However, Irvine's patriotic vitriol against the press fails to note that the United States was by far the superior military power, and yet was out-battled on the battle field. It would seem a bit simplistic to blame everything on the press. Perhaps there is some ineptness with the military or a lack of belief in the cause or some other Catch-22 type of factor operating that no one wants to admit, especially those in the military who had an active role in the Vietnam War.estimated 2,000 years living in Southeast Asia. The CIA recognized that the Montagnards would be good U.S. friends because they hated the Vietnamese for driving them into the central highlands over 900 years ago. Indeed, the Montagnards found the U.S. invasion a unique opportunity to kill the Vietnamese, and excelled in riding the highlands of Viet Cong. However, during the time that Saigon was falling and the United States was getting ready to pull out of In addition, Baritz points to problems in the high levels of the military. The military thought of everything as being a military problem and assumed that the United States was invincible and could not lose. Members of the military also were giving President Johnson assurances that the American people were behind him in stepping up the war on Vietnam. It was the belief of the American military that American military actions would determine the results in Vietnam. This feeling persisted despite evidence that Ho Chi Minh and his men were prepared to resist the Americans for decades, just as they had resisted and prevailed against the Japanese in the 1940s and the French in the 1950s (Baritz 132-177). Baritz, Loren. Backfire. NY: Ballentine, 1985. Thus, there was a wide rift between the American people and the policy-makers in Washington DC. This isolation of the American government policy makers from the people, in whose name they were supposedly governing, became even more pronounced during the Nixon presidency. Nixon would publicly declar |
