RIPPLE SALVO… #102… RS#99 EXPANDED COMMENT… but first…
Good Morning: Day ONE HUNDRED TWO of a Rolling Thunder review…
9 JUNE 1966…ON THE HOME FRONT… (NYT)… Cloudy with a chance of showers on this Thursday in NYC…
Page 1: “Hurricane Alma Lashes St Petersburg Area”…”struck with slashing rains and winds gusting to 93 miles per hour. The eye passed 60 miles off Key West. Alma is earliest hurricane to hit the U.S. that formed in the Caribbean or Gulf Of Mexico and cross the U.S. coastline… Page 1: “March’s Leaders Demand Actions By U.S. On Rights”…”Five civil rights organization leaders patched up their differences today over what they hoped to accomplish by continuing James H. Meredith’s march in Mississippi. they agree that they want President Johnson to send Federal voting registrars into 600 Southern counties and to ask congress for a ‘freedom budget’ involving billions in aid for low income Negroes. In addition, they demand that Congress pass the President’s civil rights bill but with sweeping amendments. The amendments would require states and counties to hire law enforcement officers and put Negroes on jury lists in direct proportion to their population ratio.”…Page 1: “McNamara Target of NYU Walkout’…One hundred and thirty students and faculty members walked out of the New York University commencement exercises when the University honored the Secretary of Defense, the co-author of the Vietnam War, with an honorary degree. Arthur J. Goldberg, the United States representative to the United Nations gave the principal address: “I can bear personal witness that no man has better served his country and no man has more buy his actions demonstrated an abiding attachment to peace and freedom than the Secretary of Defense.”…. Protester signs: “No Honors for War Criminals,”…” Bring the troops home now,”… “Big Firms Get Rich, G.I.s Die,” and “End the War in Vietnam.”…
Page 1: “Coast Air Collision Kills X-15 Pilot”… A mid-air collision between an F-104 chase plane piloted by Joseph Walker and an XB-50 piloted by Al White collided over the Edwards, CA test range during a photo shoot of the x-15 and XB-70 in formation. Joseph Walker was killed and Al White successfully ejected from the XB-50…
Page 41: “President Tells Youth Of Future”… The President spoke to 800 high school youth from 22 states who won essay contests sponsored by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association… “We have thrust ourselves headlong into the world of the satellites and the computers and we have learned that the power to create means also the power to destroy. The power to produce means also the power to pollute, the power to change destroys old values. You will inherit this technical revolution and you will face the same questions it poses your elders. Will man be the master or the servant of his inventions? Will our future be one of growing happiness or growing confusion? If we are to solve our problems, our citizens must develop a new sense of citizenship–a new concern for the public good. We simply cannot afford any longer the luxury of indifference–the indifference of voters who deny their responsibility to support education. The future will require more cooperation. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: We must all pull together–or our society could pull apart altogether….. Think seriously about the proper functions of human beings, when our old ideas of work are no longer useful.”
9 June 1966… President’s Daily Briefing… CIA (TS sanitized)… South Vietnam: Tam Chau met with Ambassador Lodge at the embassy this morning. Chau merely concentrated on the standard line of the Buddhist Institute that the US should encourage Thieu and Ky to resign. In commenting on the growing frustration within the Buddhist camp, one member of Chau’s retinue told the ambassador that the Institute felt cornered. Lodge warns that the time may be approaching when the Institute will turn to a coup attempt in desperation. Ky told Ambassador Lodge today that he firmly intends to go ahead with the elections and he hopes to promulgate the election laws by June 19. He also said that he would definitely be going to the Seoul Conference next week, but claimed he would stay there only one day. The US ambassadors in Seoul and Tokyo both feel that Ky’s attendance would do the conference no good… Communist China: The struggle for leadership seems to be intensifying. More heads are likely to roll soon, possibly including key figures in the military as well as the government and the party… We continue to suspect that party secretary General Ten Hsiao-ping is calling the shots.
9 JUNE 1966…ROLLING THUNDER OPERATIONS… No coverage in NYT.. Two aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 9 June…
(1) CAPTAIN J.L. CASKEY was flying an A-1E of the 602ndACS and 14thACW out of Udorn on an armed reconnaissance mission in Barrel Roll and was hit by automatic weapon fire that flames his aircraft. CAPTAIN CASKEY flew the aircraft westward for 30 miles before bailing out. He was rescued with minor injuries.
(2) CAPTAIN ROBERT IRA BUSH was flying an A-1E of the 602ndACS and 14thACW out of Udorn escorting a SAR mission when hit in mid-air by another aircraft. He was unable to escape the aircraft and died in the crash in North Vietnam. CAPTAIN BUSH had survived a 25 May 1966 downing but was Killed In Action on 9 June 1966, fifty years ago today… Fate is the hunter…
RIPPLE SALVO… #102… Ripple Salvo #99 (Incubator of Discontent) Continued…
Let’s face it–our nation has been transformed. For better or worse–you pick’em. That’s progress, in the opinion of the progressives in our society. My thesis and a core purpose of this review of the Vietnam War is to identify the war as the signal event that split our nation in half and gave opportunity, energy and direction to the “progressive” changes now carrying our nation to an uncertain destiny. The Vietnam War is therefore extraordinarily pertinent to the events of 2016 in America and the world.
Harrison Salisbury referred to the Vietnam war years as “…a moment in contemporary times for social conflict and crisis, for dissent and alienation, challenge and change, revolt and revolution, the Generation Gap, the Credibility Gap, for assault on the establishment, and doubt of traditional value systems.” He describes the seventies that began during the war and carried the events of the sixties forward…
“The seventies ushered in an age of skepticism. Not one institution of American society escape reexamination–the Church, the Courts, Congress, the White House, the whole system of government, the Banks, the great Corporations, the Foundations, the Universities, the education system from kindergarten to Graduate School, the Press, the Profit motive, Architecture, Literature, Hair styles and Music. Nothing in society was too profound or too trivial to be put under a magnifying glass of critical analysis.” (Reference: “The Indignant Years,” ed. Harrison Salisbury, 1971)
Ripple Salvo #99 stirred up a few comments from you’all… A voice that I am always pleased and profited by listening to is that of SteveD, who provides a much longer view on how our country got to 2016 and into our current and unprecedented cauldron of hot water. Steve begins at the beginning and nails it…
“I largely agree, but I would suggest that long before anyone in the USA had heard of Vietnam [in fact, before it officially existed], the nation was already set onto a very dangerous course, and the disastrous “Sixties” [actually, the period from 1963-1974] and the equally grim “Seventies” [1974-80] were the RESULTS of a brilliantly conceived, carefully executed, and diabolical plan to totally change the nation.
“The Progressive dream was hatched in the late 19th century, influenced TR, and drove and directed Woodrow Wilson, FDR, JFK, and LBJ and the people who put them into office and supported them there. Wilson set the groundwork for FDR’s New Deal, and the New Deal made it possible to even conceive of “Great Society.”
“If one sows bad seed, one will reap bad fruit. Bad trees do not bear good fruit. The Bible, both Old & New Testaments, teaches us that. The Progressives created this bad seed of class warfare, group identification, mass democracy, fascist economics, and an all-powerful central government to impose its vision of “justice.” The American people repeatedly voted to buy this bad seed and plant it, because it was advertised as being able to perfect human society without God, without sacrifice, and without effort by most people. The USA has been reaping, starting in the ’60s and continuing today, what it sowed between 1896 and 1946.
“BTW, for all of his faults, Obama is no more of a communist, socialist, or collectivist than Madam Hillary, Bernie Sanders, or their beloved predecessors FDR and Woodrow Wilson. They are not advocating a dictatorship or state ownership of all capital and resources. They are ALL advocating a hybrid — democratic fascism — that maintains a degree of private property, profit, wealth, and freedom while ensuring that an all-powerful central government can redirect any and all private/corporate/local gov’t effort to achieve its desired goals through a mix of subsidies, taxes, fees, regulations, and manipulation of the masses. Hurry Lord Jesus!!!”
Thanks, Steve… and now you know where your Humble Host is coming from, if there was ever any doubt… If you have a comment, please let me share it…
Lest we forget… Bear ………. –30– ……….