Word: vietnamized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Baritz charts the machinery of bureaucratic deceit, from the inflated body counts from the filed to the stream of lies American leaders told at home about Vietnam. The most penetrating imagery he presents, however, is that of cultural opposition between the American teenagers who were sent by ambitious bureaucrats and paranoid presidents to fight the war, and the people of Vietnam whom they met, the very reason for America's presence. The average age of the American fighting man in Vietnam was 19, and he was given the power of life and death over all the Vietnamese...
MORE THAN AN attack on these suppositions, however, Backfire is an indictment of the bureaucratic culture that actually involved the United States in the Vietnam War, and its conduct throughout the decade of massive American involvement. Baritz is an academic-turned-university bureaucrat, and he explains Vietnam policy as the ultimate example of technocracy gone wild. The men at the top-first Kennedy then Johnson and Nixon--had a vision of Vietnam that existed in spite of reality. The men below them, from defense secretaries to platform commanders, had to provide Upstairs with what it wanted to hear. The trait...
Baritz' achievements is to link these cultural realities to the actual history of the war. He recounts the entire history of American involvement in Vietnam, from the World War II days when Ho Chi Minh worked as a U.S. intelligence agent against the Japanese occupation, to the initial American opposition, to France's postwar attempt to reestablish its colonial empire in Indochina. America's attidue toward Vietnam changed, though, not because of any change in Ho Chi Minh or the Vietnamese liberation movement, but because of political events at home...
...liberal Harvard-educated Kennedy felt compelled to risk nuclear annihilation over missiles in Cuba, while Nixon, a man who made his reputation as a Red baiter, could embrace Mao Tse-tung with no fear of domestic political trouble. Liberal Democrats Kennedy and Johnson had to fight in Vietnam to prove to the Right that they were no structure in the war against Communism. These domestic American concerns motivated little to the men and women who farmed the rice paddies along the Mckong...
Kennedy felt he had to make Vietnam an example of his resolve, says Baritz, Johnson inherited the enormous legacy of JFK. And Nixon, with his duplicitous henchman Henry A. Kissinger '50 saw in Vietnam the political opportunity to carry them to the White House and keep them there while they each worked, almost separately, toward their dream of becoming the world's greatest statesman--a phenomenon Baritz calls "the politics of ago." To the men and bureaucracies under all three administrations, Vietnam provided the opportunity to advance their own agendas, as long as the men upstairs were kept happy...