York military affairs symposium. Welcome, colonel daddis. [ applause ] thank you, robert, for the kind introduction and bob for the invitation. Im not only happy to be here, given new york traffic, im also lucky to be here. [ laughter ] ize watch the clock tick away, not only only palisades driving down from west point but also in the cab trying to get us from the hotel to here, it was a it was a closerun thing, as some will say. So, what i thought i would do this evening would be to really start with something that happened last week in the white house. And there was an uproar, as you might have recalled last week, at the white house. It was not wry lated to the president s tan suit, which got quite a number of remarks, as we saw, but more significantly for my conversation this evening with you, was really revolved really revolved around one word, and that word was strategy. And the president igniting criticism by saying that we dont yet have a strategy against isis targets in syria c
Test test i dont think the gap was as large as historians might have led us to believe. Most of us are older than you are. Did you ever get a chance to meet westmoreland . Just very briefly at the end of his life he came up for a visit to west point. I had seen him speak once after he had retired and one of the things that struck me was he certainly looked the part if you were casting for a 1960s fourstar general. We need to remember that this is the man who won the time man of the year. If you read that article, hes lauded as one of the best and the brightest. He attends Harvard Management school, and so i dont think hes quite the modern major general, if you will, that some would have [ inaudible question ] yeah. Right. How much control did westmoreland have over the bombing of the north versus the restrictions . Thats a great question. None. And thats the other thing thats important here, right . Much of my discussion tonight obviously focused on the ground war inside saigon, but th
That they had a word for it, multitracking or something similar to that. Thatrtainly knowledged they were still looking at cia operations, although, truth be told, they were limited. Wasnomous operations supposed to distance the cia from the exiles and let them go off and do their own thing so that we would be less involved. The point is that kennedy also wanted to explore a different route was under serious exploration under the moment he was killed. Can i ask you one question . No, im sorry. Thank you very much, peter. [applause] october the first. Back channel to cuba. You were watching American History tv, all weekend every weekend on cspan3. To join the conversation, like us on facebook. Each week, American History puts on a lecturer with a college professor. You can watch these every saturday evening at 8 00 p. M. And midnight. Next, major Andrew Forney talks about the effects of propaganda on american use of the japanese during world war ii. The class compares antinazi propagand
Are using them online. The courses we teach at george washington, for most of these kids, if it is not online, it does not exist. So part of our whole mission has been to get these primary sources, loosed from the government through the freedom of information act, and then get them into in digital formats, organize them, curate them, index them. So students and journalists can find them. Citizens can find them. We get calls from congress. They have questions, too. How are you funded and where did you come from . We really were started by a whole group of journalists and historians back in the mid1980s who, each of whom had used the freedom of information act to get documents declassified from the government. I think the piles were stacking up in the kitchens. And to save their families i think they created the National Security archive. Not juast a repository but as an institutional memory and a followup because we not only inherited boxes and boxes of documents from these pioneering j
S focuses on the vietnam war. Inability to the plans led to a battleground. This is about two hours. It is a pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight. Serves as the head of the American History division. A west point graduate, he is veteran of both Operations Desert Storm and iraqi freedom. No surethor of victory. His new book reassesses american strategy in vietnam, Oxford University press 2014. It was recently selected for inclusion on the chief of staff armys professional reading list. Welcome kernel welcome kernel datas welcome colonol daddis. Thank you for the kind introduction and bob for the invitation. Be here,only happy to given new york traffic, im also lucky to be here. As i watched the clock tick away not only on the palisades as we were driving down from west point but also in the cap tried to get us from the hotel to hear hotel to here, it was a close run. What i thought i would do would be to start with something that happened in the white house last week. There was an