From The concise untold history of the United States (Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick, 2015) pp197-205
But it was Asia that posed the greatest resistance to U.S. goals, aside from Japan, which was becoming a prosperous client state that was paying the U.S. to maintain bases. China exploded its first atomic bomb in October of 1964, catching Washington totally off-guard. In Indonesia, sitting astride Southeast Asia’s principal sea lanes, where 3.5 million members made its Communist Party the third largest in the world behind the Soviets and Chinese, Sukarno, having survived repeated U.S. attempts to remove him, further irritated the U.S. by declaring he would test an atomic bomb, but he was denied help from China. And, when he recognized North Vietnam, expropriated U.S. rubber plantations, and threatened to nationalize American oil companies, Lyndon Johnson struck hard. Almost half the officer corps had received some U.S. training, and, in October 1965, with CIA support, General Suharto led the army in crushing Sukarno’s supporters.
In the following months, Suharto’s militias and civilian mobs went from house to house, killing a half million to a million suspected communists and their families. U.S., British, and Australian intelligence provided thou- sands of names of communists, educators, and reformers to the army.
Sukarno was forced out finally in 1967 and replaced by Suharto, who enriched himself, his family, and U.S. corporations for decades, until he was overthrown by the people, led by student activists, in 1998.
Largely unknown to the public, the coup in Indonesia was hailed inside Washington as the CIA’s greatest single operation in its history. In 1968, the CIA acknowledged that the Indonesia massacre ranked as one of the worst mass murders in the twentieth century.
President Kennedy’s national security advisor McGeorge Bundy, later criticizing the U.S. Vietnam War policy, wrote that Indonesia was the true breaking point in Asia — far more important to U.S. goals than Vietnam, which was, he said, “unnecessary.” Yet, now in history, even Indonesia’s bloodbath pales in comparison to what the United States inflicted on Vietnam. ;
Johnson and his advisors understood very little about Vietnam’s history and its strong resistance to Chinese and French invasions over the centuries. They totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement and assumed if they wreaked enough havoc and killed enough people, the Vietnamese would submit. Within two months of JFK’s death, in January 1964, Johnson and McNamara escalated covert military activities against North Vietnam, dropping intelligence and commando teams to destroy bridges, railways, and coastal installations, kidnapping North Vietnamese, and bombing border villages.
Johnson was pathological in his ability to lie. As with the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, the American people would eventually discover the false origins of the Vietnam War.
In August 1964, Johnson and McNamara used a fabricated incident in North Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse to further escalate the war. The media echoed the line that a U.S. ship had been attacked.
Johnson rushed to Congress to authorize direct U.S. military action, and the House, after forty minutes of debate, passed the resolution 416 to 0. In the Senate, it passed by 88 to 2.
A few days later, Johnson told his undersecretary of state, “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.” Senator Wayne Morse presciently commented, “I doubt that the American people understand what this resolution really is. It is a resolution that seeks to give q the president of the United States the power to make war without a declaration of war.”
In the election of 1964, Johnson crushed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who threatened to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. It was billed as a landslide for peace. But following the election, Johnson began a steady process of escalation, sharply expanding the “free-fire zones,” in which anything that moved was considered a legitimate target. The U.S. arsenal of acceptable weapons grew to include napalm, cluster bombs, and white phosphorus, which burned from the skin straight through to the bone, causing horrific deaths. All of these would have been considered illegal chemical weapons at the Nuremberg trials.
Johnson’s lies about his plans snowballed, and, by April 1965, he’d sent seventy-five thousand combat troops to Vietnam — and more than half a million by the end of 1967. The monthly draft reached thirty-five thousand men, as the U.S. set out to find Vietnam’s breaking point.
Yet, when his Joint Chiefs of Staff at a meeting asked for more firepower or an all-out war, Major Charles Cooper recalled Johnson started screaming obscenities: “Imagine that you’re me — that you’re the president of the United States — and five incompetents come into your office and try to talk you into starting World War Ill. … The risk is just too high. How can you fucking assholes ignore what China might do? You have just contaminated my office, you filthy shitheads. Get the hell out of here right now.”
The generals got out. And, after a pause, Johnson continued to escalate the bombing of North Vietnam.
In his inimitable way, he explained to George McGovern his strategy of intensifying the bombing without provoking a strong response from China and North Vietnam: “I’m going up her leg an inch at a time. . . . I’ll get to the snatch before they know what’s happening.”
The U.S. dropped three times as many bombs on tiny Vietnam as it did in all of World War II. On the ground, in a policy sanctioned by Kennedy, more than 5 million peasants were forced out of villages and resettled in barbed-wire camps. ‘Tens of thousands of supposed communists, many of them reformers or critics of the government, were assassinated as part of a “Phoenix Program,” but it did little to slow the resistance movement. The murder of civilians became commonplace, as the U.S. military leadership exaggerated body counts to tell the public that the communists were on their last legs, while still asking for more and more troops.
Five South Vietnamese governments came and went, the last clinging to power through massive corruption and violence against its own people.
America’s college campuses began to buzz with activism. In October 1967, one of the first violent confrontations took place at the University of Wisconsin. Johnson, convinced that communists were behind the anti-war movement, ordered the CIA to uncover proof, with massive surveillance and other information-gathering efforts. Codenamed “Chaos,” the CIA’s illegal domestic operations lasted almost seven years, compiling a computer index of three hundred thousand citizens and organizations and extensive files on more than seven thousand individuals, but failed to prove communist involvement.
Among the FBI’s principal targets was Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Black America was in a state of near rebellion. Riots had rocked U.S. cities for several years, but now twenty-five major riots, lasting two days or more, and thirty minor ones shattered the summer of 1967. Police and National Guard troops killed twenty-six blacks in Newark and forty-three in Detroit.
A Ramparts magazine March 1967 exposé revealed that the CIA had been funding the National Student Association. Other liberal groups were exposed as Agency fronts, with CIA money going to anticommunist professors, journalists, aid workers, missionaries, labor leaders, and civil rights activists, who did the Agency’s dirty work. Among the discredited were the Ford Foundation, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Even McNamara, with his characteristic rationality, was having doubts. In October 1967, one hundred thousand people marched on the Pentagon. Armed infantry prevented them from reaching it, but McNamara ordered them not to load their weapons. He watched alone from a command post on the roof.
Now isolated within the establishment, McNamara despaired. Rumors of a possible mental collapse reached Johnson. “We just can’t afford to have another Forrestal,” he said. When McNamara argued that more bombing would not work, Johnson was livid. He demanded loyalty, saying of another aide: “I don’t want loyalty. | want LOYALTY. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.”
Johnson ousted McNamara and announced that he would become president of the World Bank. At his last cabinet meeting, an aide reported that McNamara finally broke down: “The goddamned bombing campaign, it’s been worth nothing; it’s done nothing. They’ve dropped more bombs than in all of Europe in all of World War II and it hasn’t done a fucking thing!”
The year 1968 was one of extraordinary change. In January, on the same day, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces unleashed shock attacks on most of Vietnam’s major cities and provincial capitals. The attacks were ultimately repelled, with great losses to the Vietnamese, but the mood in Washington was despair.
A bipartisan group of elder statesmen reassessed the situation. It was time to get out.
Lyndon Johnson, his enormous ego deeply wounded by the doubts of his leadership, besieged by enemies internal and external, his popularity plummeting, announced shockingly in March 1968 that he would not run for a sécond term. The country was stunned. The leader of the war effort was giving up.
To those against the war, this was a great victory. But to many Americans, as well as neutral countries and allies alike, the U.S. now appeared as a rudderless, immoral country —-an emperor without clothes. The Chinese said “a paper tiger.”
Racked by inner demons, Johnson allowed his heartfelt dream of being a great social reformer to be buried in the killing fields of Vietnam. “Losing the Great Society,” he lamented later in the decade to a historian, “was a terrible thought, but not so terrible as the thought of being responsible for America’s losing a war to the communists. Nothing could possibly be worse than that.” Here was a man, a potential giant, who, in denying his compassion, suffered from a truly American obsession — the fear of weakness.
—
[A Texan against the Others]
Tgk1946's Blog 