Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...actually involved the United States in the Vietnam War, and its conduct throughout the decade of massive American involvement. Baritz is an academic-turned-university bureaucrat, and he explains Vietnam policy as the ultimate example of technocracy gone wild. The men at the top-first Kennedy then Johnson and Nixon--had a vision of Vietnam that existed in spite of reality. The men below them, from defense secretaries to platform commanders, had to provide Upstairs with what it wanted to hear. The trait of deceit and cover-up that publicly emerged with Johnson's "credibility gap" and continued through...
...awakening the venomous far-Right that it felt compelled to demonstrate its unflinching opposition to Communism around the world. It was perceived as soft on the Reds, it felt doomed. This is why liberal Harvard-educated Kennedy felt compelled to risk nuclear annihilation over missiles in Cuba, while Nixon, a man who made his reputation as a Red baiter, could embrace Mao Tse-tung with no fear of domestic political trouble. Liberal Democrats Kennedy and Johnson had to fight in Vietnam to prove to the Right that they were no structure in the war against Communism. These domestic American concerns...
Kennedy felt he had to make Vietnam an example of his resolve, says Baritz, Johnson inherited the enormous legacy of JFK. And Nixon, with his duplicitous henchman Henry A. Kissinger '50 saw in Vietnam the political opportunity to carry them to the White House and keep them there while they each worked, almost separately, toward their dream of becoming the world's greatest statesman--a phenomenon Baritz calls "the politics of ago." To the men and bureaucracies under all three administrations, Vietnam provided the opportunity to advance their own agendas, as long as the men upstairs were kept happy...
...Richard Nixon's first love has always been foreign policy. He has written four books on the subject (No More Vietnams was published this month) and maintains a network of high- level contacts. The appointment of a new Soviet leader was much on his mind last week when he met with TIME Washington Bureau Chief Strobe Talbott and Senior Editor Stephen Smith. Looking tanned and fit after a vacation in the Bahamas, the former President said he had recovered from a prolonged bout of shingles. In his first on-the-record interview since November 1984, Nixon discussed the pitfalls...
There have been earlier instances of American support for uprisings against regimes inimical to the U.S., but they were sporadic and a number ended in failure. In the Nixon and Ford Administrations, Henry Kissinger worked through the Shah of Iran to support Kurdish separatists inside Iraq, but in 1975 the Shah pulled the plug on the Kurds in exchange for Iraqi concessions in a border dispute. When Kissinger sought to back the pro-Western factions in the Angolan civil war, he was thwarted by Congress, which was then in the throes of its post-Viet Nam withdrawal syndrome...