Ken Burns And The Vietnam War: 10 Items To Watch For

Sgt Bob Leonard, it was the American left throwing away everything that we had fought for and forcing the first American military failure in the history of our nation.

And they really did side with our enemy and against our troops as well as our government. And Fulbright was foremost among them.

"Few doubt that American public opinion played an important role in the decision-making process on Vietnam during the Johnson years. The effect this movement had on Johnson was surely stronger than the effect afterwards on Nixon, because 'left' Democratic politicians joined the antiwar movement. The most influential among them was senator Fulbright..."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40905770_The_role_of_William_Fulbright_in_the_movement_against_the_Vietnam_War

Capt Seid Waddell - The paragraph preceding your citation...

"An indication of the impression made on the Johnson administration could be the fact that it instructed the CIA to prepare a study on the “International Connections of the US Peace Movements”.... Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and two catholic priests, the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan ...participated in international peace conferences within the framework of their clerical activities, i.e., absolutely legally... The CIA was quite aware of this fact, but it did not fit into the concept, since: “The President and other administration officials did of course have the facts. But they had little use for facts that failed to sustain their suspicions or their political needs”.

The rest of that paragraph you cite...

"... The most influential among them was Senator Fulbright, whose activities in this context will be considered later. According to M. Small, politicians such as Fulbright, the President’s advisors, who very often came from universities and held discussions about the antiwar movement with their colleagues and - last but not least - the influence on the private life of the politicians, constitute the links which connect the antiwar movement and the political decision makers, in particular the President: “The very irritating problem affected all members of the Johnson family, as seen vividly in Lady Bird Johnson’s memoirs”13."

Can you imagine such a thing? American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to express their displeasure with the War, irritating, "... all members of the Johnson family, as seen vividly in Lady Bird Johnson’s memoirs”13."


What is even more telling is that Pres. Johnson and his administration, "...had little use for facts that failed to sustain their suspicions or their political needs”.


Further along on that same page, we read, "The first contacts between American soldiers (agents) and the Vietminh at the end of the Second World War tended to be friendly, which is due to the fact that the United States had at first supported the end of the colonial age: “When the unchallenged leader of Vietnam proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) on September 2, 1945, Americans and Vietminh, OSS agents and Ho Chi Minh could look back on a period of successful cooperation”16."

i.e. As WW2 ended, not only were we (the USA) on friendly terms with HCM and the Viet Minh, we had trained and equipped them and fought alongside them in defeating Japan in SEA.

Continuing...

"One of the results of the Geneva Indochina conference, which solved none of the region’s problems, was the partition of Vietnam into a Northern part governed by the Vietminh, and a formally independent South, which could never have been able to exist without the massive support of the United States. The precondition for this enormous influence of the United States on South Vietnam was their decision to take over the responsibility for the safety of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This decision was taken by President Eisenhower and his foreign secretary Dulles during the Indochina conference. The effect was that “South Vietnam - an agrarian country of fewer than fifteen million people - thus acquired an international significance out of all proportion to its size18”.

"This was possible only because an almost paranoid fear of potential communist infiltration had developed domestically, which was systematically nurtured under the republican senator McCarthy: after “the traumatic impact of the loss of China to communism in 1949 … no American President wanted to be held responsible for the loss of Vietnam to the Communists”19.

"Thus, the course was set for America’s commitment in Vietnam, which seemed to grow inevitably. On the one hand, the very narrow-minded view of the world prevalent during the McCarthy era and the Cold War left no room for fundamental reorientation, on the other hand, every step which was undertaken turned out to be ineffective and required a next step to follow."


In other views from the region...


American Personnel in VN at the end of WW2 were consistent in their evaluation of the situation.

"Nowhere did the coming of Americans, in the case a mere handful of them, mean so much to a people as it did to the population of northern Indo-China. To Annamites (Annam being the French colonial name given to Northern Viet Nam), our coming was the symbol of liberation not from the Japanese occupation but from decades of French colonial rule. For the Annamite government considered the United States the principal champion of the rights of small peoples, guaranteed so promisingly by the United Nations conferences... Our prowess in the war, our vast production abilities, our progressiveness in technical and social fields- all were known by the Annamites, to a surprising degree. In their blueprint for self-government they envisaged American trade bringing them peacetime products."

"American technicians to help then industrialize Vietnam, American consulates in the political, medical and social sciences. Essentially, they feel that the French did not develop the resources of the country for the benefit of the people themselves, and in their own planning have emphasized their intention to throw Vietnam open to American commercial penetration. As a matter of practical preference they would like to see the economy of Vietnam geared to our own if that were possible or desirable to us. Above all they want the good will of the American people and our government. From the top of the Annamite leadership to the bottom of the social scale in Tonkin, every person made a visible effort to please American officers and men. They offered courtesies and simple gestures of friendship at every opportunity."

The C.B.I. (China-Burma-India Campaign) patch on the shoulder of an American was his ticket to a warm welcome and good treatment..."
- Arthur Hale, U.S. Information Agency 1945 (not declassified until 1972)


Lt. Col. Peter Dewey (US Liason Officer in Southern Viet Nam and OSS Agent): His final dispatch from Saigon in 1945: “Cochinchina (South Vietnam) is burning; the French and British are finished here, and we ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.”


Interview with Archimedes L. A. Patti, 1981
OSS Officer in Hanoi, 1945, US liason to Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh

"Ho Chi Minh was on a silver platter in 1945. We had him. He was willing to be a democratic republic, if nothing else. Socialist yes, but a democratic republican. He was leaning not towards the Soviet Union, which at the time he told me that the USSR could not assist him, could not help him because they just won a war only by dint of real heroism. And they were in no position to help anyone."

"So really, we had Ho Chi Minh, we had the Viet Minh, we had the Indochina question in our hand, but for reasons which defy good logic we find today that we supported the French for a war which they themselves dubbed “la sale guerre,” the dirty war, and we paid to the tune of 80 percent of the cost of that French war and then we picked up 100 percent of the American-Vietnam War. That is about it in a nutshell."



Interview with John A. McCone, Director of the CIA under Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson

Question: "What should Johnson have done differently in his conduct of the war?"

Answer: "In the first place, he should not have conducted it. You see, Kennedy made a mistake when he accepted the recommendations of Walt Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor to violate the 1954 agreement which restricted the military assistance group provided for the South Vietnamese to, I think, 850 military personnel, and that is the number Eisenhower held to it. He said, "An agreement is an agreement, and we're not going to increase that military assistance group." And Eisenhower stood steadfast against the recommendations of the joint chiefs of staff, who were insisting that it be increased."

"Eisenhower, among other things, in addition to standing by the treaty, said: "If you increase the United States presence in South Vietnam, then it will become our war. It won't be the South Vietnamese; they will walk away from it." Now Kennedy won the 1960 election by a narrow margin, and one of his cries was that Eisenhower had been soft on communism in Vietnam and soft on communism in Cuba."

"The first thing that he did was send Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow over to examine the situation in South Vietnam. And they came back recommending that the military assistance group be increased from 800 or 850 up to 25,000. Kennedy embraced that, but after a year he saw the folly of that agreement. He was prepared to withdraw a very substantial amount of our presence in South Vietnam -- possibly getting down to 850. I don't know.... If my memory serves me correctly, he had ordered the first 1,000 men withdrawn. But I am not sure about that. But Johnson, on the other hand, ignored all of this, and he just accepted it as a war that we had to win."

"He gradually built up to about 50,000 over there in small increments. From 25,000 we built up to about 50,000. I was very unhappy about the first 25,000, and I was desperately unhappy about the build-up, and then when Johnson, in response to some North Vietnamese actions against some of our bases, agreed with the recommendation of McNamara that he put our troops on the offensive, that is when I parted company with them."

Q: "Is this finally why you left the CIA and the Johnson administration -- the frustration over the non-receptivity to the information you were providing?"

A: "No, I didn't leave the CIA in any pique or because I was cross with anybody, but I had repeatedly told the president and the secretary of defense that he was engaging in an operation he could not win because of the way it was being waged, and from which he could extract himself only with the greatest of difficulty."



Concluding that we chose the wrong side to support in Viet Nam is not a position arrived at only in retrospect. Many knowledgeable, reasonable people in the '40s and '50s said the same thing, but they weren't heeded. "Tail Gunner" Joe McCarthy and his ilk would rather "kill a Commie for Christ" than develop a friendly ally in SEA.


CORRECTION:
I said,
"Archimedes L. A. Patti, 1981
OSS Officer in SAIGON, 1945"
Archimedes Patti was with HCM and the Viet Minh in HANOI in 1941, not Saigon

Sgt Bob Leonard, glad you read it. What did you come to understand from it?

Capt Seid Waddell - I haven't read it entirely yet. After you referenced it I went looking for it, found it, printed it, and jumped to the part you referenced. It will take a while, but I do plan to read and digest it. Thanks for sharing it.

SSG Robert Webster, leftist ideology trumps everything else - including rational thought and truth itself.