Yes she was.
She went to many college campus's throughout the USA in the 1970's advocating for it.
Many people were saying the same things she said - that we were lied to and that people were dying because of those lies. Very much like the lies we have been told about Iraq and other NOT wars.
Communism - no.
An end to the blood bath - YES. I was one of those people who lost loved ones in VN and spoke out against it. I would do that again.
If you're ever able to let go of your partisan hatred, you might just learn a thing or two about what really happened in VN. But, you are one who needs to hold on to the hate and nurse it.
That's your choice.
Oh and BTW, whether you like it or not, there is nothing illegal about believing in Communism. Not many do. Its like believing in Ayn Rand. It looks good until you get close and educate yourself. But, even if you do believe in it, its not illegal.
I also lost loved ones in Viet Nam and I also was against the war and I also protested it.
Who said it was illegal to believe in big government?
And yet you believe LBJ got us into VN??
You always post the same way - like you're stuck in cement and making it up as you go along.
Did Johnson do this or not?
In early
1965, Johnson authorized ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’, which started on February 24th. This was the wholesale
bombing of North Vietnam and NLF-held territory in South Vietnam. Initially, ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ was meant to last for eight weeks – it lasted for three years. The NLF responded to the bombing by attacking US air bases in the South Vietnam. The commander of US advisor's in the South, General
Westmoreland, informed Johnson that the men he had in the South were inadequate to defend their bases and that he needed more men. Johnson responded by sending in US troops – this time they were not ‘advisors’. On March 8th 1
965, 3,500 US Marines – combat troops - arrived in South Vietnam. Johnson sold this deployment to the US public by claiming that they would be in South Vietnam as a short-term measure. In a poll held in 1965, 80% of those Americans polled indicated that they supported Johnson.
Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam
The Vietnam "conflict" --- war, military action, whatever we call it -- started a decade before that.
According to the terms of the Geneva Accords, Vietnam would hold national elections in 1956 to reunify the country. The division at the seventeenth parallel, a temporary separation without cultural precedent, would vanish with the elections. The United States, however, had other ideas. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles did not support the Geneva Accords because he thought they granted too much power to the Communist Party of Vietnam.
Instead, Dulles and President Dwight D. Eisenhower supported the creation of a counter-revolutionary alternative south of the seventeenth parallel. The United States supported this effort at nation-building through a series of multilateral agreements that created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).
South Vietnam Under Ngo Dinh Diem
Using SEATO for political cover, the Eisenhower administration helped create a new nation from dust in southern Vietnam. In 1955, with the help of massive amounts of American military, political, and economic aid, the Government of the Republic of Vietnam (GVN or South Vietnam) was born. The following year, Ngo Dinh Diem, a staunchly anti-Communist figure from the South, won a dubious election that made him president of the GVN. Almost immediately, Diem claimed that his newly created government was under attack from Communists in the north. Diem argued that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV or North Vietnam) wanted to take South Vietnam by force. In late 1957, with American military aid, Diem began to counterattack. He used the help of the American Central Intelligence Agency to identify those who sought to bring his government down and arrested thousands. Diem passed a repressive series of acts known as Law 10/59 that made it legal to hold someone in jail if s/he was a suspected Communist without bringing formal charges.
If there's one guy at whose feet we can lay the blame for starting the whole thing, it isn't Johnson or Nixon or Kennedy or even so much Eisenhower -- it would be John Foster Dulles.
