EUROPE: View from the Balcony

President Ford opened his television press conference last Tuesday by soberly intoning: "The war in Viet Nam is over." In Europe, celebrations marked the ending of another war—V-E day, May 8, 1945. The three decades separating the Allied victory in Europe from the American debacle in South Viet Nam were already being viewed by some as a self-contained chapter of history, the rise and fall of the Western world's reliance upon the Pax Americana. One sign of the times was French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's announcement that France's 30th celebration of V-E...

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