Word: memoranda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Meanwhile Daniel Ellsberg '52 continues to try to end the Indochina war. Papers on the War collects his recent essays, speeches, papers, reviews, and testimony and then fills out that collection with some memoranda he produced while stationed in Vietnam during the middle sixties...
Some of the memoranda that Ellsberg wrote for American policy makers while he was stationed in Vietnam are very remarkable when compared to the sort of documents that make up the bulk of the Pentagon Papers. "Visit to an Insecure Province" and "The Day Loc Tien Was Pacified" both abandon the sad reliance on quantitative indices of progress (such as kill ratios) in favor of reporting impressions and representative conversations...
...American involvement in Vietnam came about because each decision maker thought that the escalation which he chose would be the last necessary to 'win' in Vietnam. Through ignorance the U.S. got caught in a quagmire in South Vietnam. Ellsberg proposes an alternative that is very persuasive in light of memoranda those decision makers were writing to each other in the fifties and sixties. Ellsberg believes that the paths of escalation chosen by President were never those that would lead to victory, but rather the minimal exertions necessary to retain a stalemate position...
Some think that the Administration, if it did indeed set up the operation, was after something else. There is, says one insider, "almost a paranoia" in the Government about all of the leaks of confidential papers and memoranda to Jack Anderson and others; someone trying to find the source of the leaks might have figured that O'Brien would know. (Oddly, Frank Sturgis is a longtime Anderson source.) The trouble with both theories is that they ascribe slightly sophomoric motives and methods to presumably serious...
...documents seemed hastily written but reflected the view that Afro-American Studies was a unique area of study which needed to be examined from a multi-disciplinary approach. The memoranda rejected the idea of joint faculty appointments and urged that the Harvard Administration appropriate more money in order to induce top-notch faculty to come to Harvard...