The Vietnam War: Its Clearly Liberal Origins

Memories tend to fade; often, people end up simply or mostly believing only what they wish to believe, not the hard and often unforgiving facts of history.   In the popular mind, so to speak, most people, especially those who are now below 40 years of age, usually would associate the Vietnam War, if they ever do think about it at all, with the name of Richard Nixon, a Republican Party President.  

The war, basically, gets related to this particular political personality and, as such, the original cause of support for that conflict is directed toward a supposedly conservative majority or just Republicans who simply lusted for fighting against the heroic Vietnamese people.  In the public schools, no doubt, this gross misperception and, in fact, downright lie is, generally, reinforced and reiterated, more and more as the years go by, in this country.

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

What is the historical truth?   Two Democratic Party Presidents, JFK and LBJ, got this country into the Vietnam War with enormous amounts of politically liberal support.   As a plain matter of demonstrable historical fact, moreover, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, necessarily favoring an increasingly heavy Americanization of the war, was quite enthusiastically voted in favor of by an assortment of politicians that could be truly called the then Who’s Who of American Liberalism of the 1960s.