Word: karnow
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Though the appeal of the Hart pitch is understandable, it is exactly the type of misguided response Karnow says he is trying to avoid...
...Karnow probably realizes that the increased awareness about Vietnam--which he obviously finds beneficial for the country--could be channeled into a more explicitly isolationist foreign policy and a butt-headed unwillingness among youth to involve itself in any military enterprise to defend the national interest...
...counter this, Karnow seems to come off as more conservative--or at least moderate--than he would otherwise. He notes that most criticism of his PBS series has come from the left end of the political spectrum. But his pitch is basically non-ideological. He demands that we know more than a superficial history of Vietnam--his book traces Western involvement in the region back five centuries--but also that we know when and when not to use that knowledge...
...Karnow cites Dean Rusk, secretary of state to John F. Kennedy '40 and Lyndon B. Johnson and a man involved in Far East policy for three decades, as a prime example of someone who failed to use history properly. "I went down to Athens. Georgia to interview Dean Rusk, and said what was your mindset, what was your thinking, and he said. 'I was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1933, and I was there at the Oxford Union that night when they voted not to fight for King and country. I could remember that the Berlin Radio used that...
...Karnow added, "He carried that same memory into the fifties and the sixties, and Nazi aggression and Nazi expansionism in Europe in the thirties had nothing to do with the Vietnam War. It was a totally different situation...