Word: power
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...GODFATHER, by Mario Puzo. For the Mafia, as for other upwardly mobile Americans, the name of the game is respectability and status-after the money and power have been secured. An excellent novel...
...wasting money needed for civilian purposes, giving bad and dangerous advice to the Commander in Chief, poor planning and worse execution in Viet Nam. Does the military, many people wonder, exaggerate the threats to U.S. security and grossly overestimate its own needs to retain?or even enhance?its own power...
Nonetheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that U.S. power has distinct limits, which must be better recognized than in the past. That power, often with absurd reliance on technology, is badly suited to guerrilla warfare, as in Viet Nam. It cannot be used to keep balky allies in line, as Russia did in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, because American values and politics would not permit it. It is unsuitable for ready use against mischiefmakers, whether in North Korea or Peru, because heavy ripostes to such irritations usually entail intolerable military or political risks...
...military as an institution has kept out of politics to a remarkable degree. One reason perhaps is that until the late '40s Americans never tolerated a peacetime military force large enough to be influential. That has changed radically. What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex* constitutes an enormous power bloc that now embraces manufacturers, organized labor, local business interests, many scientists and nonprofit organizations that get defense contracts (see box opposite). Yet it is difficult to show a precise cause-and-effect relationship between the defense complex and the generation of a specific conflict...
...many U.S. officers saw the Viet Nam war as a chance to field-test new weapons and season a generation of career soldiers, the experience seems more an example of military?and political?misjudgment than of calculated aggressiveness. The military, which oversold Lyndon Johnson on the efficiency of air power against North Viet Nam, can be faulted; so can the State Department, which insisted that Ho Chi Minh, despite his Soviet training and his country's history of resistance to Chinese influence, was little more than Peking's puppet. But the final decisions lay with the Chief Executive. When...