25-09-2017, 08:57 AM
(This post was last modified: 25-09-2017, 09:23 AM by Joseph McBride.)
Excellent job, Jim. The best piece I've seen on the series by far. Keep up the good work.
There's much to expose about this mendacious and often tedious as well as outrageous piece of propaganda.
It constantly makes me think of the comment by Daniel Ellsberg (who is conspicuously not interviewed)
that in Vietnam we weren't on the wrong side, we WERE the wrong side. That kind of clarity is missing
from the series. The biggest problem is the lack of perspective about why we were there.
In 1972 I covered a speech by Henry Kissinger's deputy William Sullivan at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (Sullivan would go
on to become ambassador to Iran). He was asked by someone why we were still in Vietnam. He said
we were there because we wanted to control the oil in the South China Sea. That went out on the AP
wire along with his comment about the resumption of the Paris peace talks. It caused a ruckus. They tried to deny what
he said. I produced my notes. Then they said it was supposed to be off-the-record. I produced a letter on the letterhead of the organization
inviting my newspaper (The Wisconsin State Journal) to cover the event. The only book on Vietnam
that I have read that mentions the oil in the South China Sea as a motive is Noam Chomsky's intemperate hit job on JFK,
which amidst much nonsense makes the intriguing observation that we didn't "lose" the war,
as the conventional wisdom has it, because those who wanted the war and profited from it
made out like bandits.
It seems that one of the ultimate taboos in our modern history is to mention how JFK was
in the process of beginning the withdrawal when Johnson reversed his policies on Nov. 24, 1963.
THE VIETNAM WAR fails to mention any of this (Errol Morris's THE FOG OF WAR does discuss it).
Burns & Novick fail to use the striking telephone conversations between LBJ and Sen. Richard Russell
in which Russell precisely predicts in 1964 that the war will cost 50,000 American lives
and take ten years and will be unwindable, and Johnson admits he knows it's unwinnable
but is powerless to stop it. The people and companies who put him in office (e.g., Halliburton,
Bell Helicopter, General Dynamics) made that part of the deal, to expand the
war for their profit. The human cost did not matter to them. It helped destroy LBJ. You don't
get that in Robert Caro's recent volume either.
There's much to expose about this mendacious and often tedious as well as outrageous piece of propaganda.
It constantly makes me think of the comment by Daniel Ellsberg (who is conspicuously not interviewed)
that in Vietnam we weren't on the wrong side, we WERE the wrong side. That kind of clarity is missing
from the series. The biggest problem is the lack of perspective about why we were there.
In 1972 I covered a speech by Henry Kissinger's deputy William Sullivan at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (Sullivan would go
on to become ambassador to Iran). He was asked by someone why we were still in Vietnam. He said
we were there because we wanted to control the oil in the South China Sea. That went out on the AP
wire along with his comment about the resumption of the Paris peace talks. It caused a ruckus. They tried to deny what
he said. I produced my notes. Then they said it was supposed to be off-the-record. I produced a letter on the letterhead of the organization
inviting my newspaper (The Wisconsin State Journal) to cover the event. The only book on Vietnam
that I have read that mentions the oil in the South China Sea as a motive is Noam Chomsky's intemperate hit job on JFK,
which amidst much nonsense makes the intriguing observation that we didn't "lose" the war,
as the conventional wisdom has it, because those who wanted the war and profited from it
made out like bandits.
It seems that one of the ultimate taboos in our modern history is to mention how JFK was
in the process of beginning the withdrawal when Johnson reversed his policies on Nov. 24, 1963.
THE VIETNAM WAR fails to mention any of this (Errol Morris's THE FOG OF WAR does discuss it).
Burns & Novick fail to use the striking telephone conversations between LBJ and Sen. Richard Russell
in which Russell precisely predicts in 1964 that the war will cost 50,000 American lives
and take ten years and will be unwindable, and Johnson admits he knows it's unwinnable
but is powerless to stop it. The people and companies who put him in office (e.g., Halliburton,
Bell Helicopter, General Dynamics) made that part of the deal, to expand the
war for their profit. The human cost did not matter to them. It helped destroy LBJ. You don't
get that in Robert Caro's recent volume either.
