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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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objective reporting by throwing in their own views, views that I agreed with completely but I didn't think really should appear in news accounts. I may have even talked about that to the publisher. The basic fact is that I certainly was greatly influenced in my own views about the evolution of this awful war and more and more that the South Vietnamese government was not the kind of government that the United States should be alarmingly increasing its military support for. The U.S. direction should be the other way. And it was as early as this period that we're talking about, '63 but surely by '64 this really came to a head, when we became more and more explicitly critical of the way Johnson was conducting the war. That's about the best answer I can give to the question you asked.

Q:

I was wondering --

Oakes:

Does it answer your question?

Q:

It answers one part of the question. The other part of the question was if you had any information, say, following [Senator] Mike Mansfield's visit or other fact-finding tours to Vietnam in the early period, if you had any information that there was a split on policy within the administration; if you had any sources outside the Times itself that were confirming that there was indeed disagreement, even in the Kennedy administration; and if you had any contact with that administration or with Kennedy on this issue as you were getting sharper -- more and more sharply critical.

Oakes:

Well, I'm quite sure, from this distance of more than thirty years, I'm quite sure that I was aware of this from the people that I knew. And, although I have no specific recollection and I cannot state to you that I specifically remember it, I did know Mike





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