I’m not sure there’s enough context here to tell. They
certainly work, but they change the passage in ways the author might not like.
One effect of moving from simple past to past perfect is to reduce the sense of
immediacy. The passage becomes a little less vital with the past perfects.
This is one of those speaker/writer attitudinal effects that determine a lot of
our choices between tenses. The rules are not simple and straightforward.
Herb
From: Assembly for the
Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brad
Johnston
Sent: 2008-02-17 09:01
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Context matters - continued
In
context, do the five 'had's belong in or out?
"Beyond
containment, the major thrust of American Cold War diplomatic foreign policy
was to return the defeated enemies, Germany and Japan, to the emerging
international system as full-fledged members. This task, unprecedented in
respect to nations on which unconditional surrender (had been) was
imposed less than five years earlier, made sense to a generation of American
leaders whose formative experience (had
been) was overcoming the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The generation that organized resistance to the Soviet Union (had) experienced
Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which (had)
restored political stability by closing the gap between American expectations
and economic reality. The same generation (had) prevailed in World War II,
fought in the name of democracy."
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