RIPPLE SALVO… #542… THOMAS POWERS: “Vietnam: The War at Home”… “…so much suffering and destruction…”… but first…
Good Morning: Day FIVE HUNDRED FORTY-TWO of Operation Rolling Thunder 101… a study of courage on the battlefield and malfeasance in high office…
30 AUGUST 1967…HEAD LINES from the pages of The New York Times on a cloudy day in NYC…
MIDEAST: Page 1: “Anti-Nasser Plot by Military Men reported Foiled–Arrest of 150 Officers Said to Have Smashed a Move Led by Marshal Amer–Cairo Is Called Quiet–Foes of President Planned to Act While He Was At Parley in Khartoum”... “President Gamal Abdel Nasser has apparently foiled a plot to overthrow him from within the Egyptian armed forces by arresting 150 senior officers, including some of his closest followers…the central figure in the plot was Abdel Hakim Amer, President Nasser’s closest friend for the past 15 years and his designated successor until last June 9, when he was forced to resign as the scapegoat for Egypt’s military defeat in the Arab war with Israel.”… Page 1: “Arab Parley Opens; Syrians Stay Away... in an effort to avoid any suggestion that Syria might approve any effort by Jordan and the United Arab Republic to arrange a compromise solution.”…
SUMMER IN AMERICA 1967: “Senate Unit Votes $2.8-Billion Plan for Ghetto Jobs–Defies Johnson by Including in the Bill $5-Billion Anti-Poverty Measure–Floor Fight Expected–Panel Also Backs Proposal by Javits and Kennedy to Lure Business to Slums”... “Overriding White House protests a Senate committee today added $2.8-billion emergency job program for the slums to the Administration’s anti-poverty program…”… Page 1: “Shirley Temple to Run for House From California...House seat from 11th District (San Mateo) sought by Shirley Temple Black.”… Page 19: “Dr. King Outlines New Housing Plan–to convert 11 Chicago slum buildings into poor people’s condominiums.”...Page 24: “Alligators in U.S. Face Extinction–Poachers Prey on Reptile–Sell Hides for Fashion”... Take 50,000 per year… Page 26: “Representative Ford Assails Brown and Carmichael”... “Attacking what they called President Johnson’s failure to crack down on crime, Republican Congressional leaders said it is time to ‘slam the door…slam it hard’ on H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. ‘When a Rap Brown or a Stokely Carmichael are allowed to run loose, to threaten law-abiding Americans with injury and death it’s time to slam the door on them–and slam it hard,’ said Gerald Ford of Michigan. (Stokely Carmichael is currently a guest in Hanoi).”… Page 27: “Milwaukee Firemen Halted By Snipers”…kept from fighting a fire at NAACP property for ten minutes. Police exchange fire. White marchers versus Negro marchers come together and clash.”… Page 32: “Army Blocks Rockwell Burial as Nazis Defy Ban on Swastikas”… “George Lincoln Rockwell, a former Naval Aviator, was denied burial at Culpepper National Cemetery today after his American Nazi party refused to obey army orders to remove their swastikas and other Nazi insignia. Rockwell’s body was returned to an Arlington funeral home.”…
VIETNAM: Page 1: “HANOI SAYS THEIR STEP-UP IN WAR IS REPLY TO U.S. ESCALATION”... “A high North Vietnamese official said today that the intensification of the anti-United States war effort in the South (Vietnam) was a reply to the escalation of bombing of the North and that North Vietnam would reply in the future to every such escalation. In an article in the Army newspaper…an anonymous official dismissed the backwards logic that the thesis that stepped-up bombing could force a let-up in the South. In Paris experts on Indochina affairs said they recognized the style of the North Vietnamese Defense Minister General Vo Nguyen Giap in the article’s style and content. The article discounted the possibility of a sanctuary for the United States Marines along the 17th parallel, the approximate border between North and South Vietnam in exchange for a halt in the bombing of the North. It also dismissed the Presidential election next week as a farce tailored by Washington to legitimize the regime in South Vietnam.
“At the same time the article argued that bombing Hanoi was pointless. A year has passed since the capital was first attacked and the United States troops are only further along in an impasse in the South…. the defense and economic power of the North have increased markedly so it is ‘stupid’ to attempt to bring pressure to bear on North Vietnam by bombing Hanoi. ‘It is certain that the United States will never be able to exercise pressure of any kind on our people.’ On the elections: ‘the curtain has yet to come up and the outcome of that farce is already known to everyone. Old clowns in new garb play on a rotten stage newly varnished. This farce staged by Johnson is a mere legalization of Thieu and Ky, the two traitors who bear the most responsibility for crimes against the people of the South. The civilian candidates are only puppets to make the election look free.
“As for the Secretary Rusk implications that the U.S. would stop the bombing if the North Vietnamese would cease attacks against the Marines along the 17th parallel… ‘Let us answer Mr. Rusk right away, that in this land of Vietnam there are no sanctuaries for Americans and no categories of aggressing troops that can enjoy the privilege of not receiving retaliatory blows struck by the Vietnamese people.
“American strategists have failed to see that attacking the North with a force of strength 1, the Americans would receive blows by 5 to 10 in the South. This is not only due to the determination and feelings of our South Vietnamese brothers, but also to the very simple fact that only by completely defeating the Americans on the battlefields of South Vietnam is it possible to eliminate the root of the war of escalation against the North.
“The passage continued: ‘Strike the North hard to bring pressure to bear in the South–with this backwards logic Johnson erred in his calculation.’
“At another point, the article maintained that far from breaking the backbone of the main Vietcong forces, ‘Westmoreland, with his million over-equipped men, has not broken a single vertebra.’ “
Page 1: “Foe Invades Jail and Frees 1,200 Vietcong Guerrillas–Mortar Barrage by Vietcong Preceding Quangngai Raid”... “Under cover of heavy mortar fire Vietcong guerrillas broke into a jail in the northern city of Quangngai today and released 1,200 prisoners. South Vietnam troops reported recapturing 400…the Vietcong guerrilla prisoners were freed from a barbed wire compound…the attack on the prison compound was part of multiple mortar attacks in the stepped up terror and shelling apparently designed to disrupt the final days of the South Vietnamese presidential campaign and vote on September 3.”
30 August 1967…The President’s TS Daily CIA Brief… NORTH VIETNAM: Hanoi has finally seen fit to announce Stokely Carmichael’s visit. A broadcast yesterday said Carmichael had come to North Vietnam at the invitation of the Vietnam Afro-asian Solidarity Committee…Carmichael was quoted as expressing “warm militant solidarity” with the Vietnamese…. COMMUNIST CHINA: Peking is taking further steps to curb the spread of violence, including the deployment of troops into at least one problem area (blanked out)… although the directive has been widely publicized in Canton, killing and fighting continues…. EGYPT: Last Friday night Nasir broke up a coup attempt; he simply invited the organizer, former chief of the armed forces Abdul Hakim Amir, to dinner and arrested him in the presence of other guests. Some 150 of Amir’s high-ranking collaborators have since been picked up. (Amir will commit suicide in a few days and Nasser will attend the funeral)…
30 AUGUST… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER…New York Times (31 August reporting 30 August) Page 1: “In the air war; United State jet fighter-bombers returned to targets over North Vietnam and attacked the Hoalac air base 20 miles west of Hanoi and destroyed a railroad bridge 30 miles from Haiphong. Hoalac has been hit several times before and the pilots found no MIGs during the raids…they did sort and ignore decoys… A Marine A-4 was shot down over North Vietnam Monday (Major Charles Walker, KIA) raising the total of aircraft downed over North Vietnam at 664.”…
“Vietnam: Air Losses” (Chris Hobson) There was one fixed wing aircraft downed in Southeast Asia on 30 August 1967…
(1) LTJG I.E. GARDINER was flying an A-1H of the VA-25 “Fist of the Fleet” embarked in USS CORAL SEA on a coastal recce mission and was hit by ground fire on his second attack on several small boats 20 miles north of Vinh. LTJG GARDINER was forced to abandon the aircraft at sea shortly thereafter and was rescued by a Navy helicopter to fly and fight again…
RIPPLE SALVO… #542… “VIETNAM: THE WAR AT HOME” (page 228)…
“In the fall of 1967 the number of people convinced beyond doubt that the war was militarily hopeless or morally unjustified was far smaller than the number uneasily wondering if it would ever solve anything, or ever end. The number of people who opposed the war was far smaller than the number worried about its effect on the emotional climate of the United States. This huge, uneasy public probably would have preferred to forget the whole business, but they were not allowed to forget. It was slowly becoming apparent that the war was extracting a cost, not one of the usual sort, perhaps, since the United States was far too large, distant, and powerful to be threatened by North Vietnam, but a cost of a subtler kind.
“The vast public which had been ready to let the President act as he thought best in the summer of 1964, supporting him when he bombed North Vietnam and supporting him when he promised no wider war, was beginning to turn away, wondering if the country could really afford the war. It was worried by the alienation of its children, the violence in the cities, the bitterness between the races, and the fearsome questions raised by the sort of war we had chosen to fight. It was hard to avoid a certain sick feeling of doubt about the nature of a country that could cause so much suffering and destruction, to itself, to its friends and to its enemy, in a cause it could not even describe.”
Humble Host suggests…. Fifty years later, August 2017…. deja vu: “The feeling that one has seen or heard something before.”….
RTR QUOTE for 30 August: CICERO, Orator : “To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be forever a child. For what is man’s lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?”…
Lest we forget… Bear