Remembering Vietnam
The Little Girl Picking Daisies. Vietnam was the cornerstone of the American divide from 1965 onward. You have to be as old as I am to remember that in 1964, the year Goldwater lost to LBJ, there was pretty much a national consensus that we shouldn’t run from SE Asia. I can tell you none of the mothers wanted us there, and many a person started talking about “that war so far from home.” The men I listened to at the barber shop were expressing doubts about what would later be called “nation buidling.” and the media, not yet Dan Ratherized, was smelling dissent. (Somewhere in Massachusetts Noam Chomsky was plotting another lecture.) I believe it was Life Magazine that ran pictures of beheaded corpses in 1962, thereby setting the stage for Apocalypse Now - but John Kennedy had reminded us of our duty, and he was killed by some Russian-lovin’ wife-beater, and that was that. We would do our duty. By 1965 all that had changed: the hippie movement sprouted in San Francisco; Port Huron true believers began to dominate university faculties; marijuana was the new rage, and ordinary folks were experimenting with LSD. Children were shouting at their stunned parents about the “establishment.” Strange, psychedelic notes began to creep into music. By 1968 there was violence in the streets and when, in 1970, four kids got shot dead at Kent State, the fight was on. It didn’t matter what the kids did; who pulled the trigger; who gave the orders. If you supported the anti-communist fight in Nam, you were a baby killer. Probably a Christian. And a patriot — a word now subjected to derision. In 1970 it was fashionable to hang an American flag, tattered and dirty, in doorways or on walls, upside down or reversed. One was subjected to breathless, maniacal lectures on America the imperialistic power, America the oil-hungry killin’ machine. White people again. Republicans. They killed the little girl picking daisies.
People like me didn’t know it then, but the election of Ronald Reagan was set in stone. I think he knew that; surely Nancy was already redesigning the White House in her imagination. I believe his advisers were planning for the overthrow of Walter Cronkite and the State Department. It was only a matter of time. By 1974 it no longer even mattered that Nixon sank his own ship with paranoia. The play had been cast: baby killers to the Right; Planet Savers to the Left. Get in line.
The communist effort to generate hatred for the American president began soon after President Truman set up NATO and propelled the three Western occupation forces to unite their zones to form a new West German nation. We were tasked to take advantage of the reawakened patriotic feelings stirring in the European countries that had been subjugated by the Nazis, in order to shift their hatred for Hitler over into hatred for Truman-the leader of the new “occupation power.” Western Europe was still grateful to the U.S. for having restored its freedom, but it had strong leftist movements that we secretly financed. They were like putty in our hands. ION MIHAI PACEPA
There is not one argument I hear today about conservatism, liberalism, and libertarianism, that doesn’t remind me of Vietnam. At this point it doesn’t matter — to me, at least — whether we were there or not, or whether we lost or won. What matters is that, behind all the smoke, there are two visions of America. In those two visions lies the unspoken conflict: whether America is a great nation, or a pariah. Each vision becomes the launching point for a lecture on abortion, marijuana, free markets, and so on. Funny thing is, the kids coming up now have no context for Vietnam. The Purt Huron statement is a relic; Puff the Magic Dragon has been replaced by Snoop Dogg.
This is (minus the subtle editorial slant) where we started:
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