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Seller's Description:
Very good. 21 cm, 127 pages, wraps, slight wear and soiling to covers, former owner's signature on half-title, errata slip laid in. Robert A. Scalapino was an eminent scholar of Asian politics who achieved prominence during the Vietnam War for his strong defense of American policy as opposition to it was growing. Professor Scalapino taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1949 to 1990 and founded its Institute of East Asian Studies in 1978. The author of 39 books on Vietnam, China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan, Professor Scalapino was also editor of Asian Survey, a scholarly publication, from 1962 to 1996 and advised the State Department and other government agencies. In 1965, he wound up arguing the Johnson administration's case for escalating the war at what was billed as a national teach-in on Vietnam policy. The event was a debate by a panel before an audience of 5, 000 in Washington and more than 100, 000 people at more than 100 campuses who had gathered to hear the debate by radio hookups. McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, had been scheduled to attend, and many participants had hoped to hear his pro-war views and confront him. When he canceled at the last minute, it fell to Professor Scalapino, who had also been invited to join the panel, to take the lead in defending the White House's policy. He argued that the United States was fighting communism, not Asian nationalism, and that China would regard the United States as a "paper tiger" if it abandoned the war. He continued to make that argument the following year in a long article in The New York Times Magazine. He wrote that the war tested "the American capacity to respond to a threat that is important but not terminal." Robert Anthony Scalapino was born Oct. 19, 1919, in Leavenworth, Kan., and spent his teens in Santa Barbara, Calif., where his father taught school. He studied politics, focusing on relations between the United States and Europe, at what is now the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating in 1940. He earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. from Harvard. His interest in Asia was sparked when he was trained in the Japanese language as a Navy officer in World War II. Professor Scalapino became an influential analyst of the Japanese political system. He called it a "one-and-a-half party" system in which the dominant Liberal Democrats maneuvered with minority parties to govern. His description of present-day China as an "authoritarian-pluralist society, " one that allows limited rights but not democracy, was widely quoted. In the mid-1970s, John K. Fairbank, the eminent sinologist, called Professor Scalapino "a leader in the Asian revolution in American thinking." Professor Scalapino advised secretaries of state, advocating closer relations with China years before President Richard M. Nixon's historic 1972 visit. The National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars created the Scalapino Prize, to be awarded to an outstanding American scholar on Asia.
