Vietnam RevisitedNeo-neocon has up the
latest instalment of her terrific musings on the subject of Vietnam.
To tackle a minor point up front, Dean Esmay, in an
otherwise fine post linking to NNC, makes this comment:
I have one bit of history for her: in the elections of 1972, Nixon won in a landslide. What is less well-remembered is the other landslide of that same year: the massive congressional landslide won by Democrats. For all that he won a great victory for himself, Nixon had no coattails, even reverse coattails. He didn't even try to campaign for his party that year, and while Democrats had already been in the majority they took a huge majority that year.This is an example of memory substituting for research. The Democrats did not win a congressional landslide in 1972, they did win
two more Senate seats, but they
lost 13 seats in the House of Representatives. The landslide
came in 1974, after Nixon's resignation over Watergate.
Anyway, back to NNC's post, she makes some wonderful points, and I'd like to recommend that you read it all. I do have one quibble though. She says:
...reports came back that the powers that be had never been committed to fighting an all-out war to win...There was also indisputably a lack of commitment, for political reasons, to the full effort that would have been necessary to win it.True enough, but there's an explanation. There was no commitment to fighting an all-out war to win because of the fear that if we took the fight to the North Vietnamese too agressively, it would provoke the Russians into a full-scale nuclear war. This was why the war effectively was fought as a delaying, defensive action on the part of the United States.
Still, the overall article is excellent. Get this:
But I think the word "betrayal" is absolutely appropriate here, and accounts for many of the still-powerful reactions and repercussions from the Vietnam era. Because the pre-existing trust was profound, the reversal, when it came, was exquisitely sharp also. The loss of trust in our government and military had to be dealt with emotionally and cognitively, and people dealt with it in different ways. The vast majority of liberals seem to have taken that trust and re-invested it--this time in the press, who were seen as whistleblowers, the exposers of the government's lying, cheating ways. That is one way to respond to a loss of faith--by reinvesting in it something else perceived as replacing it (you might say it's somewhat analogous to starting a new relationship on the rebound). Other people had a more extreme reaction, and decided to withdraw trust from both the government and the press, and to place their trust in nothing and became cynics. Still others (leftists) reacted to the betrayal by supporting whomever and whatever was against the US. Many conservatives, on the other hand, withdrew their trust from the press, previously seen as an ally of sorts, but now perceived as an enemy. They also solidified their anger at liberals and a left seen to have ignominiously betrayed the South Vietnamese people and our nation's honor.Now that is just superb analysis.
