HOW THE RIGHT SAVED US FROM THE REDS: PART II

The Vietnam war cost tens of thousands of lives. It made a wreck of Vietnam. Domestically it was a disaster that overheated our economy with inflation. It cost an unimaginable fortune in money. It divided the American people as nothing had in decades, and as a result the righties got in power and have largely stayed in power till this time, either directly or by gumming up the works.

The balance of historical evidence suggests that John F. Kennedy was prepared to withdraw our troops from Vietnam rather than intensify the war. His death precipitated a reversal of that judgment. One can only wonder what would have happened if he had lived, where we would be historically in this period?

It was Kennedy's academically outstanding and governmentally talented advisers, "the best and the brightest," who went for the war and persuaded a skeptical President Lyndon Johnson to go along with it. One of them, McGeorge Bundy, said that LBJ was always the last on board with the decisions to "escalate."

Kennedy had the intellectual confidence and knowledge of history to stand up to those fellows. He would have heard their recommendations and said, "You guys are full of it," and that would have been the end of these schemes. But Johnson never had the self-assurance to resist what such impressive men were telling him. If he had trusted his instincts, we would have been better served.


Am I saying these advisers were right-wingers? They were liberals domestically, but their elitism shines through their attitude. The tip-off to the rightist mentality is always one thing: that somebody counts while somebody else doesn't. So we were fighting to keep another country artificially divided and permanently under our thumb, a betrayal of our own origins.

Over and over they told us we had to win in Vietnam or the whole of Southeast Asia, maybe the whole of Asia, maybe in time the entire planet, would go Communist. Since the result was unambiguous - we simply lost - we have a perfect test case. Were they right?


Did the world go Communist? Did Asia? Did Southeast Asia? Did even one additional nation? No. They couldn't have gotten it more wrong.

Beware of righties who seem superficially to be lefties! The telltale signs are always there. And the outcomes will be crucial, as they were in the Vietnam war.