Word: revealing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...would be much more effective. Yet the bureaucracy, the Pentagon papers indicate, always demanded new options; each option was to apply more force. Each tightening of the screw created a position that must be defended; once committed, the military pressure must be maintained. A pause, it was argued, would reveal lack of resolve, embolden the Communists and further demoralize the South Vietnamese. Almost no one said: "Wait?where are we going? Should we turn back...
...vista revealed a U.S. Government far less interested in negotiations on either Laos or Viet Nam than its public stance indicated. In fact, the U.S. sought ways to avert international pressure for talks. It continually withheld from the American people a full disclosure of its increasing military moves against North Viet Nam, but often briefed Hanoi, Peking and Moscow on precisely what it intended. Moreover, the documents, while showing a stubborn allegiance to the domino theory of Viet Nam's critical significance despite CIA doubts, also reveal a shifting rationale for the massive U.S. commitment...
CONCEALMENT OF AIR STRIKES. The documents reveal that, in Operation Barrel Roll, the CIA was regularly using U.S. civilian pilots flying U.S. planes to make air strikes along infiltration routes in Laos early in 1964. In December, this campaign was stepped up to semiweekly attacks by regular U.S. Air Force and Navy flyers, but the National Security Council ordered: "There would be no public operations statements about armed reconnaissance [a euphemism for operations in which pilots are allowed to attack any target they find rather than limited to assigned targets] in Laos unless a plane were lost. In such...
...molasses to pour any faster than ours. And we should tip the pitchers now if we want them to pour a year from now." McNamara raised the possibility of compromise with Johnson, but did not urge it, and Johnson chose to unleash more Rolling Thunder. The papers also reveal that Johnson authorized serious consideration, including consultation with academic scientists, of the idea of creating an electronic and manned "fence" that would cut the infiltration trails across South Viet Nam's northern border. The proposal was abandoned as impractical...
Coles' concern, however, is not with finding the convenient label or the exploitable correlation. Like a nonfiction novelist, he seeks, instead, to reveal the buried complexity of individual lives. Customarily he spends years, not months, on his interviews, confining himself to a relatively few people whose trust he slowly gains, and whose small devices for enduring life decently, no matter what, he deeply admires. In this book, for instance, Coles condenses talk and comment, going back as much as five years, with a handful of workingmen and their wives-a steam fitter, a policeman, a filling-station operator...