Word: wicker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There were plans then for a summer in Chicago and all over. Tom Wicker was saying that hundreds of thousands would resist. Then General Hershey would not be able to get enough men, and maybe the war would end in that kind of glory. The thousands of college seniors and grad students would be the raw material for a massive movement for social change in this country...
...Wicker, chief of the New York Times's Washington bureau, suggests that the answer is a fatal euphoria. What Kennedy overlooked was the fact that Congress had no intention of carrying out his campaign promises unless forced to by public pressure. To be sure, Kennedy soon won a crucial fight for what realists call "the third house" -the Southern-dominated House Rules Committee, which can stop almost any bill from reaching a floor vote. But as Author Wicker tells it, Kennedy thus learned too well that Government is a matter of "men, not measures." Seeking more support, he wooed...
...Green Light. Wicker argues that Lyndon Johnson was even more victimized by the "ebullience of power." As a firm believer in "the domino theory" of Communist aggression, Johnson privately vowed two days after Kennedy's death: "I am not going to lose Viet Nam." But as a Southerner who was avid to rise above sectionalism, Johnson had a passion for reflecting the broadest possible national consensus, which lured him into running as a peace candidate and stating publicly in 1964: "We don't want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys." According to Wicker, this...
Newly armed with history's biggest plurality, writes Wicker, Johnson at that moment was politically free to liquidate a war he had not started. By the 1968 election, Viet Nam might have become a dead issue, long overshadowed by Great Society triumphs. (Of course it might also have become a very live issue, had it been followed by other conflicts in Asia.) Instead, banking on his mandate, Johnson chose escalation, convinced that he could avoid a big land war by using "cheap" airpower to bomb the North. But the result, Wicker argues, was that Johnson simply created...
Selected Facts. What flaws this analysis of the Viet Nam tragedy is the fact that it was written before Johnson's recent abdication-an event that might have balanced some of Wicker's more emotional judgments. That is not the only omission in what Wicker candidly calls an "imaginative reconstruction" of two tragic presidencies. Author of six published novels, Wicker is too prone to select the facts that intensify his drama. He scarcely mentions Kennedy's exciting effect on the national mood and his great coup in the Cuban missile crisis. Wicker almost totally overlooks at least...