Word: vietnamize
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...larger lesson of that day was that everyone in this vast land had instant, common access to the same information on events large and small. And there was no shortage of large ones: Vietnam, the civil rights movement, assassinations, the counterculture, space shots, Watergate...
...student of the form, I marveled at Cronkite's consistency. Night after night, the news might change, but Uncle Walter could be found at the head of the table. When he did break from his objective cadence, it was not trivial: there was his famous commentary on Vietnam and, later that year, his personal remarks from the anchor booth on the rough tactics of the security guards at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago...
Even as he had these doubts, he had no answers for them. He was not prepared to argue that we simply withdraw. America was bleeding, its cities were burning, and it was never clear to me exactly how McNamara connected this America with that war in Vietnam. In wartime, the Pentagon is the biggest bunker of all, aware of what's going on, but remote...
...almost superhuman to expect one responsible for waging war to rethink its value and necessity. And so doubts simply float in the air without being translated into policy. Things get lost--critically important things--even from an experience as profound as the Vietnam War, even as we go deeper into new wars like Afghanistan. And as I now contemplate the departure of a life so central to my own and that of my country as Bob McNamara's, one overriding lesson bombards my mind: nationalist wars, civil wars, tribal and religious wars--they can never be won by Americans...
...TIME's Vietnam War covers...