A Response to Telford Taylor's Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy

Abstract

It is a cruel irony that so many of our national leaders and opinion shapers who were silent or supported the original intervention during the Kennedy administration now adopt moralistic postures in the wake of the horrors of that war. There appears to be emerging a curious American inversion of the old "stab in the back" theory. Where the German general staff succeeded in placing the blame for the loss of World War I on the ensuing civilian leadership of the Weimar Republic, the liberal Establishment in America now seems to have embarked on placing the onus of the Vietnam adventure on the military. * . . [A] minor industry exists in the production of books and lectures castigating the military mind, the Pentagon, and GI butchers.