Re-Learning the Lessons of the Vietnam War

Watching the epic Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary "The Vietnam War" over the past two weeks has been both a revelation and a confirmation.

The confirmation? Politicians lie.

Duh.

What came as a revelation is something I think I also already knew but didn't want to face so baldly -- the depth of the lies politicians will tell and the lengths they will go to to preserve them, no matter the cost in lives, trust or treasure.

Watching, hour after hour, I confess to being constantly staggered by what they told the public, versus what they knew and said in private -- now known thanks to the passage of time.

There is no partisanship in this observation.

The first and formative lies were told by Democrats -- first by JFK, perhaps our most revered president, then by LBJ, who watched as his Great Society anti-poverty agenda was slowly crushed bneath the weight of a war he could not win and did not think he could not afford to lose.

THE ARCHITECTS OF WAR: JFK, Robert McNamara and LBJ.

Needless to say, Republican Richard Nixon was no slouch in the lying department, but by the time he began to tell his whoppers, no one could claim to have clean hands when it came to Vietnam.

There was nothing clean about it.

It was a dirty war, in reasoning, rhetoric and reality.

The soldiers in the field were fighting a dirty jungle war, with no front lines, no clear mission and, no end in sight.

How could a soldier, or anyone for that matter, be expected to maintain their composure, their

motivation, hell, their sanity, after crawling up hill through hellfire and watching friends die to take ultimately meaningless high grounds like "Hamburger Hill," only to have them abandoned by command days later,and quickly re-occupied by the enemy?

The government our soldiers were fighting to preserve in South Vietnam was filthy with corruption and the government that had sent the soldiers there to fight was making a mess of things back home.

Soldiers were shooting students, African-Americans were rioting in the streets and protesters at political conventions, thousands were marching both for and against the conflict and soldiers in Vietnam were asking themselves exactly what they were doing in Southeast Asia.

I was, I admit, admiring of the role the press played in revealing the lies and contradictions at the time.

Reporters like Morley Safer, Joseph Galloway and Neil Sheehan, risked their lives, their reputations and repeatedly spoke truth to power, over and over again, in their pursuit of the truth.

In all honesty, as proud as it made me to be a part of that profession, I don't think I would have had the balls to be a battlefield reporter during that war.

Without their steadfast reporting, most of the country would not have realized what was really going on in Vietnam, as opposed to the lies their government was telling them.

Civilian women and children were among those murdered at My Lai.

Sadly, pieces of that truth -- the comparatively isolated incidents of crimes and atrocities like the My Lai Massacre -- were too broadly applied to the returning veterans who had fought with honor as best circumstances allowed and were shunned by a nation which owed them a sincere apology.

The war, opposition to it, and Nixon's brilliantly perceptive "southern strategy" in winning the election -- recognizing and cultivating the deep desire of white suburbanites to just make it all go away so their lives could continue on as before -- combined to gouge deep divides in this country which are still visible today in red/blue states on election night maps.

And I fear the lessons of the Vietnam era are lessons we may forget because so much high school history only manages to get as far as World War II, or perhaps the Korean War. And so few people are curious to learn more about a war we "lost."

Worse yet, I fear this forgotten history is on the verge of being repeated as our leadership -- whose only consistent theme seems to be to undo everything accomplished by the previous administration -- shambles incoherently toward a mixed menu of disasters which may soon find us plunged into war, or environmental destruction or an unsustainable disregard for our less fortunate citizens, or all of the above and more.

I have seen some of the criticisms of the film, that it over-simplifies things or has left things out. That may be true. In fact, given the complexities of the time and the length of time it covers, how could that not be the case?

But born in 1964, I am too young to be the judge of that by personal experience.

My earliest memories of an awareness of the war are asking my parents, who were in the kitchen washing the dishes, how many wars America had won and how many had it lost and being puzzled by the meaningful look they exchanged.

Regardless, whether it is complete or not, it strikes me that the 20 hours of education masterfully assembled by Novick and Burns is as good a place as any to start learning those history lessons in the dwindling hope that we don't re-live it.

The First Four

Today is the day that some of us get to stay home from work or school because -- presidents.

Given the impracticality of giving people the day off for both George Washington's birthday and Abraham Lincoln's birthday, the holiday bureau, or whomever makes these decisions, combined them into a single "President's Day" holiday.

To be honest, I don't think too many of us sit around pondering past presidents all day. No doubt we're too busy resisting the urge to take advantage of the great sale prices at our local Buick dealership.

But it is worth a ponder, especially when the question of who will be the next president looms so large on our consciousness.

It seems reasonable on President's Day to look at the question of the next president within the framework of past presidents, good and bad.

Who were the best presidents? Why are they favored and what characteristics did

they have that we would like to see in the next president?

Is it Teddy Roosevelt's muscular leadership style?

Wilson's idealism, the dichotomy of an unwavering belief in world peace contained within the frame of an unapologetic racist?

Is it Kennedy's particular blend of inspiration, pragmatism and a history scrubbed clean by tragedy?

Although they all brought unique qualities to the office, so much of what it means to be president can be found among the first few.

Consider that the "father of the Constitution," James Madison, conceived of the presidency mostly as a kind of clerkship, carrying out the wishes of the legislature, which he, veteran of many state legislatures that he was, considered to be the supreme representation of the will of the people.

But almost from the beginning, the chief executive's post captured the imagination of the electorate and the post, for better or worse, has come to epitomize the America of each president's time.

Ray Raphael convincingly argues in his book "Founding Myths" that this should not be so.

American history is so much more than a list of presidents, he writes.

The United States came about, Raphael says, not just because of the actions of great men, but, more importantly, by the collected actions of thousands of unnamed patriots.

Raphael writes that those leaders whose names now echo through the history books, sometimes falsely, were merely following the trends of history and the will of a people bent of self-governing; and that the study of American history these days suffers from a kind of "presidential chic."

He is essentially right, but its hard to write a history of everybody.

Regardless of the arguments to the contrary presidents have, from the beginning, symbolized their times and the nation they led, for better or worse.

And when it comes to making the most of symbolism, few compare to our first president.

George Washington may not have been the most lettered of the founders, but his

desire to be considered a gentleman fed a deeper understanding of symbolism, and of appearances than perhaps his more well-read patriots could appreciate.

Ben Franklin once quipped that left to their own devices a roomful of men would inevitably elect the tallest of them as their leader.

This was certainly true of Washington.

But luckily for us, this was his particular genius and he more than any other understood that everything he did would be precedent-setting -- everything from policy to protocol.

Few people held in awe by their contemporaries felt the weight of that responsibility more keenly and, as a result, considered every action a careful balance between preserving the prestige he required to lead the country, and what was best for that country in the long-term.

Consider that when Washington set out to visit every state, he was would usually

stop a mile or so outside of every town, climb out of his carriage and up onto his white charger and ride in ahead of his baggage train, the way the people would expect a military hero to do.

Today, that action might be seen as craven. But at the time, it was necessary to cement a disparate and far-flung people into having some kind of national identity.

As Madison said: "The Presidency alone unites the conjectures of the public."
But Americans tire of heroes and by the time he walked away from power -- making him the "greatest man in the world," according to King George III, his former enemy -- he was being pilloried on the highly partisan press of the day, much like any other politician.

If Washington was the example of everything we say we want in a president, his successor was the opposite.

Poor, brilliant, flawed, insecure, proud, patriotic John Adams.

Just as we had never had a president, we had never had a second president and

he wrongly believed that keeping all Washington's people in his cabinet -- a cabinet filled with political opposites held together almost entirely by the power of Washington's prestige -- was the right way to go.

Bad decision. Their loyalty was to Washington and Adams, a prickly patriot not well-suited to inspiring comrades to personal loyalty, was not well served by the decision.

Ever the paradox, the steadfast patriot who took on airs, Adams oversaw perhaps the worst and best actions a president has ever taken.

He allowed himself to be talked into signing the alien and sedition act, jailing those who wrote ill of the government; a more anti-American law it would be hard to imagine.

But while he was manipulated at home by his own party, and a temperament ill-suited to the constant criticism inherent in the office, he refused to be manipulated by the conniving French.

For the good of the country, he fulfilled the wishes of his political enemies -- Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- and kept the nation out of war with France, something the self-confirmed Anglohile considered to be the greatest achievement of his one-term presidency.

Jefferson, whose flair for the dramatic was at its best when he held his pen, declared his too-close-to-call election to the office to nevertheless by a "second revolution" -- conveniently papering over the fact that it was brought about by another irony of American history.

His political enemy Alexander Hamilton maneuvered to provide Jefferson the votes he needed in the House of Representatives to break the electoral tie because Hamilton would rather have the country in the hands of an honorable man with whom he fervently disagreed, than a candidate from his own state he considered to be unscrupulous.

But it was Jefferson's successor, and legislative right hand, who was the first truly modern president.

By the time Madison took office, political parties or "factions" as the politicians of the day called them, had taken firm hold of the American political system, never to be dislodged.

Although he was among those who had warned of their dangers, Madison was also the political realist best-suited to roll up his sleeves and get dirty to get things done -- some at the time said all too willingly.

Years of making deals in the trenches of the Virginia Legislature and in the House of Representatives and Senate had prepared Madison for the inescapable facts of American politics, that compromise is necessary to get things done.

He was willing enough to do it, to risk his reputation both to history and his own "faction," for the good of the country.

History has been kind of Madison, and rightly so. But compromise, his signature skill as a founder, has lately fallen on hard times.

Public education undermined, our history re-written, compromise is now viewed not as the result of reasonable accommodation among reasonable people, but a weakness that shames the nation, particularly by some of those now running for the presidency.

There is a fine line to be walked in leading such a large, powerful and diverse country.

Absolutism is not leadership, and compromise is not weakness, it is a necessity.

Let's all hope we can elect a president who recognizes this.

The Compromise Curse

Tonight is the final presidential debate and is supposed to focus, as I understand it, on foreign policy.

That means, without fail, we will be hearing a lot about "strength." I will also wager that the word we won't hear is "compromise," unless it is used in a derogatory manner.

Since the first days of the Republic, American foreign policy has focused on, appropriate, what is best for America.

So while some thought that we had a moral obligation and political rationale for joining the force of the French Revolution -- after all, without France we would not be a country today -- George Washington wisely kept us out of it.

Not because it was necessarily the "right" thing to do, but because, at that early stage of our development, it was the "right thing for the United States."

At another time, in other circumstances, the opposite choice may have been the right one.

The point, of course, is that in foreign policy, as with many things, there are few absolutes. The variables continue to shift, as do priorities, circumstances, personalities of the powerful and the many, many other things over which we have no control.

In other words, its a lot like everything else in life.

Now, on a good Sunday, if I play my cards right, I can let the family sleep late and, if I take long enough making them a pancake breakfast, I can be in the kitchen when "On the Media" airs on NPR.

It's a bit self-indulgent, but also serves as a reality check and staves off any megalomaniacal impulses sometimes experienced by those of us in the media. Essentially, it's an hour devoted to all the things we do wrong.

Anyway, yesterday's program had an interesting segment on the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary.

The program, which was about how the media is the first draft of history and, in this case, got it wrong about how the crisis was resolved as a result of Kennedy's resolute refusal to negotiate with Kruschev and that the matter was essentially an international staring contest.

As it turns out, that first draft is entirely wrong and history is taking its own sweet time about correcting it.

Although almost his entire cabinet favored no compromise, the records now show, Kennedy was inclined to accept an offer by Kruschev to reverse the ship carrying the missiles to Cuba in exchange for the removal of nuclear missiles recently placed in Turkey, within striking range of what was then the Soviet Union.

Kennedy's only trick was to agree to do so, but six months later when it would seem to have happened all by itself.

Thus did compromise save us from a nuclear war in which victory would have been little distinguished from defeat.

The moral of the "Media Matters" piece was evidently that this "myth" of the Cuban Missile Crisis had made it even harder for American politicians to do what was already hard to begin with -- compromise.

Try and imagine, one of the speakers said, a candidate in today's election saying it would be OK to compromise with Iran and let them enrich uranium to a smaller extent under extreme oversight than the current situation, in which sanctions are crippling Iran's economy to a dangerous extent, we are being blamed and the Iranians are enriching as much uranium as they can to whatever extent they can.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

This might seem to make sense as something to consider, I don't pretend to know the answer, which is why I decided a long time ago not to run for president -- that and those pesky closet skeletons.

Some might argue that the whole point of the sanctions is not to wreck Iran's economy, but to give Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a stark choice, face ruination for your nation or come to the negotiating table.

But can you imagine either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney tonight staring into the television camera and saying solemnly that they are ready to negotiate with Iran?

Compromise, or in this case, "appeasement" of Hitler
only let 

him take at the negotiating table what he
otherwise would have 

had to take by force.

I think the best we could hope for is something like "all options are on the table."

None of which is to say that compromise is the magic bullet to solving world problems or diplomatic impasses.

It won't take an opponent of compromise long to take a few steps further back in history to point to the appeasement of Hitler as the ultimate failure of compromise. And they would be right.

Chamberlin

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin's infamous "peace with honor" policy turned out to be neither and pretty disastrous for a few million people.

So which is it?

Compromise or inflexible strength?

Yes.

The answer I will be looking for tonight is the person who I believe will not rule out any option that both keeps America safe, but also promotes peace in the world.

Neither of them will likely say that, because that will not win them votes.

As the Tea Party movement has shown us, "compromise" is a dirty word these days in American politics. Anyone who does is seen as having "given in" or "caved" to the inflexible demands of the other side.

We all have our own opinions about which side is more inflexible in Washington these days and I won't dip into that very deep well here. The point I'm trying to make is look what it's gotten us.

We all hate (or at least say we hate) the gridlock which now gives Congress a popularity rating somewhere below the Community Party table at an American Legion convention.

But in truth, they are only doing what we said we wanted when we elected them, to stand for (fill in the blank) "without compromise."

What did we think was going to happen? Does anyone in Washington ever capitulate completely?

Democracy is, ultimately, all about making deals. It is how we decided to break away from England, how we drafted a Constitution and how we have done hundreds of other things that, in the dispassionate view of history turned out to be pretty good things.

Were they flawed? Of course. We're human beings. Everything we do is flawed.

We drafted a Constitution that recognized slavery. We made compromises in westward expansion that failed to resolve that cancer and ultimately it nearly destroyed the country.

But many of those compromises moved us forward, even if it was two steps forward, one step back.

They key, it seems to me, is to know when to compromise and when to stand your ground.

As someone who has helped to negotiate a fair number of union contracts in my time, I can tell you there is little use in sitting down at the table with a side that has no intention of compromising on anything.

Why even bother negotiating otherwise?

So I tend to doubt the supposed subject of tonight's debate will matter much to most Americans.

Our awareness of the rest of the world tends to be fairly small until the complex forces at work break the bubble and planes fly into skyscrapers.

It's a complex world out there.

Rather, tonight's debate will be about zingers, and who scores the most points. And the electronic media (and most of print too) will cover it from the horse race perspective that makes the coverage exciting but not insightful.

I just hope whoever wins the horse race is smart enough to know when compromise serves the best interests of the country -- even if most of us are too stubborn to admit it -- and when it doesn't.

Because after all, in world affairs, as in life, nothing is ever absolute.