RIPPLE SALVO… #960… HUMBLE HOST COMES BACK TO DEMOCRAT JULES WITCOVER’s THE YEAR THE DREAM DIED: Revisiting 1968 in America, TO INTRODUCE AN 18 OCTOBER 2018 ESSAY BY ANOTHER VERY DEDICATED DEMOCRAT, TED VAN DYK, “DEMOCRATS HAVEN’T TURNED BACK FROM 1968,” to reinforce one of the basic premises of this web site and remembering Rolling Thunder. 1968 was a pivotal year in our nation’s history and the Vietnam war, and Operation Rolling Thunder in particular, from the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam on 1 November 1968, contributed significantly to the emergence of a generation–the Boomers–that has, in the intervening 50 years, led the systematic destruction of national unity and replaced it with “the politics of identity” and division. Humble Host didn’t write that–learned Democrats did… See below… but first…
GOOD MORNING… Day NINE HUNDRED SIXTY of a daily return to the “year (s) the dream died” and the longest “air war” in American history, 2 March 1965 to 1 November 1968…
HEAD LINES from The New York Times for Monday, 21 October 1968…
THE WAR: Page 11: “LULL CONTINUING IN VIETNAM WAR–Contact With Enemy Light–Small Clashes Reported”… “The lull in the war continued today. There were a number of small, mostly unrelated engagements, but for the most part the enemy was again unusually elusive. Winding up a two-day operation near the village of Caibe, about 60 miles southwest of Saigon, United States infantrymen reported killing 59 enemy soldiers over a 48-hour period. Other infantrymen deployed around the town of Ducpho, about a hundred miles down the coast from Danang, reported having killed 28 of the enemy. Helicopter gunners ranging over South Vietnam reported having killed 40 other enemy soldiers, while sinking 48 sampans and destroying numerous fortifications. In naval action, American patrol boats operating in the canals and rivers of the Mekong Delta southwest of Saigon continued to seek out and destroy enemy shipping and staging areas. At least six sampans and more than a hundred enemy structures were hit. B-52s STRIKE IN SOUTH… In the Air War over South Vietnam, B-52 bombers supplemented missions by fighter-bombers by pounding nine scattered areas in which enemy troop concentrations had been reported.”… Page 11: “DANANG RESTRICTION IMPOSED BY THE NAVY AFTER RACIAL UNREST”… “Racial incidents have led the United States Navy to impose restrictions in the Danang area after a weekend of tension between Negroes and Whites. A Negro guard was killed when a Negro enlisted man went on a pistol-shooting incident. The shooting incident was not necessarily a racial incident but led to the prohibition on alcoholic beverages at naval installations, limit on the use of facilities at the Navy’s Camp Tiensha, and restriction of the China Beach rest and recreation area to Navy men.”…
PEACE TALKS: Page 1: “BUNKER RESUMES TALKS WITH THIEU ON BOMBING HALT–OFFICIALS CONFIRM THAT THEY CONFERRED FOR HOUR BUT ARE SILENT ON TOPICS–4th Meeting In 5 Days–South Vietnamese Say That The Sessions Were Started At Johnson’s Request”… “…resumed a series of meetings on the state of the war and the possibilities for a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam.”… Page 10: “COMMUNIST CHINA TELLS PEOPLE OF PEACE TALKS IN PARIS FOR FIRST TIME”…
HEAD LINES: Page 1: WALLACE URGES DISCLOSURE OF ANY HANOI CONCESSION”… Page 1: “NIXON FOR AID TO U.S. PRIVATE SCHOOLS UNDER STATE PLAN”… Page 1: “NEGROES SEE RIOTS GIVING WAY TO BLACK ACTIVISM IN THE GHETTO”… Page 1: “BUSINESS EXECUTIVES BACK JOB CUTS IN A SPLIT WITH THE PRESIDENT”… Page 1: “Very Happy Mrs. Kennedy And Onassis Married”… Page 1: “Robert F. Kennedy Memoir Details Cuban Missile Crisis”… Page 3: “HUNDREDS OF EAST EUROPEAN INTELLECTUALS ENTERING UNITED STATES–Special Rule Allows ‘Involuntary Reds’ Into Country”… Page 6: “TITO WARNS SOVIET BLOC AGAINST INTERFERENCE”… Page 7: “ASTRONAUT SCHIRRA NETTLED OVER NEW TEST–Tells Ground Control He’ll Direct The Updates”… Page 21: “PENTAGON WEIGHS NEW CUTS TO F-111–Aide Urges Cancellation Of Bomber Version Of Craft”… Page 60: “U.S. OLYMPICS WOMEN DEDICATE VICTORY TO SMITH AND CARLOS”…
21 OCTOBER 1968… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… New York Times: no coverage of the air war over the North. VIETNAM: AIR LOSSES (Chris Hobson) There were four fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 21 October 1968…
(1) MAJOR J.W. JOHNSON and MAJOR PHILIP N. WALKER were flying an RB-57 of Detachment 1 (Patricia Lynn), 460th TRW out of Tan Son Nhut on a mission over the Mekong Delta when hit by small arms fire at 2,000 feet. The aircraft was in flames and the two aviators were required to eject. They sustained minor injuries but were rescued to fly and collect intelligence again…
(2) LT KENNETH KEITH KNABB was flying an A-4E of the VA-106 Gladiators embarked in USS Intrepid as wingman in a section of Skyhawks on an armed reconnaissance mission south of Ha Tinh. The flight sighted and attacked an enemy truck 20 miles south of Ha Tinh. LT KNABB followed his leader into a strafing run on the vehicle rolling in from 6,500 feet. He was hit by AAA in the run and failed to recover from the dive. His leader observed the impact and explosion without observing an ejection. A SAR mission was launched and carried out which observed a fully deployed parachute on the ground, as if intentionally spread in a circle to attract attention and flak-trap the rescue helicopter. No beeper of voice signals were received. LT KNABB was presumed killed in action and fifty years later his status remains “XX–Presumptive Finding of Death” and the young warrior rests where he fell on the battlefield–left behind, but remembered on this anniversary of his last flight…
(3) MAJOR W.I. BAGWELL was flying an A-1E of the 1st SOS and 56th SOW out of Nakhon Phanom on a mission to destroy an enemy storage area discovered 29 miles east of NKP. MAJOR BAGWELL was hit by ground fire on his second dive bombing run on the target and was forced to abandoned his burning aircraft. He was rescued the following day by an Air Force HH-53. LT BAGWELL returned to combat duty and would be shot down a second time , and rescued, on 28 June 1969… oohrah…
(4) CAPTAIN DAVID A. WELLMAN, USMC, was flying an A-4E of the VMA-223 Bulldogs and MAG-12 out of Chu Lai and crashed on landing after returning from a night attack mission. The aircraft was destroyed, CAPTAIN WELLMAN survived…
SUMMARY OF ROLLING THUNDER LOSSES (KIA/MIA/POW) FOR THE FOUR 21 OCTOBER DATES FOR THE FOUR YEARS OF THE OPERATIONS OVER NORTH VIETNAM…
1965 and 1967… NONE…
1966… CAPTAIN DAVID JOHN EARLL, USAF… (KIA) … (Refer to RTR for 21-Oct-66, Ripple Salvo #233 for details of downing. CAPTAIN EARLL was listed as Missing in Action until 1973 at which time his status was changed to “XX-Presumptive Finding of Death.” He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel during the period he was missing. LCOL Earll remains where he fell fifty-two years ago this day. Left behind on the battlefield…but remembered here…)
1968… LT KENNETH KEITH KNABB, USN…. (KIA)…
RIPPLE SALVO… #960… WHAT HAPPENED TO THE NATIONAL PURSUIT OF PEACE, PROSPERITY AND JUSTICE?… Humble Host looks to 1968 for the roots of the loss of our national spirit and unity in securing these paramount values that are the rebar of our survival as a nation. The search begins with what writer David Halberstam wrote about the 1997 Jules Witcover best seller, THE YEAR THE DREAM DIED, Revisiting 1968 in America. … I quote…
“It was one of those extraordinary benchmark years: it seemed to signify that the country, under the ferocious pressure of rapid technological change (most particularly, the nightly delivery of televised news into each home), the growing pain of an unwinnable war in a distant Asian society, plus bitter, increasingly explosive racial division, was on the verge of a national nervous breakdown. The year had begun with the stunning North Vietnamese assault upon American forces in Vietnam at the time of Tet, an assault that robbed an already embattled administration of its little surviving credibility and the validity of its pronouncements that victory was just around the corner. It speeded up immediately with two challenges to the sitting president by two members of his own party, Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, challenges that put in play a children’s army of student dissenters, and that turned the Democratic primaries into a de facto referendum on the war. If in the past American political divisions had been primarily based on region and class and ethnicity, a new ingredient had now been added, profound generational differences, not just region by region, but remarkably and often quite painfully, house by house. Those who had suffered through the Depression and fought in World War II and who tended to accept the word of the existing leadership were on one side, their children, raised in a more affluent and more iconoclastic age, were on the other.
“Nineteen sixty-eight was the year in which politics seemed to begin with violent events in a small country 12,000 miles away, to go into the streets at home, and finally to reach the convention themselves. It ws a year marked by two shattering assassinations, the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In that year, one sometimes had a sense that violence begat violence. All kinds of different forces were at work: the year marked a collision of the politics of the old, for better or worse, with the politics of the new, for better or the worse. It came a little more than a decade into the full era of politics by television, the entire nation sitting at home watching the news in a living room on a medium that seemed to need and demand ever more action, for television news loved action, because action provided film. Nothing had done more to expedite the jarring domestic political events of 1968 than the jarring nightly reports from Vietnam, what the writer Michael Arlen eventually called The Living Room War. In a way the events of 1968 reflect the culmination of an age; the dissenters kept going into the streets, until at the central moment of the political year, the Democratic convention in Chicago, the more important events were outside the convention hall in the streets rather than in side on the podium.
“No one captured the politics of that year at the time better than Jules Witcover, one of our best and most careful political writers. In The Year the Dream Died he has set down with great skill and precision the political events that reflected a year in which the nation itself seemed on the edge of unraveling.”… End quote…
In the concluding pages of his book, Witcomb, who remains among the most active liberal/progressive opinion writers of current times, said that “it is beyond dispute that the nation has experienced a major transformation (since 1968). It has gone from being a country in which Americans looked to their government to confront and solve the social ills facing it, to one in which Americans put little faith or trust in their government to do either. The transformation has been the result not of the events of any single year alone. But for millions who participated with deep commitment in the stormy events of 1968, and for other millions who observed the same events in heartbreak, dismay, disbelief and revulsion, the year was a seismic explosion. Its aftershocks are still felt, not only in our country at large but particularly in the lives of these millions, and in their memories of a year that rocked a bitterly divided nation to its core–and set it on new course that keeps it divided still (1997)…” End quote from The Year the Dream Died…
Now, surge ahead to 2018 and the conclusions of another progressive writer who admits to his 40-years as a registered Democrat and his 18 October 2018 Wall Street Journal essay, DEMOCRATS HAVEN’T TURNED BACK FROM 1968: the politics of identity and attack have supplemented the old liberal tradition, which favored national unity. Humble Host posts the entire Ted Van Dyk column… I quote…
“America is polarized in many ways, but one of the most significant is between generations in the Democratic party. Coming out of the Great Depression and World War II, we present-day seniors saw liberalism as the promise of racial and social justice and broadly shared prosperity. We also saw it as a defender of civil liberties against abuses such as those that took place in the 1950s McCarthy era. Abroad, we supported a strong United Nations and other multilateral institutions to reduce conflict but had no illusions about the expansionist ambitions of totalitarian states.
“In other words, the dwindling number of Greatest Generation and Depression-born Democrats (Silent Generation) came of age with a liberal tradition that is increasingly marginalized in today’s party. That was evident in Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation fight and in the party’s use of race, sex, ethnicity and other identity markers in politics more broadly.
“The best example of the old Democratic Party’s aspirations was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provided that no citizen should receive favorable or unfavorable treatment based on irrelevant factors such as race, sex, national origin and religion. Our domestic agenda was further realized in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society: the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, federal aid to education and other measures designed to create greater opportunity for all, underwritten by a safety net to those who needed it.
“You could feel the first big change in 1968 as a new generation in the West rebelled against established institutions and leaders. In the U.S., protest formed around opposition to the mistaken Vietnam War. I experienced this rebellion first as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s assistant in the Johnson White House, then as vice president of Columbia University during the disorders there, and later as an active member of the antiwar movement and George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.
“There was idealism in the protests but also cynicism and a touch of totalitarianism. ‘We Demand!’ often preceded the protesters’ list of objecctives. You could have a discussion with them over coffee or in small groups, but when an audience was present, a professor, speaker or political candidate expressing a contrary opinion, would often be shouted down, sometimes with obscene charts. ‘Never trust anyone over 30,’ the slogan went (or, as I often thought silently, no one under 25). Those in established positions were usually judged reactionary no matter the substance of their views.
“Over time the late-1960s protesters found adult roles. Some, perhaps not surprisingly, found outlets in self-indulgent consumerist lifestyles. Others gravitated toward politics,academia or the media and brought their youthful outlooks with them. But in the national Democratic Party, leadership continued to rest with politicians with traditional liberal values such as Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and Ted Kennedy and then with moderates like Bill Bradley, Bob Kerrey, Paul Tsongas, jay Rockefeller and Gary Hart. These latter figures were economically liberal, socially tolerant, wary of unwise foreign interventions, and willing to govern across partisan and ideological lines.
“The next big change came in 1992 with the nomination and election of Bill Clinton. His moderate platform was similar to his peers’, but his political style was a departure. The concept of a permanent campaign came to the White House. Every move was measured against its short-term political value to the president. The Clinton team launched personal attacks against policy dissenters and against women who brought charges of sexual misconduct against the president. In 1996, Mr. Clinton accused Republican nominee Bob Dole of ‘trying to destroy Social Security and Medicare’ though his support of a bipartisan entitlement-reform effort Mr. Clinton himself had previously praised. By 2001, when Mr. Clinton left the scene, say-anything attack politics had become the normal order of the day in the Democratic Party.
“President Obama brought hope of a more tolerant, less deeply partisan politics. But he was surrounded by Clinton alumni who, for the most part, kept on as before. His signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, was introduced and passed only by Democrats–a sharp contrast to the bipartisan approaches taken by Johnson with his Medicare and Medicaid proposals, and by Ted Kennedy with his Medicare prescription-drub legislation. To pass ObamaCare, the White House and its allies launched a full-court press against all House Democrats, including moderates with doubts about its cost and coverage. The legislation passed narrowly, but 63 House Democrat lost their seats in the 2010 midterm elections. That left the body sharply divided between Republican and Democratic partians, stalling the administrations legislative agenda for the remaining six years of Mr. Obama’s presidency.
“Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign labeled his opponent, the temperate former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, as anti-minority, anti-woman, anti-middle class and a financial predator. The theme continued against Republican congressional candidates in 2014. Hillary Clinton tried to replicate it in her campaign against President Trump but did not comprehend the electorate’s determination to reject political establishmentarian’s, incuding herself.
“Democratic seniors look back to their roots in the Civil Rights Act and wonder why we so relentlessly attack Republicans as racist when Democrats, the party of civil rights, have no apparent agenda to address daunting school-dropout and incarceration rates, drug trafficking and use, unemployment, violent crime, and broken or nonexistent family structures in afflicted urban neighborhoods. We ask why Democrats, the party of civil liberties, would try to destroy Justice Kavanaugh with uncorroborated accusations of sexual misconduct in high school.
“You can see the roots of what is happening now in the habits of 1968, which have been carried on by politicians, journalists and academics who seem unaware that deplorable means do not yield virtuous ends. Democrats and many in media now accuse Mr. Trump of totalitarian methods and objectives. There is much to fault in the Trump presidency, but the totalitarian tendencies appear to flow from our own party. Its present presidential aspirants appear to be emulating Robespierre in their over-the-top denunciations of Mr. Trump and all others they deem unworthy.
“What is missing now, among Democrats, is any semblance of a coherent policy agenda directed to the future. Partisan anger is not an agenda. To get started: peace, prosperity and justice. How can Americans of all parties and persuasions get there together?” End quote…
Alas, in the final analysis, all Mr. Van Dyk and the political analysts and opinion writers have to offer is confirmation of the great divisions in our society and the dwindling common ground on which to reorient the disastrous course we have been on for the last 50 years. There is only one man who can begin the process of restoring the unity that is the paramount prerequisite for national survival–the President. Unfortunately, President Trump has found comfort among “his base” to the exclusion of the many “tribes” of America outside the President’s Red Zone. It is his sole responsibility to provide the leadership of all Americans, not just those in his personal comfort zone. If we are now so divided that this cannot be done, then as a nation hopelessly divided against itself, we are destined for the trash heap of history… That’s my opinion, it comes with the blog… Your comments are invited…
Lest we forget… Bear