"The official historian of the Kennedy administration, Arthur Schlesinger, regarded as a leading dove, does indeed refer to aggression in 1962: "1962 had not been a bad year," he writes in his history, A Thousand Days ; "aggression [was] checked in Vietnam." That is, the year in which the United States undertook direct aggression against South Vietnam was the year in which aggression was checked in Vietnam. Another respected figure in the liberal pantheon, Adlai Stevenson, intoned at the United Nations that in Vietnam we were combating "internal aggression," another phrase that Orwell would have admired; that is, we were combating aggression by the Vietnamese against us in Vietnam, just as we had combated aggression by the Mexicans against us in Mexico a century earlier."