Halle P's List: Other Research

• Richard M. Nixon, speech, April 16, 1954.
• If in order to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia and particularly in Indo-China, if in order to avoid it we must take the risk by putting American boys in, I believe that the executive branch of the government has to take the politically unpopular position of facing up to it and doing it, and I personally would support such a decision.

  • IMPORTANT!! This is the controversy
• John F. Kennedy, speech, New York Times, October 13, 1960.
• Should I become President...I will not risk American lives...by permitting any other nation to drag us into the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time through an unwise commitment that is unwise militarily, unnecessary to our security and unsupported by our allies.
• John F. Kennedy, 1961
• Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.
• Barry M. Goldwater, Why Not Victory?, 1962.
• Once upon a time our traditional goal in war and can anyone doubt that we are at war? - was victory. Once upon a time we were proud of our strength, our military power. Now we seem ashamed of it. Once upon a time the rest of the world looked to us for leadership. Now they look to us for a quick handout and a fence-straddling international posture.
• Lyndon Johnson, Oct. 1964
• We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

• Ronald Reagan, 1964

    

  We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.

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• Richard M. Nixon, 1985

    

  No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

• Martha Gellhorn, 1986

    

  America has made no reparation to the Vietnamese, nothing. We are the richest people in the world and they are among the poorest. We savaged them, though they had never hurt us, and we cannot find it in our hearts, our honor, to give them help - because the government of Vietnam is Communist. And perhaps because they won.

• Henry Kissinger, White House Years, 1979.

     

  Psychologists or sociologists may explain some day what it is about that distant monochromatic land, of green mountains and fields merging with an azure sea, that for millennia has acted as a magnet for foreigners who sought glory there and found frustration, who believed that in its rice fields and jungles some principle was to be established and entered them only to recede in disillusion.

        

  • disillusion= to free from or deprive of illusion, belief, idealism, etc.; disenchant.

• Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1979

    

  Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.

• Henry Kissinger, 1979

    

  Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.

          

• Ronald Reagan, Oct. 1980

    

  It's time that we recognized that ours was in truth a noble cause.

      

• Philip Caputo, 1982

    

  There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.

  • PTSD comes from this guilt. (numbing or insanity)

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• Richard M. Nixon, speech, April 16, 1954.

•   

  If in order to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia and particularly in Indo-China, if in order to avoid it we must take the risk by putting American boys in, I believe that the executive branch of the government has to take the politically unpopular position of facing up to it and doing it, and I personally would support such a decision.

• John F. Kennedy, speech, New York Times, October 13, 1960.

     

  Should I become President...I will not risk American lives...by permitting any other nation to drag us into the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time through an unwise commitment that is unwise militarily, unnecessary to our security and unsupported by our allies.

        

• John F. Kennedy, 1961

    

  Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.

• Barry M. Goldwater, Why Not Victory?, 1962.

    

  Once upon a time our traditional goal in war and can anyone doubt that we are at war? - was victory. Once upon a time we were proud of our strength, our military power. Now we seem ashamed of it. Once upon a time the rest of the world looked to us for leadership. Now they look to us for a quick handout and a fence-straddling international posture.

• Lyndon Johnson, Oct. 1964

    

  We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

• Ronald Reagan, 1964

    

  We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.

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• George McGovern, speech to U.S. Senate, April 25, 1967.

     

  We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it....I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness which, sooner or later, will envelop my son and American youth by the millions for years to come.

• Unidentified U.S. Army major, on decision to bomb Bentre, Vietnam, February 7, 1968.

     

  It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.

• Richard M. Nixon, 1969

    

  Let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

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• It was a war that could have been avoided totally if only the military officials in
   Washington D.C. had seen what would happen to the country once the war began.
• t opened up our countries eyes to the fact that our government is not perfect and sometimes does not act on the will of the people. The media coverage of the war brought the people’s attention to this small corner of the world, and an acknowledgement that our enemies are not necessarily inferior to us.
• We won every battle, took most of our objectives, and held off numerous North Vietnamese counter-attacks. Yet, the public perceives that we lost this war because of the fact that we left.
• If we had stayed, we could have very well achieved victory. It was just that the war was very costly and the American public was tired of it.

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• trace their roots back to the end of World War II.
• A French colony, Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, & Cambodia) had been occupied by the Japanese during the war. In 1941, a Vietnamese nationalist movement, the Viet Minh, was formed by Ho Chi Minh to resist the occupiers. A communist, Ho Chi Minh waged a guerilla war against the Japanese with the support of the United States.
• Near the end of the war, the Japanese began to promote Vietnamese nationalism and ultimately granted the country nominal independence.
• Following the Japanese defeat, the French returned to take possession of their colony. Their entrance into Vietnam was only permitted by the Viet Minh after assurances had been given that the country would gain independence as part of the French Union.
• in December 1946, the French shelled the city of Haiphong and forcibly reentered the capital, Hanoi.
• These actions began a conflict between the French and the Viet Minh known as the First Indochina War.
• French were decisively defeated
• Viet Minh in control of the north and a non-communist state to be formed in the south under Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem.
• Initially, the United States had little interest in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, however as it became clear that the post-World War II world would be dominated by the US and its allies and the Soviet Union and theirs, isolating communist movements took an increased importance.
• These concerns were ultimately formed into the doctrine of containment and domino theory. First spelled out 1947, containment identified that the goal of Communism was to spread to capitalist states and that the only way to stop it was to “contain” it within its present borders. Springing from containment was the concept of domino theory which stated that if one state in a region were to fall to Communism, then the surrounding states would inevitably fall as well. These concepts were to dominate and guide US foreign policy for much of the Cold War.
• In 1950, to combat the spread of Communism, the United States began supplying the French military in Vietnam with advisors and funding its efforts against the “red” Viet Minh. These efforts continued in 1956, when advisors were provided to train the army of the new Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). Despite their best efforts, the quality of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was to remain consistently poor throughout its existence.

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