Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark17
Please, if we are going to generalize and call all conservatives fools, let's at least be a little bit honest with our facts. Kennedy escalated the Vietnam War, Johnson really escalated it while simultaneously maximizing US casualties by tying the hands of our military, and Nixon ended the Vietnam War.
For the record, I am a big fan of Ali and JFK, and I don't have much good to say about Nixon or Johnson. I'm also a conservative.
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You forgot Ike. He sent US "advisors" to the French, and later to Vietnamese President Diem, in the mid-to late '50s. My stepdad was one of them. He went to Vietnam in 1957. He was a MAC pilot and wing commander. He broke his back in an air to air crash in 1959 that I don't understand and he doesn't talk about, although my older step brother told me that there was some issue about him being too big for the plane he was flying at the time. He went back in 1962. He has absolutely nothing good to say about our involvement or the decisions we made while there.
It's easy to put today's spin on all that stuff. But I don't see how you can have any real perspective about it unless you were there. I am also sure that there were just about as many perspectives, every one of which was valid to the person who had it, as there were people who were involved. Ultimately, I choose to believe that people who followed the dictates of their conscience, whatever way that decision led them, did the right thing. Others may differ and that's OK. We will simply have to agree to disagree.