An American Amnesia: How the U.S. Congress Forced the Surrenders of South Vietnam and Cambodia
Publisher: Beaufort Books
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York, USA
Language: eng
Format: Ebook
ISBN-13: 9780825306327
Description: From the Introduction...

To be both brief and precise, this book came about because once a week during the fall semesters in the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University there is an evening Foreign Policy Roundtable for those students who elect to attend. Generally, one session each semester is devoted to the subject of the Southeast Asian War that divided the people of the United States, and continues its profound effect on U.S. foreign affairs. Since the students are post-graduates, most often they have already studied that war in the colleges they previously attended. As the session goes on, something happens that at first was unexpected and now is very much expected: it is revealed that large gaps have been left in their education regarding the lives and deaths of Americans, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians during that period and beyond. Some students are justifiably confused.

A common dialogue has become: “How come I was never told these things at the college I attended?”

The only accurate answer has been, “I can only guess. It is my belief that the professor who taught you about that war didn’t know, or did know and didn’t want you to know.”

This book is meant to fill in vacancies left in too many histories of the Southeast Asian War. Much of the information used is taken from notes, commentaries, speeches, articles, and other writings of mine during the 1960s and 1970s as those events were being lived.
Table of contents: label: Author’s Notes; label: Introduction; label: 1
title: Why We Forget; label: 2
title: Enter the 94th U.S. Congress; label: 3
title: The April Surrenders; label: 4
title: May Day; label: 5
title: Journeys from Nations Gone; label: 6
title: Before Paris; label: 7
title: Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! The N.L.F. Is Going to Win!; label: 8
title: The Fragile Bridge to Paris; label: 9
title: Kings and Queens of D.C.’s Invisible Monarchy; label: 10
title: Hotel Journalism; label: 11
title: Erasing an Old Supreme Court Decision; label: 12
title: From Vietnam to 9-11: Finding and Connecting the Dots; label: Index