Letters to the Editor

Improvement in Iraq: Trust Joe Klein and his secret sources Glenn Greenwald [2007-05-24]

• Time Magazine in the 1960s

  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,830348-2,00.html

  How is the war actually going? Measured against the desperate situation that faced General Maxwell Taylor on a fact-finding mission for the President 19 months ago, there is room for qualified optimism. When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara returned from a conference with service chiefs in Pearl Harbor last week, the Pentagon said "the corner has definitely been turned toward victory." No one was setting any timetable, but U.S. military chiefs and South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem say that the war should be won "within three years." There are many soldiers in South Viet Nam who consider this wildly optimistic; some believe that the war may never be won. But almost everyone agrees that things have improved.
  - - Time Magazine, Friday, May 17, 1963

  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,941057-1,00.html

  Nonetheless, a note of optimism permeated the conference. "There are many signs that we are at a favorable turning point," the President said at the outset. That theme was elaborated in detail as U.S. and South Vietnamese officials met on Nimitz Hill, the U.S. naval headquarters overlooking the Philippine Sea. Also in clear view from the spacious verandas on the Hill was a tangible reminder of the larger stakes — and risks—in the Viet Nam war: the Soviet trawler Gidrofon, laden with electronic snooping gear, lying just beyond the three-mile limit in order to monitor U.S. B-52 flights to Viet Nam and track the six Polaris subs based at Guam.

  
  The military situation in Viet Nam gave ample cause for confidence. South Viet Nam's Premier Nguyen Cao Ky said that the Communist forces in his country are "on the run" and pictured the supply system in the North as "in near paralysis."
  - - Time Magazine, Friday, March 31, 1967

  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,839949-1,00.html

  "Progress" in Viet Nam is a relative and fragile thing at best. But within limits, a prognosis of progress seems more valid than at any time since the U.S. arrived.

  
  The history of the war is all too painfully graven in false optimism. Again and again, U.S. hopes have been raised by officials armed with gleaming statistics and pollyanna rhetoric. First the U.S. "turned the corner" in Viet Nam; then there was "light at the end of the tunnel," "the enemy was on the run," and the attrition rates, the kill ratios, and all the other jargon of victory rolled on and on. Since they have been proved wrong so often in the past, U.S. experts are careful not to parade their latest positive assessments; indeed, they almost tend to conceal them. But those currently in charge of the war in the field are convinced that "the curve is up" at last.
  - - Time Magazine, Friday, March 28, 1969

  -- sysprog
  [Read sysprog's other letters]
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