NSA bosses feared releasing Gulf of Tonkin intel would draw ''uncomfortable comparisons'' with Iraq

[Octafish]

34. From John Pilger...

Ho Chi Minh was the antithesis of other emerging communist leaders in one respect: he wanted his people to open themselves out to other societies, communist, capitalist and non-aligned. Like Tito in Yugoslavia, he knew that this was the only way his people could survive as a national entity. Indeed, so anxious was Ho for American support for his fledgling republic that he addressed twelve separate appeals to President Roosevelt, to his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Major Patti (a U.S. government liaison officer, working for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA) later wrote that Ho “pleaded not for military or economic aid”,

...but for understanding, for moral support, for a voice in the forum of western democracies. But the United States would not read his mail because, as I was informed, the DRV Government was not recognised by the United States and it would be “improper” for the President or anyone in authority to acknowledge such correspondence. (DRV stood for Democratic Republic of Vietnam, later known colloquially by the Americans as “North Vietnam”.)

...As for relations with the Soviet Union, Ho had spent fifteen years in Moscow and expressed himself well aware of the tenuous and highly conditional nature of Soviet “friendship”. He told Patti, “I place more reliance on the United States to support Vietnam’s independence, before I could expecet help from USSR.”

— John Pilger, Heroes, (Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.180 - 181

SOURCE: http://www.globalissues.org/article/402/media-propaganda-and-vietnam

PS: I am truly sorry on the loss of your father and the suffering he must have experienced. Thank you for sharing, gopiscrap.