Monday, August 5, 2024
1964 US begins bombing North Vietnam in response to the real and imagined attacks on US Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin
1966 Protesters threw rocks and bottles at Martin Luther King Jr. during a fair housing protest march at Marquette Park in Chicago
1966 The Beatles released single "Yellow Submarine" with "Eleanor Rigby" in the UK
In bed at 10 p.m., awake at 2 a.m., and up and out at 2:30, with badly aching hip, thigh, and knee. I let Lilly out at about 3.
Prednisone, day 85, 15 mg., day 7/14. I took my 15 mg. at 4:30 a.m. and followed it with 2 slices of Dave's Bread at 4:50.
Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, we'd like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities? I'm not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout but neither did we. . . We've been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders both in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. For it seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.
To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations.
But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.
Cronkite called it the "last big gasp" before negotiating our way out of Vietnam but it was of course far from that. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sabotaged the peace negotiations that occurred in Paris at the end of LBJ's presidency and Americans wouldn't stop killing and being killed in Vietnam until March 29, 1973, 5 years later. By that time, more than 58,000 Americans had been killed there and we will never know the number of Vietnamese killed. During that entire period, as best I can recall, I felt emotionally numb, as in Neil Diamond's song ""I am"... I said / To no one there / And no one heard at all /Not even the chair. / "I am"... I cried / "I am"... said I / And I am lost and I can't / Even say why / Leavin' me lonely still." I learned that feeling of numbing myself as a child, as a defense mechanism, growing up in our claustrophobic tiny basement apartment with my father and his PTSD from combat and then my mother and her PTSD from sexual assault. I would rely on it throughout 1968 as tragedy piled atop tragedy, bad news atop more bad news. Indeed, it has stayed with me throughout my life as a protective measure in times that would ordinarily call for a strong emotional response. Instead, I tend to go numb and to 'soldier on.' Sometimes it serves me well, sometimes not. In any case, the year of 1968 called for a lot of emotional numbing. Before the year was over, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, leading to riots in many American cities including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Baltimore. On June 5th, the first anniversary of Israel's Six-Day War, Bobby Kennedy was shot by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and died the next day. I considered both men heroes. Their murders led to the later election of Richard Nixon to the White House in November and the continuation and expansion of the Vietnam War. At the end of August, the Democratic National Convention led to what the Walker Report termed "a police riot," an early reminder of the unrestrained lawlessness and brutality that law 'enforcement' personnel are capable of, especially against racial minorities and political foes. Later yet, the country experienced the bizarre trial of "the Chicago Seven" before Judge Julius Hoffman. The criminal convictions of the trials were all overturned by a 3 judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals including Tom Fairchild, with whom I worked years later as the Research Reporter on the Wisconsin Supreme Court's Commission on Judicial Campaign and Election Ethics.
I was particularly struck by the introduction to the last episode of the series which was a clip from one of Richard Nixon's campaign speeches in 1968, parts of which could be used again today in 2024. 56 years later:
We look at America and we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other at home.
We still have all-too-regular uprisings from police killings of unarmed Blacks, as we had in Kenosha in 2020 over the shooting of Jacob Blake, shot 7 times in the back at close range. We still hear sirens in the night from thousands of shootings in American cities every year. We don't have Americans dying on distant battlefields today, but we have tens of thousands of American sailors and Marines, soldiers and airmen preparing to defend Israel - and themselves - against massive attacks from Iran, Hezbollah, and perhaps others in the Mideast. Just today, Iran-backed forces fired rockets into an American base in Western Iraq and wounded several American servicemen. Mostly however we have so many Americans hating each other, fighting each other, and killing each other at home. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings (2018). I've been listening to this history on Audible and reading the paperback I just bought on eBay. This afternoon I read the chapter on planning and execution deliberations in 1964, the year of the Tonkin Gulf incident and the year that it was very clear to leaders in Washington that the communists were winning the contest and that "we" were losing. 1964 was the year I spent working in Yuma, Arizona, at the Marine Corps Air Station, working and hanging out with a group [ of other lieutenants at the Officers' Club swimming pool, rock climbing in the Sonoran Dessert with Dave Cooper, taking painting lessons from a local art teacher with fellow Chicagoan John Kroll, socializing with them and their wives Matha and Nancy, and with Bill and Bonnie Space, generally enjoying life. Anne was working at a small TV and radio station KBLU for Carl Witte, doing everything from receptionist work to on-air radio hosting a program at the Yuma County fair. In Washington, a fight was going on in the Pentagon between the 2 joint chiefs who favored a massive increase in attacks on the North ( Marine Commandant Greene and Air Force leader Curtis LeMay) and the leaders of the Army and the Navy who favored continued restraint. General Westmoreland was put in charge of MACV. Any Vietnam veteran, and anyone who lost a loved one in that war who reads Hastings book, or reads the Pentagon Papers, can hardly help having the deepest distrust of their government. I wonder whether Vietnam was the birthplace of my anger, pessimism, cynicism, and distrust of power structures, 'the Establishment', or what Trumpies call 'the Deep State' or has it always been a part of my character, maybe from the 6th grade when I worried about confessing my sin of Doubt - when I couldn't understand why none of the adults in my family went to church though they sent us kids to Catholic schools that taught us that not attending mass on Sundays was a mortal sin that would send one to Hell for eternity? In any case, in my old age, I've been focused on my time in the Catholic schools, my time in the Marines, my time in Vietnam, and my homecoming, ever since I started working on my memoir, and for the last two years that I have been writing my daily journals. I guess this is what happens to folks in their mid-80s who don't have work, volunteer, or hobby activities to occupy their thoughts; it's all backward-looking, retrospective, nostalgia, regrets, trying to make sense of the life I've lived, the time I've spent living it. How did I go from this Catholic boy in his Confirmation uniform with his prayer book
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