Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When McNamara confesses in his book, "We were wrong, terribly wrong," he means mostly that he and his colleagues misjudged the nature of the cold war and the role Vietnam played in it. In a 1991 interview with Time, McNamara recalled, "We thought there was considerable evidence China intended to extend its hegemony across Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond." But he added, "I'm not at all sure now." While many Americans agree with him that the domino theory was probably founded on an illusion, not everyone is convinced. Rusk was not, and neither is Walt Rostow, who was special...
This is a crucial question. Did the Vietnam War, tragedy though it was, provide the time and security from the communist threat for Asia to develop its present independence and booming free-market prosperity? The argument on that is still ongoing. If the question is ever resolved, it will be done by historians, not by today's politicians and citizens. And the answer will come with a proviso: it will offer no guide to the future...
...didn't occur to me that this photograph would become the enduring image of our failure in Vietnam. But it worked strongly on me, and still does: that wide-open sky waiting above the helicopter like freedom itself; the dark line of people bearing their hopes of deliverance; the apparent fragility of the craft, its precarious roost, the spindliness of the rotors on which all these hopes depend; and most eloquent, the figure of the crew chief silhouetted against the empty sky, pulling some fearful soul from one life into another, as we had set out to do by other...
...found nothing to be surprised at in the fall of Saigon, of Vietnam itself, it was because the war had already been lost by the time I got there in the spring of 1967. The suspicion that this was so came upon me not as a thought but as a deepening unease at the way we treated the Vietnamese and the way they treated one another. I hadn't been 10 minutes off the plane at Bienhoa before I saw one of our troops abusing the baggage handlers; the bus driver who ferried us to the transit barracks spent most...
...years ago, I was invited to join a group of men who were meeting every other week or so to talk about Vietnam. Three of us had served there. Of the others, one had been a conscientious objector; another had got lucky with the draft; a third had been too old for Vietnam but was active in the antiwar movement. Though our circumstances had placed us in very different, even conflicting positions, nobody was of a mind to find fault with anyone else. Indeed, the other two veterans had both become pacifists some years back...