Books, Arts & Manners: The Price of Honor

Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, by Arnold R. Isaacs (Johns Hopkins, 559 pp., $19.95)

‘You don’t argue with success,” President Reagan said when Jesse Jackson secured the release of the Navy flier held captive in Syria. And so in effect said the chagrined liberal establishment in the aftermath of Grenada. You do, however, argue with failure, and so we will have with us for many more years analyses of the nation’s greatest failure—analyses that with benefit of hindsight attempt to tell us not only what went wrong with U.S. policy in Vietnam, but what motivated the policymakers.

KC

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Kathleen Christison

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Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, by Arnold R. Isaacs (Johns Hopkins, 559 pp., $19.95)

‘You don’t argue with success,” President Reagan said when Jesse Jackson secured the release of the Navy flier held captive in Syria. And so in effect said the chagrined liberal establishment in the aftermath of Grenada. You do, however, argue with failure, and so we will have with us for many more years analyses of the nation’s greatest failure—analyses that with benefit of hindsight attempt to tell us not only what went wrong with U.S. policy in Vietnam, but what motivated the policymakers.