...Debating the Past: The Vietnam Commitment Rene Nodal HIS 145 August 26, 2015 Nancy Fraleigh Debating the Past: The Vietnam Commitment The conflict in Vietnam was controversial to say the least for many reasons. Many did not agree with the U.S. becoming involved with politics in southeast. As America went through the cold war it developed policies regarding communism and strategies to contain it that would later fuel interests in many other countries around the world including Vietnam. Choices would shape how the commitment in Vietnam would change from aid into a costly all-out war exacerbated by the lack of clarity in regards to the overall goal of the U.S. in Vietnam. In the aftermath of the cold war with the U.S.S.R, America engaged in many small conflicts around the globe for various official reasons and for one real reason: The Containment theory. There were many instances in which American military had a direct involvement with another country that dabbled in communism or had communist ties. Both Venezuela and Cuba, for example had dealt with America because of its ties to communism. Vietnam was to be no different. The French had left and where they occupied the United States would support it with military equipment and financial aid. The American presence in South Vietnam initially was mostly military advisors and its cadre. It was very challenging in many ways. The government initially supported a man named Ngo Dinh Diem who seemed to be a strong character capable...
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...Leadership capabilities of John F. Kennedy..…………………………………….……5 1. Leadership strengths……………………………………………….………………5 2. Leadership weaknesses.……………………………………………………………6 3. Emotional intelligence .……………………………………………………………7 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………….…7 References ………………………………………………………………………....…..8 1. Introduction This work’s aim is to show leadership capabilities of great man – John F. Kennedy. He was the 35th President of U.S.A., the youngest and very modern. After his tragic death, his legend is still alive and his influence on American life and politics was seen for a long time. This paper will provide analysis of how Kennedy’s leadership style and present how successful leader he was. 2. John F. Kennedy – the background and the path to success John F. Kennedy’s way to Presidency started in 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he was born as the second son of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. The Kennedy family was reach, Joseph Kennedy was successful businessman, Rose’s father, John Fitzgerald, was the mayor of Boston.(Ratma, 2002) Both Joseph and Rose expected from their children to achieve a lot, especially from sons. Parents believed that all citizens should serve their country and being politician is the most honorable way of doing that. They pay attention to education and they can afford for sending their children to the best elite schools. At the age of thirteen John F. Kennedy (called JFK) was sent to the Catholic school...
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...Atomic Shield Vs. The Iron Curtain Post-World War II attitude transitioned from relief to immediate paranoia and suspicion. World War II was responsible for roughly 55 million deaths. The most devastating war in modern history led to a great shift in power around the world. Many questions regarding the future of Europe arose. The Cold War was caused by a clash between capitalist and communist ideologies that ultimately led to the United States winning the Cold War. The Cold War was a post-World War II stalemate between the world’s two reigning superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. The world now saw opposition between the United States’ capitalist visions verses the Soviet Union’s communist visions. Various roots contributed to the start of the Cold War. Even before the end of World War II, suspicions of the Soviets were present. In October 1917, a revolution in Russia led by Lenin Bolshevik and the communists alarmed many Americans. The Communists had seized power and often used violence to achieve their goals. With a Marxist view, they rejected religion and the idea of private property. It was obvious that the Soviet Union wanted to spread communism throughout the world. After World War II, there loomed a danger of appeasement, because of the familiar events that occurred with Hitler and Germany. Hitler made demands that allowed the Nazis to expand further, and many believed that the Soviet Union was more fixed on...
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...commonly known by his initials JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th President of the United States from January 1961 until he was assassinated in November 1963. After military service as commander of Motor Torpedo Boats PT-109 and PT-59 during World War II in the South Pacific, Kennedy represented Massachusetts's 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 as a Democrat. Thereafter, he served in the U.S. Senate from 1953 until 1960. Kennedy defeated vice president and Republican candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. presidential election. At age 43, he was the youngest to have been elected to the office,[2][a] the second-youngest president (after Theodore Roosevelt), and the first person born in the 20th century to serve as president.[3] To date, Kennedy has been the only Roman Catholic president and the only president to have won a Pulitzer Prize.[4] Events during his presidency included the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Space Race—by initiating Project Apollo (which would culminate in the moon landing), the building of the Berlin Wall, the African-American Civil Rights Movement, and increased U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested that afternoon and charged with the crime that night. Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald two days later, before a trial could take place. The FBI and the Warren Commission...
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...associated with America's Civil Rights movement if only because the main 'points' happened after his presidency - Montgomery, Little Rock, Birmingham, the careers of Martin Luther Kingand Stokely Carmichael. However, some very important civil rights issues were covered in his presidency. Truman’s ancestors had owned slaves. His first recollection of African Americans was a household servants within his family - and he did not come from a prosperous family. While he was dating his future wife Bess, she claimed that he told her that he felt that one person was as good as any other as long as they were not black. He also criticised the Chinese in America, the Jews - to whom he referred to as "Kikes" and the Italians in America who he called "wops". Hence, Truman’s background produced what one would have expected and the young Truman would have had the same views as most other youths in Independence. When he got involved in politics at an early age, he did what any aspiring politician did in the South, he paid $10 to join the KKK. Public office changed Truman. Why? Did he feel that America could not claim to be the democratic capital of the world while African Americans were treated thus? Or were his motives political? The African American population was big enough to have some political clout. Was he out to fish for their votes with his adoption of the civil rights cause? Truman and civil rights legislation: Before he became president, Truman show demonstrated that he had some...
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...iTHE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS Module prepared for CIAO By Richard Ned Lebow August 2000 The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 is generally regarded as the most serious military confrontation of the Cold War. American destroyers deployed along a picket line to intercept Soviet ships transporting missiles and nuclear warheads to Cuba while American air, ground and naval forces prepared for air strikes against Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba and a follow-up invasion. The Strategic Air Command was put on an unprecedented state of alert – “DEFCON II,” only one step away from “war is imminent.” On Saturday morning,October 27, President Kennedy and his advisors were pessimistic about their ability to preserve the peace. Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother and Attorney General of the U.S., had “the feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling.”1 In Moscow, the tension was “phenomenal.” On Sunday morning, General Secretary Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and his advisors worried “that Kennedy intended to declare war, to launch an attack” against the Soviet Union.2 That same day, the two leaders reached an accommodation that, in retrospect, turned out to be one of the key turning points of the Cold War. 1 OVERVIEW The “Caribbean crisis,” as it was known in the former Soviet Union, was attributed to the Kennedy administration’s unwillingness to accept the status quo in Cuba. Unalterably opposed...
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...crucial information, use incomplete or misleading analogies to understand crisis situations, find it difficult to micromanage events, and are unable to project force effectively. Even when they are successful, it is often in spite of, rather than because of, the resources of the institutionalized presidency at their disposal. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 provides a case study of how John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev almost blundered into a nuclear war through the crisis management approaches of their advisory systems, but then managed to extricate themselves using personal diplomacy and old-fashioned political horsetrading. They did so without revealing to the world how they had defused the crisis, a decision to maintain confidentiality with far reaching consequences for subsequent presidential crisis decision making. The illusion that presidential crisis management can compel an adversary to submit and that a nuclear crisis can be successfully managed left Kennedy's successors with impossible burdens of public expectations. The United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war between 22 October, the evening that President Kennedy announced a "quarantine" on Soviet ships carrying weapons...
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...The Cuban Missile Crisis: Reading the Lessons Correctly Author(s): Richard Ned Lebow Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 431-458 Published by: The Academy of Political Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2150497 Accessed: 10/11/2008 23:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aps. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Academy of Political Science is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve...
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...The Cuban Missile Crisis: Reading the Lessons Correctly Author(s): Richard Ned Lebow Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 431-458 Published by: The Academy of Political Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2150497 Accessed: 10/11/2008 23:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aps. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Academy of Political Science is collaborating with JSTOR to...
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...mainly on LBJ and his contribution to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although the initial bill was brought before Congress during JFK’s presidency, his assassination led to Johnson successfully shepherding the bill to passage. Johnson’s success can be attributed to his headstrong endurance, long time relationships with members of Congress, and the policy window due to the death of President Kennedy that finally got the legislation passed. In order to fully examine and give context to Johnson’s struggle for passage of this important bill, this paper will also touch upon who LBJ was before his presidency and what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did for him, his perception, and his presidency. Lyndon Baines Johnson really got his start in government when he entered the Senate in 1949. Johnson had been a Representative to Texas’ 10th district; his win was due to the death of James P. Buchanan which created an open seat, prior to winning his Senate seat. His real drive and passion for politics showed in the amount of time and effort LBJ put into his work. Like most Americans in government he was only starting to be recognized when he made the transition from House to Senate. All his hard work and determination paid off,...
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... BERNATH LECTURE The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms* The Cold War is not what it once was. Not only has the conflict itself been written about in the past tense for more than a decade, but historians’ certainties about the character of the conflict have also begun to blur. The concerns brought on by trends of the past decade – such trifles as globalization, weapons proliferation, and ethnic warfare – have made even old strategy buffs question the degree to which the Cold War ought to be put at the center of the history of the late twentieth century. In this article I will try to show how some people within our field are attempting to meet such queries by reconceptualizing the Cold War as part of contemporary international history. My emphasis will be on issues connecting the Cold War – defined as a political conflict between two power blocs – and some areas of investigation that in my opinion hold much promise for reformulating our views of that conflict, blithely summed up as ideology, technology, and the Third World. I have called this lecture “Three (Possible) Paradigms” not just to avoid making too presumptuous an impression on the audience but also to indicate that my use of the term “paradigm” is slightly different from the one most people have taken over from Thomas Kuhn’s work on scientific revolutions. In the history of science, a paradigm has come to mean a comprehensive explanation, a kind of scientific “level”...
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...1 NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THE ESCALATION OF THE COLD WAR, 1945-1962 David Holloway, Stanford University Nuclear weapons are so central to the history of the Cold War that it can be difficult to disentangle the two. Did nuclear weapons cause the Cold War? Did they contribute to its escalation? Did they help to keep the Cold War “cold?” We should ask also how the Cold War shaped the development of atomic energy. Was the nuclear arms race a product of Cold War tension rather than its cause? The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War The nuclear age began before the Cold War. During World War II, three countries decided to build the atomic bomb: Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Britain put its own work aside and joined the Manhattan Project as a junior partner in 1943. The Soviet effort was small before August 1945. The British and American projects were driven by the fear of a German atomic bomb, but Germany decided in 1942 not to make a serious effort to build the bomb. In an extraordinary display of scientific and industrial might, the United States made two bombs ready for use by August 1945. Germany was defeated by then, but President Truman decided to use the bomb against Japan. The decision to use the atomic bomb has been a matter of intense controversy. Did Truman decide to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order, as he claimed, to end the war with Japan without further loss of American lives? Or did he drop the bombs in order to intimidate the Soviet...
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...Reagan wrote in his personal diary, “Central America is really the world’s next hotspot. Nicaragua is an armed camp supplied by Cuba and threatening a communist takeover of all of Central America.” (The Reagan Diaries, 2007) For the next eight years as Commander-in-Chief, this mindset would shape his perspective on the small Third World country about the size of North Carolina. The Administration’s policies, actions, and attitudes toward Nicaragua and other perceived hostile nations became known as “Reagan Doctrine.” The defeat of the Nicaraguan Revolution became the “cornerstone of the Reagan Central American policy and the test case of Reagan Doctrine.” (U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era, 1992) Reagan Doctrine was not a label coined by President Reagan or his administration. It was a term used later by his critics to define his foreign policy strategy for countries around the world. The Reagan Doctrine was a strategy to aid anti-communist, or more specifically, anti-Soviet insurgencies in the Third World during Reagan’s two terms as president from 1981-1989. The primary goal was to overthrow Marxist regimes and/or prevent Marxist regimes from becoming established. Reagan wasted no time getting started in the implementation of his foreign policy. The Administration’s first comprehensive “U.S. National Security Strategy,” which was a document approved by the President in May of 1982, stated the objective to “contain...
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...1. How did Vincent Van Gogh sign his paintings? - Vincent 2. What did Sir Christopher Cockerell invent? Hovercraft 3. In Bingo, what number is referred to as ‘Doctor’s Orders’? - 9 4. What is the Mexican food Gazpacho? - Cold soup 5. How many toes does a dog have? - 18 6. What canal is located behind Croke Park's Canal End? - Royal Canal 7. Which Beatle's first girlfriend was Thelma Pickles? - John Lennon 8. What is the capitol city of Libya? - Tripoli 9. Name the stock-market trader who sent Barings Bank into bankruptcy. - Nick Leeson 10. Name the French blue cheese made from ewe's milk - Roquefort 11. What was the first phrase recorded by Thomas Edison on his phonograph? - Mary had a little lamb 12. Who trained the 2013 Aintree Grand National winner Auroras Encore? - Sue Smith 13. What life-saving device did Sir Humphry Davy invent? - Miner's safety lamp, the Davy Lamp 14. Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson lost his right arm during which battle? - Santa Cruz de Tenerife 15. Who would use a trudgeon? - A swimmer 16. Which soup is a delicacy in Chinese cuisine made from the salivary excretions of the swiftlet? - Bird’s Nest Soup 17. Which geographical area is part of both Chile and Argentina? - Tierra del Fuego 18. Name the two main ingredients of pasta. - flour and water 19. Who wrote the poem beginning with the words "Because I could not stop for death..." - Emily Dickinson 20. Who said, "The medium is the message"...
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...deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war. These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps. America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America’s generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress. THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF GENERALSHIP Armies do not fight wars; nations fight wars. War is not a military activity conducted by soldiers, but rather a social activity that involves entire nations. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that passion, probability and policy each play their role in war. Any understanding of war that ignores one of these elements is fundamentally flawed. The passion of the people is necessary to endure the sacrifices inherent in war. Regardless of the system of government, the people supply the blood and treasure required to prosecute war. The statesman must stir these passions to a level commensurate with the popular sacrifices required. When the ends of policy...
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