Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Communist movements, supported by the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, were sweeping through Southeast Asia. This led to a clash between the national and communist powers in Vietnam and incited the First Indochina War (1946 to 1954), in which the French, supported by the United States, fought against the communist guerrillas. The communists defeated the French, signifying the rise of a revolutionary communist force.

The Geneva Accords (1954) ended the hostilities and stipulated that Indochina was to be independent from French colonial rule. Furthermore, foreign presence was to cease in the region, and Vietnam was temporarily partitioned into northern and southern zones until nationwide elections could be held in 1956. The United States refused to recognize the Accords, as the agreement would limit its involvement in a region infected with communism.

Late in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower advanced the Domino Theory, teaching that once one nation falls to communism, neighboring nations will also succumb to that horrid form of government, one by one. Based on this severely flawed theory, the United States installed a puppet regime in South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh’s communist government controlled North Vietnam, with support from China and the Soviet Union. In 1961, the United States provided direct military and financial support to South Vietnam under President John F. Kennedy. This also violated the Geneva Accords.

Furthermore, the United States initiated covert CIA operations that escalated and intensified American involvement in Vietnam before the outbreak of war. In 1961, the CIA began reconnaissance missions in the North and naval sabotage operations by sending destroyer boats to the northern coast. This program was later transferred in 1964 to the Defense Department and was under the direct control of the Pentagon. The United States military also used Agent Orange along the Ho Chi Minh trail, along which the Vietcong was transporting troops and weapons.

In addition, President Kennedy authorized the CIA to support a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam, because Kennedy’s administration feared that Diem would be unable to defeat the Communists. In 1963, a local general in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) overthrew and executed Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. The United States, in noble fashion, denied any involvement in the assassination and primarily placed blame on the ARVN.

That brings us to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s best impression of FDR. In 1964, Johnson blatantly provoked a Vietnamese attack, but claimed that the United States was attacked first. On July 31st 1964, two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and The Turner Joy, began an electronic intelligence collection mission in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was a secret mission orchestrated by the Pentagon without any congressional authority. On August 2nd 1964, the Maddox reported that it was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The Maddox allegedly returned fire, sinking one of the boats and severely damaging the other.

In 2005, a declassified National Security Agency (NSA) report revealed that the Maddox actually fired first. There is evidence that the destroyers were, in fact, instructed to open fire to scare off any communist boats that came too close. According to the report, Captain John J. Herrick, the task force commander in the Gulf of Tonkin, ordered the destroyers to “open fire if the boats approached within ten thousand yards . . . The Maddox fired three rounds to warn off the communist boats. This initial action was never reported by the Johnson administration, which insisted that the Vietnamese boats fired first.”

Two days later, on August 4th 1964, the Pentagon claimed that North Vietnamese boats launched a second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. On that date, the U.S. destroyers believed they received radio and radar signals indicating that they were under attack by the North Vietnamese Navy, and opened fire for two hours. A 2005 NSA report revealed, however, that not only was there no North Vietnamese attack on August 4th, but there may not have even been any North Vietnamese boats in the area. Cables from Herrick showed that the signals came from “freak weather effects,” “almost total darkness,” and an “overeager sonarman” who “was hearing [his] ship’s own propeller beat.”

Nevertheless, on the night of August 4th, in the midst of a presidential election campaign against Senator Barry M. Goldwater, President Johnson proclaimed on national television that the United States would begin air strikes against North Vietnam to “retaliate” against the (phantom) torpedo attack. In his speech, Johnson announced that “[t]his new act of aggression, aimed directly at our own forces, again brings home to all of us in the United States the importance of the struggle for peace and security in southeast Asia . . . Yet our response, for the present, will be limited and fitting. We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.”

Seeking to protect the United States against the North Vietnamese, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (H.J. RES 1145), a joint resolution giving Johnson the right to initiate military force in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war.9 Until late in 1964, after Election Day, Johnson held himself out as the peace candidate and called Goldwater “a war monger.”

To say the consequences of starting war with Vietnam were devastating is to be guilty of an egregious understatement. In addition to costing better than $200 million, the Vietnam War resulted in more than 519,000 seriously injured Americans, more than 300,000 wounded Americans, and more than 50,000 dead Americans. Furthermore, roughly 2,500 Americans are still missing in action and presumed dead. Why? Because Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson believed that communism, a form of government and political theory that exalts the state over individuals, could somehow be contained on the battlefield.

When in history have ideas been contained via the use of military force? Never! Not even the most powerful military in the world can “draw a line” stopping the expansion of