"President Reagan's singular political insight was this: he grasped—and fully endorsed—the unwillingness of Americans to acknowledge historical limits, much less anything as definitive as outright failure. That Vietnam was inarguably a defeat signifying unexpectedly confining limits—a great power unable to beat a bunch of peasants—was something that they and he refused to countenance.
"So Reagan told Americans they didn't have to."
Andrew J. Bacevich in The American Conservative reviews Christian G. Appy's American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity.
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