Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...scholar is, quite simply, responsible for the ultimate "use" to which his work is put. There is no room for complaints of misuse when the "output" is so painfully evident in the forms of support for Chiang Kai-shek, containment of Communist China, and the application of scholarship in Vietnam, etc., etc. Logically, those who have contributed to the making of China policy are obligated to make public their part in that sad misadventure and take the knocks that are assuredly coming. More people than Dean Rusk are due credit for the past decade's debacle--lots of academic China...
...myself what ought or ought not morally be done; for even in the heyday of t.v. and mass culture, conscience still remains an individual activity to the extent that it still intrudes uncomfortably on our consciousness. I simply know that I am incapable of rationalizing away the horror of Vietnam or the related, concrete immediacy of the CIA on our doorstep, and I will have a straight answer 20 years hence when I am asked, "Where were you when...?" I am also beginning to understand what the neutrality of scholarship really means in human terms; its euphemistic clarity is like...
...believe you underestimate the contempt which most working governmental officials have for the opinions of academic specialists who are not working within the government on current events. I really do not see anything any of us academics could have done that would have made much difference on our Vietnam policy even if we had seen the absurdity of the policy and the course it would take with the foresight we now have in hindsight. Did Roger Hillsman or Jim Thomson or even Arthur Schlesinger's resignation from the government help bring about a change? To be sure, there...
...think you even miss the role CIA analysts have played in Vietnam. From what I gather from friends in Washington, the CIA analysts come closer than anyone else to getting our government to see the absurdity of the Vietnam policy. Would these men have contributed more to themselves, to policy, to the government if they had left government service...
...easy to fight against the war in Vietnam as it was to support civil-rights in the South. From now on issues will rarely be presented that are so clear-cut. The struggle now is to attempt the massive restructuring of a complex and highly industralized society. This will inevitably be a desperately slow process and we may as well resign ourselves to patience helped by a deepening of commitment...