IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG, Reel 1

for [Music] [Music] [Music] e [Laughter] up [Music] I would remind you that scripture tells us that blessed are the peac makers I want to underscore the word [Applause] [Music] makers and it takes a lot of doing to make peace it takes a good deal of hard work building like a mighty Cathedral Stone by stone block by block and I sometimes wonder why we Americans enjoy punishing ourselves so much with our own criticism this is a pretty good land I'm not saying you never had it so good but that is a fact isn't it [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] I think the most significant aspect has been the suppression of political activity who Force the people to go underground and to um understand politics only as revolutionary struggle and not on a political struggle in other words you can only um have a chance to change the regime only by Revolution and not by an electoral process or a Democratic process one of the most important things concerning hokim in is the fact that he spent so long years out of his country and that nevertheless he has the touch and feel of the peasantry of his country of the village for Village Life in Vietnam is the essential of the life of the nation and I will just give you one anecdote to show you that connection when he for the first time met a press gave a press conference in Hanoi in 1945 when he came for the first time as a leader of his nation in front of the public he said to the people there I can't tell you what you have to do but I can show it to you put his thumb on the table and said if every aware where you put your thumb on the sacred Earth of Vietnam there is a plant growing then we will succeed if not not now this is again one of the points where who on one hand is a Marxist Economist who knows the importance of the basic production and on the other hand a confusion scholar because what you have to have in mind to understand that idea here of the thumb on the earth is a simple Chinese proverb a thumb square of planting rice is more precious than a thumb square of gold we are now in a very interesting place about oim because in this place which is now a lxmi a a key maker was um 14 years ago the place where where he founded uh and edited the paria the first newspaper he edited and in this very place the life of oin changed in my opinion where oim who came in 1917 in Paris as a peasant an Asian peasant uh became really a revolutionary and an internationalist he was born in a poor and little village at kimen near Vin a now destroyed city of Center Vietnam he was the son of a very poor man but a man who was a mandarin a litered man and this man was condemned by the French because his nationalism and all the life of O chimin was uh directed by this very uh Injustice of made to his father by the French col colonizers in this family they were nationalist since the very beginning he left Vietnam went on a boat uh landed at New York at London at loav and after that in Paris where where he became a first a socialist after that a communist I went on over to the White House and it came back with the very tight round hand of Franklin roselt I want no French returned to Indochina FDR and I remember the excitement I felt that this was the probably the first clear uh US policy toward a southeast asan state now the thing that I think we fail to recognize is that hoi men communist or whatnot is considered by the people of Vietnam and I'm speaking now of of millions in South Vietnam is the George Washington of his country he's the man that they think threw off the French the colonialism uh just as we had our uh 1776 uh they had theirs in the 1940s uh he also LED uh an underground movement against the Japanese who had occupied Vietnam and the whole Indo China peninsula during World War War II and uh whether we like him or not whether we like uh uh the particular economic system a social system that he might develop in not we must remember that he is indeed uh considered by many The Peasants the small people the little people in South Vietnam and North Vietnam as the George Washington of his country joh Gracie was the principal a British officer responsible for accepting the surrender of the Japanese in French into China south of the 16th parallel and those were that was his mission uh but after he arrived in saon with his troops he found that uh the French were without means of U maintaining Law and Order and so he as I understand it and as I recall it he took the weapons that he derived from the Japanese and turned them over to French uh Military Officers and men if this had not been done uh in all probability the French could not have recaptured their control at saon I met hoim for the first time in Hanoi at the end of 45 sent there by dar adir dar High Commissioner sent by the go in saon wanted me to contact the vietn leader for the first time I said to him I am sent to you by the High Commissioner in the name of General Deo to tell you that we want Vietnam to join us in the French Union looked at me and he said the French Union what's that is it a circle or is it a square that was a test because there is a Chinese proverb a lot of Chinese Proverbs which identify heaven and intelligence with the circle and Earth and solidity with the square is it an idea or is it a fact is it somewhere and so I answered and I think that it's one of the occs where hokim has been just a little surprised I said I don't know he said but what are you doing here I come to ask you because we have to build it together towards the end of November of 1946 when the Admiral commanding the French Fleet in the Bay of tonan in his words decided to teach the Vietnamese government a hard lesson and the fleet stood off of high Fang and shell the city until between 6 and 10 ,000 were were killed he said I have no Army it's not true now I have no Army 19 I have just hatred and I will not disarm it until you give me confidence in you now this is the thing on which I would insist because it's still alive in his memory as in mine for every time who he mean has trusted us we betrayed him here you had a country which was not really just divided at the 17th parallel um you had fought the indo-china War and all the best and most talented Vietnamese of a generation had faced in 1946 and 1947 the alternative of the French or the Vietnam the the best of a generation the kind of young men who would you know join up the day after Pearl Harbor in this country it going to are you going to fight to kick out the French or are you going to you know be a French uh puppet so the most talented people of the Generation all signed up and the Vietnam won this war and it was an enormously popular National war and at the end of it they came up with a dynamic society which had won a war which was tested which was tough which had brought up to the top the very best of a generation well there are some similarities between the French effort in the Indochina war in Vietnam and the Americans the Americans are just so much more powerful than the French were they have so much more artillery they have so much more uh air power they have so many more men they have so much more wealth uh than the French ever had so that there are not going to be any DNB Foods uh in the American uh presence there in Washington the US Secretary of Defense the equipment which we have sent to Indochina is highly technical so we are sending technicians as a temporary training Force we are sending planes but no Pilots we are not sending combat troops we have seen no reason for the abandonment of the so-called Navar plan that plan as you may recall broadly speaking was a 2-year plan and contemplated a very substantial buildup of local forces and their training and Equipment the French moved into dban Fu in 1953 in January of 1953 parachute Battalion came into the area and the idea was there were two aspects of one to control the piece of ground and then to prevent the vieten from sweeping on into Laos I do not expect that there is going to be a communist victory in Indochina by that I don't mean that there may not be local Affairs where one side or the other will win victories but in terms of a communist domination of Indochina that I do not accept as a probability the French generals did not believe that artillery could be brought to bear ins sufficient quantity so correspondingly they were not active in their patrolling outside of the particular perimeter the feature was to keep the focus on the area Not to cause the quick Rush of the battle position but to build the particular battle position are the French miscalculated as I think did we in the degree of sophistication of the Weaponry that was deployed on The High Ground they didn't think they could get these pieces up there but they did somehow the Battle of dban fu is uh a significant phenomenon in military history and from all of the standpoints that one views War it achieved a particular political objective in the full clausewitzian sense of the term it represented a tremendous logistical effort on the part of the North Vietnamese or of General zap to move the artillery pieces which changed the balance of this particular battle significantly forces of aggression see to be concentrating just at one point at Dean Ben Fu where the existence is extremely Gallant against overwhelming odds the French they began the war as a colonial war they try many times to change this very nature of the war trying to change it in a civil war a war between the the right and the left in Vietnam and after that in international War a crusade against communism it was clear that the French were in deep trouble at Yan benu and then Admiral Radford thought that if we went in with a we could knock them out Senator Morton uh as you know from my letter to you uh we are very interested in a meeting it was called by Mr secretary Dallas and Admiral Radford in which you played a part and in which eight members of the Congress of the united states were present five senators and two Representatives I wonder if you could give us your best recollection of who was at that meeting Senator Morton sign one take one there was a meeting I've forgotten the exact date this can be easily ascertained I assume that their records have been kept the burden of it was uh Admiral radford's feeling that we should really move in and bring active support uh to the French specifically uh air support from carrier based uh from carriers uh carriers were available in the nearby area how many missions could have been mounted I don't know I didn't get into the military details and it was felt that the artillery that they had on The High Ground uh could be destroyed by air attack and the f always because they were always seen by the Vietnamese as a foreign power trying to get back his colonial power that is why they lost the war at J benu Dean Ben Fu has fallen I join with you in paying tribute to the Gallant Defenders may it be given us to play a worthy part to defend the values for which they gave their lives the defense of Dean Ben Fu of 57 days and nights will go down in history as one of the most heroic of all time the Defenders composed of French and Native forces inflicted staggering losses on the enemy in job's treatment job's uh writing about this uh he it it appears that he was well ready in indanan Fu he was was ready uh to if he had chosen to assault and did not some 8 weeks before the final movement took place and I would submit that the reason for this is that that JP and uh hoi men understood the political nature of this particular battle and they wanted the politics the public opinion in France and in the rest of the world among the other powers to build to give this a great deal more uh importance than had militarily [Music]