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SENATOR FRANK CHURCH, THE FORD ADMINISTRATION, AND THE CHALLENGES OF POST‐VIETNAM FOREIGN POLICY
Author(s) -
Schmitz David F.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
peace and change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1468-0130
pISSN - 0149-0508
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0130.1996.tb00282.x
Subject(s) - foreign policy , administration (probate law) , geopolitics , exaggeration , state (computer science) , latin americans , political science , intervention (counseling) , law , vietnam war , spanish civil war , public administration , sociology , economic history , political economy , politics , history , medicine , algorithm , psychiatry , computer science
The end of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975, appeared to Senator Frank Church to provide “an opportune time for some reflections on America's role in the world,” particularly for a reevaluation of the policies which led to that protracted, painful, and divisive conflict. Church, who had been a leading Senate critic of the war since 1965, and who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975, quickly learned that his hopes for a new direction in American policy toward Asia, Africa, and Latin America were not to be realized. Rather, as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger affirmed in March 1975, there was to be no change in the assumptions that underpinned American policy. This article examines the efforts by Church to redirect American foreign policy after Vietnam. Church had long been frustrated by what he saw as the exaggeration of the Soviet threat in the Third World and by the character of U.S. intervention abroad. Watergate and the revelations of CIA efforts to assassinate foreign leaders and overthrow governments added to Church's sense of urgency. Yet, the Gerald Ford administration fought those who proposed new geopolitical strategies and ideas.