Part of Rick Perlstein’s ode to Hubert Humphrey: Was Humphrey really as hawkish as all that? Johnson didn’t think so; he actually preferred that Nixon win the election. He didn’t trust Humphrey to hold firm on the war. Hadn’t read that before, but then I have yet to finish Nixonland. Certainly has some implications for […]
Tag: Vietnam
Tom Ricks has been reading the digitized archives of the My Lai investigation: I’ve been reading My Lai materials for about four weeks now. I haven’t said much about the incident on my blo
Matterhorn is the Das Boot of the Vietnam-era Marine infantry company. Two tips when reading Matterhorn: Do NOT get attached to any of the characters, and have NO hope that things are going to get b
I endorse most of what Gian Gentile says here about the Vietnam War, especially in the context of this quote from George Herring: …the war could [not] have been ‘won’ in any meaningful sense at a moral or material cost most Americans deemed acceptable. Gentile is a pretty harsh critic of the COIN turn in […]
Why would William Calley ever be invited to speak to a Kiwanis Club? William Calley, the former Army lieutenant convicted on 22 counts of murder in the infamous My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, publicly ap
From the “Let Me Google That For You” file, here’s Jack Moss complaining about Rick Perlstein’s outstanding piece in the Post, wherein he notes that — unlike today —
I’ve had Vo Nguyen Giap on my death list for four years running. This year in History of Strategic Thought, we read People’s War People’s Army; while the first half is pretty much standard Marxist agitprop, his account of the siege and reduction of Dien Bien Phu is a beautiful thing to behold. A couple […]
Scott Johnson’s book report about the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit offers yet another recitation of the completely uncontroversial point that the 1961 Vienna meetings did not go well for Kennedy. J
In early 1972 the heavy cruiser Newport News deployed to Southeast Asia. Newport News was one of the last of the big gun cruisers, commissioned in 1949 and carrying 9 8-inch guns with an automatic rel
Today’s the 40th anniversary of the slaughter at My Lai. Less than a week after the episode was first reported in November 1969 — more than 18 months after the incident itself — the South Vietnamese Defense Ministry released an explanatory statement that described the encounter as an operation intended to destroy “an important Communist […]
Whenever I teach the American Civil War, I always end the last lecture on the conflict by reading a passage from Walt Whitman’s funeral hymn for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the D
In 1777 a peasant rebellion resulted in the massacre of the family of Nguyen Phuc Anh, son of feudal nobility in what is now southern Vietnam. The fifteen year old escaped, and returned to his home af