“The best way to end a war is to win it.” – Senator Barry Goldwater
I SAVE A FEW OLD MAGAZINES. I stumbled upon one yesterday, the April 25, 1966 issue of U.S. News & World Report. One of the featured articles was an interview with Barry Goldwater regarding the war in Vietnam. Goldwater was a military man. He flew to Burma and China and so on from 1941 to 1945. He was a Major General in the Air Force Reserve. President Johnson was just a career politician. He ignored advice from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I heard Bob Hope comment negatively about LBJ. Here are some of Goldwater’s thoughts:
U.S. News: Is the war being lost?
AuH2O: Well, we’re not winning. We are still not trying to win the war . . LBJ is trying to keep both sides happy. Senators Fulbright and Morse (etc., and the hawks).
U.S. News: You said LBJ is not listening to his military advisers because of political considerations.
AuH2O: Domestically, the reason is to keep the war at a low level to save as many members of his Congress as possible.”
U.S. News: Regarding the fear of escalation, is it a fear that China might enter the war?
Goldwater: “Yes, and it creates a kind of administration paralysis. I don’t think Peiping would come into this war under any circumstances . . It’s an open secret in Washington that the Joint Chiefs of Staff want to bomb the petroleum depots around Haiphong. I would agree with them. I would certainly close the port of Haiphong.”
Lyndon Johnson didn’t care about young Americans dying halfway around the world; it was about the power, stupid. I could almost vomit just thinking about it. Ironically, Johnson made Richard Nixon essentially a three-time winner: 1968, 1972, and possibly 1960 if you could take out the fraud in Chicago and Texas.
Nixon finally mined the Haiphong Harbor, but it was way too late. I don’t know how many G.I.s died during the Nixon years, but on LBJ’s watch in 1968 alone, the US had 16,899 killed and 87,388 wounded. That was the year of the Tet offensive; combined allied forces (including over 27,915 South Vietnamese soldiers) and a high number of North Vietnamese/Viet Cong casualties—estimated at over 181,000—made it the most intense year of fighting.
A total of 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties were recorded during the Vietnam War, according to the National Archives and VA data. These records include hostile combat deaths as well as non-hostile deaths in the Southeast Asia theater from 1956 to 2006.
Besides the Johnson-McNamara blunders, did the military-industrial complex play a part in keeping the war going as long as possible? All the world’s just a stage, they say. And don’t forget the “parts” played by our celebrities and the media! The Communists lost the Tet offensive but won the propaganda war.
P.S. Personally, I wasn’t in the service, and I wasn’t in favor of the anti-war riots, but I practically had a nervous breakdown over the way the war was going in 1966—the year of the Goldwater interview. Evidently, I had read and highlighted the article a few months earlier. I had seen where the war was coming from, and I knew where it was going.
PPS: Today’s pro-Palestine and pro-Iran protestors remind me of the sixties hippies: “Ho ho ho; Ho Chi Minh; dare to fight and dare to win.”
Curtis Dahlgren
Picture: AI
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