How can one tell the story of American involvement in Vietnam without mentioning the Dulles brothers or General Edward Lansdale? With a full 18 hours at one’s disposal, I would have thought such a thing would be impossible. Yet with Burns and Novick, the impossible becomes the possible, writes Jim DiEugenio.

At:  WorldBeyondWar

In the first part of this projected multi-part series, the author reviews Oswald's "defection" to the USSR in the light of Cold War games and his possible connection to them, and proposes an interesting twist on what the role of his stay there may have been.

Presentation by Jim DiEugenio of an excerpt from Greg Poulgrain's book on the Indonesia coup.

Jim DiEugenio calls this book "a provocative revisionist history of why the epochal coup in Indonesia happened as it did in 1965 ... [and which] has enlightened us on the crucial figures of Allen Dulles, Sukarno, Dag Hammarskjold and John Kennedy, how they played with and against each other and how this nexus led to a horrible tragedy."

An excerpt from Greg Poulgrain's book on United States policy toward Indonesia, reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.

Bridge of Spies is a well-made film.  I just wish it had dispensed with a lot of the dramatic license, which I do not think was really necessary. It would also be nice to see these two men do something a little gutsy concerning American history, opines Jim DiEugenio.

An excerpt from the second volume of Greg Parker's study of the historical context for Lee Harvey Oswald's intelligence-related activities.

What could have been an important and sterling volume is seriously compromised with a lot of litter. Instead of being up there with Rakove and Muehlenbeck, it stands a couple of steps downward, with Thurston Clarke’s mixed bag of nuts, concludes Jim DiEugenio.

Jim DiEugenio reviews Columbia University economist and author Jeffrey Sachs' latest book, which examines Kennedy's famous 1963 American University speech.