Word: viet
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Sudden illuminations occur throughout the collection. In London, an anti-Viet Nam protest is "something like a medieval carnival in a modern setting, with everybody changing places, the fool becoming king for a day . . . the police merging with the populace and even putting on false beards. But no more than a carnival did it 'solve' anything." Vladimir Nabokov, she notes, treats the Russian language "as a national treasure the usurper Bolsheviks appropriated from him, to turn over to the rabble." She ponders the absence of important fiction in prewar Germany: "Common sense tells you the way things are, rather than...
...forces from a conflict with a Soviet proxy and accepted a cease-fire that left thousands of Communist insurgents far beyond their legal borders, in place for an eventual onslaught. By the time the 1973 Paris accords were signed, any prudent politician might have had enough doubts about South Viet Nam's survival to start shifting blame to others for having "lost" an ally. Hawks like Nixon assailed doves for cutting military aid. The doves replied that they were facing up to the reality of the hawks' failure on the battlefield...
...version of what happened in his memoir RN (1978); in two books about superpower conflict, The Real War (1980) and Real Peace (1984); and in No More Vietnams, published this month (Arbor House; 237 pages; $14.95). The compact volume serves four purposes: 1) to retrace American involvement in Viet Nam by recounting, often disapprovingly but also with some sympathy, decisions made by his predecessors stretching back to Harry Truman; 2) to defend Nixon's own record, sometimes more emphatically than in his muted memoir; 3) to reassert the implacability of Communist adversaries and the consequent need to maintain a potent...
...Nixon's authority as a former President, he offers no footnotes and only cursory citations of sources. One wonders, for instance, just how he can be certain that President Ngo Dinh Diem would have outpolled Ho Chi Minh or any other opponent in a hypothetical free election in South Viet Nam. His book is less a history than an impassioned pleading against both neo-isolationists who believe the U.S. has no stake beyond self-defense and confrontational rightists who see a Soviet hand guiding every local upheaval in the Third World. To Nixon, Viet Nam was "a just cause...
...Vice President, Nixon says, he counseled that "our choice was to help the French now or be faced with the necessity of taking over the burden." He condemns President Kennedy for the overthrow of Diem, which he argues led to political instability from which South Viet Nam never recovered. He faults Lyndon Johnson for halting bombing, rather than intensifying it, to encourage diplomacy; for fighting a limited war, seeking "not to win, but only not to lose"; and, above all, for failing to blockade the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other supply routes before the invaders became entrenched...