Nation: After Viet Nam

While President Nixon was spreading the gospel of disengagement in Southeast Asia, Secretary of State William Rogers was deep in talks with the Japanese. Those discussions turned out to be not only diplomatically difficult but physically dangerous. A Japanese anarchist, Shigeji Hamaoka, 21, went at Rogers with a dull paint scraper and missed. Hamaoka's apparent motive: to protest the supposed injustice that Rogers was in Tokyo to discuss—continued U.S. occupation of Okinawa. The island was captured in 1945, and has since become the largest U.S. military base off the Asian mainland.

The generally...