Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...former Secretary of Defense returned to admit that he--and the "best and the brightest" of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations--were "wrong, terribly wrong" in prosecuting a losing effort against the Vietnamese Communists. His apology did not erase the horrors Vietnam's victims have suffered and still remember. However, he is to be commended for his candid and long-awaited admission of error...
With his recently published memoirs, McNamara broke 25 years of silence and proved that the nation has yet to recover from the disillusionment of that defeat. For four years in the 1960s, McNamara was in the national spotlight, confidently predicting a quick victory in Vietnam. Now he has once again entered the public spotlight, but this time to tell his compatriots what went wrong...
...very real threat, proven by the crises in Berlin and in Cuba that brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of war. Fear of falling dominoes in Southeast Asia and of the credibility of U.S. commitments elsewhere led the administration into the quagmire of Vietnam...
...McNamara now admits, he had realized as early as 1965 that the war in Vietnam was not winnable. He continued to send more Americans into Vietnam in an attempt to force the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. At the same time his fear of "escalation" led him to hamstring the military's efforts to push northwards toward North Vietnam or to disrupt the enemy's supply lines, the so-called "Ho Chi Minh Trail" that went through a nominally neutral Laos...
...irresolution that characterized Johnson and McNamara's military strategy raised the costs of the war for the American people, both at home and in the jungles of Vietnam...