Call it the dog that didn’t bark. Both John Kerry, the new secretary of state, and Chuck Hagel, the defense secretary-designate, are Vietnam veterans. Both turned bitterly against the war — and that view plainly informs the sensibilities that have guided them ever since.
Yet not a single senator from either party spoke up to defend the war in Indochina, to differ with either nominee on the meaning of Vietnam. The chairman of Armed Services, Carl Levin of Michigan, just sat there. Not even Sen. John McCain, who was held prisoner in the communist dungeons in Hanoi, countered their view of Vietnam.
The controversy that did erupt — in the hearing on Hagel — was about Israel and the Middle East. Hagel’s view of Israel certainly deserved all the attention it got. But what are we to make of the fact that when two veterans of the Vietnam generation get elevated to our top foreign-policy spots, not a single significant question is put to either one about their views on the Vietnam War itself?
Kerry’s views are notorious. When he came home, he threw away his medals. He also met with enemy envoys in Paris, after which he made a public endorsement of the enemy’s key demands. At a Senate hearing, he accused his fellow GIs of war crimes — and joked about how if we retreated from Vietnam, the North Vietnamese would help us carry our bags.
Hagel’s view of the war is less well known. He had a more harrowing time in Vietnam than Kerry; he was badly wounded, as was his brother Tom. He later questioned President Lyndon Johnson’s motives for the war, writing: “I wish someone had told me when I was sitting on a burning tank in a Vietnamese rice paddy that I was fighting for a lost cause just to save a president’s legacy.”
One thing Hagel did say at the hearing is that Vietnam was a part of his whole makeup, and it has led him always to ask, “Was the policy worthy of the men and women that we are asking to make the sacrifices?” He has made it all too clear that his view is that Vietnam wasn’t worth the sacrifices.
This seems to be what passes for the establishment view today. No one wants to litigate the war all over again. President Obama has lamented the way Vietnam veterans were ignored, or even shunned, when they came back from the war. But he shares the cynical view of the war held by Kerry and Hagel.
In his book “Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote: “The disastrous consequences of that conflict — for our credibility and prestige abroad, for our armed forces (which would take a generation to recover), and most of all for those who fought — have been amply documented,” he wrote. “But perhaps the biggest casualty of that war was the bond of trust between the American people and their government — and between Americans themselves.”
Well, let it be said somewhere that all their cynicism about Vietnam isn’t a universal view. There are those of us who see Vietnam as an important battle in the vast twilight struggle known as the Cold War, who believe there was a right and wrong in that war. And that America was in the right.
There is a camp that comprehends that America’s GIs won the fight on the field of battle only to have their victory thrown away by the 94th Congress. It was in early 1975, when there were no longer combat GIs left in Vietnam, that Congress cut off all military aid to our allies there and left them to be conquered by our common enemy.
The anti-war movement, it turned out, wasn’t about saving American lives. It had many patriotic members, to be sure. But seen through the hard lens of history, the movement helped deliver a communist victory. Neither Kerry nor Hagel were asked how that worked out for Vietnam.