On Thu, 23 Sep 2004, Michael Pugliese wrote:
> Carl Oglesby in '65 at the first big anti-war demo, about 30,000 in
> D.C., "The original commitment in Vietnam was made by President
> Truman, a mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower,
> a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy,
> a flaming liberal. Think of the men who now engineer that war —
> those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and
> tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President
> himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They
> are all liberals."
> (JFK recoiled at being called a liberal according to Richard
> Reeves, btw.)
> It was the combined actions of radicals in the streets, many not of
> the Kumbaya type (Scanlans in '70 in an issue of the magazine that had
> to be printed in Canada, enumerated thousands of acts of property
> destruction and other militant action against the war in the U.S.)
> w/liberals in Congress that had turned against the war, plus, of
> coarse, the NLF, NVA, PRC, USSR and anti-war movements worldwide, that
> won the war of national liberation for the Vietnamese. The left needed
> liberals inside the system just as they needed mass pressure in the
> street generated by the radical left.
>