Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Remember Vietnam...
...people of Indochina have fought on--against Japan, against France, against the United States--for the right to live quietly in their own land. The American military had billions of dollars, thousands of tons of bombs, the most up-to-date electronic weaponry. The National Liberation Front and North Vietnam had less sophisticated weaponry and less practiced troops, but they also had a reciprocated faith in the people of their country. And they fought the United States to a standstill...
...Vietnam changed all that. It was a group of Harvard men, after all, that dragged us by hook and by crook into the war. And it was another group of Harvard men, serving another administration, that helped keep us in the war when most everyone else wanted out. If Harvard's image suffered because of Vietnam, that is well and just. Harvard's involvement in the war was nothing to be proud...
...easily wounded. Nor has it survived by questioning its intimate relationship to the pinnacles of power. Harvard likes to think of that relationship as a proper and natural one, one that serves the interests of the nation. Watergate, coming as it did on the heels of the Vietnam debacle, gave this university the perfect opportunity to resurrect its much-adored self-image as the home of respectable political leadership...
...Harvard ever had a just pride in the role its alumni play in American politics, that pride can not be restored so quickly after the moral disgrace of Vietnam. Elliot Richardson can not approve of the Christmas bombings of Hanoi as a government official one day and then turn around and serve as an ideal of moral politics the next because he stuck with Archibald Cox. Things do not work that easily. Despite Watergate and Archibald Cox, Harvard needs to do a lot more soul searching about its relationship to the seats of power...