Rick Perlstein Quotes
When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.
Perlstein, Rick. The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. Simon & Schuster, 2014.
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.
John E. Puerifoy, the American ambassador to Guatemala
Chomsky was not asserting this statement as the truth. He was making the statement assuming that the absurdity of it would be clear to the listener and they would also realize that was what the then government policy was. North Vietnamese had infiltrated the South and had much support in many of the South Vietnamese villages. When the U. S. bombed the North Vietnamese—and the Vietnamese inhabitants—of those villages, the intention was indeed to help the South Vietnamese. If Chomsky were a politician running for office, his opponent might well have taken this quote and used it to “prove” that Chomsky supported the American effort in the Vietnam War when he was a vehement opponent.
On November 3, 1979, the KKK had attacked a demonstration of Communists in Greensboro, NC and murdered 5 communists. The head of the Klan in NC saw no moral difference in gunning down 5 unarmed demonstrators and killing communist soldiers in The Vietnam War. Despite news video which clearly shows the shootings, an all white jury acquitted the 6 murderers. Later, they and the Greensboro police force were found guilty in a civil trial.
Up to that time U. S. policy was to provide training and assistance to the South Vietnamese government and military, but not to attack the North. America had backed a corrupt and incompetent South Vietnamese government and Bundy and other policy makers were convinced that the North Vietnam would win, if the fighting and governing were solely left to the South Vietnamese. Johnson, who had resisted this policy for several weeks finally acceded. It was a major escalation of the Vietnam War.
sending American troops to Vietnam
Eric S. Perlstein is an American historian and journalist who has garnered recognition for his chronicles of the 1960s and 1970s, and the American conservative movement. The author of three bestselling books, Perlstein received the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Politico has dubbed him "a chronicler extraordinaire of modern conservatism."
