Who the heck is Michael Tracey?

[James DiEugenio]

Katie Helper let this guy spin out of control.  What a gasbag.

Every statement he made was false. And Katie did not let Aaron respond enough.   The "debate" starts at 33:53 mark

 

 

[Paul Brancato]

Jim - since you don’t accept messages I’ll leave one publicly - I’d like to bend your ear about something in person. Any chance you could message me some contact info either to my email pcbrancato@gmail.com or privately here? 

[Matthew Koch]

20 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Katie Helper let this guy spin out of control.  What a gasbag.

Every statement he made was false. And Katie did not let Aaron respond enough.   The "debate" starts at 33:53 mark

 

 

He's a Bernie Sanders supporter and political commentator that rose to prominence on twitter during Bernie's first run in 2016.

[James DiEugenio]

And now he is an expert on JFK and his presidency, and the JFK murder?

The guy is full of it, saying Kennedy was in charge of the Castro Plots?  That is pure crapola.

[Joe Bauer]

Wondering...perhaps JFK meant that he would still support South Vietnamese efforts to fight the North in every way "except" sending in massive of numbers of American troops?

[James DiEugenio]

Joe:

What Tracey does here is to separate out the Cronkite interview.

He cut out the part about Saigon having to win the war.  And only played this part.

What he does not say and what Aaron did not say is that this interview was done a month before JFK signed NSAM 263, which was the beginning of the withdrawal plan, which even conservatives like Howard Jones said was unequivocal to be completed by 1965.

The reason JFK delayed in making that public was he knew his enemies would use it to attack him.  Which MACV did out of Saigon.  When they did that Bundy told him you may as well make the NSAM public and have it recorded. So he did, but recall Joe, when this was decided in early October?  What did JFK tell McNamara?

"And tell them that means everything, including the helicopter pilots."

As Howard Jones wrote, the idea was to get back down to what it was when Kennedy entered office: a skeleton crew of say 600-1000 advisors.  There was no way in this universe that the ARVN with a 1000 advisors was going to stop an invasion by the combined force of the Viet Cong and the PAVN.  That would have been an enormous and overpowering force. And everyone knew the ARVN was about zilch in the field.  In fact, I knew someone who was there when Nixon announced Vietnamization.  he told me that this is when the fraggings began in earnest since they knew the ARVN was no match for the combined forces of the north. And as I have proven so did Kissinger and Nixon.  They just wanted a decent interval, which is what Kissinger talked to the Chinese about.

One of the most bizarre things in Selverstone's ersatz book is to compare Vietnam with Afghanistan.  Giap and the PAVN was not a loosely knit band of nomads.  The PAVN was a very good army. Giap had already defeated France.  And JFK knew that.  And he was warned about the same result with the USA by MacArthur and that scared the heck out of him.

He was not going to let it happen again. Vietnam was not part of our national security. It was not worth 500,000 combat troops for ten years--which is the report that  LBJ got from the Pentagon in advance of his escalation.

Edited May 18, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Joe Bauer]

Exactly.

John Judge filled in the very early secret planning for the war very thoroughly.

As Donald Sutherland said to Costner in JFK...the purpose of war...*******

Vietnam made a lot of people a lot of money.

We expended "TRILLIONS" on Iraq and Afghanistan.

TRILLIONS!

Our military funding priorities have always taken precedence over our social needs. By a huge margin.

That is why America is noticeable way down the list on the World Health standards of living amongst the industrialized nations of the Earth.

Edited May 18, 2023 by Joe Bauer

[James DiEugenio]

You know, I have never been able to decide about the John Judge story about his mother.

Since she had passed on and I did not get to question her.

But man, if that is true its prima facie evidence of a high level plot focused on Indochina.

[Bob Ness]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

You know, I have never been able to decide about the John Judge story about his mother.

Since she had passed on and I did not get to question her.

But man, if that is true its prima facie evidence of a high level plot focused on Indochina.

Link or explanation?

[James DiEugenio]

John's mother worked in the Pentagon for years as a statistician working on troop allocations all over the world.

She said that within a week or so of Kennedy's murder, the numbers of combat troops destined for Vietnam radically changed.

And it was in reverse to what was supposed to be happening--the numbers all went up, by the thousands. 

Oliver was really impressed by this but could not verify it since she was gone.

[John Deignan]

John Judge tells the story about his mother in the beginning of this video. 

[Michael Griffith]

With the aid of JFK's own words, especially the telling clip that Katie Helper plays to open the debate, Michael Tracey pounces on the biggest gaffe and flaw in Stone's movie JFK, i.e., the claim that JFK was going to abandon South Vietnam after the election. Every recorded or written statement that we have from JFK himself refutes this idea. 

Aaron Good is apparently unaware that a number of the people close to JFK, including Bobby, rejected the idea that Kennedy was going to abandon South Vietnam after the election. I'm guessing Aaron Good does not know about the evidence from the White House tapes presented in Selverstone's book The Kennedy Withdrawal. Over and over again on those tapes we hear JFK express a desire to win the war. So we're not just talking about Kennedy's public statements but also his confidential statements made in White House meetings. 

I'll tell you, folks, the longer some of you continue to cling to this post-election-unconditional-withdrawal myth, the longer the case for conspiracy is going to be discredited by association with this myth. 

[Joseph Backes]

Michael,

You're in a cult.

Right-wingers always pull Dean Rusk out of their collective rear ends to buttress the lie that JFK was never going to withdraw from Vietnam.

Look at NSAM 263.  Look closely at it.  Look at the list of people its addressed to.

Who is the first person it's sent to? Ahead of the Sec of Defense and everybody else?

Why look, it's the little round headed kid, Dean Rusk.

And to his dying day Rusk always exclaimed, "No, JFK never told me nuthin about getting out of Vietnam."  

L-I-A-R!  

Edited May 18, 2023 by Joseph Backes

[James DiEugenio]

Good point Joe.

See, Kennedy was going to replace Rusk in his second term. 

Neither him nor Bobby were impressed by Rusk's performance during the Missile Crisis.  Or otherwise.

As many commentators have said, due to this, JFK acted as his own Secretary of State.  

Rusk, like Bundy, was  bad on Vietnam.  Which is why Kennedy went around both of them and made McNamara his point man.

Edited May 18, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Everyone--I mean everyone-- should watch that excerpt John Deignan posted. 

Its the first three minutes of that video where John Judge relates that story about his mother in the Pentagon and the Vietnam troop order.

The turnaround on the troop build up is even faster than I thought.  Its not a week, but a few days.

She didn't believe it, and had it confirmed.

Edited May 18, 2023 by James DiEugenio