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| In The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era (1965), David Halberstam analyzes issues, events, and personalities in South Vietnam in 1961-63, before the US sent massive numbers of troops. Giving the facts as he saw them in journalistic prose, Halberstam does not offer any solutions, political or military: “South Vietnam may be worth a larger commitment on our part,” he says, “but, if so, we should be told the truth, not spoon-fed cliches as in the past.” Hindsight forces us to the conclusion that this suggestion went unheeded, in light of Walt Rostow, National Security Adviser, saying in December 1967, “I see light at the end of the tunnel.”
By the age of 27 Halberstam had already practiced excellent journalism for the NYT during the Congo crisis in the early 1960s. He was therefore posted to the plum assignment of Saigon, where he worked until the generals’ coup which ousted the authoritarian and nepotistic Ngo-Diem administration.
Halberstam shows that President President Ngô Ðình Diem.did not receive accurate information. His underlings feared angering Diem with reports of high casualties and other bad news from the provinces. Ambassador Frederick Nolting and Harkins did not realize how poorly the war was proceeding, but they reported conditions they thought true to McNamara, Rusk, and President Kennedy. When every level emphasizes the good news and downplays the bad news for the higher-ups, the flow of poor information causes bureaucratic, military and political failure.
Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife Madame Nhu (Ngô Ðình Nhu) manipulated Diem as a tag-team. Madame Nhu’s strong anti-Buddhist, pro-Catholic beliefs contributed to the Buddhist crisis in 1962. When monks set themselves on fire in protest, Madame Nhu called it a “barbecue” and said “Let them burn and we shall clap our hands.” Halberstam writes sympathetically of American advisors who had to deal with such allies.
This book would interest readers who want to know more about the war during the Kennedy/Diem era, but, like me, may not feel up to 700-plus pages of Halberstam’s comprehensive The Best And The Brightest.. The Making of a Quagmire is worth reading because at the time it was released it drew harsh criticism from the usual quarters. If the people that thought Joseph Alsop was the fount of foreign-policy wisdom didn’t like this book, Halberstam must have been telling the truth. Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize for the original reporting for the New York Times (NYT) on which this book is based.
I read this for the War Through the Generations reading challenge.
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| Isaiah Berlin (1909 - 1997) is best known as a political philosopher and historian of ideas. In November, 1945 he was working temporarily as the First Secretary at the British Embassy in Moscow.
He took the train to Leningrad and spent a night in conversation with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. This meeting was a fraught one for the poet since the mean, stupid, and paranoid security forces were afraid Berlin was a spy and so they made her life difficult for many years after.
The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin by György Dalos gives a sobering overview of oppressive Soviet culture under Stalin and the watchful eye of his arts overseer Zhdanov. Sometime the writing is rather obscure, sometimes creaky, but readers who know who Joseph Brodsky, Nadezhda Mandelstam, or Lydia Chukovskaya are will probably enjoy this book.
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| All manner of surprises in The Hotel Majestic aka Maigret and the Hotel Majestic (Georges Simenon, 1942). Instead of starting in Maigret's office, the wonderful opening scene has Prosper Donge, who toils as a cook in the bowels of the swanky hotel of the title, bicycling to his job from his already run-down suburban hut. Simenon's magic puts with him, taking in the sights and smells of Paris in the Thirties. At work, Donge discovers another surprise: the corpse of an American woman. In another surprising scene, probably unique in all the 80-some Maigret novels, our Inspector himself gets on a bike and rides along with Donge to time his trip and confirm his alibi. Another fine scene is when Maigret comes home after being slugged by a Yankee and Madame M. exclaims in dismay, "You've been fighting again!" Also out of character, Maigret, angry as heck, slugs a suspect. Well-drawn characters, superb twisted plot, fine "behind the scenes" atmosphere. I highly recommend this "middle period" Maigret.
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| George Packer has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 2003. In his first book Village of Waiting, released in 1988, he describes life in Togo (Francophone West Africa) in the early 1980s. He was a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching languages, in the rural hamlet of Lavié.
In honest and plain prose, the author tells how he hiimself came to know himself and human nature better by becoming an all too visible minority - a yovo (white outsider) in Africa. He also tells about the rough waters the locals must navigate, caught between traditional personal duty (help one's family and tribe members) versus responsibilties as a citizen of the country (obey the laws, serve the government). Another excellent point is that he provides rich details about the land, climate, seasons, drought, and how they all affect the rhythms of work in the tropics. Best, he gives a synmpathetic portrait of ordinary Africans and their round of sleep and backbreaking work for men,and drudgery for women, which starts for both at about three years of age.
The book is organizaed more topically than chronologically. Readers who will enjoy this memoir: Peace Corps past and present, hardy souls who want to travel in West Africa, students of international aid and education, and readers who like expatriate memoirs.
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| The AP reports "Louis Auchincloss, a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction whose dozens of books imparted sober, firsthand knowledge of America's patrician class, has died. He was 92,"
Gore Vidal said in an essay, "He is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs ... things that we don't often meet in fiction." On the strength of that recommendation, in 1986, I bought almost all of Auchincloss's novels in used paperbacks and took them to Okinawa, where I was to teach English for the next six years. I enjoyed them. I can recommend The Rector of Justin (1964). Late last year I re-read A Law for the Lion (1953) and posted the review here.
For an interview, see here.
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