Word: viets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seemed for much of his life unaffected by the world around him, that may have been an advantage, considering the world he lived in. He avoided the Viet Nam War, but he also ignored much that led to Viet Nam. Inattentiveness is sometimes a survival skill. Quayle's pugnacious father did not always agree with Quayle's more famous grandfather, Eugene Pulliam, and among Pulliams it matters from which wife of Eugene one is descended (he had three). When the 17-year-old Quayle thought of siding with his father against his grandfather on behalf of family friend Barry Goldwater...
There had not been much war protest on the DePauw campus by the time Quayle graduated in 1969. Quayle's father was writing editorials backing the war in Viet Nam, but his son was not paying attention. As graduation approached, Quayle had to do some shopping around to find an opening in the National Guard. (In 1988 he said he meant to go to law school, but he had not applied to one.) He asked people he knew about the Guard, whom to call, but it is unlikely they did or could rig things for him. His grandfather was semiretired...
During the 1988 campaign, people wondered about Quayle's actions (and even his whereabouts) in the Viet Nam War. But the startling thing is that, if he inherited the Oval Office tomorrow, Quayle would be the first President since World War II who did not serve in the military during that war. Even Jimmy Carter, the U.S. President of most recent birth (1924), was a Navy cadet during the war. Not only was Quayle born after the war -- the first baby boomer so near the top -- he is also the first man to have grown up entirely within the confines...
...past, raucous demonstrations have sometimes polarized the nation, shifting attention from the issues to the rowdy behavior and unpopular politics -- Stalinists for Solidarity with the Viet Cong! -- of protesters. Since support for environmental protection spans the political spectrum, polarization should not plague Earth Day unless fringe groups seize the occasion to sabotage a steel mill or stage other "ecotage" attacks on perceived corporate villains. Earth Day's organizers more likely face the opposite problem: the possibility that the hype and the numbing array of events will cause people to throw up their hands and stay home...
BETTER RED THAN UNFED. Viet Nam's aging Communist hierarchy has sent a clear signal that major Soviet-style political reforms are out of the question. This aversion to change stems both from ideology and practicality. Hanoi, long allied with Moscow and at odds with Beijing, has been offered $2.1 billion in aid from China to cover a projected shortfall in Soviet assistance. The collateral: a commitment from Hanoi to keep glasnost from breaking out near China's southern border...