Letter #73 – An American Amnesia

in Letters from Yorba Linda by Bruce Herschensohn — February 25, 2010 at 3:45 pm | 0 comments

It was my privilege to be part of the Nixon Administration during the height of the Southeast Asian War, first as Director of Motion Pictures and Television of the United States Information Agency and later as Deputy Special Assistant to President Nixon. I was, therefore, able to witness a great man seek liberty for the people of Southeast Asia.

My new book, An American Amnesia is the story of President Nixon’s pursuit, and how the 93rd Congress attempted to thwart his pursuit and how, after he left office, the 94th Congress forced the surrenders of South Vietnam and Cambodia.

My introduction to the book follows:

An American Amnesia: How the U.S. Congress Forced the Surrenders of South Vietnam and Cambodia

INTRODUCTION

Like all times, the 1960s and the 1970s will someday be so long ago that the world will be vacant of anyone who lived through them. Now, however, those decades are not so distant, and under ordinary conditions the years ahead would provide more than sufficient time to record the truth of those years. No rush; there would be plenty of opportunity to do that. But the conditions are not ordinary, as already there has developed a self-induced American amnesia so deep and so widespread that many in the new generation are being educated by teachers who inject their students with a hypodermic filled with fiction.

The serum contains ingredients that convince the student that during the war in which the United States fought in Southeast Asia, five U.S. Presidents were not as smart as their professor. The injection is painless; just a little pressure is felt at the time of the fluid’s introduction. But after a while the fluid hardens in the student’s system and it flourishes into delusions of how foreign policy should be enacted in the future.

It has already happened.

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.

It should be apparent by this book’s short length regarding a long war that it is not meant to be a complete history of the war. Rather, it is meant to act as a supplement to history by recording those pertinent pieces of the past that have been tossed aside, successfully destroying so much of the truth and creating the book’s title: An American Amnesia.

Related posts:

1. Letter #34 – An American War
2. Letter #8: We Haven’t Even Begun To Agonize Over Vietnam