Analysis: In his college thesis, future presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg saw religious motives behind U.S. wars gone horribly wrong
It’s a sign of just how much President Donald Trump has moved the goalposts of American involvement abroad.
The text, available through the Harvard library archives, draws on a 1950s novel that famously foreshadowed the end of the Vietnam War and spawned two film adaptations. Its author, the Englishman Graham Greene, was maligned at the time as a communist for writing a plot that portrays Americans as naïve, short-sighted and immature on the world stage. Buttigieg elevates him to the status of an “impressive” prophet.
His mind turned to men who died in the waning days of wars past: the Americans sent to their deaths in the six hours before the armistice ending World War I went into effect, the thousands of Japanese soldiers who kept fighting in the jungles of the remote Pacific islands years after World War II had long since ended.
In his thesis, Bercovich’s influence is clear as Buttigieg casts Puritanism as a kind of grand strategy: “The very founding of America was an act of international intervention, not just an emigration but a proactive enlightenment of foreign territory, which would recur in later years with America’s exportation of its democratic creed.
“The Quiet American” was remarkable due to its prescience: The bombings are used in the press to blame the communists because of the West’s ability to control information coming out of Vietnam. And in the aftermath, Pyle is murdered, signaling that America’s maelstrom in Vietnam was the result of a self-inflicted wound.
Former Rep. Dan Glickman, who was director of the Harvard Institute of Politics while Buttigieg served as president of its student activities committee, remembers him less as a firebrand activist than as a thoughtful, “whip-smart” debater. The Kansas Democrat remembered him as an intellectual — a characterization often used by fawning media profiles and evidenced by his use of phrases like “typological exegesis” in his thesis writing — who was not afraid to challenge authority.
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