Firing Line With William F. Buckley: Secretary Dean Rusk- 'The Revisionist Historians (1974)'

Source:Firing Line With William F. Buckley- with former Secretary of State Dean Rusk (1961-69)

"Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Revisionist Historians. Episode S0123, Recorded on January 23, 1974."

From Firing Line With William F. Buckley

"Dean Rusk is, I suppose," Mr. Buckley begins, "by everyone's reckoning the

principal historical victim of the Vietnam War"--reviled by the elite press and the

revisionist historians and exiled, as his Ivy League friends see it, to the wilds of Georgia. He is, however, unbowed: "Well, legitimate historians are always in the process of revising history, whether it's based upon new archaeological finds or some documents of the 19th century that crop up. But I don't believe that we should roll over and play dead just because someone writes a political tract and calls it history." A rich discussion starting with the beginnings of the Cold War, moving to the early days of the Kennedy Administration--when Cuba and Berlin and, soon, Vietnam were all clamoring for attention--and on to the American campus of today."

From The Hoover Institution

I think what I'm getting from Bill Buckley in this interview here with former JFK and LBJ Secretary of State Dean Rusk (1961-69) is that he's interested in what I guess left-wing (Far-Left, really historians) historians takes on important and controversial events in American history. And he was trying to get Secretary Dean Rusk to talk about that and what the Secretary was doing was essentially trying to dodge Buckley's jabs about these left-wing historians.

A good case to talk about when you're talking about so-called left-wing historians and leftists (Socialists and Communists) in America, as well as anti-government Libertarians (if not Anarchists) and their take on a major historical event in America, is of course the JFK assassination. Almost 60 years later you still have a faction of leftist Americans and anti-government Libertarians who'll never accept the official report of the Warren Report about the JFK assassination, no matter how many facts and how much evidence you throw at these people.

You literally have leftists in America who can't accept that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, simply because L.H. Oswald was a Socialist. And they say that Socialists don't murder people. Apparently unaware and perhaps never heard of Soviet Russia or Communist China or Communist Korea, Nazi Germany, etc. Even though it was Oswald's gun that shot President Kennedy. The bullets that killed JFK came from Oswald's gun. The shots came from where Oswald was and where he was working at the time of the assassination. Oswald had motive, opportunity, and the ability to assassinate JFK when he was in Dallas that day in 1963.

As long as there is money to be made and fame to gain off the backs of controversial, historic events in American history, you're going to have people try to make as much money and gain as much fame as they can off of those events regardless of the facts and they'll let the facts be dammed. Roger Stone on the Right and his own bullshit (to be frank) book at the JFK assassination is a perfect example of that, where he argues that Vice President Lyndon Johnson ordered the JFK assassination, is a perfect example of that.

This is just one of the consequences of having a First Amendment and a constitutional right to free speech in America, as well as a private enterprise economic system. And I wouldn't have it any other way as a Liberal. What honest Americans need to do and our educators need to do is separate the facts from the fiction and make sure as many Americans are aware of them as possible. 

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