Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Haywood
This is like the claim that JFK would have withdrawn from Vietnam. His partisans believe it, despite the dearth of direct quotes.
William Manchester, in One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering Kennedy (hokey title, but he did know the guy a little), quotes JFK telling Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963, ' "It is their war. We can help them, we can send them equipment, we can send men out there as advisers... but in the final analysis it is their people and their government who have to win or lose this struggle. All we can do is help." A month later, on October 2, at the end of a National Security Council meeting, he told McNamara to announce to the waiting press that a thousand US advisers were to brought home from Vietnam by Christmas, and that he expected the last American to leave there before the end of 1965. While McNamara was still in earshot, Kennedy added: "And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too." The secretary rephrased this message, thereby altering its meaning. He merely said that in his opinion "the major part of the US military task" could be "completed by the end of 1965." But the President's verbatim instructions remain in the records of the National Security Council. And he followed them up. McNamara having weaseled presidential words, the President unweaseled them. On the last day of October he told the nation: [This must have been at his news conference that day, but it's not included in the YouTube extract] "Our object is to bring home every American technician, helicopter pilot, and military adviser by the end of 1965, permitting the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country." Nor did he stop there. On November 14, 1963 -- eight days before he died -- he announced that the first thousand men were already packing and would be on their way home by Christmas.'
Some direct quotes there. Kennedy seems to have regarded detachment from the tar-baby of Vietnam as a '64 election priority. He always refused to commit US conscripts, or jets, to the theatre, and his attitude was very different from VP LBJ's. But, because of 'a punk with a mail-order gun', we ended up with LBJ, and the rest is history, of a depressing kind.
The movie Go Tell The Spartans, with Burt Lancaster, set in Vietnam in 1964, is quite an interesting critique of the deluded US involvement, after JFK but before LBJ's ramp-up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Tell_the_Spartans
The title comes from the motto on the gate of a 1950s French military cemetery that the American 'advisers' discover, citing the historic epitaph of Leonidas's Spartans at Thermopylae. One of the Americans (a conscript, but one who volunteered for Vietnam) translates the French as, 'Stranger, when you find us here, go tell the Spartans that we died according to their laws.' Underrated movie.
Last edited by 57 On Red; 01-17-2024 at 03:25 PM.