The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    Barth's picture

    This is how it works

    By Barth on Sat, 12/05/2009 - 5:41pm |
    I really did not notice the Vietnam War until 1967. I feel guilty about not being aware of it before then, but in fairness, I was 15 years old in 1967 and had other things on my mind. I did watch a little bit of Secretary McNamara's press conference in 1964detailing an attack on United States naval vessels in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, but did not feel obligated to investigate myself where those ships were or whether, as it turned out, they were not attacked and, instead, made errors in analyzing radar. I was, after all, about to begin eighth grade in 1964.

    By the time the whole thing seemed worth looking into, the die seemed to have been cast. It did not seem to be going well by then, and I was developing some back of the mind concern that when I graduated from high school in three years, someone might expect my personal assistance in this war. Still, I felt that the President of the United States, the man who had steered Congress into enacting key portions of the civil and voting rights proposals of the murdered president he had succeeded as well as the Kennedy administrations medicare and medicaid initiatives, probably had a handle on this thing, too, and that, as a loyal Democrat, I ought to support him. That turned out to be a mistake.     I make these confessions not to accept responsibility for the Vietnam War, but to suggest that for all the comparisons of that horrible and searing experience, one that still has substantial impact on our politics and the way people view our government, that times have changed, we have learned a few lessons, and in the end, a citizen's responsibility basically extends to electing the right people to manage the government and expect that, if that happens, those we choose will do what should be done.

    President Johnson made enormous and far reaching mistakes, to be sure. I still believe him to have been an excellent president---an loyal steward of the legacy of probably our greatest president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and one who understood his obligations to the course set by the President with whom he was elected as Vice President---John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

    Getting Congress to enact important and far reaching legislation is no easy task as our current president and Senate majority leader can see. President Johnson was both. He was forced to leave the leadership of the Senate to Mike Mansfield when elected Vice President, but when he became President he exercised that authority and his skills in getting legislation passed (first in getting a small step forward civil rights bill passed in 1958) were again in use and accomplished their end.

    War and how to deal with the communists were not his strong suit and, actually, except for George F. Kennan, were not anybody's strong suit in those days. President Kennedy had learned the lessons from following military advice to closely when he allowed the Bay of Pigs to go forward, but that lesson was lost with President Kennedy's death.

    But President Obama is not President Johnson and, indeed, has the advantage of learning from the Johnson experience. His administration includes people well versed in the limits of force, and the Vietnam experience. They are not people talking about "rolling out" a war on the even of a midterm election or trying to change the history of the Vietnam War to influence a public rightly wary of anything that resembles that experience. 

    Anyone who saw the great Rachel Maddow discussing Afghanistan and Pakistan with our United Nations Ambassador, Susan Rice(two links here) could have little doubt that whatever one thinks about the administration's proposed course of action, that it is the result of considerable, thought, discussion and review by people who are truly brilliant, not the self-proclaimed "best and brightest" who advised Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. 

    Before the Vietnam War began to build up, most of us believed that we ought to trust the nation's leaders. It was not that "we" did not know they lied from time to time: President Eisenhower flat out denied our U-2 flights over the Soviet Union before Francis Gary Powers was shot down [NYT subscription required], but most understood that this was an acceptable part of his responsibility to do what he needed to do to protect us from harm. I rather suspect that nobody who studied the issue believed the United States really had nothing to do with the 1953 coup in Iranor, for that matter, in helping Saddam Hussein take over in Iraq in beginning in 1963 but generally most people feel it best to leave those things to people with access to more information than the rest of us have.

    Vietnam and subsequent events changed a lot of that. The Pentagon Papers showed the extent to which were actively deceived about things that were happening in relatively plain view and when Richard Nixon and his henchmen claimed the United States was not bombing in Cambodia when anyone living there could tell otherwise or, most memorably to this blogger, a Pentagon flack named Jerry Friedheim first denied a United States bombing of a hospital in Bach Mai, near Hanoi, then claimed it was accidental before that entire administration fell apart in a pile of lies, trust in what the government told us was almost completely destroyed.

    It did not help that the Nixon fiasco was followed by the presidency of a well meaning dolt, and eventually a movie actor whose grasp of reality was tenuous and whose every public statement was designed to further a political end. On 9/11, my first thought was that our politics had descended to the point that every day of a president's term is a campaign for re-election or for a chosen successor and that all that baby kissing---or reading books to schoolchildren---left presidents with insufficient time to actually organize the government to protect us from harm.

    But the last dolt was so incompetent as to permit the election of President Obama. (That about a third of the country would replace him with Sarah Palin if they could tells us how backward we have become, but we'll worry about that another day). This thoughtful and intelligent President, as close to the Kennedy model as we have come since that horrible day forty-six years ago, has appointed as Ambassador to the United Nations a brilliant woman, a Secretary of State who is not dogmatic and instead flexible, one who has met directly with Karzai and others in the area, continued a wise and experienced Secretary of Defense who appears to be liberated by the change in the presidency, a national security advisor who is an experienced retired general savvy in the limits of military force, and a commander of the forces in Afghanistan who, contrary to the politically charged description of his report, actually has written a very compelling report on what we should do there, suggests that a re-evaluation of our relationship to the government might be in order.

    I do not suggest ceding all authority to the President or the military and blindly following them wherever they want to take us. We have made grave mistakes in following such a course, as recently as in the run up to the Iraq war, of course, where the President's deceptions were clear and vitally significant given the amount of trust that must be reposed in any President. 

    In a democratic republic we are required, however, to vote for people who will represent us in the government. As elected officials they will be given access to information the rest of us do not have, and are charged with a responsibility to protect us. When the general supervising our troops in Afghanistan writes on almost his first page that "doubling down" is not the answer and the focus on additional forces wrongheaded, his requests are entitled to more respect than that the general just wants more troops so he can keep fighting. When the President of the United States---this President of the United States---a man I trust and admire---tells usthat he is

    convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards, and al Qaeda can operate with impunity


    my conclusion has to be that we should follow his lead. Maybe he and his advisors are wrong. Maybe this will not work, and maybe, quite unlikely, is anything required at all. Maybe we should do something else. I understand all of that and respect those views. But I voted for, and we elected this man as President and the process by which he reviewed the situation did nothing but give me reason to believe that, for a change, we are the beneficiaries of a serious government trying to do the right thing. 

    This is how it works. We elect the person who can and will do his or her best to serve the interests of our nation, and not just a political party or faction. If this is not what you wanted, you ought to have pushed someone else forward for the presidency, but in my view, we would have been better served if John Kerry had been elected in 2004 or Vice President Gore had been seated as president in 2001 and the election of President Obama may be our last hope to restore to the presidency and this nation the respect it needs to achieve the ends of our 200 plus year experiment.