The corny razzle-dazzle of the LBJ roadshow covers up the reality in Vietnam and Laos. While the President reads TV scripts about “the Great Society” in the tone of a ham preacher, and Lady Bird dips corn-pone in Appalachian sorghum and politics, we are being driven out of Asia and back to the western shore of the Pacific. Few Americans see what is happening; still fewer understand; and of those who both see and understand, hardly any seem to give much of a damn.
It is not unnatural that the understanding, in this case, should be scanty among the general public. Southeast Asia is as far away from the United States as you can get on this earth, and its peoples and ways, too, are exceedingly distant from ours. Most Americans have never heard or read anything at all, apart from news scraps during the last couple of years, about Southeast Asian geography, history or culture. Even today’s catastrophic events in Southeast Asia have no direct, immediate effect on the lives of Americans—except for those few. thousand stationed there, and their families, and the few thousand more with professional or business interests in the region.
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