Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

Vietnam has become known as Nixon’s War. Why is that? Do people not remember that John Kennedy was the President who sent in advisors to help the South Vietnamese? JFK was the man who authorized the formation of the Army Special Forces, Green Berets, to be the prime advisory/training group for counter-insurgency operations. Lyndon Johnson was the President who initiated full involvement by our military after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which has since been debunked. All the major forces employed in Vietnam were sent by Johnson.

The body-count mentality of that war was proposed by Robert MacNamara and the other “Best and Brightest” in the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations. The war was run from the White House, up to and including determining bombing targets and the exact routes aircraft had to take to hit Hanoi. By the time the 1968 election came around, people were sick of the war as prosecuted by Democrats. Johnson declined to run again, knowing he had no chance of winning.

Richard Nixon came into office with the promise of ending the war. After months of argument over the size and shape of the negotiating table in Paris, the North Vietnamese finally sat down to talk about ending the fight. Nixon did what the loudest critics wanted done. He pulled our troops out and left the South on their own. It was a “quagmire” only because that is how Johnson ran it.

Ted Kennedy, the last remaining brother, and the incompetent one of the bunch, wants to compare Iraq to Vietnam. It will only be another Vietnam if we follow his advice and put another anti-war Democrat in charge of running it. Vietnam was Kennedy’s and Johnson’s War. I would hate to see what happens if we allow Iraq to become Kerry’s War.