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Did Mcnamara Tell the Whole Story? (1998-07-09)
About this film
Major McMaster, who has taught history at West Point and who commanded a cavalry regiment in combat in the Persian Gulf War, challenges, as WFB puts it, "all the assumptions about the Vietnam War that we tend to cling to, both those who approved the war and those who did not." As a talk-show guest, the Major suffers from a desire to impart all he knows about the subject in half an hour; but what we do learn should send us to his book to learn more. HRM: "One of the elements of the conventional wisdom in connection with Vietnam is that Vietnam was a quagmire that sucked an unwitting American Government into a war that it fundamentally did not understand. What this new evidence suggests--most of it recently declassified documents of the most confidential meetings between the President and his closest advisors, and tapes of telephone conversations, for example, between Lyndon Johnson and his closest advisors and confidants--[is] that these were men who not only should have known better, but who did know better and who made these decisions anyway." Currently there is only a digitized transcript available for this episode.
Directors & creators
Southern Educational Communications Association
Subjects
public broadcasting, AAPB, William F. Buckley Jr., H.R. McMaster, Robert McNamara, Lyndon B. Johnson, Vietnam War, Persian Gulf War, United States Military Academy, Dereliction of Duty, military strategy, Presidential decision making, declassified documents, United States foreign policy, Cold War diplomacy
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