Homer Bigart Quotes
Actually, the United States has been deeply involved in the fate of Vietnam since 1949 when the decision was made to subsidize the continuation of French rule against the Communist Vietminh rebellion
Homer Bigart, 1907-1991, War Correspondent, “A 'Very Real War' in Vietnam, and the Deep U.S. Commitment”, New York Times, February 25, 1962
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The occasion was the visit to Washington of French Minister M. Jean Letourneau. The French were fighting the communists in Vietnam and the U. S., not yet in the fight, promised material and political aid, but no military participation. It was almost a decade later that America sent its first military personnel to Vietnam. The West was persuaded that the French could handle the situation. When they were defeated, America and Britain assumed that it was the notorious military incompetence of the French that accounted for the situation rather than the competence and commitment of the Vietnamese Communists and their support of the majority of the people.
Most socialists in American and elsewhere initially supported the United States policy of intervention in the Vietnamese civil war. While they disapproved of much of the general economic policy, the Russian, Chinese and other Communist trampling on human rights seemed like a worse alternative.
Nguyen Ai Quoc was early pseudonym. It was many years and millions of combatants sacrificed, but the Vietnamese resistance finally won.
Giro'n is the Cuban name for the Bay of Pigs.
After the French were driven out, Vietnam was supposed to have a national election to choose a government but the people of Vietnam were deeply split between those supporting the Communists and Ho Chi Min (who had led the campaign to oust the French from their colony) on one side and Vietnamese who were more Westernized and favored a democracy. Vietnam was mostly Buddhist but most of the Western oriented leadership of the Democracy advocates were Christians. They wanted to delay the election to give them a chance to organize to catch up with the communists at political organization. Ho Chi Min and the Communists already do facto controlled the North of Vietnam and decided to use force against the Western oriented forces whose military was much smaller than the Communists who had ejected the French. The United States provided financial aid and supplied weapons and Central Intelligence Agency assistance to the South Vietnam forces who were afraid of being overrun by the Communists headquartered in the North. Taylor’s mission was to go to Vietnam, assess the situation and make recommendations to President Kennedy.
Later, when he ran for the Democratic Presidential Nomination had had changed his mind and was a major opponent of the Vietnam War. This was the pattern of so many Americans whose first instinct was to support the government’s decision to wage war, and over time grew disenchanted with the war and ended up opposing the war actively.
Most Americans had not then realized that American troops had gotten involved in the Vietnamese Civil War. For some this was shocking. Kennedy helped his brother, President Kennedy, arrange for a coup to replace President Ngo Dinh Diem in which the man we pledged to “stand by” was murdered. He turned out to be thoroughly corrupt, and had little if any more respect for democracy and human rights than the North Vietnamese leadership did. Nonetheless we broke a pledge to an ally. This and similar promises that are not kept complicates American diplomacy as there is rarely complete trust in the pledges of American officials.
His prediction was correct. However, most of the direct force for withdrawal came from the people of America and not the Vietnamese.
Homer William Bigart was an American reporter who worked for the New York Herald Tribune from 1929 to 1955 (later known as the International Herald Tribune) and for The New York Times from 1955 to his retirement in 1972. He was considered a "reporter's reporter" and an "enduring role model." He won two Pulitzer Prizes as a war correspondent, as well as most of the other major journalism awards.
