Each year I update this post to remind myself to remember -- all the more timely given the current campus strife and the 50th anniversary of the fall of Vietnam .
When I arrived in October’74 I said it would all be over when North Vietnamese aircraft showed up over Southern battlefields, they trumped that thought by using the captured A-37s. Reading HR McMasters Dereliction of Duty last year was like reading a criminal indictment of several generations of leadership in DC that decided to fight a war knowing they couldn’t win it. I always thought as well that they didn’t give another credence to the one real advantage held by the Vietnamese who knew that “we’ll still be here” whatever the US did. From the student viewpoint Kent State was an incentive but when I found unexpected joiners in the demos and asked why they simply named a friend who’d been killed in the war - it was getting closer to them and less abstract. You make some interesting points about Nixon’s handling of the war and info available to him which raises the interesting counter factual of how it might have happened differently if all the US administrations had been more frank and open with the American electorate.
Washington always seemed to have a different picture of the war. But I am reminded of: "The saying "The children kill the frogs in jest, while the frogs die in earnest" is a proverb often attributed to the Greek philosopher Bion of Borysthenes." (Google)
When I arrived in October’74 I said it would all be over when North Vietnamese aircraft showed up over Southern battlefields, they trumped that thought by using the captured A-37s. Reading HR McMasters Dereliction of Duty last year was like reading a criminal indictment of several generations of leadership in DC that decided to fight a war knowing they couldn’t win it. I always thought as well that they didn’t give another credence to the one real advantage held by the Vietnamese who knew that “we’ll still be here” whatever the US did. From the student viewpoint Kent State was an incentive but when I found unexpected joiners in the demos and asked why they simply named a friend who’d been killed in the war - it was getting closer to them and less abstract. You make some interesting points about Nixon’s handling of the war and info available to him which raises the interesting counter factual of how it might have happened differently if all the US administrations had been more frank and open with the American electorate.
Washington always seemed to have a different picture of the war. But I am reminded of: "The saying "The children kill the frogs in jest, while the frogs die in earnest" is a proverb often attributed to the Greek philosopher Bion of Borysthenes." (Google)