Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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History has played few tricks with as many odd twists and turns as the U.S.'s imperial adventure in the Philippines. In his first book since Vietnam: A History, journalist and historian Stanley Karnow chronicles 90 years of the U.S.'s relationship with its former colony with a keen eye for such incongruities. Beginning with a penetrating look at 300 years of cruel Spanish rule in the islands, Karnow sketches a history suffused with politics both Machiavellian and messianic: from Commodore George Dewey's whipping the Spaniards at Manila Bay in 1898 and America's later subversion of Emilio Aguinaldo...
...ensuing conflict, the Viet Cong were able to cast themselves as defenders against a foreign invader, a time-honored role in Vietnam since the Mongol invasions in the middle ages...
...That Vietnam did not fit into the paradigm of good and evil contributed to the U.S. failure there, he said...
Sheehan told the audience, comprised of students, professors, relatives and a sprinkling of Vietnam veterans, that the war helped expose a dichotomy in the American mindset...
Sheehan said many mainstream reporters covering the war thought they could have an impact on decision-makers by writing the truth about the war. But the problem lay not only in the levels of bureaucracy which distanced politicians from the realities of jungle warfare in Vietnam, as the reporters thought, but with the leaders themselves, Sheehan said...