When I did 'Esquire,' I did a lot of celebrity covers, but the celebrity cover was Hubert Humphrey as a dummy, sitting on Lyndon Johnson's lap and aping his feelings about the war. I did celebrity covers that made a difference in what was going on in American culture.
We have as a nation been duped by those who use our guilt about how we treated the innocent pawns in the Vietnam War game - the soldiers - into missing the point once again about the utter senselessness that is war.
Nevertheless, China was unfortunately unable to understand Japan's real position, and it is greatly to be regretted that the Sino-Japanese War became one of long duration.
Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush - just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.
Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican nominee in 1952, made a strong public commitment to ending the war in Korea, where fighting had reached a stalemate.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, in my judgment, will go down in history as one of the four 'great' presidents since the U.S. reluctantly became an empire in World War II; Richard Nixon as the nearest to a sociopath by the time he was compelled to resign.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.
Nobel was a genuine friend of peace. He even went so far as to believe that he had invented a tool of destruction, dynamite, which would make war so senseless that it would become impossible. He was wrong.
Each generation seems to invent its own reasons for war.
As for Vietnam, what matters is that Kennedy successfully resisted pressure to send anything more than military advisers, a stance that was a likely prelude to complete withdrawal from the conflict. There is solid evidence of his eagerness to end America's military role in that country's civil war.
'War Eagle' is like 'I love you.'
Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.
East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century.
I grew up on the East Coast and was going to go to an Ivy League School, but at the last minute I decided to be a hippy. It was the protest movements on the war, peace movements were going on at our university. It was a fantastic time.
My dad was born in 1930 in Lithuania, located in Eastern Europe. He was 9 years old when the war started, and his family was sent to the Kovno ghetto. They were soon separated and sent to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
Had my grandparents not emigrated when they did, I might have been born Jewish in Eastern Europe during World War II, or I might not have been born at all. Instead, I was born in 1942 in New York City.
The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay - these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists.
I have never before, in my long and eclectic career, been gifted with such an abundance of natural beauty as I experienced filming 'War Horse' on Dartmoor.
I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.
