You Can't Skip Vietnam Twice (Author Compares Bush to Hitler)

New York Times ^ | 2/22/2004 | Frank Rich

[againstallhope]

February 22, 2004

FRANK RICH

You Can't Skip Vietnam Twice

hen George W. Bush's handlers had him dress up as the 1986 Tom Cruise of "Top Gun" to dance a victory jig on an aircraft carrier, they didn't stop to think that he might soon face an opponent who could be type-cast more persuasively in his own Tom Cruise role. John F. Kerry was in real life a comrade of Ron Kovic, whom Mr. Cruise played to great acclaim in the 1989 "Born on the Fourth of July." Mr. Kerry, like the movie's hero, was a decorated Vietnam soldier who became a star activist for Vietnam Veterans Against the War upon returning home.

In a pivotal scene in the film, delegates at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach eject Kovic and his fellow protesting vets from the hall, call him a traitor and spit on him. If that incident has a certain angry passion, it may be because the director was Oliver Stone. Like both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, Mr. Stone was a son of privilege who attended Yale in the mid-1960's. Like Mr. Kerry but unlike Mr. Bush, he went on to combat in Vietnam, won a bronze star and then turned against America's most disastrous foreign war.

But just where was Mr. Bush during that convention fracas dramatized in "Born on the Fourth of July"? We still don't know. The summer of '72 is midway through the missing months in the president's résumé ? a time when, in the still undocumented White House account, the young Mr. Bush was supposedly completing his National Guard service while campaigning for a senatorial hopeful in Alabama. Whatever the future president was up to, it is not inconceivable that he accompanied his candidate to Miami Beach, where he watched from afar as Mr. Kovic and his fellow veterans were dispersed in a paroxysm of tear gas and rage.

Cut to 2004. We want to believe that the wounds of Vietnam have long since been anesthetized by the panacea we call closure. Most Americans can probably no longer identify Nguyen Van Thieu or the Tet Offensive. Communism and the domino theory alike have been relegated to history's junk heap. And yet: even as the actual war fades in memory, Vietnam still looms as a festering culture war, a permanent fixture of the national collective unconscious, always on tap for fresh hostilities.

Whether before 9/11 or since, more Americans visit Maya Lin's memorial in Washington each year than they do the White House, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson memorial combined; no wonder it's the only aesthetic standard against which the ground zero memorial is measured. This year no fewer than two Oscar-nominated documentaries, "The Fog of War" and "The Weather Underground," take us back to Vietnam in all its anguish. And now, of all unlikely developments, Jane Fonda has been roped into a comeback. A movie star who hasn't been seen in a Hollywood feature in almost 15 years and who is best known to younger Americans as Ted Turner's ex-wife has been drafted into a political attack on Mr. Kerry: he appears as a blurred extra sitting several rows behind her in a photo of an antiwar protest held two years before her famous, self-immolating trip to Hanoi. This is guilt by association so loony that even the perpetrators of the Hollywood blacklist might have found it a stretch.

Mr. Kerry and his fellow members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War are now being attacked by Republicans as vociferously as Mr. Kovic's band of brothers were at the party's '72 convention. The head of a group called Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry, which helped disseminate the Fonda picture, portrays him as a radical, a traitor and, worst of all, "hippielike." The Weekly Standard characterizes the antiwar Vietnam veterans of that time as "hairy men, many with `Easy Rider' mustaches."

There's a method to this archaic culture-war language. It's meant to complement the ubiquitous Vietnam-era photo of a decidedly clean-shaven, unhippielike Mr. Bush at the moment he is joining the Texas Air National Guard. The tableau shows Mr. Bush's beaming father, then a congressman, as he prepares to pin second lieutenant's bars to his son's uniform. But there's something wrong with this picture. It all too potently raises the unanswered question of just how the young Mr. Bush got into the guard, in those days a safe haven from combat duty, ahead of 100,000 others then on the national waiting list. At the time, 250 Americans a week were dying in Vietnam.

Those in Washington who view Vietnam only through a political lens say none of this should matter today. As President Bush and his surrogates point out repeatedly, his service record is old news and died as a campaign issue in both his '94 governor's race and in 2000, when he faced two Vietnam vets, John McCain and Al Gore. Others note how Bill Clinton, a notorious draft avoider, vanquished both a Vietnam vet (Bob Kerrey) and two World War II heroes in the '92 and '96 elections. End of story, end of culture war.

"I don't think the Democrats really want to rerun Vietnam," is how one Republican consultant's wishful thinking put it on "Nightline," just as the story of the president's guard service ignited once again.

But we're not in '92, '96 or 2000 anymore. American troops are once again fighting a war of choice ? and this time the National Guard is seeing combat, lethally so. Mr. Bush's Tom Cruise pose of May, so fetishized among his partisans that an ad in National Review hawks a bronze replica at $1,995 a pop, makes an unexpectedly striking visual contrast with Mr. Kerry's Tom Cruise role of 30-some years earlier. In the Kerry Vietnam flashback we hear his most famous line as a protester, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" While few Americans believe that it was a mistake to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the question hangs in the air anyway in 2004. It hangs over those American soldiers who have died since his overthrow, who have died since the triumphal Bush "Top Gun" remake declared "mission accomplished."

In this cultural battlefield, Mr. Kerry is a unique figure as a presidential candidate. Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Gore or Mr. McCain, he is the first in either party to have been both a leader in combat in Vietnam and a leader in the antiwar movement; he represents both the establishment that fueled our misadventure in Southeast Asia and the counterculture that changed America, for better and for worse, in revolt against it. To his critics he's hypocritical, but to many others he may be prototypical. It took years of body bags and falsely optimistic White House predictions for an American majority to turn against the war. Once the country did change its mind, however, it stayed changed. To argue now that antiwar protesters were traitors, especially those who took bullets for their country in the Mekong Delta and saved their buddies' lives, could be a tough sell.

"He can't run on a war record when his true record is an antiwar record," said Steve Buyer, a Republican congressman, on CNN. Perhaps other Kerry opponents are realizing that he can. This may explain why they quickly tried to change the subject from Vietnam once it impaled the president. Instead of defending Mr. Bush's military service, The Drudge Report rushed to brand Mr. Kerry with another trait associated with 60's antiwar counterculture: sexual hedonism. But even before it was exposed as false, the "intern" rumor got no traction, despite ample airing by Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. We're not in the frivolous peacetime Clinton 90's anymore, and if the well-documented exploits of Arnold Schwarzenegger could not outrage a public sated by the Starr Report, it's hard to imagine what politician's sexual transgression would.

Maybe that other "hippielike" activity, drug use, will be the next up to bat. But in Douglas Brinkley's best-selling chronicle of Mr. Kerry's Vietnam years, "Tour of Duty," this candidate not only admits to smoking pot upon return from the war but also adds that he "certainly enjoyed it." I have yet to hear anyone so much as remark upon this revelation.

If Mr. Kerry is anomalous as a presidential candidate of the Vietnam generation, so in his way is Mr. Bush. By all reports neither a true hawk nor a dove at Yale, the president was AWOL from the culture wars back then even if he wasn't AWOL from guard duty. Though Mr. Kerry was in a pick-up rock band, the president, by his own account, didn't even listen to the Beatles once they entered what he called their "weird, psychedelic period."

To be as unhip and apolitical as Mr. Bush was in that most politicized of times is certainly no sin. But it leaves him at a disadvantage as he finds himself thrust back into Vietnam all these years later. He doesn't seem to know the potential dangers of the jungle in which he may have to do battle as a "war president" in this election year.

In response to Tim Russert two Sundays ago, Mr. Bush said that the only troubling lesson he had learned from Vietnam was that "we had politicians making military decisions." Given that his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, has made military decisions about Iraq much as Robert McNamara did in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, it's not clear how well he learned that lesson. But in any event, the real problem for Mr. Bush is that he seems tone-deaf to the other echoes of Vietnam in our home-front culture as the postwar war drags on: polls that show that half the country now thinks the Iraq war was "not worth fighting," the return of a "credibility gap" about the war's progress and origins, the fogginess of the exit strategy, the class differences between many of those who return from the war in coffins and those who sent them there.

"The issue is settled" has been the White House press secretary's mantra when badgered about the president's military service. You have to wonder if the issue would have come up at all had Mr. Bush not set the stage for Iraq-Vietnam parallels by wearing the fly boy uniform of his own disputed guard duty while prematurely declaring victory last spring. But that's the way it always is with Vietnam. To paraphrase a totemic line that Francis Coppola wrote for "Godfather III" but that would be even more appropriate to "Apocalypse Now": just when we think we are out, it pulls us back in.  

[againstallhope]

Check it out. Remember the pictures of Hitler doing his 'victory jig' (always described that way) when France capitulated. For those of you who are familiar with the photos (shocked if you are not), who would you think of when you hear the term 'victory jig'?

Amazingly craven, is it not?

[aimhigh]

John F. Kerry was in real life a comrade ..

At least they got one thing right.

[concerned about politics]

Hate doesn't sell. It sickens people. Hate creates violence.
Bush will do very well in 2004. The left has been rabid.

[concerned about politics]

The left is too progressively regressive. There're getting stuck in their own time warp vortex.

[Admin Moderator]

In the future, please use the published article title only. Thanks.

[basil]

John F. Kerry was in real life a comrade ..

sort of, as it turns out.

[watchin]

We need to remember - out loud - that Benedict Arnold was also a war hero.

Most of the time, his treason overshadows that fact. With Kerry, it is just the opposite.

[PatWilson]

Why is Mr. Kerry so afraid of anyone inspecting his voting record? Or his medical records, for that matter. For a big, brave war hero, he certainly seems a little, well, cowardly.

OK, he is a decorated military vet. So am I. Big deal. Can we talk about something else? Preferably something that has happened in the past 32 years? Mr. Kerry's voting record would be an interesting place to start although I am beginning to understand his timidity in getting this out on the table.

[From The Deer Stand]

The Democrats don't realize how stupid they are on this issue. I'm waiting for them to explain why Bush's military service is a big deal when Clinton's evasion of the military during Vietnam wasn't. Sorry, Rats, but you can't have it both ways.

[Admin Moderator]

New York Times material can be posted in full.

[dead]

Theater critic.

[Libertina]

As usual it's either "Mr. Bush" or "the President" - never PRESIDENT Bush! Just another hating leftie cheater who can't get over not being able to steal Florida 2000. Now where did I put that official seal of the democrat party?

[baseballmom]

Author of this article? - FRANK RICH.

'Nuff said.

[ontos-on]

Frank Rich's standard for "journalism"....

"it is not inconceivable that ....."

It must be so nice to just make stuff up as Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd do. Just so long as it comes out for the "correct people" in the end. Great job, Francis. How come you talk in such an affected manner?

[tkathy]

Vietnam was a "democratic war". Kennedy sent the first ground troops, LBJ turned it into a debacle.

[ontos-on]

In the Kerry Vietnam flashback we hear his most famous line as a protester, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" While few Americans believe that it was a mistake to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the question hangs in the air anyway in 2004.

While virtually no one believes that "A" is a mistake.....the question hangs in the air anyway?

What the F does that mean??? Who says it "hangs in the air"? If the air you hang around in, is the foul air of those "few Americans" who might beleive that it was a mistake.

When you analyze what Frank Rich says, that is, when you get past the mood music used to distract you from what he is saying, it amounts to nothing.

[Maybe this 'sound and fury signifying nothing' is typified by and explains why this former drama critic's speaking style sounds so fruit-loops, but then he goes out of his way whenever he appears for an interview, to miss no opportunity to cite evidence of supposed heterosexuality---"my wife"; "my son" etc... ]

[muawiyah]

Kerry is not only accused of guilt by association, he actually did "associate" with those people and was their leader for awhile.

I know if I tried to get that close to Jane Fonda in that picture dozens of her keepers would have beaten me to a mass of bloody meat and cracked bones.

This is the guy who wanted the US Army put under the command of the United Nations, presumably so our soldiers could stand there watching while Hutus murdered nearly a million innocent Tutsi women and children.

I don't think I like Senator Kerry very much.

[goodnesswins]

Frank "Rich" has a POOR brain.

[redrock]

My answer to the crap spewed out in the article is found HERE

redrock

[Defender2]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1079247/posts

Good info ca=n be found on this thread above, D2.