Emergency Anti War Convention - Philadelphia

“Come senators, congressmenPlease heed the call

Don’t stand in the doorway

Don’t block up the hall

For he who gets hurt

Will be he who has stalled

There’s a battle outside

And it’s ragin’

It’ll soon shake your windows

And rattle your walls

For the times they are a changin’.” – Bob Dylan, 1963 

That’s right, folks, nineteen hundred and sixty-three.  I was thirteen years old and I was told that the big bad communists in North Vietnam just shot at one of our destroyers.  I was told that, if we didn’t fight back, the North Vietnamese were going to take over Democratic South Vietnam and then Laos, Cambodia, Burma, The Philippines and even New Zealand and Australia would fall! 

After misleading the American people about the phantom attack on the American destroyer Maddox in The Gulf of Tonkin, Lyndon Johnson went so far as to proclaim, “If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we'll be fighting in Hawaii and next week we'll have to fight in San Francisco.” 

My god, people, what in the hell does this sound like to you!  Does this not reek of “if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them over here.”? 

What I wasn’t told when I was thirteen was that the very same commander who reported being attacked by the North Vietnamese in The Gulf Of Tonkin on August 4, 1964, Captain John Herrick, retracted his original report after further investigation. 

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