Talk Elections

Had you been alive in th 60s with roughly the same political views you have now would you at any point have supported the Vietnam War without heinseight ? Personally I never would have. I could see myself voting for LBJ in 64 but then burning him in effigy just several years later.

No

If Scoop Jackson supported it, I probably would have too, of course not knowing what we know now about the Gulf of Tonkin and the eventual course of the war. That being said, I would have probably been against it starting in 1966 or 67.

I wonder if anybody on here is old enough to have actually had an opinion when it was happening, maybe Torie?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JvA1bKLQtbM

Yes, from the beginning. Luckily the good guys won.

Yes, I would have supported North Vietnam's war to smash the capitalist-backed colonialist regime in Saigon from the start.

I probably would have supported the Vietnam War at the time, but with hindsight, I'm not so sure.

Yes, probably at the beginning.  Not by the end.

RF(Bobby Kennedy) or Hubert Humphrey would have stopped it.  But, the war did bring about war powers act, as Kosovo and Bosnia and Libyan wars weren't escalated.

Unfortunately, the Iraq war wasnt haulted in 1990, or 2003, as Harry Reid, in both instances lead Dems in support of War.

Perhaps initially, but not after 2-3 years.

Unfortunately, yes. I would have been wrong - but politically I am far too similar to a lot of people who got the US in. And they were better informed than I would have been.

Nobody knew how laughably wrong the domino theory would turn out to be. Who can say how myself or others here would have thought ? People thought that if South Vietnam fell, then next up would be the rest of Indochina, then Thailand, then Indonesia, then India etc.

People also said that we signed an alliance with South Vietnam, and they were a part of SEATO. If the US 'abandoned' South Vietnam, then would our NATO allies think we would abandon them too? All of this was part of the mainstream foreign policy views that we're pretty reasonable thinking at the time without hindsight.

lol moderate heroes


Anyway, fyck no!

Nope.

Or just being honest.

I'm going to be honest. At its onset with JFK, yes. I would sour on it quickly.

Who knows? We have access to a lot of information that people at the time didn't. I think I might well have supported in some vague sense US support to the Saigon regime including aerial bombardment, coordination, supplies, and training to South Vietnamese troops, though I doubt I'd have supported American troops on the ground.

No; If I were the same person I am now when the Vietnam War became an issue, I would not have supported direct U.S. involvement.

The Vietnamese people had been fighting a war of independence against multiple foes for decades. They were resilient, well-adapted to conflict, and determined. It should have been plainly obvious from the very start that it was a war that only the Vietnamese people could win. Whether that meant communists in the north or the western-backed government of the south, it had to be Vietnamese blood that determined the future of that country. Putting American and Allied boots on the ground may have ensured a communist victory. They might have won regardless, but our goal was nevertheless hurt by our own direct involvement.

In principle, I would have supported the arming of a particular side, but I do not believe that either side had the moral high ground. At the time, with the Cold War ongoing, I might have supporting arming the south, anyway, but it is hard to tell from my perspective this day, despite the fact that I lived through the Cold War. I can attest that one's state of mind during those days was quite different from life in absence of it.

No, it was and is clear that the South Vietnamese government was not worth preserving and arguably worse than the North.