Episode 28 Hour of Decision: Vietnam: Tragedy and Treason

[00:00:06] It's midnight in America, and this is the Hour of Decision.

[00:00:12] My name is Lou Moore.

[00:00:14] Tonight we're going to talk about Vietnam.

[00:00:18] Vietnam, Tragedy or Treason?

[00:00:23] So there are a couple of concepts and a couple of factors in the world

[00:00:30] at the time the situation in Southeast Asia was developing

[00:00:35] that are important for us to consider when we look at Vietnam.

[00:00:40] One is the phenomena of colonialism.

[00:00:44] And as I talked about in my last JFK podcast,

[00:00:48] the establishment was now turning its back on colonialism

[00:00:53] and encouraging former colonies, whether they were ready or not,

[00:00:58] to become independent nations.

[00:01:01] And of course the communists were taking advantage of this fact,

[00:01:05] and Khrushchev, the Russians and the Chinese were doing everything they could

[00:01:10] to promote what they called Wars of National Liberation.

[00:01:15] So one concept, one area of thought we have to consider in this episode is colonialism.

[00:01:24] The other one is the internationalist doctrine that was developed after World War II,

[00:01:30] after the public turned on the idea of the United States being an ally

[00:01:35] of the Soviet Union and an ally of communism,

[00:01:39] and that is a concept of containment.

[00:01:42] The idea that you manage conflicts,

[00:01:46] that we are anti-communist but we're not able to defeat communism

[00:01:51] because they have the bomb,

[00:01:53] and also because we are trying to develop a wonderful one world government.

[00:01:58] But with the doctrine of containment,

[00:02:00] we could just kind of keep them in the places they're at now,

[00:02:04] hoping they don't swallow any more countries.

[00:02:07] So that was the doctrine of containment.

[00:02:10] And along with those two, maybe a third one or a minor category,

[00:02:15] is the idea of monarchy and monarchies,

[00:02:19] which are all over the Third World,

[00:02:22] particularly all over Asia in this period of transition,

[00:02:26] this time of transition between colonialism,

[00:02:30] between the idea that places like Southeast Asia,

[00:02:33] like French Indochina to get more specific,

[00:02:37] the transition from being colonies and to being independent countries.

[00:02:42] There were a lot of monarchies within the nation states

[00:02:47] carved out in the French Indochina and in a lot of other areas as well.

[00:02:53] But of course, that's the area we're talking about.

[00:02:58] So French Indochina was an area that consisted of what later became

[00:03:06] North and South Vietnam or now just Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

[00:03:13] And in each of those areas, coincidentally enough,

[00:03:16] was a monarchy, at least one.

[00:03:19] And so monarchies were the enemies of the left.

[00:03:26] Colonialism was the enemy of the left,

[00:03:30] the left whether you're talking about communists, communism, the USSR,

[00:03:35] or if you're talking about the Fabian variety,

[00:03:38] the kind we've had to put up with,

[00:03:40] the people of the left, members of the Americans for Democratic Action,

[00:03:45] if you remember me talking about that organization.

[00:03:48] These people were also very much against colonialism

[00:03:53] and against perpetuating monarchies,

[00:03:56] at least monarchies that had any political power.

[00:04:00] So Vietnam in this part of the world that was called French Indochina

[00:04:08] that was a colony, France or several colonies of France,

[00:04:12] all contiguous altogether there in French Indochina,

[00:04:16] Vietnam was in their history, they've been in a constant state of war.

[00:04:22] They're a strong people, they have a strong culture,

[00:04:26] but they're right up against China that is a very big place

[00:04:30] full of people with expansive ideas over the centuries.

[00:04:36] So constant war kind of reminds me a little bit when I read about it

[00:04:41] about the lowland scotch.

[00:04:43] If you've heard of those people, the people that live between Scotland and England,

[00:04:48] constantly in the middle of a war just because of their geographic location

[00:04:54] if for no other reason.

[00:04:56] So these folks in Vietnam tend to be kind of warlike, very close-knit,

[00:05:02] and later on we would say very nationalistic,

[00:05:06] very proud to be Vietnamese,

[00:05:08] not happy about people like China and other people in the world.

[00:05:13] So one result of the Chinese constantly trying to have dominance

[00:05:18] or conquest in Vietnam is they've developed a wealthy Chinese merchant class in Vietnam

[00:05:26] and in fact a good hunk of the wealthy people in Vietnam

[00:05:31] during the time that we're going to be talking about

[00:05:34] were ethnic Chinese hated by the Vietnamese

[00:05:39] who sometimes impolitely called them the Jews of the Orient.

[00:05:44] So the Vietnamese hate the Chinese, ethnic thing there.

[00:05:50] And so communists in Vietnam, a lot of people made the mistake during that time

[00:05:57] and later during the time we're talking about now

[00:05:59] the beginnings of the 1950s, late 40s and 50s,

[00:06:04] a lot of people thought, oh boy, look at China, they're becoming communists now.

[00:06:08] Here comes Vietnam working with China, another Asian group becoming communists.

[00:06:12] But in fact the communists in Vietnam were always much closer to the USSR,

[00:06:19] to the Soviet Union which is also at this time the much more powerful

[00:06:24] of the two countries between the USSR and China.

[00:06:28] But they were much more closely affiliated

[00:06:31] and had more of an affinity with the Russians, with the USSR.

[00:06:36] Their leader, and why don't we say now we're starting toward the end of World War II, mid-1940s,

[00:06:44] their leader was a man named Ho Chi Minh.

[00:06:46] And if you're my age you've heard that name hundreds and hundreds of times

[00:06:50] and if you're young you probably heard it a few times anyway.

[00:06:53] He was the communist leader of that area for many, many years, a legend,

[00:07:00] a man who was trained to be a revolutionary in Moscow under Joseph Stalin

[00:07:07] and who allegedly over his life had over 200 aliases

[00:07:14] and we honestly don't know that much about the earlier part of his life,

[00:07:19] constantly involved in communist intrigue,

[00:07:22] constantly doing things that were evidently illegal in the places he was at.

[00:07:27] And we know this, Vietnam, French Indochina was a French colony

[00:07:33] and Ho Chi Minh was not only a Vietnamese communist,

[00:07:37] he was also a French communist.

[00:07:39] He was a member of the French Communist Party, spent a lot of time in Europe,

[00:07:45] constantly trying to stir up trouble wherever he was at for the Great Revolution.

[00:07:51] So like Stalin, trained by Stalin, trained by Stalinists in Moscow as a revolutionary

[00:08:01] and because he was Vietnamese and they were very proud of themselves,

[00:08:08] of their culture, of their people, Ho Chi Minh used nationalism,

[00:08:14] used nationalist messaging in his organizing of the Communist Party in Vietnam

[00:08:21] and in this he was very much like Stalin.

[00:08:24] So Joseph Stalin took over the Soviet Union in the 1920s, I think it was 1924.

[00:08:31] One of the first things he did was get rid of Leon Trotsky.

[00:08:36] If you remember, the Russian Revolution was led by Lenin and Trotsky.

[00:08:42] Lenin died, but Trotsky was a very straight-line communist,

[00:08:48] very much of an internationalist as a communist and believed

[00:08:53] that you had to just take over all the countries,

[00:08:56] you had to fight all the countries at one time,

[00:08:58] you had to appeal to the proletariat spirit,

[00:09:02] to the fact that we're organizing workers and farmers wherever they live,

[00:09:06] we don't care what country they're in

[00:09:08] and that you don't use nationalist type of messaging in your communist organizing.

[00:09:14] Well, Stalin was completely different about this and became even more so

[00:09:19] when the nation of Russia was attacked by the National Socialists,

[00:09:24] by the Germans in 1941.

[00:09:27] So Stalin was all about using nationalism.

[00:09:30] He was all about robbing banks.

[00:09:32] He was all about anything that advanced his personal power

[00:09:36] and led the society he was in at that time to the total power of absolute communism.

[00:09:43] That was the goal, he never lost sight of it,

[00:09:46] but he was willing to use any weapon, any strategy, any kind of messaging.

[00:09:50] He was all about using nationalism if it were.

[00:09:53] So this is who Ho Chi Minh learned from.

[00:09:57] And so that was the approach that he took in organizing the very proud Vietnamese people.

[00:10:06] And of course this led to a lot of confusion, some of it deliberate,

[00:10:11] by authors, analysts, historians, whatever, influencers who said,

[00:10:18] oh no, these Vietnamese people, oh yeah, they have a red star on their flag.

[00:10:22] I guess they do get some help from Russia.

[00:10:25] Oh yes, Ho Chi Minh, he was trained in Moscow, but they are nationalists.

[00:10:30] They're not communists.

[00:10:32] And in fact, I can't remember his name,

[00:10:34] but I'm pretty sure there was a reporter at the New York Times

[00:10:39] who said the same thing about Ho that Herbert Matthews,

[00:10:43] another reporter at the New York Times, said later about Fidel Castro that,

[00:10:49] oh no, he's the George Washington of Vietnam, we should be helping him.

[00:10:53] He's a nationalist.

[00:10:55] So that was ridiculous, but people have tried to use that,

[00:11:00] people have tried to use that in my lifetime.

[00:11:02] When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s in that Vietnam War era,

[00:11:07] many of the student protesters were saying, oh no,

[00:11:10] the Viet Cong, the Viet Minh who was Ho's organization,

[00:11:15] they're just nationalists, they just want their nation.

[00:11:18] They're not communists.

[00:11:20] So that was the situation as far as the messaging and the imagery.

[00:11:27] So France was in control,

[00:11:30] Evo colonialists over all French Indochina,

[00:11:35] which again was all of the area that we now call Vietnam,

[00:11:38] including the area we used to call South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

[00:11:44] But they were invited in by a couple of different monarchs.

[00:11:48] They didn't conquer the Vietnamese or the Laotians or the Cambodians.

[00:11:53] They were pretty much allowed in.

[00:11:55] Why would that be?

[00:11:57] Well, they brought stability, they brought health care,

[00:12:00] they brought road systems as I talked about in my last podcast.

[00:12:04] Colonialism was actually a pretty good deal for a lot of the people

[00:12:08] that lived in these colonies depending on who they were,

[00:12:11] what the situation was, and who the Evo colonial masters were,

[00:12:16] which nation they were.

[00:12:18] So France was invited in,

[00:12:20] so France was in control of this area.

[00:12:23] But then we come to World War II.

[00:12:25] Sure you know, it didn't go real well for France in World War II.

[00:12:29] Hitler rolled across the northern part of France,

[00:12:32] conquered that, but what you might not know

[00:12:35] is that the southern part of France was not conquered by the Germans.

[00:12:41] It declared itself Vichy France

[00:12:46] and collaborated with the Germans under their leader was Marshall Pétain,

[00:12:52] the French hero of World War I as far as generals that they had in World War I.

[00:12:57] And so Vichy France is the entity that continued to administer

[00:13:03] French Indochina during the war.

[00:13:06] So France, the government of France has been conquered,

[00:13:09] France has been conquered, the Germans are all across

[00:13:12] northern France running it during the war.

[00:13:16] But southern France cooperating with the Nazis

[00:13:20] as they know their way,

[00:13:22] but they were still the administrators of French Indochina

[00:13:26] until the end of the war when the Japanese,

[00:13:29] if you remember, they were Hitler's allies.

[00:13:31] So they left these people who were cooperating with Hitler alone,

[00:13:36] Vichy France people in Vietnam, but toward the end of the war

[00:13:40] the Japanese had the hell with it and just swept in there, took it over.

[00:13:44] So at that point we're looking for somebody to fight the Japanese

[00:13:49] and we had the same kinds of people in our State Department

[00:13:54] having the same kinds of thoughts about Vietnam

[00:13:59] as they were having about China.

[00:14:02] If you remember in my earlier episode about my hero,

[00:14:05] I hope it's your hero, he's your hero too, Joe McCarthy,

[00:14:09] in that episode we talked about the Institute of Pacific Relations

[00:14:14] which was the Pacific region, a sub organization basically

[00:14:20] of the Council on Foreign Relations

[00:14:23] loaded with communists during World War II.

[00:14:26] Very friendly to Mao Tse-Tung and coincidentally enough

[00:14:30] also very friendly to the idea of the Americans' Army Ho Chi Minh

[00:14:36] and his communist Viet Minh army to be the ones to fight the Japanese

[00:14:43] at that juncture once the Japanese took power away from the French.

[00:14:48] We did that, big, big mistake.

[00:14:52] For one thing, very similar to what Mao did in China

[00:14:57] is they spent as little time and effort as possible confronting the Vietnamese.

[00:15:03] This is the, or confronting, excuse me, the Japanese.

[00:15:07] This is the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh.

[00:15:10] They spent very little time on that, but they spent a lot of time

[00:15:15] building their resources and also going around to all the other communities in Vietnam.

[00:15:22] Vietnam is very fragmented.

[00:15:26] There are a lot of different powerful families in different areas that had control.

[00:15:32] There were different kinds of militias.

[00:15:35] There were militias based on the area they were in.

[00:15:38] There were militias based on the Buddhist sect that they might have belonged to

[00:15:43] or Catholics because the French brought Catholicism to Vietnam.

[00:15:48] So it was very fragmented, but Ho was going around saying,

[00:15:52] I am a nationalist, I'm not a communist, and look, I am the agent.

[00:15:57] I am the one that the Americans are supporting here in Vietnam.

[00:16:01] Look at all the weapons that the Americans have given me,

[00:16:04] so you need to follow me or you need to not be in the way of my ambitions

[00:16:10] and what I do because I'm with the Americans.

[00:16:13] So on a couple of levels here, very, very unfortunate.

[00:16:19] One, Ho is armed to a great degree by the tax dollars of your ancestors.

[00:16:26] And two, he's kind of buffaloed some of the natural anti-communist forces

[00:16:33] that could be marshaled against somebody like him because he's saying

[00:16:37] he's an American, he's an agent of the Americans.

[00:16:42] So very important point here.

[00:16:47] Vietnam was fragmented and divided into many different sects.

[00:16:51] And I am not going to get into that because all these Vietnamese names

[00:16:55] of the leaders and the sub-leaders and the people that fought each other,

[00:16:59] I mean, first of all, folks, you can't even believe it.

[00:17:02] The intrigues and the backstabbing and the many wars and the alliances

[00:17:08] and the breaking of the alliances, I mean, it goes on and on.

[00:17:12] But just trust me, there are a lot of different factions in Vietnam,

[00:17:15] a lot of them naturally anti-communist,

[00:17:19] a lot of them rooted in the culture of Vietnam.

[00:17:22] So at least to some degree, they were supportive of the monarch of Vietnam

[00:17:29] who was a fellow by the name of Bao Dai.

[00:17:32] Bao Dai was the monarch of Vietnam pretty much at this time.

[00:17:38] People liked him, people didn't like him, people supported him, people didn't.

[00:17:41] But anyway, a lot of these groups did have some kind of monarchical ties

[00:17:48] and many of them had ties to the French

[00:17:51] and cooperated with the French and worked with the French.

[00:17:54] All of these people could be natural enemies of a communist takeover

[00:18:00] that's actually being directed by Moscow.

[00:18:03] Not really nationalist, but Ho is pulling the wool

[00:18:08] over the eyes of many of these folks.

[00:18:11] So during World War II, a lot of communists in the State Department,

[00:18:17] a lot of communists in our government, Institute of Pacific Relations,

[00:18:21] putting out as much communist propaganda as they possibly can

[00:18:26] both about China and about Vietnam.

[00:18:29] But at the end of the war, as I've talked about in three or four of my podcasts,

[00:18:35] people are pissed. They're saying, we fought this war.

[00:18:39] We lost an uncle, we lost a brother.

[00:18:42] Somebody doesn't have a leg.

[00:18:44] Somebody has mental issues.

[00:18:46] Coming back from this terrible war, all-out war,

[00:18:50] we had rationing and we didn't have butter,

[00:18:53] we didn't have tires and we didn't have this and that.

[00:18:55] And we sacrificed because we were promised

[00:18:58] that at the end of this war, we were going to have the four freedoms.

[00:19:03] We were going to have no tyranny in the world.

[00:19:06] We were going to all unite and there was a lot of talk about a world government,

[00:19:10] a united nations. We were all just going to get along.

[00:19:13] But guess what? That's not what happened.

[00:19:16] No, the communists were stronger than ever.

[00:19:20] The communists were now in control of all of Eastern Europe

[00:19:24] and very soon they would be in control of China,

[00:19:28] Poland, Manchuria, Korea and parts of French Indochina,

[00:19:36] the area we're talking about now.

[00:19:37] So they were very pissed off.

[00:19:39] And so in 1946, they elected a number of staunch anti-communists

[00:19:45] like Richard Nixon, like Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

[00:19:49] And there are all these hearings and everything.

[00:19:51] So upshot of this.

[00:19:53] A lot of liberals who really socialist, if not communist,

[00:19:57] Fabian Socialists, they started calling themselves liberals.

[00:20:01] They started calling themselves old war liberals.

[00:20:05] We're very steely eyed.

[00:20:07] We are very realistic about this communist threat.

[00:20:10] We know it's out there.

[00:20:11] We're anti-communist.

[00:20:13] But that's again where this containment doctrine came in.

[00:20:17] We don't really want to try to defeat communism,

[00:20:20] but boy we are totally against it.

[00:20:23] So one of the effects of this is that a lot of these here Fabians

[00:20:28] and Socialists and even communists that were in our government

[00:20:31] or had legitimacy in America who were supportive of Ho Chi Minh

[00:20:37] could not continue to be so.

[00:20:40] And so they're pivoting from being allies of the Reds

[00:20:46] to being progressives, to being liberals,

[00:20:50] to maybe even self-admitted Socialists, but anti-communist Socialists.

[00:20:55] And so this kind of affects some of the things that happen next.

[00:20:59] So we have this anti-colonialist push that is coming from some parts

[00:21:07] of the Third World.

[00:21:08] It's coming from the communist community.

[00:21:11] It's coming from Moscow,

[00:21:13] but it's also coming from the Council on Foreign Relations.

[00:21:16] It's coming from the American establishment.

[00:21:19] And we're starting to get some of these wars for national liberation.

[00:21:24] And one of the first ones that drew attention,

[00:21:27] and I mentioned this before too because Kennedy was all for it,

[00:21:30] was the rebellion and the war in Algeria.

[00:21:34] Well, Algeria was another French colony.

[00:21:38] And there was tremendous instability in France after the war.

[00:21:43] France took the brunt of the Western Front and the fighting there.

[00:21:49] The agriculture totally disrupted roads,

[00:21:52] destroyed whole fields full of mines and what not,

[00:21:55] and cleared all the mines out from World War I,

[00:21:57] where France was also taking the brunt of the action in that war.

[00:22:03] So I believe there was four or five parliamentary governments.

[00:22:08] I mean, a government would be formed, a coalition did fall.

[00:22:11] But there were anti-communists and there were very much pro-communist socialists

[00:22:17] involved in this ferment in France.

[00:22:21] But at points the anti-communists,

[00:22:24] the nationalistic French would get the upper hand.

[00:22:27] And there were many generals in the French army

[00:22:31] who had become very, very hardened anti-communists.

[00:22:36] So they put up a tremendous resistance in Algeria,

[00:22:41] but they also put up a tremendous resistance now in French Indochina

[00:22:47] and specifically against Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh,

[00:22:51] his communist army, in Vietnam.

[00:22:55] And there were a lot of Vietnamese on their side

[00:22:59] because they had it pretty good,

[00:23:01] because they might have known what was coming

[00:23:04] with the communist government.

[00:23:06] And so they fought.

[00:23:08] And then the French also had this organization called the French Foreign Legion.

[00:23:13] There used to be a lot of movies about the Foreign Legion,

[00:23:17] very dashing characters and whatnot.

[00:23:19] And they came from every different country

[00:23:21] and they would swear loyalty to France.

[00:23:24] They were kind of just mercenaries,

[00:23:26] but they were quite a fighting force,

[00:23:29] fierce, very proud of their identity.

[00:23:32] And the French were now using them extensively

[00:23:36] in trying to keep Algeria and to keep French Indochina.

[00:23:41] But Ho Chi Minh was supplied by first the U.S.

[00:23:46] and now increasingly by the Soviet Union.

[00:23:50] And so the French poured the crap out of Ho's army,

[00:23:56] but they just didn't quite have enough to secure victory.

[00:24:01] And finally were cornered at a place called Dien Bien Phu.

[00:24:06] And many military analysts, experts believe

[00:24:09] that if we would have just provided one series of air support,

[00:24:15] just an air support campaign to help them in this mountainous area,

[00:24:20] I think they were on top of a mountain,

[00:24:22] kind of surrounded by the communists,

[00:24:25] that they could have then broken through and beat the communists

[00:24:28] because their army was in such bad shape, the communist army.

[00:24:32] But we did not do that.

[00:24:34] So the French lost at Dien Bien Phu.

[00:24:41] And so the French are now going to recede from the picture.

[00:24:47] At this point, the Americans step in,

[00:24:50] and specifically a man by the name of John Foster Dulles.

[00:24:54] I mentioned him just briefly before.

[00:24:57] John Foster Dulles was a lawyer for the J.P. Morgan and Company at one time.

[00:25:02] He was part of Colonel House's inquiry after World War I,

[00:25:07] that was the germination for the Council on Foreign Relations.

[00:25:12] Dulles was a lefty by any standards, a total internationalist.

[00:25:18] He made Alger Hiss, who was later convicted for lying about being a Soviet spy,

[00:25:24] he made him the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

[00:25:29] because Dulles was the chairman of the board

[00:25:32] of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

[00:25:35] But then, kind of like his boss, President Eisenhower,

[00:25:40] who suddenly and mysteriously becomes a Republican and a conservative Republican,

[00:25:46] John Foster Dulles suddenly becomes like the most militant anti-communist in the history of the world,

[00:25:52] if you believe establishment media accounts of that period of time.

[00:25:57] Of course, that is not true.

[00:25:59] He was a total internationalist, and so he helped bring together

[00:26:03] a big international confab.

[00:26:05] We got to all get together and talk about what to do next in Vietnam.

[00:26:10] The Chinese are, had the Russians are, had all these different people are.

[00:26:14] And they came up with this peace treaty and a partition

[00:26:19] where like Korea, they divided Vietnam into North and South Vietnam.

[00:26:25] The North being communist, being controlled, being run by Ho Chi Minh.

[00:26:30] And the South, non-communist, hard to say because it wasn't really clear who would be running the South.

[00:26:40] And there was all these competing sects, religious sects that had militias,

[00:26:45] all these competing warlords, all these competing elements politically,

[00:26:51] Catholic, Buddhist, monarchist and pro-French and all these different things.

[00:26:56] And so kind of a chaos there in South Vietnam.

[00:27:01] And so they were supposed to have an election,

[00:27:03] but the Americans wouldn't let that happen because the only real organized political force

[00:27:09] with strength all over the country was the communists, the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh.

[00:27:16] So we didn't really want him to be strolling in there.

[00:27:20] So that was canceled, something the left still makes a big deal about if you read

[00:27:25] he left his orientated history of the Vietnam War.

[00:27:31] But a couple things came out during this process.

[00:27:35] One is the French were saying, boy, we need some help here.

[00:27:38] We're willing to even maybe give up this colony, but we don't want the communists to take it over.

[00:27:43] We want some reparations maybe for some of our industries we put in there or different things.

[00:27:50] And it comes out that Dulles who's supposed to be such an anti-communist, he says,

[00:27:54] well, the only way you'll get any help is if you ask the UN for help

[00:28:00] and have UN troops come in to Vietnam, kind of like Rhea,

[00:28:07] which was a disaster, a total disaster.

[00:28:11] And anyway, so that was allegedly the terms given to the French and the French refused

[00:28:17] because they saw what happened in Korea and they saw a lot of the characters around that table with the UN

[00:28:24] did not see that as being a brilliant move to try to stop communism in Vietnam.

[00:28:32] So anyway, so the country's partitioned.

[00:28:35] But then the US Eisenhower says, oh, we're not signing this compact.

[00:28:40] So it was a rather strange situation, but a lot of internationalism on display,

[00:28:45] a lot of international law and UN participation around this new problem we have in Vietnam

[00:28:54] with North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

[00:28:58] So what evolves here is that not communists, we don't want to be communists.

[00:29:05] All people around Ike, all the more left wing foreign policy types in America,

[00:29:11] but they are adamantly against colonialism.

[00:29:14] They are adamantly against restoring the monarchy in Vietnam or any monarchies running around.

[00:29:21] So they turned to a guy who, a little bit shady and a real nasty character by the name of DM.

[00:29:31] And his brother's name was New, N-H-U New, who was a socialist labor leader

[00:29:40] who turned his union into basically a 75,000 man secret police force.

[00:29:47] Madam New, Mr. New's wife, was the head of some fascist organization of women

[00:29:55] that went around with their uniforms on.

[00:29:57] She's a very beautiful woman and often the spokesman for this family,

[00:30:03] this venal family that got a hold of South Vietnam.

[00:30:09] They got a hold of South Vietnam because the internationalists thought they were just perfect.

[00:30:15] Not colonialists, but yet they were Catholics.

[00:30:20] So they were Catholic. They were supposedly anti-communist.

[00:30:26] They were anti-colonialist. And DM figured out a couple things.

[00:30:32] One, he kind of saw what happened with China, with the Institute of Pacific Relations

[00:30:38] and all of this phony stuff that went on promoting Mao Zedong in China.

[00:30:45] And he decides, this is a very good way to get the U.S. to support me.

[00:30:50] So he starts sinking money into a lobby.

[00:30:54] So Vietnam suddenly has one hell of a lobby or DM has one hell of a lobby

[00:31:01] in his pursuit to maintain power in Vietnam.

[00:31:09] And most of the people helping him, folks, most of the Americans helping him were lefties,

[00:31:16] socialists, internationalists.

[00:31:19] And pretty soon he gets the full blessing of the big shots,

[00:31:26] the Rockefellers, the Carnegie Foundation.

[00:31:29] He gets the full blessing of these internationalists to become the leader of South Vietnam.

[00:31:37] So let's look at DM a little bit more closely.

[00:31:41] So DM was kind of an aesthetic type. He kept to himself a lot.

[00:31:46] He was a little bit odd, maybe even.

[00:31:50] His dad was a functionary in the royal court,

[00:31:55] which used to convene at Hue in Vietnam, HUE, if you're familiar with that part of Vietnam.

[00:32:02] It was mentioned many times when the war was going on.

[00:32:04] The imperial capital of Vietnam, his father was a functionary for the royalty there.

[00:32:12] But by the time DM became an adult, he already had some very strong anti-colonialist sentiments,

[00:32:21] some very strong Catholic sentiments, and we were told very strong anti-communist sentiments.

[00:32:26] And the Viet Minh, as they were gathering strength,

[00:32:32] wanted to get rid of him, get rid of his dad.

[00:32:35] And allegedly his father, and I believe one of his brothers, were murdered by the Viet Minh.

[00:32:41] Not sure about that, but DM escapes and goes to the United States.

[00:32:47] He's befriended in the United States by a professor, Frantzel, I believe his last name is.

[00:32:53] He was at UC Berkeley but soon moved to Michigan State,

[00:32:57] where he kind of set up a think tank, a nation-building think tank focused entirely on Vietnam and on DM.

[00:33:08] Interesting.

[00:33:10] The other thing about this Frantzel that's interesting is he was kind of an entry point for access to the CIA.

[00:33:16] He was affiliated with the CIA and very early on they're taking a look at DM and saying,

[00:33:23] hmm this guy, he talks pretty well, has Western values because he's a Catholic,

[00:33:29] he's militantly anti-colonialist, and he's an anti-communist.

[00:33:34] This guy is just about perfect.

[00:33:36] So DM spends a couple years, almost three years in the United States during this period of time.

[00:33:42] While there's nothing but ferment in his land, the French going at it with the Viet Minh,

[00:33:48] all of these different militias and groups and in fighting and fighting with each other,

[00:33:53] a lot of chaos in Vietnam.

[00:33:56] Then the French are defeated and the partition occurs.

[00:34:01] And so DM returns to Vietnam under our sponsorship as like a number two,

[00:34:07] a prime minister I believe was the title he was given to the monarch who has been in place,

[00:34:14] a monarch he's been in place for I don't know how many years, thousands of years in Vietnam.

[00:34:19] And Bao Dai, who spends a lot of his time in France and is not really a great leader,

[00:34:25] was a figurehead because the French were running Vietnam.

[00:34:29] And now he's continuing kind of to be a figurehead because DM is now running Vietnam.

[00:34:37] But there are a lot of people who don't like that in South Vietnam,

[00:34:43] people who were more loyal to the monarch, who are not so anti-colonialist or anti-French,

[00:34:51] and who basically just saw DM's family coming and they did not like it.

[00:34:57] DM's brother, as I said, was a labor leader.

[00:35:00] He was a globalist and an internationalist.

[00:35:03] He was in a labor union umbrella group, the IFTU.

[00:35:13] I have here what that even stands for.

[00:35:15] It was a labor umbrella group, powerful.

[00:35:19] The AFL-CIO was part of it.

[00:35:21] The major British umbrella labor unions was in it, the French, Italian, Spanish.

[00:35:27] But the South Vietnamese union that DM's brother Nhu was in control of

[00:35:34] was a big deal within this international body,

[00:35:38] which was basically globalist and according to some people pretty much under the sway of the CIA.

[00:35:46] So Nhu is involved with the CIA.

[00:35:48] Already DM is involved with the CIA.

[00:35:51] Nhu is a big deal in international labor circles.

[00:35:56] He's the brother-in-law of DM and then DM's sister, Nhu's wife.

[00:36:03] You really kind of need to do a little chart here, but I won't make you do that.

[00:36:06] I'm trying to limit the number of names and different things

[00:36:09] just to give you the big picture as what I'm always trying to do on this show,

[00:36:13] to give you the big picture and definitely to correct things you probably heard that are not true.

[00:36:21] So anyway, DM has quite the family and he has another brother who's a priest and becomes a bishop,

[00:36:27] has a lot of Vatican access.

[00:36:30] So DM is unknown, but he's also kind of a big deal

[00:36:35] and has a lot of connections, the CIA, international labor,

[00:36:41] labor in the United States, labor in France, the Vatican.

[00:36:46] So he has a lot of connections and he is really ambitious,

[00:36:51] but one thing he's not really into too much, he talks a lot about democracy.

[00:36:57] He talks about making Vietnam, South Vietnam, a republic and not a monarchy,

[00:37:04] but he's not really too much into elections or having to be elected.

[00:37:09] He's kind of more into rigging elections.

[00:37:12] He does a lot of that while he is in charge of Vietnam,

[00:37:15] which is essentially from 1954 until 1963 when he is murdered.

[00:37:22] I army officers of the South Vietnamese Army that are very closely tied with the CIA.

[00:37:30] Anyway, I digress a bit, but DM is developing now a power base.

[00:37:36] He has his figurehead above him, but not really a big deal.

[00:37:41] And so then the CIA already now on the ground, very active,

[00:37:46] helping DM helps him set up an election, a plebiscite.

[00:37:51] Where is it going to be? Baodai? The monarch? Will he be the head of state?

[00:37:56] And the other thing I should mention, a lot of these militias and groups,

[00:37:59] they're pushing Baodai because they're traditionalists, not Catholic.

[00:38:05] Most of them, they don't trust DM.

[00:38:07] And one of the large Catholic militias doesn't trust him either.

[00:38:10] And they see Baodai as a way to unify around the symbolism of tradition,

[00:38:16] of spiritual life, faith, all the things that a monarchy is supposed to embody.

[00:38:22] Just even in Western culture, that's true. It's also true in Asia.

[00:38:26] So these are traditionalist types who want to rally around the figure

[00:38:31] to unify all these various forces because they also see what's coming from the North.

[00:38:37] And a lot of the Viet Minh did not go back to the North.

[00:38:41] There was Viet Minh all over Vietnam. These are the communists now, Ho Chi Minh's folks.

[00:38:46] He instructed many of them to stay in South Vietnam. Don't come to North Vietnam.

[00:38:51] We're going to be unifying the whole thing before too long.

[00:38:55] So there are communists in the under every bed almost.

[00:38:59] There's communists in the woodwork in South Vietnam, as well as a full communist state

[00:39:04] that Ho is very mercilessly consolidating in North Vietnam.

[00:39:10] So a lot of these other groups see this.

[00:39:12] And so they want to unify around somebody that can bring the people together in their minds

[00:39:18] and then go into this major fight that's coming with the communists.

[00:39:23] But Diem has other ideas. Diem is 100% our guy now, the American guy in Vietnam.

[00:39:32] He does not carry a Vietnamese tradition with him.

[00:39:36] He's a militant Catholic. But as I said, even a lot of the Catholics don't like him.

[00:39:42] His family is without doubt really a mafia.

[00:39:45] He has several brothers. They all have some kind of concession.

[00:39:49] They have some part of the economy that they control in utter corruption.

[00:39:54] One brother was in charge of rice distribution for about a third of the country and would starve people out.

[00:40:01] They weren't playing ball with Diem's family.

[00:40:05] We told you about the labor leader or the labor leader's wife who has this woman's division, uniformed division,

[00:40:12] a big secret police force forming now.

[00:40:15] And Diem knows he's got to, if he's going to stay in power, he has to get rid of all these other sects and factions.

[00:40:22] And so they really go at it. They really go at it with these other groups, taking out as many of them as they can using all kinds of means.

[00:40:31] Diem is even erecting concentration camps in South Vietnam to house these people that are not cooperating,

[00:40:40] taking land away from rich individuals who have their own militia or they're working with some group that's not loyal to Diem.

[00:40:47] And one upshot of this is many of the landowners that are the lands taken away from them by Diem,

[00:40:55] they will start cooperating with the communists here in just a minute.

[00:40:59] We'll talk about that in a second.

[00:41:01] So Diem is really tightening the grip.

[00:41:04] They hold this plebiscite and the ballots have two colors because a lot of the people can't read.

[00:41:12] And so one color is the lucky color, lucky color for Vietnamese.

[00:41:17] I believe it's red.

[00:41:19] That's Diem's color.

[00:41:20] And the other color was green.

[00:41:22] I might have the colors confused, but the unlucky color in the culture is Bao Dai's ballot.

[00:41:28] So plebiscite is over whether Bao Dai will continue to be the monarch and now has a growing number of people around him

[00:41:37] that really don't want Diem in the picture.

[00:41:40] Diem is the number two.

[00:41:42] And the other, the people vote for Diem want Diem to become the head of state and get rid of the monarchy altogether,

[00:41:48] which of course is the internationalist goal, the goal of the State Department and the goal therefore of the CIA.

[00:41:56] So Diem easily wins this plebiscite.

[00:41:58] There's all kind of ballot stuffing and bribery and blackmail and people getting killed and all kinds of things going on around the periphery of not just this election,

[00:42:09] but this whole power acquisition by Diem.

[00:42:13] And so he is consolidating power, but making a lot of enemies.

[00:42:18] And finally, even a couple articles.

[00:42:21] One was in the New Republic, which is a leftish publication started by the Morgans.

[00:42:27] But this reporter is a legit investigative reporter that writes his story.

[00:42:32] He wasn't really an ideological leftist saying, boy, America is supporting this Diem, but he's setting up concentration camps.

[00:42:39] He's killing his opposition.

[00:42:42] He's taking over all the various parts of the economy and giving them as concessions to members of his own family,

[00:42:48] which is a very large family with all kinds of cousins.

[00:42:52] Second cousins are all getting some kind of fiefdom now in Vietnam.

[00:42:57] He's getting rid of village leaders out in the rural areas that are not supporting his program.

[00:43:03] People are flocking into the city because it's not safe in the rural areas.

[00:43:07] And this is before the communists really make it unsafe in the rural areas.

[00:43:13] So there were some people warning about this.

[00:43:16] Nobody was listening in America because the powers that be had pretty much anointed Diem.

[00:43:23] And so they wait and see if he can solidify power in this kind of crazy environment, which he does.

[00:43:31] And then there's quite a lot of activity when Diem kind of takes a victory lap and comes to the United States.

[00:43:39] He's met by President Eisenhower.

[00:43:43] He has a, I'm just looking here now, and a very good book.

[00:43:47] I'm going to link to this book. It's called Background to Betrayal, The Tragedy of Vietnam by Helier DuBerrier.

[00:43:55] We won't talk about him right now, but this book is well worth reading if you can get through the hundreds and hundreds of Vietnamese names,

[00:44:02] factions, organizations, and stuff like that.

[00:44:05] But his take, it's kind of turgid prose in places, but his take, I believe, is very good and correct.

[00:44:15] So on Sunday, May 11th, 1957, I'm quoting now out of Background to Betrayal, page 168.

[00:44:25] America's folly took off for New York in a cloud of glory.

[00:44:31] American conservatives caught up in the mass intoxication, swallowed anti-communist headlines, and exalted in the thought that somewhere we were coming out on top.

[00:44:43] Remember folks, communism is on the march all around the world.

[00:44:47] New York dignitaries awaited DM at the airport, rushed them to St. Patrick's Cathedral for a mass, and then to Tarrytown, New York for a luncheon with John D. Rockefeller III and Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller,

[00:45:05] among the guests following all over themselves in praise of their guests.

[00:45:10] Excuse me, where was Henry Held, president of the Ford Foundation?

[00:45:16] Joseph Johnson, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace?

[00:45:22] John McCloy, chairman of the board of Chase Manhattan Bank?

[00:45:28] Mrs. McCloy was also there. Ogden Reed, president and editor of the New York Herald Tribune, which gave DM rave stories on pages 1, 13, 14, and 15 the following morning.

[00:45:44] And it just goes on and on.

[00:45:47] Dean Rusk, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, soon to become John F. Kennedy's secretary of state?

[00:45:54] It goes on and on, folks.

[00:45:58] So he has this reception.

[00:46:00] Then he's given the next day a ticker tape parade in New York City and a big reception in the afternoon at the Council on Foreign Relations.

[00:46:11] But it just goes on and on for three or four days.

[00:46:15] So without any doubt, DM is now our boy.

[00:46:19] He is now the internationalist pick to be in charge of Vietnam where they have in mind, I think, a major nation building project.

[00:46:30] The internationalists love nation building not because they love nations.

[00:46:34] They don't want to have any nations ultimately, but they love us going in there and engineering things around in various nations.

[00:46:43] And that's what's going on in Vietnam.

[00:46:46] There is a Colonel Lansdale on the ground in Vietnam of the Army.

[00:46:51] He's into psychological warfare, Psi Ops, which he will produce in abundance against the communists.

[00:46:59] But I think he might have been doing some of it for DM as well.

[00:47:03] Anyway, it goes on and on.

[00:47:04] A young senator by the name of John F. Kennedy gets up in the Senate and says, boy, we need to support that DM.

[00:47:11] He is the wave of the future.

[00:47:13] We need to support DM.

[00:47:15] And as I said, DM is cranking up a lobby.

[00:47:19] Of course, he's getting some help from his CIA friends.

[00:47:22] He's been he was in the United States for three years.

[00:47:25] But the leftists around him, a lot of them were formerly supporters of Ho like Norman Thomas as one example.

[00:47:34] Very famous man of the 50s, a socialist named Norman Thomas now all about Vietnam.

[00:47:41] So DM is getting the leftist, not the communists in America, but this new old war liberalism group,

[00:47:50] the Americans for Democratic Action types, the Fabian Socialists.

[00:47:55] They're swinging in hard for DM.

[00:47:57] And obviously, the foreign policy establishment, the establishment with a capital E, the Rockefellers,

[00:48:05] the Carnegie Foundation, all these folks, all these social engineering types, the types behind the bankers,

[00:48:12] the international bankers, all these folks now swinging in behind DM.

[00:48:19] It's quite a sight to behold.

[00:48:21] Things are not really so nice over in Vietnam.

[00:48:25] But he is getting it under control, at least to enough of a degree that they're willing to swing in behind him in full support.

[00:48:33] And also because he has very smart people doing his lobbying campaign.

[00:48:38] He's bringing in conservatives.

[00:48:40] The money is flowing.

[00:48:42] And I'm going to be doing a podcast pretty soon on Conservatism, Inc.

[00:48:48] And what I call the Beltway bandits who have operated, they're still operating today,

[00:48:53] and they have operated all the way back to this period of time as anti-communist conservatives,

[00:49:00] but really kind of interested in the money and ending up saying and doing things that help the establishment of the United States,

[00:49:08] not the sovereignty of the United States, not the Constitution, not we the people, not the grassroots.

[00:49:15] So you have some leading conservative authors, suddenly National Review, William F. Buckley's magazine.

[00:49:22] If you remember, if you're familiar with National Review or if you remember my podcast on the Goldwater movement,

[00:49:29] William F. Buckley's magazine having some pup pieces there on DM.

[00:49:33] This guy's tough. The communists are shaking in their boots because DM is now in charge.

[00:49:39] And boy, he is going to be tough on the communists.

[00:49:43] So DM has got the establishment.

[00:49:45] He's got the American left, not the far left, but he's got the American left and he's got the conservatives all saying this guy is fantastic.

[00:49:55] So DM is going around destroying all the other organizations in South Vietnam that would be natural enemies of the communists

[00:50:04] because they're his rivals and he's doing a very good job of it.

[00:50:09] But meanwhile, the Marxists never sleep.

[00:50:14] And Ho has consolidated his power base in the North and he has a lot of supporters in the South.

[00:50:21] And the support is growing because of the way DM is treating a lot of the rural folk in particular,

[00:50:30] many of whom are now pointing to the cities to get out of the rural areas where all kinds of violence and bad things are happening.

[00:50:38] Because of DM is brother new and increasingly now also because of the communists.

[00:50:45] So Saigon is swelling, building with people who don't have jobs, who are displaced.

[00:50:52] And the countryside is turning into a real disaster.

[00:50:57] And so as I said, their concentration camps are emerging.

[00:51:00] This is on our side, folks, not on the other side.

[00:51:04] But I was going to read another passage here.

[00:51:10] May not be able to find it about how the communists operate in the rural area.

[00:51:17] So the French, they would have fortifications, fortresses kind of like the old west, the stockade or not the stockade,

[00:51:27] that they would have the forts around towns to keep the Indians at bay or whatever.

[00:51:34] The French had fortifications like that too, big tower.

[00:51:37] They could look way out and see if any communists were coming to disrupt village life.

[00:51:42] But it was not very obtrusive, intrusive of village life.

[00:51:49] But DM came up with this idea of the strategic hamlet,

[00:51:54] which instead of having a guard post or having a base with military by a village,

[00:52:01] they would just fortify the entire village but turn it into kind of a prison.

[00:52:07] Because it would be under control at that point by DM's people.

[00:52:11] A lot of the village leaders were not the people that they were.

[00:52:15] So this was a strategic hamlet program.

[00:52:18] I think this was actually the brainchild of our folks,

[00:52:22] the advisors now slowly coming in more and more numbers into Vietnam.

[00:52:28] And a lot of people did not like it.

[00:52:31] A lot of people started joining the new communist organization.

[00:52:35] I told you that Ho Chi Minh had the Viet Minh,

[00:52:38] which kind of just became the government of North Vietnam.

[00:52:42] But they started officially a communist organization in the south

[00:52:47] called the National Liberation Front,

[00:52:50] but NLF but also known by us as the Viet Cong.

[00:52:55] Those become the enemy, the main enemy for most of the Vietnam War

[00:52:59] until North Vietnamese regulars or regular army people

[00:53:03] started swarming in from the north later on in the war.

[00:53:07] So the Viet Cong now are starting to get active in the rural areas

[00:53:11] and their modus operandi was pretty simple.

[00:53:14] They would come into a village, they would overrun a village.

[00:53:17] They would bring all the people in the village together

[00:53:20] and then they would shoot every one of their leaders in front of the people

[00:53:24] and then ask them if they were now loyal to the Viet Cong.

[00:53:28] Then suddenly became very loyal to the Viet Cong.

[00:53:32] And over time there's different figures,

[00:53:35] but Du Barry said that there are a lot of lying going on

[00:53:38] just like every other part of Vietnam.

[00:53:41] At one point they had calculated that out of 14,000 villages,

[00:53:46] rural little tiny communities in Vietnam,

[00:53:49] 13,000 village leaders had been slaughtered,

[00:53:53] most of them by the communists but some of them by DM.

[00:53:58] So it's getting nasty out there and the SDM has all the support in America,

[00:54:04] but he's not doing real well with the communists

[00:54:09] because he's destroyed most of the natural opposition to the communists

[00:54:14] and he's going after the people, taking their land.

[00:54:18] I mean, you know, he's stealing stuff.

[00:54:21] This guy is kind of part gangster, part maybe crazy, part fascist,

[00:54:27] but what he is not is doing what we always said we had to do in Vietnam to win,

[00:54:33] which was win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.

[00:54:36] That was supposed to be the objective

[00:54:39] and the nation-building exercise going on with the Ford Foundation over there

[00:54:44] and the Rockefellers were over there,

[00:54:46] and of course the CIA was over there and growing numbers,

[00:54:49] and now more regular American personnel as advisors in Vietnam.

[00:54:57] So the communists are gaining ground rapidly.

[00:55:01] They're taking village after village.

[00:55:03] They have some legitimate support and they have terrorized

[00:55:07] much of the rest of the rural population.

[00:55:10] The Vietnamese army, very corrupt, not very effective.

[00:55:15] A lot of the effective fighters neutralized or put in concentration camps by DM.

[00:55:22] So this mess is getting worse and worse and worse.

[00:55:26] Ike is trying to kind of just ignore this thing a little bit,

[00:55:31] but the press is getting more interested

[00:55:34] and there becomes this fixation with Vietnam.

[00:55:36] And of course some of this is DM's fault

[00:55:39] because he has his lobby paying all these journalists

[00:55:42] to write about how great he is over in Vietnam.

[00:55:46] It's just bringing a lot more attention to a country

[00:55:49] that is just another small third world country.

[00:55:53] Third world country, no offense to anybody,

[00:55:55] but it's getting a ton of attention and here again the big backdrop is

[00:56:00] the American public is very concerned about communism.

[00:56:05] It didn't end when they censured Joe McCarthy in 1954.

[00:56:09] All of the things that happened after World War II,

[00:56:12] all of the gains made by the communists,

[00:56:15] all of the revelations of infiltration of our State Department,

[00:56:19] our Treasury Department, parts of the Army,

[00:56:22] other parts of the Defense Department.

[00:56:24] The concerns that were raised by this didn't go away.

[00:56:29] Now when Russia got the bomb in 1949 it just made it worse.

[00:56:33] People got more concerned and so the Cold War,

[00:56:37] as you heard it called, which was really a whole series of hot wars

[00:56:42] and then an information war between us and the USSR,

[00:56:47] they raged all through the 50s.

[00:56:49] Ike got us out of Korea and he did not want to get us in any other big conflict,

[00:56:55] but he tried to keep things out of the headlines

[00:56:58] and tried to keep a little bit of international order and containment

[00:57:03] by using the CIA in various places.

[00:57:07] I won't get into all those things,

[00:57:09] but one of the places that he's using the CIA quite vigorously is in Vietnam.

[00:57:14] But the situation is going south as Ho Chi Minh is now focusing

[00:57:19] and the communists in the north, and the communists in Moscow,

[00:57:24] and the communists in Peking,

[00:57:26] as they called it at that time before they started calling it Beijing.

[00:57:31] They're all focused, among their focuses is on South Vietnam,

[00:57:36] making Vietnam one country, one communist country.

[00:57:41] And so things heating up in the rural areas, the rural people,

[00:57:45] not for DM, not basically would like to probably just like to be left alone,

[00:57:50] most of them.

[00:57:51] And so things are heating up at the time John F. Kennedy takes office in 1961

[00:57:57] and he starts ratcheting up because he's all about intervention.

[00:58:01] He's trying to say, oh, I'm really a anti-communist

[00:58:04] and he starts the Green Berets

[00:58:07] and actually ratchets up activity of the CIA, folks.

[00:58:11] I know you may not want to believe that, but he does, at least initially,

[00:58:15] at least in this period, and starts sending advisors by the thousands,

[00:58:19] military advisors by the thousands,

[00:58:22] to Vietnam to go with these social engineers,

[00:58:25] to go with the spooks in the CIA

[00:58:28] to try to keep the DM government propped up.

[00:58:32] So in this process, we also start building the ARBN,

[00:58:36] the Army of Vietnam, ARBN.

[00:58:41] And so that army becomes stronger and stronger,

[00:58:45] but it doesn't really do a very good job against the communists.

[00:58:50] They outnumber the communists four to one,

[00:58:53] but four to one is not that great of odds when the other side

[00:58:57] are hardened, experienced guerrilla warfighters

[00:59:01] that are being supplied endlessly

[00:59:05] by the USSR through the North Vietnamese.

[00:59:09] And then at some point in this period,

[00:59:11] they start building the Ho Chi Minh Trail,

[00:59:13] which is a trail that goes from North Vietnam

[00:59:16] and not just straight into South Vietnam,

[00:59:18] but through parts of Laos and Cambodia

[00:59:21] and then around into South Vietnam

[00:59:23] to sneak in tons and tons of war material

[00:59:27] and foodstuffs and whatnot.

[00:59:29] And the Viet Cong are really rolling at this point

[00:59:32] in the rural areas of Vietnam.

[00:59:36] And so we get up to 1963,

[00:59:40] and Kennedy is finally seeing the light,

[00:59:45] and the establishment pumped up DM.

[00:59:48] Oh boy, he's our man.

[00:59:50] He's our man all the way.

[00:59:52] DM is actually turned into a complete disaster,

[00:59:55] and the people hate him,

[00:59:57] particularly the people who aren't Catholic.

[01:00:00] Buddhist monks are lighting themselves on fire

[01:00:02] and saying, boy, I hate this.

[01:00:04] They always say we hate this Catholic guy

[01:00:06] that family is looting us and cheating us

[01:00:10] and has all these crooked agents running around

[01:00:14] and has a large secret police force running around.

[01:00:17] And so Kennedy agrees,

[01:00:20] and there's some versions that the CIA said,

[01:00:23] oh, we won't hurt DM.

[01:00:25] We're just going to remove them from power

[01:00:27] and send them to France or whatever they told Kennedy,

[01:00:30] but that's not what happened

[01:00:32] because these military people hated DM,

[01:00:34] most of them, nearly all of them,

[01:00:36] the generals and whatnot that now have more power

[01:00:39] because we built up that army.

[01:00:42] And so he is assassinated.

[01:00:45] DM is just before Kennedy is assassinated

[01:00:49] in November of 1963.

[01:00:53] So, you know, the question is,

[01:00:57] what would Kennedy do in 1964?

[01:01:00] What would he do during the election year,

[01:01:02] and what would he do if he won reelection?

[01:01:04] Probably more importantly,

[01:01:06] because it's not good to make big changes

[01:01:09] in that war area before an election.

[01:01:13] You might notice that Woodrow Wilson

[01:01:16] didn't get us into World War I

[01:01:18] until after the 1916 election

[01:01:21] where he promised he would not get us into World War I.

[01:01:25] FDR reacted to Pearl Harbor and got us into World War II

[01:01:29] and actually really, really revved up our war capability

[01:01:34] and our confrontational profile,

[01:01:37] at least with the Germans, before Pearl Harbor.

[01:01:40] But after the 1940 election where he said,

[01:01:43] I will not send your boys to war.

[01:01:46] And of course, Kennedy dies.

[01:01:48] Lyndon Johnson does the same damn thing.

[01:01:50] He does the same thing.

[01:01:51] I will not send your boys over to Asia

[01:01:54] to do what those Asia boys should be doing.

[01:01:56] And he said that all over the country,

[01:01:58] and then he lied and really revved things up

[01:02:02] after he was president after the election of 64.

[01:02:06] So that's the pattern.

[01:02:07] So Kennedy is not likely to have changed things too much in 1964,

[01:02:13] but the country was collapsing

[01:02:17] and the communists were making tremendous gains.

[01:02:20] They were getting well supplied,

[01:02:23] even though a lot of the people knew by this time

[01:02:27] that they were no good because they would come in,

[01:02:29] shoot people.

[01:02:31] I mean, they would do all the terrorist tactics

[01:02:33] that communists always do in these situations.

[01:02:37] But Diem had made such bitter enemies,

[01:02:39] they didn't immediately all just go over to his camp.

[01:02:42] There was no enthusiasm.

[01:02:44] There was no real patriotic fervor for South Vietnam.

[01:02:49] Now I know there would have to be exceptions,

[01:02:52] and there were military leaders who were very legitimately anti-communist.

[01:02:57] But despite their best efforts of the Arvin,

[01:03:05] legitimate anti-communists in South Vietnam,

[01:03:10] they were losing.

[01:03:12] They were losing, friends.

[01:03:14] It was an impossible situation.

[01:03:16] So could, if Kennedy would have lived,

[01:03:19] could he have held out in the limited war fashion

[01:03:24] until after the 64 election?

[01:03:26] Johnson ended up taking power,

[01:03:29] and somehow they did, but they did manufacture an incident.

[01:03:33] In late 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin incident,

[01:03:37] which most historians now agree,

[01:03:40] as more documents have been revealed,

[01:03:43] that kind of a phony deal there where supposedly

[01:03:46] gunboats attacked our folks in the Gulf of Tonkin,

[01:03:50] and it was an act of war on the part of the North Vietnamese,

[01:03:55] and Johnson doesn't make his move until after the election,

[01:03:59] as I just stated that particular pattern.

[01:04:02] But then we greatly ratchet up our forces,

[01:04:06] and of course planning had already been undertaken to do that,

[01:04:09] and we ended up with over 500,000 American troops

[01:04:16] fueled by the fact that we still had the draft in Vietnam

[01:04:21] at the height of our participation there.

[01:04:24] And then when Nixon got in,

[01:04:26] he made a big deal about Vietnamization,

[01:04:29] that we could turn the war over to the Vietnamese,

[01:04:32] but as you know, things didn't exactly work out that way in Vietnam.

[01:04:40] Hence, there is no more South Vietnam.

[01:04:42] There is now only one nation, Vietnam,

[01:04:45] which is still a communist nation.

[01:04:50] So I didn't record all of this at one time.

[01:04:55] We're now at Memorial Day,

[01:04:57] and I want to say clearly before I say anything else

[01:05:03] that the communist Vietnamese,

[01:05:07] whether the Viet Cong or what they began calling

[01:05:10] the North Vietnamese regulars

[01:05:13] because they just started sending their army into South Vietnam,

[01:05:17] that our forces never lost a military engagement with these people.

[01:05:24] Our troops, despite the fact that it was a very frustrating war

[01:05:29] where we really did not make a lot of progress

[01:05:32] because we would take an area and they'd come back in after we left

[01:05:36] and the whole thing going on in the rural areas,

[01:05:38] the city slowly collapsing, all the corruption after Diem is murdered,

[01:05:44] all the instability in the government,

[01:05:47] one military junta after another until finally Thu and Thi,

[01:05:52] Nguyen Cao Thi and General Thu took charge

[01:05:57] and were in office for a long period of time in South Vietnam,

[01:06:01] but a lot of instability.

[01:06:02] Despite all that, our troops really performed magnificently,

[01:06:06] which shows that that is not enough to win a war.

[01:06:11] So, you know, this was just a perfect storm of disaster.

[01:06:16] Let's start with the fact that our State Department allowed China,

[01:06:22] you know, really destabilizing the whole region.

[01:06:25] And despite the animus between the Chinese and the Vietnamese,

[01:06:29] there was still cooperation between the communist Chinese and the Vietnamese

[01:06:33] and the whole region was destabilized by the fact that our State Department

[01:06:38] and General Marshall allowed China to fall to the communists,

[01:06:44] a terrible blow as far as the whole regional dynamic.

[01:06:48] Then we decided to arm Ho Chi Minh,

[01:06:52] the worst and most dangerous individual we could have possibly empowered in Vietnam.

[01:06:58] Then we empowered Diem, who destroys all the rest of the anti-communist,

[01:07:06] basically destroys all the rest of the anti-communist opposition,

[01:07:11] which is also his opposition in Vietnam.

[01:07:15] He's a terribly unpopular leader.

[01:07:19] And we are all of this time, during all of this time,

[01:07:25] we are empowering and continuing to empower the Soviet Union.

[01:07:31] In World War II, we gave a tremendous amount of material to Stalin

[01:07:37] because he was supposed to be helping us in fighting

[01:07:40] and he did fight to protect his own country from the Germans.

[01:07:46] And then he was more than happy to swallow all of Eastern Europe

[01:07:49] and half of Germany after that,

[01:07:53] but never could have happened without all of the aid we had given him.

[01:07:57] But after the war, it wasn't aid so much,

[01:08:02] but there was still this continual input of capital,

[01:08:07] of resources, of infrastructure built by American corporations,

[01:08:14] who also in many cases were profiting by the relationship

[01:08:18] they had with the Russians, that continued to build up their military capability,

[01:08:25] which the Russians began transferring to Ho Chi Minh, to the North Vietnamese.

[01:08:32] So that's going on all of this time.

[01:08:35] I'm going to turn your attention back to a man by the name of Anthony Sutton,

[01:08:39] who was a professor at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

[01:08:44] He did his treatise on Soviet technology that I talked to you about in an earlier podcast,

[01:08:50] where he showed in infinite and incredible detail

[01:08:55] how we had basically built the Soviet Union in terms of it being an industrial and military power.

[01:09:03] And this continued in this era.

[01:09:07] So he created, he did another book more for the general public

[01:09:11] that treatise is very hard to get through, not out of statistics detail,

[01:09:16] but he wrote a book based on that treatise called The Best Enemy Money Can Buy.

[01:09:23] And there's a box on the cover of this book

[01:09:27] filled with all kinds of material that says US bound for Russia.

[01:09:33] And that's exactly, folks, what happened.

[01:09:38] Let me just take for example the Ford Gorky automobile plant.

[01:09:43] And we refer to Ford's role a couple of times,

[01:09:46] including the fact that Walter Ruther, the evil one himself,

[01:09:50] the Fabian agent and for a while card carrying communist,

[01:09:55] the head of the United Auto Workers,

[01:09:57] him and his brother went over and for almost two years worked in a Ford plant in Russia

[01:10:04] because Ford had booted, he worked in Detroit for Ford.

[01:10:08] Ford booted him out because he was organizing socialists on the shop floor.

[01:10:13] But then he went to Russia because they had great need of people who understood

[01:10:18] the design and various production elements of building the Model A and the Model T Ford.

[01:10:26] And he went over there and helped them with that.

[01:10:28] Well, they did all kinds of things over there.

[01:10:30] They built this Gorky plant, which created a large number of light and heavy trucks

[01:10:37] that were immediately adopted for military use.

[01:10:41] This started in 1929 and a lot of these trucks ended up in Vietnam

[01:10:50] and ended up allowing Ho to solidify his power in North Vietnam,

[01:10:56] allowed him to then start to destroy the South and eventually take over the South

[01:11:02] and kill a lot of Americans.

[01:11:05] There was this Zill plant, Z-I-L, they created by the Arthur Brandt Company of Detroit

[01:11:12] same year, 1929, that Ford started the Gorky plant.

[01:11:18] And they had the Zill trucks that were fitted with 85 millimeter anti-tank

[01:11:23] and anti-aircraft guns, quadruple 7.62 Maxim's, not quite sure what that is,

[01:11:29] self-propelled grenade launchers, including the M8 and the 80 millimeter

[01:11:35] and a number of other weapons that were specifically adapted to operate with these Zill trucks.

[01:11:42] A company based in the United States designed these

[01:11:46] and were helping them build these things in the Soviet Union.

[01:11:51] And then there was the humongous KAMA facility that was built,

[01:11:58] actually this is more pertinent to what comes up in Afghanistan with the Soviet Union,

[01:12:03] but this thing is a monster.

[01:12:05] I mean it's 36 acres folks, a 36 acre industrial facility building heavy tanks

[01:12:12] with American technology, American inputs, American material and even computers

[01:12:19] all the way back to the 60s, Control Data Corporation, if you remember those folks,

[01:12:25] they were as early as 1965 sending computers to the Soviet Union from the United States.

[01:12:33] They built semiconductor plants over there,

[01:12:36] and semiconductors big issue now since we're dependent so much on Taiwan.

[01:12:42] We were building these things for the Soviets.

[01:12:44] All during this time they're supposed to be the worst enemy in the world

[01:12:48] and in fact, Control Data, their exports to the Soviet Union were only $2,000 in 1966,

[01:12:58] but in 1967 at the height of the Vietnam War,

[01:13:04] $1 million in computer exports to the Soviet Union.

[01:13:09] IBM was involved.

[01:13:11] IBM, a ground floor internationalist company.

[01:13:16] And of course when we look at some of the investors here,

[01:13:20] I mentioned like this KAMA plant, David Rockefeller, Chase Manhattan Bank,

[01:13:27] all these internationalists, as I told you before,

[01:13:31] were investing in the Soviet Union, profiting in many cases and building our enemy.

[01:13:39] And so all this material is pouring in to Vietnam,

[01:13:45] and we are not trying to stop it in any way.

[01:13:49] I had a friend who was involved in Vietnam, a combat veteran,

[01:13:53] and he said they used to be on the shore there in South Vietnam,

[01:13:58] and they would watch a parade of Soviet merchant ships.

[01:14:03] By the way, we also built their merchant fleet.

[01:14:06] That's another story for another day.

[01:14:08] Just one after another, lines of them heading north up to Hai Phong Harbor

[01:14:14] to be unloaded by our enemies, the North Vietnamese,

[01:14:18] who would then start infiltrating a lot of the material,

[01:14:21] particularly the handheld type of material,

[01:14:23] on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Viet Cong in South Vietnam,

[01:14:28] and also beefing up tremendously the regular army in North Vietnam,

[01:14:33] which does play a major role in the endgame of the Vietnam War,

[01:14:39] of the resistance from the South.

[01:14:41] So folks, this is a big problem, but you can see we arm our enemies,

[01:14:47] we put an idiot in, totally backed by us,

[01:14:51] totally backed by the establishment, as you could tell by the treatment he got

[01:14:55] when he came to New York and his ticker tape parade

[01:14:58] and his council on foreign relations reception

[01:15:01] and his big reception with David Rockefeller

[01:15:04] and the Carnegie people and the Ford Foundation people.

[01:15:08] He's our guy. He destroys the monarchy,

[01:15:14] the monarchy which whether you really like kings and queens

[01:15:18] and monarchies or not as an American,

[01:15:20] it's a stabilizer of society.

[01:15:24] It's a foundational element of a lot of these societies.

[01:15:28] It's a spiritual thing with these people.

[01:15:31] We're destroying that, folks.

[01:15:33] The rationale they could use,

[01:15:35] whether they like the current politics or not,

[01:15:37] the anchors of society that are a block on something like communism,

[01:15:43] Barfabian socialism coming into the society,

[01:15:48] we financed and facilitated the destruction

[01:15:52] of a good part of this conservative element, should I call it,

[01:15:56] in South Vietnam and there's nothing left but the social engineering

[01:16:02] of our foundations and the psych war operations of our military

[01:16:08] helping this psychotic dictator really who is more like an organized crime

[01:16:14] figure has his entire family on the payroll looting this country,

[01:16:19] looting the foreign aid, a very common pattern by the way.

[01:16:23] We'll talk about Ukraine in another podcast,

[01:16:27] but all of this is going on as a perfect storm of why the South Vietnamese

[01:16:33] couldn't win certainly and 500,000 American troops couldn't get the job done either.

[01:16:41] I mean they could not invade North Vietnam.

[01:16:43] They could not do that.

[01:16:45] They could not interfere with the flow of supplies coming into Vietnam

[01:16:50] until they reached the Hai Phong Harbor in North Vietnam.

[01:16:53] Now we did, what was the phrase, bomb them into the Stone Age.

[01:16:57] We had an incredible number of bombing runs and dumped tons and tons and tons of material.

[01:17:02] Oh, and by the way, folks, this is bankrupting America.

[01:17:06] This leads to rapid inflation.

[01:17:09] This leads to the terrible situation that didn't really get rectified until Ronald Reagan

[01:17:14] got in office because of course, Lyndon Johnson,

[01:17:17] who is the one who put 500,000 troops in South Vietnam

[01:17:22] and really revved the war up from our standpoint, our participation.

[01:17:27] You know, he's also got the biggest domestic governmental program going

[01:17:33] we've ever had called the Great Society.

[01:17:36] And these collect guns and butter, a ton of material to Vietnam

[01:17:42] and the Russians, and a ton of money spent on social programs

[01:17:48] and government programs that all cost a whole lot more

[01:17:53] than he said they'd cost like Medicare is an example.

[01:17:57] All this is going on at the same time.

[01:17:59] So this is tremendously destructive of our economy.

[01:18:04] And then there was the fact that people were dying over there.

[01:18:09] 57,000 Americans, friends, died in Vietnam.

[01:18:15] 57,000.

[01:18:18] Incredible number of the injuries, the psychological damage.

[01:18:24] But the damage to the psyche of America is probably the greatest damage

[01:18:30] that this war inflicted because in fact, folks, we did pour it on.

[01:18:35] The bombing in North Vietnam, the number of troops we had over there,

[01:18:40] the draft, the number of particularly poor Americans of every race

[01:18:45] who were drafted and had to go over there did not have any choice in the matter

[01:18:50] unlike the wealthy who could get deferments, people like Mitt Romney,

[01:18:54] but I'm not going to digress too much there.

[01:18:58] This is a terrible thing for our country.

[01:19:01] This revs up the new left, it invigorates and energizes all the Marxist professors

[01:19:07] in the college institutions around the country.

[01:19:11] This creates a huge subculture of leftists who then decide to cut their hair,

[01:19:18] stop taking drugs, stop bombing things, and take over our government,

[01:19:24] which is guess what? Exactly what they did.

[01:19:27] The march through the institutions is what they called that.

[01:19:30] So then you get people running your country like Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton,

[01:19:36] and then you get even to the next level a Barack Hussein Obama

[01:19:41] whose parents were communists.

[01:19:43] Anyway, I am digressing now, but it's a perfect storm for disaster,

[01:19:49] for defeat, for disillusionment, for destruction

[01:19:55] to a degree of your own society,

[01:19:58] not to mention what happened to the Vietnamese people, the defoliation.

[01:20:03] All of the terror in the countryside perpetrated on them by the communists

[01:20:08] and the terror perpetrated on them by the team that we were backing.

[01:20:13] Total and complete disaster.

[01:20:20] And you know, DM, he, his program crank up a humongous PR firm of Americans

[01:20:29] from the left who then also bring in grifters from the right

[01:20:34] like a man named Marv Liebman who is a major figure

[01:20:38] in organizing a lot of fundraising activities in Washington, D.C.

[01:20:42] that were supposed to be very conservative.

[01:20:45] Anyway, he had all kinds of people on the payroll, generals and professors

[01:20:49] lying to the American people about what's going on over there.

[01:20:54] He's destroying the anti-communist resistance

[01:20:58] because the real resistance, the potent resistance

[01:21:02] lied among his immediate domestic enemies

[01:21:06] and he's looting the country.

[01:21:09] All three of these things completely at odds

[01:21:12] with the goal of stopping containing communism.

[01:21:17] But I point out to you, this is containment in action.

[01:21:22] We're not going to try to win.

[01:21:24] We're not going to stop those shipments going to the Haiphong Harbor.

[01:21:29] We're not going to get tough with the Russians who are backing all of this.

[01:21:34] We're not going to go into North Vietnam in any way.

[01:21:38] We're going to let them have that whole base of operation.

[01:21:41] We're bombing it, but we don't go in there.

[01:21:44] This is all containment, folks.

[01:21:46] This is a managed conflict.

[01:21:48] This is a conflict that no way in hell were we going to win

[01:21:53] under these conditions.

[01:21:55] And I've been talking about containment,

[01:21:57] but this is containment on the ground.

[01:22:00] This is what it looks like.

[01:22:02] This is what your internationalist masters think is a good thing

[01:22:06] and continue to think it's a good thing.

[01:22:08] Thank goodness, thank God, Ronald Reagan had a different way

[01:22:15] of looking at things, that there were so many veterans that came back

[01:22:19] realizing how completely stupid this was on every level.

[01:22:25] And now that's not a mentality that we have,

[01:22:29] at least in the general public thinking somehow this is a good idea

[01:22:34] to approach war.

[01:22:35] If you are going to go to war,

[01:22:38] there's a whole different issue on where we should go to war,

[01:22:41] when we should intervene.

[01:22:43] That's also been a very healthy conversation thanks to Ron Paul,

[01:22:47] thanks to Pat Buchanan, and mostly thanks to Donald Trump

[01:22:50] that we've had in the last few years.

[01:22:53] But there's whether we should intervene and then how we intervene.

[01:22:56] Of course, we're going retrograde in the Ukraine

[01:23:01] because this is another limited war, folks.

[01:23:03] This is not being fought in a rational way.

[01:23:06] There's a lot of foreign aid, a lot of grifters,

[01:23:09] a lot of people stealing our money.

[01:23:11] And this is another disaster.

[01:23:13] We'll talk about that one though a little bit later.

[01:23:17] So this is Vietnam.

[01:23:21] So my question now is why?

[01:23:25] Why?

[01:23:28] I mean, we know the political realities,

[01:23:31] that the people wanted action against communism,

[01:23:34] but not a big war like Korea.

[01:23:36] I mean, that was their hope.

[01:23:38] We know what that political dynamic was

[01:23:42] and why politicians would want to try to act

[01:23:44] like they're doing something against communism

[01:23:46] and get tied up in something like Vietnam.

[01:23:48] But why did these smart people at the Council on Foreign Relations,

[01:23:53] people like David Rockefeller,

[01:23:55] why when DiEM came to the United States,

[01:23:59] why was this reception kind of highlighted by the big foundations,

[01:24:06] the big NGOs, the big social engineers of America?

[01:24:12] Why are they pushing this psychotic man DiEM

[01:24:17] on the American people?

[01:24:20] What was the purpose of that?

[01:24:22] Well, again, we're looking, if you look at what happened,

[01:24:28] all of the experimentation that went on,

[01:24:31] on how to terrorize a population,

[01:24:34] on how to militarize a population,

[01:24:39] how to force them out of the countryside into these big cities.

[01:24:43] There was just a lot of opportunity for social engineering,

[01:24:48] kind of to them a blank canvas

[01:24:50] when they divided North and South Vietnam

[01:24:54] in that accord in 1954.

[01:24:58] They were just all about this, folks,

[01:25:00] as well as elements of our military.

[01:25:03] Colonel Lansdale, an interesting figure in his own right.

[01:25:07] You know, all of the things the CIA was playing with in the 1950s,

[01:25:12] all the experimentation, you know, things like LSD,

[01:25:16] and the Tavistock Institute stuff over in England

[01:25:20] that was also being perpetrated over here in America.

[01:25:26] I don't have all the answers to provide you,

[01:25:29] and there's a lot of conspiracy theories

[01:25:31] and a lot of extremists have written about a lot of this stuff,

[01:25:34] but it's obvious, folks.

[01:25:36] There was something up with these people.

[01:25:38] They were just idiots falling into a perfect storm

[01:25:43] of a terrible situation, which it was,

[01:25:48] but that I don't think is where they were motivated

[01:25:51] because they were so highly motivated to push this.

[01:25:55] And the advisors around, particularly now Kennedy,

[01:25:59] pushing, pushing to get more and more involved.

[01:26:03] And then these same advisors, at least McNamara and Rusk.

[01:26:07] If you remember Dean Rusk,

[01:26:09] who came from the Rockefeller Foundation,

[01:26:11] and Robert McNamara, who came from the Ford Motor Corporation.

[01:26:15] They stay around and they're Johnson's advisors,

[01:26:18] and they keep pushing him to ratchet up this involvement

[01:26:22] that we had over there and get us up to 500,000 troops.

[01:26:26] And then they come to Johnson,

[01:26:28] and there's pictures of this meeting.

[01:26:30] They're just saying, buddy, you really screwed up.

[01:26:33] I mean, we're not going to win.

[01:26:35] It's kind of like when they came to Kennedy and said,

[01:26:38] excuse me, earlier, and said,

[01:26:40] we know, we told you, DM was the greatest guy in the world.

[01:26:43] We sent you down on the floor of the Senate

[01:26:46] to give a speech saying, DM is the greatest guy in the world.

[01:26:50] But he's not the greatest guy, Mr. President,

[01:26:53] and he has basically destroyed our chances

[01:26:56] of winning this war unless we turn things around.

[01:26:58] So we got to take him out immediately.

[01:27:00] Well, in Johnson's case, a lot more,

[01:27:03] a lot more extreme than Mr. President.

[01:27:05] We can't win this war.

[01:27:07] And so all these establishment folk around Johnson

[01:27:12] kind of left him holding the bag

[01:27:15] to the point that even though he won in a massive landslide

[01:27:19] against Barry Goldwater in 1964,

[01:27:23] lying to the public saying he did not want to send

[01:27:26] American boys over to do what Asian boys were supposed to do,

[01:27:31] paraphrase of what he actually said

[01:27:33] at campaign stop after campaign stop in 1964,

[01:27:37] you know, they talked him into this tremendous involvement

[01:27:42] and then they came to him and said,

[01:27:46] you know, this is not working.

[01:27:48] So they left him holding the bag.

[01:27:50] So he doesn't even run for reelection,

[01:27:52] which he could have done in 1968.

[01:27:55] Johnson's destroyed by the Vietnam War.

[01:27:59] And so I have to remind you also,

[01:28:02] going back now, we're going to talk more about this

[01:28:04] in the final Kennedy podcast,

[01:28:07] but all these people are saying, oh, Kennedy,

[01:28:09] he realized the CIA was lying

[01:28:12] and he realized this whole Cold War was terrible

[01:28:15] and he wanted to just have peace,

[01:28:17] peace with the Russians.

[01:28:18] Kennedy was a Democrat politician

[01:28:21] and they were extremely sensitive

[01:28:24] to the idea that they were not anti-communist enough

[01:28:28] because so many Republicans had run successfully

[01:28:31] telling the public just that because they weren't.

[01:28:35] And so Kennedy and Johnson, both of them,

[01:28:39] even though this is not working out well

[01:28:42] or not able to do all the things we should do

[01:28:44] or letting the Russians go up

[01:28:46] and filling Haiphong Harbor full of merchant vessels

[01:28:50] built by Americans and American technology and capital

[01:28:55] and then offloading all that material

[01:28:57] and using it on us.

[01:28:58] A lot of stuff doesn't work real well here,

[01:29:00] but we got to stay the course

[01:29:02] because we cannot be seen as pulling out

[01:29:06] and allowing Southeast Asia to go communist.

[01:29:10] So this was constantly on the mind of Kennedy.

[01:29:13] And when Waller Cronkite is interviewing Kennedy

[01:29:17] in September of 1963, not long before he's assassinated,

[01:29:21] Kennedy is telling, Cronkite, oh no,

[01:29:26] there's problems over there.

[01:29:28] DM has just been assassinated, I believe.

[01:29:31] I believe that happened before the interview,

[01:29:33] but they're talking about the problems over there

[01:29:36] and Kennedy is like, no, we can't pull out.

[01:29:39] We have to stay the course.

[01:29:40] I mean, he's saying that.

[01:29:41] I know there's other evidence and whatnot.

[01:29:43] Bobby Kennedy told the National Archives,

[01:29:49] he was interviewed by some folks back in D.C.,

[01:29:51] I think it was National Archives people,

[01:29:54] not too long after his brother was assassinated,

[01:29:58] that John F. Kennedy was not going to leave Vietnam

[01:30:01] and he was absolutely going to, guess what,

[01:30:04] stay the course in fighting communism.

[01:30:07] Now there's reasons that Bobby would say that,

[01:30:09] like the politics of the moment,

[01:30:12] but there was a lot of pressure on Johnson

[01:30:17] and on JFK to figure out how to win in Vietnam

[01:30:23] and at minimum to contain and to contain communism.

[01:30:27] So it did not spill from, they already gave up North Vietnam,

[01:30:31] but so it did not spill into South Vietnam

[01:30:34] and over into Cambodia.

[01:30:36] I didn't even get into all that situation

[01:30:38] where we have a monarchy,

[01:30:41] we have a prince, a sihanouk,

[01:30:43] who has been neutralized by the Chinese

[01:30:45] and essentially playing for the other team

[01:30:48] and we had a so-called coalition government in Laos

[01:30:51] that ended up to become communist.

[01:30:54] So I mean there's already a few losses on the board

[01:30:56] in the containment scorecard

[01:30:59] and so they just felt a lot of pressure

[01:31:01] to make sure that didn't happen in South Vietnam.

[01:31:04] So a total disaster and nothing to do

[01:31:07] with the American troops who went over there,

[01:31:12] members of my family, probably members of your family

[01:31:16] who may have died over there,

[01:31:19] who came back with horrific injuries

[01:31:22] or a horrific issues to deal with PTSD, mental issues.

[01:31:28] It wasn't worth it folks and it was a disaster

[01:31:32] and I'm going to argue there was treason going on

[01:31:35] because we were not meant to win this war.

[01:31:39] This was a managed conflict managed by our masters

[01:31:43] to perform a bunch of experiments on a society,

[01:31:47] ours and Vietnam's,

[01:31:51] for their benefit and not ours

[01:31:54] and of course for the benefit of the communists

[01:31:56] because our pinstripe-suited Fabian socialists

[01:32:02] always end up doing everything they can

[01:32:05] to help the communists.

[01:32:07] When Richard Nixon was trying to get the communists

[01:32:13] to finally sit down at the negotiating table

[01:32:16] to try to negotiate out

[01:32:19] and end to the Vietnam War,

[01:32:22] Nixon desperately was trying to get us

[01:32:25] out of the entanglement of Vietnam.

[01:32:29] He did something that the internationalists had told us

[01:32:33] the entire time this was going on.

[01:32:36] He did something they said could not happen.

[01:32:39] He mined Haiphong Harbor.

[01:32:43] He mined this harbor where all this material was coming in.

[01:32:50] We did not end up in a nuclear war immediately

[01:32:53] with the Soviet Union which is what the Council on Foreign Relations people,

[01:32:57] what all the internationalists smart people

[01:33:01] told us would happen if we did that.

[01:33:03] That was their excuse as to why we were letting all this material

[01:33:06] just come flowing into Vietnam.

[01:33:09] But when Nixon did it, none of that happened

[01:33:13] and the North Vietnamese were at the table within days.

[01:33:18] What does that tell you folks?

[01:33:20] What does that tell you about what could have happened

[01:33:23] with the right leadership in Vietnam?

[01:33:28] Also, many of the people mostly on the farther left

[01:33:33] told us the entire time that this idea of the domino theory,

[01:33:39] I hadn't really talked about this in this podcast,

[01:33:42] but that if we left Vietnam

[01:33:46] that all these other countries would fall around Vietnam.

[01:33:50] They were saying that was ridiculous,

[01:33:52] that each country was separate,

[01:33:54] that these were nationalist movements involved,

[01:33:57] not really just communists,

[01:34:01] just communists trying to take as much power as they can everywhere they can.

[01:34:05] So they po-tolds in the domino theory,

[01:34:09] but after our disgraceful exit from Vietnam,

[01:34:14] one of the most undignified and defiling acts

[01:34:19] in the history of mankind,

[01:34:21] much less the history of the United States,

[01:34:23] the way we left Vietnam,

[01:34:25] what happened was Cambodia,

[01:34:30] who had this neutralist Prince Sihanouk

[01:34:33] that was playing ball with the Chinese,

[01:34:35] they fell to the communists and became a total communist nation.

[01:34:40] And unfortunately, this communist nation, unlike others,

[01:34:44] had a real crazy person running things,

[01:34:48] and Pol Pot was his name,

[01:34:51] and other communist nations have very rational people

[01:34:55] that do terrible things as far as terrorism

[01:34:59] in order to maintain their power.

[01:35:01] But this guy, Pol Pot, was actually crazy

[01:35:04] and thought anybody that wore eyeglasses should be executed

[01:35:08] because they might be reading something

[01:35:10] that is not authorized by the communists.

[01:35:13] And so what did you end up with?

[01:35:15] The 25 million people killed in a holocaust in Cambodia

[01:35:21] that I would argue is one of the many, many things

[01:35:25] that happened that were a result of our departure from Vietnam

[01:35:31] and not the way we should have departed, not in victory.

[01:35:35] It's midnight in America, and this is the hour of decision.

[01:35:39] My name is Lou Moore.

[01:35:41] Our decision can be found on News for America

[01:35:44] at newsforamerica.org.

[01:35:47] Thank you very much. See you later.