Word: viets
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Shortly before 11 a.m. on Oct. 16, 1973, a Situation Room officer interrupted a meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group on the Middle East to deliver an Associated Press news bulletin. It announced that North Viet Nam's Le Due Tho and I had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for our efforts to end the Viet...
...admires the gubernatorial record, but is disturbed by what he feels was Rockefeller's emotional freeze after ordering the grisly assault on rebellious prisoners at Attica. Behind the image of a liberal Republican was an old-fashioned cold-warrior and bare-taloned hawk, who dismissed all Viet Nam draft resisters with the remark, "Those guys just didn't want to get killed...
...short, the Viet Nam analogy is really the Viet Nam fallacy. It is fallacious not just in the objective difference between the two situations, but in the way that indulgence of a false analogy can skew judgment. In general, foreign policy is better served by a conscious attempt to analyze each situation afresh, rather than by the wisdom of hindsight (which, of course, is really not wisdom at all). Soldiers, it has often been said, have the bad habit of waging the last war. Americans, in their current fretting over El Salvador, are similarly afflicted. Across the political spectrum, there...
Another difference between now and then: the Viet Cong had spent decades building up their cadres, fighting skills, command structure and supply lines; they also had North Viet Nam, with its huge regular army, first backing them up, then leading them in their conquest. The Salvadoran insurgency, by contrast, is limited to about 6,000 active fighters, many of whom are recent converts to the cause. The closest analogue to a North Viet Nam in Central America is Nicaragua, which is not really very close at all. The Sandinista regime there is still young and insecure. True, it is gravitating...
DIED. Arthur Barsky, 82, pioneering plastic surgeon who treated children injured in the Hiroshima atomic explosion and the Viet Nam War; near Le Beausset, France. Author of one of the first textbooks in his field and founder of plastic-surgery services in several New York City hospitals, Barsky led the team that treated the "Hiroshima maidens," 25 deformed A-bomb survivors who came to the U.S. for surgery. In 1969 he set up a 50-bed unit in Saigon and spent much of the next six years there helping to treat more than 7,000 children, grafting skin and restoring...