Word: neutralizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...years of the Viet Nam War, the Communist forces crossed the Cambodian border and established a whole network of secret bases, which they relied on to shelter and resupply their troops. To attack these "sanctuaries," the U.S. bombed the Cambodian countryside, then launched an armored "incursion" into the once neutral nation. Now a book by William Shawcross, who covered the war for the Sunday Times of London from 1970 to 1972, challenges that U.S. policy and charges that it contributed to the Communist takeover...
...Cambodia, Shawcross does not minimize the difficulties that confronted the Nixon and Ford Administrations in Indochina. But he sharply criticizes the U.S. view that Cambodia was a minor adjunct to the Viet Nam War and that the strategy of the larger war justified spreading the fighting into a neutral land. President Nixon expressed that view when he said in December of 1970: "The Cambodians . . . are tying down 40,000 North Vietnamese regulars. If those North Vietnamese weren't in Cambodia, they'd be over [in Viet Nam] killing Americans...
...calls that "questionable." Sihanouk himself, who was overthrown by General Lon Nol just two weeks before the U.S. invasion in 1970, told Shawcross that there was nothing he could have done about either the Vietnamese bases or the U.S bombing. But Sihanouk's doomed effort to keep Cambodia neutral, Shawcross believes, was the right policy in terms of Cambodia's own interests...
Some say the University must preserve its neutrality, so as not to endanger its academic freedom, so as not to provoke political or economic retaliation. Now not only is it impossible for the University as an investor to be neutral, but also I do not think that academic freedom is best preserved if we shrink from exercising it. I do not think academic freedom is best preserved if we deny the social consequences of our investment policies. I would have thought that academic freedom meant finding and speaking and acting the truth regardless of the consequences. I would have thought...
...turned out, members of the Administration were not the only ones on trial. Sirica's unbridled temper and his less than brilliant reputation were large targets for the defense attorneys. But the old pugilist had not forgotten how to feint and duck. He remained imperturbable, retired to a neutral corner, and saw every major decision upheld by the appeals courts...