Secret Plans, a Con Artitist and a War Criminal
Never trust a a
candidate with a secret plan. Donald
Trump says he has a plan to destroy ISIS but won't tell anything
about it lest he tip off the enemy. Last time a candidate
claimed to have a secret plan to end the war it ended with Richard Nixon killing another
25,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians. If Americans had known that Nixon's secret plan was to escalate the
violence even more I'm sure that would have changed enough votes to make Hubert Humphrey president.
As in the current
election, America in 1968 was faced with two flawed candidates. Both
were experienced in government but Richard Nixon had a reputation for
dishonesty and cold war militarism while Hubert Humphrey had spent
the previous four years defending Lyndon Johnson's escalation in
Vietnam. The war pretty much destroyed Humphrey's reputation as a
progressive liberal. Fortunately I was too young to vote that year.
I was almost 21, in my third year of college and keenly aware of the
war as a draft-age male. In the end, I thought Nixon's secret plan
had more credibility than Humphrey's late embrace of some anti-war
policies. Nothing else seemed to matter as much. In the end a very
divided nation chose Nixon.
Okay, I thought. He
says he has a plan. He's known to be intelligent and experienced in
foreign affairs, I'll give him a chance (or the benefit
of the doubt, as Hillary Clinton would say). I figured a couple
of years to wind things down would be reasonable. Aside from ending
the carnage in Southeast Asia, that timetablewould eliminate the
chance that I might have to go to Vietnam. By the time my student
deferments ran out, the war should be over.
Except that the war
did not end. Two years after Richard Nixon's inauguration, I was
humping the boonies on combat patrol in the mountains of Long Khanh
Province in South Vietnam.
So, yeah, color me skeptical about secret plans.
Labels: vietnam, why am I in this handbasket?