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.
Well he was very emphatic in his acceptance speech at the RNC that the
US should not be in that war at all. I think what he meant by your
quote is basically do it without getting your ass kicked.
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.
Exactly. The democratic hawks outnumbered the doves, so the antiwar
platform lost out. It makes you wonder what RFK would have done with that.
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.
I wonder how much was real and how much was political posturing against
a potential rival (Johnson). After all, I dont think Johnson was out
of the race at that point, right?
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
--
Someone handed me a picture and said, "This is a picture of me when I
was younger." Every picture of you is when you were younger. "...Here's
a picture of me when I'm older." Where'd you get that camera man?
- Mitch Hedberg
