11-04-2009, 11:47 AM
Peter Lemkin Wrote:The complete
Argo interview
by Perry Adams with Mort Sahl
(This interview was conducted at the Hungry i in San Francisco on Monday, March 18th, 1968)
ARGO: Why is the truth behind the assassination of President Kennedy the last chance of America for its survival?
SAHL: Because the evidence developed by District Attorney Garrison indicates that certain people had to take President Kennedy's life in order to control ours. In other words, as Richard Starnes of the New York World-Telegram said, the shots in Dallas were the opening shots of World War III.
The WWIII feared by Starnes - and many others - in this period was with China: The US "Strike North" clique nearly pulled it off, too.
Quote:The Washington Daily News, 8 April 1965, p.37
The Great Dilemma
By Richard Starnes
Lyndon Johnson, who is more dedicated to government by consensus than any President since Warren Harding, has fallen short of generating wide public support for his policy in Viet Nam.
Indeed, Administration brinksmanship in Southeast Asia finds more favor among Republicans than it does among the President’s own party. A Gallup Poll taken before the President made his Johns Hopkins speech found 41 per cent of Americans favored peace negotiations, 42 per cent favored sending more troops and planes, and 17 per cent expressed no opinion.
But when replies were broken down by party affiliation, they showed that most of the Democrats who held an opinion favoured peace talks. Of Democrats polled, 43 per cent backed negotiations, 40 per cent favored increased armed intervention, and 17 per cent were undecided. Republicans showed 45 per cent in favor of greater troop commitment, only 38 per cent in favor of negotiations, and 17 per cent undecided.
Abroad, of course, American policy in Southeast Asia is almost universally mistrusted. An extraordinary Japanese mission to Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos conducted by Shunichi Matsumoto, a respected diplomat and former envoy to Britain, concluded that it was doubtful the U.S. could prevail in Viet Nam by force of arms.
Mr. Matsumoto questioned the basic American assumption that the Viet Cong was the creature of North Viet Nam and communist China, or event that it was largely communist character.
“Even the people of Saigon,” he reported, calculate communist strength in the Viet Cong is “at most 30 per cent.”
The Japanese diplomat, who is an influential adviser to the staunchly pro-American government in Tokyo, went so far as to suggest the Viet Cong guerilla forces “could possibly be called a movement somewhat similar to the resistance of the French underground during World War II.
“It can be said that the Viet Cong is not directly connected to Communist China or the Soviet Union.
“Consequently it is not certain that the Viet Cong will give up fighting because of the bombing of North Viet Nam.”
This same opinion is shared by many of the people who took the trouble to study the U.S. State Department’s “white paper” on Viet Nam. The document purported to show that the civil war in South Viet Nam was sponsored, directed, equipped and manned largely from North Viet Nam. But scrutiny of the white paper revealed that it demonstrated the reverse of what it undertook to show. Documented instances of help from North Viet Nam to the guerillas in the south just could not be reconciled with the magnitude of the Viet Cong war effort.
The inescapable truth is that the war in South Viet Nam is largely a self-supporting civil war that is being supplied almost wholly by captured U.S. weapons.
This leads to the vital question of what would happen even should Hanoi succumb to the pressure bombing and withdraw support from the Viet Cong. If, as Mr. Matsumoto and others have concluded, the guerilla war contains large elements of indigenous nationalism, it is at least possible that the Viet Cong will continue to fight.
If that happens, it will leave President Johnson beset by a dilemma even more cruel than the one that faced him when his advisers from the Department of Defense and CIA reluctantly informed him that the pretense of organized resistance from Saigon was not long for this world, and that other harsh alternatives had to be considered.
Like all Presidents, Mr, Johnson is concerned with the ultimate judgment which history will pass on him and his Administration. Further miscalculation in Southeast Asia could lead it to the grim conclusion that the first shot of World War III was the one that killed John F. Kennedy in Dallas.