Talk:Cold War
hugh_m says, "don't spin the Nixon evil darkness around me"
While browsing recent changes i noticed a reference inserted by user - 68.59.168.100 in the topic cold war which claims:
- The Nixon administration promised support for South Vietnam should the fighting resume, but Nixon was politically unable to provide that support when the North invaded South Vietnam in 1975.
So sorry, but Nixon god-damned resigned in 1974! So actually it isn't untruthful to state that he was politically unable to provide help, but inaccurate just the same.
Reference:
- Nixon's televised resignation speech, August 8, 1974
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/character/links/nixon_speech.html
- graphic of Nixons's one sentence resignation letter to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, dated August 9, 1974.
http://www.watergate.info/nixon/resignation-letter.shtml
This also seems to be distorting the Nixon legacy regarding the Vietnam War. As I posted in the Kissinger section recently, the recently released(Aug. 2004) tapes from the Nixon administration would indicate that he cared very little about the ideology of the cold war, only about how it affected his own re-election in 1972. Pure cold-blooded real_nixonian_politik.
Please visit the current online exhibit of the University of Virgia, Miller Center of Public Affairs:
- The Nixon Presidency — 30 Years After
http://www.millercenter.virginia.edu/programs/prp/nixon/
and more specifically:
- Seeking a ‘Decent Interval’ Exit From Vietnam.
http://www.millercenter.virginia.edu/programs/prp/nixon/public_vs_private/pvp1.html
- ";;...Nixon had privately decided to time the withdrawal to the election, he publicly claimed that every decision he made regarding the war had the aim of saving American lives."
Nixon gamed death and political timing while the North Vietameese, the South Vietnameese, Cambodians, Laotians, and American soldiers, both volunteers and conscripts, were dying as he played with his timetable.
It wasn't just party politics that caused the upheaval, either. The United States Armed Forces were in serious decline. Fragging as an expression of distaste for officers had spread beyond the war zone. Racial tensions had become almost(some would argue with regards to almost) intolerable. By forcing the selective service to play fair by not giving student deferments in 1969, the Armed Forces suddenly found themselves innundated with smart-assed upper-middle class boomer fucktards, who could wrap the NCO's and Officers of that era around their fingers, and/or bury them in processes of bureaucracy.
It is the Jr. Officers of that time, who stuck it out and became the upper command that should be held highly. Clark, Shinseki, Zinni, Powell etc. were the young bucks who were able to turn it around. Now contemplate how nicely their dissent in regards to the War Upon Iraq was taken by the current administration, and think about how these for the most part chickenhawks attempted to tarnish these career officers' honour and reputations.
reference
Col. Robert D. Heinl is a respected Military Historian, generally USMC. The following is an excerpt from a June 7, 1971 article of his pulished in the Armed Forces Journal.
The link offered is from an unapologetic lefty college professor's webspace though. His name is Grover Furr and he teaches at Montclair State University Montclair, New Jersey. I have never seen any reference to his html marked up version of the Heinl article being false.
It has also been republished in
- Vietnam and America: A Documented History
- Edited by Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane M. Franklin, Marilyn Young and H. Bruce Franklin
- New York: Grove Press, 1985; 1988. Revised and expanded edition, New York: :Grove/Atlantic, 1995. ISBN 0-8021-3362-2
- Chapter 49
I heartily recommend anyone interested in History and/or PR spin download and archive this article. It is a keeper.
A citation and a few paragraphs from the intro follow:
- Heinl, Col. Robert D., Jr.
- The Collapse of the Armed Forces
- North American Newspaper Alliance
- Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971
- http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/heinl.html
- THE MORALE, DISCIPLINE and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.
- By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having _refused_ combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.
- Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.
- Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general government, in Congress as well as the executive branch, distrusted, disliked, and often reviled by the public, the uniformed services today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professions who doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat.
- The responses of the services to these unheard-of conditions, forces and new public attitudes, are confused, resentful, occasional pollyanna-ish, and in some cases even calculated to worsen the malaise that is wracking. While no senior officer (especially one on active duty) can openly voice any such assessment, the foregoing conclusions find virtually unanimous support in numerous non-attributable interviews with responsible senior and mid-level officer, as well as career noncommissioned officers and petty officers in all services.
- Historical precedents do not exist for some of the services' problems, such as desertion, mutiny, unpopularity, seditious attacks, and racial troubles. Others, such as drugs, pose difficulties that are wholly NEW. Nowhere, however, in the history of the Armed Forces have comparable past troubles presented themselves in such general magnitude, acuteness, or concentrated focus as today.
- By several orders of magnitude, the Army seems to be in worse trouble. But the Navy has serious and unprecedented problems, while the Air Force, on the surface at least still clear of the quicksands in which the Army is sinking, is itself facing disquieting difficulties.
Hugh Manatee 05:08, 2 Jan 2005 (EST)
