traveling person, i was not in a senior role. and when you are traveling, you got to meet people traveling with her and i felt like i got to know her well. at the same time, i did not have the sources of the campaign and high-level people i have now, and whether that is a function of the time were being in a more senior role. >> sunday night, on c-span. bookshelf features popular writers and heirs on american history tv every weekend at this time. next, associated press staff talk about vietnam war photographs and the state of war photography today. the book, vietnam: the real war - a photographic history by the associated press, contains 300 photos by 50 photographers. the passage in california posted

this event. for the first few minutes we will see a slideshow. >> hello, i am tina with book passage. thank you for coming. i was a child during the vietnam war, really. i was living in turkey while my dad was reporting for armed forces radio. he remembers the war much more vividly than i do. but for both my dad's generation and for mine, the war is preserved for our reflection and study. it's history in words and images captured by some of the most impressive journalists on the planet, the associated press. over the time of the vietnam war, ap won 6 pulitzer prizes for coverage, or both stories and breaking news photography. some of the greatest names in war correspondence staffed the ap bureau, malcolm brown, peter arnett, nick ut, george esper, eddie adams, just to name a few.

ap's photo coverage from the vietnam war constitutes more than 25,000 images, now it is almost the 50th anniversary of the war and ap has put together the first-ever collections of these images to tell the story of the conflict in vietnam. the book, vietnam: the real war, which of course i am blocking, a photographic history by the associated press, is a collection of 300 of these images. we are thrilled tonight to have some of the ap correspondents joining us, as well as current photographers who have covers red modern-day wars to talk about these images from vietnam. they are pulitzer prize winning correspondent, peter arnett. he covered the vietnam war. [applause] >> he was with ap for 13 years. julie jacobson, who has worked as a photographer for the associated press since 2001 and has covered everything from the olympics to wars.

[applause] >> she has been embedded multiple times with u.s. forces in afghanistan and iraq. santiago lyon. [applause] >> director of photography for the associated press and responsible for global reporting and hundreds of photographers and photo editors worldwide who produce it. if you take pictures, you want to suck up to that guy. and nick ut, who was born in vietnam. [applause] >> he joined ap in saigon at the age of 14 years old. this was after his brother, who is also an accomplished ap photographer was killed during the war. nick is best known for the iconic photo he took of a nine-year-old running naked and badly burned from a misdirected south vietnamese air raid. he won a pulitzer prize for that photo. many of the photos in the book were taken by nick. it is an impressive and exciting panel of journalists, whose experience total decades and are

collected in some small part in this wonderful book. help me give a warm welcome to the photographers. [applause] nick: we are going to run through some pictures here and then have a conversation and then we will open it up some questions for everybody.

>> you cannot see the end of the date there. nick: ok. [applause]

[applause] nick: clearly an extraordinary set of images from the book, which is what we are gathered here today to talk about this evening. i thought it might be useful to put this work into a little bit of context, with the ap's history. for those not familiar with the associated press, it is a not-for-profit cooperative news organization founded in 1846, during the mexican-american war as a way for newspapers to share the costs and logistics of coverage of that conflict. and the ap since 1846 has covered just about every conflict known to man, so we have a very intimate and long-standing relationship to warfare and armies and conflict around the world. the cooperative is owned by about 1500 u.s. newspapers and they pull their resources together through the fees that

they pay us, the access to the content, and sharing of their own content, to provide a news agency that is unparalleled in global reach, bureaus, just about every country you can name, a never ending stream of photographs and text and video and audio and interactives. it is a real institution in the world of journalism. the coverage of vietnam was extraordinary. because of the commitment that the ap made to covering the story and the dedication of the journalists assigned to vietnam, many of whom stayed there for years upon years, quite different to the way that stories are covered today. today, journalists are typically assigned for tours of anywhere between six weeks and two months.

journalists who covered the vietnam war for ap would stay for many years and as a result they gained the very intimate knowledge of what was going on in the country, who the players were, how to access things and this was coupled with an extraordinary dynamic that existed then, which facilitated access to journalists in a way that has probably never been seen in warfare and possibly won't be seeing again, which is to say journalists could show up at military bases and essentially is the pilot of the helicopter or airplane that they wanted to travel on was willing and most of the time they were, they could jump on a helicopter and go to where the action was, photograph, jump in another helicopter, come back. drop some film off and go back the next day if they felt like it. depending on what was going on. that level of access is

different than the level of access that you have today, possibly because the flow of information around the world is so much faster and so much more voluminous now than i was then, that the protagonists of many stories nowadays seek to control the information in a much more direct and demanding way. whereas in the vietnam era, it was quite a different dynamic. so i thought i would start off with a brief conversation here with my fellow panelists before opening it up to questions. tina informed us that the questions here tend to be good and robust and frequent and animated and thoughtful and precise, so that is what we are counting on you all to do. when we stop talking. i thought i would kick it off by asking the panel if they have a particular photograph in the

book, perhaps one of the ones we just saw projected, perhaps not, that they would like to talk to, either because it meant something to them personally, or it works for them on some level. i thought i would start with the dean of the panel, mr. arnett. peter: thank you very much. it is my pleasure to be here in your community. my daughter lives nearby, so i am a visitor to this area and i will be back in this bookstore again. next week, i will be staying another week. having said that, i was one of those who spent a lot of time in vietnam. i went there at age 26, 1962. i stayed for nine years, living there, i got married there and had two children there and kept going back until the fall of saigon.

and i stayed with two other ap colleagues. that was until after the communists took over. you might say, that sounds crazy, but in the era i started being a journalist, in the 1950's, it was not uncommon for american correspondents to be away from home for three years, i would be based in tokyo, be based in afghanistan, or delhi, and he tried to run by ships in the 1950's. this was an era, the vietnam era, you have to think of it as a former period of time. the pictures that were taken in vietnam were simple film processed in a dark room and , andby radio photo sometimes to send one little 6x4 picture -- and it was, you just don't have the kind of facilities available to

everyone, photographers like julie, today. but there was another factor in place, that in the u.s. tradition of war coverage, the military and the u.s. government had a lot of influence and what appeared in magazines and on radio and on television. so as the vietnam experience began, the u.s. president starting with president eisenhower, president kennedy in particular, and president johnson, they made it their job to lobby intensely with american newspaper editors and television directors, to shape the image coming out of vietnam. now, because of the nature of american commitment, there is still not war being clear, it

was a limited engagement. they went with advisers and then troops and smaller groups finally becoming a large army. this was never a conflict in which the u.s. government felt it could impose the kind of censorship that was common in world war ii, world war i and korea. the censorship, they would be obligated to run photographs and written material past sensors, also publishers at home would be patriotico take a look at what was going on in a conflict like the anon or in overseas commitment. in 1962, ito vietnam was joined by a group of young american journalists, it was

brown,at that time, mel others, all graduates from ivy league universities. i was the first to actually reportingcrop of news and they took a much more pragmatic approach to what was going on in vietnam. they cover the civil rights movement, the development, in the american south. others had been in africa. we all had military training, we had spent a couple of years in the military, so the vietnam conflict as it began, you had people who knew a lot about the world, about the military, and had taken a healthy view of the role of journalists as being challenging to government or

authority, that was understood as the tradition of a journalist, challenging authority, to see what was really going on. it was that environment that the pictures and news started coming out of the anon. -- vietnam. we discovered that the vietnamese we met were very candid about what they were facing. and the soldiers who are younger than us, they were very candid about what they saw and felt, therefore we felt we were getting a clear picture of what was emerging as the conflict grew in size. our vision from the scene deferred from what the kennedy administration was hoping for and definitely from the johnson administration. 1962, he kennedy in

phoned the new york times and becauseat we come back, he thought that reporting was dangerous to national security. and president johnson approached the ap executives to have me removed from the war area. and there were lots of other influences on publishers, particularly on television owners, important owners of networks. it was in this environment that the news product, the written and photographic product, emerged. there was a matter of controversy from the beginning, we saw a picture earlier of a buddhist monk committing suicide by fire in saigon in 1963. that was a picture that helped

shape president kennedy's view that the government in vietnam, that we had supported, had not done in adequate job. i was later told that he had gone to the oval office to get his last instruction before appointed ambassador to vietnam, the washington post was open on the desk and there is a picture of a pretty monk on the front page and kennedy says, you have to go over and change things, we cannot let this happen again. interestingly enough, the new york times did not publish the photograph. they had the story. they did not publish the photograph of the burning monk, meaning that editors in the u.s. were conscious of the nature of the images and about the controversy, which brings me to the question cd-rw asked --

santiago asked about my favorite pictures. favorite is not the right word. if i could pick any picture, i would look at them in a way that emotionsthem, but my are far more deeper and sad -- it was the set of photographs taken by a great photographer, a inman, who began taking them a 1963-1964. he spent a lot of time with south vietnamese troops in the delta of the southern part of the anon and -- vietnam, and in deep jungles. he would go out with american advisers. he was coming back with pictures of enormous brutality and -- brutality committed against the

vong --the enemies farmers -- ietnamese farmers. these military operations were painted as being necessary to thed out the viet cong, group that was plotting against the government. but in fact, what was happening, whole villages were being laid to waste. there was one picture in particular in the book, that shows a farmer holding the body of a child. palm had stripped skin from the body and the farmer was holding the body of soldiers who were just interestingly -- d

isinterestly looking at it. they moved on. there were many photographs of the terrible agony inflicted on local people and that remains with me as important, because it in the -- illustrated the punishment that local people were taking in the war. secondly, the indifference of the allies in the war at that population andhe what was seen as a civil war, but with the communists said was a people's war, but we should have known from the french experience, but -- that the role of supporting the hierarchy in government that won the war against the french. so this pictures that were taken, which got him the pool surprise, remained in my memory. another point, when that photographer arrived back at the

bureau and he developed film and brought out the prince, -- the director of the associate press was there and he looked at them. he said they were shocking. i know that in his heart of hearts, having been a reporter in world war ii and is subject to censorship, he had some indecision about the pictures, he had the authority to say, let's hold these for a while, we do not -- they didn't have to put them on the wire, but what he said to me was, we are going to use those pictures, but i want you to write a story talking about the pictures, pointing out that the viet cong also commit atrocious -- atrocities, at least try to balance it. i did it, but there is no way to

balance the power of those pictures. they went on to win the pullets are -- pulitzer prize . nick: julie, when you look at the pictures in the book, are there any that jump out to you or anything you would care to share with us about the work in the book. julie: there were a couple of pictures that jumped out at me, the cover photo of the book. for aof a squad waiting helicopter to land and pick up the wounded. timei was in iraq, i spent on evacuation helicopters, so despiteped out at me, the different environments, vietnam, afghanistan.

nothing has changed. i remember looking down from the helicopter before we landed and there were guys looking up just like that. just like we were the saviors dropping from the sky, to pick up the guys. it brought back memories, i do not know what year that was, maybe 1968. do the math, it is not matter, 50 years later it is the same scenario, same expressions on their faces, same emotions running through. the other photo that jumped out at me was, i believe it was up here, it was civilians in a ditch and i think it was water and that struck me because, while covering the war in afghanistan, i was embedded with u.s. troops and i was always

very curious about how war affected people in that country where it is fought. mostly about the civilians who were not necessarily -- who were noncombatants. it made me realize when i saw it, there is something lacking in the pictures i made, i didn't have access to the populations because of the cultural differences. a lot of women and children are behind walls and when they come out my they are wearing burqas. or do not see their eyes emotions. i remember being frustrated about that in afghanistan especially, in iraq we had a little more access. so those two images jumped out for those reasons, but i always wished i had a chance to get because i walls,

wanted to sort of bring together, you know, people's thoughts and feelings as things were happening, we are all the same. you look at these people and you think, that can be anybody, and iraqi, and american, anybody. nick: thank you. one of the pictures in the book that is hardly one of the most iconic pictures to come out of the war was the photograph of the young girl running down the ,ighway, covered in napalm screaming as a result of the pain she was in. nick took that picture and i thought it would be interesting if he shared with us what happened that day and what happened afterwards. i had heard a story about

the viet cong on the highway. i was there in the early morning, they were beaten in mind -- the enemies -- vietnamese refugees. i take a lot of pictures of the refugees. this is on winning. -- all morning. to be there too long. soldiers. when i came back to the highway, i saw a south the enemies soldier with a grenade. [indiscernible] bombs, twoopped to

explosions. first we did not know it was nepalm. comei saw the palm -- bomb up, i saw people running and blackman. i thought, oh my god. there was a little boy in front of the camera. lookedthe picture and i and i saw the naked girl. i asked, what happened? i saw her body burnt so badly. i didn't want her to die. i had water that i put on her body. --

[inaudible] [indiscernible] screaming in my car the whole time, i think i am dying. i told her, we will be to the hospital soon. when we got to the hospital, nobody wanted to help her. there were so many bodies of soldiers. i showed my media pass. then they all ran up. nurse ora doctor or anything, but i wanted to help the little girl first before i ran back to the ap office. i know i have a good picture that day. but too many people not helping the little girl.

when i got to the office, i showed my picture. i wanted to send it right away. peter: i was in the bureau when it -- nick came with the pictures. and someone said, they will not use this picture with a naked child and there was a debate within the bureau, whether it would be sent to new york, considering the moral aspects of it. -- was in charge of the photo production. he said no, new york will

receive this. when you write a story, the picture will go with it. and in new york, there was a debate about the usage of the picture, but it was sent out and it was widely published, i do believe. to some degree, but widely published. nick: the next morning, we went shotto the village and i the mother who was running around looking for the daughter. i told her, she is in the hospital. taxi there.a peter: the wonderful part of the story is that nick continue to be interested in that young child, helped her and the family in the course of the three years

left of the war. operationhe whole closed, but he later picked up her story when she moved to cuba for extra treatment and they kept in touch, they are now close friend and they go to conferences together. it is a wonderful story of how a photographer goes from taking the picture, to actually doing something positive about the victims of the photographs, it is not such an unusual story. has: now she is married and two children and lives in canada. nick: we can open it up to questions now. santiago: maybe people want to ask questions about war in general. >> i am interested in

photography, in new york i used to be at icp and i heard famous photographers talk about the pictures they took. my question is, is there a different approach as a war photographer than a traditional photographer, other than the obvious stages, is there a different approach or does it depend on the photographer? santiago: julie? julie: good question. dangers,n the physical you are limited in war on how you can cover things, some blue because you are not free -- simply because you are not free to move around on assignment. your approach to people is pretty much the same, you treat

everybody with respect, compassion, you are always trying to put yourself in the other person's shoes. you are always trying to find balance in your reporting to make sure that you are fair, that your education -- interpretation is balanced. when i talked about not having access to the women and children in afghanistan, to me, that is an imbalance, but that is nothing i can do something about. at home, you have more access. no, i mean, i think in general, other than looking out for yourself or looking out for people around you while you are there, that is another thing you need to take into account. for the most part, you approach assignments not as assignments,

people. way of meeting the story is about the people you are covering, regardless of whether it is war or something a home. there is something out there, sometimes i tell friends and me,eagues that at least for is less about the competition when i am covering conflict. it is more about getting the story out. especially if you are embedded and you have other journalists with you from other news organizations, you -- your priority is more looking out for each other and making sure that everybody is safe. safety is always first, so that respect, that is different. and you are looking out for people you are with, whether it is soldiers or civilians, you realize you are all human beings.

santiago: i might add that in covering conflict, obviously the stakes are high in the sense that your life is often in danger. the scenes you are photographing our dramatic, people are dying or living the worst moments of their lives and it is your job to photograph them anyway that tells a story, but that also preserves their dignity, if possible. the conversation of all those things -- combination of all those things, photography has a strong element to it. photojournalism has a creative element to it, but also journalistic element. a lot of what you do in covering these stories, you concentrate on telling a story as

effectively as possible, there's a much invested in being there, so to wait for that opportunity by merely making aesthetically pleasing pictures would possibly defeat the purpose. so there is a strong tendency and perhaps this is an obvious thing to say, there is a tendency to focus on the guts of the story and communicate that. it is very mission driven. the common factor you hear when you talk to photographers who have gone to conflict or gone to cover wars, they are extraordinarily focused and driven because they believe that their work has value. now, it is debatable the power of photography, some people argue it can influence things,

others say it is a waste of time , there is a value in it, in the sense that without it we would not know what is going on and we would make the notion of impunity that much more powerful. by witnessing what is going on in situations where no one else wants to be, we are stripping the excuse of impunity away from people who do these terrible things, whether they are politicians, militias, whoever it is. anything to add? governmentink the role in conflict is an important factor. is unique, vietnam because the u.s. government did not get around to imposing limits on the media.

1967, whened in someone was asked about the media complaining constantly, why didn't you impose censorship? he answer, censorship is too important a decision to make that influence is so much else of how a country functions, we do not feel that vietnam is a big enough war to do it, but they were unwilling really to censor the war or impose censorship, because johnson and others kept believing it was a limited war. lyndon johnson had his other domestic policy ideas. having said that, the military much prefers a controlled environment and that basically goes back to the american civil war when photographers were all

over the battlefield and took the most heart-wrenching pictures you'll ever see. and in world war i and one or two, strict censorship prevailed. these are both sides. there was propaganda from the nazis that ordered thousands of german media people not to take a photograph of any german soldier. do not take the photograph. the american government decreed there would be no photograph of dead americans published, until 1943, when roosevelt listed the order, because he was concerned about cynicism growing about the propaganda images they kept saying in the newspaper. was clearmory of this during the vietnam war.

today, there is the embedding , is controlling. when it is exercised in its entirety, photographers would not be allowed to take pictures of wounded or dead americans, but we know that julie did, but generally you are not allowed near the bodies of american troops. in addition, an important part of war coverage is the written. putting the picture into a context that is meaningful. and if journalists in the embedded system, the ability to ideas within the --itary, they just would not i was embedded several times and they would not let me talk to the intelligence chief of a unit in iraq, it was difficult to get

the kind of information that would make understanding clearer . i think the media was hardly credit -- highly criticized in the second gulf war, because they were perceived to go along with george bush's invasion policies. in fact, the new york times apologized not infrequently about the nature of the coverage. positive than the public deserves. santiago: any more questions? approach to add, my commitment level of is raised, because there is so much more at stake. the process, you are with those guys for 3-4 weeks, sometimes

longer and you get to know them, so you are emotionally invested. there is always a line you draw, at least i do, i am not going to be home for christmas dinner, you get to know them as human beings. every time i left, i felt guilty. i felt, the way that they expressed, not enjoyment but there approval of having me means having me there people to see what it is like their and when i left it felt like taking a voice away. how long you would be there, you didn't know. i hope that answers your question. thank you all.

allks for what you are doing. my question dovetails into what nick did for the little girl, thank you for that. and peter said, these stories are not uncommon, these things happen and we do not always hear about them. my question is, being in the horrific and is having a camera, i would imagine they look at you as a family face, a hopeful face, someone they can connect to outside of the madness. i am wondering, what is that like for you all and have you had challenges with that and how you developed europe or -- your havert, how is it when you --ldren, the mothers coming =

it. peter, you are in how is it for you and for them? ap in vietnam, we had the enemies -- vietnames photographers, they were vietnamese the community. because of their friendliness and determination, they were accepted with american troops also. feel think, how did you about being in the military. , we didn't have any trouble with anything we covered. i think the soldiers, they were

lonely. ush the media, they wanted to take their picture. [indiscernible] we took a lot of pictures and i never had trouble with soldiers, they are happy to have the photo. julie's comment really resonated with me. you go with these units and they get to like you, that was exactly the experience in vietnam. it was said at the time or after the war that the press and military were fighting each other and the military said, we will never have the press back. at one level, there was great distrust of the media. while at several levels.

the political level, the white house level, the pentagon brass, they were not happy with looking at pictures like nick with taking. and other reporters. why were they unhappy? not because they were an , theate -- an adequate chief and said, do anything you like as long as it is the truth. if you make a mistake, we cannot protect you. we were protected, but they said, we want the truth. but the truth hurts. the kennedy of ministers in, the johnson administration, the nixon and ministers in, they were prevailing among publishers and news directors to disregard material. at the level of the soldier, wrote,ds of stories i and i was out three weeks every

with marines, end lvary, there was rarely an incident where you are criticized by soldiers. they felt your presence was a part of how america fights wars. the beloved report of world war wrotet road about -- about american soldiers with great sensitivity and his impact died in theact field. to this day, i go to reunions of military units. last night, we were at the marine memorial, where they put us up. great accommodations, there were a lot of marines there and they

were very supportive of the book and of reporting. so, from what i experienced, soldiers like to have us around them, somehow it connects them with the real world. >> thank you. peter: anything more to add? that is ok. think -- thank you, all of your coverage is great. , you are operating on one side which may have some control of the news coverage, then you have the communist side, which was pretty repressive on any kind of information. so, especially like in cambodia,

there was an instance where nick a river port, it was bombed by mistake by the americans and it got a lot of coverage. you have the -- who are totally , into and they snuck in power, they were there and i don't think that the media had given the american people -- they took over and they immediately emptied the city. i think that was the first idea most americans had that these people were killers. some ally had told us all along that they had been killers. so when you're covering one side and you have photographs representative of proof, but on the other hand, on the other

side, they totally control the media. their brutalities are covered up that is maybe a crazy idea. ,eter: you are absolutely right there is a difference between a democratic of government -- form of government and the dictatorships the government is against. as far as the public was concerned, the enemies communist communists, we call them terrorists. they were terrorists who were attacking government outposts. we know now that they were actually organized, political, legitimate forces fighting for nationalist causes. but the whole fence during that

-- sense during that era was that communists were bad, we didn't need pictures of these atrocities, we were told they were doing this local time. the sense about government, why was america in vietnam? to save the country from the terrible, violent, communist people and advanced the spread throughout asia and eventually to san diego. it was not up for us, not our job to talk about the other side. our government was doing that. picturesthe kind of and reporting we did reflected the view that many americans that were within the anon -- vietnam at the time, the

military, the embassies. ,he reason i know this is true said, we were working for the associated press and we had television subscribers and radio stations, so every picture we took and every story that i and other reporters wrote, appeared in american newspapers. if we mentioned a local name or address, certainly not newspaper would headline -- that newspaper would headline it. the first people we were riding , the soldiersut knew exactly what we were riding -- writing and photographing. knew what weew --

were doing, they saw our news product. it was very were denied -- rare we were denied entry into a unit, maybe half a dozen times and they were for reasons may be a misinterpretation. but from the soldier's point of view, we were telling the real story of the war, the struggle, the difficulties, the kind of policies that were not making headway that exceed thousand americans deserved -- 60,000 americans deserved. santiago: you are asking about trying to get as many sides of the story, generally as many sites as possible, and i think that a lot of news organizations nowadays strive to do that. for example, in afghanistan and

iraq, there were very robust network of local journalists, photographers, videographers covering aspects of the story that were impossible for western journalists to cover, because it was too dangerous. so it is that kind of comprehensive coverage that gives a balance of what is going on. i think often, for whatever becomes impossible to tell certain sides of the story, because it is too dangerous. i think the coverage we saw out takeover was minimal to nonexistent, because it was impossible for westerners to operate their and -- there and there was no independent journalism. if you look at syria today, it

is in store nearly difficult - -extraordinarily difficult story to cover. over the course of last year, it journalists to send to cover the story, very carefully planned, but in the last year or so, it has become impossible because of the various rebel groups who have started to abduct foreign journalists. there are as many as 18 foreign journalists who have been kidnapped in syria, some of whom have been made public, but it has changed the whole equation. essentially has made it off-limits for independent journalism to tell what is going on there and as a result, the only information coming out of a

country like syria is agenda driven information that is being provided by activist groups on the ground. it is the job of journalists to verify and validate that information and to use it to tell a story, but it is a far cry from looking at it with your own eyes. it shifts the way we see a story when the situation on the ground is too hazardous, because as brave as journalists are in covering stories, there comes a point where it is suicidal. where if you go to these places, you will almost certainly be and quiteabducted reasonably, no story is worth a life. so you have this >> it has been 50 years since

vietnam. make and peer have obviously incredible insights into what went down at the time but also in 50 years of reflection, you retrospectpinions in regarding the vietnam war. i would be interested to hear a couple of your comments about that. >> that is a big subject. 50 years ago, i would feel too old to answer that. ended.s ago, the war how do you feel about the war, nick? it worth america going to

your country to help your people create a free society? so many people died. the children, bombed. why when i took a heture of the napalm -- helped me become a refugee. i am happy with the visa. >> you asked me that we don't have the time. --tarted collecting books there were not many books available in english during the

1960's. today there are 30,000 titles available on amazon in english about vietnam. of those titles comes up with a theory about the war. i live in orange county these days near little saigon. very successfully, they own restaurants and theirf businesses and children are well-educated. to a person, they will tell you that the war should have been won thing that the americans should have done more. they realize and they will admit

that there were weaknesses within their own government. they feel that they were worth supporting longer defend and support came. i don't agree with that viewpoint because i feel that the u.s. had already done much say president eisenhower or president kennedy ever foresaw. had reason that vietnam was what they called a domino that had to be held at, if it had fallen, neighboring with it andght fall that would mean they were be a communist push into southeast asia. eisenhower and kennedy had that idea. kennedy agreed to a peace laos.ment in

an important ambassador negotiated that deal. , who had ideas to develop the green beret, the great heroic force that essentially was fighting the early wars in vietnam, even he, towards the end of his third term, had ordered a withdrawal. strikes me that kennedy was seeing the american effort to try to create a government that would have the kind of values that america could support, a performnt that could the kind of military and makership capabilities to

a new south korea which was being talked about. they just didn't have it. the overthrowed of the current president, november, 1963. engineer that. president kennedy himself unfortunately was to be assassinated three weeks later. you have, historically, an opportunity that early 10 maybe prevent the tremendous loss of american and vietnamese life that followed the administration of president johnson and minddent nixon, bearing in that as many americans died under president makes an as did under president johnson, so, early on, my colleague david

wrote that this was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. i didn't necessarily agree with now10 but i agree with him and i doubt that even an extended american effort could have forestalled an ultimate nationalist victory, a nationalist victory in vietnam would have meant the supremacy of the major force in vietnam at that time and today which was the communist party. >> thank you, peter. thank you for coming this evening. we will be hanging around for a little while to have a chat. thank you. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015]

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