A reader has called my attention to the fact that Lewis Sorley has written a new book, a biography of General William Westmoreland, the general who directed what might be called the first act of the portion of the Vietnam … Continue reading →
Peter Fonda has been generating a little buzz today because of a murky and unclear statement he made at Cannes that seems to be about his training his grandsons to shoot Obama if some sort of class war starts up. … Continue reading →
Floyd Abrams, one of the lawyers who defended the NY Times in the Pentagon Papers lawsuit, differentiates between Daniel Ellsberg’s actions in releasing those documents and Julian Assange’s in Wikileaks. Ellsberg, he says, was mindful of the damage that could … Continue reading →
It’s Memorial Day. Time for picnics and get-togethers. Time, also, for remembrance of those who sacrificed their lives in American’s wars. This post by Gerard Vanderleun at American Digest offers a poignant poem in honor of a high school acquaintance … Continue reading →
Who are “they?” The Left. What war? Vietnam. What battle? The one that determines who gets to write history. It’s said that history is written by the winners, and that’s true. But Vietnam just may have been the first war … Continue reading →
Presidents are civilians, but they are also Commanders-in-Chief. Generals advise them in times of war, but there is an inherent conflict present in the relationship. The buck stops on the president’s desk. But especially when he has no military experience … Continue reading →
[NOTE: Today, when framing a comment, I came across this previous post of mine. I think it’s so important—and so relevant to another heated discussion we had recently on this blog, that I decided to repost it.] I first read … Continue reading →
The news comes today that Robert McNamara, famous as Kennedy and then Johnson’s Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, has died at the age of 93. Those of us who are of a certain age remember him well, as … Continue reading →
Hugh Van Es, the photographer who took the iconic “helicopters on the roof” photo of the fall of Saigon, has died at 67: [Van Es’s] shot of the helicopter escape from a Saigon rooftop on April 29, 1975 became a … Continue reading →
What important military defeats has America ever known? If you don’t count the South in the Civil War, we have a single one: Vietnam. The consequences of that defeat, in a land so far away, were easy for Americans to … Continue reading →
I first read John Updike’s Vietnam War essay “On Not Being a Dove” in 1989. That’s when his memoir Self-Consciousness, the book in which it was included, was first published. At the time the essay seemed to me to be … Continue reading →
Joe Conason thinks McCain doesn’t know much about history, in particular the Vietnam War and the lessons he should have learned from it. Conason, as the possessor of a 1975 degree in history from Brandeis where they no doubt taught … Continue reading →