Top 5 Books On JFK & Vietnam

[Paul Rigby]

6 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

British journalist Richard West, who knew Indochina intimately and had once been passionately anti-American, now wrote remorsefully from Saigon,

The Black Dwarf*, Tariq Ali’s revolutionary organ, outed Richard West, then working at Private Eye, as a recycler of low-grade CIA nonsense (in this instance, about Che Guevara’s murder) in an October 1968 edition**. According to the splendidly named Dwarf Diary feature, the CIA had first attempted to persuade British reptiles to run with the claim that Fidel Castro had bumped off Guevara in a desperate attempt to steal his wife. When this failed the credibility test of even our notoriously corrupt and dishonest presstitutes, the Agency tried a different tack, according to the diminutive diarist, comparing Castro to Peron, and other such guff. West, the anonymous diarist insisted, duly obliged (“bearded loony…hysterical tirade”). 

An alternative explanation may well lie in West’s time working for the British Council in Yugoslavia, where, he was later to claim, he refused the offer of a job with the Charlatans (MI6). Given that Private Eye was founded by a coterie of serving and “ex-“ Charlatans, and West spent a number of  happy years there, it would appear much more likely that he either accepted the MI6 offer while based in Belgrade,  or was recruited before, perhaps even at university (Cambridge). 

West’s denial should not be taken at face value for an additional reason – he was notoriously untruthful. Challenged at Private Eye as to the origin of some or other legally dubious allegation, West responded that his source was “cast-iron.” Unconvinced, Richard Ingrams, the Eye’s then-editor, persisted. West’s reply was classic Fleet Street: “As a matter of fact, I made it up myself.”*** 

*This was the second incarnation of The Black Dwarf, not to be confused with the original, an early nineteenth century British radical paper (1817-1824): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Dwarf

John Simkin produced a better history of it: https://spartacus-educational.com/Black_Dwarf.htm

**Dwarf Diary, Private C-Eye-A (The Black Dwarf, 15 October 1968, V13 N6, 😎

https://banmarchive.org.uk/black-dwarf/

*** Anonymous,  A System of Wandering – a profile of Richard West (The Spectator, 6 May 1989, V262 N8391, 19)

[Michael Griffith]

2 hours ago, Paul Rigby said:

The Black Dwarf*, Tariq Ali’s revolutionary organ, outed Richard West, then working at Private Eye, as a recycler of low-grade CIA nonsense (in this instance, about Che Guevara’s murder) in an October 1968 edition**. According to the splendidly named Dwarf Diary feature, the CIA had first attempted to persuade British reptiles to run with the claim that Fidel Castro had bumped off Guevara in a desperate attempt to steal his wife. When this failed the credibility test of even our notoriously corrupt and dishonest presstitutes, the Agency tried a different tack, according to the diminutive diarist, comparing Castro to Peron, and other such guff. West, the anonymous diarist insisted, duly obliged (“bearded loony…hysterical tirade”). 

An alternative explanation may well lie in West’s time working for the British Council in Yugoslavia, where, he was later to claim, he refused the offer of a job with the Charlatans (MI6). Given that Private Eye was founded by a coterie of serving and “ex-“ Charlatans, and West spent a number of  happy years there, it would appear much more likely that he either accepted the MI6 offer while based in Belgrade,  or was recruited before, perhaps even at university (Cambridge). 

West’s denial should not be taken at face value for an additional reason – he was notoriously untruthful. Challenged at Private Eye as to the origin of some or other legally dubious allegation, West responded that his source was “cast-iron.” Unconvinced, Richard Ingrams, the Eye’s then-editor, persisted. West’s reply was classic Fleet Street: “As a matter of fact, I made it up myself.”*** 

*This was the second incarnation of The Black Dwarf, not to be confused with the original, an early nineteenth century British radical paper (1817-1824): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Dwarf

John Simkin produced a better history of it: https://spartacus-educational.com/Black_Dwarf.htm

**Dwarf Diary, Private C-Eye-A (The Black Dwarf, 15 October 1968, V13 N6, 😎

https://banmarchive.org.uk/black-dwarf/

*** Anonymous,  A System of Wandering – a profile of Richard West (The Spectator, 6 May 1989, V262 N8391, 19)

I don't buy your wingnut sources. More credible, respectable sources thought highly of West. Here's what Wikipedia says about Richard West:

Richard West (18 July 1930 – 25 April 2015) was a British journalist and author best known for his reporting of the Vietnam War and Yugoslavia.^[1] He is described by Damian Thompson as "one of the finest foreign correspondents of the 20th century",^[2] with a career that covered the span of the Cold War in most of its theatres.

Life and career[edit]

Born in London, West attended Marlborough College before his national service spell in Trieste awakened a lifelong interest in Yugoslavia.

Starting off his journalistic career at the Manchester Guardian, West became a foreign correspondent in Yugoslavia, Africa, Central America and Indochina. Described by Neal Ascherson as the "paragon of the independent journalist for his generation",^[3] he would spend much of the next two decades in Vietnam, Africa and eastern Europe, where he was codenamned Agent Friday by Communist Poland's secret police. Among his books are The Making of the Prime Minister (with Anthony Howard),^[4] An English Journey (1981) and Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (1995).^[5] Along with Patrick Marnham and Auberon Waugh, West was one of three signatories to a letter to The Times that called for a British monument to honour those repatriated as a result of the Yalta Conference; it was eventually erected in 1986.^[6][7]

[John Cotter]

39 minutes ago, Michael Griffith said:

I don't buy your wingnut sources. More credible, respectable sources thought highly of West. Here's what Wikipedia says about Richard West:

Richard West (18 July 1930 – 25 April 2015) was a British journalist and author best known for his reporting of the Vietnam War and Yugoslavia.^[1] He is described by Damian Thompson as "one of the finest foreign correspondents of the 20th century",^[2] with a career that covered the span of the Cold War in most of its theatres.

Life and career[edit]

Born in London, West attended Marlborough College before his national service spell in Trieste awakened a lifelong interest in Yugoslavia.

Starting off his journalistic career at the Manchester Guardian, West became a foreign correspondent in Yugoslavia, Africa, Central America and Indochina. Described by Neal Ascherson as the "paragon of the independent journalist for his generation",^[3] he would spend much of the next two decades in Vietnam, Africa and eastern Europe, where he was codenamned Agent Friday by Communist Poland's secret police. Among his books are The Making of the Prime Minister (with Anthony Howard),^[4] An English Journey (1981) and Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (1995).^[5] Along with Patrick Marnham and Auberon Waugh, West was one of three signatories to a letter to The Times that called for a British monument to honour those repatriated as a result of the Yalta Conference; it was eventually erected in 1986.^[6][7]

Thanks for that very interesting post and those links, Paul.

[Michael Griffith]

On 5/6/2023 at 7:26 PM, John Cotter said:

Thanks for that very interesting post and those links, Paul.

If you want to rely on truly fringe, paranoid, and openly pro-Communist sources like The Black Dwarf for your information about Richard West and the Vietnam War, that is of course your right.  

In any case, Paul's post failed to address the fact that Richard West's statement about South Vietnam was demonstrably correct: that the Saigon regime allowed considerable freedom of the press. In contrast, North Vietnam allowed no freedom of the press. 

And just FYI, Richard West was so outspokenly anti-American for a time that the U.S. government included him on a list of journalists with a "negative publication pattern." He was so critical of apartheid South Africa that South Africa refused to issue him an entry visa.

But, of course, in liberal eyes, West committed the unpardonable sin when he changed his mind about Communism after seeing its horrendous fruits up close, especially in Vietnam. When West began to tell the ugly truth about the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, liberals went berserk. Radical leftists and Communists accused him of working for British intelligence, peddling CIA "propaganda," etc., etc. 

If you want to read what two respected, non-fringe British newspapers said about West, here are two lengthy articles about him, one by The Guardian and one by The Spectator:

Richard West obituary | Newspapers | The Guardian

In memory of Richard West, 1930-2015 | The Spectator

Finally, it should be remembered that the same liberals who attacked Richard West after he realized the truth about Communism had nothing to say when the North Vietnamese imposed a reign of terror on South Vietnam after Saigon fell. They had nothing to say when the Communists executed tens of thousands of people, engaged in truly massive looting, and sent around 1 million people to concentration camps ("reeducation camps") where the death rate, due to cruel treatment and harsh conditions, was at least 5%. To this day, very few liberal books and supposed "documentaries" on the Vietnam War mention these facts. 

Edited May 8, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Michael Griffith]

By the way, in 2014, RFK's youngest daughter, Rory Kennedy, produced a superb documentary on the end of the Vietnam War titled Last Days in Vietnam. Yes, I said RFK's daughter, i.e., one of RFK Jr.'s sisters. The film was nominated for an Oscar award. Here's some of what Kyle Smith says about the documentary:

          Last Days in Vietnam, the Oscar-nominated 2014 film by Rory Kennedy (the youngest child of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who died before she was born) is available for streaming on Netflix. It’s a devastating counterpunch to the anti-American propaganda Hollywood and the rest of the leftist culture have been spewing about Vietnam for more than four decades. . . .

          The effort Kennedy documents so vividly led to the rescue of 77,000 Vietnamese. The immense courage and honor of the heroes depicted in the film, and the clamor of the South Vietnamese to receive their share of American liberty as Communism descended upon their homeland, make for an eloquent rejoinder to those who dismiss the entire war as a misbegotten mess. (‘Last Days in Vietnam’: War Victory Squandered by Congress | National Review)

Far-left critics howled at the documentary, one even going so far as to accuse Kennedy of resembling a right-wing reactionary. 

The documentary pulls no punches about the Communists' brutal conduct. It also discusses the devastating impact that Congress's aid cuts had on South Vietnam's army and notes that the U.S. had promised in the Paris Peace Accords to resupply the South Vietnamese army. 

The documentary also acknowledges that "hundreds of thousands" of South Vietnamese were sent to concentration camps after the war and that many people died of disease and starvation in the camps. 

To its great credit, PBS aired the documentary. It is now available on numerous streaming platforms, including Netflix and Amazon. 

[James DiEugenio]

You know, sometimes Mike gets so carried away on his soapbox, saliva flying every which way, that I don't know what he is talking about.  

Here was my review of Last Days in Vietnam.

That film was not about the war.  It was about how screwed up the US plan for getting the last skeleton shift out was.  And also how bad the Intel was about when that would have to occur. The bad guy was the last US  ambassador.  That is clearly who Rory points to.  This disaster led to the iconic image of the helicopter lifting off the building. Epitomizing our disaster in Indochina.

That night, Kissinger called an old friend from academia after his very long day and he said, "We should never have been there."  It took Henry ten years to come to the conclusion that JFK had come to many years before.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/277

Edited May 9, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

3 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

You know, sometimes Mike gets so carried away on his soapbox, saliva flying every which way, that I don't know what he is talking about.  

Here was my review of Last Days in Vietnam.

That film was not about the war.  It was about how screwed up the US plan for getting the last skeleton shift out was.  And also how bad the Intel was about when that would have to occur. The bad guy was the last US  ambassador.  That is clearly who Rory points to.  This disaster led to the iconic image of the helicopter lifting off the building. Epitomizing our disaster in Indochina.

That night, Kissinger called an old friend from academia after his very long day and he said, "We should never have been there."  It took Henry ten years to come to the conclusion that JFK had come to many years before.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/277

 

Yeah, where are the flying custard pies when we could really use one on a JFKA thread? 🤥

 

"Griffith, you military-industrial slut!"

 

[James DiEugenio]

LOL,  ROTF, nice one William.

[Michael Griffith]

10 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

You know, sometimes Mike gets so carried away on his soapbox, saliva flying every which way, that I don't know what he is talking about.  

Here was my review of Last Days in Vietnam.

That film was not about the war.  It was about how screwed up the US plan for getting the last skeleton shift out was.  And also how bad the Intel was about when that would have to occur. The bad guy was the last US  ambassador.  That is clearly who Rory points to.  This disaster led to the iconic image of the helicopter lifting off the building. Epitomizing our disaster in Indochina.

That night, Kissinger called an old friend from academia after his very long day and he said, "We should never have been there."  It took Henry ten years to come to the conclusion that JFK had come to many years before.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/277

Your review provides further evidence that you really have no business talking about the Vietnam War on a public board. You have every right to do so, but you have no business doing so. You allow your far-left ideology to drive your conclusions, and your review is further proof that your reading has been limited and one sided. 

When people read your review and then watch the documentary, or vice versa, they are going to see that your review ignores much of the information presented in the film, and that your review goes off on tangents that merely seek to buttress your spin.

It is curious that your review seeks to paint the documentary in a mostly positive light, and that you pretend that the film supports your far-left spin on the war. Every other far-left review stridently condemns the documentary; one of them even accuses Rory Kennedy of being as bad as a right-wing reactionary. One suspects that since Rory Kennedy is RFK's daughter, you could not bring yourself to condemn her documentary, and so you decided to pretend that it supports your viewpoint, when in fact it does no such thing.

It is telling that your review says nothing about the documentary's information on the devastating impact of Congress's aid cuts, which violated our promise in the Paris Peace Accords, and which forced South Vietnam's army to ration everything from ammo to barbed wire to bandages. Funny how that point never made it into your review. 

It is also telling that your review says nothing about the film's segment on Communist brutality during the war, including the horrific massacre at Hue (which dwarfed the My Lai massacre in scale and brutality). 

To read your review, one would think the documentary spends considerable time on the "decent interval," since you spend several paragraphs discussing it, when in fact the film does not even mention it. I've already dealt with the holes in your spin on the decent interval in another thread, so I won't reinvent the wheel here. 

Yes, the film does heap considerable criticism on Ambassador Martin, but it also gives him praise and puts his tragic delay in ordering an evacuation into proper context, another fact that is missing from your review.

The film notes that Martin could have left much earlier but that he insisted on evacuating as many South Vietnamese as possible before he left. The film further notes that Martin thanked Herrington for making unauthorized runs to take South Vietnamese to the docks to get them on boats. Your review ignores these facts and demonizes Martin in a way that goes far beyond what the documentary says about him.

People who read your review and who watch the documentary are going to wonder how and why you failed to mention and discuss any of these facts, among others.

And people whose reading on the Vietnam War has been more balanced than yours are going to see that your review repeats a number of long-debunked liberal myths and contains several rather glaring omissions, such as the impact that the continuation of adequate U.S. aid would have had on the course of the fighting, the fact that Nixon and Kissinger fully intended to honor our pledge to aid South Vietnam but that Congress made that impossible, the performance of South Vietnam's army, etc.

Even with the disgraceful aid cuts imposed on South Vietnam's army by our Congress, it took the North Vietnamese army over two years of hard fighting and massive casualties to conquer South Vietnam. Fighting resumed within weeks after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. As the documentary notes, soon after the Accords, the North Vietnamese kept escalating their attacks on South Vietnam, and then finally decided to launch a full-scale invasion in March 1975 because they concluded the U.S. would not intervene. 

Newly disclosed/available North Vietnamese sources confirm that when the U.S. provided just barely adequate aid in the first year after the Paris Peace Accords, South Vietnam's army more than held its own. 

Finally, your review says there were "well over a 100,000 [sic]" South Vietnamese who did not want to stay behind to live under communism. Yikes. As any serious student of the Vietnam War can tell you, the number was at least several million, not 100,000-plus. Over 1 million South Vietnamese fled by boat. Around 400,000 of them died at sea. About 800,000 made it to other nations. Those refugees would be the first to tell you that there were many, many, many other South Vietnamese who wanted to flee but who did not have the means or could not escape. 

Edited May 9, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

Mike on his soapbox again.

When he said Far Left ideology, that was it.

Yawn. 

Edited May 9, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

17 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Yeah, where are the flying custard pies when we could really use one on a JFKA thread? 🤥

"Griffith, you military-industrial slut!"

So in response to my post recommending Rory Kennedy's documentary, this is your crude, juvenile reply? I think your reply says volumes about your maturity, mindset, and credibility. 

Apparently, in your mind, a person is a prostitute for the military industrial complex if they wish that 18 million people had not fallen under brutal tyranny, if they point out the suffering and atrocities that the Communists imposed on those people, and if they observe that this terrible outcome could have been avoided if Congress had honored our commitment under the Paris Peace Accords to resupply South Vietnam's military forces.

When you're not busy defending an anti-Semitic fraud who provided WC apologists with a gold mine of bogus claims to shred, you're peddling nutty theories such as the 9/11 Truther lunacy. You are a dream come true for WC apologists. They love it when JFK conspiracy theorists discredit themselves and the cause by advocating fringe, bizarre theories that have nothing to do with the JFK case. 

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

Mike on his soapbox again.

When he said Far Left ideology, that was it.

Yawn. 

Are you actually denying that your ideology is far left? Surely you must realize that anyone who has read your posts over the last few years alone knows that you are very near the left fringe of the political spectrum. Surely you know that even most liberal historians, some of whom are very liberal, reject your fringe view that JFK was going to abandon South Vietnam after the election. Surely you know that even most liberal historians regard Fletcher Prouty as a fraud, if not a genuine nutcase, whereas you claim he was a valuable and reliable source. Surely you know that even most liberal historians reject your fringe view that there would have been no Cold War if FDR had lived. Surely you know that even most liberal human rights advocates would view your rosy portrayal of life in Vietnam as false, if not bizarre and shameful. And on and on and on we could go. 

And, I take it that you have no comment on the point that your review omits numerous important facts discussed in the documentary, and that your review gives the misleading impression that the film supports your far-left view of the war.

Edited May 9, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

Will you stop it Mike?

Give us all a break, with those political smears of yours.  

I am not Far Left.  And for you to say that shows just how biased you are. How about this one:

John Newman is a conservative.  

Got that partner!  A conservative.  He actually used to host, ever so briefly, a conservative radio show.

So what are you going to say about John? 

Mike G: You dirty commie symp, Newman.  You wrote that seminal book that said Kennedy was leaving Vietnam and letting it fall to the north.  You dirty stinking Far Left Nut!

John N: I am quite conservative sir.  I was in the Pentagon for over 20 years working intelligence. And politically I am conservative oriented. But the truth is the truth.  Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam.

Secondly, both Ken Hughes and Jeff Kimball have proven the whole Decent Interval concept. It was in writing and Kissinger wrote it in his notes for God's sakes.  OMG, you just cannot admit this can you?

Frank Snepp is a major figure in the film. He wrote the original book about the Decent Interval. Nixon and Kissinger both knew that their whole Peace Accords  agreement was a sham. And Kissinger lied about this in the film. Kimball listened to tapes of them discussing it, and they knew it was a mirage and admitted it on those tapes!  Again, you cannot admit this because you are the one who is tied to their own ideology.

You will not find a better review of that film than mine.  Either in length, in depth, or in narrative or technical detail.  Anyone who can ignore what Graham Martin did--as you have--that person is simply incapable of admitting what a debacle Vietnam was at the end.

 

Edited May 10, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

5 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

So in response to my post recommending Rory Kennedy's documentary, this is your crude, juvenile reply? I think your reply says volumes about your maturity, mindset, and credibility. 

Apparently, in your mind, a person is a prostitute for the military industrial complex if they wish that 18 million people had not fallen under brutal tyranny, if they point out the suffering and atrocities that the Communists imposed on those people, and if they observe that this terrible outcome could have been avoided if Congress had honored our commitment under the Paris Peace Accords to resupply South Vietnam's military forces.

When you're not busy defending an anti-Semitic fraud who provided WC apologists with a gold mine of bogus claims to shred, you're peddling nutty theories such as the 9/11 Truther lunacy. You are a dream come true for WC apologists. They love it when JFK conspiracy theorists discredit themselves and the cause by advocating fringe, bizarre theories that have nothing to do with the JFK case. 

Are you actually denying that your ideology is far left? Surely you must realize that anyone who has read your posts over the last few years alone knows that you are very near the left fringe of the political spectrum. Surely you know that even most liberal historians, some of whom are very liberal, reject your fringe view that JFK was going to abandon South Vietnam after the election. Surely you know that even most liberal historians regard Fletcher Prouty as a fraud, if not a genuine nutcase, whereas you claim he was a valuable and reliable source. Surely you know that even most liberal historians reject your fringe view that there would have been no Cold War if FDR had lived. Surely you know that even most liberal human rights advocates would view your rosy portrayal of life in Vietnam as false, if not bizarre and shameful. And on and on and on we could go. 

And, I take it that you have no comment on the point that your review omits numerous important facts discussed in the documentary, and that your review gives the misleading impression that the film supports your far-left view of the war.

Most of what you post on this forum is complete bunk, Griffith-- like your ludicrous claim that the arrest and FBI incarceration of the "Five Dancing Israelis" on 9/11 is a "wingnut myth," and your tropes about 9/11 research scientists, engineers, and architects being "nutcases."  It's the kind of blatantly dishonest bunk we see in the M$M, and on government-funded disinformation websites.

Your McAdams-esque tropes about Fletcher Prouty are similarly deranged.

In a nutshell, you are a purveyor of disinformation, and a shameless defamer of honest, educated scholars who have worked on their own dime to debunk false M$M narratives about U.S. military and intelligence black ops.

It's truly a pity that you ever joined this forum, and spent the past ten months flooding the zone here with bunk.

[Michael Griffith]

19 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Will you stop it Mike?

Give us all a break, with those political smears of yours.  

I am not Far Left.  And for you to say that shows just how biased you are. How about this one:

John Newman is a conservative.  

Got that partner!  A conservative.  He actually used to host, ever so briefly, a conservative radio show.

So what are you going to say about John? 

Mike G: You dirty commie symp, Newman.  You wrote that seminal book that said Kennedy was leaving Vietnam and letting it fall to the north.  You dirty stinking Far Left Nut!

John N: I am quite conservative sir.  I was in the Pentagon for over 20 years working intelligence. And politically I am conservative oriented. But the truth is the truth.  Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam.

Secondly, both Ken Hughes and Jeff Kimball have proven the whole Decent Interval concept. It was in writing and Kissinger wrote it in his notes for God's sakes.  OMG, you just cannot admit this can you?

Frank Snepp is a major figure in the film. He wrote the original book about the Decent Interval. Nixon and Kissinger both knew that their whole Peace Accords  agreement was a sham. And Kissinger lied about this in the film. Kimball listened to tapes of them discussing it, and they knew it was a mirage and admitted it on those tapes!  Again, you cannot admit this because you are the one who is tied to their own ideology.

You will not find a better review of that film than mine.  Either in length, in depth, or in narrative or technical detail.  Anyone who can ignore what Graham Martin did--as you have--that person is simply incapable of admitting what a debacle Vietnam was at the end.

I think I should start by revisiting a severe gaffe you made in your "review" of Rory Kenedy's documentary. I discussed this gaffe in a previous reply to you, but I think it warrants another look because it shows that you really have no clue what you're talking about. You said, in all seriousness, that "well over 100,000" South Vietnamese did not want to stay behind to live under communism, when the actual number was at least several million. This blunder is as bad as saying "well over 300,000 European Jews did not want to remain in German-controlled territory."

One could excuse this egregious gaffe if you had just started studying the Vietnam War and had only read a few general articles on the subject. But you pretend to be qualified to review books and documentaries on the war. You posture as though you are some kind of an authority on the subject. Yet, you've made numerous statements that show that your research has been meager and largely limited to fringe sources. 

Yes, you are most certainly far left, and I cannot believe you could be so delusional as to believe otherwise. In this forum alone, just in the last year or two, you have made numerous far-left claims on a wide range of issues. I cited a few examples in my previous reply, but you ignored them.

You keep trying to hide behind John Newman. But we're not talking about Newman, and I haven't compared your views on JFK's Vietnam policy to Newman's. I've compared your views to those of numerous liberal historians, and I've pointed out that your views on the subject are even farther to the left than theirs. 

I answered your distorted claims about the decent interval in considerable detail in another thread, yet here you are, as usual, repeating your claims while saying nothing about the facts that contradict them, facts that I personally presented to you, with sources, in another thread. I'm guessing you still have not read Dr. Larry Berman's book No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam, which examines the decent interval in great detail. 

And I would again point out that Rory Kennedy's documentary does not even mention the decent interval, not even once, but your "review" of the film goes on and on about it. 

I notice you ignored the point that in the first year after the Accords, when American aid was even just barely adequate, South Vietnam's army more than held its own against the NVA. It was only after repeated aid cuts that the situation changed, as Ira Hunt documents in painstaking detail in his book Losing Vietnam: How America Abandoned Southeast Asia (University Press of Kentucky, 2013).

Hunt was the deputy commander of USAAG in Thailand after the Paris Peace Accords and was responsible for tracking the fighting in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The U.S. Naval Institute says of Hunt's book,

          "For the serious historian or military strategist who would want to have one book in his library to explain the loss of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, this would be it."

Hunt's book sheds important light on the decent interval by debunking the liberal myth that maintaining adequate U.S. aid would not have changed the outcome of the fighting.  

Finally, regarding your odd claim that I have "ignored" what Graham Martin did, no, I have not. Go back and read what I said. I have not "ignored" it at all. I just disagree with your extremist spin on his actions. I agree with Rory Kennedy's portrayal of Martin in her documentary: that Martin made a tragic mistake in delaying the evacuation but that his motives for doing so were honorable, and that once he realized that an evacuation had to be done, he did everything in his power to evacuate as many South Vietnamese as possible.

And, needless to say, if your good buddies the North Vietnamese had honored the Paris Peace Accords, there would have been no need to even think about an evacuation. Let's put the blame where it morally and actually belongs, and not on a good and decent man who was put in a terrible situation because of the treachery and brutality of the Communists and because of the back-stabbing of the anti-war majority in Congress. 

Edited May 10, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

Yeah Mike, what I said was well over 100,000.

Which would signify anything up to 200,000.

No one knows for sure.  With your politics and your sources you would write that the whole country wanted to leave to avoid poison gas extermination.  Which of course is what you wrote.  

I mean geez.  Yeah that is why the north left the business school intact in Saigon--filthy communists.

John Newman is a conservative.  He is the man who wrote the first book length study of Kennedy and his withdrawal plan.  You try and tar everyone with political smears for thinking JFK was getting out in 1965.  But you cannot do that with him.  And that is my point.  Those are all nothing but cheap shots by you.

The whole thing about the Decent Interval has been proven by Jeff Kimball and Ken Hughes with written data from the Nixon Archives in Yorba Linda.  When is the last time you visited there?  Just read their books.  You are too busy reading those Heritage Foundation sponsored propaganda tomes about how Vietnam was really a noble cause and how Saigon could have really won the war.

Nixon said twice that Saigon could not win the war.  So he and Henry played for a decent interval for Saigon to fall after the truce,  and Kissinger wrote about this in his notes, and Kimball found it.  The whole Peace Accords was a knowing charade, there would be no peace and no honor, and the pair actually joked about it.  And then they sold Thieu down the river. Read the book The Palace File.  Oh, too busy reading  that propaganda piece Triumph Forsaken?

There is a very good reason that Nixon fought tooth and nail not to have his papers and tapes declassified during his lifetime.  And now we know why.  Just the opposite of JFK: They make him look even worse than he appeared much worse. Don't even ask about Kissinger and his files.  That one is sickening.  

But Henry knew how bad it would be.  He told Haldeman: we sat hare and listened to his ranting.  History will not be kind to us.

You got that one right Hank.