"This struggle for freedom was not new. As Richard Wormser explains [Three Faces of Vietnam, [New York, 1993]], "From three hundred years before Christ to 1500 years after, they continuously battled the Chinese." As Wormser puts it, "Catholicism opened the door to European influence, and the French rushed in to dominate Vietnam." Hundreds of thousands were converted to Catholicism for political and economic reasons, as well as religious ones, continues Wormser. But the people continued, despite the religious factor, to oppose French domination, and in 1847, they faced French military might [for the French were now sending troops to the tiny country to maintain order]. "

To quote from Drew Pearson's column, N.Y. Post, January 5, 1967: "In some diplomatic and political circles..... It will come as a surprise to the American people that our soldiers have enlisted in the war as soldiers of Christ," said Senator Wayne Morse [D.-Ore.]. The Cardinal [SPELLMAN], in calling for 'total victory,' in Vietnam, said it was a war in which American troops were fighting as 'solders of Christ.' .......... Ngo Ding Diem, described as a sort of 'Catholic mandarin,' who had been sent by Cardinal Spellman to see Sen. John F. Kennedy ........... As a Catholic [Diem] in a country 80 percent Buddhist, he was not popular. Eventually he was assassinated."

Diem's brother, a Roman Catholic archbishop, was "warmly welcomed by Bishop Fulton Sheen," according to an article titled, "How Religion is involved in Asia," by Edna Ruth Johnson, in The Churchman for June, 1965.

McNamara, BTW, is a Roman Catholic.

As was his president, JFK.

As was JFK's CIA head, John McCone.

From ............ THE CHURCHMAN'S HUMAN QUEST

MARCH-APRIL 1996 pages18-19

McNAMARA'S CONFESSION: AN OVERVIEW OF VIETNAM

By JOHN FULTON TAYLOR

THE HIGHEST U.S. war time official, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, has admitted that the Vietnam conflict was a total mistake from the beginning. For those who still try to justify the debacle - and there are many - it would be well to review the steps that led us into that war, and to see if we can benefit from our mistakes.

It is all to be found in the so-called "Pentagon Papers," that detailed study of the conflict commissioned by Secretary McNamara in June, 1967. According to McNamara's instructions, the report was to be "encyclopedic and objective." And it was. What emerged was so candid, so spine-chilling, that only 15 copies of it were printed. It was called secret. McNamara attempted to have it declassified at the end of the Johnson administration, but LBJ rejected his efforts. The report had been compiled by a team of 36 government authorities, largely civilian and military officials who had attempted to carry out the policies. The document shows that succeeding U.S. governments from the time of the Truman administration onward deemed it important to take action to prevent communist control over all of Vietnam. Out of it came the "domino" theory - the idea that if South Vietnam fell, every country in Indochina would inevitably follow. This theme was continued in endless debate for nearly two decades.

The Pentagon report shows that a successful "defense" could not be carried out under the limits imposed by the 1954 Geneva Accords. So-called military "advisors" were sent in only on the insistence of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. But Presidents Kennedy and Johnson decided merely to use partial measures, thus overriding the advice of the military; such measures, said the military, couldn't work on a piecemeal plan. In one section of the Pentagon report, Senator Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar candidate for the 1968 presidential nomination, is described as "impudent and dovish." A candid report indeed!

But for the most part, the emotional tone of the document is detached, calm. Nevertheless, the Pentagon papers made it clear that there was a need for government secrecy in order to keep the war efforts runnning smoothly, and to try to affect the public "positively." As President Johnson explained in a personal cable to General Maxwell Taylor, then U.S. ambassador to Saigon, LBJ wanted a pause, "which I could use to good effect with world opinion."

In May, 1965, McNamara sent a topsecret, misleading order through the entire military command stating that the purpose of a 5-day bombing pause was "to permit reconnaissance aircraft to conduct a thorough study of [North Vietnamese] lines of communication." But, as. the Pentagon papers show, the real purpose was to provide "an opportunity to secretly deliver what amounted to a 'cease and desist' order to Hanoi to call off the insurgency in the south "

None of this information would have been made available to us had it not been for a courageous man named Daniel Ellsberg, who seized these papers and turned them over to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both promptly began publishing them. The rest is history. Efforts were made to stop the publication, but the Supreme Court, to its everlasting credit, decided in favor of the newspapers on the grounds of freedom of the press. What could be done about it? One thing was the so-called "Watergate burglaries," a politically motivated bit of criminality engaged in by the GOP to discredit the Democrats - and, as far as Ellsberg was concerned, to blackmail him by uncovering conversations between him and his psychiatrist.

Senator Fulbright made clear in his remarkable book The Price of Empire [New York: Pantheon 1989], "The offenses involved were largely derivative - products of Nixon's efforts to stamp out opposition to war." On coming to know the Pentagon Papers through the New York Times disclosures, Fulbright reports,

Hardly anyone had really even heard of Vietnam. We had been taught that for a very long time the people of Vietnam had struggled to free themselves from the French. In 1954 came the so-called "Geneva Accords." There [in Geneva], diplomats from France, China, England and the Soviet Union negotiated an end to a 7-year conflict between France and Vietnam. The U.S. did not participate, but attended merely as an observer.

This struggle for freedom was not new. As Richard Wormser explains ['Three Faces of Vietnam,' [New York, 1993]], "From three hundred years before Christ to 1500 years after, they continuously battled the Chinese." As Wormser puts it, "Catholicism opened the door to European influence, and the French rushed in to dominate Vietnam." Hundreds of thousands were converted to Catholicism for political and economic reasons, as well as religious ones, continues Wormser. But the people continued, despite the religious factor, to oppose French domination, and in 1847, they faced French military might [for the French were now sending troops to the tiny country to maintain order]. Quoting Wormser, again, "By 1887, nevertheless, the French had conquered the countryside despite fierce Vietnamese resistance." The French were brutal invaders, burning homes, looting villages, killing men and raping women wherever they went. They burned one of the great Vietnamese libraries, destroying hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.

France then proceeded to divide the country into three parts - Cochin China, Annam, Tonkin - which collectively, along with Cambodia, was called Indochina. Exploited farmers lost their lands and starved.

Then, in 1891, a Vietnamese patriot named Ho Che Minh, fed up with the abuse, journeyed to France, attempting to find ways to free his nation from French rule. In 1941, after a thirty-year period of self-imposed exile, Ho returned to his native land. Here he organized a revolutionary group called the Viet Minh and established a new, independent government called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with headquarters in Hanoi. This was the government that France attempted to overthrow when its invaders moved back at the end of 1945. The following year warfare broke out between the Viet Minh and the French.

By then the United States was engaged in a war in Korea. Fearful that the communist government of North Vietnam would be successful, President Truman sent military aid to the French. It was at this point that the "domino" idea was announced. Like the French-Vietnamese conflict in Indochina, the Korean War looked as if it might drag on indefinitely.

But when Eisenhower became president in 1953, he succeeded in gaining a truce in the Korean conflict. That phase of the war seemed to be over. But Ike now faced what he felt was the domino effect and decided to give aid to the antiFrench Southern Vietnamese instead. Ho, as the political leader of North Vietnam, wanted to establish there a democracy modeled on that of that of the United States. But though he had pleaded with Truman for aid in doing this, he had received no such help. In the meanwhile the French were being kicked out of Vietnam. The decisive battle between these people and the French came to a head in the village of Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954. This was to be the end of the French domination of the little country.

It looked as if the Viet Minh were victorious. At this time the peace conference was held in Geneva. The division of Vietnam into north and south was intended to be temporary only. By now thousands of people had fled south in fear and in poverty, for in the south lay the best farmlands, and many had lost their lands in the previous conflicts.

The leadership of this so-called "temporary" southern region now asked our new president, Dwight Eisenhower, for military men - so-called "advisors" - to help train the inexperienced people there, both warriors and civilians. Eisenhower was terrified of Ho's northern government so he sent 150,000, "military advisors" to the south.

[ "150,000" IS NOT CORRECT. EISENHOWER SENT FAR FEWER ... JP ]

In addition, he provided the southern part of Vietnam with American weapons and other military equipment. North Vietnam actually had two armies now: one made up of the regular soldiers under General Giap - north of the demilitarized zone; the others - the Viet Minh - grouped themselves together as guerrilla fighters in the North and South and called themselves the Viet Cong. The "free elections" which had been promised as part of the Geneva Accords, were never held. In place of a democratic leader in South Vietnam, a U.S.-approved dictator was chosen - Ngo Dinh Diem, whom the U.S. supported until the time of his assassination in November, 1963.

To quote from Drew Pearson's column, N.Y. Post, January 5, 1967:

Diem's brother, a Roman Catholic archbishop, was "warmly welcomed by Bishop Fulton Sheen," according to an article titled, "How Religion is involved in Asia," by Edna Ruth Johnson, in The Churchman for June, 1965.

By now the U.S. was deeply involved. Green Berets were already at work "advising" in their own murderous way. Just three weeks after Diem's death President Kennedy, who had succeeded Eisenhower, was gunned down in Dallas. Everything suddenly fell on Lyndon Johnson, the new president. Quickly he increased U.S. aid [we weren't officially at war]. But he looked secretly for dramatic action to bring the nation to an official declaration. This came in the summer of 1964. At that time two U.S. destroyers were sent spying into the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. Washington suddenly received word of an attack by a North Vietnamese patrol boat. Whether the attack ever occurred at all is still a matter of dispute. But Johnson did not wait. He immediately ordered American planes to fly from aircraft carriers in the Gulf and to bomb North Vietnam. Later investigations indicated that Johnson's bombing plans had been formed before the so-called Tonkin incident. Now we were at war - really and truly.

Thus, by a dubious event, the United States allowed itself to be plummeted into a war' against a people fighting for their freedom - and to be driven by our fears of the communists into what amounted to a government-imposed piece of genocide, of torture, of human devastation.

[FANATICAL ANTI-COMMUNIST HYSTERIA WHIPPED UP LARGELY THANKS TO VATICAN - ROMAN CATHOLICS ...... JP ]

The war of course brought out the best- and the worst of us: primarily the worst! McNamara's confession has been a gesture of true faith by a man whose honesty of conscience will have implications for generations to come. Let us hope we remember.

Dr. Taylor taught English literature at Baltimore Community College and played the viola in the Maryland Symphony Orchestra before moving to Austin, Texas, recently. He is a Contributing Editor to The Churchman's Human Quest.