ONE OF THE MOST ACCLAIMED WORKS OF HISTORY IN RECENT YEARS — Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians • Winner of the American Library in Paris Book Award • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • Finalist for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature.
Strains between China and its neighbors burst to the surface in two parts of the South China Sea, taking the high-stakes struggle for control over the waters to new levels of friction.Well, if Japan gets involved I wouldn't expect the Obama administration to lift a finger. They haven't been too forthcoming in the Ukraine situation, that's for sure.
Off Vietnam, dozens of Chinese military and civilian ships clashed with the Vietnamese coast guard, with Vietnamese officials complaining its vessels were repeatedly rammed. On the same day, Philippine police apprehended Chinese fishing vessels loaded with hundreds of sea turtles in disputed waters.
About 80 Chinese vessels moved into an area near the disputed Paracel Islands, where Hanoi has sought to prevent China from deploying a massive oil rig, said Rear Adm. Ngo Ngoc Thu, vice commander of the Vietnamese coast guard. He said the flotilla included seven military ships and that it was supported by aircraft.
He said the situation, which started brewing over the weekend, was "very tense" and said six Vietnamese officers had been injured in the standoff.
The confrontation—by far the most serious in recent years between the two neighbors—marked a significant escalation in Beijing's willingness to press its natural-resource claims, analysts said.
Theresa Fallon, a senior associate at the European Institute for Asian Studies, a Brussels-based think tank, said China's move represented the regional energy sector's "worst nightmare" and was bound to provoke Vietnam's anger.
"This is a huge rig—it's the size of a couple of football fields," Ms. Fallon said.
A senior administration official said the White House views the latest escalation as part of a pattern of behavior as China continues to try to advance its territorial claims. "We're obviously very concerned about it," the official said. "We have conveyed our concerns to the Chinese."
The standoff is "an unprecedented situation," said Ian Storey, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. The sheer number of Chinese vessels that appeared to be involved was a clear indication of China's "resolve to make sure this rig can operate in these waters."
China's state councilor described the move as part of Chinese business's normal operations and asked Vietnam to stop interfering, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said at a daily briefing.
China's Defense Ministry didn't respond to a request to comment.
John Duong, who lives in Irvine and heads the city’s Finance Commission, said he was “floored” that a veteran politician like Agran would make such a proposal.Well, obviously Democrats don't truly value freedom. Shoot, Communist Vietnam is right up there with Cuba as the cool spot for leftist happy campers!
“I don’t think he understands our sentiments and emotional scars,” Duong said. “Why bring back painful memories for people who value freedom?”
AUSTIN, Tex. — Luci Baines Johnson leaned forward in her father’s private suite at the L.B.J. Presidential Library, her voice breaking as she recounted the “agony of Vietnam” that engulfed Lyndon Baines Johnson and the pain she feels to this day of witnessing his presidency judged through the prism of a failed war.Keep reading.
“Nobody wanted that war less than Lyndon Johnson,” said Ms. Johnson, 66, who is the president’s younger daughter. “No matter how hard he tried, he didn’t seem to be able to get out of that quagmire. Not only did he not get out of it in his lifetime, but his legacy indeed has that weight of the world on it.”
But now, 50 years later — with a coming rush of anniversaries of the legislative milestones of the Johnson presidency — Ms. Johnson and the diminishing circle of family and friends from those White House years have commenced one last campaign. They are seeking a reconsideration of Johnson’s legacy as president, arguing that it has been overwhelmed by the tragedy of the Vietnam War, and has failed to take into account the blizzard of domestic legislation enacted in the five years Johnson was in the White House.
On Monday, the L.B.J. Presidential Library and Museum will announce details of a Civil Rights Summit to be held here in April to commemorate Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act, attended by three of the four living former presidents — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — and perhaps President Obama.
A ceremony is being planned inside the massive slab of the L.B.J. Library, to be followed by celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Johnson initiatives: Medicare, the Clean Air Act, public broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Head Start, the requirements for seatbelts, and warnings on cigarette packs. The events are intended to offer a counterweight to the way Johnson has been portrayed over the past decades.
“Our goal has NEVER been to create a false image of L.B.J.,” wrote Tom Johnson, a former president of CNN and a former publisher of The Los Angeles Times, who served for 40 years as chairman of the L.B.J. Foundation, in an email to other foundation members. “What we are striving to do is to achieve recognition of the truth about L.B.J.’s years, most of which (except Vietnam and some recognition of civil rights) has been forgotten or swamped by Vietnam.”
Ms. Johnson responded to that with a one-word note: “AMEN!”
Larry Temple, a former Johnson aide who is the chairman of the L.B.J. Foundation, said the coming months might offer a last opportunity for the surviving members of the Johnson administration to make his case. “The next five years will be the 50th anniversary of everything he did,” he said.
The campaign comes at the end of a long period in which aides and advisers to Johnson, who died at age 64 in 1973, have largely stayed in the shadows, quieted by the memory of a war that still prompts anguished debate and condemnation. They have patiently watched the adulation of John F. Kennedy — whom Johnson succeeded and with whom he had a decidedly competitive relationship — that accompanied the commemoration of another 50th anniversary: the Kennedy assassination.
“I’ll tell you: I don’t think people understand that this country today reflects more of Lyndon Johnson’s years in the White House than the years of any other president,” said Joseph A. Califano Jr., who was Johnson’s top domestic aide in the White House.
This advocacy of a broader view of Johnson is not confined to his immediate circle. “I absolutely think the time has come,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, a historian who wrote a biography of Johnson. “When he left office, the trial and tribulations of the war were so emotional that it was hard to see everything else he had done beyond Vietnam. The country fundamentally changes as a result of L.B.J.’s presidency.”
Vo Nguyen Giap, the relentless and charismatic North Vietnamese general whose campaigns drove both France and the United States out of Vietnam, died on Friday in Hanoi. He was believed to be 102.An "implacable enemy."
The death was reported by several Vietnamese news organizations, including the respected Tuoi Tre Online, which said he had died in an army hospital.
General Giap was among the last survivors of a generation of Communist revolutionaries who in the decades after World War II freed Vietnam of colonial rule and fought a superpower to a stalemate. In his later years, he was a living reminder of a war that was mostly old history to the Vietnamese, many of whom were born after it had ended.
But he had not faded away. He was regarded as an elder statesman whose hard-line views had softened with the cessation of the war that unified Vietnam. He supported economic reform and closer relations with the United States while publicly warning of the spread of Chinese influence and the environmental costs of industrialization.
To his American adversaries, however, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, he was perhaps second only to his mentor, Ho Chi Minh, as the face of a tenacious, implacable enemy. And to historians, his willingness to sustain staggering losses against superior American firepower was a large reason the war dragged on as long as it did, costing more than 2.5 million lives — 58,000 of them American — sapping the United States Treasury and Washington’s political will to fight, and bitterly dividing the country in an argument about America’s role in the world that still echoes today.
Few comparisons have been as odious as the one offered by the president linking one of the great mass murderers of history to one of America's Founding Fathers and authors of our liberty.And really, is that so hard to understand? Is it that hard to understand that it serves American foreign policy no good purpose to stroke the vanity of Vietnamese Communists?
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were mortal and inhumane enemies who joined civilization after their hideous barbarism was defeated.
They renounced their former brutality, acknowledged their guilt and shame, and became our strongest allies as they genuinely embraced liberty and democracy. They did not forget their past. They repudiated it.
Vietnam has never repudiated its past while celebrating a faux victory over an American enemy that was never defeated on the battlefield but only in the halls of a Congress that abandoned an ally and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
President Obama met with his Vietnamese counterpart, President Truong Tan Sang, last Thursday in the same Oval office where LBJ picked bombing targets in a war he micromanaged into futility. The 44th president conveniently forgot Vietnamese history and slandered ours by linking a founder of our democracy, Thomas Jefferson, to the mass murderer Ho Chi Minh.
Sang had brought Obama a copy of a letter sent to President Truman from Ho in which the communist dictator spoke hopefully of cooperation with America.
Obama, stopping short of yet another apology, mused about what might have been, and noted "we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson."
That's technically true and historically accurate. Ho Chi Minh did frame the earliest portions of the 1945 Vietnam Declaration of Independence on the actual Declaration of Independence written by Jefferson in 1776. But while the future third president spoke of inalienable rights granted by his and our Creator, he meant it. Ho Chi Minh was only serious about the glory of the state.
Come to think of it, Obama is too, often leaving the word "Creator" out of any mention of our inalienable rights as mentioned in the declaration while he routinely ignores the Constitution and its restriction on his and federal powers.
To be charitable, one could claim Obama was just trying to humor a guest, as Trent Lott once did to Strom Thurmond.
But was it necessary to praise a man who killed approximately half a million people in an effort to consolidate his power, or to suggest ideological similarities between the architect of mass carnage and an author of liberty?
In consolidating his dictatorial power in North Vietnam, Ho went after landowners, intellectuals, school teachers, businessmen, civic leaders, anyone who might pose future opposition to his thuggish rule. Those who would not publicly confess their crimes against the state and the people were often brutally executed.
By early November 1956, when residents of An Giang province, which included Ho's birthplace village of Nam Dan, refused to pay what they considered oppressive taxes, Ho sent troops to collect, then sent in an army division, shooting. About 6,000 unarmed villagers were killed in a massacre obscured by the Soviet Union's suppression of Hungary.
After Ho's death in 1969, his successors did not miss a beat. Congressional Democrats and their allies in the media, such as the venerable Walter Cronkite, who had already proclaimed the war lost, helped ensure South Vietnam's defeat and ushered in an era of mass carnage, boat people and re-education camps that resulted in more death after the war than during it.
After Saigon's "liberation," the summary executions of tens of thousands of South Vietnamese began. Hundreds of thousands more were forced into re-education camps as 1 million boat people fled on anything that would float, with countless thousands perishing in the South China Sea. And let us not forget the killing fields of Cambodia, where 3 million were slaughtered.
This is the legacy of the man Obama said was inspired by Thomas Jefferson.
LAKEWOOD -- For many Americans, Memorial Day is a break from work, a day marked by barbecues and special sales.
Veterans, their families and others who gathered at Del Valle Park on Monday for Lakewood's annual Memorial Day ceremony see it differently, as a time to honor those who served their country and gave their lives so it may yet fulfill its promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Los Angeles County Department of Military and Veterans Affairs Chief Deputy Director Stephanie A. Stone noted a somber set of numbers from the last 100 years in her keynote address: more than 100,000 dead in World War I, 400,000 in World War II, 36,000 in the Korean War, 58,000 in Vietnam and 6,000 in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"This day is reserved for the men and women who were part of our lives," Stone said.
"The fathers and the mothers, the sisters and the brothers, the sons and the daughters who lived in our town, went to our schools, played with our children and prayed in our churches."
Lakewood Mayor Steve Croft suggested in his own remarks that the gratitude of the crowd should continue past the day's ceremony.
As a decade of war comes to an end, Croft said, the nation must support, encourage and nurture hundreds of thousands of veterans who need help restarting their lives.
"The challenges facing veterans today range from unemployment to homelessness, to mental, emotional and physical impacts that must be addressed," said Croft.
The mayor noted that many of Lakewood's earliest homebuyers in the 1950s were veterans who fought in World War II, and in a spirit of volunteerism, some founded the Lakewood Youth Sports program and did other work to build the city into what it is today.
"It's our turn now," Croft said, urging citizens to do what they can to ensure that veterans have access to education, jobs and other services so they may transition from war.
I spent the night of July 2, 1969, in the Transit Barrack at Tan Son Nhut on the outskirts of Saigon...as I mentioned, the sounds and the anticipation left me with little sleep, and the events of early the next day are pretty cloudy 40 years hence. What I do rememberr is that I walked on to that concrete runway at TSN, and got on board a Military Plane for the first time...I had been a member of the Air Force for a year by this time, but had never flown in a Air Force aircraft...all my flights had been civilian to this point ...Head on over to Pat's to read the whole thing!
