History-Fest 2014: Post War Era

Showing posts with label Post War Era. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides by Christian G. Appy (Post War Era, Military & Foreign Policy)

Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides

by Christian G. Appy

Post War Era
Military & Foreign Policy

Thesis:

The Vietnam War is divisive topic. The books uses the words of soldiers, pows, politicians, generals, antiwar activists, students, and civilians from both sides to demonstrate how many experienced this conflict differently. Appy wanted to open eyes to confront the war's full picture and how personal accounts contradict the collective memory of the conflict.

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

The Vietnamese were dedicated to national sovereignty and independence. They had been abused by colonial rule of the French (supported by Americans after WWII) and were willing to fight and die for autonomy.

Interviews with US policy makers showed that they had no real understanding of what the Vietnamese were fighting for and why they seemed to have no breaking point. They believed there was some magic number of casualties and once they accomplished that, the Vietnamese would surrender. This was not the case.

The brutality of the acts of war range from, soldiers wearing scalps, to annihilating villages, to chemical ware fare with agent orange. Veterans still carry remorse over their actions against innocents.

Summary:

What does this tell us about Military & Foreign Policy in the Post War Era?

Military leadership during the Vietnam War was lacking. Policy makers and in country leaders had no clue what the Vietnamese were fighting for. They believed it would be an easy short-lived conflict and they never seemed to determine when enough was enough. US civilians were willing to send some troops but as the war escalated patience and acceptance from the American people dwindled, as soldier deaths increased and journalists began getting the stories out of what was really going on, protesters emerged in the largest antiwar movement we've ever had.

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?

General Thoughts:

Excerpts from Book Reviews:

My Highlighted Passages:

One coastal target in the north was identified by Saigon intelligence as a rest and recuperation center for Viet Cong cadre, but the Vietnamese PT skipper said, “No, that’s a leper hospital.” My intelligence said it was a communist R and R center so that was that. We sent a team in there firing as they went, and they killed a lot of people. It turned out to be a leper hospital just as the Vietnamese officer had predicted. When the team got back I’ll never forget the look the skipper gave me. His eyes said everything. He pointed at me and said, “Hospital.” That really did a great deal of damage to our credibility.399

Our hope early on in Vietnam was to win the hearts and minds of the people, but that hope was destroyed by the South Vietnamese government’s failure to gain the people’s allegiance and by Westmoreland’s strategy of search-and-destroy.460

You simply pile on and crush ’em. That was Westmoreland’s approach in Vietnam. There was no subtlety. His idea was to go after people and kill them in great number.463

However, one of the basic problems was that the North Vietnamese had an almost bottomless pit of people with the determination to outlast the Americans. And they were able to engage us on terms favorable to themselves. They would inflict casualties and then disappear.466

Their strategic aim was to wear us down until the American public turned against the war. It worked. People thought, we keep taking terrible casualties and we’re not seeing any benefit.468

Some Americans claim that Hanoi ordered the attack to provoke the United States into these actions; that we did it specifically to kill Americans and planned to do so on a day when [U.S. National Security Adviser] McGeorge Bundy was in Saigon and [Soviet Premier] Alexei Kosygin was in Hanoi. I have never understood why the U.S. government regarded this attack as provocative. It was just a normal battle, part of a long-term dry-season offensive in the Highlands.499

We had such heated discussions about how to fight. Should we be on the offensive or defensive? It was a very hard question. Fighting the U.S. wasn’t easy. We had to rely on our creativity.518

I remember putting the stethoscope in my ears to listen to his pulse. I glanced at my watch and it was almost eleven o’clock. That’s all I can remember.716

Later my friends told me that we were hit by a bomb from a B-52. There were six of us in that room—myself, two male nurses, and three patients. I718

When I got home, I think everybody, including myself, was sick of the war. We abhorred it. It was not only cruel, it was absurd.727

We had guys whose morale was so damaged as a result of returning to the States after their first tour that they volunteered to come back. They could simply not stand to read the paper or watch the television. I couldn’t believe the newspaper clippings my family was sending me after the Tet Offensive2173

I had to tell these boys that had just served their country to get out of their country’s uniform as soon as they could. If they weren’t wearing their uniform then maybe they wouldn’t be targeted by the protesters. disappointed. I had grown up with World War II movies and everybody had a band or something to welcome them home. An ungrateful nation let some twenty-three-year-old stewardess welcome these guys home.2500

“We all have very serious misgivings about the direction of the war. We don’t want to be piling up American boys like cordwood fighting endless Asian troops. We feel that we can bring this war to a quick conclusion by using overwhelming naval and air power.2738

The assumption was that the North Vietnamese would sue for peace if we increased the level of punishment.2742

“So you’re going to cut them off, keep them from being reinforced, and then you’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age.2743

Air force chief McConnell said,

“Well, that’s not exactly it, but you’ve got to punish them.

“Do you fully support these ideas?

Both generals said they totally agreed

“You goddamn fucking assholes. You’re trying to get me to start World War III with your idiotic bullshit—your ‘military wisdom.

“You dumb shit. Do you expect me to believe that kind of crap? I’ve got the weight of the Free World on my shoulders and you want me to start World War III?

“I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to give me an answer. Imagine that you’re me—that you’re the president of the United States—and five incompetents come into your office and try to talk you into starting World War III. Then let’s see what kind of guts you have with the whole damn world to worry about. What would you do?

“Mr. President, we’ve obviously upset you.The understatement of the year.There are many things about the presidency only one human being can understand. You, Mr. President, are that human being. With that thought in mind, I cannot take your place, think your thoughts, know all you know, and tell you what I would do if I were you. I can’t do it, Mr. President. No man can honestly do it. It’s got to be your decision and yours alone. The risk is just too high. How can you fucking assholes ignore what China might do? You have just contaminated my office, you filthy shitheads. Get the hell out of here right now.2763

I think Johnson had already made up his mind long before they got there and was using his most forceful way to kill the plan. When I got back into the car with Admiral McDonald, he said,2767

“Never in my entire life did I ever expect to be put through something as horrible as what you just watched from the president of the United States to his five senior military advisers.2769

He was just destroyed. For three or four days they seriously considered a mass resignation—all of them. I think the reason they didn’t was that we were at war and they did not want to be labeled traitors who quit in the face of the enemy.2769

have low tolerance for Vietnam vets who blame everything that’s happened to them in the last thirty years on the twelve months they spent over there. The fact of the matter is that7108

ninety-five percent of vets are normal, functioning, completely well-adjusted people just like everybody else.7109

We also made a distinction between the ordinary solders who carried out orders and the policy makers who initiated the war.7181

wrote, but there was no way to know if he was still alive. In many cases people received letters saying everything was okay when, in fact, the writer had already been killed. So receiving a letter was a mixed blessing. At first you were so happy, but then you looked at the date it was written and started to worry all over again. I was separated from my husband for ten years and he was separated from our two children for thirteen.7187

Dissent was expressed from every quarter. Two hundred and fifty State Department employees signed a letter of protest and several of Kissinger’s top aides resigned in opposition to the policy.8220

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

xThe Sixties : Years of Hope, Days of Rage by Todd Gitlin (Post-War Era, Politics)

The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

by Todd Gitlin

Post-War Era
Politics

Thesis:

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

Summary:
The prologue lays out the main topics the author discusses throughout as the legacies/missed opportunities/accomplishments of the 60's...
1. Social Equality (Race, Gender, Sexuality)
2. Wide Open Lifestyles
3. Limitation of National Violence
4. Care of the Earth
5. Spread of Democratic Activity

What does this tell us about Politics in the Post War Era?

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?

General Thoughts:

Gitlin experiences this era first hand. His interpretations are largely personal in his efforts to explain why the SDS movement ultimately failed to move forward the New Left Agenda and make any permanent long lasting impact

Excerpts from Book Reviews:

"One of the most perplexing, yet historically important, phenomena of our era has been the rise and abrupt fall of the New Left during the 1960s."

"Gitlin is on home base when describing the early, heady days of the student movement; he is increasingly introspective about the later sixties when the "movement" splintered. As much as anything, this is a book that seeks to explain what went wrong—what decisions, influences, and intentional disruptions pushed the Left into its final spasms of self-destruction."

My Highlighted Passages:

xFrom Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism by Darren Dochuk (The Post War Era, Religion)

From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism

by Darren Dochuk

The Post War Era
Religion

Thesis:

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

Summary:

From Bible Belt to Sun Belt tells the dramatic and largely unknown story of "plain-folk" religious migrants: hardworking men and women from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas who fled the Depression and came to California for military jobs during World War II. Investigating this fiercely pious community at a grassroots level, Darren Dochuk uses the stories of religious leaders, including Billy Graham, as well as many colorful, lesser-known figures to explain how evangelicals organized a powerful political machine. This machine made its mark with Barry Goldwater, inspired Richard Nixon's "Southern Solution," and achieved its greatest triumph with the victories of Ronald Reagan.

What does this tell us about Religion in the Post War Era?

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?

General Thoughts:

Excerpts from Book Reviews:

" the economic and cultural transformation of Southern California from the 1930s to the 1980s that led to the nationwide dissemination of the conservative views that influenced the rise of the Christian Right in American politics. As such, it is as much a regional history as it is a volume on religion and politics."

"George S. Benson (president of Harding University and instrumental in its National Education Program), John Brown (founder of several educational institutions in Arkansas and California as well as of a prominent evangelical radio station in Southern California), and George Pepperdine (founder of the Western Auto nationwide chain of automotive specialty stories and Pepperdine University) created a network of media outlets, educational institutions, and evangelical Christian organizations that proved to be the catalyst for the emergence of the Religious Right in national politics."

"The vast majority of evangelical Christians in Southern California adopted the premillennial view that individual salvation required personal commitment and constant vigilance against the creeping socialism of the liberal establishment and the threat of a worldwide communist takeover that would stamp out conservative Christian institutions."

"In Dochuk’s telling, we have here the roots of the Religious Right, and there is no question that the American Left has savaged those with religious commitments, to its own detriment. But the Left’s failure is not nearly enough to explain why American evangelicalism has been so easily captured by right-wing corporate capitalism, militaristic nationalism, and the prosperity gospel. That is to say, how do we get from antebellum evangelicalism, with its plethora of socially progressive reform efforts, to the contemporary and reactionary evangelicalism of Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and the Tea Party?"

"A pivotal point in Dochuk’s narrative comes in 1945–1946, when a peculiar old age welfare scheme ($30 scrip weekly to every unemployed Californian over age fifty) was resurrected. At this time California’s southern evangelical transplants were equally suspicious of “corporate capitalism and the bureaucratic state” (p. 80), and this “Ham and Eggs” proposal provided an alternative to “the industrial unionism and progressive liberalism that animated the Left, and the strident antistatism that energized the Right” (p. 92). The arrival of the rabidly anti-Semitic Gerald L. K. Smith in behalf of the Ham and Eggers helped convince Social Democrats that this proposal was the manifestation of reactionary, fundamentalist religion. The result was violent confrontations between the two groups and the defeat of Ham and Eggs. More importantly, this conflict ensured that southern evangelicals in California would choose the Right and its “united Christian, conservative front” over a Left that “sympathized with their economic plight but vilified their religion” (p. 101).

My Highlighted Passages:

“Sunbelt evangelicals” were changing American politics, helping “win the governorship for Ronald Reagan in 1966, the South for Richard Nixon in 1972, and ultimately the country for Reagan’s Republican Party in 1980”

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis (Post War Era, Military & Foreign Policy)

The Cold War: A New History

by John Lewis Gaddis

Post War Era
Military & Foreign Policy

Thesis:

The Cold War changed what war meant and how wars would be fought for the world as a whole. The author hopes to correct the current misunderstanding that the Cold War was a war where dangers were not real and the threat of Soviet Union was exaggerated. In fact, the threat was very real and the world narrowly escaped detrimental destruction.

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

Summary:

The author first describes how capitalism and socialism were positioned in conflict with one another immediately following WWII. The US found itself in a powerful position after the war, with a relatively uneffected homeland and population. At the same time, Russia had suffered vastly during the war but had come out victorious, without Russia and the Eastern front, the allies could not have won on the European front. While Stalin accepted assistance to rebuild after the war, he was also preparing his people for the next war, he thought was inevitable as tensions between capitalist nations built back up after this war.

The nuclear weapons used by the US were in large measure meant to force cooperation of the Soviets during peace negotiations for WWII. In this way, they were effective. However, the USSR also had spies and a nuclear program of their own.

What does this tell us about Military and Foreign Policy in the Post War Era?

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?

This book is an excellent over view of the events and forces involved in the Cold War Era. This is the author's field of research and the subject he most often teaches. This is his abbreviated version of history and it was very helpful.

General Thoughts:

Excerpts from Book Reviews:

My Highlighted Passages:

Stalin’s was a very different vision: a settlement that would secure his own and his country’s security while simultaneously encouraging the rivalries among capitalists that he believed would bring about a new war. Capitalist fratricide, in turn, would ensure the eventual Soviet domination of Europe. 451

Despite their revolutionary character those bombs were built under an old and familiar set of assumptions: that if they worked, they would be used. Few of the thousands of people employed in the wartime Manhattan Project saw their jobs as differing from the design and production of conventional weapons. Atomic bombs were meant to be dropped, as soon as they were ready, on whatever enemy targets yet remained. 835

Technology might have changed, but the human habit of escalating violence had not. 839

And Truman himself had left it to the Army Air Force to determine when and where the first atomic weapons would be dropped: the names “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” were no more familiar to him, before the bombs fell, than they were to anyone else.10 859

After that happened, though, Truman demanded a sharp break from past practice. He insisted that a civilian agency, not the military, control access to atomic bombs and their further development. 861

But Truman did have one unique qualification for demanding a return to Clausewitz: after August, 1945, he had the ability, by issuing a single order, to bring about more death and destruction than any other individual in history had ever been able to accomplish. That stark fact caused this ordinary man to do an extraordinary thing. He reversed a pattern in human behavior so ancient that its origins lay shrouded in the mists of time: that when weapons are developed, they will be used. 881

But he also tried to be nice about it: at one point, while bullying an American visitor, Hubert Humphrey, he paused to ask where his guest was from. When Humphrey pointed out Minneapolis on the map, Khrushchev circled it with a big blue pencil. “That’s so I don’t forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly,” he explained amiably.43 1122

Wilson’s vision, at least, had been revived: the contest of ideas that he and Lenin had begun during World War I would continue now within the emerging 1500

Cold War. That became apparent in three important speeches, given within thirteen months of one another in 1946–47. 1501

Stalin made the first one in Moscow on February 9, 1946, and in it he went back to basics. He restated Marx’s condemnation of capitalism for distributing wealth unevenly. He reiterated Lenin’s claim that, as a result, capitalists were likely to go to war with one another. He drew from this the conclusion that peace could come only when communism had triumphed throughout the world. 1502

Winston Churchill, recently turned out of office, gave the second speech in the improbable setting of Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, with President Truman sitting at his side. 1508

an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of ancient states of central and eastern Europe. . . . [A]ll these famous cities and the populations around them . . . are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow. 1511

Truman himself gave the third speech a year later, on March 12, 1947, in which he asked Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey and announced the Truman Doctrine, with its implied American commitment to assist victims of aggression and intimidation throughout the world. 1518

His ideological justification for these measures was Wilsonian: the world was now divided between “two ways of life”—not communism versus capitalism, but democracy versus 1519

authoritarianism, a distinction that allowed him to link this new American involvement in European affairs with the ones that had preceded it in 1917 and in 1941. 1521

United States, after World War II, assumed peacetime responsibilities beyond its hemisphere. Stalin’s challenge had helped to bring that about. 1531

He did so with a view to preserving communism: reform could only take place by acknowledging error. “I was obliged to tell the truth about the past,” he later recalled, “whatever the risks to me.”37 But the system he was trying to preserve had itself been based, since the time of Marx and Engels, on the claim to be error-free. That was what it meant to have discovered the engine that drove history forward. A movement based on science had little place for confession, contrition, and the possibility of redemption. The problems Khrushchev created for himself and for the international communist movement, therefore, began almost from the moment he finished speaking. One was simple shock. Communists were not used to having mistakes admitted at the top, and certainly not on this scale. It was, as Secretary of State Dulles commented at the time, “the most damning indictment of despotism ever made by a despot.”38 The Polish party leader, Boleslaw Bierut, had a heart attack when he read Khrushchev’s speech, and promptly died. 1681

He ordered farmers throughout China to abandon their crops, build furnaces in their backyards, throw in their own furniture as fuel, melt down their agricultural implements—and produce steel. The result of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was the greatest single human calamity of the 20th century. Stalin’s campaign to collectivize agriculture had caused between 5 and 7 million people to starve to death during the early 1930s. Mao now sextupled that record, producing a famine that between 1958 and 1961 took the lives of over 30 million people, by far the worst on record anywhere ever.46 1749