A REPLY TO PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S STATE OF THE UNION MESSAGE
by the University of Wisconsin Student-Faculty Committee to End the .'
WBr in Vietnamand the National Coordinating Committee Research Staff
On January 12, 1966, the President addressed both Houses of Congress in his
annual State of the Union Message to Congress, It is our feeling that his speech
was a total misrepresentation of the facts concerning American involvement and
the costs of this involvement to the American people and to the people of Vietnam.
Let us consider the state of oar union*
PRESIDENT JOHNSON SPOKE OF THE OÏIIGINS OF THE VIETNAM WAR:
President Johnson spoke of self-determination and free elections and said
that we became involved only as a response to North Vietnamese aggression. He would
like us to forget that for eight long years, from 1946-1954, America tried to pre
vent the Vietnamese people from exercising their right to self-determination, In
1946, a coalition of catholics, buddhists, socialists, businessmen, and communists
declared their independence from France and Japan with these words: "ALL MEN ARE
CREATED EQUAL. THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS;
THAT AMONG THESE RIGHTS ARE LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS." Ho Chi
Minh was not only a communist. He was and is considered the George Washington of
Vietnam. Set while the Viet Minh fought for self determination, we were subsidizing the French colonial war. By 1954, we were paying 80% of the military costs
of the war.
When the Geneva Conference began, the United States knew that the Viet Minh
had the support of the people. "I HAVE NEVER TALKED OR CORRESPONDED WITH ANY PERSON
KNOWLEDGEABLE IN INDOCHINESE AFFAIRS WHO DID NOT AGREEE THAT, HAD ELECTIONS BEEN  .
HELD AT THE TIME OF THE FIGHTING, POSSIBLY 80% OF THE POPULATION WOULD HAVE VOTED
FOR THE COMMUNIST HO CHI MINH AS THEIR LEADER...THE MASS OF THE POPULATION SUPPORTED THE ENEMY," (Mandate for Change, p. 372)
So when the Geneva Conference came, we, not the communists, laid a "well-laid
plot", as the State Department calls it, to prevent the Vietnamese people from
gaining their independence under the leaders they had chosen. The victorious Vietnamese had to give up much of what they had won even in the final victory. As Bernard Fall points out, the Viet Minh controlled all of Vietnam down to the thirteenth
parallel, not the seventeenth parallel. The Geneva Agreements clearly made the truce
line at the seventeenth parallel only temporary. Within two years free elections,
supervised by an international control commission, were supposed to be held.
President Johnson didn't tell the American people how we approved of the preventions of those free elections by supporting the declaration of an illegal government in South Vietnam by Ngo Dinh Diem, a man who spent the years of the struggle for
independence in New Jersey, Paris, and Japan. Diem, the first premier of this illegally declared government, lobbied for his office not in Vietnam but in the United
States (see Marvin Gettleman, Vietnam, pp 236-238) . Ho was installed in office on
June 19, 1964, not in Saigon, but in Paris (see Bernard Fall, The l^ro  Vietnams, p.
244). Neither he nor his successor ever achieved office by free elections. The United
States has supported one sham government after another, claiming that these regimes
represent the people of South Vietnam.
President Johnson spoke of a North Vietnamese plot to take over the South . He
would like us to focget the reasons why the people of South Vietnam were finally
driven to revolt in 1959, The reasons for the lack of American success in erecting
an illegal government lay in the nature of the Diem regime. The United States all-
owed it to supress any political opposition to the corruption, venality, brutality,
and nepotism of the government. Diem persecuted, from 19.36 onwards, all who had any
connection with the Viet Minh nationalist movement that had freed the country from
the French, There was widespread discrimination against the Buddhist majority, which
effected appointments within the government and army. Buddhist leaders were threatened with violence and beaten and hunted down; their pagodas ware raided and peasant
members were treated as second-class citizens in comparison with the small minority
of North Vietnamese Catholic refugees. The Diem regime refused to acknowledge the
land reforms of the Viet Minh and proceeded to carry out its own program which fell
far short of the Viet Minh's and which aided and allowed for the restoration of large
numbers of the landlord class which had spent nine years in exile or in the French-
held cities while the peasants fought the French and carried out their own land re e
form program. The old landlord class, not the peasants, became one of the major props
to the Diem regime, (see Gettleman, pp 210-271).
President Johnson then stated that this revolt which soon took an organized
form (The National Liberation Front is the political movement fighting in the south),
would have failed but for North Vietnamese aid. Let us compare American aid to aid
from Communist countries. In financial terms, the United States' aid to the Seigon
government from 1955 until February, 1965, amounted close to five billion dollars,
most of which was spent on military aid. From 1955 to 1965, on the other hand, Russia