Word: indochina
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...answer: Were any American prisoners unaccounted for when the U.S. pulled out of Southeast Asia in 1973? Are any alive there today? Opening two days of hearings, Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the chairman, said the committee had gathered information indicating that "some Americans remained alive in Indochina after Operation Homecoming" in 1973, when North Vietnam handed back 591 prisoners. He said an additional 133, later lowered to 80, were unaccounted for, though there was no absolute proof they were alive. Kerry added that the Pentagon routinely falsified the records of men lost in covert operations in Laos...
Retired Army General John Vessey, who has been negotiating the question with Hanoi for five years, had what may be the last word. He told the committee that he too has a list -- of 135 unresolved cases -- but has uncovered no evidence that any Americans are being held in Indochina...
...product of fevered anti-communist imaginations, and topped that off with a fire-eating inaugural speech about "a long twilight struggle" with the Russkies. He was, in short, exactly the kind of leader you would expect to get a lot of Americans up to their knees in Indochina...
...sure, on taking office he promptly swore that "I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went." But above all, Johnson wanted his Great Society, not a mess in Indochina. As Halberstam, hardly a Johnson apologist, explains it, "[h]e intended to secure the Kennedy legacy, prove his own worthiness to accept the torch by pushing the Kennedy legislation through Congress" and then move on to his own agenda. But "[a]ll that would take time, and for a start he wanted to hold...
Saddled with such staffers, and with the rhetorical justifications of any number of Cold Warrior speeches by Kennedy, Johnson found himself haunted--and his domestic agenda threatened--by the Kennedy legacy in Indochina. "I left the woman I really loved--the Great Society--in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world," Johnson said after he had escalated the disaster...