I recommend the film "The Fog of War" if you want to know more about
Vietnam war era politics ...
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001L3LUE/qid=1137510799/sr=8-1/
ref=pd_bbs_1/002-3728243-0166437?n=507846&s=dvd&v=glance>
or
http://tinyurl.com/c4eqj
Godfrey
On Jan 17, 2006, at 5:20 AM, frank theriault wrote:
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
