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Why this Election Is All About Vietnam

by Jerry Lembcke

Mr. Lembcke is Associate Professor of Sociology at Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA. He is the author of The Spitting Image and CNN’s Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam’s Last Great Myth. He can be reached at jlembcke@holycross.edu or 508-793-3050.

News about the news surged to new heights recently with the admission by CBS anchor Dan Rather that he and the network had made an error in judgment in broadcasting a story about President George Bush’s National Guard record. The controversial September 8 “60 Minutes” segment had relied on documents received from former Texas National Guard officer, Bill Burkett. Those documents appeared to support a claim by Bush critics that he had received preferential treatment by his commanders because his father was a congressman. The authenticity and provenance of the documents proved difficult to establish, however, leading CBS News president Andrew Hayward to say of the documents, “We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret.”

The flap over Bush’s military service mirrors, of course, the challenge that his supporters made to Democratic Party contender John Kerry’s credentials as a decorated Vietnam veteran. During August, Kerry’s detractors questioned the authenticity of his battle wounds and the medals he received for heroism as a swift boat commander in 1969. It now appears that those charges could be a decisive factor in the November election.

The back-and-forth over the mettle of the men who would command the nation’s uniformed services for the next four years has now created a chorus of newsmakers and pundits objecting that thirty-year-old issues from Vietnam threatened to displace the war in Iraq and economic planning from the political agenda. Long-time news analyst David Gergen lamented last week that Vietnam will shadow the campaign all the way to November.

But past and present are not so clearly separable. The war in Iraq is an extension of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In turn, that war was as much about kicking the “Vietnam syndrome” out of American culture as throwing Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. It was, in those words, a kind of propaganda-by-deed intended to demonstrate, mostly to Americans themselves, that they still had the “right stuff.” On that score, the Gulf war was unsatisfying. The enemy turned out to be a paper tiger, the shootout needed to whet the will to war, a “turkey shoot.” The Gulf War only added to the unfinished business left by Vietnam, rejuvenating the Ramboesque imperative to go back—and do it right next time.

The central fact that the war in Vietnam was lost has also been the motor-force of domestic policy-making for three decades. The rise of the neo-conservative New Right within the Republican Party was propelled by fear that America had “gone soft” from too many entitlement programs, too much feminism, excessive permissiveness in families and schools, and spreading secularism. The problem, as the neo-cons saw it, demanded a roll-back of New Deal liberalism in government, a refurbished masculinity, and a reassertion of church and patriarchal authority. Contrary to those who decry the persistence of Vietnam-era issues in the present campaign as a “distraction,” the historical record speaks clearly that the domestic issues dividing conservatives and liberals today would probably not even be on the table were it not for the war in Vietnam and, in turn, neither can they be meaningfully addressed in a present alienated from its past.

Domestic support for the war in Iraq, moreover, is every bit as much about opposition to the anti-war movement as it is about the regime of Saddam Hussein. In the spring of 2003, pro-war conservatives swung public opinion behind the invasion of Iraq with a jingoistic “support the troops” campaign, implying that anyone opposing Washington’s policy was guilty of betraying the men and women sent to fight the war. The tactic worked precisely because the fanciful image of protesters spitting on Vietnam veterans had been made vivid in American imaginations by the same right-wingers now in the lime light with their attacks on Kerry.

The anti-Kerry fusillade uses the questions about his character and credibility to tap into a deep pool of public apprehension that the war in Vietnam was lost because of betrayal on the home front. The right reached those emotions using a doctored photo to associate Kerry with Jane Fonda early in the campaign. It was a clumsy effort but one that exposed the agenda of those making it for what it really is: the exploitation of fears that the real enemy is within. The tap root of those fears grew out the Vietnam experience but it found fertile soil in the misery of unemployed workers and displaced farmers during the 1980s and 1990s. By the time the planes hit the World Trade Center in 2001, a large swath of Americans was ready to believe it was an “inside job” and a larger number still vulnerable to the Bush-Cheney demagoguery that votes for Kerry invite more attacks.

The Kerry-Fonda fantasy also plumbs the veins of troubled masculinity that run through the betrayal narrative. The American sense of manhood is entangled with measures of military prowess. For many men, military service is the highpoint of their lives; for men coming of age during wartime, the question, “What did you do in the war Daddy?” nags at their identity. And, just as sports fans identify with the home team—as in, “We’re in the playoffs”—whole generations of men, veterans and non-veterans alike, identify with the outcomes of the wars of their early adulthood. The victory becomes “our” victory, the valor of the soldiers “our” valor, their heroism “our” heroism.

The other side of the coin, of course, is that when war is lost, it becomes “our” loss. For those experiencing Vietnam as emasculation inflicted by the home-front knife in the back, the loss has been attributed to the gendered “other,” the feminine in our own culture.

The attack on Kerry’s military credentials, the allusion to his “softness” on terrorism, and the “girlie man” caricatures are rhetorical tactics premised on a widespread discontent about Vietnam. On the surface, Kerry is targeted because he came home from the war and joined the anti-war movement, but the gendered lexicon of the barbs themselves points to an unarticulated angst in the American subconscious that is about something more serious than Kerry’s fidelity or even the defeat in Vietnam.

It’s the war itself, not just its loss, which eats at the nation’s soul. America’s short-lived Age of Empire began and ended in Vietnam, its self image as the “City on the Hill,” a people with a calling to bring a new and better world to being, shed in that country’s cities, jungles, and deltas. Kerry and thousands of other Vietnam veterans against that war came home with the message that there is no glory to be had in wars of conquest—be they won or lost. Kerry’s figure on the political stage is an iconic reminder of that lesson, one that is particularly disquieting as another generation of soldiers sacrifices its lives, limbs, and honor for an ignoble cause.

Campaign '04 is not about the character traits of George Bush or John Kerry, such as they can be discerned in their thirty-year-old military records. It is about the American character and its struggle to confront the neo-imperialist impulses common to the U.S. invasions of both Vietnam and Iraq. Notwithstanding the proclivity of newsmakers to displace that struggle from the news with non-news about hairdos, bottle tans, windsurfing, and would-be First Wives, this election is very much about Vietnam.