Watching the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick Vietnam documentary on PBS last week brought back a flood of memories, not just of the war but of that whole disruptive era. As a kid, we only had one TV and every night, it was turned to the news, first the local news on WSOC in Charlotte and then to Huntley and Brinkley, probably because of David Brinkley’s North Carolina roots. We watched it as a family with my father’s inevitable “HUSH!” whenever somebody started talking.
It was a hell of a time to watch the news. I don’t remember a lot of specifics but every night seemed to have footage of helicopters in Vietnam and men moving through the jungle with guns. I remember lots of footage of protests and reports of domestic terrorists. The news was almost always of strife in America and few, if any, of the type of human interest stories that define news today.
The documentary reminded me that among my earliest memories is the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and then of Bobby Kennedy a couple of months later. From then until the resignation of Richard Nixon, there doesn’t seem to have been much good happening in the world, especially from the point of view of a young boy from the South. The news reports from this time surely helped shape my world view today.
I’m also reminded that the divisions of that time are still driving our politics today. Some of us lost faith in our leaders and government because of Vietnam, Watergate and the struggle for Civil Rights. We didn’t trust authorities to tell us the truth about the assassinations of our leaders or reasons for foreign intervention. After almost a century of Jim Crow, we, especially in the South, knew that our leaders and institutions would willingly discriminate against Americans to preserve power.
We began to define patriotism differently. Instead of loyalty to the symbols of the Republic like the flag or the national anthem, we believed patriotism involved searching for truth and holding our leaders accountable. Skepticism became a virtue.
Another part of the country, though, saw patriotism as preserving the status quo in America. They abhorred the disruption and were fast to defend those who they believed we were standing up for order and traditional values and against communism. They made up a large part of Nixon’s Silent Majority and eventually drove the Reagan Revolution.
Today, those same forces are at odds. The difference is that neither side has much trust in the institutions that have sustained us. Groups like Black Lives Matter have little faith in law enforcement or the officials that defend it. Trump supporters have given up on the ability of government or the market to improve the quality of their lives. They might not know exactly what they want but they don’t want what they’ve got.
The same forces that divided America over Vietnam and Civil Rights are dividing us today. Neither side is happy with state of America, but both have dramatically different visions. One side wants to create something new, a country they see as more equitable. The other wants a return to the old order and the calm of the 1990s, just like those in the 1960s yearned for the 1950s.
For those seeking change, America as a country of opportunity has always come up a little short but they believe its strength is its ability to evolve. For others, that evolution leads to uncertainty and the potential loss of their place in society. They’re not only resisting the urge to change but want to return to a time when they had more stability and hope for the future. Reconciling those two views of America is our struggle now and probably always will be.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Fine essay Tom.
While the ideologues of today love Atlas Shrugged, missing that scene and its meaning where Dagney gives the conductor 100 dollar bill saying a man with money in his pocket can think about his job, I am more about the message from Tolstoy in War and Peace. It’s all bullshit for nothing but the pride of the Emperor and the Czar.
Those who practice journalism can be proud regardless of the insults of those in power swaying the ignorant with their claims of fake news when they sure are ready to live lives in a fog of fantasy. In the US Textbooks made of lies and superstitions are written and sold to state school systems on the basis of their ideological purity not facts.
One fact: Where there is a Free Press there are not famines.
Mr Smith the similarities between those two wars are very striking. As a history major I read and studied about that war and the after effects of it. General Sherman after that war wanted nothing to do with war after it was over, he made few public appearances and did not wish to speak of the war, he was most likely suffering from PTSD. By 1876 the country had slid into the worst economic downturn the country had seen until that time and would see until the Great Depression it was blamed on the war. If the Confederate death were bad with the young men the Union deaths were worse. I once got to tour a Union prison camp they kept for the deserters in the Union army a story rarely spoken of. Confederate deserters had the luxury of having there sentence dropped after the war ended because they lost the Union ones had no such luck. When one asked why southerners remember there dead with such statues, and northerners do not, it is at some point the south came to terms with honoring there battle fighters, while the north never really did. By 1876 the attitude in the north towards anything to do with that war was extremely negative, your average northerner felt like wealthy people in the north wanted to fight that war but those same wealthy people did not with to be in the battle themselves, nor did they wish to help the struggling Union war veterans after the war. By 1876 if one were to ask your average northern family was the war effort worth it, the answer would have been a resounding no. That mentality has stayed in many northern areas until very recently. The country as a whole has never really dealt with that war it has been something we would just as soon forget, but we will not be able to do that until we face all the truths of it.
Tom, you and I must be about the same age. Your memories closely track my own. One of my earliest memories is of Dr. King lying in state. In my very young mind, I could’t understand why so many people were upset that their doctor had died. I grew up in the NC foothills. My family traveled the Philadelphia Wagon Road and settled there in the mid-1700’s. My family’s staunch Republicanism was born in the antebellum South. Many Westerners in NC opposed succession before the War, were split between fighting or fleeing during the War, and were heavily involved in the Republican-Populist rebellion of the 1890’s. The Democrats at the time of that rebellion used race to divide the movement and impose a variety of voting restrictions on blacks and poor whites. Sadly, it worked. NC leadership continued the race-baiting tradition through a strong KKK presence in the 1920’s, Jesse Helms’ various campaigns in the late 1900’s, and the GOP takeover in 2010. Mountain folks have always been mistrustful of government and power, but since the 1960’s that mistrust included the educated and corporate establishments as well. But the history is interesting to follow. I shake my head at the proliferation of the Confederate battle flag in the region in the past several years, especially after Obama’s election. They think they are standing up for a tradition, but many of their 1800’s ancestors would be enraged to see such a thing flying on their progeny’s property.
One of the most striking things to me about the Burns Vietnam documentary was how much of the War you could actually see on TV back then.
Journalists who attempt that kind of journalism nowadays don’t fare well.
The news was considered a public service at that time. Now it is a profit center for major corporations. The news is laundered, fluffed and homogenized for public consumption. Even though the news resembles tapioca, even that much truth hurts the eyes and ears of fact-averse right wing who complain that the multi-billion dollar business of network television is a conspiracy of the left.
Young people paid attention to the perils of the Vietnam War because we all literally had skin in the game. The draft made every 19-year-old a potential casualty. Today when they “Send in the Marines,” we are sending a few kids from the poorer quarters. When they get killed or hurt, it’s not something we like to think about anymore.
Tom– I am 70 years old and Vietnam is my generation. In response to the Ken Burns documentary, I have been thinking about our gradual process of national reconciliation following the War in Vietnam and what lessons that process might offer for our divide over how to honor the Southern men lost in the Civil War/the War between the States. When our vets returned from Vietnam many were maimed both physically and psychologically. They did not return to receive the gratitude of their country as our fathers had following World War II. At best the Vietnam vets were greeted with indifference, with the sense that their sacrifices were at a minimum in vain, or at worst in the cause of evil. Baby killers, perpetrators of genocide. Such horrible charges were made by those of us who opposed “the war”. Over time the most remarkable memorial was constructed on the Mall in Washington for those lost in Vietnam. For my generation, it is an astoundingly moving place to visit. Interactive in that you can locate on the beautifully austere polished wall the names of high school classmates who died fighting for their country or in my case the name of a first cousin, a marine helicopter pilot, the first grandson born on my mother’s side of the family who made the ultimate sacrifice. The Vietnam Memorial a peaceful place to meditate on the war and in my case, on my use of an educational deferment to escape service until I received a lottery number of 308 which allowed me to avoid altogether the painful decision of whether to serve or not. Following “the war”, amnesty has been granted to those who left for Canada on principle or in cowardliness, depending on your point of view. Regardless, I would say that our country has now largely reconciled itself following the acrimony of that period in our history. Even Jane Fonda has expressed regrets. The ones unfortunately left behind are the homeless Vietnam vets who we now see begging at our highway intersections. I grieve whenever I pass one of those men.
What about the Southern men who lost their lives in our internecine conflict. In fact the majority of those men were not men but boys fighting in the “Rich Man’s War” that was the “Poor Man’s Fight”,. Most were probably not at all clear what they were fighting for. War takes on its own logic, its own dynamic. You are fighting because you are fighting. These kinds of reflections left me feeling very sad when our Boy in Gray statue in Durham was decapitated and desecrated. I don’t blame the kids who were responding to the outrage of what happened in Charlottesville that was subsequently ginned up by the man who is NOT my president. That statue was unlike the statues of Confederate generals that were at issue in Charlottesville. In North Carolina, our courthouse statues of the Confederate enlisted man were generally not heroic. Rather they spoke of a loss of innocence as well as the loss of life. While it is clear that our Boys in Gray memorials should be relocated from our town squares and placed as memorials in other appropriate locations, I have come to think that the Southern dead deserve to be honored for their sacrifices just as we honor those who sacrificed limb and life in Vietnam. The Southern enlisted soldier should be held in our hearts just as we honor the men/boys who lost their lives in other conflicts.
The General Assembly should get out of the way and allow our communities to engage in their own reconciliation process. In Durham our Boy in Gray statue would most likely have been relocated respectfully to Bennett Place Other towns may wish to leave their statues in place but provide historical context. African Americans need to remember that Southern boys were fighting in an illegitimate war which they did not understand, just as African African young men were fighting and dying in Vietnam for a country that had, reluctantly, only a few years earlier, allowed them the full rights of humanity and citizenship. African Americans may well have had more in common with the Vietnamese fighting against Western oppression than they had with the oppressive racial status quo in the United States.
What about the equestrian statue to William Tecumseh Sherman located in the President’s Park in Washington, DC? I agree with my Southern life partner who says: let’s relocate it to somewhere else. Scorched earth Sherman should not be in a place of honor. His traffic circle in DC should be renamed. All part of our reconciliation process.
A very thoughtful posting and one for which I am grateful. I had never considered the comparison to those young men (yes, too often 16/17 year old boys) who fought for the Confederacy and the many young men drafted to fight in Viet Nam. Obviously there are deep distinctions, but for the 17 year old young men involved in either, probably less than I imagine. Thanks.