Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...chief problem is that some intellectuals are helping to run society-while other intellectuals are busy accusing them of botching the job. Many denounce the Viet Nam war as "an intellectuals' war," because assorted academics helped conduct it. Meantime, the New Left has attacked liberals for having failed to cure the country's social ills. Caught in this cross fire, the intellectuals are wavering between passive despair and revolutionary fervor. Today, many intellectuals are unsure of where they fit into U.S. life, unsure of how to apply their intelligence to rational reform -even unsure of just what...
...except, perhaps, a William F. Buckley or a Milton Friedman. "Liberal" and "intellectual" are thought to meld nicely. Among scientists, for example, Liberal J. Robert Oppenheimer met the test, but Conservative Edward Teller did not. If nothing else, Viet Nam has provided a handy screening device. Opposition to the war has clinched the intellectual standing of Senator J. William Fulbright and perhaps even of Dr. Spock. War supporters who have been drummed out of the fraternity include Dean Rusk, John Roche and Eric Hoffer. As a crypto-opponent, Robert S. McNamara is slowly being reinstated, and the admissions committee...
Actually, it verges on caricature to blame pragmatic intellectuals for so much of the war. Both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson relied heavily on other kinds of advisers, notably the military, with its enthusiastic contingency plans. Moreover, it was primarily intellectuals who inspired a national dissidence sufficient to drive Lyndon Johnson from office. Still, the war does demonstrate that many scientists and scholars have not yet learned to handle their worldly roles. Some have been blinded by government research, which has transformed the nature of American universities. Yet few modern intellectuals can retreat to ivory-tower isolation. How, then, should...
...intellectual seemed ubiquitous -moving back and forth among the universities, government, business and industry. Harvard's Edwin O. Reischauer and John Kenneth Galbraith were dispatched as ambassadors to Japan and India. "Pragmatic" intellectuals like Economist Walt Rostow and the Bundy brothers, McGeorge and William, helped to formulate the war's policies and rationale. As they did so, the schism in the intellectual community widened...
Above all, the antipragmatists have focused on the Viet Nam war as a classic case of myopic "crisis management." What seemed immediately workable, they say, was quickly done without regard to moral and political consequences. Noam Chomsky, a leading war dissenter, has lambasted such thinking in his acute if intemperate book, American Power and the New Mandarins. Chomsky cites one Far East expert who assured a congressional committee that the North Vietnamese "would be perfectly happy to be bombed to be free." Another scholar proposed that the U.S. tame China by buying up all surplus Canadian and Australian wheat...