A History Lesson for Oliver Stone on Vietnam

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

Editor’s note: The following is the seventh installment of a series of articles Frontpage is running in response to Oliver Stone’s revisionist documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States.” Frontpage will be reviewing each episode of the Stone series, exposing the leftist hateful lies about America and setting the record straight. Below is a review of Part 7 of the series.

Readers should be extremely grateful to all reviewers of this series, for it is the equivalent of acquiring a case of cinematic herpes—utterly disgusting, embarrassing, and perpetually painful.

 

 

In Episode 7, “Johnson, Nixon & Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune,” Oliver Stone continues his concocted fantasy of how American history “was,” with the brave John F. Kennedy set to pull Americans out of Vietnam (and, lest we forget last episode, it was Mr. Kennedy who began with a mere 600 advisors there then ramped up the troop total to over 14,000—some estimates put it at 25,000). If this is the left’s definition of “withdrawal,” it’s easy to see why Shawty Lo has 10 Baby Mamas. But I digress.

Lyndon Johnson, according to Stone, disregarded JFK’s “memo” about withdrawing troops (ignoring, for the umpteenth time that this was an engineering battalion that had completed its construction project), and instead escalated. We shall return in a moment to the timeline of the program—which begins with a litany of American/CIA “plots” to destabilize Latin American governments—but it is critical that a clear understanding of what Johnson did vs. what the Joint Chiefs said to him occurs. In a meeting in 1965 with his JCS, Johnson bluntly asked if the U.S. could win the Vietnam war. The Chiefs responded with a qualified “yes”: if the U.S. put in 500,000 ground troops immediately, if the U.S. mined Haiphong harbor and sealed off Soviet and Chinese aid; and if there was round the clock bombing of the north, the U.S. would win.

Keep in mind these were the requirements in 1965, although as late as 1969 the U.S. never reached 500,000 troops (when at least a million troops would have been needed due to the escalation by the North) and there were dozens of “bombing pauses” and “peace offensives,” all useless to the cause of peace. While the military may have lied about enemy body counts and the course of the war later, in 1965 the brass was crystal clear that this was a WAR, and a major commitment if America wanted to win.