20-05-2018, 08:42 PM
(This post was last modified: 20-05-2018, 09:33 PM by 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
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
