Word: mayaguez
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...presenting a special leather-bound copy of our Bicentennial issue to our highest ranking reader, Gerald Ford. Our appointment was delayed by a strategy session of the National Security Council. That meeting, we later discovered, had focused on ways to respond to the Cambodian seizure of the merchant ship Mayaguez (see cover story). Unruffled by the developing crisis, the President greeted us warmly and leafed through the special edition. He paused at the People section, laughing over colonial Dr. Benjamin Rush's prognosis of ten extra years of life for anyone taking up a newly imported game called golf...
When that last distress call crackled over the air from the beleaguered U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez in the Gulf of Siam last week, it set in motion a dramatic, controversial train of events that significantly changed the image of U.S. power in the world?and the stature of President Gerald Ford. By calling up U.S. military might and successfully forcing the Cambodians to surrender the ship and free the 39-man crew, Ford acted more firmly and decisively than at any other time in his presidency. By drawing the line against aggression in the Mayaguez incident, he put potential adversaries...
Hard Kick. The cannon was effective, of course, showing the world that the U.S. will not accept humiliating provocations. But the U.S. success owed almost as much to luck as to skill in combat. If the Communist Cambodians had dug in and refused to release the Mayaguez crew, the military mission might well have aborted. In an interview with TIME Correspondent Joseph J. Kane, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger admitted: "The outcome was fortunate...
...world that the Communist victories in Indochina had not turned the U.S. into a paper tiger. He had been searching for a means to show that the U.S. is now conducting what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recently called an "abrasive" foreign policy. Even before the Cambodians seized the Mayaguez, one U.S. Government policy planner had told TIME, "There's quite a bit of agreement around here that it wouldn't be a bad thing if the other side goes a step or two too far in trying to kick us while we're down. It would give...
...that the United States, always ready to swiftly commit troops around the world, did not have better diplomatic ties to Cambodia and that China was not openly willing to help with negotiations. The lives that were lost, however, make the Mayaguez incident not a success, but a failure in diplomatic relations and a failure on the part of both countries' leaders to consider the lives of their people...