Nicolaus Mills: Richard Blumenthal, Liberal Guilt, and Vietnam
[Nicolaus Mills is a professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).]
Once thought to be a lock to take over the seat of retiring Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd, Richard Blumenthal, the liberal attorney general of Connecticut, is now on the defensive as a result of saying that he served in Vietnam when he did not. In Connecticut, where he faces a tough Republican opponent, Linda McMahon, as well as in the pages of The New York Times, Blumenthal is being called to account for telling voters, "We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam."
Blumenthal's case resembles that of the Mount Holyoke College professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, who in 2001 was revealed to have lied to his students about serving in Vietnam. The Blumenthal and Ellis cases are about more than the personal failings of public figures. Their deceptions, in fact, raise an important question: Why do liberals who opposed the Vietnam War feel the need to claim they fought in Vietnam, while hawkish conservatives, like former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, remain untroubled by the deferments they received in those years?...
Ellis, who, until his falsehoods were uncovered by The Boston Globe, claimed he was a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne and had served on the staff of Vietnam commander Gen. William Westmoreland, had an equally circumspect military record. As a college student, he joined the ROTC at the College of William & Mary, then went on to graduate school at Yale University from 1965 through 1969, before teaching history at West Point until 1972, when he was discharged from the Army with the rank of captain. There is little more Ellis could have done to prepare himself for a career in academe. His subsequent best-selling biography of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx (Knopf, 1997), and his Revolutionary-era history, Founding Brothers (Knopf, 2000), did not require him to be a hero in order to draw readers....
Vietnam ushered in a period in which, unlike World War II, America went to war without requiring broadly shared sacrifice on the battlefield or on the home front—and now we have, for all practical purposes, institutionalized that undemocratic arrangement. Military recruiting has closely followed the ups and down of the U.S. economy since the nation switched to an all-volunteer force, David R. Segal, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, has noted, and the U.S. Army Accessions Command, which heads Army recruiting, agrees. The command has made television ads and enlistment bonuses of up to $40,000 the backbone of its appeal to the millennial generation, and recruiting has thrived, it acknowledges, during economic downturns.
In terms of the military, the result is that today there is no need for an Ivy Leaguer to engage in the kinds of draft deceptions that Fallows and Buckley employed during Vietnam. Worrying about fairness is over. As far as the law goes, we aren't all in this together....
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Once thought to be a lock to take over the seat of retiring Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd, Richard Blumenthal, the liberal attorney general of Connecticut, is now on the defensive as a result of saying that he served in Vietnam when he did not. In Connecticut, where he faces a tough Republican opponent, Linda McMahon, as well as in the pages of The New York Times, Blumenthal is being called to account for telling voters, "We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam."
Blumenthal's case resembles that of the Mount Holyoke College professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, who in 2001 was revealed to have lied to his students about serving in Vietnam. The Blumenthal and Ellis cases are about more than the personal failings of public figures. Their deceptions, in fact, raise an important question: Why do liberals who opposed the Vietnam War feel the need to claim they fought in Vietnam, while hawkish conservatives, like former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, remain untroubled by the deferments they received in those years?...
Ellis, who, until his falsehoods were uncovered by The Boston Globe, claimed he was a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne and had served on the staff of Vietnam commander Gen. William Westmoreland, had an equally circumspect military record. As a college student, he joined the ROTC at the College of William & Mary, then went on to graduate school at Yale University from 1965 through 1969, before teaching history at West Point until 1972, when he was discharged from the Army with the rank of captain. There is little more Ellis could have done to prepare himself for a career in academe. His subsequent best-selling biography of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx (Knopf, 1997), and his Revolutionary-era history, Founding Brothers (Knopf, 2000), did not require him to be a hero in order to draw readers....
Vietnam ushered in a period in which, unlike World War II, America went to war without requiring broadly shared sacrifice on the battlefield or on the home front—and now we have, for all practical purposes, institutionalized that undemocratic arrangement. Military recruiting has closely followed the ups and down of the U.S. economy since the nation switched to an all-volunteer force, David R. Segal, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, has noted, and the U.S. Army Accessions Command, which heads Army recruiting, agrees. The command has made television ads and enlistment bonuses of up to $40,000 the backbone of its appeal to the millennial generation, and recruiting has thrived, it acknowledges, during economic downturns.
In terms of the military, the result is that today there is no need for an Ivy Leaguer to engage in the kinds of draft deceptions that Fallows and Buckley employed during Vietnam. Worrying about fairness is over. As far as the law goes, we aren't all in this together....