Word: laird
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although 10,000 U. S. ground troops remained poised on the Laotian border directly behind the South Vietnamese forces, both Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird and Secretary of State William P. Rogers denied that U. S. ground troops would be brought into the Laotian attack...
Foreign Relations Chairman J. William Fulbright, (D-Ark.), also found little encouragement in Laird's and Rogers's repeated reassurances that the Laotian invasion was necessary for American troop withdrawal...
...State and the Pentagon, the Administration seemed to be testing the limits of last year's Cooper-Church restriction forbidding the use of U.S. ground troops or advisers in Cambodia. (A similar measure, adopted in December 1969, prohibits sending U.S. ground forces to Laos and Thailand.) After hearing Laird's testimony, Armed Services Chairman John Stennis declared that "the margin is so thin" in Cambodia that it might be necessary to loosen the strictures of Cooper-Church to allow some U.S. personnel to act as air controllers on the ground. Was he launching a trial balloon...
...Vietnamese army defector insisted that Communist strength in Cambodia totaled no fewer than 150,000 men-a seasoned core of 35,000 North Vietnamese regulars plus 115,000 Cambodian peasants recruited in the countryside. Little wonder, then, that after he emerged from a grim meeting with Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, Armed Services Committee Chairman John Stennis said: "The margin is so thin." By intensifying the pressure against Communist supply routes in Laos, Richard Nixon seemed to be accepting grave risks in hopes of fattening the margin, not just in Cambodia but in all of Indochina...
...owlish little man minces few words. To Isidor Feinstein Stone, Richard Nixon is a "banal and shallow man," and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird "Washington's biggest liar since John Foster Dulles." As for John Mitchell: "Nothing is more dangerous than weak men who think they are tough guys...