Andrew L. Johns

Achilles' Heel: The Vietnam War and George Romney's Bid for the Presidency, 1967 to 1968

Most party presidential nominations are lost radier than won. Candidates in recent years have stumbled over their political views, off-the cuff remarks, and personal lives, thereby forfeiting their chance at the White House.1 The 1968 Republican presidential campaign was no different. Although the GOP nominee, former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, went.on to capture the White House in the fall campaign against Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, he had not been the favorite for the nomination a year before. That distinction was held by Michigans Governor George W. Romney. A moderate whose views on civil rights, .Americas cities, and other domestic issues made him extremely popular both in his own state and throughout die country, Romneys presidential ambitions foundered on die most divisive issue facing die country, die Vietnam War. Indeed, Romneys bid for die Oval Office might have succeeded if not for his misstatements, ambiguous policy, and dovish sympathies in regard to Americas longest war.

Opening Pandora's Box: The Genesis and Evolution of the 1964 Congressional Resolution on Vietnam

On 7 August 1964, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution swept through Con gress, signalling the beginning of a new era in the American commit ment to Southeast Asia. Within a year, Lyndon B. Johnson used the broad and ill-defined grant of authority to significantly escalate the U.S. military presence in Vietnam with the introduction of combat troops. Historians consider the Tonkin Gulf Resolution to be a water shed event in the American Vietnam saga, the turning point that al lowed Johnson to conduct an undeclared war without direct congressional sanction. What many scholars have failed to recognize, however, is that the resolution itself was less a turning point than a culmination of months of planning and preparation by an administra tion which anticipated the necessity of escalating the conflict in order to save South Vietnam from communism.

Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada (review)

Andrew Faull’s book Police work and identity: a South African ethnography (Police work hereafter) is in some ways the more conventional of the two, standing, as it does, in a distinguished tradition of post-apartheid police ethnography.1 It is based on eight months of fieldwork carried out across four police stations that reflect the diversity of the environments in which the South African Police Service (SAPS) has to operate. Faull’s main interest is in the work that individual police members have to do in maintaining a coherent narrative of self and a sense of what he, following the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, calls ontological security. Although he acknowledges that personal identity overlaps and is entangled with the organisational culture of the SAPS (including the stories that it tells about itself as an institution) and the political economy of contemporary South Africa, Faull’s primary focus is the police men and women he observed and talked to as they went about Andrew Faull, Police work and identity: a South African ethnography, Abingdon: Routledge, 2018 ISBN: 978-1-138-23329-4