Word: ellsbergs
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...when Ellsberg enlisted in the Marines, he was an ardent Cold Warrior who fully accepted Korea as a case of collective security. "I was not impressed, as I should have been, when Truman ignored Congress, sending planes and troops there," he says. Today he realizes that it was not "an act of courage but an impeachable offense for which he should have been impeached...
...Americans know that during the '50s the Central Intelligence Agency was operating covertly in Guatemala. And after the 1954 battle of Diembienphu, they failed to realize the significance of then vice president Richard M. Nixon's speech warning the country to be prepared to send troops to Indochina, Ellsberg says...
...Ellsberg attributes these gaps to "the shortcomings of a Harvard education. We were told what was necessary for us to know. We were killing Indochinese with American money when I was still in college but we didn't think of it as an American involvement. We were ignorant, we were lied to. Nixon is right. He did not start any of this. But that does not mean that he should not have been impeached. That means they all should have been impeached," he says in retrospect...
Students like Ellsberg could support Korea without supporting McCarthyism, a phenomenon that Bruce C. Davidson '52, an editorial writer for the Boston Globe, terms "a paradoxical divergence." But the fear of McCarthy did have a "deadening effect" on any political initiative, Walter A. Carrington '52, one of four blacks in the class and the first black president of the Harvard Liberal Students Association, then the largest political organization on campus, recalls...
...Ellsberg does not accept the theory that McCarthy rose because he was a demagogue who had the support of the Stalin-fearing masses. Instead, he believes that the Republicans, caught off balance by Truman's victory, "went crazy." Former Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio) was "willing to do literally anything to get the Democrats out of office," Ellsberg says. In addition, there is evidence that Truman himself supported McCarthy in an effort to "tar Henry Wallace with the communist brush" and thus eliminate the opposition from the left in his own party, he says...