Tag: Vietnam War

The best spies work for everyone.– Lucien Conein, legendary CIA operative. Colonel Nguyen Mau was director of the Special Branch of the Republic of Vietnam’s national police force from 1968 to 1972. Created, funded and advised by the CIA, the Special Branch consisted of professional interrogators and agent handlers who maintained...
This article addresses one of the most consequential and deliberately obscured chapters in American history: President John F. Kennedy’s potentially planned strategic withdrawal from Vietnam, its abrupt reversal under Lyndon B. Johnson, and the documentary evidence suggesting foreknowledge of policy transformation. The focus centers on National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM)...
The son of the Iwo Jima flag-bearer in one of the most iconic photos in U.S history, James Bradley gained fame for his 2000 book Flags of Our Fathers, which was made into a film directed by Clint Eastwood. Offput at how Flags of Our Fathers was...
Lucien Conein was a key figure in coup that set the groundwork for the escalation of the Vietnam War Lucien Conein was a legendary CIA officer known as “Black Luigi,” who ran agents behind the Iron Curtain in the early Cold War, helped organize Iran’s notoriously brutal secret...
Set the groundwork for Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and torture chambers across the Middle East in the Global War on Terror In the summer of 1970, Tom Harkin, a U.S. senator from Iowa from 1985-2015, was a congressional staffer invited to be part of a delegation that was sent to...
Called them “propagandists” and “communists trying to discredit the U.S.” Got off the plane in Vietnam;It didn't seem like war.With all I saw, I started to wonderWhat I had come there for.Oh, the Army tried some fancy stuff,To bring them to their knees;Like Agent Orange defoliants,To kill the brush and...
Of course he did. And a look at the film’s funders helps to explain why. In the fall of 2017, more than 60 million people tuned into PBS to watch Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary on the Vietnam War, which was ten years in the making and cost $30...
This week marks the 50-year anniversary of the end of the U.S. war against the country and people of Vietnam. Americans refer to the war as the Vietnam War, but it was actually an American war. This war had a huge impact on me, my generation and, of course, the...
Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s premier from 1954 to 1963, was a Cold War version of Volodymyr Zelensky, an American-subsidized ruler who was fawned upon by leading U.S. politicians and the U.S. media despite causing the ruin of his own country. Lyndon B. Johnson at one point compared Diem to...
On September 19, the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee hosted a webinar focused on the significant impact of women in the Vietnam era anti-war movement. The first speaker, Vivian Rothstein, who was drawn to anti-war activism after participating in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, spoke about her participation in a conference in...