Richard Elfers, a former Armstrong Church of God member writes for The Courier Herald in Enumclaw, Washington. He mentions his time in Armstrongism in relation to his story on John f Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson.
Kennedy, Johnson, and America’s “best and brightest”
The year was 1975. I had just received my master’s in history from Pepperdine University in Central L.A. I had also just left the religious cult I had been involved with since I was a teenager in 1963. Traveling home to Renton from Pasadena, California, in my 1963 American Motors Ambassador station wagon with all my worldly possessions packed in the back, I had a lot to think about.
A few months earlier I had read David Halberstam’s book, “The Best and the Brightest.”
“Published in 1972, it’s the definitive account of the decision-making process that led to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, written while the war was still being fought.” (Shapiro, David. “Geopolitical Futures”, March 5, 2019)
Halberstam’s book dramatically changed my rather cloudy thinking about the Vietnam War and the Federal government. It was as if scales fell from my eyes and I saw reality from an entirely different perspective.
The cult, the Worldwide Church of God, led by Herbert W. Armstrong, was anti-war. I was classified as an “IV-D” divinity student on my draft deferment. The WCG, as we called it, paradoxically favored the Cold War interpretation of the Vietnam conflict as a war against godless communism. Implicit in that stand was the belief in the domino theory myth: If Vietnam fell to the Communists, all of Southeast Asia would fall, too, all the way through the rest of Asia to Europe.Read the complete article here.