The lead editorial of The Boston Herald, on Saturday, January 21, 1967, began as follows: “Last week in Vietnam 144 Americans were killed, 1,004 were wounded and six were reported missing.”
It is the sad purpose of this article to raise the question: Did the death of those hundred and forty-four Americans constitute deliberate, conscious, and cold-blooded murder on the part of the Johnson Administration?
This is a somber and solemn thought. We do not plant it without being fully aware of the significance of what we are saying. Nor do we mean the question to be metaphorical or hyperbolic. It is not intended as simply a sensational means of supporting or emphasizing some criticism of the way the war is being conducted. Our inquiry goes much deeper than that, and comes out with the question above when every word is used in its more literal sense.
Let us go back now and begin our approach to this ultimate demand, which will end our essay as it has begun it, by asking a whole series of more immediate and more specific questions. The Greeks said that to know the right questions to ask about any subject was to be half way, already, towards knowing the answers. We do not claim to know the answers about Vietnam, nor even all of the valid questions. But we certainly do know quite a number of questions which the American people should be asking.II
First, let’s gradually become immersed in our subject matter by considering the more obvious puzzles, which float right on the surface of the discussion all around us.
1. When are we going to win this war in Vietnam — and why not? The United States is still by far the most powerful nation on earth. We have been spending around forty to fifty billion dollars per year on our military preparedness since the memory of man runneth hardly to the contrary. Under these circumstances is it possible that we cannot lick a puny bunch of half-starved guerrillas in a country the size of Missouri? Or is the real difficulty the lack of any will to win on the part of the Johnson Administration? Or (to be more seriously considered later), the lack of even any desire to win?
2. Why fight ‘em in Vietnam and help ‘em everywhere else? And if you do not believe we are helping the Communists everywhere else, you need only to read your daily papers. In fact, the Administration is right now moving heaven and earth to bring about more so-called trade with Soviet Russia and all of its satellites. Most of this trade turns out, in any final analysis, to be simply gifts in one form or another from the United States. Yet Moscow and these satellites are supplying most of the war matériel to be used by the Viet Cong in Vietnam against our soldiers there, while Washington helps to keep these Communist regimes in power and in position to do so.
Putting it more concisely, our boys in Vietnam are being killed by Russian bullets fired from Russian guns, while the Johnson Administration sends the Soviets wheat to feed those who are making the guns and the bullets. So much wheat, indeed, that Soviet Russia, in turn, has just given two hundred thousand tons of wheat to India! And in one recent year the Communist regime in Poland gave to our enemy Ho chi Minh, in North Vietnam, thirteen million dollars taken directly out of the much larger sum which Washington had given to Warsaw. What kind of insanity (or worse) is this anyway?
3. How is it possible that supposedly mortal enemies, namely the Viet Cong and ourselves, while locked in a so-called battle to the death, can keep on declaring time out for holidays, huddles, and repairs? What kind of a war is this? In a football game there can be time out because the conference or the league controls both sides, and the enemies are not really enemies but friendly rivals who are doing it all for sport. Is some similar conference or league running both sides of this war, and is it all just a show? If so, have our boys who are maimed and killed been let in on this fact?
4. Is this war being run by the United Nations, or isn’t it? Is it being run by SEATO, and if so is that the same as being run by the United Nations? Of course we know that the answer to both of these questions is yes. The Australian contingent of troops, for instance, is not there by the orders or direction of the United States, but of this Southeast Asia Treaty Organization — exactly as the Turkish contingent in the Korean War, and in fact our own troops in Korea as well, were under the control of NATO — as Walter Lippmann so gleefully boasted. And SEATO, like NATO, by the very treaties which established it, is a regional subsidiary of the United Nations. But it would be good to get a lot of Congressmen, for instance, and other people too, on record about this matter — or asking the same questions on behalf of the American people.
5. Why, when we are asking for troops to help us from all other allies we can get, do we not ask Chiang Kai-shek to send over his half a million men? They are the best trained and the most knowledgeable troops in the world for fighting Communist guerrillas in Asia, and their whole ambition in life is to have a chance to do so. And what kind of nonsense is it about our being afraid of bringing Red China into the war, when — according to the UPI dispatch of December 22 from Manila — Foreign Minister Chen Yi of Red China is already boasting (however untruthfully) that Peking is even now supplying seventy percent of the total aid being received by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese? And when the Peking regime has also repeatedly stated that it would send troops to help North Vietnam, even under present conditions, at any time that troops are requested?
6. Where is there any real difference between this mess and the one we went through in Korea? In that case, even after the Red Chinese had officially entered the war, we not only refused to allow Chiang Kai-shek to come in and help us, but we kept our Seventh Fleet patrolling the Formosa Strait to make sure that this ally did not attack our enemy. The Seventh Fleet is still patrolling the Formosa Strait, you will notice, and for the same purpose: namely, to protect Mao Tse-tung’s regime from Chiang Kai-shek. Only now, this purpose has been officially admitted by an American ambassador. (John Cabot on June 23, 1962. See New York Times, June 27, 1962)
There are a dozen other vital similarities in the picture. This is just the same old road show enacted in Korea, where MacArthur was fired for even trying to win the war. The road show has now been moved south a thousand miles and reopened at a new stand, with the same plot, the same management, and a very similar cast. Once again we are sending our men to fight against the Communists, in a war which is actually being controlled on both sides by Communists or Communist influences. Why are we stupid enough to allow it all a second time?
7. In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson, during his campaign for re-election, used as his main appeal the theme that he had kept us out of war. But at that very time the INSIDER, Edward Mandell House, was having the plans drawn up to send a huge American expeditionary force to fight in the European war. In 1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, during his campaign for re-election, used as a strong appeal his statement: “I say to you again and again and again that your sons are not going to be sent to fight in any foreign wars.” But at that very time he was taking every step he dared to assure that American boys would be sent into the war in Europe, by the hundreds of thousands, just as soon as it could be contrived after his re-election. In September 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson, during his campaign for re-election, proclaimed: “… We are not about to send American boys 9,000 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing to protect themselves.” But at that very time, as became obvious later, he was a party to plans for gradually moving hundreds of thousands of American boys into a war in Vietnam.
We know now that the Communist influences headed by Edward Mandell House were controlling Woodrow Wilson, whether Wilson was conscious of it or not. We know that Franklin D. Roosevelt was not only completely surrounded by Communist influences right in the White House, but was fully aware of it and even boasted that many of his best friends were Communists. In view of the incredible advance of the Communists everywhere during recent decades, is there any chance of their influence in top circles of our government actually being less now than it was under Wilson or under Roosevelt? Does anybody have any doubts as to who is really running things in Washington today, or that our actions in Vietnam are being conducted exactly according to Communist plans and wishes?
8. Are we actually at war in Vietnam, or aren’t we? In one breath we are given to understand that this is simply a “police action,” within a friendly nation, to help the government and people of that nation protect themselves from Communist guerrillas. (Communist guerrillas, incidentally, whom we — meaning the Roosevelt Administration — set up in business under Ho chi Minh, in 1944 and 1945, with American money, equipment, and support.) In the next breath, the President himself tells us that “this is war.” And we now read about more and more bombing raids by American planes over the territory and capital of a supposedly independent nation, North Vietnam. But if this is war, then what happened to Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 11 of the United States Constitution which decrees that only Congress can put this nation into war?
9. Since we are in a war, even though an undeclared war, why do we impose, or allow to be imposed, so many incredible handicaps on our men who are trying to fight it. Our bombers are regularly required to fly dangerous missions with only a small fraction of the effective bomb load they could carry. To enter North Vietnam they must fly a specified route, well known to the enemy, which makes the operation so dangerous that the pilots call this route “slaughter alley.” In bombing the supply route to the Viet Cong, known as the Ho chi Minh trail, through Laos, our bombers are required to confine their attacks to targets within 204 feet from the trail itself. So the Communists, when they see American planes coming, merely pull aside until they are 205 feet from the road, and figuratively thumb their noses at the helpless American pilots.
Villages may not be attacked, no matter how superficial their appearance may be. So the Communists build what look like the roofs of huts over the beds of their trucks. When they see American planes coming the Communist supply trucks merely stop and huddle. And presto, as somebody has said, you have an instant village, which is immune from attack. And on the ground, in most cases, the boys in our detachments are not allowed to fire on the enemy until they have been fired on first. We recently published the true story of one American soldier, lying in a hospital bed with both legs blown off, whose chief concern was that he might be court martialed because he had fired on the advancing Viet Cong before they had fired on his position which they were attacking. Again we ask, what kind of a war is this? And whose side do you suppose the people are on who have laid down or even accepted any such restrictions?III
Now let’s dive below the surface into gradually deeper waters. We soon begin to find more monstrous puzzles and more sinister skullduggery which needs to be examined. Our questions, therefore, become more fundamental — and more frightening.
10. First, there is the most fundamental of all: Why are we fighting in Vietnam anyway? For what reason, or what objective? What are we trying to accomplish? If you have ever heard any straightforward answer to that question which makes sense, against the background of American history for the past fifteen years, then your receiving facilities are better than ours. The only answers we have heard simply prompt more difficult questions.
The answer most frequently given or implied by the Administration, for instance, is that the United States — meaning its government — is duty-bound and nobly determined to oppose Communist aggression. Unfortunately, this tempts any informed listener, who is familiar with the record, to come out with a huge horse laugh, and ask sarcastically “Is that so?” But let’s suppose that, for the present and simply as an hypothesis for the sake of the argument, we were willing to accept that protestation as if it were bona fide. Then further questions would pour out faster than we could list them.
11. The most obvious is: Then why pick Vietnam, and Vietnam alone, for this opposition? We first went into Vietnam, or made it theoretically our protégé nation, in 1954, by throwing the French out and putting the Communists in. As so-called “observers” at Geneva in 1954, but really running the show, we turned the top half of the country over directly and officially to the Communists, and set up an anti-Communist government in the bottom half, exactly as we had done in Korea in 1948. In both cases we thus prepared the way for the Communist aggression from the northern part into the southern part, and for the war that would follow, exactly as the Communists were already planning. There was a tremendous difference in the caliber and quality of the two governments, of South Korea and South Vietnam respectively. But both were eventually to be overthrown by conniving from Washington, when they had served their purposes as foils in the longrange Communist strategy.
Now since 1954 there has been vicious and vital Communist aggression all over the world. In Ghana, in the Congo, in Indonesia, in Algeria, in Cuba, in the Dominican Republic, the Communists have proceeded by guerrilla action, mass murders and cruelties, treasonous subversion, and diplomatic pressures, to set up one Communist tyranny after another. And in every case the Administration in Washington, whether headed by Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Johnson, has been visibly and actively on the side of the Communist aggressors. Basically it has been the same Administration all of the time, of course, controlled by the same influences, carrying out identically the same policies, with politically hermaphroditic characters serving alike in so-called Republican or Democratic administrations, and with bi-partisan treason rampant everywhere. But this treason to the United States and treason to the human race has taken the form of brazenly helping Communist aggression everywhere else, until we come to Vietnam. Why the change? Or the pretended change?
There are circumstances about this war, deriving from its geographical, historical, and ethnological background, which are palpably disadvantageous to the United States. To these circumstances there have been added many others, carefully and cunningly created by somebody, which serve the same purpose of “stacking the cards” against us. The combination produces a situation in which the United States is fighting a war under the cumulative weight of the greatest possible handicaps which could be contrived anywhere on this planet at this time. Is that why Vietnam was picked as the battleground? Let’s examine this possibility by a series of further questions.
12. Why fight the tentacles of Communism instead of its body? But if we must do so, then why choose the most unfavorable area in the whole world in which to attack those tentacles? And why, in doing so, use methods which go contrary to all of our knowledge and experience of the enemy?
General MacArthur solemnly warned us that the only kind of war in which the United States should never engage was with ground forces on the continent of Asia. There are many reasons. One is that, for our Communist enemies in eastern Asia, human life is entirely too cheap and too vastly expendable. Right now, for instance, because of a fantastic animal-like increase in the population, Red China has some two hundred million young people, under twenty years of age, over and above what would be its normal youth population. Mao Tse-tung’s brilliant adventure in birth control, by having prospective mothers swallow live goldfish, simply did not work. So he has on his hands, or soon will have, as many as a hundred million additional young men, most of whom are not capable of doing anything productive whatsoever, but every one of whom wants to eat just as much rice as anybody else.
There is no doubt that, when and if this war is allowed to follow Communist strategic plans, and gets escalated to the point where we are again openly fighting the Red Chinese on the ground in Asia, as we were in Korea, then the monsters in Peking have a hundred million surplus and hungry young robots whom they would love to have liquidated. If each hundred of them could average taking just one American soldier to the graves with themselves, the result would be perfect for Peking — and for Moscow. For then the American people would cry for “peace,” even at the price of being ruled by the Communist United Nations as the last great step towards a worldwide Communist police state. Clearly the circumstances are being created and the groundwork laid right now for that ultimate flowering of the present embryonic and poisonous little war in Vietnam. Is this why we have been committed to such a war?
13. But let’s look further along the line of MacArthur’s thinking. In two world wars American boys have proved themselves to be wonderful soldiers, in any form of battle where the opposing sides wear uniforms and some kind of civilized rules prevail. But neither by nature nor by training are Americans suited to fight as guerrillas in swamps against enemies, to whom dirt and starvation and disease are as normal as the hot climate, who delight in cruelty for its own sake and regard human life, including their own, as on the same level with that of insects, and whose vast numbers offer a bottomless reservoir of replacements for those who are killed. Nowhere else in the world could American soldiers be taken to fight at a more terrific disadvantage than on the ground in Southeast Asia. Is this one reason why Vietnam was picked as the one place for the United States to make its ostensible stand against Communist aggression?
14. And there is more. Vietnam is almost exactly half way around the world from Washington, D.C. It would be impossible for the United States, in fighting a war, to have longer or more difficult or more costly supply lines for its troops. When this Administration or the next one, still under the same Communist influences and run by the same INSIDERS, escalates this war until we have one million, then two million, and then three or four million men fighting the Red Chinese, in North Vietnam and in Southern China, and probably in Cambodia and Laos and even Thailand as well, the cost will be staggering enough to supply the excuse for the most confiscatory taxation and controls that even the Communists in Washington can devise. The six percent surcharge on income taxes which has already been proposed since the notes for this article were put together is only a straw in the wind of what is contemplated. While the length, size, and complexity of the supply lines will make it easy for Communist traitors at a hundred points along those lines subtly to sabotage and misdirect and confuse the equipment our boys need in the field; and to do so a great deal more extensively than in the worst of our similar experiences so far. These disadvantages to ourselves, and advantages to the Communists, would be almost overwhelming. Is this why Vietnam has been picked for the crucial battleground?
15. Or, let’s take a simpler approach to the whole subject. If this Administration or any Administration really and truly did want to fight the Communists and save some other nation or people, why not run the beasts out of Cuba instead of Vietnam? Cuba was really our protégé nation, and for a much longer period of time than the present gang in Washington have pretended to hold South Vietnam in that esteem. Cuba is right at our doorstep, and a Communist regime there is infinitely more damaging and more dangerous to ourselves than one in South Vietnam, on the other side of the world. For a war in and over Cuba, and even if you give consideration to some nonsense about the Soviets coming into it, most of the advantages, as to supply lines and style of fighting, would be with us instead of with our enemies. Can you or anybody else name one reason why we should not be fighting the Communists, if at all, in Cuba instead of in Vietnam? Or do the powers which control Washington want us to be fighting only where we are at the greatest possible disadvantage, and where our inability to win can be made to seem plausible?
16. In 1954, when North Vietnam was turned over officially to the Communists and South Vietnam was made theoretically an independent nation, the Cao Dai religious sect, with about three million adepts ruled by their Pope Pham cong Tac was devoutly anti-Communist. So was a smaller sect, the Hao Hoa, with about two million followers. The former emperor Bao Dai, who had been restored by the French to a semblance of power in 1949, with the title of “chief of state,” was bitterly anti-Communist because of his personal experiences as a captive pawn of Ho chi Minh, as well as from tradition and principle. Le van Vien, the former vice-lord of Cholon, had become not only powerful and respectable as head of the Saigon police, but was the most formidable and efficient foe of the Communists in all Vietnam. He had ferreted them out and put an end to their terror wherever it appeared in the Saigon area.
Today the sects have long since been destroyed by pressures, briberies, and attacks of various kinds, all approved by the American advisors of Ngo dinh Diem — whom we had made Prime Minister in 1954 and then President of the newly established republic in 1955. Today the emperor Bao Dai lives in exile in France. So does Le van Vien. In the meantime — and this is the only place where we shall reach on this occasion into that touchy subject of the Ngo family — President Diem’s brother, Ngo dinh Nhu, maintained a “labor organization” in the My Tho area of South Vietnam which was practically indistinguishable from the Communist Party there. At the same time, as “advisor to the president,” he controlled the army and the police of the regime, and an underground party of some 70,000 members which spent much of its energy turning in denunciations of anybody who was opposed to the Ngo family.
But it would take hours just to outline the almost incredible confusion, factionalism, cross purposes, bitterness, and conflict which have been built up in Vietnam since 1954. The divisions and subdivisions are of every kind, and for every reason, from sincere religious differences to the splitting of graft and spoils. This disunity is so complete, so extensive, and so deep that we cannot conceive of its having gone so far unless it had been deliberately planned and fomented by forces behind the scenes which were in actual control. Even if the Administration in Washington honestly and actually wanted to oppose Communist aggression somewhere, there is almost certainly nowhere else in the world today that its action would be so handicapped by dissension and distrust among the native anti-Communists as in South Vietnam. All of which raises the question of why and by whom such nefarious and evilly productive intrigue was carried out. Or, perhaps even more important, has this present war for its present purposes actually been planned by the Communist conspiracy since 1954 or even earlier? Was South Vietnam selected that far back as the locale for a final phoney “confrontation” of American military forces with Communist military forces, and all the groundwork laid accordingly?
17. The one and only way in which unity could be restored to the South Vietnamese people today would be by allowing the return of the Emperor Bao Dai in some capacity. He still commands the personal loyalty of all sides except the Communists. Also, the one and only man who would have the following, the ability, and the determination to weld the native fighting forces of Vietnam into one loyal anti-Communist army, and then to use that army effectively to wipe out the Communist guerrillas, is Le van Vien. He says that without any American help, except in the matter of supplies, he could sweep the whole country clean of the Communist Viet Cong gangs which now infest it, in three months time. And there is no reason, based on past experience, to doubt his assurance. If the Administration in Washington really has any interest in ridding South Vietnam of Communist aggression, why does it not bring in the two men who can be of the greatest help for that purpose?
18. Or let’s look at the other side of that coin. History shows clearly that Henry Cabot Lodge played a leading role in turning Algeria over to the Communists. He has been similarly helpful to the Communists in many other times and places. History also shows with equal clarity that Edward Lansdale played a leading role in originally driving the French out of Vietnam to make it easier for Ho chi Minh and his Communists to seize the country. Yet for the past couple of years the direction of our war in Vietnam, supposedly against the Communists, has been virtually in the hands of those two men. Why? With all of the patriotic Americans there are to choose from, why would any Administration which really wanted to stop Communist aggression in Vietnam put our effort in the hands of men who have always been willing to yield to, or even actively to support, Communist aggression?
19. Is the real purpose of our fighting in Vietnam simply to be at war? For the power and the spending excuses and the political advantages which being at war gives to the Administration? There is nothing new about any such strategy on the part of rulers, whether known as kings or dictators or presidents. In fact the idea has been used so long and so frequently throughout history that Shakespeare gave it dramatic recognition nearly four hundred years ago, when he had King Henry IV offer his son, Prince Hal, who was later to be Henry V, the following advice: “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” It is through the opportunities offered by embroilment in foreign wars that any government most easily increases its size and its reach. Is it this primarily for which the Administration is letting our boys be killed in Vietnam?
20. Or is the real explanation even more tragic and more sinister? Is the war in Vietnam, with the actions on both sides controlled by the Communists according to a blueprint in advance, actually a long planned and vital part of Communist strategy for the final steps in the Communist take-over of the United States and with it the rest of the world? Is the obvious lack of any will to win, on the part of the Administration, really something far worse, and part of a carefully planned design not to win, imposed on us by the Communist influences which are running the show? What is the basic plot?IV
There are a great many more questions which could be asked about the conduct of the war. Quite a few of them are being asked, in fact, by some of our ablest generals — generals who are still military men instead of politicians in uniform. There are also more good questions about what we are trying to accomplish. But let’s move on, instead, to a few final questions about what the Communists are trying to accomplish; or about the comprehensive strategy underlying this whole chapter of history.
21. The fundamental query in this category derives from a fact on which we have commented many times before. The American people always have been, and still are, willing to make more sacrifices, and to put up with more demands by their government, for the sake of fighting Communism, than for any other purpose. The two greatest aids to the worldwide Communist advance since 1945 have been the American foreign aid program, and the United Nations. Yet both were sold to us as means of opposing Communism. And these tremendous drains on our national resources and national sovereignty were accepted for that reason. Are the American people now to be carried the great final step into complete submission to Communist tyranny, through the deceptive mechanics of a war being fought ostensibly to oppose Communism?
22. Every form of strife, division, and confusion among the American people creates grist for the Communist mills. The original protests of the squalid beatniks and the pink intellectuals against our participation in the Vietnam war constituted little more than a clever gambit advanced by the Communists to ensure that participation. If, as thus appeared on the surface, the Communists did not want us involved in Vietnam, then — so reasoned the American people intuitively, as the Communists knew they would — we should be involved, and the Administration was right. As our no-win policy continues and becomes more obvious, however, these protests against the war, and even the reluctance or resistance of our youth to being drafted for service in Vietnam, begin to make more sense, for this different reason, to a larger fraction of the American people.
We have been cunningly led into a situation where — according to Communist plans — we have only two alternatives: (a) We must increasingly support the continuation of a war which serves Communist purposes, under conditions where even our demands that the war be won can be distorted into excuses for steadily making it larger; or (b), we must give attention and substance to protests which insidiously make the whole Communist line seem more respectable, and which strongly serve Communist purposes in many other ways. The bitterness and cynicism and doubt growing out of this dilemma can gradually permeate the whole American mood. Has it all been planned that way, as a part of the total plot?
23. Full-scale war always creates or increases a moral breakdown within the participating nations. For at least fifty years the Communists have been using every conceivable means — through movies, television, radio, education, publishing, and even massive infiltration of religious bodies — to destroy traditional morality and even any sound sense of values among the American people. For the destruction of individual moral responsibility is a fatal blow against any resistance to Communism. If this war becomes full-scale, with millions of American boys fighting ten thousand miles from home, under incredibly frustrating circumstances, where human life seems to have so little value and purpose, will the American faith and the American dream be eroded out of the American mind? How fatal to American character will be the warbred persistence of gnawing doubt and the excitement of ephemeral pleasures? And is this a major purpose of the long and gigantic involvement which is planned?
24. One hundred percent government is Communism. A growing obsession on the part of the American people with an interminable, ever larger, and ever more horrible war, could enable this or any future Administration not only to increase taxes and controls and government paternalism to fantastic levels. But it could increase its arbitrary powers and its detailed reach over the lives of all individual citizens, and suppress mercilessly all opposition to its policies and its decrees, until the tentacles of this central government in the United States would be hardly distinguishable from those of the central government in Moscow or in Peking. The conditions and the time would then be ripe for the long-planned worldwide merger. Have all the steps toward this hundred percent government already been plotted and timed? Are the current proposals for greatly increased Social Security payments, for an enormously expanded budget, and for increased powers and agencies of the federal government on every side, simply taken from the blueprint which has been prepared long in advance?
25. All of Communism, of course, is simply a gigantic lie and fraud, made up of lesser lies and frauds as component parts. The most important of those components today is the ever greater pretense and publicity about a growing “rift” between the Soviet Communist and the Chinese Communist regimes. For these regimes are merely two arms of one octopus-like body with an incredibly intricate nerve center which serves as a composite brain. These two arms could no more oppose each other, in reality rather than for show, than your left hand could engage in a serious battle with your right hand. When they pretend to do so, the show is for the purpose of distracting, disarming, and eventually strangling an enemy.
There is nothing new about this kind of pretense in Communist strategy. Around 1950 it took the form of a supposed split between Tito and Stalin. All of the details were carefully stage-managed with almost infinite realism. Magazines such as Life devoted whole issues to glorifying Stalin’s hatchet-man, now called Marshal Tito, as a great new friend of the West, who had defected from the international Communist body headed by Stalin. Eventually this fraud netted the Communist world, through Tito, some three billion dollars in gifts of American goods and money, plus even far greater gains by the confusion, and loss of morale to anti-Communists, which it caused.
Right while Life’s glowing eulogies of Tito were appearing we wrote a small book, May God Forgive Us, which was finally published early in 1952. In that book we devoted several pages to pointing out the absurdity and impossibility of there being any such rift at all. There were many reasons for this certainty. One was that internationalism is of the very essence of Communism, and a national or “nationalistic” Communism is no more possible than dry water or iron wood or a cold fire. But our book reached only about two hundred thousand readers in 1952, while Life’s articles had reached several million.
We have called attention in print to other similar but less important pretenses on several occasions. But now we are faced with a manifestation of this kind of fraud which makes all earlier manifestations pale into insignificance. Already, under the contrived and stage-managed circumstances of the Red Chinese attack on the Indian border — which the Soviets pretended to oppose — it has supplied the thin veneer of plausibility needed for our government to send more than a billion dollars worth of American war matériel to the Communists. The consignee, of these shipments, of course, was that lifelong Communist henchman, J. Nehru. Their ostensible purpose was to enable him, with the moral backing of the Soviets, to resist the Red Chinese invasion. Their real purpose was for future use by the Communists wherever needed. And the same fraudulent rift has been of tremendous value in other ways to the Communist cause. But we believe that its basic importance and place in Communist strategy are still to be revealed.
For the Soviets opened more doors and made more progress by being our allies during World War II than through any other step they have ever taken. Now the ground is visibly being prepared — has been in preparation in fact for several years — for the Soviets again to become at least our informal allies, giving us their “friendship” and “moral support” (!!), in our forthcoming colossal struggle with “the Mongolian hordes” of China. (“You know, after all, we Russians are of the Caucasian race!!”) And as soon as the Communist influences in Washington can get the pending consular treaty passed, we shall have far more of these “allies” circulating in our midst than we ever dreamed of having during World War II.
To what end? Let’s project a possibility. When the loss of hundreds of thousands of our sons and of most of our liberties, and fatigue and frustration and despair, have eventually made the time ripe and the American people ready, the Soviets can step forward as mediators — “after all, you know, fortunately they do still have some influence with the other branch of the Communists” — and arrange for everybody, including themselves, to come in out of the holocaust, under the umbrella of the United Nations. Thus we would never actually admit defeat by the Red Chinese, nor they by ourselves, but all of us, including the noble Soviets, would meekly surrender to this world power, the United Nations, and gratefully accept the “peace” which it could provide. And then this Communist “peace” would turn out to be, as it always has been everywhere, simply another name for such abject slavery under a brutal Communist tyranny that no resistance would dare to raise its head anywhere on earth. Is this the plotted culmination of the long conspiracy?
There, my gentle listeners or readers, you have a lot of questions, with few answers. But every day, even while these notes are being finished (as in the Administration’s budget proposals for next year, including twelve billion dollars extra, or twenty billion dollars altogether, for the war in Vietnam) it becomes more likely that the true answers to these questions would frighten the American people out of their wits — and maybe out of their lethargy! And it becomes obvious that if the Administration is letting our men be killed in Vietnam, in order to help the Communists carry out the plot adumbrated by these questions, then it is murder indeed. And those responsible should begin to feel the wrath of the American people.
With our basic brief for the prosecution thus on file, it would now be easy to bring before the court of public opinion a great many current and specific items of evidence. Let’s incorporate here just one or two by way of illustration.
(a) Despite a superficially pretended aloofness and desire for peace, Moscow is as deeply involved in keeping this Vietnam war going, and growing, as is Washington. In fact the Soviets are right now creating the whole Communist side and position in this war, for Red China to pretend to run. The rumbling offstage voice is that of Peking, but the hands bearing the guns are clearly those of Moscow.
The surface-to-air missiles which have already shot down thirty of our planes over North Vietnam are Soviet-built. They are fired from sites supervised by Soviet technicians. The hundred new MIG fighter planes now being used by the “North Vietnamese Air Force” were supplied by the Soviets. Their pilots are trained in Russia and are supervised in Hanoi by Soviet flyers.
According to U. S. News and World Report, the North Vietnamese war machine runs almost entirely on Russian oil, of which the Soviets are now shipping 25,000 metric tons per month into North Vietnam through Haiphong. The Soviets are sending North Vietnam through Haiphong an additional 50,000 tons of construction equipment, military trucks, cargo transports, heavy weapons, and other war matériel, every month. The truth is that, at present, Moscow is practically running this war against us, from Hanoi — but without any more visible desire to win it than has Washington on the other side. Both are gradually and patiently escalating the war, in accordance with longrange Communist strategy.
(b) In order to enable the Soviets and their satellites to provide this opposition, the Administration — as President Johnson boasted in his state-of-the-union speech — has recently added more than four hundred items to the so-called non-strategic list for export to the Soviet bloc. This is in utter defiance of the obvious fact that everything these Communist governments receive from us gives not only comfort but also strategic aid to our deadly enemies.
To help this so-called trade, the Administration has arranged for the Export-Import Bank to extend huge credits to Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. Whether, as reported in Hong Kong, every third Russian is now eating American wheat, we do not know. But we do know that, as the Chicago Tribune pointed out on November 26, 1966, right while on one side of the Polish harbor of Stettin American wheat (on credit from the United States to Poland) is being unloaded from the freighters, at the very same time, on the other side of the same harbor, weapons (on credit from Poland to North Vietnam) are being loaded onto ships for Haiphong to be used in killing American soldiers. And a booklet twice the size of this one, printed entirely in this small type, could be filled with similar illustrations.
This whole war, as presently conducted, is as phony as a nine-dollar bill. And we ask again: Are our boys being consciously and deliberately murdered to serve Communist purposes? If so, you are never going to put an end to this crime by pretending that the Administration is merely naive and confused and making infinite blunders. If the Communist influences over the Administration are as controlling as our twenty-five questions certainly indicate they may be, then the influence of patriotic public opinion had better be raised to the strength of a mighty and overwhelming wave. And it had better be soon.
As to what should be done, we suggest four steps: (1) Go ahead and win this war, promptly and conclusively. The artfully contrived and massively prepared handicaps do not prevent victory. They merely give some semblance of plausibility to the long stalemate which has been planned. And victory will come in a very few months, whenever Washington has the will to win forced upon it. (2) Set up an unquestionably and firmly anti-Communist government in Saigon, preferably under the Emperor Bao Dai, or his son, Bao Long, so as to give visible stability to the regime; and preferably with General Le van Vien as the Minister of Interior, so as to keep any Communist infiltrators and troublemakers in their proper place. And his idea of the proper place for Communist murderers, incidentally, is in a prison or a grave. (3) Issue an ultimatum to Hanoi and Peking so strong that none of these Red puppets will even dare look in the direction of Saigon, and Moscow itself will shudder at the thought. (4) And then, bring our boys home.
In this writer’s opinion, we should never have become involved in Vietnam at all. But, regardless of how we got there, or who put us there, we are too deeply involved today to have any honorable way out except through victory. It should be our determination not to escalate this war, nor to prolong it, nor to muddle through it, but to win it. A great American once said: “In war, there is no substitute for victory!” This is certainly one time and place in the history of our nation when we must not even consider any substitute. Victory, Then Peace! must be our slogan and our goal.