Why had Nixon decided to widen it? How could invading another country help bring peace to south-east Asia? ibid.
According to one poll 58% of the American people thought the [Kent State campus] killings justified … More than 4,000,000 college students demonstrated against the war and what had happened at Kent State. ibid.
In the spring of 1970 despite the uproar over the invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students of Kent State, President Nixon’s hold on what he called ‘the great silent majority’ seemed secure. But after so may years of fighting more and more Americans were tired of the war. Ken Burns & Lynn Novich, The Vietnam War IX: Fratricide (May 1970 – March 1973)
The president searched for a face-saving way to end the war. ibid.
That’s the tragedy. The tragedy of the war is that Vietnamese killed each other. ibid. Bao Ninh, North Vietnamese army
Heroin was cheap, pure and everywhere. ibid.
700 Vietnam veterans against the war gathered in Washington. ibid.
Nixon ordered up Operation Linebacker – massive air attacks on the advancing North Vietnamese. The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be this time, he said. ibid.
It would be remembered as the Christmas Bombing. ibid.
Within a few weeks the last American combat troops would leave Vietnam. But they would leave behind many unanswered questions. ibid.
March 29th 1973: 58,126 Americans and more than 2,000,000 Vietnamese have died. ibid.
On March 29th 1973 the last American troops left Vietnam. Fewer than 200 marines would remain assigned to guard consular offices and the American embassy and other installations in Saigon. Ken Burns & Lynn Novich, The Vietnamese War X: The Weight of Memory (March 1973 – Onward) *****
Over the next two years the forces of North and South Vietnam would continue to savage one another. ibid.
Richard Nixon became the first president in American history to resign. ibid.
Conditions in South Vietnam continued to deteriorate. ibid.
The North Vietnamese decided to move against Saigon. ibid.
‘I knew that we were abandoning millions of South Vietnamese who had trusted us.’ ibid. marine
‘I was detained in a re-education camp for seventeen and a half years.’ ibid. Pham Duy Tat, South Vietnamese army
A million and a half people are believed to have undergone some form of indoctrination. ibid.
After thirty years of war much of Vietnam lay in ruins. Three million people are thought to have died, north and south. Still more have been wounded. Thousands of children fathered by American servicemen had been left behind. ibid.
On January 31st 1968 Saigon: Suddenly savage fighting broke out. It was the beginning of a nationwide communist assault that would change the course of the long-running Vietnam war. Peter and Dan Snow, 20th Century Battlefields s1e5: 1968 Vietnam, BBC 2007
A war that would rage for more than a decade. ibid.
The United States as the world knows will never start a war. The Post ***** 2017 starring Meryl Streep & Tom Hanks & Sarah Paulson & Bob Odenkirk & Tracy Letts & Bradley Whitford & Bruce Greenwood & Matthew Rhys & Alison Brie & Carrie Coon & Jesse Plemons et al, director Steven Spielberg, Kennedy
We can’t let an administration dictate our coverage. ibid. Ben
What is it you think we do here for a living, kid. ibid.
Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing US Involvement. (Newspaper & Press & Free Speech & Vietnam) ibid. Sheehan Times article
We got over 100 pages of the McNamara study here. ibid. journalist
They lied to Congress and they lied to the public. ibid. Leak
If we don’t hold them accountable, my God, who will? ibid. Ben
This is an historic fight. If they [Times] lose, we lose. ibid.
Two Viet Cong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane flying toward Saigon. The first refused to answer questions and was thrown out of the airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered all the questions. But he, too, was thrown out … Variations of the water torture were also used to loosen tongues or simply to torment … Other techniques, usually designed to force onlooking prisoners to talk, involve cutting off the fingers, ears, fingernails or sexual organs of another prisoner. William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military & CIA Interventions Since World War I, ch 19: Vietnam 1950-1973: The Hearts & Minds Circus
During the Vietnam war, a number of young Americans refused military service on the grounds that the United States was committing war crimes in Vietnam and that if they took part in the war they too, under the principles laid down at Nuremberg, would be guilty of war crimes. One of the most prominent of these cases was that of David Mitchell of Connecticut. At Mitchell’s trial in September 1965, Judge William Timbers dismissed his defense as ‘tommyrot’ and ‘degenerate subversion’, and found the Nuremberg principles to be ‘irrelevant’ to the case. Mitchell was sentenced to prison. ibid.
In 1971, Telford Taylor, the chief United States prosecutor at Nuremberg, suggested rather strongly that General William Westmoreland and high officials of the Johnson administration such as Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk could be found guilty of war crimes under criteria established at Nuremberg. Yet every American court and judge, when confronted by the Nuremberg defense, dismissed it without according it any serious consideration whatsoever. ibid.
The West has never been allowed to forget the Nazi holocaust. For 55 years there has been a continuous outpouring of histories, memoirs, novels, feature films, documentaries, television series … played and replayed in every Western language; there have been museums, memorial sculptures, photo exhibitions, remembrance ceremonies … Never Again! But who hears the voice of the Vietnamese peasant? Who has access to the writings of the Vietnamese intellectual? What was the fate of the Vietnamese Anne Frank? Where, asks the young American, is Vietnam? ibid.
During American involvement in the Vietnam war 57,000 men lost their lives. Over 100,000 wounded were rescued … What happened to our servicemen who went down behind enemy lines, men who were known to be alive on the ground? Could new evidence mean that Americans are still alive in the jungles of Indo-China? In Search of s6e4: MIAs, 1981
February 22 1975: The men who work closest to Richard Nixon in the White House and in politics today were sentenced to prison for their role in the Watergate cover-up. Watergate, US news, History 2019
For over two years President Richard Nixon secretly taped his White House conversations. ibid. caption
Vietnam threatened to dominate the 1968 election … Over a million Americans had been drafted. ibid. commentary
Kissinger Aide Quits in Protest Over War: Dr Morton I Halperin, one of the first men recruited by Kissinger in 1968 for a White House job, wrote Kissinger a letter of resignation last week. ibid. newspaper article
He [Nixon] intensified American bombing … They also used Napalm and cancer-causing defoliants. ibid. commentary
The Pentagon papers, seven thousand pages long, documented the history of American failure and dishonesty in Vietnam, evidence that many had known the war was unwinnable. ibid.
Chuck Colson was a ruthless ambitious young lawyer who quickly became Nixon’s favourite hatchet man. ibid.
Infuriated by leaks to the media, Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to create a secret White House organisation to identify leakers and attack them – starting with Daniel Ellsberg. ibid.
Nixon was truly loyal to Mitchell and refused to make him the fall guy. ibid.
How high up in the White House does it go? And is the president himself involved? ibid. Dan Rather
Again and again over the following months Nixon pressured his staff to attack the Democrats. ibid. commentary
The crown jewel of Nixon’s strategy was Vietnam. ibid.
Watergate just wouldn’t go away. There had already been rumours of payoffs to the Watergate burglars and suddenly they weren’t just rumours any more. ibid.
Katharine Graham and the Washington Post didn’t give an inch. ibid.
The Watergate committee took its job seriously. Starting in May 1973 its hearings produced a series of shocks, all broadcast live on national TV. ibid.
The systems and numbers approach dominated the Pentagon. McNamara’s whizz-kids were convinced that the battle against the Viet-Cong could be managed in a rational, scientific way. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box II: To the Brink of Eternity, BBC 1992
January of 1968 also signalled a turning point in the Vietnam War. 1968: A Year of War, Turmoil and Beyond, commentator, Sky Arts 2018