Word: viets
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...leadership group in America that had won the battle against isolationism in the 1940s and sustained a responsible American involvement in the world throughout the postwar period was profoundly demoralized by the Viet Nam War. They had launched their country in the 1960s into this war of inconclusive ends and ambiguous means. When it ran aground, they lost heart. The clarity of purpose that had given impetus to the great foreign policy initiatives of the late 1940s-the Marshall Plan, the Greek-Turkish aid program, the Atlantic Alliance, the reconstruction of Japan-was unattainable in Indochina...
...political situation in Viet Nam was equally at variance with our preconceptions. Many Americans tended to judge the government we were defending by our own constitutional practices, which were only marginally relevant to a civil war in a developing country with a totally different historical experience...
...that most vocal hard core of dissenters, the issue was not the wisdom of a particular American commitment but the validity of American foreign policy in general and indeed of American society. They saw the war as a symptom of an evil, corrupt, militaristic capitalist system. They treated the Viet Cong as a progressive movement, North Viet Nam as a put-upon, heroic revolutionary country and Communism as the wave of the future in Indochina, if not in the entire developing world. They were outraged by our incursion into Cambodia less because of the alleged extension of the war than...
...these tendencies were tragically accelerated by the election of Richard Nixon. Nixon was probably the only leader who could disengage from Viet Nam without a conservative revolt. Yet his history of partisanship had made him anathema to most of the responsible Democrats. Radical opposition to the war thus fed on and merged with hatred of Richard Nixon on the part of many who had no sympathy for radicalism in general. The virulence of dissent was not moderated by those who, presumably, stood for values of civilized discourse and civic responsibility. Their yearning to expiate guilt shattered forever the existing foreign...
...Haig would not refuse a request by the President no matter how I might feel about it. I told Haig with conviction that he had to accept, even though it would probably mean the end of his military career. Haig replied that when he had gone on patrol in Viet Nam, he had risked not only his career but his life; he had no right to abandon his Commander in Chief in distress. He was shamingly right...