Myths of the Vietnam War
Lulves, John F.
tential costs enormous. (For one thing, you could go to jail- which would mean that your life's work as a professional politician would be instantly and forever ended..) Only an amateur, one without...
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...Clearly it used to weed out amateurs and persons who relied on amateurs- Nixons, in short, on the above, only partly valid theory of Nixon's personality and skills...
...Take, for example, the claim that Ho Chi Minh was a popular or natioffalist "George Washington...
...What is not so widely acknowledged is the reason why Nixon was surrounded by amateurs in 1972...
...So who first violated the Agreements...
...Now that this war is receding into history let us hope that the critical minds which have examined American policy so rigor- ously will begin to review the academic and journalistic accounts of the war's origin...
...Half of his references are to the Pentagon Papers and their cache of primary source material, and lead to his conclusion that they "thoroughly discredit most of the myths...
...Shows what you can do to correct the situation...
...Myths of The Vietnam War is a tight little piece of meaningful "revisionist" scholarship...
...He shows that the United States attended the Conference only as an observing "friendly nation," that it announced repeatedly that it would not support general elections in part supervised by the communists, that it signed only the Cease-Fire which but once in passing mentions "general elec- tions" someday to be held, and that it deliberately refused to sign any of the more explicit documents regarding elec- tions...
...e Political prisoners were in the news...
...Eyes bulge and pulses pound as the re-porters and gossips pile luridity atop luridity, all the time exaggerating the importance of what was perhaps little more than a lapse of campaign etiquette...
...This, one of the great canards of the era, is the infamous "Eisenhower Quote," an intellectual ripoff of the first magnitude and the century's most publicized example of quoting out of context...
...The Americans, for not holding elections which would have been impossible to hold fairl:~ ,~nyway...
...John F. Lulves CONTINUING CRISI S (continued from page 2) floods and tornados of the Mississippi Valley might be the consequence of gov- ernment policy to discontinue atmos-pheric atomic testing...
...and the result is that we end up selecting men for president who lack not only the skills of the pro, but also his habits and methods and preferences in aides...
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...So what we need to do now is to put aside the science fiction of our man-ipulative, self-aggrandizing rhetoric about Watergate as a Triumph of the System, and to turn instead to the task of developing a proper political science of Watergate...
...Not only are academicians at fault for the myths...
...Postpaid The Alternative June-September 1973...
...Indeed, Turner's 55 p .s and 200 footnotes describe a case study of the muse of history being ravished...
...Clearly the press has also played a role in the weak- erring of political parties...
...Chapter on political sophistication worth the whole book...
...Why this erosion of party has taken place is a long story, and nobody has yet told it all...
...Indeed, throughout the 1930s and 1940s Ho elim- inated thousands of noncommunist nationalist leaders, including members of the popular "Viet Nam Quoc Dang" party...
...Ho has been called the "Tito" of Vietnam, even though --ironically --Ho approved of Moscow's repudiation of Tito's inde- pendence...
...So much for academic integrity...
...This is so because the actions of "'nondictatorial and democratic oppon ents...
...Another pathology to which it is prone is the nomination of the unelectable candidate, as happened to Myths of the Vietnam War --The Pentagon Papers Reconsidered by Robert F. Turner in "Southeast Asian Perspectives" Number 7 September, 1972 In an especially lucid moment several years ago, C.L...
...This much is widely acknowledged...
...eMembers of the Watergate Seven are now being implicated in a pedestrian at- tempt to burglarize the files of an obscure California psychiatrist...
...Cultural changes seem an im-portant part of the explanation, and so are certain developments in public law over the last seventy years...
...The noncommunist, anti- French nationalist, Phan Boi Chau, whom Bernard Fall has called "Vietnam's Sun Yat-sen," Ho regarded as a rival...
...Meanwhile the media are furiously stok- ing the furnaces, trying to heat up the American people to a febrile dither, in hopes that the people will accept the media's fantastic tale about Watergate...
...They don't need to be skilled in dealing with a variety of different local organizations and interests...
...Sulzberger neatly sketched an essential impediment to .American suc- cess in Vietnam...
...Ho later sold him out to the French...
...the jet plane, the fat cat, and the media specialists have replaced the traditional party-based election cam-paign...
...But what I do say is that Watergates are not the only price we pay for our current system of presidential selection and for its divorcement from an ever weaker two-party system...
...Since that misfortune rumors have persisted to the effect that the area swarms with government agents, the representatives of several large foundations, and staff members from National Geographic magazine...
...that the United States first broke the Geneva Agreements of 1954 and refused to allow free elections in 1956...
...The North Viet-namese, Sulzberger reported, believe that their strategy is workable because "great powers engaged in small wars are more vulnerable at home than on the battle-field...
...Some have explained it in terms of Nixon's personality, which is not entirely wrong, but which leaves un-answered a further and absolutely crucial question: if Nixon's person-ality is what accounts for his willingness to hire and rely on amateurs, then what is it that accounts for the fact that Nixon, with this personality and this pre- ference, was able to successfully neg-otiate the cruel Darwinian gauntlet that is our presidential selection system...
...that American leaders utterly mis- took the communism of the nationalist Vietnamese for the monolithic, expansion- ist communism of Lenin and Stalin...
...The monograph is subtitled "The Pentagon Papers Reconsidered," and it is all the more interesting because those doughty documents, which we had all supposed supported the Anti-Vietnam History Lesson, are employed by Turner as one means to analyze the myths...
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...Is there a backwater in the country that has not had some leavings of this rendition floated upon it...
...In Tennessee civil libertarians have yet to respond to the dubious judgment of Circuit Court Judge George R. Shepherd who, on April 21, ordered the faithful of a rural cathedral to stop handling poisonous snakes in their religious observances...
...Then Turner's devastat- ing analysis reveals it all for hokum, and the.GOP in 1964 and to the Democrats in 1972...
...are governed by the majority opinion of a confused public...
...Sheds new light on cause and only possible cure of inflation and unemployment...
...the primary system has re-placed the brokered nominating con-ventions...
...that the war was a struggle by the nationalist NLF to liberate and reunite their nation, which had a thousand-year tradition of unity...
...or, to put it the other way around, our political party or-ganizations have become weaker and weaker over the past decades, to the point where they exercise shockingly lit- tle influence over the selection of pres-idential candidates and presidents...
...The personal following and the amateur club have replaced the local party organ-ization...
...That system selects a very special sort of person with very special skills and characteristics...
...This is not, of course, to say that all these pathologies are of equal magnitude...
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...indeed, it helps their image in the media if they are amateurs...
...But as we have also seen, this arrangement also seems to create a maximum probability of Watergates...
...The result is that presidents don't have to be pros to be elected or even nominated...
...Wrote Ho himself in a passage simultaneously approving Marx, Lenin, and Mao: "Viet- nam and China are two brotherly coun-tries, having close relations like 'lips and teeth.' " Or consider for a moment the manifold myths of U.S...
...and on and on the myths run...
...So why didn't it weed out Nixon in 1968 and 1972...
...they don't have to be in touch with all the different sectors of their party...
...Robert F. Turner, a Vietnamese affairs specialist on the staff of the Hoover In- stitution at Stanford University, cata-logues and examines this received wisdom under the rubric of Myths of the Vietnam War...
...Such men may find that this arrangement gives them max-imum room for maneuvering, maximum time to think and study, and maximum opportunity to exert presidential power and presidential preferences over the bureaucracy...
...Turner cites several historians who believe neither side seriously expected that the elections would be carried out, and he goes on to expose as mythology the "natural and historical unity" of both Vietnams...
...Such men have a tendency to turn the White House staff and the admin-istration as a whole into a personal court where personal loyalty is the prime con-sideration...
...Such men are often isolated from contact with the various sectors of American society...
...Did Ho, as a nationalist, reflect the Vietnamese people's innate distrust of China, as is so often claimed...
...Earlier in the month, two of the parishioners expired after guzzling strychnine during a solemn testimony of faith to which the spirits seem not to have been privy...
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...Only an amateur, one without political experience, one who does not make politics his career, one not socialized into the craft of politics, one defined not as a craftsman but as an ideologue or a courtier-only such a person could have undertaken Water-gate...
...it ruthlessly weeds out all other kinds of people...
...Discloses little known extent of union power and its abuses...
...Witness this statement in the UPI's summary history of the Vietnam war, sent to subscribers last October: "But there was another reason for the decision not to hold the election (in 1956...
...Turner's research is an auspicious beginning...
...the Watergate variety is incomparably the most virulent...
...The Alternative June-September 1973 delegate but as an official representative of the Communist International, and in fact did not again set foot on Vietnamese soil until 1941...
...Who ever reminds us that after Ho left Vietnam at the age of twenty-one (in 1911), he effectively expatriated himself, that he became one of the founders and official representatives of the French Communist Party, helped originate the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 not as a Vietnamese "THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA has an enviable but embarrassing budgetary surplus ot $850 mil- lion, which Governor Reagan would like to return 'to the peo- ple who had it in the first place.' That proposal is too drastic for some ot the Governor's critics, who conclude he is a danger-ous radical, .~ For a free copy of which is exact- NATIONAL REIy rlgh...
...All these stem, in one way or another, from the same political source: the erosion, in some areas to the point of devastation, of the political party...
...Presidential politics are now almost entirely separate from the political party...
...Incidentally, Watergate-type behavior is not the only pathological consequence of our increasingly party-less pres-idential politics...
...For those who would like to see how it is done, copies are available cheapest from ISI, 14 S. Bryn Mawr Ave., Bryn Mawr, Pa...
...There have been some willing rubes in journalism too...
...Turner, in a long series of hard-hitting arguments, effectively de-stroys this view...
...Edith Irving beg an her two-year jail term in Switzerland, and harassment of her im- prisoned husband, the controversial author, continued when authorities claimed they had found a pint of liquor on the distinguished author's person...
...clearly illuminates the myths as, in his words, "a collection of historical and factual inaccuracies and half-trutlas...
...First, he lays out the pieces of his- torical misinterpretation in all their de-tail and ingenuity: that the United States became involved in Vietnam to restore French colonialism...
...Why did Nixon manage to make it all the way to the White House...
...that Ho Chi Minh was the "George Washington" of Vietnam...
...Or the communists, for never withdrawing their forces from the South (in violation of Article 1) and forbidding hundreds of thousands of refugees, slaughtering many of them, from leaving the North (in direct defiance of Article 14...
...Re-enthrones the economics, morals and politics of something-for-something...
...Grand jury investigations led by white ethnic, Judge John Sirica, and Senate hearings under the stewardship of Senator Sam Ervin, a Southern Bourbon, are (continued on page 31) NEWEST CHALLENGE TO CURRENT CONSENSUS Lively new guide for corrective thought-leaders Assigns rewarding new course to be pursued personally and through others...
...If we do that, and if we learn and act on its lessons, only then will there be a real possibility that this dis- graceful episode will be transformed into an enduring triumph of the American democracy, and of the System which helps to define it...
...The strategy and the confusion have been fueled in the United States by Hanoi's academic bagmen (as the British would put it) and assorted, native-grown muddleheads who have produced an Anti- Vietnam History Lesson and sold it as the standard text for media as well as college use...
...In fact, as anyone with the honesty to do a bit of research could confirm, Eisenhower was referring to an entirely different election --one that would have taken place two years earlier (before the communist purges in the North) against a feeble opposition which did not include Diem...
...The real objective of Revolutionary Warfare is to achieve vic- tory on the main battlefield which is neither military nor in Vietnam but polit- ical and in the U.S...
...James Earl Ray was definitely denied a new trial...
...betrayal of the 1954 Geneva Conference...
...As President Eisenhower was later to remark in his memoirs, every responsible observer estimated that Ho Chi Minh would have won if there had been an honest election...
...The answer goes to the very heart of the American political system, and to its greatest emerging slaw...
...The Anti-Vietnam History Lesson alleges of course that the United States encouraged Diem to ignore the elections and delay unification of Vietnam because it feared a landslide victory for Ho Chi Minh...
...Puts blame where it suri.~ ~elt~: prisingly belongs...
...Yet a third pathology is the in-creasing lack of coherence in the parties of Congress, and indeed the growing bud- getary irresponsibility of Congress...
...Freshly debunks something-for-nothing promised through government, unions, business or magic...
...It is hard to say what should be done to shore up this absolutely crucial political institution and to reintroduce its beneficent influences into our system of presidential parties, but it is clear that campaign finance re-form won't even begin to do the whole job...
Vol. 6 • June 1973 • No. 9
