Bob Gunton Quotes
Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon's.
Gunton, Bob. "Playing the President: It Took a Role as Richard Nixon to Help an Actor Overcome His Deep-Seated Hatred for the Man." Los Angeles Times, 10 Aug. 1997.
See the Macnama telephone quotation when the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted many more combat soldiers in Vietnam. Johnson felt he had no political choice.
This was the inception of the Civil War draft.
Had he signed such a treaty in 1968, he would have been pilloried by the Conservatives of both parties for selling out the interests and principles of the United States and shackling the military before they could win the war. The military was lying about their successes and there were very few. Further, our ally whose government we were protecting from armed revolution was totally corrupt and did not support freedom and democratic values much more than the North Vietnamese Communists did. The Vietnamese in the South had little to fight for unless they were proofing from the corrupt government. There was no possibility that American could have won the war under those conditions. When the Nixon Administration signed the treaty, some of the ultra conservatives objected, but Nixon was a Republican anti-Communist and red baiter and this blunted the opposition of the bulk of the conservatives who were seeing a more realistic view of the war. The liberals who hated Nixon, however, supported him on this matter which was then their most important issue.
Robert Patrick Gunton Jr. is an American character actor of stage and screen. He is known for playing strict, authoritarian characters, including Warden Samuel Norton in the 1994 prison drama The Shawshank Redemption, Chief George Earle in 1993's Demolition Man, Dr. Walcott, the domineering dean of Virginia Medical School in Patch Adams, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in Argo. He also played Leland Owlsley in the Daredevil television series, Secretary of Defense Ethan Kanin in 24, and Noah Taylor in Desperate Housewives.
