Word: vietnamize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ERNEST GRUENING was defeated for reelection to the Senate last year by a 38-year-old moderate who claimed to stand "more in the main-stream" of American opinion on Vietnam. The claim had at least the virtue of being true: at 82, Ernest Gruening has yet to join anyone's mainstream...
Gruening was the first Senator to attack the war in Vietnam, and to this day remains the only member of the Senate to have demanded a U.S. withdrawal. His speeches against the war have a clear-sighted moral vigor that we have learned not to expect from our politicians...
...conversation, he constantly comes back to the war, explaining his ideas over and over again to anyone who will listen. The words flow out easily, in an even, forceful voice. A disaster, he says continually. The worst disaster in the country's history. We are the aggressors in Vietnam, he says. The spectre of the draft, forcing young men to choose between Vietnam and prison, seems to haunt him as intensely as any college senior. One feels, in talking to him, that Gruening has not yet been able to assimilate the existential horror of the draft for Vietnam: it torments...
Throughout it all, Gruening has remained a liberal. His analysis of the causes of the Vietnam war goes no deeper than the personality of President Johnson: he sees the war and all the other disasters of American foreign policy as errors that could have been avoided by wiser leaders. His approach to politics is largely unanalytical and moralistic: his radicalism, if it can be called that, is of a traditionally American sort. What distinguishes Gruening from his liberal colleagues in the Senate is not his ideology, but his extraordinary courage and vigor. He spoke out against...
...analysis concocted in tranquility and life enacted in unanalyzed violence. The analysts are always there, narrating the actions of others. Sometimes we see bright and uncomfortable close-ups of their faces (usually minus the tops of their heads) as they clinically pick apart and piece together the puzzle of Vietnam. Paul Mus, Professor of Buddhism at Yale, lounges in his living room chair beside a hi-fi speaker and Oriental trinkets and dramatically recreates his contact with Ho. Meanwhile, back where everything is what it is, Ho exhorts a loving crowd to keep the faith...