How small a fraction of the cost to America of the episode that history has come to remember simply as “Vietnam” is represented even by these figures, moreover? How many American lives were wrecked in other ways, scarred inside with scars that would never heal? And what of the cost to which President Eisenhower referred when he wrote (in words he struck from his memoirs before publication), “The standing of the United States as the most powerful of the anti-colonial powers is an asset of incalculable value to the Free World.… Thus the moral position of the United States was more to be guarded
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