Professor Bernard on the Vietnam War

Today in my Cold War History class, professor Bernard introduced the Vietnam War. Easily the most interesting class so far this year. Here are a few quotes:

1. "I think the only ones who understood the situation were the French, because they had been there and left."

2. "Dean Rusk, Kennedy's foreign secretary, firmly believed that the National Liberation Front (the Viet Cong) was simply an arm of the North Vietnamese government people who were themselves Chinese stooges. Which is very dumb to say the least, of course, they weren't stooges for anybody."

3. "The leaders in Washington were pretty much conceited."

4. "They killed one million Vietnamese because they loved freedom so much."

5. "The people you train will not kill their brothers, they will join them."

6. "Weapons manufacturers don't need a war to sell their wares."

7. About President Kennedy: "It is very difficult sometimes to do what you want to do."

8. It snowed during the night, leaving a nice coat of fresh snow over everything: "For the Americans it was like having an arm in the snowblower--very difficult to extricate yourself once your arm is caught by the auger."

9. "Kennedy didn't appreciate the military situation."

10. "The Americans thought it was the bad communists in the north who were meddling with the south."

11. "Even now, I hear on the radio, these backwoods Canadians talking about how we have to fight the Talibans because if we don't they will come in their back yards. If you paid me, I wouldn't go into their back yards."

12. About the Tonkin Resolution: A student asks a question comparing the Tonkin Resolution to the post 9/11 Patriot Act. Professor Bernard deflects the question, a second student comments on how the Patriot Act came out only one or two days after 9/11, and wonders how they got "like five thousand pages" written in that short a time. A third student puts in, "Well, you're a good history student, you know all about that." And Professor Bernard says, "Yes, they enlisted some history students to write the Patriot Act." Student number three says, "That's not very patriotic" (referring to the deception of the Tonkin Resolution, but said right after the professor's comment about enlisting History students--there were two or three discussions going on at the same time.)