On 1/16/06, Gonz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > > Had [RFK] > > done so, I think he'd have beaten Nixon. > > I'm not so sure about that one. Nixon's message was getting out of > vietnam.
I disagree. Nixon's slogan was "peace with honour", IIRC. That meant that he wasn't about to just pull out unconditionally. >Since the democrats were in power, and they were mostly > responsible for the bulk of the war effort at that time, they were not > running on a similar message, and thus Nixon was more popular due to the > war's unpopularity. It was that very schism (the hawks vs the doves) that lead to the debacle that was the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. > > >He'd have gotten the US out > > of Vietnam much faster than Nixon was able to. > > This is clearly not the case, IMO. JFK & RFK together had committed US > involvement to "saving" south vietnam from the communist north. There > was no way RFK was going to backpeddle on that. He probably would have > committed more troops in an effort to win quickly. But my suspicion is > that it would have backfired and we would have lost more troops and > stayed longer. Sorry, but I can't agree with you at all. By the time RFK announced his candidacy for 1968, he was a dove. Yes, it was he and JFK who committed the US to Vietnam involvement, but it was LBJ who escalated that involvement, and ordered bombing of the cities. Besides, as I said earlier in this thread, RFK seemed to have something of an epiphany after JFK was assassinated. I think he'd have gotten the US out of Vietnam very quickly. Here's more about RFK: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/kennedys/peopleevents/p_rfk.html Including the following: "In 1968, he declared his candidacy for the presidency with an anti-war platform." <snip> cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson
