them he would leave South Vietnam no matter what after the election were going beyond what JFK actually said to them. I suspect that what he actually expressed to them was his desire to withdraw from South Vietnam as soon as possible based on conditions on the ground.

In any case, the record is indisputable that JFK intended to continue to provide military and financial aid to South Vietnam even after he deemed it safe to withdraw American troops from the country. That is a far cry from total abandonment. 

Edited April 4, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Michael Griffith]

The CBS documentary The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, which accused Westmoreland of deliberately underestimating enemy strength, was so blatantly deceptive and biased that five months after it aired TV Guide published a scorching critique of it titled "Anatomy of a Smear: How CBS News Broke the Rules and 'Got' Gen. Westmoreland” (TV Guide, 5/24/1982).

In response to the TV Guide critique, CBS's chief executives ordered an internal investigation into the documentary. The man chosen to conduct the investigation was CBS executive Burton Benjamin. Benjamin's internal report was a devastating indictment of the documentary's unfairness and bias. CBS suppressed Benjamin's report, but Benjamin was so disturbed by what he found that he wrote a book on his findings titled Fair Play: C.B.S., General Westmoreland, and How a Television Documentary Went Wrong (Harper & Row, 1988).

Two years before Benjamin's book was published, an even harsher critique of the CBS hit job was written by Renata Adler, a respected investigative journalist who had previously worked as a lawyer and had served with the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation. Her book, titled Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS et al, Sharon v. Time (Alfred Knopf, 1986), picks apart the CBS documentary point by point. She presents examples where CBS editors took answers out of context and edited them to make them appear to be responses to different questions. She also shows that several of the anti-Westmoreland witnesses' titles and roles were exaggerated, and that the producers simply ignored a large number of witnesses who disputed the claim of deliberate falsification. 

We can dismiss the debunked slander that Westmoreland tried to mislead the White House and the Pentagon by purposely underestimating enemy troop strength. Even liberal historian Dr. Greg Daddis rejects this claim as "hollow," noting that the White House and the Pentagon "were well aware" of the dispute between MACV and the CIA over how to accurately measure enemy troop strength (Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 85).

The underlying core issue was whether the Viet Cong's so-called "self-defense and secret self-defense forces" should be counted in the enemy order of battle. There was an honest difference opinion about these forces among both civilian and military analysts. However, there was a small but vocal group of analysts, led by a genuinely sleazy CIA hack named Sam Adams, who adamantly insisted that every single person in these forces should be counted as an enemy combatant, an utterly preposterous idea. 

General Creighton Abrams, one of the straightest shooters and most honorable and decent officers in the war, explained why he believed it was "highly questionable" to include the self-defense and secret self-defense forces in the enemy order of battle:

          These forces contain a sizable number of women and old people. They operate entirely in their own hamlets. They are rarely armed, have no real discipline, and almost no military capability. (Daddis, Westmoreland's War, p,. 85)

In most areas of South Vietnam, these forces were a non-factor, partly because they would often switch sides or go neutral, especially after the Tet Offensive. Only in the Mekong Delta did those forces pose anything approaching a viable military threat, and even then their impact was sporadic and usually limited. 

Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, former head of the MACV Current Intelligence and Estimates Division, pointed out how strongly Adams' vastly inflated numbers had been debunked by the Tet Offensive: 

          Had the Allied forces been attacked by a half million or more troops, one would have to give some credence to Mr. Adams. Since that was not the case, he should be given no credence. (Hearings, House Select Committee on Intelligence, December 3, 1975, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976, p. 1653) 

It turns out that MACV's estimates for enemy troop strength before Tet were much more accurate than Adams' wild numbers. Adams put enemy strength at 500,000 to 600,000 shortly before Tet. Yet, only about 80,000 Communist troops took part in the offensive. Of course, we now know from North Vietnamese sources that the NVA had nowhere near 500,000 troops in South Vietnam before Tet, including all Viet Cong forces. 

We could spend many pages talking about all of Adams' bogus claims. Just two examples: Adams absurdly claimed that 10,000 American troops died in the Tet Offensive, when in fact a little over 2,000 died (in contrast, well over 40,000 North Vietnamese-VC troops died in the offensive). Also, Adams not only claimed that 1,200 American aircraft were destroyed on the ground during Tet but that they were destroyed by North Vietnamese artillery! This was laughable. The North Vietnamese forces involved in Tet had conspicuously little artillery (this was just one of the reasons the offensive failed). The only two NVA forces during Tet that had any artillery to speak of were those in Hue and near the DMZ--and, in point of fact, fewer than 60 American aircraft were destroyed on the ground during Tet. 

Finally, I should add that the CBS documentary has been criticized even by some liberal scholars for doubting Westmoreland's 1968 factual statement that the Tet Offensive was a severe military defeat for the North Vietnamese. Even Ed Moise notes that "by 1981, when this documentary was made, the fact that Tet really had been an American military victory had become clear." The fact that the Communists suffered a crushing military defeat during Tet was clear to any rational observer by mid-1968. Of course, North Vietnamese and VC sources later confirmed that Communist losses during Tet were "catastrophic," "horrendous," and that after Tet the Viet Cong presence in many parts of South Vietnam was either obliterated or vastly reduced.

Edited April 6, 2023 by Michael Griffith