"Those were the days, my friend..."

Ah, the 50's, I thought wistfully. Now there was a time! We were at peace, banks were solvent, jobs were aplenty, and cars had fins.

The catalyst for my mental wandering was a plaque before me that bore the inscription:

May 17, 1957 * Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam

I was walking up the stretch of lower Broadway known as the "Canyon of Heroes," so dubbed, as it was the site of New York’s renowned ticker tape

 parades. Since my last visit years ago, the city had placed individual plaques for the honorees in ascending chronological order along the street’s eastern sidewalk.

Diem?

A ticker tape parade?

At first it struck me as random. Few New Yorkers back then had heard of Vietnam and fewer still could have known of its new President. Yet, upon further thought, I began to smile, and softly uttered philosopher George Santayana’s notable phrase, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Diem, Catholic and a fervent anti Communist, was able enough, but his family was fabulously corrupt. Regardless, he garnered enthusiastic support from the United States as a symbol of Indo-China’s cold war resistance to Communism and, consequently, was greeted personally by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles when he arrived in the US in 1957.

The rest, as they say, is history. Diem was assassinated in 1963 (reputedly by the CIA), North Vietnam continued their incessant pressure on the South. In the summer of 1967, ten years after Diem’s triumphal ticker tape parade down Broadway, I joined 550,000 other American boys to fight for the “International War Against Communism” in Vietnam, of all places.

The political insanity that began with Eisenhower, but did not end there.

No thanks to:
Dwight Eisenhower
John Foster Dulles
John Kennedy

Robert McNamara
Lyndon Johnson
Richard Nixon
Henry Kissenger

Republicans? Democrats? 

There was plenty of blame to go around.

There will be again.

Thank you for visiting.

Jack