JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Vietnam

By David in TN and Nicholas Stix

[Re: “Don’t Get All Excited About Donald Trump’s Humble Foreign Policy, Just Yet”; and

“Containment Theory is Dead! Long Live Containment Theory! (Communists Always Lie About History… and Everything Else”).
 

David in TN: Have you noticed how some people say with absolute assurance "JFK would have pulled us out of Vietnam. There would have been no war?"

Well, we can never tell what living presidents or presidential candidates are going to do. Often, their foreign policy does not resemble what it was presumed to be prior to the election.
 

N.S.: I make no claim to be a scholar of the War in Vietnam, but like you, I grew up during it, such that anytime I see mention of a fellow citizen named “Nguyen” or “Trinh,” I become quiet and melancholy. The last chopper taking off from the American Embassy in Saigon, and all that.

I recall, clear as day, that JFK had sent tens of thousands of “military advisors” to South Vietnam.

How many military men were necessary to send to a little country like that, to serve as actual “advisors,” rather than warriors? Ten? Fifty?

I believe that we were already fighting in Vietnam, long before the Gulf of Tonkin “Incident,” and even before Communist assassin Lee Harvey Oswald murdered our President. In any event, Kennedy would have gotten us in Vietnam just as deep as Johnson eventually would. However, I do not believe that Jack Kennedy would have made the sort of botch of Vietnam that Lyndon Johnson did. Johnson imposed unwinnable rules of engagement. He had our military men fighting a purely defensive war on South Vietnamese soil.

I just can’t see Navy combat veteran and hardcore anti-Communist Jack Kennedy doing that.

Note, too, that virtually everyone back then, Communist and anti-Communist alike, believed in the Domino Theory, whereby losing South Vietnam would lead to losing all of Southeast Asia. And the Communist conquest of South Vietnam and ensuing collapse of its neighbors and “killing fields”—remember Pol Pot?—were confirmations of the Domino Theory.

However, we might have lost Vietnam, in spite of all that. After all, we lost Nixon, because the pro-Communist Democrats had to exact “revenge” against him for Alger Hiss, and their refusal to honor our obligation to provide the South Vietnamese with air cover against the invading Communists from the North, was part of that “revenge.”

With all that in mind, the distinction between “Communist” and “Communist sympathizer” is eliminated. Only a communist—small or big “C”—would destroy presidencies and entire nations, for the sake of the “honor” of a Communist agent and traitor.

Blacks are similar. They support every kind of evil, using the cover story of defiance against whites. But there’s no way around the fact that they support every sort of evil. That makes them not merely “defiant,” but evil.