War Stories: The Taylor-Buzzanco Debate and How We Think about the Vietnam War

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 453-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Miller
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The Future ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
War Stories

This paper examines the recent debate between historians Keith Taylor and Robert Buzzanco over the interpretation of the Vietnam War and considers the implications of the debate for the future of Vietnam War studies. Miller analyzes Taylor and Buzzanco's differences over the origins and evolution of the war, and finds that both historians rely too heavily on the Cold War to explain the motives and actions of leaders and groups who participated in the conflict. The paper concludes with a proposal to reconceptualize the war as a contest among the multiple ways of thinking about modernization.

The Roots and Rationalizations of U.S. Torture in Vietnam

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-124
Author(s):  
William L. d'Ambruoso
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Behavioral Control ◽  
Sensory Deprivation ◽  
Control Techniques ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Policy Elites ◽  
The U.S

This chapter traces the twin tales of the CIA’s and the U.S. military’s use of torture during the Vietnam War. The CIA’s interrogation program was rooted in the early days of the Cold War, when the agency was founded. U.S. foreign policy elites like Dwight Eisenhower and Allen Dulles were convinced that the Soviet Union’s freedom from norms and laws gave it an edge. As a result, the CIA began researching and practicing behavioral control techniques, using drugs and sensory deprivation to compete with Soviet programs. The agency’s KUBARK interrogation manual (1963) considered physical torture off-limits and ineffective, but recommended “maxim[izing] mental discomfort.” Likewise, CIA interrogators in Vietnam such as Frank Snepp believed isolation and sensory deprivation were both ethically and efficaciously superior to harsher alternatives. While racism and exasperation explain much of the U.S. military’s use of torture, soldiers also used water and electricity because the techniques were “unpleasant” but not “injurious.”

“Ali Even Motivates the Dead”: The Pursuit of Sovereignty in Norman Mailer's The Fight

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-336
Author(s):  
Michael Collins
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Norman Mailer ◽  
Private Bank ◽  
Bank Account ◽  
Social Death ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
George Foreman ◽  
The Cold War

Norman Mailer was haunted by the specter of social death—a specter created for him by living as a Jew between the parentheses created by the Holocaust and the prospect of nuclear Armageddon. As an antidote to social death, Mailer sought its opposite—sovereignty within and beyond his writer's sphere. In the boxer Muhammad Ali, Mailer found an exemplar of the seizure of sovereignty within and beyond a sphere. The Fight chronicles the heavyweight championship battle between Ali and George Foreman in Zaire, a country treated like a private bank account by its dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. I argue that Mailer regrettably failed to emphasize fully the fact that Zaire was exhibit B (the Vietnam War being the writer's inevitable exhibit A) in the case Mailer passionately made that the Cold War brutalized the American psyche.

Imaging Nationalism in the Cold War: The Foundation of the American National Portrait Gallery

1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-375
Author(s):  
Marcia Pointon
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Washington Post ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Martin Luther King

In October 1968 the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London was under siege from students protesing against the continued American presence in Vietnam. In France the universities were in turmoil. The Washington Post for 6 October covered the Apollo Flight – the first step to the moon–, uprisings in Columbia university, Twiggy in person and a debate about when the Bikinians might return to their island. Nixon was edging his way towards the presidency in a year that had seen the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, a year in which Johnson decided not to stand for another term in order (allegedly) to devote himself to ending the Vietnam war, in which the Democratic convention took place in Chicago in the midst of violent clashes between police and demonstrators.

scholarly journals The Secret of Seeing Charlie in the Dark

Vulcan ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-88
Author(s):  
Richard A. Ruth
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Emotional Stress ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Night Vision ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The introduction of night vision technology during the Vietnam War transformed how u.s. military men and their communist enemies fought at night. The starlight scope’s seemingly miraculous light-amplifying powers made hitherto unseen targets easier to see. And as sole possessor of this new technology, American soldiers had a profound tactical advantage operating at night. But they also paid a price for this new edge. Burdened by the scope’s weight, untested technology, and extreme secrecy, these servicemen suffered. They endured physical, psychological, and emotional stress unforeseen by the military leaders who pushed for the scope’s development during the Cold War. The new rifle-mounted scope figuratively transformed night into day, and, paradoxically, made it harder for many American soldiers to pull the trigger.

5. From confrontation to détente, 1958–68

2021 ◽  
pp. 78-101
Author(s):  
Robert J. McMahon
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War

‘From confrontation to détente, 1958–68’ explores the events and forces that made the late 1950s and early 1960s a period of seemingly perpetual crisis. In the late 1950s, the Cold War entered perhaps its most dangerous phase, the time in which the danger of general nuclear war was highest. A succession of crises, culminating in 1962 with the epochal confrontation between Washington and Moscow over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, brought the world perilously close to a nuclear conflagration. On both sides of the superpower divide, risk-taking and shrill rhetoric reached levels not witnessed since the late 1940s. The US involvement in Vietnam, particularly the Vietnam War, is an important part of this history.

The Illusion of Progress

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER T. FISHER
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Development Support ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the relationship between pacification and modernization theory during Lyndon B. Johnson's stewardship of the Vietnam War. It uses Johnson's South Vietnamese pacification program, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), to reveal the hopes, intentions, and limitations of the administration's approach. This article contends that CORDS represented Johnson's attempt to define the Vietnam conflict as a progressive expression of the Cold War through modernization theory. It also argues that CORDS's inability to resolve the contradictions implicit in development and security exposed the limits of Johnson's vision for both Vietnam and the Cold War. Finally, the article illustrates how interadministrative debates regarding the intersection of pacification and modernization anticipated intellectual tensions that divided modernization theorists and dominated the field in the 1970s.

Shots Made around the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Paasche
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Media Production ◽  
Labor Practices ◽  
Military Commanders ◽  
The World ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

The Department of Army Special Photographic Office (DASPO) was created to document U.S. Army activities during the Cold War, with much of the work centered on the Vietnam War. This chapter, by James Paasche, demonstrates that the production of state and military propaganda required constant negotiations of control between military commanders and the soldiers and media makers on the ground. Further, this chapter attends to the labor practices of an institutional filmmaking unit in the hopes of delineating how the processes of media production must adapt to the fraught contexts of war. In addition, the chapter considers how image making was considered a key component of the U.S. military’s supposed technological superiority during the Vietnam War.

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