An election a US president delayed that cost thousands of American lives

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With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2020

This morning, in a tweet I think was designed, in part, to upstage the funeral of John Lewis, President Trump suggested that the November presidential election be postponed. He wants to stop the election because current polling indicates that he would lose, and lose big, if the election is held as scheduled. Since that tweet, many commentators have said that never before in US history has a president had the audacity to suggest such a thing. This is true, as long as we are talking specifically about US presidential elections, but it is worth remembering that a US president not only championed, but engineered, the postponement of an election with catastrophic results.

In 1954, the Vietnamese independence and reunification movement led by Ho Chi Minh, a communist, won a decisive victory over the French colonists at Dien Bien Phu. In the peace negotiations that followed, the Vietnamese were promised an election in 1956 to decide who would lead a unified Vietnam. When 1956 came around, US President Eisenhower, and his administration, forced the postponement of that election because the CIA reported that if the election was held as scheduled, Ho Chi Minh would win with 80% of the vote. The result was a civil war in Vietnam that quickly morphed into a US war against Vietnam that cost 58,000 American lives, and more than 3 million Vietnamese lives, before Vietnam was finally reunited under the party Ho Chi Minh had led, he died in 1969, in 1975, 19 years after the cancelled election. The New York Times reported on this in 1971:

In July, 1955, under the provisions of the Geneva agreements, the two zones of Vietnam were to begin consultations on the elections scheduled for the next year.

But Premier Diem refused to talk with the Communists. And in July, 1956, he refused to hold elections for reunification. He asserted that the South Vietnamese Government had not signed the Geneva accords and therefore was not bound by them.

American scholars and government officials have long argued over whether the United States was responsible for Mr. Diem's refusal to hold the elections and therefore, in a sense, whether Americans had a role in turning the Communists from politics back to warfare.

Connivance by U.S. Denied

The Pentagon study contends that the “United States did not—as it is often alleged—connive with Diem to ignore the elections. U.S. State Department records indicate that Diem's refusal to be bound by the Geneva accords and his opposition to pre‐election consultations were at his own initiative.”

But the Pentagon account also cites State Department cables and National Security Council memorandums indicating that the Eisenhower Administration wished to postpone the elections as long as possible and communicated its feelings to Mr. Diem. ...More.

Diem was a US puppet. US President Kennedy would have him assassinated and replaced on 2 November 1962, only 20 days before Kennedy would meet with the same fate.

I raise this today because it is an important cautionary warning of the high costs that can accrue when democracy is delayed.

For more on the US misadventures in Vietnam, see my documentary Vietnam: American Holocaust, now available on Amazon Prime Video.

Clay Claiborne