[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 111 (Tuesday, July 11, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H6742]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                    WHAT A DISGRACEFUL DAY TODAY IS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized 
during morning business for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker and my colleagues who may have clicked on the 
floor proceedings in their offices this morning, and to a handful of 
visitors in the gallery, and to the million or so people that track the 
proceedings of this, the world's greatest legislature, over C-SPAN, I 
rose this morning to discuss again that 11 July of 1995 is a 
disgraceful day in the history of our country because the Commander in 
Chief down at the White House in a Rose Garden ceremony--I gag on the 
words a Rose Garden ceremony--is going to extend the honor and the 
dignity of diplomatic relations to the war criminals, the Communist war 
criminals, who sit in power, and oppressive power, in Hanoi. The 
Americans that we left behind in Laos, 499 men shot down, some of them 
captured on the ground, Special Forces men, performing special 
operations, they may still be alive. There is no proof that they are 
not. They may be executed by this deed of infamy in the Rose Garden at 
midday today.
  Last night I did a 1-hour special order. I had Robert Strange 
McNamara's evil book in my hands, this book that the New York Times has 
on the best seller list. Boggles my mind that people would pay money to 
read the words of this man who walked off the battlefield in Vietnam, 
blood dripping from his hands, resigned on February 29, 1968, leap year 
day of that year, probably a deliberate choice of day. Lyndon Johnson 
disgracefully gave Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, the choice of 
when he would resign. He made a speech in Canada in October 1967 saying 
we could not win the Vietnam war, and LBJ, instead of firing him the 
next day, gave him 4 or 5 more months of payroll, and that February 29 
he resigned in a rainy ceremony over on the Mall, had canceled his 
flyby, thank you God, no Air Force veterans of that long struggle in 
Vietnam had to fly by and honor this disgraceful man, and then guess 
where Mr. McNamara went, Mr. Speaker? He went skiing at Aspen and then 
took a diversionary side trip in March 1968 down to the Caribbean, back 
for more skiing at Aspen while the hospitals in Vietnam were filled 
with the broken
 bodies of young Americans, some of them triple and double amputees, 
and I remember one quadruple amputee, all from that massive Tet 
offensive that we won, and Walter Cronkite is writing off our effort to 
LBJ, forcing him to resign or to say he resigned from the Presidential 
campaign on the 30th of March, and Bob McNamara is still skiing at 
Aspen.

  Here is what McNamara said in his book, page 105. I am reading from 
last night's Congressional Record where I inserted this. He writes:

       It is a profound, enduring and universal ethical and moral 
     dilemma: How, in times of war and crisis, can senior 
     government officials be completely frank to their own people 
     without giving aid and comfort to the enemy?

  There is McNamara talking about Hanoi, North Vietnam calling him the 
enemy, and they were, and they still are, and he is talking about 
giving aid to the enemy in Hanoi, comfort to the enemy in Hanoi, and, 
less than 2 years after that, Bill Clinton was in Moscow giving aid to 
the people in Hanoi, giving comfort to the people in Hanoi, giving aid 
and comfort to the Communist forces in Hanoi, and then went down to 
Prague and did it some more. It is unbelievable that of all the human 
beings that should be in the White House, in the Oval Office, in the 
Rose Garden, it is a man who let three high school men go in his place. 
Maybe one of them was this young missing in action American, Jimmy 
Holt, captured February 7, 1968, disappeared into the midst of 
Southeast Asia the very month that McNamara is resigning, and this 
disgraceful book of McNamara is called ``In Retrospect.'' Clinton said 
it vindicates his stand to give aid and comfort to the Communist forces 
in Hanoi. What a disgraceful day today is.

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