The unforgiving, part 1

The last helicopter out of Saigon, 1975

Helicopters and planes were dumped from American ships
fleeing Vietnam to make room for American soldiers
and Vietnamese collaborators.

My political and social beliefs were forged in one of the most turbulent and radical periods in U.S. history. America's earliest involvement in the war in Vietnam (in 1959) had begun when I was a boy and ended in a humiliating defeat when I was in my twenties. From the mid-1960's until the final months after the war, it was the defining political issue for my generation and for the politicians who either supported the criminals in the White House or stood against them for peace.

Opposition to the war and to the governmental and corporate corruption surrounding it became the central and unifying theme for political liberals in this country. On that single issue, there was no middle ground, no complexities of thought or belief, no soul-searching about right and wrong or the good of the nation. You were against the war, or you were for it. You wanted the U.S. out of Vietnam, or you supported the continuation of napalming and carpet bombing the "pinkos" back to the Stone Age.

Media coverage of the war was immediate and horrifying. There was little censorship of the news footage, either by the Pentagon or the media themselves. The nightly news was an endlessly gory series of photographs and videos of dead American soldiers, slaughtered civilians, and maimed victims of torture. One of the most famous photos from the war, which ran on page 1 of the New York Times showed South Vietnam's General Loan shooting a suspected Viet Cong sympathizer in the head:

But where there was little censorship, there was also massive propaganda. Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford openly and repeatedly lied about the course of the war and their intentions. There were "secret" bombings of neighboring countries, particularly Cambodia, and backroom deals with world leaders that perpetuated the war solely for the purpose of lining the pockets of corporate executives with taxpayer dollars. Each American president also had his cabal of thugs masquerading as diplomats, namely, for instance, Henry Kissinger, a man so steeped in the blood of innocents that he reeks of it to this day from his perch at his international consulting firm that advises multinational corporations on how to exploit the world's most vulnerable countries for financial gain.

Worst among them all, however, was Nixon himself. Enough years have passed to allow a kinder, more forgiving view of the man and his presidency. For many Americans, he is now remembered mostly for Watergate and for his trips to China; but not by me. He and his kind would never want or seek my forgiveness but neither would I ever give it. That man was directly responsible for the horrible and pointless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

I was in college when Nixon resigned. The lingering, ugly disease of his presidency was finally drawing to a close. I remember staring at the TV screen as he smiled smugly for the cameras and boarded Marine One for the last time, offering his famous "victory" wave. 

I remember when he died--20 years later--the epitaph that was chosen for his tombstone (which was taken from his first inaugural address in 1969): The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. The words of one of his predecessors, Harry Truman, might have been more suitable: Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard.

Arrayed against the Nixons and Kissingers and corporate pirates was another type of army, an army of ordinary citizens who would not stand idly by while the country they loved demeaned itself in an illegal and immoral war and destroyed itself in corruption and lies. It was a hodgepodge of hippies, grandmothers, teachers, students, the working poor, veterans, draft dodgers, activists, environmentalists, and anyone else who was hungry for a better world, a world that would bestow the title of peacemaker on those who strove for peace, not those who made war.

Today, 40 years later, I've been looking back on those difficult years and reflecting on the hopeful differences and tragic similarities between then and now. In Part 2 of this post, I want to write about the beliefs I developed during those troubled times and how they have made me feel not only a kinship with today's liberals but also a sad and disconcerting sense of differentness, an unshakeable feeling that their world is not my world, their hopes are not my hopes, their values are not my values, and their future is not my future.

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