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Originally Posted by cremebrulee
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You're completely wrong, cremebrulee…
I'm old enough to have been around back then as a young adult.
Kennedy was the one who first involved the U.S. into the mess in Vietnam, beginning in late 1962 as the Diem regime in S. Vietnam began falling apart.
Jack Kennedy was a Cold Warrior to the bone. His Senatorial voting records show this, and he fully supported the foundation of SEATO, the Southeast Treaty Organization, created by Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Dulles.
SEATO was intended to be the Asian equivalent of NATO in Europe, but it never jelled as a solid anti-Communist bloc of allies, as most of the signatory nations had recently emerged from western colonization and/or were still recovering from their brutal treatment under the Japanese during WWII. Vietnam was the largest nation in the group, and the French had really messed it up trying to hang onto it as a colony.
North Vietnam became the half where the nationalists, who wanted an independent Vietnam fled to when they French went after them in the south. South Vietnam remained pro-French throughout the prolonged conflict.
Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first and foremost. He had been exiled by the French long before, and had returned only after the end of World War II. At first, he tried to seek the United States as an ally against the French, using some of our former OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) operatives as his intermediaries. The men couldn't gain any interest from our state department, who all supported the French.
As a young man, Ho spent years living in France and in the United States, and later, in Moscow. Still later, he spent time in China when Chiang Kai-shek briefly ruled while trying to fight the Japanese.
His time in France made him a nationalist, but he was open to any western belief that would allow Ho to bring about his nation's independence. Ho wanted a socialist democracy for his native land, but wanted it to be built on a U.S. style Constitution. If not ours, then the Communist model would suffice.
Most of all, he wanted wanted arms and aid to drive the French out. After his discussions with our guys went nowhere, he turned to the Russians, who were seeking their own sphere of influence in the region, and they were happy to oblige him.
By the time Kennedy was elected, Ho had created a socialist state built on the Communist model, while South Vietnam fell into a dictatorship. The Diem family were very unpopular from the first, as they were Catholics and oppressed the Buddist majority severely. By the time Kennedy sent in our first troops, all military advisors, South Vietnam was in the beginnings of a civil war. President Diem was assassinated in 1963, and from then on, every South Vietnamese leader was a puppet of the United States.
Within a few months of Diem's death, Kennedy was assassinated.
Johnson was a complete outsider in the Kennedy administration. As a new President, Johnson was in no position to kick out Kennedy's Secretaries, and he had to follow Kennedy's early steps into intervention in Vietnam. For political reasons of his own, he began escalating the intervention into Vietnam in 1965.
Johnson's real desire was the creation of the Great Society, and he managed to get it realized. How much he wanted to win in Vietnam is something that remains unknown, but he was a man of his time, and was also a Cold Warrior. From the viewpoint of the time, Korea's stalemate was a successful stop to the widespread belief that the Communists wanted to take over the world, so Johnson may have thought a similar permanent stalemate would happen in Vietnam.
Whatever his thoughts were, no one in Washington foresaw or understood the resolve of the Vietnamese desire to be independent of all westerners and free to live in their own independent nation. Uncle Ho was not a good man; he was as brutal his his opposition as the Diems were, but he was always the figure in his nation who was the fiercest nationalist, and no nation, not even the United States, could overcome that.
Johnson became mired just as Bush was mired in Iraq, and Nixon did no better than Johnson. The United States simply could not tolerate the thought of losing it's war, ever. 50 years later, we are still suffering divisions that came from that loss.
But that does not make Johnson an evil man, either in his actions during the civil rights movement nor during the conduct of the war.
Remember that Selma is a movie, and movies always have historical inaccuracies. It's also good to remember that MLK was a Republlcan.
I enlisted in 1965 when I was 21 years old and watched it all unfold.
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