Max Boot gets Booted on Lansdale in Vietnam

[Jim DiEugenio]

Its incredible but there has been a long time movement to somehow rewrite the history of the Indochina conflict. I wrote about this in the discussion of the completely forgettable Burns/Novick PBS disappointment.

Now comes Max "Mr CFR" Boot. Right in the steps of the likes of Lewis Sorley who Burns and Novick interviewed for their show.

See, the line goes, we actually could have won. We just did not follow the right tactics. Lansdale had the right idea and somehow Kennedy made a mistake not making him the ambassador.

This is the guy who was so instrumental in propping up Diem! And rigging elections for him.

Sick.

I could not bring myself to read this book after Burns Novick, so give thanks to Mr Bass.

https://mekongreview.com/lansdales-ghost/

[Cliff Varnell]

This is the guy who was so instrumental in propping up Diem! And rigging elections for him.

Sick.

So you think it was a good idea to overthrow Diem?

[Jim DiEugenio]

Oh please, will you.

I mean really Cliff. You have nothing better to do than be a provocateur on JFK web sites?

Why don't you do another movie since your last one was such a hit? You know, the one with Sugar in the title.

Clearly, you are one of the finest American actors since Sean Penn. Maybe Jack Nicholson.

[Cliff Varnell]

Oh please, will you.

I mean really Cliff. You have nothing better to do than be a provocateur on JFK web sites?

Correcting your mis-representions of historical fact is more than a full time job, so I have to be choosy where I chime in.

So you think the over-throw of Diem was a good idea?

[Jim DiEugenio]

Like you know more than me about the foreign policy of the JFK administration or his presidency?

LOL

ROTF

LMAO

When is you next film coming out by the way?

[Cliff Varnell]

Like you know more than me about the foreign policy of the JFK administration or his presidency?

You're off on the Bay of Pigs, Laos, the Diem over-throw, and the root facts of the JFK assassination.

I can have a collegial discussion of all these topics -- take the Pepsi challenge any day.

[Cliff Varnell]

Back in the late 80's/early 90's I had a Vietnamese girlfriend whose father had been an officer in Nhu's secret police.

She was Buddhist, said the Catholic vs. Buddhist tension was propagated by the CIA because Diem was in the middle of negotiating a peace deal with the North -- and kick the US out.

[James Lateer]

The PBS Ken Burns Documentary is a must-watch for every US contemporary history buff. I learned a lot from that source that I never realized before.

As for JFK and Vietnam, I think the following were true:

1. JFK was informed in 1963 that we were winning the Vietnam War. I think that was actually true.

2. There is no doubt that the Vietnam War was based on a theory that South Vietnam was Catholic-run and that it should be kept that way. Much of the entire "Cold War" was a Catholic vs. Communist struggle disguised as something else.

3. The US did not lose the Vietnam War. We WON the Vietnam War. The domino theory was real. Indonesia was about to fall to the Communists and India had been neutralized by the Sino-India War. The Vietnam War was a war of attrition much like our Civil War and World War I. The US was buying time and we bought 30 years with our Vietnam strategy. By 1975 when it ended, the world was an entirely different place than in 1955 or 1965.

4. One of the main theses of Ken Burns' documentary was that with proper material support, the South Vietam (ARVN) army could have defended itself against the North. According to Burns, the US simply cut off material support for the South inn the 1970's and this caused the surrender of the South.

5. I also believe the thesis of Fletcher Prouty's book where he says there was no such thing as the Communist Viet Cong. They were, rather, displaced Catholic refugees from the North who were only fighting for economic survival. This same phenomenon was played out in England in the days of Robin Hood (who lived and plundered from the Sherwood Forest) and Ethiopia in their Civil War (in the 1990's) where there were only plunderers living in the woods and robbing people to just survive.

O should add a P.S. that the only disagreement I had with the JFK foreign policy speech by Jim Di Eugenio was the portrayal of Dag Hammerskjold as a "good guy". He was actually a Swede who made his name by managing money in Sweden for the Nazis. He was a Nazi Collaborator. This pattern was repeated by Kurt Waldheim who had a Nazi past. And also Pope Pius XII. And also Pope Benedict XVI and the current Pope, Francis. Francis was in Argentina during the heyday of the Juan Peron and Argentinian mass murder. And then you have the Bilderbergs run by SS Officer Prince Bernhard.

These international groups just can't cut the umbilical cord to the Nazi past.

James Lateer

[Paul Rigby]

Back in the late 80's/early 90's I had a Vietnamese girlfriend whose father had been an officer in Nhu's secret police.

She was Buddhist, said the Catholic vs. Buddhist tension was propagated by the CIA because Diem was in the middle of negotiating a peace deal with the North -- and kick the US out.

"Today's World Report: Truce Moves Reported In Viet Nam," New York World-Telegram & Sun, (Friday), 25 October 1963, p.6:*

"LONDON - The government of South Vietnam and Communist North Viet Nam are apparently making exploratory contacts that could lead to a truce, diplomatic sources said. There was no official confirmation…Diplomatic sources said the current moves were believed to be aiming at some sort of truce arrangement with possible wider ramifications."

[Jim DiEugenio]

Mr. Lateer, I really do not know what to say about those observations on Burns/Novick. I mean what on earth could any really informed person learn from that Koch Brothers sponsored limp noodle of a program.

Have you read the following books?

Gordon Goldstein: Lessons in Disaster

James Blight: Virtual JFK

David Kaiser: American Tragedy

John Newman: JFK and Vietnam

America was not winning the war in 1963. The Battle of Ap Bac proved that. Jean Paul Vann, an American advisor, understood that and he got his newspaper assets, Sheehan and Halberstam to begin a campaign for direct American involvement. JFK was firmly opposed to this to the point that he tried to get Halberstam rotated out of Vietnam. And he was upset when Vann tried to bring his campaign stateside to do the same.

What was really happening was that the Pentagon was falsifying the data to make it look like we were winning. Kennedy was going to use this false data in order to sponsor his pullout plan, knowing the data was wrong. In other words, he was going to hoist them on their own petard. LBJ, through his aide Burris, knew what the true reports were saying. Therefore, when Kennedy was killed, LBJ used those reports to say, since we were losing, we had to escalate. Halberstam wrote a book in 1965--which he tried to make everyone forget later--which said the same thing.

South Vietnam was not a Catholic country, it was about 70 per cent Buddhist. This is why Diem and his brother were so wrong as leaders of the country.

The domino theory was a bunch of crap and even Kissinger later admitted that. Sukarno was not a communist. And what happened there in 1965 was an epic tragedy for that country. The genocide in Cambodia was provoked by the bombing program of Nixon and Kissinger which in turn caused the overthrow of Sihanouk.

When you leave a country and your enemy then takes it over two years later, that is not winning the war. But the broader point is this: we should have never been there. Kissinger admitted this to an old academic friend the night the last helicopter so ignominiously left the top of the American embassy.

The Burns Novick program begins by saying that the Vietnam War started through the efforts of "decent men". If you think that Nixon, the Dulles brothers and Lansdale were decent men you may be living in an alternative universe from the rest of us.

Here is my four part review of that shameful pastiche:

https://kennedysandking.com/reviews/ken-...r-part-one