Sy Hersh writes an interesting essay about an incident I vaguely remember reading about - the demotion (without court-martial) of Air Force General John Lavelle, the one-time commander of all air operations in Vietnam.
Symour Hersh - Authorizations: Comment: The New Yorker
... In April, 1972, the Pentagon announced that Air Force General John D. Lavelle, the commander of all air operations in Vietnam, was retiring for “personal and health reasons.” In fact, as it became clear over the next two months, he had been relieved of his command and forced to retire—demoted by two ranks—after an internal inquiry determined that he had ordered bombing attacks on unauthorized targets in North Vietnam.
Mr. Hersh concludes:
We have become inured to the vulgarity, deceit, and distrust that mark the Nixon tapes. But the Lavelle incident has a special resonance: in the midst of a disastrous and unpopular war, a President and his closest confederates authorized actions in violation of both the rules and their own stated policies. We’ll never know exactly what has been said in George W. Bush’s Oval Office, but there are parallels with the Nixon White House. One who has come to understand them is Robert Pursley, the Air Force lieutenant general who was Laird’s military assistant. Laird, who will publish a memoir next year, insists, “I did not know they were breaking the rules or lying about coördinates.” Pursley said last week that it was Laird’s office that noticed the increase in bombing missions over North Vietnam and questioned the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the authority used to justify it, which led to the Pentagon’s first, internal inquiry.Pursley also told me, “I believe Lavelle was guilty of poor judgment, but Nixon enhanced the issue by saying, ‘Do what you need to do.’ That’s what’s wrong with us today. The President is just diminishing what holds the military together by saying forget the ethics—we’ll do whatever we have to do. It’s the stuff from which Walter Reed and Abu Ghraib are born.”
Read the whole thing here
Tags: History, /military, /Vietnam_War
