Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle's senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experience Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDRLST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Mark Moyer, William P. Harris, Professor
of Military History, Hillsdale College. Hard to believe it's been
fifty years since the fall of Saigon. On April thirtieth,
nineteen seventy five. To mark the occasion, Hillsdale Colius Center
for Military History and Strategy, along with Hillsdale in DC,
hosted a conference on the Vietnam War. Professor Moyer joins
us with some perspective on the war that tore America apart,
scars that remain, and the Vietnam of today. Thank you,
sir so much for joining us on this edition at
the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: That's great to be with you today.
Speaker 1: Absolutely quite an event last week with some of the
best and brightest minds on history, global affairs getting together.
But I'll begin with the ending. It's amazing, truly to
think that it has been fifty years on the fall
of Saigon, when some nine thousand individuals were airlifted out
of that war torn city. Where have we gone since
the end of that war?
Speaker 2: Yeh, it's been a strange and I think in any
way somber journey. I think one of the things that
we really ought to think about, and we talked a
lot about over the past week, is that there was
a real, extremely damaging, deadly outbreak of further violence after
the war, and I think a lot of Americans were
too ready to simply wipe their hands of it. But
the number of people killed after the war is actually
greater than the number killed during the war. And that's
a combination of re education camps, people fleeing in these
boats and dying at sea, and the Kremer rouge, which
is enabled by the fall of South Vietnam. And that is,
you know, among the most tragic legacies. You know, from
a perspective a US foreign policy, we've done somewhat better,
but the reasons for that it is highly controversial. Some
people say well, we save the rest of Asia because
we made us stand there. Others say, what happened in
Vietnam had nothing to do with it, and that's still
a great point of contention. And I'm of the opinion
that in fact, it's American involvement from sixty five to
seventy five that does save most of Asia from communism,
which is of course hugely important today because we're still
competing with China in that region.
Speaker 1: No doubt about it. And I think if you track
the antecedents of this, you can't talk about the end
of the Fall of Saigon without looking at where all
of this started. And it starts, you know, certainly back
in the nineteenth century French colonialism in control of Indo
China at the time, and then along the way we
have an invasion by Japan and World War Two. We
have this guy named Ho Chi min who take us back,
who is Ho Chi Minh? And is it true that
he appealed originally to the United States, to the Roosevelt administration,
than ultimately to the Truman administration that hey, you know,
you guys, get behind me, and you know, we can
make some deals here. The idea is and maybe it's
revisionist history that Ho Chi Minh was an opportunist. He
wasn't necessarily a premier communist to begin with, but willing
to make a deal for the independence of his country
from French control.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's another point of enduring historical controversy. There
were a lot of people and still many historians who
would claim that he was really more of a nationalist,
He wasn't so much a communist, and he would have
been happy to join forces with the United States, and
so we blew massive opportunity to make him our ally. Now,
I and others take a strong issue with that and
point out that, for one thing, if we now know
a great deal about hoach Human's life, there's been several biographies,
he clearly is a true believer in Marxism and Leninism.
And what you see with him, as you saw with
people like Mao and Fidel Castro, is that they pay
lip service to non communist principles as a way of
duping the people that they call useful idiots, so gullible
people in the West who are going to buy their
line for a time so that they can exploit them.
But in hindsight, it's really to me absurd to think
we could have really been an ally. You know, the
only time we've really been able to have a significant
alliance with communist country was during World War Two when
we were fighting for our existence. But other than that,
you know, alliance with murderous communist regimes is just something
the United States do want to do, and we were
at the time competing with communism for control of the
war world. So why would we side with a communist
country when we're trying to support all these non communist groups.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an excellent point, you know, Stalin at a time,
as you just noted, you know, seemed to indicate, you know,
an open partnership with the West, and indeed there was
a partnership during World War Two, but it certainly wasn't
a sustainable partnership. They were just just absolutely diametrically opposed
in freedom, free markets, capitalism, in what we know as
you know, the Western experience versus the Soviet what would
become the Soviet Union. Obviously, as for Ho Chi Minh,
no matter how he started or what overtures he made
to the US government and to the West, he was
a tried and true communist throughout his life, and that
included did it not just absolute brutal means to control
his people his country?
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean one of the best pieces of evidence
we have that he was a communist is that he
set up a communist government with police state brutality, everything
you would expect a communist to do. You Another point
that's worth emphasizing is that he very much espouses Marxist
Leninist internationalism. It's one of the other claims that emerges
that Ho Chimen could have been the Teeto of Asia.
That refers to Tito of Yugoslavia, who turns his back
on the Soviets because he thinks they're not giving enough
deference to his national interest. But the problem with that
is that Ho Chi Minh repeatedly time and again made
clear he rejected Tito's idea that this is a world
revolution and so the international revolution comes before your national interest,
and in fact, he and other Vietnamese communists routinely attackedunce
Tito for taking this position.
Speaker 1: And as we see the build up the collapse of
France in Indo China, its exit and rapid exit in
nineteen fifty four, this movement to two states. Of course,
like we saw in Korea, we see Ho Chi Minh
doubling down and then receiving massive amounts of assistance in
the Cold War, and what became part and parcel of
all of that at the domino effect, that's where the
United States gets involved. Eisenhower is convinced in the mid
nineteen fifties that we need a presence there economically, we
need a presence there, at least training wise, militarily. At
that point, was there an opportunity to roll back Ho
Chi Minh or at least have a situation like we
ultimately did in Korea where you have a very prosperous
western linked South Korea versus obviously the absolute reverse in
North Korea.
Speaker 2: Yes, And that's a great question. And that's I think
another of the enduring questions that we continue to grapple
with is could South Vietnam have ended up like South Korea.
I certainly think so. There are some major similarities. They
have a very similar cultural background. The most important difference
that makes it so much harder in Vietnam is that
you have a massive exposed western border. Because the border
between South Korea and North Korea was relatively short and defensible,
but in Vietnam. Once Lyndon Johnson decides he's going to
not go into Laos to cut the Houchuan trail. You
have a thousand mile border on the west that the
North Vietnamese can invade almost anywhere, and it makes it
extremely difficult to try to defend the country. The US
does it for many years, but if you don't want
to spend a lot of money on ammunition and fuel,
you're not gonna be able to do that. And that's
what finally happens, is that the US Congress in nineteen
seventy four decides it's not going to fund expensive war.
And they had a very naive vision. And this is,
you know, a recurring theme we have. I mean, you
saw it going back to the Second World War. We
thought we were going to get along great with Stalin
after World War Two, but then all of a sudden,
we know the Cold War. Then we think we're going
to get along with Mao, and then he turns against us.
We think we're gonna get along with Castro, he turns
against us. And so you have in seventy four seventy
five Democrats saying, well, the North Vietnamese really aren't that bad,
and you know, if we just if we reduce support
to South Vietnam, that means they're going to have to
negotiate with the North Vietnamese and end this war. Well,
of course, the North Vietnamese, we're not actually going to
do that, and so when we reduced aid, they just
exploited that to destroy our allies with enduring bailful consequences.
I mean, you now have capitalism in Vietnam, but it's
still much poorer than South Korea, and you don't have
any freedom, said South Korea samething with Taiwan, which we
bailed out on the Chinese nationalists in nineteen forty nine
in a way similar to Vietnam. But Taiwan and South Korea,
which we helped nurture, are now two of the greatest
countries in the world, whereas North Korea is one of
the world's worth China is quite awful. Who's going to
pick to live in North Korea over South Korean. So
that was one of the great tragedies of the war,
is that all these people in South Vietnam who had
been our allies for over twenty years are essentially abandoned,
and some small number of them are able to escape,
and you know, some of them have become great successes
in the United States, but they had to abandon their
land to this tyrannical government.
Speaker 1: Yeah, chronologically, I want to get to Kennedy, and I'll
do that in just a moment. But you mentioned something
that is both amazing and very frustrating. It's again, we
just never seem to learn. When we think as a country,
the people who are in positions of authority to know
better should learn from history. But as you mentioned, this
long line of dictators, we thought that we could work with,
particularly communist dictators, and it never turned out. In seventy four,
as you mentioned, Congress says, well, we're not going to
pay for this. There are all kinds of reasons. Obviously
the war is very unpopular at this time. But it
just seems like the Jane Fonda approach to dealing with reality,
and that is to say, we just cut ties with
reality when we were dealing with or thinking about dealing
with ho Chi men and Stalin and with you know,
Cruse Chef and Fidel Castro in this long line. Why
is why can we never learn from our history?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's h it is sad, and it is you know,
I have to say, it's consistently come from one side
of the political spectrum. You have American left, which you know,
for a long time was sympathetic to socialism or some
ex sense still is, and and they thought communism really
wasn't you know, all that bad. And then and you know,
even after Vietnam, we see it continue with Jimmy Carter.
You know, he comes in office in seventy seven saying
that we had this inordinate fear of communism, we really
didn't need it. And then and he starts doing the
same thing, throwing our allies under the bus and then
letting the communists roll over them. And you know, it's
not until near the end of his presidency he himself
admits that this was a catastrophic err and so he
actually she starts rebuilding our military. But it is just
a really tragic view that coused so many people their lives.
I mean, you think about especially China today. I mean,
China is our biggest adversary, the biggest threat to the world,
and we really could have prevented that all from happening
in the forties, and it happens on a smaller scale elsewhere,
and it's you know, Unfortunately, there's just a lot of
wishful thinking, and I think a lot of it also
has to do with people not really understanding human nature
and having naive expectations and somehow believing that these people
aren't going to be lying to us through their teeth.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. I think the fatigue plays a role too, And
I think everything you just said adds to that fatigue.
You know, in World War Two, post World War Two,
the fatigue of that just massacre of humanity, you know,
this catastrophic event for years. I think people were just
tired of it and they wanted to move on. I
think the same thing happened, you know Vietnam. Certainly toward
the end of hostilities, people just wanted to move on.
But the way you move on, how you move on
sets up how you are going to experience the few
and whether you're going to experience the sequel of those events,
and that's unfortunately what we have seen. I want to
take you back to the early nineteen sixties. There's been
a lot of talk over the years that John F. Kennedy,
who certainly listened to his military advisors and got the
United States more involved with training advisory roles I think
somewhere in the vicinity of nine thousand US representatives in
Vietnam in the early nineteen sixties. But there's long been
this debate that Kennedy really soured on Vietnam, and had
he survived, he would have removed United States presence from Vietnam.
Is that true? Is that any record really to confirm
that line of thinking or is that just kind of
counterfactual thought.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that I think is not at all substantiated by
the evidence. And it's just I mean, we have so
many examples of people getting Vietnam wrong, and this is
one of the leading cases, and a lot of it
is inspired by the affect that the analy these admirers
who wanted to think he was a bit further to
the left than he was. But we know clearly he
undertakes a huge increase in the US presence in Vietnam.
And there are a few discussions that people refer to
you to try to say he was thinking about getting out,
where he talks about maybe we take some troops out,
But the reality is those discussions were based on the
idea that things were going to be getting better, and
things were actually getting better in nineteen sixty three until
what is probably the single most important event of the
whole war, which is the overthrow assassination of South Vietnam's president.
And Kennedy had really mismanaged that he is distraught, he's
dumbfounded by the whole thing. And then this is just
weeks before his own assassination. But given everything else, we
know he had already failed in the Bay of Pigs,
and he'd failed in Loss and he specifically said on
a number of occasions, you know, I've already had two
strikes we cannot you have a third strike. We've got
to stand firm in Vietnam. So I think he would
have done just about the same thing as Lyndon Johnson
had he been alive.
Speaker 1: So here comes Lyndon Johnson forced into the role becoming president.
As we've seen over history. Some call these vice presidents
who suddenly ascend to the chief executive role, accidental presidents,
if you will. But he's got some major decisions to make,
and his timetable is quickly set for him in what
becomes the whole Gulf of Tonkin affair that obviously precipitously,
you know, heats up the Cold War, makes it a
hot war in Vietnam for the United States. Take us
through the Gulf of Tonkin, the resolution and where Johnson's
mindset was, and the peoples who surrounded him at that
time giving him advice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, s. Johnson in nineteen sixty four is thinking mainly
about one thing, which is getting re elected. He's also
thinking about his civil rights agenda, and he's advancing civil
rights legislation. He does not want to be a foreign
policy president. He wants to be a domestic legislative guy.
And he does pass a lot of important legislation in
consultation with Congress. But his for nineteen sixty four is
keep Vietnam off of the front page because it's going
to distract from the domestic agenda and people, voters might
get worried that it's not going as well and that
might hurt him. So he is able for the most
part to do that during nineteen sixty four, but the
Gulf of Tonkin incidents in August really throw a wrench
into his plans. You have attacks on American destroyers in
the Tonkin Golf. Now there is later doubts about whether
one of those happen. We know at least the first
of the two happened. Johnson believed they happen, And so
Johnson has to do something to show that he's going
to respond when American ships are attacked on the high seas.
And therefore he consults with his top officials, Robert McNamara
foremost among them, and McNamara is enamored of academic theories,
and the academic theories of the day look at war
as an abstraction between rational actors, and so they hYP outhesize,
what if you do this, take this action, how's the
other side going to respond, and while they're rational, so
we can address that. So the thinking here is that
if we undertake a little, tiny show of force, that's
all we need to do to show the enemy that
we are not going to get pushed around, that we're serious.
So they launch a very small bombing raid against the
North Vietnamese navy and so they think this has worked well.
It turns out the North Vietnamese view this exactly in
the opposite way. They see this as a sign of weakness,
because if you are the world's greatest power, why do
you just rely on this little pinprick strike. So this
actually will encourage North Vietnam to escalate the war, and
then Johnson further pushes them in that direction by stating
repeatedly on the campaign trail that he's not going to
send American boys to Vietnam and that he's a peace candidate.
So this then sets in motion full blown invasion of
South Vietnam, which will come to fruition in early nineteen
sixty five. And that's why ultimately Johnson will have to
send ground troops into the war.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he is not the peace candidate. He got himself
into a lot of problems by saying those things. Other
presidents have said lots of things that have gotten them
into problems. I think of George H. W. Bush and
read my lips. But this obviously ends up with Johnson
sending lots of boys into the jungles of Vietnam. To me,
his handling of Vietnam in many ways was much like
his handling of the Great Society, the War on Poverty
abject failures both. What do you think of Johnson's handling
of the Vietnam Did he approach it in a winnable way?
Is the question for history.
Speaker 2: Now he made a great many errors. Now, one thing
I will say is, you know, I do think in
terms of fighting for venom in itself there was actually
good reason to do that because of the threat of
Asian expansion Asian communist expansionism. But when you get to
how he actually tried to do it, it was a
series of very catastrophic errors. I mean one starting with this,
you know, incorrect messaging about how we're not serious, I
means inviting the enemy to invade, essentially for his own
domestic political benefit. Then he consistently ignores the advice of
his generals, and one of the things they tell him
is we're going to once we start bombing in Earnest
in nineteen sixty five, we have to hit him hard.
And Johnson said, now I'm gonna listen to mak Mara,
who says we should do this thing called gradual escalation,
where we slowly increase. That turns out to be a
terrible idea and ineffective. He refuses to he requests from
the generals to push into North feenomenor laws, which you
also know would have worked out very well. He also
deliberately avoids trying to rouse the nation's spirits, and this
is again because he wants to be the president of
the Great Society and civil rights. And he will admit
later on in his presidency that this was probably not
a good idea, because if the president's not out there
explaining to the people why their war is being fought,
you're going to see the people gradually lose faith in
the war and in the president.
Speaker 1: And indeed they did, they absolutely lost faith in the
war and the president. More on that in just a moment.
Our guest today is Mark Moyer, William P. Harris, Professor
of Military History, Hillsdale College. As we talk about the
fall of Saigon, the effective end of the Vietnam War,
at least for the United States of America. That date
April thirtieth of nineteen seventy five, a day that will
obviously live long in our memories. So macnamara, this is
an interesting fella. And he's got the president's here. I mean,
he absolutely has the president's ear. And as you mentioned before,
he's a theorist. He's a different kind of general. Clearly
history tells us he was not an effective general. Why
what happened with this guy? And why did Johnson listen
so sincerely to him?
Speaker 2: Yes, well, he was somebody with a very impressive demeanor,
the kind of person you listen to. You know, everyone's
come across people. You do something about this person that
instills confidence in him. And so Johnson for a long
time was sort of spellbound. And you know, mcmaarr is
a very smart guy. He was very good at giving presentations.
Now McNamara had come from the business world, he'd been
an executive at the Ford Motor Company, and well rich
religion and Kennedy who brings him in Johnson will inherit him.
But Kennedy and others are of the belief that, well,
we can take things from the business world, which seems
to be more effective, and use them to run this
stodgy pentagon bureaucracy. And now government bureaucracy does tend to
be stodgy and does sometimes need a kick. But when
it comes to war, war is a fundamentally different enterprise
than building cars, because when you're building cars, nobody's there
trying to blow up what you're trying to do. You
don't really have an enemy who's actively getting in your way.
And McNamara really didn't know how to deal with these adversaries.
So that's why he turns to these academic theories. And
you know, this is a part of a broader contentversy
between sort of social science and the humanities and history.
And I'm a historian. I firmly believe that, you know,
as we think about the future, you've got to think
about history. The social sciences like to think in abstract terms,
but if you spend much time looking at the course
of his human history, usually get into trouble if you
simply rely on abstractions, because you take out the human
element and the humans. You know, humans often do things
that are unexpected. They often disappoint us. They are not
always rational, as macnamara is prone to believe, and so
McNamara repeatedly misunderstands his enemy and just makes one bad
decision after the next.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to the detriment of national security and foreign policy
throughout the tet offensive comes along. Is that the the
end for Lyndon Baines Johnson or does he think at
that point we can regroup, because you know, it's not
much longer after that that you get this announcement from
the president on national TV. I will not accept the nomination.
He's done as president of the United States. Did the
tet offensive drive him there?
Speaker 2: It certainly played a large role, and it brings Johnson
to realize that he's been trying to play something of
a middle ground between the liberal wing of his party
and the more considered wing his party and the rest
of the country. And eventually both sides come to conclude
that he's not doing good job, and so he's run
out of support. Now, it's worth noting this is not
the end for the war itself. Public support for the
war actually is quite a bit higher. Still. People still
see this as a significant warrant, and Americans don't want
to lose a war, and what we'll see in the
years ahead is declining American participation. But the hope is
that we can keep South Vietnam alive and not allow
them to collapse.
Speaker 1: Definitely. So and so you have an interesting campaign in
nineteen sixty eight that also includes the Democrats are going
through some very difficult times, to say the least, our
college campuses are on fire, some of our inner cities
are on fire. You have this in the backdrop of
Marxist movement on our college campuses and violence in the
civil rights movement. All of this stuff is going on Vietnam. Obviously,
like everything else, does not happen in a vacuum. But
you have emerging from the nineteen sixty eight presidential contest
a guy that everybody thought was done in politics after
nineteen sixty and certainly after his ill fated run for
governor of California. That's Richard Nixon, and he becomes, in essence,
if not the peace candidate, the win with dignity. It
didn't turn out that way, though, did it.
Speaker 2: Now. I mean, initially Nixon comes in thinking he may
be able to intimidate the North Vietnamese. He has in
mind what Eisenhower did in nineteen fifty three when he
came in and brought an end to the Korean War.
And unfortunately for Nixon, he makes some decisions in nineteen
sixty nine that undercut that. There's a couple of serious
enemy provocations and Nixon doesn't react even though some of
his advisors tell him to do, because he's being told
by Henry Kissinger and others that, well, this could undermine negotiations.
And this is one of the many the fallacies that
comes up over and over again that and it's the
same people usually who are telling us that we really
can we should be more trusting in these communists, but
they keep saying, well, if we only ease off them,
then they will negotiate. And Nixon will eventually learn that
the only way to get the negotiate is actually to
hit them very hard, and that's what will finally happen,
but that will be several years down the road. And
so what Nixon does is go on this strategy of Vietnamization,
of turning things over gradually to the South Vietnamese, and
it actually ends up working pretty well. When you get
to nineteen seventy two, there's a huge North Vietnamese invasion.
American ground troops are gone at that point, and yet
the South Vietnamese hold them off. And so the question
then is how much longer can the US maintain a
high degree of support And Americans will pull out the
early seventy three, but the AID will continue, and another
big conference is how we continue the aid at that level.
Would they have survived? I tend to think they will,
but of course, because of Watergate and Congress, we will
cut the aid in that I think ensure South Vietnam
is going to fall.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Again, so many different events beyond the control of
just this one major war that is going on. I said,
I think I said win with victory or win with dignity.
I think that the term at the time was peace
with dignity, and it's a long road to peace. Obviously,
as we see moving through the Nixon years, when did.
Speaker 2: The pro.
Speaker 1: Vietnam establishment, When did they lose ultimately the support of
America to put it in TV parlance at the time,
when did it go from Americans being archie bunker to
meathead if you will?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I do think Watergate play a critical role,
and it's you know, even as the US is pulling out.
There's still a strong sentiment. You know, most Americans want
the country to succeed. They don't like the ally the
idea of one of our allies being overthrown by by communism.
But you know, with Watergate, there's such a souring on Nixon,
and I think that also contributes to the souring on
the war because it was something that Nixon was associated with.
And so you certainly see that in Congress that people
are mad at Nixon, and they they use Vietnam as
a weapon to hit him with. And I said, there's
also in there some naive hope that somehow it's our allies,
you know, racalcitrinds that's in the way of peace. So
if we we remove support to them, that will bring peace.
I mean, it's to some extent a little bit like
we we here in debates today over the Middle East
that well maybe we should just you know, if we
just reduce our support to Israel, that that's going to
bring us peace and happiness.
Speaker 1: I understand, we have lived with a lot of what
feels like never ending wars in this century and the
century past. Americans have dealt with that. Americans have funded
that and whether they wanted to or not. But again,
it is a matter of learning from history. Will delve
into that in just a moment. But I want to
ask you this, because so much came out of Vietnam
and the Vietnam era that has informed and shaped what
this country is today and in many cases the divide
that we experience in this country today. How much did
the fall of Vietnam contribute to this rabid Marxist movement
that is so alive and well, that's that really did
spring up in large part because of Vietnam on college
campuses and in our institutions across the country. How much
of that has to do with Vietnam and the apps
at the actual end, the collapse, the loss in Vietnam.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think they really went hand in hand. And
the Vietnam campus protests is interesting because that when the
war first gets going in nineteen sixty five, there's really
not much criticism on campus, and it's really not to
you get the baby boomers coming in, combined with the
fact that they get tougher on the draft rules in
nineteen sixty seven, and so you have a generation now
baby boomers really taking control and a lot of them
are not as interested in patriotic sacrifice as their predecessors,
and they latch onto Vietnam. I think partly why it's
still so misunderstood is they really distort the war in
order to serve or their own interests. And then you know,
it's interesting too to see what happens when the Saigon
actually falls. They stop paying a lot of attention to it,
but sort of cling to these notions that it was
a terrible war, but in the meantime kind of forgetting
about what happens next. You know, they're not talking about
re education camps or both people or Khmer Rouge killing
you know, millions of people, and sometimes they'll come up
with crazy excuses as to why, you know, those things
are actually America's fault. But it is an enduring symbol.
And that's why too, you have so much even today,
a strong resistance to anyone who might question through the
conventional wisdom that's been handed down through the anti war movement,
which continues to dominate culture. If you see things like
Ken Burns documentary a few years ago, and there's actually
a new Netflix documentary that just came out out which
I haven't gotten a chance to see yet. But from
well I've heard, it seems to be in the same vein.
This is a fundamentally important event in our history and
especially to them, and so they feel they've got to
control the narrative.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating to me that the history that we talk about,
I mean, as you go back to the founding of
this nation, and you see, you know, a just a genius,
no other way to describe, but Thomas Jefferson, who is
you know, sucked in by the Jacobins, by the you know,
the the appeal of the French Revolution, and then you know,
has to kind of recalibrate is support for what becomes,
you know, just the tyranny of the mob. And that's
where you have the federalist and anti federalist clashing going
on and all of that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: And it just.
Speaker 1: Seems, you know, two hundred years later, two hundred and
fifty years later, we're in the same position again. I
just can't help but think will we ever learn?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's an excellent point, and that is in fact,
next year will be a much happier anniversary for us,
and we Hillsdale are going to be yes celebrating that
anniversary at the two hund and fiftieth anniversary at the start
of the country. This year's anniversary at the Vietnam is
much more somber. One said, it had so many negative
consequences that it just makes all of us a bit sad.
Speaker 1: Does So let's look at the legacy of Vietnam as
we close out our conversation you mentioned at the beginning,
and we can never forget that the fact that, you know,
things didn't become a nirvana in Vietnam or the rest
of the world, in the United States of America after
the United States left Vietnam in April nineteen seventy five. Altogether,
the devastation that was caused in the wake of our
withdrawal is very clear. And what we have seen, i
think in modern times, the comparisons to what we saw
in the Biden administration and those similar images in Kabul Kable,
it's just once again amazing how its book ended some
fifty years forty five years later. Where do we go
from this point with today's Vietnam.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's sad. And we saw pretty much the same
thing in Iraq too with Obama and then he also
was trying to get out of afghanistanment you have these
people who think that when the Americans leave, the war
is over. I mean you literally had both Obama and
Biden say that. But you know, the war's not over
as long as people are fighting, and when we had
such a big role in it, to pull out and
then try to pretend that things are over is just horrible.
Hopefully we some people at least will learn something, and
clearly people like Biden didn't learn that from Afghanistan, because
he turns around and does the same thing in Afghanistan.
Of course, we've seen horrible things happen there as well
to the people who had been our allies. And you
also had this naivete that, oh, the Taliban, they've told
us they're going to be nice to women now, so okay,
we can trust them now, which, of course they've totally
renigged on all of that as well. And so I
think it's a reminder we should be very careful in
how we think and avoid this tendency to his naivete
that is unfortunately often common among Americans. I think one
of the best ways to do is actually study history
and see how things actually work in the real world.
Is people, human nature doesn't really change very much so
you're going to find out more about people by looking
at the past than about thinking in abstract terms.
Speaker 1: When I think about Vietnam, America's role in it and
what happened there, and since I cannot help but think
about some family and friends, some men who served in
Vietnam who didn't get lucky by some college deferment, who
lost the lottery, so to speak, and they were in country,
and one in particular comes to mind. Doesn't like to
talk about his experiences because what he experienced would be
unimaginable to most of us, who fortunately haven't had to
deal with that. But despite all of those things that
he witnessed that he experienced, among the worst, if not
the worst, was coming home to be spit on by protesters.
Have we at least got an understanding of what that
meant to those brave people.
Speaker 2: Yes. And you know, that's one area where I will
say the left a little bit got its act together.
They eventually figured out that it's the politicians and not
the troops who decide when we go to war. They
didn't understand at the time of the war, so they
did the sorts of despicable things you talked about, you know, now.
You know, fortunately our veterans don't have to deal with
that same sort of of problem today. But you know,
we are in a period where we now that it
is all volunteer for us. Fortunately we're not heavily engaged now,
but the burden has shifted to a much smaller percent
of the population, which I think is problematic in a
number of ways. It's certainly hard on those families, but
you know, I do think it's worth remembering. A big
reason why I spent so much time writing books about
Vietnam was that I think a lot of the veterans
and their families and the men who never came back,
you know, never really got the full story on what happened,
and they most of them, were subjected to things like
ken Burns and Stanley Carno's book and other gross distortions
of history which made it seem like they had just
been thrown into a complete fools erin it was totally worthless,
and so the real history is much different than In fact,
there were compelling reasons for us to go to Vietnam,
and Americans did many noble things there, and as I think,
as Ronald Reagan said, it was a noble cause it
wasn't be awful and a big nothing, as John Kerry
wants to put it. And it's an important part of
our nation's history.
Speaker 1: Yes, and it definitely has shaped us as Americans and
as a nation. Fascinating conversation. Very much appreciate your time, sir.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Thanks, great to be with you again.
Speaker 1: Thanks to my guest today, Mark Moyer. William P. Harris,
Professor of Military History, Hillsdale College. You've been listening to
another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle's
senior elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll be back soon
with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious
for the fray