71
JFK Assassination Discussion & Debate / Re: Education Forum Goes Off the Rails
« Last post by John Corbett on Yesterday at 05:05:49 AM »You need to do research on Cardinal Francis Spellman and Senator John Kennedy.
Read up on the American Friends of Vietnam, a very influential and powerful but relatively small organization which advocated for SV nationhood. Senator Kennedy was the organization's dynamo.
Famous Speech: On June 1, 1956, Senator Kennedy delivered a prominent speech at an organization conference luncheon in Washington, D.C., famously calling South Vietnam "our offspring" and asserting that the U.S. could not abandon it.
The Kennedy family, devout Catholics and ardent anti-communists, loathed and detested the communist North Vietnam.
They more or less installed he Catholic Diems to run SV.
Ngo Dinh Diem first met John F. Kennedy in 1951 in the United States.
Background of Their Meeting
The Introduction: Cardinal Francis Spellman introduced Diem to Kennedy while Diem was living in the U.S. during a period of political exile.
Their Positions: At the time, Diem was an exiled Vietnamese nationalist leader, and Kennedy was a young U.S. Congressman representing Massachusetts.
Shared Interests: Both men bonded over their shared Catholic faith and strong anti-communist political views.
The US and Kennedy did not support the 1954 Geneva accords, which they feared would lead to a commie SV in addtion to NV.
I wrote about this over at the EF-JFKA, but I am too lazy to try to go and find it.
Your comment made it sound as if JFK was instrumental in the formation of South Vietnam as a country. He had nothing to do with that. Ike's administration engineered it after the French got their butts whipped by Ho Chi Minh. He didn't want the whole country to go communist. All we managed to do was delay that outcome for two decades and it cost us the lives of over 58,000 US servicemen not to mention untold numbers of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.
Recent Posts
