Maynard Parker
Essay
Jan
1975
Viewed through Vietnamese lenses, Vietnam has always been the center of the world and Indochina the center of the universe. And in the late 1960s, it seemed as if America shared that peculiar vision of the world. The war in Vietnam became the scar on the national psyche. It dominated our national agenda, flickering into our living rooms each night through television, fueling a series of firestorms of protest, laying the groundwork for the dislocations that still hobble the nation's economy, driving thousands of young Americans into exile and an American President from office. In the end, 2.6 million Americans served in that far-off land and 56,000 died there in what had become, without our quite knowing why, the nation's longest war.
Essay
Jan
1973
The implications of an uncertain ceasefire in Indochina and the possible beginning of separate political dialogues in Laos and Cambodia have again focused attention on Washington's alliance with Thailand, the only nation on the mainland of Southeast Asia which the United States is bound by treaty to defend. Significantly too, Thailand faces an increasingly serious, if not yet critical, insurgency. No matter how the situation in each of the three Indochina states is finally resolved, President Nixon's decisions on Thailand in the next year will largely determine the future course of American policy and involvement in Southeast Asia during the decade ahead.
