Neocons and their political allies are often called “chicken hawks” because few have fought in the wars that they’ve advocated, which means America’s chief war proponents have very little concept of the short- and long-term consequences for soldiers, what ex-CIA official Paul R.…
Tag: Vietnam War
Why Mr. Hardball Found JFK Elusive
Exclusive: For weeks, Chris Matthews has been flogging his book, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, driving it up the ranks of best-seller lists, but the biography is as superficial and clueless as the MSNBC pundit often is, missing Kennedy’s true complexity,…
Three Pillars of a Revived Republic
Richard Nixon’s Darkest Secret
Why the Left Won’t Accept Success
Running from Right-Wing Clowns
By the late 1970s, there was a serious national debate about the blood-soaked Vietnam War, but then came Ronald Reagan rebranding it a “noble cause” and right-wing accusations against critics who “blame America first,” followed by the panicked retreat of…
The Clash Over Dr. King’s Legacy
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is fittingly located between the monuments to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. But historian William Loren Katz asks which version of the martyred civil rights leader will be remembered, the gentle advocate for racial…
Lemmingly, We Roll Along
Exclusive: When soldiers die, the politicians who sent them to their deaths typically use euphemisms, words like “fallen” or “ultimate sacrifice.” On one level, the avoidance of blunt language may be seen as a sign of respect, but on another,…
‘Agent Orange’ Relief Sought for Vietnam
Among the many acts of U.S.-inflicted devastation in the Vietnam War was the aerial spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides to kill vegetation, thus making the Vietcong easier to hunt down and kill. However, the cancer-causing chemicals proved dangerous…
Brian Willson’s Blood on the Tracks
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan made many Americans feel good again, after Vietnam in the 1960s and the Oil Shocks in the 1970s. However, when part of Reagan’s “Morning in America” involved death-squad slaughters in Central America, some Americans, like Vietnam veteran…