Word: viets
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...ills is one way the Carter crew answers its critics. No less a doubter than former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declares that the President is not responsible for the growth of Soviet military power, which has neutralized our own; the decline of American political authority because of Viet Nam and Watergate; the conditions that led to the revolution in Iran; the growing self-assertion of the industrialized allies; and the energy squeeze. Carter has not fragmented the Congress or created the fierce independence of its individual members. The wealth and power of the lobbies and their ability to thwart...
...arms competition. Carter's human rights campaign is now viewed as having often embarrassed U.S. allies and hardened the opposition of adversaries. His vague notion, preached mostly by his friend and onetime U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, that the radical nations were our natural allies has been mocked in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Iran. "It is not that he does not mean well," says one thoughtful critic of Carter. "It is that almost everything he has touched he has made worse. He operated from the wrong concept of his job, the wrong theory of international affairs, and he uses administrative procedures...
...cropper from the start because, in Goldman's words, "he does not understand modern America. Carter understands small towns, not the cities." New York City University's ubiquitous and biting Arthur Schlesinger Jr. feels that Carter is something the American people produced in their exhaustion and confusion after Viet Nam and Watergate. We are in a period of "national doldrums," contends Schlesinger, and when the U.S. begins to stir again?and it will?the Carter era will be swept away with the lethargy. "Carter would have been O.K. for the Republicans who don't want to do anything," says Schlesinger...
Nothing in this sweeping account alters history's preliminary judgment: L.B.J.'s domestic record on health care and civil rights is outstanding, his foreign policy tragic. Viet Nam defied a political solution as he understood the term. "I think he wrongly thought that the same assumptions prevailed there that prevailed here," says Moyers. "He'd say, 'My God, I've offered Ho Chi Minh $100 million to build a Mekong Valley. If that'd been George Meany he'd have snapped...
...personal weaknesses. But the superficial treatment of the Bobby Baker scandal, the relationship between the Johnsons' business interests and the FCC and the Tonkin Gulf deception lets L.B.J. off the hook. Miller also fails to reflect strongly enough the extent of the damage caused by Johnson's Viet Nam policy. Eulogistic gloss tends to soften some of the harder truths. Perhaps this is the nature of oral biography. At one point the author notes that "memory is a gentleman." True. But when memory serves legend more than history, it becomes a gentleman's gentleman. -By R.Z. Sheppard