Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tall, boyish, slim-featured and soft-spoken Fallows opens his explanation evoking the moral challenge that the Vietnam War presented students in the late '60s. Today, he says, "there is no single overriding concern which makes you dismiss all marginal concerns and trimming." But in the late '60s the war was such an overriding force. It was an "epochal test, and you didn't know how it was all going to finally turn out and whether for the next 39 or 40 years people would point back and say, 'Those people did not speak up when the test of time...
...goes wrong." He offers the civil service unions--once a "grand hero of the left" but now an "impediment to much of what you want to do"--as one reason why he supports the ex-Georgia governor's at-times sacrilegious proposals for improving government services. Characteristically choosing the Vietnam War as an example, Fallows maintains that a theme that "rings out from history" is the inability of those performing a job to communicate what's going right and what's going wrong to those making policy decisions. He believes Jimmy Carter the businessman and government reorganizer would attack this...
...Republican. Like many of his classmates Fallows soon was swept up by the anti-war movement. He recalls that he began to doubt the right-wing, pro-war legacy of his upbringing during his freshman year, when Sen Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) journeyed to Boston to defend the American Vietnam policy. "I went and listened to it perfectly confident that he would have reasons to rebut all the criticism of the war, and he didn't. He never really answered any of the questions. That was a real shock...
Fallow's political awakening parallelled immersion in The Crimson, which he headed during 1969, the year of the occupation and bust at University Hall and the year the newspaper called editorially for the victory of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. Looking back at his actions during the late sixties, Fallows believes the most profound change in his character since his graduation has been acquiring an ability to accept the human decency of individuals who he believes are guilty of indecent acts. "It always came as somewhat of a surprise back in those days to see that people you thought...
...lies paralyzed in a Veteran's Administration hospital. He can feel nothing below his chest. He will never again walk nor make love to a woman: his condition is permanent and without hope. A "Yankee Doodle boy born on the Fourth of July," he had gone to Vietnam in defense of the American dream and to fight the scourge of communism. He has returned not as the conquering hero, but as a cripple, his spinal cord shattered by a volley of rifle fire. The young president's words linger in his mind, the words of the president whom he loved...