Origins of the Vietnam War

In this program, Daniel Ellsberg discusses early U.S. support for France’s effort to retain control of its Indochina colony. In a little-known and scary fact of history, he describes Eisenhower’s offer of nuclear weapons to the French to stave off defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Within a few years, the U.S. supplanted the French and expanded the war to all of Indochina. Ellsberg looks at Washington’s policy of backing corrupt regimes in Saigon, first by Kennedy and then by Johnson. You’ve probably heard the figure of 58,000 Americans killed in the war. There is scant mention of the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who were victims of U.S. military intervention.

Interview by David Barsamian
Speaker: Daniel Ellsberg
Description from www.alternativeradio.org