Word: nams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What had happened to Clark Clifford? The question inevitably arose in Washington as the Secretary of Defense began taking his own distinctive line on Viet Nam, notably in his public rebukes of the South Vietnamese regime. Even officials high in the Johnson Administration were uncertain whether he was acting with the President's assent-or out of sheer foolhardiness. Some speculated that perhaps the President had grown passive as his term drew to a close and was simply allowing his Defense Secretary to take charge. Others were convinced that the President was in full agreement with what his longtime...
...went to the Pentagon in March, Clark Clifford was cast as a hawk. That was largely because Lyndon Johnson had told and retold the story of how Clifford, in the fall of 1965, had argued against what was to become a 37-day bombing halt over North Viet Nam. But the casting was misleading. Then chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Clifford was opposed to a pause in the bombing principally because of its timing. The U.S. then was just beginning to build up its forces, and could ill afford the sudden upsurge in infiltration from...
...more troops. For two weeks, he examined all the angles with the same care that had made him one of Washington's most successful lawyers. Finally, he decided that a further buildup was madness. A subsequent trip to Saigon confirmed his suspicion that South Viet Nam's government wanted no part of a peace that would oblige them to risk political concessions and curtail the comforts of U.S. military protection and cash...
...observed it, "the gutsiest performance I've ever seen or ever heard about." For seven months the argument raged. Johnson said little, but he was listening. Clifford threw all his weight behind arguments that persuaded the President to order the partial suspension of bombing of North Viet Nam on March 31 to get talks with Hanoi under way. Again, Clifford's view held sway when bombing was halted altogether on Oct. 31 in an effort to rescue the negotiations from stalemate...
...differences between the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies over the glacial progress of the Paris peace talks have never been very far from the surface. Last week they burst into full public view in a transatlantic quarrel between U.S. Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford and South Viet Nam's Vice President Nguyen...