Who Let the Dogs In? (10 page)

L
OS
ANGELES, CALIF.
— All right. Once more, Vietnam.

For those of you who are too young to remember; for those of you too old to have felt it intensely.

There were no good choices in those years. Early in the war, you might have believed in it. You might have been like John Paul Vann. Or even David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, because the press believed in it, too, at the beginning.

But by 1969, no one believed in it. We had been told too many lies about why we were there. God knows the men running the war had long since stopped believing in our stated purposes there. David Beckwith, Dan Quayle’s press secretary, said the other day that even Dan Quayle was opposed to war “as it was being fought” by 1969.

And what did he do to stop it? He voted for Richard Nixon, who had a “secret plan” to end it. More than twenty thousand Americans died in Vietnam after Nixon was elected, not to mention millions of Vietnamese.

There were no good choices. You could go to jail. You could go to Canada. Or you could go to Vietnam and kill or die for a cause you didn’t believe in. You couldn’t get conscientious objector status until later in the war. But you could get out of it if you were middle- or upper-class.

Because Vietnam was, from the American side, a class war from the beginning. It was planned that way.

General Lewis Hershey was in charge of the Selective Service System. His infamous pamphlet, “Channeling,” made it all too clear that young American men had been divided into future members of the professional classes and cannon fodder. If Bill Clinton had stayed in Hope, Arkansas, and never gone to college, his butt would have been shipped to ’Nam. When Clinton says he got an induction notice while he was at Oxford but didn’t pay much attention to it, of course he’s telling the truth. No one was going to draft a Rhodes scholar, for God’s sake, and everyone knew it.

As I recall, five men from Harvard were killed in Vietnam. There were a hell of a lot more from Odessa, Texas. For those of us who opposed the war, the rank unfairness of who had to go fight it was part of what we hated. When Dan Quayle joined the National Guard, 1.26 percent of Guardsmen were black.

Joining the Guard was a way to stay out of Vietnam, period. Yes, there were a few Guard units sent to ’Nam, and boy were they surprised. I had to laugh when I saw the quote from Retired Colonel Robert T. Fischer of the Indiana National Guard in last Sunday’s
New York Times:
“Headquarters detachment just didn’t take every turkey off the street. It was where the general was, and there were some of those guys they just didn’t want. If they walk in the door and he looks like a dog and has hair down to here, you send them to another unit. When some trash bag came in the door, there were ways around these things without breaking any rules.” They took only nice, clean-cut boys with connections, like Quayle.

When the long, miserable folly of Vietnam finally ended, I thought America would never do anything that wrong again. But we managed one more piece of cruelty and stupidity with regard to that war—we failed to honor and in some cases mistreated our own men who had fought it. Ten years later, Vietnam veterans gave themselves a homecoming parade. I don’t know how many of you were there; the crowds were thin. There were no socko military bands because the government didn’t spend a nickel on it. It was the weekend The Wall was dedicated that the vets held their own homecoming. The only member of the government who came was that fool John Warner from Virginia, may it not be forgotten. Do you remember how they looked, the Vietnam vets, rolling down the avenue in wheelchairs, straggling along in no formation? Almost all of them had hair down to here: Many wore bandanas around their foreheads. They must have looked like trash bags to Colonel Fischer. I don’t think more than 1 percent of them could have gotten into the Indiana National Guard even at that late date.

After all that long history of unfairness and insanity, I did believe no more indignities could be heaped on that particular pile. Wrong again. Now, for political purposes, lies are being told once more. Quayle, who supported the war and took an easy out, now claims to be “proud” he “served,” while Clinton was leading “anti-American” demonstrations in England. Not anti-American, Mr. Quayle, anti-war. Bush says Clinton called the entire American military “immoral.” He didn’t: He called the war immoral. It was.

No one who loved someone who was killed in Vietnam, and Bill Clinton did, ever confused being anti-war with being against those who served there. Many of us who love this country hated that war and still believe the highest patriotism was to oppose it. Mr. Bush now implies that someone who has not served in a war is unfit to be president, might be too easily inclined to risk American lives. I believe the opposite, although you could cite Ronald Reagan as evidence of Bush’s thesis.

Clinton worked against the war in Vietnam; Al Gore served in it: I believe they each represent the best of our generation. One thing all of us of the Vietnam generation know for certain is that we cannot prop up a government that does not have the support of its own people. But the price of that lesson was too high.

September 1992

The Year of the Woman

N
EW
YORK
— The most conspicuous contradiction of the convention is the contrast between the Democrats’ “Year of the Woman” emphasis and the punishment tour Hillary Clinton is on. Here are the Democrats featuring one woman candidate after another—bragging about their Senate candidates, massing their House candidates for photo ops, Ann Richards chairing the convention, Barbara Jordan keynoting, all hands being pro-choice out the wazoo—and poor Hillary is assigned to the Cookie Wars.

Family Circle
magazine started the cookie fight by distributing the chocolate chip cookie recipes of both Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton and asking people to vote on them. Sample batches of the cookies are being distributed, and partisan Democrats vote for Hillary’s chocolate chips without even tasting Mrs. Bush’s. Hillary Clinton, who is under orders from her husband’s handlers not to say anything controversial or even substantive, has taken on the cookie project with characteristic zeal and intensity. This woman now knows enough about the making and distribution of chocolate chip cookies to become the next Famous Amos. If Clinton loses in November, she can make her cookie business into a Fortune 500 corporation.

But precisely because she has the smarts and the drive to do things like that—to become one of the best lawyers in the country or, if she chose, to be as formidable a political candidate as any of the women the Democrats have so proudly featured at the podium—she’s considered a menace to her husband’s campaign. His image guys (note: guys) want her to stay home and knit tea cozies lest the Great American Public take alarm.

Personally, I don’t think any of this has anything to do with Hillary Clinton, who seems just as nice as she can be (I base this on all of two encounters with her) and has specialized in the area of law that helps children. It does, however, say a great deal about the ambivalence and confusion in this country over the changing roles of women. Wicked Women are a running theme in our culture, from the femme fatale of the nineteenth century to the castrating bitch favored in current films about career women who don’t have enough sense to give it all up for a chance at marriage and motherhood. The Republican attack machine, a formidable instrument, stands ready to paint Hillary Clinton as someone akin to the Glenn Close character in
Fatal Attraction,
some ambition-crazed female without an ounce of natural warmth.

Women receive so many conflicting messages these days about how to behave and what is expected of us—sugar and spice, ruffles and lace, white gloves and gentility, stand by your man and good old mom (as long as she’s not on welfare) get all mixed up with independence, holding a job, respect, achievement, and having a brain as well as a figure. Ellen Chesler’s new biography of Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate and early exemplar of emancipated womanhood, reminds us of how long we’ve all been struggling with these same contradictions. Frankly, if women didn’t have a strong sense of humor, I think we’d all be nuts by now.

What interests me about the mass media’s treatment of the recurrent conflicts caused by this mad mix of messages is their practically prurient interest in seeing women fight. “Catfight,” “hair pulling,” and “mud wrestling” are the beloved clichés of those who like to promote events where “the girls go at it.” Setting women up to attack one another and then reporting on the ensuing festivities is a favorite media ploy and has been ever since the press tried to make nonexistent bra-burnings the equivalent of feminism in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, the convention’s social scene is roaring along but may not again match the awesome display of New York power and glitter that turned out to meet Ann Richards at the Russian Tea Room Tuesday night. Richards, like most people in politics, is used to the politically prominent and long past being thrilled at meeting someone with a political title. But the crowd invited by gossip columnist and New York Texan Liz Smith (of Fort Worth, of course) was a mix of creative talent and media clout that left the press agape. Jane Pauley of television and her husband, Garry Trudeau, who does the “Doonesbury” strip,
Vanity Fair
editor Tina Brown and her husband, Harry Evans, of Random House, lyricist Adolph Greene,
New York Times
publisher Arthur Sulzberger, writers Peter Maas and Norman Mailer, Roone Arledge of ABC, on and on it went. Ann Richards may be governor of Texas, but she’s still from Waco: She said later, “Can you believe they came to meet ME? I looked around that room and I felt like a stump.”

Trudeau, by the way, is a fan of Texas comptroller John Sharp, who picked up on a Trudeau strip urging people who want to escape paying state income taxes to become titular Texans, à la George Bush. Sharp issued honorary Texan certificates to the thousands of “Doonesbury” fans and tax-dodgers who responded to the joke—and made money for the state doing it.

July 1992

The Voters Speak

A
LITTLE-KNOWN FACT
about political writers, especially this one, is that if it weren’t for the readers, we would go insane.

At this stage of a campaign, when we’re wading around in b.s. up to our hips, trying desperately to cut through the bull so our readers can get some reasonably accurate picture of what’s being proposed and what it will mean, it is, oddly enough, the readers who pull us through.

My election-year mail is a constant source of wonder and delight, not to mention an ongoing tribute to the common sense, variety, and creativity of the citizenry. Paul Tully, one of the great students and lovers of American politics, died last week, and I regret his death for many reasons, not least of which is that I never got a chance to show him the letter from the guy who figured out the thing about N.

It’s about presidents whose last names end in N: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Truman. It’s staggering, the number of last-name-ending-in-N presidents we’ve elected. My correspondent not only noticed this, he went on to figure out the ratio of final N’s compared to final anything-elses, and I’m here to tell you, the guy is onto something.