At the time Daniel Ellsberg first leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, the newspaper's action was to have a team of their people read the original document, and then to write a series of news stories explaining what it contained. One prominent piece of the news stories they published pointed out that there had been rumors of a secret plan to withdraw the USA from Vietnam by John Kennedy, but the Pentagon Papers made it clear that the rumor was false, no such withdrawal plan ever existed.

Then within a few weeks Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska decided to enter the entire original Pentagon Papers history into the Congressional Record, effectively declassifying it and placing it into the public domain.

Very quickly Beacon Press of Boston published a four-volume set of the entire original Pentagon Papers history, which I purchased and read.

Oddly, the original newspaper claim was diametrically false. The actual Pentagon Papers records clearly that John Kennedy did indeed establish a secret plan to withdraw troops from Vietnam about a month or two before his assassination. Some troops actually were withdrawn from Vietnam under that program by the time Kennedy was assassinated.

When Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency upon John Kennedy's assassination, his first act as president was to announce to the nation that he would faithfully continue all of Kennedy's policies and programs. And just about the second thing he did was to break that promise by secretly cancelling Kennedy's plan for US withdrawal from Vietnam, followed soon by his escalation of that conflict.

In the years since, government apoligists have acknowledged the facts of the matter, but insisted that John Kennedy would certainly also have cancelled his Vietnam withdrawal plan had he survived. I've never learned how they could perceive that assertion to be a fact, as I have seen absolutely no factual evidence offered for it whatsoever; it seems to be a matter of feelings.

Now maybe after a decent time has elapsed, I will no longer hear his name mispronounced so gratingly all the time. It's mac-na MAH-ra, people.

...was an excellent piece.

A precis of a very confusing era (I'm 70ish), morphing into current similar debacles.

But who is it that might be the villain, the perp; or do we think that these horrors are just the currents, cross- and otherwise of human history.

Can't we do better? Are we doomed to stupid?

How many of us are aware of how much harm President Eisenhower did to this country? He was, perhaps, the right man for SHAPE during WWII, but as a president he saddled us with so many of our present problems. Not an historian, I am not prepared to list ALL of the harm he did, but here are just a few:

1. He allowed the destruction of railroads and mass transit in our cities, by putting all federal subsidization into the building of interstate highways. This caused the flight to the suburbs and the dependency on petroleum that is not a principal national problem.

2. He OK'd the overthrow by our CIA of legally elected, democratic governments in Guatemala and in Iran. That led to military dictatorships in central America and in Iran, under the Shah.

3. He installed puppet regimes in South Vietnam and prevented elections under the Geneva Accords that had been agreed. He sent US military "advisers" to South Vietnam to prop up the puppet regime.

4. He broke off relations with Cuba and pushed Castro into the arms of the Soviets. This was Eisenhower's payoff to United Fruit Co. that contributed heavily to the General's election in 1952.

5. He installed anti-labor regulators on the NLRB and helped to destroy labor unions using the Taft Hartley Law.

Finally, when he was about to leave office in January of 1961, he warned about the military-industrial taking of our government, but he did nothing about it during his eight years in office.

It is sad that instead of being remembered for the Bay of Pigs and halting what would have been a nuclear war at the last minute, he is remembered for a war in which he was just the technician. It was my understanding that were it up to McNamara, we would have left Vietnam in 1963. It is absurb to blame a general who takes orders from The Commander in Chief, but congress played a big part in escalating Vietnam.

Afghanistan could become our next Vietnam. I won't pretend to have the answers for what we should do there, but they have already crippled two great nations, Great Britian and Russia, who arrogantly thought that Afghanistan was a winable military conflict. But I do know the Americans have no patience with 25 year wars. Those of us in the center, the realist, want no part of unnecessary wars and when necessary we want to get in and get out. The economy and the military are already drained with two wars over 7 to 8 years. I understand the concept of trying to establish a government and decrease the poppy trade by offering alternative crops but I don't know if Afghanistans gets it or wants it or are ready for it. We seem to forget that nations appear to need to evolve on their own in accordance to the needs and desires of the people who occupy the space. We try to impose our way of life on to nations that may not be ready and that may never by ready We aren't trying to impose our way of life of 100 or 200 year ago. We forget that we evolved.

Unlike the invasion of Iraq, which was a decision by Bush, Cheney, and a handful of folks close to them, the Vietnam War was not a decision by any one person. Vietnam evolved out of French colonialism of the late 1800’s, and the need of rubber during and after WWII. Ho Chi Mien fought with the Allies against the Japanese in WWII, but we wanted the Michelin Group to start harvesting rubber again, and so did not help the Vietnamese establish their own government. The Allies sided with the French corporation and let them have their colonies in French Indochina back. After WWII Vietnam became Cold War diplomacy run-a-muck.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XovGfVN6qTE

**As GIs in Vietnam we saw the often-stark realities of Vietnam and could compare them to the "truth" the American people were being told. We saw the corrupt Saigon generals making money hand over fist while their armies would not fight. We saw the hate in the eyes of the local villagers who never welcomed us as "liberators" bringing us bouquets of flowers as we had seen in World War II movies. The only Vietnamese who seemed to want us there wanted greenbacks in return for drugs, booze or women, or all three. We also saw the enemy fight and had to admire both his bravery and tenacity in taking on U.S. tanks, planes and helicopters with grenades and rifles. We supposedly valued human life while our enemy did not. Yet we paid the owners of the Michelin plantations $600 for each rubber tree we damaged, while the family of a slain Vietnamese child got no more than $120 in payment for a life.**

** http://www.vvaw.org/about/warhistory.php