McNamara, Cronkite
As a not so serious blogger who doesn't have a compulsion to push views out regularly, I realized how some topics freezes my thinking as the world passes by.
I have been trying to blog on former Secy. of Defense McNamara passing away, who was much reviled for going to Vietnam. Vietnam war was not a war of deceit, there was no WMD used or mushroom cloud threat thrown. What started as a US support operation for South Vietnam slipped into a war after a North Vietnamese attack on US destroyers in what is called Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Many years later it was revealed that the North Vietnamese attack was ordered by a local commander, whereas US thought it was decision of the North Vietnamese top leadership. This was revealed in a conversation by McNamara and North Vietnamese leadership of the time, much after the war, this conversation much more can be found in McNamara's book Argument Without End In Search Of Answers To The Vietnam Tragedy .
It is difficult to say the war was necessary or not, Vietnam came soon after Korea. US being a nation of ideas and ideals instead of nation based on ethnicity had to make hard decisions like Vietnam. When time came McNamara took decisions based on convictions, his decisions might not have won him friends, but he did an honest public service. McNamara was not a Donald Rumsfeld.
Cronkite who passed away soon after McNamara was an outstanding journalist rarely seen these days, he made a prescient call that US has lost the war much before it lost. We don't too many people of this kind these days, 24 hour news cycle make me sick.
I am ambivalent about the opinion that Vietnam was an unpopular war, for the following reasons.
1) Loss of antiwar candidate McGovern's loss due to his opposition to Vietnam war among many other things.
2)Change of heart in many Americans after looking at the way South Vietnamese were treated by the North Vietnamese after the end of War, in fact support for the war grew after the end of Vietnam war. A book I read recently details it.
Comments
I would very much appreciate your efforts here, we vilify people who risk their life , all their life! for us , yet are subject to brutal criticism from folks sitting in the comfort of home. He was a war hero and deserves his stars.