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Jewish World Review April 24, 2000 / 19 Nissan, 5760

Chris Matthews

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Vietnam 25 -- The good, bad and ugly


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- TWENTY-FIVE YEARS after the fall of Vietnam, Americans are studying the ashes.

David Halberstam, whose "Best and the Brightest" showed how the elite led us into the jungle, offers us a tad of optimism. "There's something quite outstanding about America today," he ventured at the Brookings Institution seminar this week.

Could it be that this adventurous, hi-tech economy of ours owes a seedling of its genesis to the brazenly exploratory politics of the anti-war 1960s? That minds liberated by their generation's rebellion have exploded into a revolution every bit as iconoclastic?

Mary McGrory, the liberal columnist so sickened by Vietnam that she has refused for three decades to even watch a movie about it, finds hope in the late presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.

"He made it possible for people who were opposed to the war to look up to him, to admire him and to vote for him."

Halberstam pointed to "a certain nobility" in the way that McCain used the drama of his Vietnam captivity -- not to wedge people apart as Richard Nixon did, but to bring voters of varying views together.

He finds the Democratic party still suffering from its horrid divisions from the Vietnam years. He imagines a giant football stadium where one team led by Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern battles another led by Hubert Humphrey and Henry "Scoop" Jackson with tens of thousands of Republicans cheering from the stands.

"What is the foreign policy of the present administration?" he wonders aloud.

Even in 2000, Halberstam argues, President Bill Clinton is unable to state and execute a clear, explicable American policy toward the world. One reason is the "CNN effect," the ability of voters to see and count the casualties of war 24 hours a day. A dead G.I. is dragged through the streets of Mogadishu with the people back home watching the repellent image.

All this began, Halberstam notes, with the Vietnam conflict, which entered our national consciousness as "the living-room war."

Richard Haas, a national security aide to President Bush, notes another legacy of that war: the termination of the draft and its replacement by an all-volunteer army.

One casualty has been the shared national experience of having been "in the service." Instead of being the great "leveler," Haas argues, military service is now the great divider, separating those who fight from those civilians who commit them to the fight. Presidents now find themselves surrounded by Ivy League-schooled advisers who never fought in war and know they didn't. They and their aides sit across the table from generals dripping in medals who wonder what these over-educated pencil necks know about war.

All things to consider as we commemorate the quarter-century anniversary of an event few of us could have imagined till it actually happened: the collapse of Saigon and, with it, a notion of American power and goodness.



JWR contributor Chris Matthews is the author of Hardball. and hosts a CNBC show of the same name. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

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© 2000, NEA