American History Revised (61 page)

There
was
a conspiracy involved, but it had nothing to do with the assassination; it had to do with certain government agencies misleading the Warren Commission and the American public. In an intelligence cover-up at the highest levels, the CIA and FBI failed to inform the Warren Commission about John and Robert Kennedy’s covert operations to remove Castro. “Such information,” the agencies reasoned, “would not contradict the central conclusion and therefore could be, and was, kept secret.”

In thinking this information was not important and could be kept secret, the CIA and FBI were astoundingly naïve. Every crime needs a motive, and until there was one, Americans wouldn’t believe that a loser like Oswald could have been the lone killer. Twelve years later this Cuba information all came out when Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence revealed the anti-Castro plots and the fact that “the CIA and FBI had lied by omission to another arm of government.” The conclusion was clear: “The Kennedys’ fixation with Castro had inadvertently motivated a political sociopath.”

1965
How America got itself involved in the Vietnam War is a topic that
stirred much puzzlement at the time, and continues to do so to this day. In February 1962, a three-star general and a new field command called MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) took over U.S. operations in Vietnam, and proceeded to airlift troops and supplies, build jungle airstrips, coordinate artillery fire and air support, fly helicopter rescue teams, and fight alongside South Vietnamese troops in the field. Attacked at a press conference for being “less than candid with the American people” about the growing involvement in Vietnam, President Kennedy tried to wiggle his way out: “We have not sent combat troops there—in the generally accepted sense of the word. We have increased our training mission and our logistics support.”

Many members of the press were not fooled. James Reston identified the key issue and wrote a column about it that day: “The United States is now involved in an undeclared war in South Vietnam,” he wrote. “This is well known to the Russians, the Chinese Communists and everyone else concerned except the American people.”

What followed were several developments not known to the American people. After the fighting started in earnest in 1965, the U.S. Army found itself overwhelmed trying to cope with the hordes of refugees created by the Army’s burning of peasant villages in search of the Vietcong. In 1966 the U.S. Army changed the count from 1.4 million to 268,000 by simply changing categories. When the number of refugees climbed back by the end of 1967, the United States initiated a bold new program that succeeded in reducing the number of refugees to 205,000.

Presto! By abolishing the term “refugee” and substituting a new term, “war victims,” the number of refugees dropped dramatically. More distortions were soon to come. In 1967, General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, received a report of 600,000 Vietnamese troops—far more than the previous estimate of 371,000. Wheeler cabled the report to General William Westmoreland: “If these figures should reach the public domain they would, literally, blow the lid off Washington. Please do whatever is necessary to insure that these figures are not, repeat, not released to news media or otherwise exposed to public knowledge.” Shortly afterward, President Lyndon Johnson asked Westmoreland for a status report. Westmoreland told the president that the U.S. had reached the crossover point—which of course was not true. A year later, after receiving more reports promising the same, the president threw up his hands and quit. Let someone else solve this bloody war. Just as George Orwell had predicted in
1984
, a society—the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam—had descended into a “doublethink” world of systemic falsification of reality, in which “body counts,” “refugees,” and “pacification” took on bizarre meanings.

The charade over body counts never seemed to end. Arthur Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, attended one of the briefings and asked how many of the enemy had been killed before Tet. The answer was eighty thousand. With a ten-to-one ratio of wounded to killed, and only 230,000 estimated Vietcong in the field, Goldberg did a quick mental calculation and responded that all the enemy must be either dead or wounded. “Who the hell are we fighting?” he asked. Next day, when General Wheeler admitted that the United States could not achieve a classic military victory in Vietnam, former secretary of state Dean Acheson blew up: “Then what in the name of God do we have five hundred thousand troops out there for? Chasing girls?”

The same obfuscation applied even to the enemy. To hide the number of deaths they were suffering at the hands of the U.S. military, the North Vietnamese Army developed a unique military tool known as the body hook, to quickly drag a dead comrade away from the scene and bury him, before the conquering U.S. soldiers could do their body count. This had the double benefit of denying satisfaction to the enemy and concealing bad news from their own people. When the U.S. left South Vietnam in 1975, the standard assessment of enemy soldiers killed by the U.S. was around 700,000. Twenty years later, in a press release addressed to the Agence France-Presse, the North Vietnamese government admitted that the number of NVA deaths was far greater: 1.1 million. That figure, said the memo, had been “deliberately falsified during the war to avoid demoralizing the population.”

For reality to sink in, it should occur in one sharp focal point—like scoring a touchdown or hitting a home run. Everyone notices, whereas continuous two-yard gains or Texas League singles go unnoticed. We all know Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but we know little about our later bomb warfare. American military commanders in Vietnam, making little progress in Vietnam and Cambodia, had every reason to be frustrated. “Bomb ’em back into the Stone Age!” cursed General Curtis LeMay. The only problem was that we did—and it didn’t work. From 1965 to 1973 the United States dropped 8 million tons of bombs. By contrast, President Harry Truman, much castigated for dropping the two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had only used 12,500 tons of bomb power. The ratio of LeMay versus Truman was 640:1. Yet Vietnam to this day is still called “a limited war.”

So long as they are the right numbers, statistics—being much more precise—don’t lie like words do. Out of Vietnam have emerged a number of left-wing myths that do not stand up to scrutiny. One is that Afro-Americans served in disproportionate numbers and suffered disproportionate deaths. In fact, Afro-Americans—who
made up 12.5 percent of the U.S. population—constituted 10.6 percent of the Americans serving in Vietnam and 12.1 percent of the deaths. Same for the antiwar movement: most of the protesters were objecting not to the war, but to the prospect that they might be drafted. Yet the war was not a massive draft program. Only 25 percent of those who served in Vietnam were drafted; the rest were volunteers.
*
Contrary to most media stories, Vietnam was probably one of the most democratic wars Americans ever fought in response to Uncle Sam’s “We Need You.”

1985
When the ship went down after grazing an iceberg and was described by one survivor as “not a tremendous crash, but more as though someone had drawn a giant finger all along the side of the boat,” everyone assumed the cause had been a freakish gash long enough to flood six compartments (i.e., 249 feet long).

What you see is what you see, right? Not always. Numerous movies and books and articles have been written about the
Titanic
—plus two government investigations. You would think that by now everyone would have their basic facts straight.

Yet if anyone had bothered to do the simple mathematics—mathematics you or I could do—he would have realized that there was no way the
Titanic
could sink by scraping an iceberg. Consider: a 249-foot gash would have sunk the ship in thirty minutes. For the ship to stay afloat as long as it did, the gash would have to have been a sliver only three-quarters of an inch from top to bottom along all 249 feet—an impossibility of physics.

Little wonder, then, that when Robert Ballard discovered the wreck seventy-three years later and examined the hull closely, he found no such gash.

In the early 1900s a Cunard sailor named John F. Curtain suggested that the
Titanic
had not struck an iceberg, but had simply self-destructed from the heavy vibrations of her twenty-nine massive boilers, causing hull fatigue. Nobody paid attention to this farfetched theory until 1985, when Robert Ballard observed “very clear evidence of where the plates had ‘popped,’ leading him to think that the fatal damage was really caused by separation of the plates. This discovery was unexpected.” Curtain was wrong in saying there was no iceberg, but he was right to point at the ship’s self-destruction.

Question 1. Why Did She Sink So Quickly?
Indeed, the real question is not why did the
Titanic
sink, but why did she sink so fast? Only by examining how the ship could sink so quickly can one begin to surmise how the “unsinkable” ship could sink at all. This, remember, was a ship designed to stay afloat for three days under the worst possible adverse conditions. Yet she survived less than three hours in a situation where none of the night watchmen saw huge icebergs, and where the only noise heard by any of the crew or passengers was “a thud”: obviously, something terrible and unexpected had gone wrong. What was it?

To figure this out, look again at the evidence. It doesn’t take much to sink a big ship. In his testimony before the 1912 British Board of Inquiry,
Titanic
naval architect Edward Wilding had said all that was required was an aggregate of holes totaling “somewhere about twelve square feet.”

The underwater square footage of the
Titanic
, at 850 feet length times 15 feet height times two sides, works out to be 25,500 square feet. Divide Wilding’s estimate of twelve square feet by 25,500, and you get 0.0005, or
1
⁄
20
of one percent. Because of the watertight bulkheads, these 12 square feet couldn’t be in one place, but in several. Stated Wilding, “I cannot believe that the wound was absolutely continuous the whole way. I believe it was a series of steps.” Obviously he had to be right. But nobody believed him, and so the public hung on the fantastic image of the gash (just like a conspiracy—very dramatic: imagine the side of the
Titanic
as one long zipper).