The form of government was left behind by the French, but Diem was installed by the U.S. and he was at the top of a “U.S. supported” government–which is what I said, your misreadings of Wikipedia notwithstanding. (If you wish to rely on Wikipedia, you might want to read the article on Diem.)
Several of Kennedy’s friends have been pushing the “Kennedy wanted to get out” bit ever since the war got seriously unpopular. Maybe he did; maybe he didn’t. At any rate, Johnson had no desire to get more involved, either. He initially resisted calls from Bundy, McNamara, and others to get more involved. When the replacement government to Diem began to stumble over the next months and after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Johnson was sucked into the situation. He did not leap in looking to enlarge the war.
It is not what you have said, it is what you carefully imply. You initially claimed that the opposition to the war came in reaction to Johnson’s mishandling of it. When I pointed out that opposition to our involvement began while Kennedy was still president, you claimed that you are only talking about the later, noisy protests–a point you never actually made, earlier. That seems to be a pretty clear implication that the earlier period should be ignored, since that is when the protests began.
What I posted was not “just what you said.” You misinterpreted my statement–that the protests in the U.S. began as a reaction to the Buddhist suicides–to be a claim that the Buddhist suicides were small actions of little consequence. I responded with a fuller explanation of the entire sequence of events (that you are now chopping up and pretending that you had already said the same thing).
No, you merely said that you did not associate the protest movement with a few Buddhist monks or a few malcontents “inspired by” folk musicians. The clear point that I made was that the protests began much earleir than you wish to admit and that they were not as small as you wish to pretend–and that they certainly were not merely “inspired” by music. In fact, folk music–and folk music as a vehicle for social protests–goes back at least to the 1930s. The point, however, was that folk music did not lead anyone to protest the war; folk musicians simply added their voices to a growing opposition to the war.
This seems merely wishful thinking on your part. As noted, folk music has been around a long time. (And if, as you now admit, it was not a major part of the movement, perhaps you should not have made your initial claim that it “inspired” the movement that was actually larger than you wish to admit.)
More realistically, it was a society that was already sitting atop a number of social issues (not all of them problems) that was ready to erupt, regardless of the appearance of a few musicians from England. Part of it was influenced by the sheer size of the baby boom, but most of the disruptive elements were going to break out whether or not the generation born between 1946 and 1964 had been as populous as they were.
Your claims about boomers seem to buy into some of the legends of the period without actually paying attention to what actually happened. For one thing, the boomers are not some sort of monolithic population that acted in some sort of lock step. Over half the names on the Vietnam Memorial are of boomers who served and died in Vietnam. Throughout the Vietnam War, boomers consistently showed more support than any other demographic for the war. As I noted in one of our earlier exchanges on this topic, the 1950s were abnormally quiet and bore the seeds for much more disruption.
It seems to me that you not only did, originally, mean what I have paraphrased, but you have repeated it, here.
For one thing, I do not see any significant difference in tone between the words you have highlighted and the words “commie,” “pinko,” “unAmerican,” “treasonous,” “duped,” “uppity,” “inferior race,” or any of the other epithets that were common in American political discourse before the ones at which you take so much umbrage. For that matter, the relations between the two parties remained cordial well into the 1980s (when the Religious Right began chipping away at civility in that arena) and did not become openly hostile until the 1994 Congressional elections. The difference being that while name-calling has always been a part of the American scene among rabble rousers along the fringes, it took the Gingrich revolution to bring that level of acrimony into the halls of Congress (once we got congresscritters to stop having duels and beating each other with canes in the early 19th century).
Why you think that having anyone throughout the 1950s who proposed any sort of social program being branded a “commie” or anyone championing civil rights being called “race traitor” or “nigger lover” was less hateful than the words aimed at people opposing specific legislation regarding the rights of women or ethnic groups, I cannot imagine. If you attempt to claim that such was not the case prior to the late 1960s, I will simply have to conclude that you were not really there (or that you lived in some small enclave that was so vanilla that no one even bothered to address such issues in public).
