RIPPLE SALVO… #834… AUTHOR JULES WITCOMB’s THE YEAR THE DREAM DIED: Revisiting 1968 in America, makes a good case for a conclusion that the events of fifty years ago transformed our country into a “sick society.” Those events are the seeds of our despair in 2018. Writer Arthur Schlesinger wrote in June 1968: “With the murder of Robert Kennedy, following on the murder of John Kennedy and the murder of Martin Luther King, we have killed the three great embodiments of our national idealism in this generation. Each murder has brought us one stage further on the downward spiral of moral degradation and social disintegration.”…
“THE TERRIBLE TOLL OF VIOLENCE” at Ripple Salvo below…
GOOD MORNING… Day EIGHT HUNDRED THIRTY-FOUR of a return to the age of iron-sight bombing and dumb bombs…
HEAD LINES from The New York Times on Monday, 17 June 1968…
THE WAR: Page 1: “FOE IS DRIVEN OFF IN 7-HOUR BATTLE NORTH OF SAIGON–52 Of Enemy Are Killed In Attack On U.S. Battalion Hunting For Rocket Units–Navy Patrol Boat Sunk–General Abrams Pledges To Put Stop To The Shelling Of South Vietnam ‘s Capital”… “…the infantrymen, part of a force of 25 allied battalions that has been concentrating on clearing enemy rocket teams from the fringes of Saigon, repulsed the attackers and killed 52 of them in more than seven hours of fighting. The fight cost the lives of three Americans and 32 were wounded… No shells have fallen on Saigon for more than 24 hours…The patrol boat, one of four United States vessels that were shelled near the demilitarized zone in the morning, went down about two miles off shore. Two wounded crew members were rescued, five others were listed as missing… The first target for the enemy gunners near the DMZ was the cruiser Boston, five miles off shore in the South China Sea. Three shells exploded around the vessel after midnight and a pair of Navy F-4 Phantom jets were called in to silence the guns but the pilots could not find the guns. A Coast Cutter and another patrol boat that sped to the scene were also fired on but were not hit.”…
PEACE TALK: Page 4: “IMPASSE IN PARIS TALKS ON VIETNAM–U.S. AND HANOI EACH INSIST OTHER TAKE NEXT STEP”… “The negotiations between North Vietnam and the United States have been deadlocked for more than a month because each side insists that the other must take the next step toward peace. The impasse reflects their conflicting estimates of their relative strength on the field of battle. The talks have reached a delicate stage because of the intensified enemy shelling around Saigon. W. Averell Harriman, the chief United States negotiator, is eager to keep the discussions going in order to encourage any elements in Hanoi that favor a negotiated settlement against those that prefer protracted warfare. He is deeply fearful, however, that the shellings, and the civilian casualties it causes, may bring new pressures on President Johnson to resume bombing parts of North Vietnam now immune to attack, starting a new intensification of the war and jeopardizing the very process of negotiation. The intensity and duration of the attacks on Saigon have come as a surprise to the American negotiators, raising new questions about Hanoi’s intentions.”…
Page 1: “EISENHOWER STRUCK BY HEART ATTACK–Condition Is Stable”… “A bulletin from Walter Reed General Hospital said he had spent a comfortable night…the seizure last night was General Eisenhower’s fifth known heart attack…He has been at Walter Reed since May 14.”… Page 1: “MOYERS SAYS HUMPHREY WILL STRESS OWN POLICIES”… “Bill D. Moyers, President Johnson’s former press secretary predicted yesterday that Vice President Humphrey would ’emerge on his own within the next week or so’ and stress his differences with the Administration over Vietnam and other issues.”… Page 1: “LEE TREVINO WINS U.S. OPEN–BEATS NICKLAUS BY 4″…Page 1: “Political Patronage Rising At Fast Rate”… Page 1: “STEPPED UP GUERRILLA ACTION IN ISRAEL REPORTED–Arab Commandos Supported By Egypt And Jordan–Occupied Area Is Opened Up To Some Arabs For Vacations”… Page 24: “NEGROES IN LOUISVILLE ARE STILL TENSE AND BITTER AFTER MAY 28 RIOT THAT LEFT 2 DEAD”…
17 JUNE 1968.. THE PRESIDENT’S DAILY BRIEF (CIA-TS/SI) CZECHOSLOVAKIA: Prague has taken two steps which will not be received well in Moscow. in an agreement signed this weekend the Czech Communist Party in so many words renounced “monopoly of political power” it has held since 1948… Other parties will stay within a vague concept of “socialism” and participate in the drafting and implementation of national policies. the Soviets are sure to regard this as a major departure from the gospel as it is preached in Moscow…
17 JUNE 1968… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… New York Times (18 June reporting 17 June ops)…Page 1: “In North Vietnam two United States Navy F-4 Phantoms maneuvered briefly with a pair of Soviet designed MiG-17s in the vicinity of Vinh, but no fire was exchanged. After unsuccessfully trying to get the American aircraft in their gun sights, the North Vietnamese broke away to the north, a military spokesman said. He added that the Americans chased the MiGs as far as the 19th Parallel, then turned back. No United States tactical fighter-bombers have been flying above the 19th Parallel since March 31. At that time, President Johnson announced a curtailment of the bombing of the North Vietnam and the 19th became the northernmost point that the attacks could occur. United States pilots flew 142 missions into North Vietnam Sunday, the highest number in nearly two months.”… VIETNAM: AIR LOSSES (Chris Hobson) There were no fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 17 June 1968…
SUMMARY OF ROLLING THUNDER LOSSES (KIA/MIA/POW) ON 17 JUNE FOR THE FOUR YEARS OF THE OPERATION OVER NORTH VIETNAM…
1965… NONE over North Vietnam, however, 18 June 1965 was a disastrous day for the aerial bombing program. On the first day of the B-52 Arc Light operations two aircraft collided in mid-air with the loss of eight airmen. In the eight years of the Arc Light ops the B-52s flew 125,000 sorties.
1966… NONE…
1967… NONE…
1968… NONE…
Humble Host flew #189. Section lead in CO’s division in a group of ten bridge busters. Put 3 Mk-83s on or through a beat-up bridge north of Vinh toward Tam Da identified on my kneeboard card as “T-6″… Gunners were ready for us but no MiG or SAM activity for the duration of the early morning flight… Nine flying days left, 11 missions to make it 200…
RIPPLE SALVO… #834… “THE TERRIBLE TOLL OF VIOLENCE” by Tom Wicker…NYT, 16 June 1968…
“Washington– What kind of nation is it in which Robert Francis Kennedy was murdered last week? Is it, as so many foreign commentators and not a few Americans seem to think, a country in which a violent and intemperate people frequently settle differences by force rather than by democratic process? Is it, as some others believe, a nation with so many conflicting forces–black and white, rich and poor, young and old– that violence is an inevitable product of their collision?
“Is it in addition, immersed in an era of increasing permissiveness, when court decisions tend to protect criminals, leaders like Maritin Luther King can take their causes into the streets in defiance of law and order, and radical groups like the Students for a Democratic Society are willing to use any means to remake what they regard as an exploitative and oppressive society?
“Is it, finally a nation whose frontier heritage is so close in time and so romantic in aspect that it perpetuates violence in Vietnam, enjoys it on it television screens and tolerates it in its streets, as if violence were–in Rap Brown’s phrase–‘as American as apple pie.’?
“In the shock of another Kennedy assassination–coming only a few weeks after the shooting of Dr. King–all these questions were being asked. To many Americans and even more foreigners, it seemed that there had to be a pattern, a reason, and explanation. Conspiracy was sometimes suggested, more often, the notion was pressed that something was fundamentally wrong with American life–a ‘sick society’ was responsible for the chain of assassinations, and other problems.
“It has been difficult for anyone to diagnose the precise nature of the sickness, it is equally difficult to give the patient a clean bill of health. After all, in a little more than five years, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, George Lincoln Rockwell, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy have fallen before gunfire; Detroit, Newark and dozens of American cities, including Washington, have erupted in racial disorder and pillage; the crime rate has risen at a pace alarming to millions; and not only the downtrodden black but affluent white students like those who seized the buildings at Columbia are turning to violence to attain what to middle-class Americans are obscure or unworthy goals.
“But Evers was shot by a white segregationist, Malcom by a black, Rockwell by an American Nazi rival, and Dr. King by person or persons unknown. An authorized commission decided John F. Kennedy was killed by a mental misfit with a grim personal history; and a Christian Arab immigrant, nationalist with the murder of Robert Kennedy, a defender of Israel.
‘None of this suggests a coherent political or social pattern. Nor were any of these deaths (except possibly Dr. King’s) visibly connected to the strife in our cities–which in itself, while a recent development, is part of a racial problem as old as America and certainly antedating today’s ‘sick society.’ The crime rate is going up, all right, but so is the proportion of youths who perpetrate most crime) in this population: police techniques in discovering and reporting crime are improving, further inflating the statistics, and even rising prices mean that many thefts once dismissed as petty crimes are classified today as ‘major’ crimes. American students, moreover, are increasingly unruly but they have yet to set off a general strike and rebellion like the one that has paralyze France.
CONTAGION, EMULATION…
“So a specifically American social sickness is difficult to see, even in the recently disturbed American scene–although some psychological suggestions could be made. Robert Kennedy himself told the French writer Romain Gary that he might be killed ‘through contagion, through emulation’–that is, that a deranged mind might get its suggestion to kill from the murdering act of someone else (even from the pantomime murders on TV).
“Some psychologists believe too, that the ‘sick society’ idea is a sort of American defense mechanism; these dreadful things having happened, some Americans are anxious to regain their self-regard and the respect of others, and therefore hurry to ‘accept the responsibility’ for awful events.
“There was an increasing clamor, too, for one obvious legal step–a gun control law with teeth in it. This seems to many Americans a minimum necessity in a complex urban society, with the stresses it places on human temperament.
THE BLACK AND THE POOR…
“But it is also true that the 1960″s have given birth to ominous giants–the great social struggles are racking America. The most vital and dramatic of these is the black people’s rising militancy in demanding not merely ‘civil rights’ but full equality. That struggle, in its turn, is inextricably involved with the insistence of the have-nots that in the wealthiest society in history the gap between rich and poor is too great–involved because many of the poor are black and most of the black are poor. The conjunction of these two causes results in class struggle, perhaps embryonic but massive in its potential. (“EMBRYONIC BUT MASSIVE IN ITS POTENTIAL”)…
“A whole new generation–the children of affluence–has taken up the cause of the black and the poor, not so much out of class feeling or shared experience, perhaps, as from recognition of a common enemy–the Establishment. It is the Establishment–the elders, the politicians, the military-industrial complex, the Administration, the press, the university trustees, the landlords, the system–that represses the black, export the poor, stultified the students, vulgarizes American life. And it is the Establishment, of course, that wages the war in Vietnam–in the widespread protest against which the underlying protest against which the underlying class and generational clashes were dramatized and sharpened.
“Never in history or in any country have such profound struggles as these been waged without bloodshed and human tragedy. So if it seems on sober reflection too glib and too much to say that the murder of Robert Kennedy is a direct result of a sick society in upheaval, it is nevertheless true that the new dynamics of American life, the brutal forces moving in her society, like ignorant armies clashing by night, scatter their lethal sparks indiscriminately, callously, as if by chance. Not even our contemporary gods can be immune.”… End Tom Wicker OpEd…
RTR quote for 18: MAO TSE-TUNG: “Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.”…
Lest we forget… Bear