10. The US government was caught lying about the Vietnam War
In the 1960s American strategy in Vietnam was focused on attrition – killing more of the enemy than he killed. The strategy evolved because territory in South Vietnam was already, at least on paper, under the control of the government of South Vietnam. Without the seizure of enemy territory as a measure of military success, the much higher death rates of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were substituted. Junior officers in the field and their superiors in both Vietnam and the Pentagon began submitting exaggerated casualty reports, which were reported to the American people via official government releases and the media from the battlefields. That ended when the Pentagon Papers were leaked from the military and revealed the magnitude of the deceptions perpetrated by the government over Vietnam.
The Nixon administration was incensed at the national embarrassment imposed by the release of the Pentagon Papers, which covered the period of the preceding Johnson years, as well as those of American involvement in Southeast Asia going back to 1945. The embarrassment led to the creation of the White House Plumbers, a group of political operatives and security specialists who later participated in assorted illegal activities including the Watergate break-in. In defending the release of the Pentagon Papers Senator Birch Bayh, a Democrat, said, “The existence of these documents, and the fact that they said one thing and the people were led to believe something else, is a reason we have a credibility gap today, the reason people don’t believe the government”. The revelation that the government had lied about the war for decades further split an already divided country.
Read More: 10 Crimes of the Nixon Administration.