"More still: we maintain, in these matters, a very considerable degree of freedom of (not if he and George Carey had had their way)
speech—a discussion process, which so to speak invites individual Americans like yourself,
who seek revision of our traditional commitments, to get out and persuade other Americans
that those commitments should be set aside; you have either accepted that invitation, and
failed to win over any significant number of your fellow Americans to your point of view (in
which case, (a) their acquiescence, as we have just noted, expresses their tacit acceptance of
the traditional commitments, and (b) your very exercise of your right to participate in the
discussion process obligates you to accept, from moment to moment, the verdicts at which it
arrives) or you have not accepted the invitation, not attempted to win others over to your point
of view, in which case, again, you have no business taking exception to the verdict by
pretending that no commitment exists. You, personally, nevertheless repudiate the
commitment? Well—so the generality of Americans, as I understand them, to the Vietnik —
that does indeed create a difficult situation, but one that we see only one way to handle; either
you mean that you do in fact wish to emigrate, and live amongst us no longer, in which case
you will probably find us reasonable enough; or you don’t mean that you wish to emigrate, in
which case we shall treat you, and with good conscience believe us, as if your commitments
were the same as ours, and will take it out of your hide if you try to behave as if they were not.
(We will, for instance, march you off to the war in Vietnam, regardless of your personal opinion
as to whether our commitments as a nation warrant our presence in Vietnam, or, if you prefer,
we will march you off to jail.)
The fact that no one on this email list made even the slightest objection to the promotion of this openly fascist "political theory" when it was so heavily promoted here, except for me, with me being the one scolded for my objections, indicated (in Kendall's words) a "tacit acceptance" of this anti-Constitutional Traditional Conservative ideology, with Kendall credited as Trump's precursor. So much for "defending the (Democratic) Republic, with that moment long gone.
On Apr 10, 2025, at 12:35 PM, Chas Freeman via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:--
View in browser JUST ANOTHER AMERICAN PRESIDENT
Trump’s second term has been cruel and disastrous, but in those respects he has a lot in common with his predecessors
READ IN APP President Lyndon Johnson and General William Westmoreland on the back of a jeep, visiting troops at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, December 23, 1967. / Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.
One of the best books I’ve read on the Lyndon Johnson presidency and the Vietnam War is The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam, published in 1970 by Chester Cooper, a longtime intelligence officer who ended his career as the CIA’s man in the White House. The book is little known, and though it was full of new information, it was passed over by almost everybody at the time it came out.
Cooper was the quiet man at many of the most significant events in the postwar era, including the vastly misunderstood 1954 Geneva Conference, but the crucial story in his book is his inside account of Johnson’s refusal to respond to many offers for peace talks with Hanoi. Simply put, there were far more serious than publicly known offers of talks put forth by North Vietnam in the later Johnson years when bombing by US B-52s was at its peak.
Hanoi’s only condition, Cooper explains, was that America halt its bombing before the talks began, but Johnson believed any cessation would be a sign of weakness. One serious peace initiative from Hanoi in early 1967 was dashed by a major American bombing attack that could have easily been delayed: “The American bombing during the same 24-hour period in which we launched a major new negotiations approach did not stem from a conscious high-level decision to sabotage the efforts of peacemakers, nor was it a ‘carrot/stick’ attempt to signal Hanoi that, even though we were making a new diplomatic initiative, the pressure was still on. Either of those would have at least had the merit of reflecting some thinking on the subject at high levels of government, but there was none at this point in time; instead there was inertia, lethargy, and a reluctance to ‘upset the President,’” Cooper writes. “The President dug in his heels when presented with any suggestion to modify or delay bombing timetables, let alone to de-escalate the bombing.”
On another occasion later that spring, with fewer good targets for US B-52s in Hanoi and its vicinity and increasing losses of American planes and crewmen, it was suggested that we would tell Hanoi that we would limit the bombing of the North in return for renewed peace talks. The proposal, Cooper wrote, “was sufficiently convincing to gain the support of both Secretaries Rusk and McNamara. A meeting was scheduled at the White House. Hopes were high for the President’s approval,” Cooper writes, relating a story that was not known before he told it.
“In due course,” Cooper writes, “I was told to put the draft away. The Joint Chiefs wanted the President first to approve a raid on the one juicy target left in Hanoi.” Johnson, who had to be aware that he was killing the proposal for peace talks, agreed to the military request and the target, a major power plant in central Hanoi, was attacked not with one strike, as Cooper and his colleagues had been told, but with repeated strikes over a few months, causing immense damage and untold deaths in the area. The peace talks were kaput.
Meanwhile, far below the presidential level, senior officers of the US military command in Saigon, headed then by General William Westmoreland, and the CIA were doing everything possible to keep some major facts about the war secret. The truth, unraveled in real time by Sam Adams, a brilliant agency analyst, was that there were far more enemy troops than Westmoreland and the Pentagon wanted the White House and the American public to know.
Westmoreland, in his ambition, went so far as to fly to Washington in the fall of 1967 and tell the National Press Club that “the enemy is running out of men” and that “the end begins to come into view.” He was seen by many as a conquering hero. In fact, by then Adams, a descendant of President John Adams, was telling anyone who would listen in the CIA—there were not many who would listen—that the Army command in Saigon was systematically lying about the number of Viet Cong soldiers it had slain in combat.
Adams also became convinced, after studying thousands of combat reports, that the number of active duty enemy soldiers was far higher than Westmoreland’s estimate of 270,000. In one case that he cited in a 1975 essay he wrote for Harper’s, he found a translated Viet Cong headquarters estimate of troops it had in Binh Dinh province in mid-1966 at “just over 50,000. I looked for our own intelligence figures for Binh Dinh in the [Army’s official] order of battle and found the number 4,500. ‘My god,’” he thought at the time, “‘that’s not even a tenth of what the VC say.’”
He frantically began searching through other Viet Cong estimates of troop strength and found similar discrepancies. He recalled himself almost shouting from his desk at the agency, “There goes the whole damned order of battle!” The Viet Cong were a far greater enemy than the US command was telling Washington—and itself. One obvious question was: Who were the Americans killing?
The answer eventually became clear long before reporters like myself wrote about the massacre of close to five hundred civilians in a village called My Lai.
There was little support from Westmoreland’s headquarters for Adams’s contradictory CIA reports, although the number of estimated enemy troops—once Adams’s figures were sent to the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara—were revised higher.
Adams would later learn that orders had come from Westmoreland’s command center in Saigon to keep the official count of enemy soldiers lower, thus making predictions of victory seem more likely. The lying about enemy strength became official. “All along,” Adams wrote, “I had wondered whether the White House had had anything to do with fixing the estimates. The military wanted to keep them low to display the ‘light at the end of the tunnel,’ but it had long since occurred to me that maybe the generals were under pressure from the politicians.”
He would end up trying to circumvent the agency’s stringent rules about keeping all documents in the office and slipped a copy of his report to a member of newly elected Richard Nixon’s staff. There still was no response. “So,” Adams wrote, “I gave up. If the White House wasn’t interested, there didn’t seem to be any other place I could go. I felt I’d done as much as I possibly could do, and that was that.”
But he kept on asking questions and stayed at the agency, on different assignments, until 1973. He spent the next decades, until his death by heart attack in 1988, continuing to report and write about his disillusioning experiences. His posthumous book War of Numbers was published with little fanfare in 1994.
I and many others who remained fixated on the human costs of the war, both here and in Vietnam, would visit Sam at his farm in the Virginia countryside. He was reluctant to go beyond the public record about Vietnam. He was always warm and funny—he made a point of asking this city boy to help him feed the pigs—but had no ill will toward the agency, which, no matter how reluctantly, had allowed him to make his arguments to the military.
But a colleague and friend of Sam’s told me years later something Sam never did: that General Westmoreland, frustrated by the US Army’s inability to track down and kill the elusive enemy, had changed the rules of engagement within two years of assuming command in Vietnam in 1964. “The North was not only replacing losses [by early 1966] but also increasing its deployment,” he told me. “The South Vietnamese Army operations were just as ineffective as ever. General Westmoreland was seen to be losing the war as body count was the only accepted criterion to measure success. Westmoreland saw that the number of bodies had to increase.
“Accordingly, Westmoreland issued a new strategy in 1966 that directed commanders to continue search and destroy in the mountains but added a new enemy to the order of battle and the rules of engagement—the VC infrastructure. This was identified as VC base villages ‘infested’ by VC supporters who sheltered, fed, and sympathized with the combatants.
“This new strategy changed the war for General Westmoreland and the army he commanded. It was no longer combat against another army and their armed rebel allies, but it was now a political war against ‘communists,’ wherever or whoever they were.
“Westmoreland ignored the fact that unarmed non-combatant were protected by the Geneva Conventions. Violations began as US commanders responded enthusiastically to the new strategy and began to focus their operations on the new ‘target,’ which included operations in the flat lands. The body count began to climb and the light came on at the end of the tunnel.
“A CIA ‘bean counter’ [Adams] began to see that the books did not balance. While Westmoreland’s body count increased, Adams’s tally of actual armed men in local and main force units remained fairly constant, Adams reported that the army must be killing non-combatants, claiming they were VC.
“People were now being targeted by where they lived,” Sam’s colleague told me.
Three specific areas were selected for such targeting, including Quang Ngai, whose peasants had supported Communist and nationalist revolutions since the 1940s. In March of 1968, the Americal Division, then headed by Major General Samuel Koster, like Westmoreland a fellow graduate of West Point, attacked the undefended village of My Lai 4 in Quang Ngai province, murdering nearly five hundred peasants. It was just another operation on the target list. There was no attempt to cover up the crime. It was reported as a victory, although the number murdered was drastically reduced. There was no resistance, and there were no military-age victims. Westmoreland returned to Washington to become chief of the Army and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Koster was soon named by Westmoreland to become the superintendent of West Point, the Army’s elite training ground for its officer corps.
The massacre at My Lai was made public by my reporting in the fall of 1969. Westmoreland completed his tour as the Army’s chief of staff in 1972. Koster was reduced to a one-star rank and resigned in 1973. And the full story of the Army’s war against the peasants of South Vietnam remains to be told.
It is hard to accept that the United States, then with a president from Texas and an ambitious four-star general who looked the other way as their army committed war crimes against peasants in total secrecy, is in far greater peril today with a vengeful president who is convinced he can rewrite the Constitution.
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