Raul Grijalva Quotes
More than half the combat deaths in Vietnam occurred after Richard Nixon was elected on a promise to bring the war to an end, and after the American people had already decided that they did not want one more soldier to die in Vietnam.
Grijalva, Raúl. Congressional Remarks. Congressional Record, Government Printing Office, 15 June 2006, p. H4064.
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.
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.
Berger was actually prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years in prison, for this editorial. The House refused to seat him after the 1918 election (see {587981}); his constituents re-elected him in 1920 anyway. Finally the Supreme Court overturned his conviction, and he was again seated in Congress.
In 1963 there was only one Congressman who expressed misgivings about United States military involvement in Vietnam:
Raúl Manuel Grijalva is an American politician who serves as the U.S. Representative for Arizona's 3rd congressional district, serving since 2003. He is a member of the Democratic Party. The district, numbered as the 7th district from 2003 to 2013, includes the western third of Tucson, part of Yuma and Nogales, and some peripheral parts of metro Phoenix. He is the current dean of Arizona's congressional delegation.
