COMMENTS: The Vietnam Hangover

...The term is calculated to make prudence sound like pathology...

...When he began belatedly to distance himself, he made dramatic gains...

...The "good communists" were not, of course, typical of the antiwar movement...

...President Johnson died in office two years later...

...An enormous amount of creative legislative work was done around that period, everything from Medicare to federal aid to education to the civil rights and voting rights bills...

...But in the Democratic party fragmentation has become a way of life...

...This brings us rather naturally to the other ideological product of Vietnam, neoconservatism...

...It was done on the cheap...

...But it was the Democratic party, not the Republican party, that was the real battleground of Vietnam...

...The other way that Vietnam thwarted the emergence of a mature social democracy in the United States was by short-circuiting the Great Society that might have been...

...Women's liberation and gay liberation and black militancy and the rest were in the cards, war or no war...

...In 1964 SDS supported Johnson against Goldwater...

...And the cumulative effect of the lies, deceits, crimes, and abuses of power attendant upon the Vietnam War created the atmosphere in which the notion of removing a sitting president became thinkable...

...for the first couple of years after President Kennedy's death it was still going to be a great decade...

...Indeed Norman Podhoretz, like Caesar dividing Gaul, has divided the antiwar movement into three parts: pro-Communist, anti-anti-Communist, and anti-American...

...The debate occasioned by Charles Murray's book Losing Ground has pretty well established that the Great Society "worked," above all that its universalist programs worked...

...Some of the passions have cooled...

...In August 1964, 300 Americans had already been killed in Vietnam and a thousand wounded...

...The war tore apart the Democrats, not the Republicans...

...The first such book I read was an obscure novel called Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore, set in about the year 1950...

...For some of us, Theodore Draper's summary (rendered in a 1968 essay in Commentary, of all places) still stands: the war was "a political debacle, a military folly, and a moral disgrace...

...It's very slyly done...

...Hubert Humphrey lost because he was too closely tied to Johnson and the war...

...Perhaps the most pervasive legacy of the war, and the least discussed, has been the political legacy...

...But it was too late...

...Yet all three elements of this harsh judgment remain controversial...

...Shall we pour...

...Consider the progression of Students for a Democratic Society...

...In origin, the Vietnam conflict actually was what Robert Dole (in the 1976 vice-presidential debate) called all the American wars of this century: a "Democrat war...

...And it is a positive legacy of the tragedy of Vietnam...

...It suffuses our political and ideological universe like the hiss of creation...

...Tax reform is a good example...

...All of them were Democrats...

...The Plumbers' unit was created because of Nixon's obsessive concern with secrecy and national security, and particularly with leaks about the war in Vietnam, beginning with stories about the true extent of American bombing and culminating in the Pentagon Papers...

...What Vietnam did was to embitter and alienate these movements, giving them a corrosive edge that increased the violence of the reaction to them...

...But the Great Society was half-formed...

...Which of the three categories he fell into he has not said...

...In 1968, President Johnson was reelected overwhelmingly against token opposition offered by the Republicans, who nominated former Vice-President Richard Nixon as a sacrificial lamb...

...Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening opposed it...

...along the route of his funeral train from Washington across the country to Texas, the silent crowds were seldom less than three deep...

...To view the war in any other way, they thought, was to be objectively pro-Communist...

...Vietnam aborted the entire generational reinvigoration and completion of the New Deal that had been, as it were, on America's schedule...

...Then came the war, and in a remarkably short time SDS went mad...

...The assassination was a dreadful thing...

...Most likely it would have done both...

...John F Kennedy was exciting, and so was LBJ...

...The premise was that the South had won the Civil War...

...Vietnam had the effect of smothering a nascent American social democracy...

...A more recent, and very clever example of the genre is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration...

...It should have happened during the 1960s...

...Oddly enough, it is the Nixon administration that offers the best evidence for the proposition that there was indeed an enormous wave of creative reform that should have happened and didn't because of Vietnam...

...And Medicaid—a politically much weaker program, because means-tested programs are always weaker than universal programs—established the general principle that poverty should not be an insuperable bar to minimal care...

...In 1961, SDS put forth the Port Huron statement, written largely by Tom Hayden, then fresh from the editorship of the Michigan Daily...

...and the inflation launched by Vietnam helped give him the election...

...He did not want to give up his domestic program, and he calculated, probably correctly, that the kind of appeal he would have to make in order to get a war tax would either make the war unpopular, because taxes are unpopular, or would make the war impossible to limit, because the sort of fervor it might have been necessary to whip up to get a war tax might not have been so easy to control...

...The Republican role was limited to cheering for war, shouting for war, and finally, under Nixon, waging war...

...It viewed Johnson with a kind of wary affection...

...Among the precursors of neoconservatism were such men as John P Roche and Tom Kahn—liberals and social democrats who passionately supported the war because they saw it entirely in abstract ideological terms, as a struggle against communism...

...The issues raised by America's war in Vietnam are still alive, the passions still warm...

...The war also created two kinds of ideologues: the New Leftists, active in the late '60s and early '70s, and the neoconservatives, active in the 1980s...

...Lyndon Johnson proposed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution...

...In that theological dispute I tend to side with those who think Kennedy would not have escalated the war, that he would have temporized for another year and then, once safely reelected in 1964, would have cut his losses...

...III IN THE GENRE OF FICTION known as the "alternative present" story—a subgenre, really, of fantasy and science fiction—the author posits that some crucial historical event turned out differently, and then imagines what the present would be like...

...Yet in the intensity of this outpouring there was more at work than media faddism...

...In a word: everything...

...Even so, a much larger number of people, some hundreds of thousands, got involved in a deeply alienated brand of protest politics...

...He ran as the peace candidate, the candidate with the secret plan to end the war...

...Vietnam gave us Richard Nixon, his rise and his fall...

...What did Vietnam do to our politics...

...Medicare, for example, enshrined the principle that people who are old and sick should be cared for whether they have money or not...

...0 The war in Vietnam caused a terrible discontinuity in the natural rhythms of American political life...

...The Democratic candidate in 1984, Senator Jerry Brown of California, was a great favorite of intellectuals...

...The Vietnam syndrome is merely a nasty name for the fact that the American people would prefer not to have another war like the war in Vietnam...

...Medicare and Medicaid simply ladled vast amounts of money into the existing system of power relations in the medical-care industry...

...They began talking about how they would have to learn to be "good communists...

...Yet there were only a half-dozen American correspondents in Saigon, and LBJ was running as the peace candidate in a campaign in which the war was a relatively minor issue...

...The same is true of the cultural upheaval that came to be called the counterculture...

...This is the broader pattern of which the so-called Vietnam syndrome is a part...

...Vietnam taught the American people to be skeptical of their leaders...

...In 1972 he easily defeated his "me, too" opponent, George Romney...

...All of the present cleavages in the Democratic party can be traced to the war...

...It never was able to carry through its own logic, because it was thrown together in a race against time...

...Few listened...

...But the broader pattern involves much more than the public's very intelligent reluctance to go to war for light and transient causes...

...Vietnam made us crazy...

...This need not be viewed as a product of cynicism or weariness or morbid suspiciousness...

...From the very beginning, insofar as the debate took place in the political mainstream at all, it took place within the Democratic party...

...Robert Kuttner has a good nickname for that consensus: macho détente...

...Obviously, many of the social movements that occupied the attention of the left during the 1960s would have happened with or without Vietnam...

...There was a logic to the old alternations...

...its slogan that year was "Part of the Way with LBJ...

...The fact that they did oppose it was a consequence of Vietnam—to be precise, a consequence of the atmosphere of mistrust, hostility, and suspicion that was created by Nixon's paranoia about Vietnam...

...Neoconservatism is mostly a phenomenon of intellectuals, largely Jewish, once rooted in the old socialist left and in literary journalism...

...President Westmoreland, by the way, is said to be fond of golf...

...We may be out of Vietnam, but Vietnam is not out of us...

...Consider what has been called Nixon's Disraeli period, when he was very much under the influence of Daniel Patrick Moynihan...

...And then came 1960, and a wonderful sense of expectancy...

...The debate over the funding of the Contras of Nicaragua demonstrates that the American people are less apt to give their assent to war, even when American lives are not directly at stake, without a full and convincing account of the war's aims and prospects...

...Before Vietnam, the Democrats had the Republicans outflanked at both ends...

...That gave Reagan the nomination...

...We do know what Johnson did about Vietnam...

...Vietnam gave anticommunism a bad name, just as, a decade later, the Reagan administration's weakness for military dictatorships has given the valid distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism a bad name...

...That nominee, the first deep Southerner to attain the White House since before the Civil War, was of course Governor William C. Westmoreland of South Carolina...

...This is not to minimize the accomplishments of that period between the end of 1963 and the middle of 1966...

...It has emerged in great part as a reaction to events in the 1960s that were themselves reactions to the war in Vietnam...

...Johnson decided not to ask for a rise in taxes to pay for the war...

...The period of progressive reform from Theodore Roosevelt through Wilson was followed by the long conservative afternoon of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover...

...The Nixon years saw the greatest growth in Social Security, in social welfare programs generally, and in environmental programs, which essentially did not exist before the Nixon administration...

...Then came the time of extraordinary innovation called the New Deal, interrupted by World War II, and continuing, in a minor key, into Truman's Fair Deal...

...as Johnson understood, Vietnam would soon put an end to the country's receptivity...

...A THIRD—AND MORE PALATABLE—political legacy of Vietnam has been the democratization of American foreign policy...

...Also, the president of the United States—its territory limited to the northeast, and heavy on the dark satanic mills—was Norman Thomas...

...There's a particularly funny scene in which today's pope, who is English, entertains at tea...

...His rise was a direct consequence of Vietnam...

...Some of them did more 401 than talk...

...I liked that part...

...Medicare and Medicaid, in other words, were a poor substitute for the kind of universal health insurance that never got enacted...

...As little details accumulate, the reader gradually realizes that the pope is in fact Harold Wilson...

...By the time we reach Ronald Reagan the thread begins to grow thin, but it's still there...

...It was a very American document—it would not be too much to say that it was a patriotic document...

...It thus created the present era of dissonance and confusion...

...platform...

...Benefits have trickled down to the patients, who are generally much better off than before...

...Norman Thomas advised the movement to wash the flag, not burn it...

...There are many ways of looking at neoconservatism, and it is certainly as much a cultural as an ideological phenomenon (one of the many things it has in common with sectarian leftism...

...but the poisonous effects of his war policy did not really begin to be felt for almost three years...

...It never did...

...President Humphrey served until 1977, choosing not to run for reelection on grounds of health...

...On the contrary, it reflects a healthy spirit of selfgovernment...

...II OF THE WAR'S MANY BANEFUL political effects, let's consider two: first, the discrediting of the liberal social dream...

...The war totally destroyed the foreign policy consensus that had prevailed in the party for 15 years, beginning about 1950...

...It wasn't the assassination that created that anxiety we all became so familiar with during the last half of the 399 1960s, that terrible feeling that things had come unstuck...

...Vietnam–Watergate weakened the Republican establishment, as it weakened all establishments in all institutions, and thus it opened the way for Reagan and for the takeover of the Republican party by the insurgent conservative movement...

...A consensus about the war has yet to emerge...

...Yet when it got there it was destroyed by Vietnam...

...Some of the things Nixon proposed look positively radical by today's timid standards...

...Vietnam alienated the labor unions from the intellectuals, the party regulars from the party activists, the volunteers from the officeholders, the young from the middle-aged...

...The burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office prefigured the burglary of the Watergate...

...Many other Great Society programs have a similar truncated quality...

...It violently interrupted the stately swings back and forth between innovation and consolidation that had marked the first two-thirds of our century...

...But how great a national tragedy one judges the assassination to have been depends to a large degree on one's assessment of what Kennedy would have done about Vietnam...

...But anyone who has any firsthand experience with these programs knows how inadequate they are, how pathetic compared to the corresponding programs in such countries as West Germany, or England, or Israel, or even Canada...

...In the domestic arena Kennedy's work was continued by Johnson, and it was not until 1966 that things began to get really ugly...

...And then it was all cut short, and what cut it short was Vietnam...

...The inflationary storm raged through the end of the 1970s, with the help of the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979...

...The mourning for him was comparable to the mourning for Lincoln...

...President Humphrey continued the building of the Great Society, using the emotion generated by Johnson's death to secure the enactment of a comprehensive system of socialized medicine...

...This happened partly because of a decision designed to avoid such an outcome: the decision to pay for the war through inflation...

...Many found their way back eventually, as Tom Hayden has found his way back to the homegrown economic populism he started with...

...Its themes of economic and participatory democracy were a conscious effort to develop a radicalism rooted in the American experience...

...The title refers both to the main plot device (a boy soprano's campaign to avoid the honor of remaining a soprano through surgical intervention) and to a particular "alteration" of history: Amis imagines what might have happened if Martin Luther, instead of leading the Reformation, had become pope...

...And this is to say nothing of the programs that never got enacted in any form...

...Those are great accomplishments...

...In the alternative-present spirit, let's imagine what might have happened had there been no war in Vietnam...

...There followed another sleepy period of consolidation under Eisenhower...

...So the first bleak political legacy of Vietnam is the souring of the idea of social security broadly understood, which, among the prosperous nations of the world, is something that has happened only in the United States...

...Such relative public indifference to a war with American deaths running into the hundreds would be absolutely unthinkable today...

...But at the very least, an enormous number of people of my generation were made suspicious of and hostile to liberal anticommunism...

...In retrospect it appears that the grand cycle of American politics was actually interrupted by two tragedies, the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War...

...The best example was his welfare reform proposal, the Family Assistance Plan, which would have put a floor under the income of everybody in the country...

...Its members forgot about participatory democracy and began chanting slogans translated from the Chinese—slogans like "Long Live the Victory of the People's War...

...Today, a retrospective defense of the war is an important part of the neoconservative ideological program...

...equally important, by dividing their leaders—which is to say, by destroying the old foreign-policy consensus—it gave the people a chance to choose among alternative foreign policies...

...The doctors were simply bought off...

...And it was the war in Vietnam that was to blame...

...The result of the policy of social spending plus war spending minus taxes was to turn the economy into an engine of inflation...

...There are congressional liberals who now rue the day they opposed that particular Nixon program...

...One might even argue that Vietnam gave us every president since Johnson...

...They did nothing about the structure of fee-for-service private medicine in this country...

...But if the war was a Democratic phenomenon, so was the movement to stop the war...

...The two sides of macho détente were symbolized by President Kennedy's two nuclear triumphs, the Cuban missile crisis and the test-ban treaty...

...The point is that the natural cycle of American politics, which was supposed to bring about the 400 completion of the American welfare state, was so strong that it rolled right through into the Nixon White House...

...Among the consequences was that Germany won the first (and only) World War—not such a bad thing, since French fascism turns out to be less virulent than the German variety...

...The moral debate has been the bitterest, the military discussion the calmest and most productive (also the least consequential...

...THE SECOND LEGACY is the fragmentation of our politics...

...Ditto for welfare reform...

...Vietnam and Vietnam's offspring, Watergate, were the principal causes of Gerald Ford's defeat and Jimmy Carter's victory...

...Even though much of this happened under Nixon and Ford, the basic political result was to discredit the Democrats as economic managers...

...and second, the fragmenting and embittering of our politics...

...But Vietnam was like an assassination every day...

...The system has worked beautifully for them...

...The Great Society was a fast and dirty improvisation...

...The 1976 campaign was a classic liberal-conservative battle, with Senator Robert Kennedy of New York narrowly defeating a former governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who ran on a "Who lost Vietnam...

...It was Vietnam...

...But he was no match for the Republican nominee, a distinguished-looking ex-soldier who left the Army in 1966 to seek greater opportunities in business and politics...

...they blew things up, including themselves...

...but it is also true that the programs have been enormously wasteful...

...President Johnson—the peace candidate —was returned to office in 1964 on an immense popular landslide, bringing with him heavy majorities in both houses of Congress...

...Watergate, too, was a direct consequence of Vietnam...

...Still, it's unknowable what Kennedy would have done...

...But Vietnam split macho detente right down the middle, leaving each half of the party with half a foreign policy...

...The second President Kennedy edged the by now aging Reagan once more in 1980 and served through 1984, when the long period of the second (or third, by some counts) New Deal at last came to an end...

...but a blessing it has been...

...This has been a decidedly mixed blessing (for example, in the field of arms control it seems to have produced an impasse in which the Republicans are unable to negotiate a treaty and the Democrats are unable to ratify one...