Vietnam Blood Bath to Prove America Had "Balls" - Christian Appy on RAI (3/5)

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TranscriptListenDonateSubscribeGuestMusic PAUL JAY, SENIOR E"} This interview was originally published May 29, 2015. On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Appy says that presidents Kennedy and Johnson pursued the Vietnam war largely to prove the U.S., and themselves personally, had the “courage” to wage war. .kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;border-top-left-radius:0px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item .kt-blocks-post-grid-item-inner{padding-top:10px;padding-right:25px;padding-bottom:25px;padding-left:9px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item header{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item .entry-title{padding-top:5px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:10px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:16px;line-height:17px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .entry-content{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .kt-blocks-post-footer{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .kb-filter-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:2px;border-left-width:0px;padding-top:5px;padding-right:8px;padding-bottom:5px;padding-left:8px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;} Vietnam Blood Bath to Prove America Had “Balls” – Christian Appy on RAI (3/5) “American Does Bad Things for Good Reasons” – Christian Appy on RAI (2/5) “America Does Bad Things for Good Reasons” – Christian Appy on RAI (1/5) Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay. In his book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and American Identity, Christian Appy writes: the need to demonstrate presidential balls has been an under-acknowledged but enduring staple of American foreign policy. Aggressive masculinity shaped American Cold War policy and still does. Deep-seated ideas about gender and sexuality cannot be dismissed as mere talk–they have explanatory value. U.S. policy in Vietnam was driven by men who were intensely concerned about demonstrating their own and the nation’s toughness. As every other justification of the war grew threadbare, it became increasingly important to appear firm. Now joining us in the studio is Christian Appy. Thanks for joining us again.  CHRISTIAN G. APPY, AUTHOR, AMERICAN RECKONING: You’re welcome.  JAY: So one more time, his latest book is American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. And Christian teaches history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. So this has always seemed to me, this need to develop, portray firmness and strength and so on, you know, it’s akin to, like, a loan shark, and it’s actually a lot akin to a loan shark, given how much of American commerce is based on lending people money–and I shouldn’t say people; lending countries money, and assuming they’re going to pay back. And for most loan sharks, you’ve got to break some knees once in a while to make sure people pay you the exorbitant interest you’re trying to collect. Talk about this need to projected toughness, and start with Kennedy in Vietnam.  APPY: Well, Kennedy early on in his presidency suffered a couple of real blows to his reputation, most obviously when he supported the–orchestrated the invasion of Cuba in an effort to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs. And it was a debacle, and it failed. Every one of the Cuban exiles that was trained to carry out the operation was either killed or captured. And Kennedy was forced to actually pay ransom to get the prisoners back. So what was to be a secret operation was quickly exposed, and it was felt that he felt it as deeply humiliating. And then later that same year he met for the first time with Khrushchev, and Khrushchev effectively kind of bullied him, and once again Kennedy felt that he had not demonstrated his presidential gravitas and was already beginning to look at foreign-policy interventions.  JAY: Can I just add one thing?  APPY: Sure. Yeah.  JAY: And internally taking tremendous flack from some sections of the military and certainly the whole conservative /pʌndərˈæpɨs/–can’t say it, but you know what I mean–about being weak.  APPY: Yes.  JAY: I mean, why didn’t he go in with a full-fledged invasion of Cuba?  APPY: Right. That, and he was already beginning to sort of move toward a neutralist solution to the communist insurgency in Laos, so he was beginning to think that maybe Vietnam would be the place to assert American credibility and power. But before that really began to develop, we had the Cuban missile crisis, and this for him was a great boost to his reputation and to his reputation for strength and steely resolve.  JAY: Again, really quickly–some of our viewers don’t know that what that is.  APPY: Yeah. Well, the United States discovered, through U-2 reconnaissance photographs, that the Soviet Union–  JAY: That was the spy plane. APPY: –the spy plane–that the Soviet Union was beginning to install medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba–in response, actually, to the U.S.-backed invasion. They were put there as a kind of deterrent, really defensive, though of course all nuclear weapons are almost by definition dangerous.  JAY: And also there were nuclear–United States had weapons in Turkey which were awfully close to Russia.  APPY: We had–exactly. And indeed you speak to the exact resolution of the missile crisis. Kennedy made clear on television that it would not be tolerated. Interestingly enough, he couldn’t tolerate it because he had made a speech a couple of months earlier saying that if offensive weapons were put on Cuba by the Soviet Union, he would not allow that. And once it happened, he asked some advisers, does this really change the balance of power in the world? And Kennedy said–McNamara said, no–this is Secretary of Defense McNamara. And Kennedy agreed. He said, I wish I had never said that. I wish I had never drawn that line.  JAY: Yeah, ’cause what could they do with them?  APPY: Yeah. So he had–b...