You’ve given me a lot to chew on in your post, on the LBJ factoid alone...
You are very welcome, good buddy. It’s true that retired General John “Pete” Piotrowski relayed this accusation in his book, “Basic Airman to General: The Secret War & Other Conflicts: Lessons in Life and Leadership.” The claim that the U.S. notified the North Vietnamese government of airstrikes ahead of time went viral in early 2015 when an excerpt from General Piotrowski’s book appeared in chain emails:
“Nearly twenty years later, I saw former Secretary of State Dean Rusk being interviewed by Peter Arnett on a CBS documentary called ‘The Ten Thousand Day War.’ Mr Arnett asked, ‘It has been rumored that the United States provided the North Vietnamese government the names of the targets that would be bombed the following day. Is there any truth to that allegation?’
“To my astonishment and absolute disgust, the former Secretary responded, ‘Yes. We didn’t want to harm the North Vietnamese people, so we passed the targets to the Swiss embassy in Washington with instructions to pass them to the NVN government through their embassy in Hanoi.”
It should be noted for accuracy that that documentary “The Ten Thousand Day War” was made by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), not CBS, as the email miss-states.