Tag Archives: Vietnam conflict

Innocence Lost? November 22, 1963

The day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, November 23, 1963, may be the day America lost her innocence.

True, the nation experienced horrible tragedies before Kennedy’s murder: Lincoln’s assassination, Pearl Harbor, the beginning of the Great Depression. This one, however, involved young children—Caroline and John-John, barely six and three years old. Pictures of innocence.

Before that day, we were on a roll as the unassailable victor of World War II, our nation physically undamaged by the carnage that had devastated Europe, free to lead the industrialized world. The Cold War was at its height, but Kennedy had stood firm during the Cuban missile crisis. The young and personable president was much more popular with the world’s peoples than the aging, dour Kremlin leaders.

Surely, the nation would conquer all. We would win in any encounter with the Soviets. We would buy our homes and enjoy rising middle class prosperity. Our children would go to college, find great jobs. We would enjoy sitcoms and sports events as the television age blossomed.

And then Lee Harvey Oswald killed the President, for what reason we are still not sure. In a bizarre anticlimax, he was killed by Jack Ruby two days later. Ruby died in 1967 of cancer. Speculation has boiled ever since.

Of course, even in Kennedy’s presidency, things weren’t as sanguine as they appeared. The baby boomers, beginning to grow up, would transform every demographic bulge they passed through. Something called “the pill” would challenge moral certainties. And U.S. advisors already were entering the little Asian country of South Vietnam.

Iraq, Ten Years Out, and Almost Forty for Vietnam

 

The late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas wrote a book in 1966 called The Arrogance of Power. Fulbright was the longtime chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was respected for his knowledge of foreign relations and was strongly anti-Communist. However, he spoke out against America’s growing involvement in Southeast Asia that eventually led to the Vietnamese conflict.

He did not fear, he said, that the United States would seek to dominate in the manner of a Hitler or a Napoleon. He feared rather that we would drift into commitments that were beyond our capacity to honor. We should, he suggested, confine ourselves to doing only those things that truly matter to us.

Like another senator known for his foreign policy expertise, Richard Lugar of Indiana, Fulbright was eventually defeated in his party’s primary. Politicians risk losing their constituency when they emphasize global concerns. “All politics is local,” U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once said.

Are we concerned only for our, admittedly important, domestic concerns?

Perhaps we would never have committed so much blood and treasure to Viet Nam, now a byword for a failed U.S. foreign policy, if we, the people, took more time to understand the rest of the world. And what about Iraq, ten years out? Was it worth it?

Hippies, Flower Children, and Other Heralds of Our Time

 

“Stories about World War II, Pearl Harbor, and the like, are always popular,” an editor told me. By contrast, I find more intriguing the decades following this war, the decades of the hippies and the flower children. If the child is father of the man, as the poet William Wordsworth wrote, these years spawned the present that we now inhabit.

The turbulent sixties and the years following led to 1989, the watershed year of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The texts and twitters of the Arab Spring in 2011 and beyond mirrored the earlier events.

All wars change the societies that experience them. World War II brought the United States, kicking and screaming, onto the world stage. We have often played our role reluctantly, much more interested in domestic issues. The Vietnam War tore the country apart. The meshing of the antiwar movement and the New Age reverberates with us to this day, precursor of current polarization.

Quiet Deception, a novel of mine billed as a mystery, follows the protagonist, a college professor, from the days, seemingly so innocent, of his childhood shortly after World War II. His participation in the horrifying Vietnamese conflict transforms him. He stumbles into the society that follows, with its loosening of age old constraints.

How he and the other characters resolve the jarring collision of tectonic plates from two eras is the subtext of the mystery’s solution.

“Even the Good Parts of It.”

 

Sometimes good works are done for wrong reasons or out of ignorance.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. diplomat who brokered an end to the genocidal Balkan wars of the 1990’s, was influenced during his entire career by the tragedy of America’s involvement in Vietnam.

He spent his first diplomatic postings in the 1960’s in that country, taking part in efforts to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese. He saw those efforts fail, and disillusionment followed as he realized that American power, great as it is, has limits.

 

 

Holbrooke wrote: “But then finally it all seemed to come down to one simple, horrible truth: we didn’t belong there, we had no business doing what we were doing, even the good parts of it.” (quoted in The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World, page 105, from an article he wrote for The New Republic, May 3, 1975.)

 

Holbrooke died suddenly in the middle of his diplomatic mission in another war, this one in Afghanistan. He saw differences with Vietnam, including the fact that America had been deliberately attacked by enemies with bases in Afghanistan. However, he also detected similarities with the quagmire that became Vietnam: ” . . . the existence of an indefensible border harboring enemy sanctuaries; American reliance on a corrupt partner government; and, most critically, the embrace of a counterinsurgency doctrine, which he had learned through painful experience was an exceedingly difficult military and civilian strategy to execute.” (The Unquiet American, page 95.)

How did the United States become involved once again in nation building? Because we allowed our justifiable anger at the 9/ll attacks to carry us too far.  To attempt even good things that we had no business doing. Emotion overrode reason.