Word: viets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...boys of Viet Nam fought a terrible and vicious war . . . It was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march . . . They chose to believe and answer the call of duty...
...know in 1969 that I would be in this room today," said Dan Quayle last week about his decision two decades ago to pull strings and get into the National Guard rather than risk serving and dying in Viet Nam. It was the most accidentally revealing remark of the week, outdoing even Ronald Reagan's classic Freudian slip at the convention, "Facts are stupid things." As Fats Waller so aptly put it, "One never knows, do one?" In this day when politicians are created like androids by consultants and pollsters, using off- the-shelf parts for everything from hairstyles...
Senator Quayle is just one of many so-called war wimps or chicken hawks: prominent, youngish Reagan-era conservatives who, one way or another, ducked the war in Viet Nam. Others include such Reagan Administration foreign policy hard-liners as Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle, Commentator Patrick Buchanan, and even Sylvester Stallone (who taught at a girls' school in Switzerland while the Commies were being beastly to his fantasy alter ego John Rambo). A similar Quayle-like controversy also surrounds the Rev. Pat Robertson, whose father, a Senator, may have helped him avoid combat in Korea...
DIED. Elmo R. Zumwalt III, 42, whose father, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., ordered that riverbanks in Viet Nam be sprayed with Agent Orange to protect U.S. sailors, including his son, from ambush; of cancer; in Fayetteville, N.C. Both the former chief of naval operations and his son contended that the illness was caused by the defoliant. "Knowing what I know now," wrote the father after his son fell ill, "I still would have ordered the defoliation. But that does not ease the sorrow I feel for Elmo...
...spoke of forming a vital Republican Party in the Democratic state of Texas, as if he were his father disinterestedly keeping the two-party system alive. But Prescott Bush brought high standards to the Senate -- opposing Joseph McCarthy, championing civil rights bills -- and later criticized the war in Viet Nam. George Bush entered public life opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He went native without much principle, perhaps because he had not given it much thought. Belonging mattered more than weighing the issues at stake. He was not going to "dick" much about ideas. There were games...