Now that McNamara has laid the Vietnam War indictments of himself and LBJ on the table it is time to deal with the other co-conspirators in that war. LBJ is obvious. He fabricated the entire pretext for the war and sent 57,000+ Americans to their deaths and uncounted Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians and who knows who else. The two left are Nixon and Kissinger.
And here we have a problem. The days of LBJ were the days before the shredding machine but also the days before the EPA. And although shredding is great, stirred ashes are even better. That is we do not know what information was passed from the LBJ to the Nixon Administration. As Nixon is dead we have only Kissinger to tell us unless some lower lever person comes forward but then Kissinger can always impugn that statement as being from ignorance.
Unless Kissinger speaks out we may never know if Nixon was aware that LBJ fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It is reasonable to expect that he did and certainly should have asked after the incident but then he was involved in politics as much in those days as was LBJ. It was certainly disloyal in the 1960s to suggest that LBJ would perpetrate deliberate fraud upon the American public.
It was equally "disloyal" not matter how true to suggest that LBJ did not care how many Americans died in his private war.
Consider the 1968 presidential campaign when Nixon had no way to say LBJ created the war from a lie without being considered disloyal. Worse that than, "hate speech," conspiracy talk. If he knew the truth, would anyone have taken him seriously if he had spoken it?
Consider today. There are some people who are saying the US government set off the bomb in Oklahoma City and they are uniformly considered in need of thorazine and a long rest. But then this bombing pales in comparison to the atrocity of the Vietnam war. And in that context, what presidential candidate could say LBJ lied? That is not to excuse Nixon and Kissinger continuing the war but rather there was no political way win the election and tell the truth.
After all, who would elect a conspiracy nut giving out hate speech against LBJ regardless of its truth? Even when the Captain if the "attacked" destroyer went on TV and pointed to one small hole as evidence of a torpedo attack he was believed. When he was safely retired and said he was not aware of any attack he was not generally believed.
Even today, despite McNamara's confession, people are "defending" LBJ by attacking Nixon. There is no question in this matter, LBJ was at least as culpable as Nixon and by any objective evaluation even worse. And if there was full disclosure then both Kissinger and Nixon do indeed deserve the same condemnation save for the one difference, it was politically impossible to announce LBJ and McNamara were liars, frauds and murderers of the first magnitude in those days.
Whether they wanted to do so or not is open to speculation if and unless there is a similar near deathbed confession from Kissinger. So we can not know the depth of the culpability of Nixon and Kissinger unless Kissinger speaks up on this matter. My best guess is that he will and use the McNamara confession and the context of the times as I have suggested.
So in fact we will probably never know the culpability of Nixon and Kissinger in the Vietnam War. And as to speculation in the absence of evidence, anyone can do that, but it is no more than speculation, as is my speculation as to what Kissinger might do.
There is no getting around the fact that the Vietnam Memorial, The Wall, exists today because of four people who are without question responsible for it. Those people are LBJ, McNamara, Nixon and Kissinger. We now know for certain the first two were unquestionably culpable without mitigating circumstances. What we do not know and can only conjecture is if there were mitigating circumstances for the latter two.
But what we do know is, that when we say the government could not be responsible for killing innocent people in Waco or Oklahoma City we know we are living on pious hopes and not reality.