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Agreement was signed, there was the decision to have the Communists withdraw to the north. That is to say, you go back to where you come from. Those people who wanted to have freedom should go to the south to live, below, that the Americans would not dare to carry the war to the North or to Communist China. So naturally they went on fighting and creating problems for the South. The American people, in the meantime, were quite opposed to the war, . What did this Agreement to Vietnam? We saw all kinds of disadvantages to South Vietnam. After the signing of the Agreement, the Communists continue to bring all kinds of weapons and ammunition into the South

. When did you go South, and how long did you remain there? And how did you feel going South. I went to the South in 1967 and stayed there for 9 years. My feeling was to go there in order to help liberate the South, drive away the imperialists, and regain independence and freedom for the nation. How often did you get news from your family? I arrived in the South in 1967, but it was not until 1969 that I received the first letter

of them, that while the enemy had shown that he could hit a number of South Vietnamese cities, hard, even after years of bombing, and...of search and destroy missions and all the rest of it, that he could still come out...that...that, that was terribly depressing uh, to me, at any rate. But the word came back from the embassy that, in fact, it had been a great victory for our side. The, the enemy had lost these assets, the South Vietnamese, . The cables flowed through from the military headquarters and from the Embassy in Saigon saying that we’re, we have survived, the South Vietnamese have survived, the enemy has suffered a terrible defeat, he made a great

, who made up the South Vietnamese opposition at the end of the Vietnam War? A certain number of people, some of whom were extremely sympathetic, extremely brilliant, honest, patriotic, yet who along with the rest, was that the Republic of Vietnam, South Vietnam- given the position of Thieu's government- was bound to suffer progressive disintegration. Little by little, bit by bit, towards what it was difficult to predict. And in a corner lay, reaction, snowball, which would lead to rapid crumbling of the regime. It was an hypothesis that I always had in mind, because without going too far back into the history of South Vietnam, in 1972 there was a communist

the right and wrong of the US commitment in Vietnam for more than indicated between the '65 and til the end in '75. But, eh, I would like to stress the point of view of a Vietnamese who look at the problem and who happen to have ah participated here in Washington in many of the developments at this time. Let us put aside the problem of right and wrong of the US commitment in South Vietnam. But, from the point of view of the Vietnamese, we would say that we think the US in terms of a responsible great nation whether it was wrong or right, we hoped and we believe strongly by then that the United States would believe as a respectable nation. Suppose that you are wrong by this time, you cannot say after committing the more than half a million troops in South Vietnam and well, putting the whole house in shambles and say that well, we are wrong. Let us ah call it quits and you leave

of Vietnam, South Vietnam would occur, probably by the end of 1965 or early 1966. Ah. We felt that the, the situation in Vietnam was so weak and the, the North Vietnamese exploitation of that weakness was such that they, the victory would have been to the enemy, unless we put substantial U.S. combat forces in to establish a screen behind which something could be built in South Vietnam. We Americans had brought about chaos by the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem - I think the most stupid thing we did in Vietnam. But nonetheless, the fact was ah that we felt that if you put troops, do to the north what they were doing to our friends in the south, and ah, that the vehicle was the bombing. I always thought that the key to the war in Vietnam was in the villages of Vietnam, that to the degree to which the villagers took their own responsibility to protect themselves you would

did not have time to retrieve were also taken to the mass graves. In addition the young people and the prisoners of war who walked with us into the jungle were killed by the American planes along with our cadres. During the period from 1975—1977 when we dug canals and irrigation ditches, we discovered that in the mass graves of the so-called massacre victims there were full of people who were wearing the lotus-shaped hats (Liberation forces) and wearing Liberation forces’ uniforms. This was indeed the devious trick of the neocolonialists. They killed two birds with one, in the south. This and other means were employed through the use of the Law Code no. 10/59 which Diem had decreed. In Hue at that time there was a very infamous place for imprisoning people called the “Nine Tunnels”. Patriots were kept there. When the Diem regime was toppled we went into those tunnels

to President Johnson and all of his advisors. We had been led to believe that uh the Viet Cong were pretty well uh defanged by that period, that uh the pacification program had worked very well, that, uh most of the villages in South Vietnam were secure, and that it was virtually impossible for the Viet Cong, and South Vietnamese troops, though uh, was certainly no surprise. Our military people felt that that uh, we would be able to cope with virtually any eventuality and this proved true in Tet. The Viet Cong casualties were immense. The territory lost to the uh, North Vietnamese, and the Viet Cong during Tet, . This was in '67. He made his trip and he came back. Clark Clifford, having been a very strong advocate of the war effort, made a trip to Vietnam, came back with reports indicating that the South Vietnamese leadership did not ever want the United

Vietnam T-879 Sound Roll 2638 George Ball Special reference tone minus 8 d.b. This is Vietnam T888, WGBH TV Boston. This is May 18, 1981. Sound roll 2638. This is presence only for sound rolls #2636 and #2637, 60 cycle reference tone, 7-1/2 ips. 24 frames per second monorecording. Okay. That's the end of presence. I'll start before you start rolling so you can just say stop. I wanted to start with the Kennedy period and ask you where Vietnam stood on ah...I'm sorry, I have to start again, . I want to jump now on to (clears throat) the period just after the Taylor-Rostow mission at the end of 1961. What was your own reaction to that mission? Taylor-Rostow Mission concluded its visit and came back with a series of reports