2011-06-04
Revisiting Vietnam
My first memory of the Vietnam war is chanting "Hey-hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today" as we pretended to be peace marchers. That would have been before David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest was published. I was probably only 6 or 7 but I was putting the blame squarely on Johnson at that point although I probably wasn't too sophisticated in my analysis.
James DiEugenio's recent post on Consortiumnews, Halberstam’s ‘Best-Brightest’ Blunder, gave me a chance to revist that time. I have never read Halberstam's book so DiEugenio's main thesis, that Halberstam got it wrong in blaming "the folly of action-oriented intellectuals who surrounded President John F. Kennedy and whose hubris supposedly plunged the nation into a destructive war," was somewhat lost on me. But I found the details about the pre-Kennedy period eye-opening. He also argues that Kennedy was actually on the road to withdrawal until he was assassinated.
Eisenhower joined the French in support Bao Dai government by providing air support and influencing the outcome of the Geneva peace talks.This was a reaction to the Chinese revolution.
After the French defeat, it was John Foster Dulles who controlled the Geneva Agreements, which ended the First Indochina War in 1954. Dulles coordinated what was essentially a damage-control operation.
The key point in the peace agreement was that Vietnam was to be temporarily divided at the 17th parallel and free elections were to be held in 1956 to unify the country under one leader.
But Dulles knew that the North Vietnamese communist Ho Chi Minh would win these elections in a landslide.
So even though Dulles’s representative at the conference read a statement saying that the U.S. would honor the agreement and that America would not use force to upset the deal, the U.S. did not sign the agreement, thus giving the Americans an out for later violating it.
Covert operations began almost immediately as the US worked to undermine Bao Dai and install Ngo Dinh Diem. And as DiEugenio makes clear "The crisis in South Vietnam – largely the consequence of decisions made by the Eisenhower administration – is what the Kennedy administration encountered when it entered office."
DiEugenio's description of Kennedy's handling of the war focuses on his efforts to resist war hawks in the CIA and his administration who were pushing for US combat troops to be sent to Vietnam to prop up the Diem regime. Kennedy sent John K. Galbraith to Vietnam to get a more favourable report then the one commissioned by Eisenhower and produced by the CIA. Armed with that he pushed for a plan for American withdrawal from Vietnam. DiEugenio concludes "Rather than a hubristic continuum from Kennedy to Johnson, Kennedy’s assassination marked a dramatic change in direction for the Vietnam War. If Kennedy had not been assassinated, he might have completed the withdrawal after his reelection in 1964."
Labels: eisenhower, kennedy, united states, vietnam
2009-01-26
Sean Penn, Rae Abileah and the art of listening I found these two accounts very interesting to read together. In Mountain or Snakes (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sean-penn/mountain-of-snakes_b_146765.html, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sean-penn/mountain-of-snakes-part-i_b_147239.html) Sean Penn reports his experiences traveling to Venezuela and Cuba and meeting with Chavez and Raul Castro. In her diary of the (http://codepink4peace.org/blog/2008/12/a-week-in-iran-raes-diary/, http://codepink4peace.org/blog/2008/12/week-two-in-iran-raes-diary/) Rae Abileah recounts her trip to Iran with the Fellowship of Reconciliation Iran Peace Delegation.
These are two reports of visits to countries the US officially sees as pariah states. Penn is able to meet with high profile leaders. Abileah is part of an interfaith mission and meets with community leaders. But they both have an ability to listen without judging and they communicate that to the reader. They are not uncritical and they are honest about what they see and hear. And I came away convinced that relations with these countries can be improved, must be improved and that listening is the key.
Labels: code pink, communication, cuba, iran, rae, sean penn, venezuela
2009-01-06
Labels: American song, McCarthyism, socialism, yip harburg
