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PBS Newshour
- Trump pullback from bipartisan health care fix gives Washington whiplash
- News Wrap: Sessions insists he didn’t lie about Russian contacts to Senate
- Trump promised to give a grieving military father $25,000
- Xi Jinping celebrates China’s rising power — and his own
- Rep. Gallego: Democrats are going to protect U.S. — and your paycheck
- How did consoling Gold Star families become political?
- The battle for Mosul is over, but this hidden ISIS danger could lurk for years
- Escaping Harvey Weinstein was a ‘cat-and-mouse game,’ says Katherine Kendall
- Witnessing the collision of two neutron stars is a ‘textbook changer.’ Here’s why
- As Rohingya refugees continue to flee from persecution, here’s how you can help
Trump/Nixon
With reported leaks of ‘back channels’ and secret negotiations with Russia in the news recently (as well as the ongoing furor over the firing of FBI Director James Comey), I thumbed through Richard Reeves’ excellent bio, President Nixon: Alone in the White House to bring myself up to speed on the master secret negotiator and power broker himself. After World War II, the transition from war and conflict to peace and stability was the main problem in which most US presidents grappled and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., US Senator from Massachusetts and Ambassador to South Vietnam from 1963-1964 during the Kennedy Administration, which viewed South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem as an ineffective leader, supported the coup d’etat that overthrew his presidency. In reviewing the conditions that led to US involvement in Vietnam, Lodge said in an interview in 1979:
Well, there was a big “to do” in the Eisenhower administration. Vice President Nixon took part and Admiral Radford took part, about, uh, sending US forces into… Into Vietnam.
And Eisenhower let them all talk and the upshot was he was against it and we didn’t do it. It was just as simple as that.
The interviewer pressed:
Do you think perhaps the attack on the pagodas was calculated to impress you as you were on your way out to Saigon? In other words, do you think the attack was staged to coincide with your appointment and your imminent arrival in Saigon?
Lodge: That might have been. I’ve often thought of that but you can’t tell. You don’t know.
Interviewer: Now, just the day, about the day after your arrival, two South Vietnamese generals, Le Van Kim and Tran Van Don, made contact with two CIA representatives in Saigon, Rufus Phillips and Lucien Conein and the generals wanted to know whether the United States would support the army in a coup against Diem.
Lodge: I [had] discussed it with uh, um, with Tran Van Don.
At this point in the interview, recognizing that this wasn’t going to be some relaxing, nostalgic interview about the good ‘ol Kennedy years, Lodge quickly lost interest in answering any further questions. As Ken Burns and Lynn Novick revisit the Vietnam War this summer with their new PBS documentary, I recommend the seminal Vietnam: A Television History as well.
Friday 