Where did you read that, either during LBJ or Nixon's presidencies in places like the New Left newsletter, Viet Report, in Ramparts or since? I'm pretty familiar w/ the 8 shelves of books at the downtown SFPL on the Vietnam War ( http://people.clemson.edu/~eemoise/bibliography.html Vietnam War Bibliography ) , from classics like Bernard Fall, Marilyn B. Young, Frances Fitzgerald, George T. McKahin and Lewis, Joseph Buttinger, Robert Shaplen, Michael Lind, Paul Joseph's work testing various radical and liberal theories about the war, Ellen J. Hammer on the Diem assasination, Christian Appy's new oral history (one highlight there, Chalmers Johnson dissing Berkeley campus maoists as harshly as Lewis Feuer) Gabriel Kolko, even the hard right works that Chomsky excoriated by Guenter Lewy, "America In Vietnam, " and Douglas Pike on the NLF that he tore apart on, "American Power and the New Mandarins." There have been dozens of new books focusing on the internal conflicts withing the Johnson and to a lesser extant the Nixon admin. (see, on the former, works by Lloyd Gardner and Longevall and on the latter, Jeffrey Kimball's, "The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era Strategy, " Univ. Press of Kansas, 2003, http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/kimvie.html ) . In all these works, as well as academic journal pieces in places like Diplomatic History and Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, LBJ is always quoted against the voices as such as Curtis LeMay who would have been happy to send tons of nukes raining down on Peking. Didn't the PRC in '50 have a million troops assisting the N. Koreans in wave attacks? And the heightened revolutionary fervor of the yrs. of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, imagine that deployed externally against Amerika. And, if one reads the excellent book by James Mann on the USG and PRC from Nixon to Clinton, the (conventional) opinion about the China opening of Nixon and Kissinger being motivated by the demands to disengage from a conflict that, in tandem w/ Black Power and other "civil unrest" from Newark to Cicero, was, depending on one's ideological positioning on the extremes, either bringing on the Revo (strains of Jefferson Airplane, "Got a Revolution...Up Against The Wall, Mothgerfuckers, Tear Down The Wall..." Eartha Kitt slamming LBJ and at W.H. or Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald, or Lawrence Welk, Up With People w/ Mike Curb or The Carpenters invited to the Nixon W.H.) or...or...or bringing on the Revo.
-- Michael Pugliese