On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson
Rockefeller by Richard Norton Smith, and
Nationalist in the Viet Nam War, Memoirs
of a Victim Turned Soldier by Nguyê͂n Công Luâ̩n: Two brilliant
and important books that will change anyone’s understanding of the 1960’s.
In 1998, when Cary Reich,
a financial writer for Investor’s
Business Daily, virtually dropped dead at the age of 48 after having completed
the well received volume one of The Life
of Nelson Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer 1908 – 1958, a disappointed world
wondered how this great magnum opus would be completed. His agent said he had
already completed the research for the second volume.
There had never been a really
good biography of Nelson Rockefeller if only because the Rockefellers had made
secrecy a way of life. With the power conferred by so much money, many of the
people in the know were on the family payroll and reluctant to betray the hand
that fed them.
Now, along comes Richard Norton Smith with a one volume
biography On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller. This brilliant book, that benefits from
Reich’s research, reveals the extent to which Rockefeller, four term Governor
of New York State and perennial aspirant to the presidency of the United
States, through his foundations and expert study commissions, actually drove
much of the domestic and international agenda in the 1950’s and 1960’s. He hired and supported Henry Kissinger while
Dean Rusk was president of the Rockefeller Foundation before becoming Secretary
of State.
Smith has gained access to much
personal documentary material that was unavailable to Reich. Smith soft pedals the damage that
Rockefeller’s obsession with giant building projects did to New York City’s and
New York State’s economy. However, his
exposition of Rockefeller’s personality and foibles is brilliant and
perceptive.
Amazingly, I came away from
this book, not only with a much deeper understanding of the forces and
personalities that shaped the all-important decade of the 1960’s, but secure in
the knowledge that there is such a thing as being too rich. I had always thought, and this book confirms,
that Richard Nixon’s greatest contribution to the United States of America is
that he stood in the way of Nelson Rockefeller’s becoming president of the
United States. For that alone, the
nation should be eternally in Nixon’s debt.
And we should be forever in
Richard Norton Smith’s debt for this brilliant and important biography.
Nationalist in
the Viet Nam War, Memoirs of a Victim Turned Soldier by Nguyê͂n Công Luâ̩n, an incredible,
intimate examination of the war from the perspective of a soldier who spent
nineteen years in the South Vietnamese Army.
Luâ̩n has no doubt that he was fighting
on the right side. Luâ̩n
was born in 1938 in a small village near Nam Dinh
south of Hanoi. After 1945, when he was in the second grade, Luâ̩n’s village was in a no man’s land between French
and Viet Minh forces, so he alternately lived under both sides. His father was a member of the nationalist
party VNQDD. After his father was arrested and died in a Viet Minh jail, Luâ̩n moved with his family to Saigon in the
resettlement following the 1954 Geneva Accords.
In the early
years of the war, Luâ̩n was trained at Fort
Bragg in 1957, and rose relentlessly in the ranks. Uniquely, he spend three years as a director
in the Chiêu Hồi
program where he dealt with defectors from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese
Army, so he has a really good understanding of the soldiers on both sides of
the conflict. He returned for another course at Fort Bragg that ended in March
1975. Nevertheless, he returned to South
Vietnam, just in time for the end. After the collapse of South Vietnam, Luâ̩n spent eight years in communist prisons in both
north and south Vietnam.
After another eight years, he moved with his family to
San Diego under the orderly departure program. Luâ̩n’s
observations are important and priceless.
If nothing else, the complexities and nuances of the conflict are
illuminated by someone who spent the thirty years from 1945 to 1975 immersed in
the war. This book makes the strongest
possible case for why the United States was right to fight in Vietnam. He claims that without American intervention,
South Vietnam would have collapsed no later than 1967, and then the wholesale
slaughter that the world witnessed in Cambodia would have been the fate of
South Vietnam. For anyone looking for a book to make a veteran feel great about
his or her service, this is it.
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