The Vietnam War: Its Clearly Liberal Origins

Interested readers can, therefore, go themselves directly to that highly important document to there obviously see the elaborate list of names of the many prominent liberals and leftists of that past era: George McGovern, Frank Church, etc.   There was no assembled cabal of rightwing reactionaries who secretly or, perhaps, otherwise greatly conspired to then, supposedly, force entirely unwilling liberals into seeking no alternative but war.  That is the stuff of fictional books; it is not supported, therefore, by the existence of hundreds of thousands of government documents detailing the decisions made and by whom and why things got done. 

Though John F. Kennedy gets often reinterpreted as something he really was not, he was then properly identified as being a true liberal, when Liberalism was not considered a dirty word in this country; the same needs to be correctly said about Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been Kennedy’s Vice President.  Of course, in liberal efforts to stubbornly rewrite actual history, it is argued, mainly unconvincingly, that had he lived, JFK would not have gotten as deeply involved as did LBJ; this debatable point of view is purely speculative and, moreover, does not fully speak to the known and, of course, easily researchable facts of the 1950s and early 1960s; this is especially, e.g., regarding the liberal Truman Doctrine of Containment that was to be used against Communism in the world.

In the 1964 presidential campaign, liberals and others, actually and deliberately, had warned people that if Republican Senator Barry Goldwater were elected President, then there, soon enough, would be over 500,000 American troops sent to fight in South Vietnam; the Republican Party-sponsored joke, later, became that, sure enough, about 28 million voters still stubbornly and obstinately chose Goldwater and just look what happened, they said; and, LBJ, who actually had then won in a landslide election, ended up putting over a half million troops there.   The liberal origins of that Cold War Era war, therefore, have not any merely minor but rather quite substantial and substantive liberal fingerprints all over it without any rational question whatsoever.

General Douglas MacArthur Opposed War There

Yet, as unfortunately noted above, the popular mind usually incorrectly associates conservatism and conservative politicians with, eagerly and rabidly, wanting to lustfully enter into a fight there in South Vietnam.   Among many others, General Douglas MacArthur, in at least as early as the 1960s, urgently warned against ever fighting any conflict there.   And, this historical truth can be verified by research.   It ought not to be said that he and others on the political right, who had totally opposed the initiation of any direct American hostilities, were not also exactly identified, to say the least, as being any prominent liberals or leftists.   

Dumping blame for that past war, meaning its very existence due to its noted origins, upon Nixon was, thus, entirely unfair.  This brief article merely seek to keep the current generation (and any others) fully informed concerning what is needed to be known as to the actual truth, not historical misinformation or any ideological/liberal propaganda to the contrary.

Though most liberals, of course, later turned against the war, however, they originally had made it very certain that LBJ, in carrying out what he had basically perceived correctly to be JFK’s intentions, was enormously empowered by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (that most of the liberals who signed it later disavowed, of course).    The Vietnam War began, nonetheless, as a Cold War Era liberal crusade consistent fully with the liberal political Doctrine of Containment.   

Conclusion: Interventionism is not Genuine Conservatism

Contrary to what gets usually incorrectly depicted in most American history books these days, since they are— guess what? — written mainly by liberals and leftists, the Vietnam War was, therefore, a war manifestly created by the thinking of Cold War Era Liberalism, vigorously voted into existence usually by liberals, and was, as known, conducted initially by liberals, inclusive of LBJ, of course.  

But, the question might be: who and what typically gets now blamed, quite damnably, by the mass media, pundits, academicians, etc.?   Conservatives and conservatism, as is known, have become largely synonymous with depictions of the causations behind that Cold War conflict.  It is the liberal ideological victory of propaganda over the historical truth.   Interventionism, starting at least as early as with Woodrow Wilson, is a Wilsonian-internationalist trait of Liberalism, not an aspect of conservatism, meaning as it was related, in particular, to the Old Right in America of at least the 1920s and into the 1960s.

The traditionalist right is most like the Old Right and opposed fighting a war in Vietnam, unlike Liberalism.