Sarah Paine

Well, the Iranians have never forgotten that.

They're furious to this day.

Wouldn't you be if you're Iranian?

Mosaddegh was democratically elected.

Or another time, actually in Vietnam, we didn't want to hold, we didn't push the South Vietnamese to hold elections because we knew Ho Chi Minh would win.

He was the only national figure in Vietnam.

So the United States is all about free elections.

The Vietnamese could have run a free election and Ho Chi Minh would have won.

That was our assessment that he would win.

Okay.

Well, if you're for free elections, it means you don't get the outcome you want.

You

And I wonder if that wasn't a terrible mistake because the Vietnamese actually can't stand the Chinese.

So they were always going to be a counterbalance to the Chinese.

But due to the McCarthy era, we purged all of our China experts, all these children of missionaries who knew a great deal about China, less so about Vietnam, but at least it's a related cultural group.

So we had gotten rid of all that expertise in the McCarthy era.

So we're running blind in Asia.

Because the South Vietnamese would have voted for him as well.

We've just been fighting a massive war with Japan and Germany.

There's no way we're going to let the Germans and Japanese decide anything initially.