Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What he brought was a spirit of rebellion--against first the French and later the Americans. As Ho's war escalated in the mid-1960s, it became clear to Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam would imperil his presidency. In 1965, Johnson tried a diplomatic approach. Accustomed to dispensing patronage to recalcitrant Congressmen, he was confident that the tactic would work. "Old Ho can't turn me down," L.B.J. said. But Ho did. Any settlement, he realized, would mean accepting a permanent partition and forfeiting his dream to unify Vietnam under his flag...
There was no flexibility in Ho's beliefs, no bending of his will. Even as the war increasingly destroyed the country, he remained committed to Vietnam's independence. And millions of Vietnamese fought and died to attain the same goal...
...reflected glory of his posthumous triumph, his heirs put his embalmed body on display in a hideous granite mausoleum copied from Lenin's tomb in Moscow. They violated his final wishes. In his will he specified that his ashes be buried in urns on three hilltops in Vietnam, saying, "Not only is cremation good from the point of view of hygiene, but it also saves farmland...
Stanley Karnow, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines, is the author of Vietnam: A History
...1940s some U.S. officials suspected that Ho Chi Minh was not just another Soviet stooge but a Vietnamese nationalist suspicious of his huge Chinese neighbor--an "Asian Tito." Had the pro-Ho factions in the CIA and State Department persuaded Eisenhower to compel South Vietnam to hold a reunification referendum in 1956--despite rampant McCarthyism in the U.S.--Ho would surely have won. While Ike would have taken some political heat, a newly reunited Vietnam backed by American power would have quickly asserted its independence from Beijing. With no war to fight in Southeast Asia, Lyndon Johnson would have concentrated...