ENT, Ohio - Kent State is a large state-supported school located in northeast Ohio, and last month I went out for a visit, as part of a larger program commemorating the 30th anniversary of the terrible day in May when Ohio National Guardsmen fired on students here.
The university lies in a relatively conservative part of the heartland, and even now it strikes me as being among the least likely places to find a shrine commemorating civilian victims of a bad war which took place some 12,000 miles away.
What happened at Kent State on that day in 1970 still seems inconceivable to me. First that it happened at all, second that it happened on a campus like this - so distanced physically and emotionally from the center of the antiwar movement.
It was a campus where a large number of the students were first-generation college-educated, and therefore innately wary of political protests. To them, the degree was the most serious business of college, and protests were for rich kids.
Let me set the scene: Richard Nixon, having pledged to end the war, had just sent American troops into Cambodia, and that incursion had triggered a rage across a large number of campuses because of the fear that Nixon, rather than ending the war, was expanding it. There had already been some picketing at Kent State, a reflection of a growing edginess about what was happening in Vietnam. Up to then, it had been a school where the peace movement lacked the kind of deep roots it had gained earlier on more elite campuses favored by children of the upper middle class. But in the midst of these protests, most of which had been peaceful, there had been some looting in the downtown area, though apparently not by the protesters. Then things got uglier: someone burned down the local ROTC building. The National Guard was called out at the request of the mayor.
On May 4, there had been more protests and the National Guard troops - poorly led, poorly commanded, using, it still seems unbelievable to me, live ammunition - had fired on the students. The troops were scared kids themselves, many in the guard because they did not want to go to Vietnam, firing on other scared kids who did not want to go to Vietnam. Four students were killed. A fifth was permanently paralyzed.
What happened that day at Kent State was important. It was what separated the Vietnam War from so much else in the American experience: it was us against us, or as Walt Kelly once wrote in Pogo, ''We have met the enemy and he is us.''
I was reminded of that quote a few years ago when Robert McNamara's book, ''In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,'' came out, some 30 years after he apparently turned on the war. I was summoned to the Charlie Rose Show to talk about the book and the subject. McNamara's bizarre book had opened a firestorm of protest from all sides.
Suddenly it was as if all the stitches of a wound that had never entirely healed had been ripped out. The country was once again very much in pain. Rose asked our panel why Vietnam still hung so heavily over us. I said it was in some way a smaller version of the second American Civil War, not just us against the Vietnamese, but Americans against Americans.
I still think that is true. It touched all kinds of fault lines within our country, some which existed by generation, some by region, some by class, and some by ethnicity. And of course, it also reflected vastly conflicting visions of what we wanted our country to be, and what we thought was the principal threat to its greatness. Does the greatest threat to us as a free, strong, and just society come from external enemies, or from ourselves, from our failure to be what we're supposed to be?
Now, 25 years after the last helicopters left the American embassy in Saigon, it is still hard to assess the impact of the Vietnam War on the United States. The Cold War is over. The only dominoes that fell - to the degree that there ever were dominoes - did so not in Southeast Asia but in Eastern Europe.
As the Vietnam War ended, I came to think of it as an aberration, a bitter one to be sure, one to which we had diverted valuable lives and resources in a hopeless cause, but an aberration nonetheless. It represented a terrible misreading of history, first of the impact and political viability of McCarthyism post-McCarthy, and second, over there, of the probable impact of the French Indochina War.
By the first point I mean the architects who decided to send troops feared too much their own domestic political vulnerability if Saigon fell; they feared the passions of the past rather than the realities of the present. Lyndon Johnson, in particular, made a bad political call, that of a man failing to read the larger lesson of his own landslide victory in 1964. We were, if treated as grown-ups by the President, quite capable of understanding why the administration had not sent combat troops to do, in the immortal words of LBJ, for Asian boys what Asian boys should do for themselves. Secondly, the same architects underestimated why the other side had so powerful a political-military dynamic, and therefore would be able to sustain the technological pounding we gave it.
But our failure in Indochina was not a reflection of American weakness, or of a broader communist strength in other countries where there was no preceding colonial war. The lessons of Vietnam were localized, as were the unique strengths of the other side. It was a place where, tragically, we applied our power where power was not applicable.
It was nationalism that was the central issue in both Eastern Europe and in Southeast Asia. (I had an unusually good view of this because I had gone from Saigon in the early '60s to Eastern Europe in the mid-'60s, and then back to Saigon in 1967.) In Vietnam, where Catholicism was identified by much of the predominantly Buddhist population as an instrument of the former colonial power, cmmunists represented the indigenous anti-Western forces which had defeated the French. Because of that, the people in a small Mekong Delta village would hide a Viet Cong commissar from the forces of the government.
Comparably, in Poland, where the government was seen as an extension of a Soviet occupation and where the Catholic Church was historically twined with the country's nationalism and was, of course, anticommunist, the exact reverse was true. If a commissar came into a village looking for a local priest, the villagers would hide the priest.
Let me take that one step further: I believe that in the end, when Gorbachev made his fateful decisions to change the Soviet system, he did so because he was a patriot and a nationalist. In the end he was a better Russian than he was a communist. I think he realized that the system had blocked the nation; communism had suppressed the true energies of his people. It was one thing to fall behind the United States, Western Europe, even Japan, in terms of industrial production and technological achievement. But when you were falling behind South Korea, that was something to alarm any patriot.
So what happened in Vietnam - for better or worse, for all the pain it caused us at the time - had, I suspect, little to do with the eventual outcome of the world as it stands today.
Perhaps Vietnam weakened us momentarily. That sense of weakness was probably heightened by two succeeding events. The first was the hostage crisis in Iran, overamplified as it was by network television reporting, which gave off an impression of American weakness, rather than frustration. The second event was the subsequent dramatic change in oil prices, with its parallel arrival of massive inflation which was so hard on the middle class. But I don't think the war affected our core strengths. We were strong before Vietnam in any true reading of our innate qualities and our resilience as a society, we were strong during it, and we were strong after it.
The weaknesses that the war underlined seem in retrospect those of perception to me rather than reality. The failure of our military there did not mean that we were weak militarily. It meant instead that we were fighting the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. We had ended up fighting alongside a feudal ally whose generals had more often than not served with the French. And we were fighting against a force in which communism and nationalism were blended together.
We were effectively fighting the birthrate of Vietnam. We had absolute military superiority. We could win any set-piece battle, but they had absolute political superiority: they would always keep recruiting and coming. They did not have to win the war to triumph, they had only not to lose it. Sooner or later we would tire and go home.
The antiwar movement was seen by so many as a sign of American weakness, of citizens who shirked their responsibilities and were less patriotic than their forebears. Former Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes, running for the Senate in the days after the Kent State incident, referred to the antiwar protesters as worse than vigilantes, communists, and brownshirts. But to me the movement was a sign of strength. It was the mark of a youthful, vigorous, indeed even passionate, democratic society reconstituting itself politically outside the normal political channels, because the party of normal protest on this particular issue was the party from which the war's architects had come. Had we watched a comparable citizen uprising elsewhere - Russian people protesting against the use of their forces in Afghanistan, the French population protesting against their war in Algeria - I am sure we would have seen it as a sign of strength.
Of course the war did terrible damage to those who went and did not come back, or who came back in some way or another changed and wounded, either physically or emotionally, and to their families - homes that would never be the same. It did great damage to the Vietnamese, who endured on both sides a brutal war and the heaviest bombing in the history of mankind.
For a time the war damaged the US economy. There was a major inflationary cycle because Lyndon Johnson deliberately hid the real price of the war in his budget. The concept of broad internationalism was damaged, and there developed a parallel wariness of getting involved anywhere else in the world, lest it be another Vietnam.
Though this is harder to prove, I suspect there was also damage to the broader concept of public service, damage to the political system in a variety of ways. Certainly the Republicans in general tend to run on the concept of minimizing government, but after Vietnam, many traditional liberals were equally wary of the role of government. The system, after all, did not work very well during Vietnam. The Democrats were the architects of the war, largely because John Kennedy and Johnson feared that losing Saigon would weaken their chances for reelection and would hand the Republicans a golden issue: that the Democrats were once again, as had been charged before, soft on communism.
But the Republicans were not much better in terms of using the political system to make public service seem attractive. Nixon was elected largely because 1968 was a plebiscite against the war and he claimed he had a plan to end it. But he had no real plan. Rather, he exploited the existing domestic tensions to pick up alienated blue-collar Democrats; in the end he managed to keep the war going another six years. Peace with honor was for a long time neither. We simply changed the color of the bodies. And finally of course, Nixon's own callous disregard for the elemental political rights of his fellow citizens led us into Watergate.
The effect of the Vietnam War on the liberalism of the era was in some ways considerable. Certainly the Great Society, which Johnson wanted as his legacy, was stillborn: it competed against the war from the start for financial resources and the attention span of those who governed. Moreover, a number of the political constituencies whose support might have been so crucial for any success from it, had already turned against the President because of the war.
If there was long-standing damage done by Vietnam, that is damage which has taken a long time to heal, I am inclined to think it took place in two institutions critically important to this country: the Democratic Party and the United States Army.
Vietnam was a disaster for the Army. In Korea, the saying went among military men, we sent over a bad Army and got back a good Army. In Vietnam, it was the exact reverse. We sent over a very good Army and got back a bad Army. That tends to happen when the people presiding over a foreign adventure lie and deceive from the start, and as they significantly underestimate their opponent.
In Vietnam it became clear to a generation of officers who went that it could not be done as it was supposed to be done. What happened then was not a pretty thing to watch. Some high officers played the game and got their tickets punched. They cynically gave both Saigon and the Pentagon what they wanted: greatly inflated reports of victories which were probably not victories, but reflected instead that we were caught in an endless stalemate. A great many men who should not have been promoted were, and a lot of men who played it straight were, for a time, punished.
''What the United States Army lost in Vietnam,'' noted my friend Charles Mohr of the New York Times, one of the best reporters to cover that war, ''was its intellectual integrity.''
General Colin Powell, who did two tours in Vietnam, the first as a young major, would later write quite bitterly about the corrosive careerism of the senior officers which he and other younger officers had too often seen at work - the cynical reporting, the games played by so many senior officers.
''Many of my generation, the career captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels seasoned in that war vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support,'' Powell wrote. ''If we could make good on that promise to ourselves, to the civilian leadership and to the country, then the sacrifices in Vietnam would not have been in vain.''
The Army that came home from that war was dispirited, its morale was terrible, its leadership in doubt. The cleansing of the Army during the '70s, under the leadership of a number of gifted men, the reinstitution of old and important virtues was, I think, a signal success. It is not surprising that Powell says in his memoir the thing that he is proudest of is his role in bringing back and modernizing the Army, rather than his leadership during the Gulf War.
By chance, in the current book I am working on, I have spent a good deal of time with recent three- and four-star generals of the post-Vietnam era, and become a genuine fan of these men. I've often pondered why they seem so impressive.
The answer, I think, is in where they came from and what they've gone through. They are almost all self-made, men of the modern meritocracy. They are more traveled, less narrowly focused, and more broadly educated outside the classroom than most high-level executives in civilian positions. Most of these senior officers went through something terrible in Vietnam, and come out of it tempered, and stronger, with a sobered view of their own institution and their country, and a healthy skepticism about the arrogance of power. It is no surprise that John McCain, whose personal story is not unlike theirs, and whose breadth of experience also parallels theirs, was by far the most captivating candidate of the recent primary season.
The other institution badly damaged was the Democratic Party. At the time of the initial troop commitments, the Democrats had been the dominant party. Through the 1964 election, with Johnson's huge victory over Barry Goldwater, they had won seven of nine elections. Since then, they have won three of eight - one because of Nixon's crimes and the fact that Gerald Ford forgot where Poland was, and two because of Bill Clinton's deft ability to exploit the vulnerabilities of an increasingly divided Republican Party. By all rights, the Republicans should be the majority party now. The Democrats, though in power for eight years, are most definitely a minority party.
Not all of that can be blamed on Vietnam. More important, perhaps, were other factors like the fragmenting of the traditional alliance between blacks and urban blue-collar workers, the decline of labor, the shift of affluence from the North and Northeast to the South and Southwest, and the effect of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on former Southern Democrats. All this has given the Republicans a new basis for a majority.
But much of the Democratic malaise does spring from Vietnam - the Reagan Democrats became what they did as much because of the war and perceived weakness on foreign policy as because of race. In 1968, a defining year, the great struggle in American politics was over Vietnam, and it took place within the Democratic Party. It was as if there was a giant football stadium and down on the field there were two teams playing: one led by people like Kennedy, McCarthy, and McGovern, the other led by people named Johnson, Humphrey, and Jackson. In the stands cheering wildly were 60,000 people, all of them Republicans. Echoes of that campaign, and of those divisions, still exist within the party.
I am not sure the Democrats have entirely righted themselves and found a new center. Some of that is from Vietnam, some of it the result of broader changes in the society. Despite winning twice under Clinton, the party still seems like a collection of rather selfish one-issue groups brought together uneasily under the same roof. And it still seems somewhat schizophrenic, in no small way because of Vietnam, about the use of power in the world.
In the end, despite the size of the force we sent, very few Americans went to Vietnam. For most of them, it was a kind of geopolitical entertainment - the living room war, in Michael Arlen's apt phrase. The number of people it touched directly, in a nation then of some 216 million, seems now almost infinitesimal.
When I was young and in college back in the '50s, I thought the veterans of the Great War, my father among them, were older men from another, long-past era. Now I realize that to today's college students, my daughter among them, those of us who went to Vietnam and who were so young then, must seem as old as the World War I veterans did to me.
Most of us who went and were lucky enough to come back, went through our own evolution - at first anger and bitterness, even rage. Then if we were lucky, we tried to use the experience to strengthen ourselves. We had, whatever else, done it. We had paid a price, and we had survived.
Now, as Vietnam moves into the distant past, those of us who once seemed to be in such bitter debate over the war have bonded. We've shared part of a painful experience, with which we have mutually struggled for a very long time, in order to get on with the rest of our lives.
David Halberstam was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting from Vietnam for the New York Times. He has written 16 books, including ''The Best and the Brightest'' and ''The Powers That Be.'' His new book, about what American policy on Bosnia and Kosovo tells us about ourselves, will be published next year.
