Dymg, We Live
O'Collins, Gerald
interpretation of Christ's passage from being "rich" to being "poor." Finally, the bibliog- raphy has some surprising omissions: for example, G. Schneider on the Acts of the Apostles, H. Schlier...
...troop ships were ordered to ferry thirteen thousand French soldiers to Saigon to fght the Vietnamese seeking independence, the same Vietnamese who had cooperated with the Allies in resisting the Japanese occu- pation...
...How would you answer it...
...r. President," HEW Sec-retary Wilbur Cohen asked Lyndon B. Johnson at a cabinet meeting in early 1968, "why are we in Vietnam...
...Finally, he spoke up, questioning their judgment...
...Finally, the bibliog- raphy has some surprising omissions: for example, G. Schneider on the Acts of the Apostles, H. Schlier on Galatians, and C.ED...
...and Young reminds us of their flawed advice...
...Her book opens by noting that, two months after the surrender of Japan, twelve U.S...
...They all just disregarded it or said it was not backed by anything...
...Years later Kattenberg described the meeting: I listened for about an hour or an hour and a half....There was not a single person there that knew what he was talking about...
...Cohen had prefaced his question by say- ing that his fourteen-year-old son and friends had posed the very same question of him...
...It was appalling to watch....They didn't know Vietnam...
...Years later Cohen described Johnson's explanation: "The president took half an hour to answer, and the answer didn't make any sense whatsoever....If he had given that answer publicly, he would have been laughed out of court...
...Moule on being "in Christ...
...the principles and practices of the liberal capitalist system that governed America was good for America and good for the world...
...They didn't know the past...
...The old dictum, that what was good for General Motors was good for America, was stood on its head...
...And every pres- ident, from Truman to Eisenhower and Kennedy to LBJ and Nixon, set in motion the events that led to the deaths of fifty- eight thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians...
...They had forgotten history...
...Only two senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, voted against the Tonkin Gulf resolution...
...Young points out that we had once again assumed a responsibility grounded on the conven- tional premise that, "a world ordered by 202: Commonweal...
...Marilyn Young, an Asian history scholar at New York University, painstakingly dis- closes the mistakes and lies of those years in her illuminating and riveting synthesis...
...Still, a nation born of revolution had now become the world's leading counterrevolutionary force, opposing virtually every regime it chose to define as Communist...
...Yet until 1968 the overwhelming major- ity of Americans stood behind the war in Vietnam...
...If this is his final, major work, I cannot think of a more impressive achievement to crown the learning of a lifetime...
...Then, as now, Washington policy makers drew a tight circle about themselves and rendered life and death decisions without benefit of naysayers...
...In August 1963 Kattenberg returned from an official visit to Saigon and sat in on a National Security Council session attended by Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Maxwell Taylor, Roger Hilsman, Bobby Kennedy, and LBJ...
...His scholarship is rich and his judgment repeatedly sure as he brings to life, in a new way, passage after passage of the New Testament...
...But, all in all, these are minor blemishes EVERY FIFTEEN YEARS in a book that puts us in Grayston's debt...
...But, notes Young, there were exceptions like Paul Kattenberg, then the State Department coordinator of an interdepartmental group on Vietnam...
...Framed in terms of"the struggle for free- dom," a generation of trusting Americans could hardly be expected to envision any alternatives to so massive a military interTHE VIETNAM WARS, 1945-1990 Marilyn B. Young HarperCollins, $25, 386 pp...
...The more this meeting went on, the more I sat there and thought, "God, we're walking into a major disaster...
...The absurdity of applying this sweeping formula to Southeast Asia escaped most people in Washington...
...It was a gen- eration deeply affected by Munich and ter- rified-with some reason---of Stalin's Soviet Union and Communists...
...And then as now, the rationale for the war kept changing--from the Soviet and Chinese threat, to the "domino theory," to America's burden in defending freedom, a burden (then, as now) never shared by our war party's children and grandchildren, let alone themselves...
...They were all great men...
...he asked LBJ...
...Then, as now, ordinary Americans embraced the emotional patriotic appeals while the elites--in Washington, in cor- porations and unions, and in the media--backed the war with few questions or challenges...
...Then, as now, a few experts were allowed in to confirm their wis- dom...
...Murray Polaes...
...The pattern was repeated in the Philippines where General Douglas MacArthur had installed as head of state Manuel Roxas, "a collaborator closely associated with the most exploitative Japanese occupation policies," writes the author...
...With little or no understanding of the consequences, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy (harshly criticized by Young) and their successors plunged into a region they barely understood, determined, as they repeated endlessly, to stop communism and resist aggression...
...Where foreign policy was concerned, an uncritical generation of Americans pas- sively accepted increasing military inter- vention in Southeast Asia...
...Then, as now, Undersecretary of State George Ball was alone in trying to talk sense but was overwhelmed by those like the New York 7~mes' s influential military correspondent, Hanson Baldwin, who wrote that, while "Vietnam is a nasty place to fight...there are no neat and tidy battlefields in the struggle for freedom [my italics...
Vol. 118 • March 1991 • No. 6
