Good afternoon, everybody. Premium professor getting trade and investment policy here at the hum friday institute and school here at the university of minnesota. This is a special, special of our 20 years of seminars on global policy. The vietnam war was a series of event both domestic that ended the lives of millions of people and in that generation. Disputes have raged about every aspect of that war in the decade since it was over and they actually started before obviously. From time to time. And cant wait on the dispute involved. And thats what the seminar is about. And very fortunate to have with us to introduce today the students of the vietnam period my colleague professor paul stone of the Humphrey School and university of Minnesota Department of history. Ill introduce the speaker and handle the question and answer period following our pespeaker. Paul stone. [ applause ] good afternoon and welcome to this session of the forum. This is also a joint meeting with my class which is taking place right now which is called government ethics for the public will. Can you imagine a good portion of that course going on in this particular topic. Bob mentioned so many things that im not going to try to repeat that i will point out major focus. It was obvious but the president of the United States. President of the United States domestic and International Issues as a member of the History Department one of my main objectives is to wean people away from undo admiration for certainty. One thing im certain about is in the spring of 2017 were going to be paying a lot of attention to 50 years ago. This is exactly what he was talking about that i think this coming april, through the summer, well have a heightened sense of what it was to be in the United States 50 years ago. And this museum was designed. And youll notice by president humphrey and president johnson sitting there its dividing them. 20 years before that time. Harry truman had ordered two Nuclear Bombs in japan. 50 years prior to that he had gone almost exactly 100 years ago today. 1917. He had gone before a joint session of congress. And run in 1912 and in 1916. Staying out of these conflicts. Were absolutely certain that president johnson was aware of all of these things. Bob mentioned and my final point would be as time goes on new information those of you is that have the privilege of working in the Minnesota Society and the ford president ial library and johnson library. No help citing this. Pick up a piece of paper and had it hands on at the time. The president then had his hands on. Had gone to minnesota named Joseph Mccarthy about whether he was going to run for president or not. Its a very eerie kind of moment that brings history alive. And perhaps we will become less certain. And global director of the coround table here in minnesota. Of another little law school in cambridge massachusetts. He was at the team there. Hes been active and for quite awhile. The nations foremost on asian issues and he spent a good deal of his youth. So without thank you not only for the seminar and for all that it does. I would like to tell you a little bit about myself. The context of what im going to he reveal and then i want to tell you a story about Lyndon Johnson and how he personally set a different strategy for the war in vietnam in december 1966. Which was implemented in marchand april. And then after telling you that story i want to do the sort of a historian task of coming up with some background and some documentation. First of all i had a long and checkered history with vietnam. I began learning about vietnam when i was 9 years old in 1954 because my father was first at the geneva conference. Studying the war between corkor and he was in charge of state affairs until 1958 so our conversation often was about vietnam and was about east asia and i remember conversations with dad and people in his staff and tom cork ran and grow one that. As i was concluding college i volunteered with work. By the time i showed up in 67 a new organization. And is the result of what im going to tell you about Lyndon Johnson in a few minutes. So one year of Language Training i went to vietnam and spent about almost a year. And february of 69 i was moved down in july of 69, the head, later the head of the cia pulled me out of the field to really coordinate the u. S. Government and the South Vietnamese government. I came back and during that experience i learned a lot. Came back and went to law school. Started in my year of Language Training i learned to speak and read japanese which i can still do and then became more of an academic if you will. After i was able to convince the Ford Foundation to fund a project at Harvard Law School for the english transition, fear of the volaw coach in 1943. I only wanted to be part time. I got halftime work on this translati translation. With my friend and colleague. I did a couple of law review articles. Elite privileges 1428 to 1788 for the journal of ancient history. Later on i got to know general west motherland. I did an article. In the interim he was our ambassador from 1967 to 1973 that will figure in this story asked me to help him write his memoirs to i had another grant to do another study interviewing him for several months. Read all the cable that he sent to president johnson and nixon and some other stuff. And in a couple of months. A study of the Court Program in vietnam which flows from the story im going to tell you. More recently in 2012, i think he asked my wife and myself to translate this novel. They poorly translated in and this is a novel but i revealed in a way that nobody has ever known and its true but nobody knows about it. Which was the 1958 rape and murder of his wife by the minister of security. I throw that out there just as a little piece that theyre still at this in ho chi minh ease wife by the minister of security. I throw that out there just as a little tease that there is still at this date in 2017 many, many things about the vietnamese that we just dont know in the west. And also, i think there may be things about our own people we may not know that much about. Now, i would like to tell you the story. So ellsworth asked me to help him write his memoirs. So i started off in getting to know his background. And then i asked him a question. I said, mr. Ambassador, why did president johnson send you to sigh gone as an ambassador. And he said thats easy, Dominican Republic. How many of you remember the Dominican Republic in 1965 . Yeah, two professors. Anyway, so i sort of started and bunker could see i was puzzled. He kind of smiled and said its easy to understand. Johnson overcommitted himself in the Dominican Republic. I got him out and all the american troops went home and then he remembered. And then it clicked because i had known something about what happened after bunker had been appointed. You may remember in the spring of 65, there was a political controversy in the Dominican Republic. The military split into two groups. Typical for latin america, a conservative group and a sort of leftleaning group. The left leaning group pulled a coup, the conservative group was preparing to fight back. Castro was preparing to pounce. Then he had a problem. How do you get him out . You sort of stabilize the situation. Anyway, bunker by accident was there as the ambassador to the organization of american states and he worked on a political strategy to create a coalition among different factions of dominicans to come together for an election. And they elected a president. Peace, no shooting, no violence. And the American Forces went home. In the week in march, roughly march 7th, 1967, johnson called bunker in and dean russ told him ant this and said im warning you that johnson is going to ask you to go to vietnam ellsworth was surprised because he didnt see this coming. To my knowledge, this conversation was never recorded. Johnson has never told anybody about it as far as i know. Bunker i dont think has ever told anybody about it. He didnt tell his wife carol. He didnt tell his kids. He told me. So president johnson has passed away. Bunker passed away. I have yet to pass away. But i can pass on the story. So ellsworth is sitting there with johnson and johnson says i want you to go to sigh gosaigon war over to the South Vietnamese to we can withdraw our troops. This is linden baines johnson. If i remember, the vitriol and the stereotyping of johnson about a man committed to bombing and destroying of escalation. Here he is sending an ambassador to prepare the way forthe withdrawal of american troops. By turning the war over to the South Vietnamese. And bunker went out and i will tell you, i wont tell you the whole story, it will take too much time. But he went out and basically did that. So how did this happen . Why would johnson had made this decision . Let me point out that this decision was made by Lyndon Baines johnson himself. And i will tell you more about it as we go through it. This is a personal decision by the president of the United States to set a Strategic Direction for the american participation in the war and he was going to against his secretary of defense mcnamara, the joint chiefs of staff and did not consult the cia or the state department. The track record and the documents in the Humphrey Library thanks to professor stone, i was able to go there and find stuff which has been overlooked by scholars for many years that have been sitting there in the files which shows you the steps in the story. Let me try to set a Historical Context of the vietnam war coming down to the fall of 1966. As you know, the french colonized indochina in the 19th century. During the end of world war ii, the japanese, they were occupying indochina, and they overthrew the french governing authority. They placed the French Military in containment camps and they created a vietnamese government, a nationalist government. Please Pay Attention to the word nationalism i am going to talk about this a lot. They failed to do two things, the japanese. One, they did not give this government an army. So you had independent vietnam with its own government and no army. Secondly, there was a very special vietnamese political leader who nobody ever heard of. And he is a descendant of the first king of the dynasty that came to power in 1902. Had the japanese brought him back in the waning months of world war ii to be the leader of vietnam, history would have been different. They didnt do that. The japanese lose the war. British troops come back to South Vietnam. British troops come to North Vietnam and there is a free for all among the vietnamese about who is going to create the government, who is going to have the power . In this, in Early September ho chi minh and his viet minh plus communist they stage a coup in hanoi and proclaim themselves an independent vietnam and proclaim themselves a government. That night, i may get too much into the weeds for you, but there is an important theme here which we americans dont know enough about. That night, members of two political groups on the vietnamese nationalist side they met to say what are we going to do about the communists, they set up a government. And some of the men in the room wanted to go fight. The leader of the dai vets say we will not do that. Good vietnamese do not shed the blood of other vietnamese. So they didnt strike back at the communists. Within nine months onethird to half of the men in that room had been killed by the communist. On september 9th, 1945, the official gazette of the vietnamese government issued this order. I will read it in vietnamese and then english. [ reading in vietnamese ] order. This dissolves the two parties this is seven days after the viet minh have taken power. Will be brought before the court for serious punishment. The ministers of interior defense and justice will implement this order. Signed minister of the interior the famous vietnamese military leader. So within sevendays of taking power, the communists have already outlawed two principle forces. Ho chi minh needs an ally. On one hand they go to the chinese who come in but in march 1946 they make a deal with the french. They bring the french back to vietnam. Ho chi minh agrees to have the french army return to central and North Vietnam and in return, the french conclude that ho chi minh is the leader of the vietnamese people. Ho chi minh was created as a vietnamese leader by the colonialists. Over the next six months, their negotiations between ho and the french for an independent vietnam within the French Police are liquidating the nationalists. By the end of 1946 with the nationalist oppositions either liquidated or intimidated, the two parties start fighting each other. They fight basically to a stalemate in 1954. Along the way, however, which is overlooked and a friend of mine in france found this document in the French Colonial archives. This is the order for the execution of a young man who founded a religion and this is a report up to the north that he has been executed. So it was the communist many vietnamese believe who started the civil war by suppressing and liquidating the nationalists. The war ends in 1954. The french cant prevail but the viet minh cant either. A conference was called in geneva to work out a way for allowing the french to exit. Theres a new french government. Socialist, he wants to get out because he doesnt want to continue fighting. China suggests a deal. The deal is to divide vietnam in two with the communist having control of the north. And the french and their supporters having control of the south. The americans dont like this. But the french have already agreed separately with the chinese to do this. The vietnamese nationalists feel betrayed but the deal is done and the socalled geneva accords are publicized but nobody has ever signed them. The people can relocate. And a new government is set up in South Vietnam. It is technically the old french Union Government with a new prime minister. The question in the fall of 1954 is what are the americans going to do . Visavis vietnam and Southeast Asia. Well one of the things is we set up under dulles, looking to create containment against the mao in china. A decision was made to support the South Vietnamese government. This was affirmed by the letter of president eisenhower in october 23, 1954. My father wrote the letter. There is a paragraph in here which i want to submit to you and to all americans absolutely fundamental in explaining the morality and the efficacy of our effort in South Vietnam which paragraph has been overlooked as far as i can tell by every scholar and every commentator. I read, the purpose of this offer is to assist the government of vietnam in developing and maintaining a strong viable state capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means. The government of the United States expects that this aid will be met by performance on the part of the government of vietnam in under taking needed reforms. It hopes that such aid combined with your own continuing efforts will contribute effectively towards an independent vietnam endowed with a strong government. Such a government would i hope be so responsive to the nationalist aspirations of its people, so enlightened in purpose and effective in performance that it will be respected both at home and apraud and discouraged any who might wish to impose a foreign ideology on your free people. And we committed ourselves to South Vietnam. In 1959, the power in the bureau had shifted away from ho chi minh to lay zuan. And he pushed through a program of taking over South Vietnam by force. This was in the resolution 59 i think. Setting up group 555 which was opening up the infiltration trail down through laos and group 779 which was infiltrating people via sea. They began to shrink back, not use a policy of relying on the nationalist but relying on the family, police and catholics. This then created tension. The vietcong were able to increase their activity level, their cause more dissension. In november 1960, there was an attempted coup aimed at his younger brother. And i remember this because it was after the election in november. And we knew that dad was going to be appointed ambassador to thailand. And so we were all as kids getting ready to be new frontier people. And dad said one day, well i just got a call from the government and there was an attempted coup in vietnam. And they are calling me to get advice on what the americans should do. So i focused on that. Recently, the hanoi has released a lot of the documents party documents and we now have english translations of the orders of the bureau to the china Regional Party committee and the interzone party committee. These are instructions on setting up the National Liberation in the vietcong which was established at the order of hanoi. And they go through the ten principles of the nlf. The nlf starts to grow. The hanoi sends down more people. In 59 they sent down 542. In 1960 they sends down 1217 and this is a document from hanois ministry of defense which shows all the troops they sent south. This was give