Partial Transcription Archimedes Patti: During all the years of the Vietnam War no one ever approached me to find out what had happened in 1945 or in ’44. In all the years that I spent in the Pentagon, the Department of State and the White House, never was I approached by anyone in authority. However, I did prepare a large number, and I mean about, oh, well over fifteen position papers on our position in Vietnam. But I never knew what happened to them. Those things just disappeared, they just went down the dry well, as far as I was concerned, even though I was in a high level position to be able to see that they got to the right people.
For example, when finally in 1973 I started to search for my papers, my documents, and by chance and good offices of the Central Intelligence Agency I was able to find my documents, they were then stored in the CIA files. I found that the documents that I had sent back to the United States in 1945 through our registry office, which at the time was being run by a young lady by the name of Julia McWilliams. Julia McWilliams, by the way, is generally know to the American public as the uh Julia Childs, the uh, the master of culinary art on TV.
The way she had wrapped them and the way that she had packaged them, the way she had sent them was the way I received them in 1973 in the CIA at Langley office. They had never been opened. They [hadn't ever] been looked at. The question rises from time to time as to whether or not the same situation doesn’t apply to Iran, to Afghanistan, to El Salvador, to any other trouble spot in the world. That perhaps there are people who may know the causes that actually led to what followed and have never been approached or asked to give at least, if not their views, at least to give what facts they had. That is a question.
Poster Comment:
Additional interview references on his rendition of Vietnam history, etc., here and here [Full length video with right-sidebar transcription]
FYI ping to All on the above excerpts. Julia Childs ping to the Freedom4um Cookbook subscription list.