A must read
Almost half a century ago, a young reporter from Germany arrived in
still-glamorous Saigon to cover the Vietnam War over a period of five
years.
He praises the beauty, elegance and feistiness of
their women. He describes blood-curdling Communist atrocities and
fierce combat scenes he had witnessed. He introduces a striking array of
characters: heroes, villains, statesmen and spooks, hilarious
eccentrics, street urchins and orphans herding water buffalos.
He
shows how professional malpractice by U.S. media stars such as Walter
Cronkite turned the military victory of American and South Vietnamese
forces during the 1968 Tet Offensive into a political defeat. He mourns
the countless innocent victims of the Communist conquest of South
Vietnam, which was the grim consequence of its abandonment by the
United States. Thus, he argues, the wrong side won.
======================
America’s most famous whistleblower, the former military analyst who
leaked the Pentagon Papers which helped
end the Vietnam war with the abandonment of our Vietnamese allies– has just
published a book
revealing that he was also one of the main nuclear war planners for the United States in the 1960s.
Ellsberg said in an interview this morning that the U.S. had plans
for a first strike on every city in Russia and China … and that numerous
field-level commanders had the power to start nuclear Armageddon:
[Interviewer] So, you made copies of top-secret reports for plans about nuclear war years before you copied the Pentagon Papers—
DANIEL ELLSBERG: That’s right.
[Interviewer] —and released them to the press?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Essentially, my notes, and sometimes verbatim
excerpts, not the entire plans themselves, but on plans that were then
unknown to the president, to begin with, to President Kennedy. I briefed
his aide, McGeorge Bundy, in his first month in office on the nature of
the plans and some of the other problems, like the
delegation
of authority to theater commanders for nuclear war by President
Eisenhower, which was fairly shocking to McGeorge Bundy, even though
Kennedy chose to renew that delegation, as other presidents have.
