The Mutual Defense Assistance Control Act of 1951 was introduced in the Congress by Alabama Representative Laurie C. Battle (1912 - 2000). The legislation banned all American commercial interests from conducting business with the USSR and their satellites; this law was an important part of the Communist containment policy - but it was totally ignored during the era of the Vietnam War by both the Johnson and Nixon administrations:
"Even if our trade with Communists were negligible in both the economic race and propaganda war, it would be highly objectionable on purely moral grounds. It reveals incredible intellectual confusion and moral lethargy. The Soviet Union and its East European satellites are providing more than eighty percent of the strategic war materials used by the Vietnam Communists. At cost of more than one billion dollars a year they keep the war going that is costing us more than one thousand casualties every week and more than $25 billion a year. According to Representative Glenard P. Lipscomb (1915 - 1970) of California, 'practically every American plane that has been shot down over North Vietnam has fallen victim to Soviet-made and Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missiles or anti-aircraft batteries. American planes have been tracked by Soviet radar; American ground forces have been subjected to substantial causalities caused by Soviet and East European equipment; and the Vietcong and North Vietnamese have been supplied in the South by trucks made in these countries."
More article about the Vietnam War can be found here...
