Word: war
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Washington either should have used the leverage it had to force reforms more strongly or, once the Vietnamese proved incapable of putting their house in order and fighting a successful counterinsurgency war against the Communists, should have reduced its aid and refrained from becoming more militarily involved...Certainly there was no chance to impose a Western democratic system on an antipathetic Asian framework or to blend American habits and customs with the far different and more elusive attributes of the Vietnamese...
...where Shaplen has chosen to write, he has done a spectacular job. For the expert on the Vietnam war or the student who has never heard of Kuala Lumpur. A Turning Wheel is required reading. Shaplen's ability to preach without being pretentious and to find the personal thread among the sweep of revolution is extraordinary. If his vision of Asia's future is hesitant, then he has learned more than most writers and journalists
...downfall, it was domestic politics. By foregoing the flamboyance of some of his colleagues, Helms had also lacked their visibility--and thus did not make an easy target or scapegoat when CIA projects went awry, as they did with increasing frequency after the early "successes" of the Cold War. He covered his tracks well, and when superiors sacked other, more imaginiative CIA men in the shake-ups that followed such failures as the ill-advised backing of Indonesian rebels against Sukarano in 1958 or the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Helms was passed over; he was a survivor...
Helms remains unrepentant: "I'll wear this conviction like a badge of honor...I don't feel disgraced at all." His world view crystallized long ago into patterns of Cold War confrontation. But one cannot gauge Helms the individual from The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Touching only briefly on Helms' personal life, Powers attempts to tell the secret history of the CIA by using his career as a reference point; since Powers portrays Helms only in his Langley office persona, he appears for the most part as just a particularly durable background actor in a play where the cast...
McKay's Bees has perhaps a roomful of such figures--Henry David Thoreau comments on the biology of Louis Agassiz. Agassiz terrorizes his students and commits indiscretions with his housemaid. John Brown and his gang of Missouri border ruffians wage war on free-staters in Kansas. Even President Pierce gives an audience or two, once weeping, once belligerent...