critical thinking questions about the vietnam war

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Contested memory: the vietnam war and american society, 1975–2001.

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Robert McMahon, Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society, 1975–2001, Diplomatic History , Volume 26, Issue 2, April 2002, Pages 159–184, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7709.00306

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“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner once famously remarked. “It's not even past.” 1 The celebrated novelist was alluding, of course, to the powerful grip that the Civil War and its troubled aftermath continued to exert on his native region. And one need only scan contemporary newspaper headlines about the controversy that still surrounds the flying of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and other Southern states to appreciate the acuity of Faulkner's observation. “Memory is a living thing,” noted Eudora Welty, another distinguished Southern author – “it too is in transit.” 2 The tangled connection between past and present – or, in the idiom that has become so common in our postmodern era, between history and memory – seems particularly apt when considering the place of the Vietnam War in American culture and society. Arguably the second most traumatic, contentious, and problematic event in U.S. history, the Vietnam War, like the Civil War, remains a “zone of contested meaning.” 3

Recent revelations about ex-governor and ex-senator Bob Kerrey's involvement in the killing of more than a dozen Vietnamese women and children during a botched intelligence operation over three decades ago serve as but the most recent reminder of the Vietnam War's enduring hold on the national psyche. 4 “The Ghosts of Vietnam,” screamed a Time magazine cover story about the Kerrey incident. 5 It joined a long pantheon of searching reassessments of the Vietnam War by that newsmagazine and its counterparts in the mainstream media. For the war's tenth anniversary, in April 1985, Time's cover story proclaimed: “A Bloody Rite of Passage, Viet Nam Cost America Its Innocence and Still Haunts Its Conscience.” Five years later, its cover story announced: “Vietnam 15 Years Later. Guilt and Recrimination Still Shroud America's Perception of the Only War It Ever Lost.” In 1995, the weekly's editors adopted a more concise lead: “Vietnam 20 Years Later, It Haunts Us Still.” 6 The persistent conceptualization of the Vietnam War as a haunting, tragic event for the United States has become a staple of such retrospectives, a phenomenon that shows no sign of ebbing. Indeed, just this past April, the annual Los Angeles Times Book Festival featured an overflow session entitled, “Will Vietnam Ever Go Away?” The panelists’ conclusion: probably not, or at least not for a very long time. 7

“Vietnam won't go away,” bemoaned conservative policy analyst Ernest W. Lefever in 1997. “Its ghosts still haunt the American psyche like fragments of a twisted nightmare.” 8 From the other side of the political spectrum, Brendan Walsh, a liberal activist who left his seminary back in 1967 to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam, echoed Lefever in a recent interview. “The war keeps coming back,” he commented in response to the flap ignited by the Kerrey story; “it's forever.” 9

This essay examines the ongoing struggle within American culture and society over the meaning and significance of the Vietnam War. It is a struggle that was joined first in the mid-and late 1960s, when raging debates about the morality and efficacy of U.S. involvement triggered the most profound societal divisions since the Civil War. It has continued without surcease ever since the war's end as various claims-makers, operating from a wide diversity of motives – political leaders, military officers, veterans, intellectuals, filmmakers, television producers, writers, artists, monument-builders, and more – have tried to fit this turbulent chapter of America's recent past into the wider compass of the nation's history and purpose. Although the ultimate triumph of North Vietnam came in 1975, two years after the withdrawal of the last U.S. combat units from South Vietnam, the war's outcome constituted a humiliating defeat for the United States, and was widely viewed as such. Plainly, despite the deaths of over 58,000 Americans and somewhere between two and three million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, the expenditure of billions of dollars, and the most extensive bombing campaign in world history, Americans had failed in their principal purpose. They could not preserve the independent South Vietnamese government that so much U.S. blood, treasure, and prestige had been tied to; nor could they prevent the emergence of communist regimes in any of the three countries that once constituted French Indochina.

Critical questions loomed in the war's immediate aftermath. What lessons should Americans learn from defeat in Southeast Asia? How would they apply those lessons? Who, or what, should be blamed for the debacle? How could the deep societal ruptures opened by the war be closed, the wounds still festering within the body politic healed? And, most fundamental of all: How would, and should, the war be remembered? How would, and should, ordinary Americans, and their political leaders, fit this colossal national failure, and the enormous sacrifices in lives, money, and domestic comity it had entailed, into the overall American narrative? My central purpose here is to explore in a very preliminary way how the process of remembering the Vietnam War and fitting it into the broader national story has played out over the past quarter-century. How, I ask, has the war been explained, rationalized, memorialized, represented, understood?

My chief subject here is not history per se, but memory. The obsession with memory, individual and collective, seems to be a defining feature of our age. “Everyone's talking about memory,” notes the novelist Mary Gordon: “French intellectuals, historians of the Holocaust, victims of child abuse, alleged abusers.” 10 She might have added the Vatican, which published just last year a lengthy document entitled Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past , in which it confessed and sought forgiveness for its role in the Inquisition and other past injustices committed in the name of Christianity, 11 and South Africa, whose Truth and Reconciliation Commission has pioneered a brave approach to reconciling the competing demands of history and memory, of forgiveness and justice, in the process of seeking to account for and mend the depredations of the apartheid era. Numerous modern societies, forced, like South Africa, to confront traumatic episodes in their recent histories, have agonized about the memory problem. Following World War I, victors and vanquished alike searched for appropriate ways to memorialize and find meaning in the millions of lives taken or shattered by that catastrophic conflict. 12 Germany and Japan continue to wrestle with the legacy of their aggression and brutality during World War II. How can it be atoned for? How should that era be remembered, taught, presented to the public? So, in a less direct and tortured way, do nations such as Austria, Switzerland, and France grapple with the emotionally freighted events of that same era: were they victims of the Nazis, or willing collaborators – even perpetrators? 13

The concept of collective, or public, memory offers a useful analytical construct for examining each of those cases, as it does for explicating the contest of meaning over the Vietnam War. A diverse array of scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines have been drawn of late to the important and complex function that public memory plays within societies. Nations need somehow to come to grips with traumatic events of the recent past. Monuments, literature, memoirs, popular culture, political debate, public rhetoric – all represent arenas of contestation in that regard, arenas in which collective memories are forged. Public memory, according to historian John Bodnar, refers to “a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that helps a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future.” 14 Memories, of course, national as well as private, are by nature highly selective. This is so, argues historian Michael Kammen, since societies “reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them” in order to serve the “needs of contemporary culture … manipulating the past in order to mold the present.” 15 As individuals and polities choose to remember certain aspects of the past, they foreclose – or seek to foreclose – other aspects. In the end, alternative memories come to be silenced. The stakes are extraordinarily high in this struggle over public memory since, as so many scholars have demonstrated, our reconstructions of the past prove as, or even more, important than the actual past (if the latter can ever be recovered – a philosophical problem of no small import). A rich theoretical and case-specific literature has developed around the general subject of collective memory, a substantial amount of it focused specifically on the question of war and remembrance. I will draw liberally from that literature in framing the remarks that follow. 16

Although there is nothing approaching scholarly unanimity on the topic of collective memory, several broad conclusions emerge from much of this literature. First, memories, individual and collective, are typically constructed rather than emerging as the simple, unfiltered recollections of past events. Individuals and societies choose what they will remember about the past – and what they will forget. Second, memories are constructed to meet present needs. The process of collective memory formation within societies is tied up with utilitarian ends. There are conscious purposes and goals behind these efforts; they never occur in a social or political vacuum. Third, the project of forging a collective memory of important episodes in the histories of nations or groups is invariably led by elites, with the state itself often playing a dominant role. Finally, collective memory formation is intimately related to larger questions of group, or national, purpose and identity. 17

The study of memory has, of course, tended to fall within the ever-expanding boundaries of cultural history. But the topic is far too important to be left to the cultural historians alone. It is quite germane, moreover, to our field, one whose boundaries have also been expanding of late, particularly into the cultural realm. A growing number of U.S. diplomatic historians have begun to recognize that American culture, broadly conceived, helps explain some of the distinctive tendencies that have shaped the American approach to and encounter with the wider world. The struggle over societal memories of the Vietnam War, a struggle with enormous foreign policy implications, belongs to that broader culturalist trend.

In the remarks that follow, I will examine three important aspects of this struggle. I begin by analyzing the role of official rhetoric in setting some of the terms of the debate. I turn next to the public and congressional clashes over the memory of the Vietnam War, clashes intimately connected to debates about the present and future U.S. world role. Finally, I probe the crucial influence exerted by popular culture in the formation of the nation's collective memories of the Vietnam experience. Since national leaders invariably assume a lead role in the development of an official memory of traumatic events in a nation's history, I begin with their efforts.

On 23 April 1975, less than a week before the final collapse of the Saigon regime, President Gerald R. Ford delivered a speech at Tulane University in New Orleans in which he appealed for a permanent moratorium on any additional debate about the Vietnam War. “Today,” he proclaimed, “Americans can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished – as far as America is concerned.” His appeal for closure, however premature, seemed to mirror the prevailing sense of national exhaustion with a war that had for so long divided the American people and fractured the country's political system. Indeed, Ford had personally inserted those last lines, categorically foreclosing any possibility of a last-minute U.S. reinvolvement, into the prepared text of the speech just prior to its delivery. They met with deafening applause from the audience.

“The time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future,” Ford continued, “to unity, to binding up the nation's wounds and restoring it to health and optimistic self-confidence. I ask tonight that we stop refighting the battles and recriminations of the past.” The president pleaded with Americans, instead, to “look now at what is right with America, at our possibilities and our potentialities for change, and growth, and achievement, and sharing.” Dwelling on the country's failures in Vietnam, he warned, could just sap national self-confidence. “Some seem to feel that if we do not succeed in everything everywhere,” Ford complained, “then we have succeeded in nothing anywhere. I reject such polarized thinking.” 18 Any effort to seek deeper meaning in, or accountability for, the enfolding debacle in South Vietnam, according to this curious logic, was thus not just inappropriate but dangerous – a potentially debilitating exercise in unpatriotic self-absorption.

When asked at a 6 May press conference, exactly one week after North Vietnamese tanks had rolled up to the presidential palace in Saigon to accept South Vietnam's surrender, what lessons might be derived from the Vietnam War, the president dismissed the question. “The lessons of the past in Vietnam have already been learned,” he retorted. Though pressed to elaborate, the Republican chief executive refused to specify what those lessons were. Instead, he once again urged the nation to look beyond the “sad and tragic” events in Indochina, since to “rehash allegations” or affix blame would just foster continued divisions within American society. “We should have our focus on the future,” Ford insisted. 19

Anxious to bury the controversies surrounding the war as quickly as possible, Ford was vying with this rhetorical strategy of preemption and premature closure essentially to delegitimize the significance of the entire Vietnam experience. The American people, he was suggesting, should shake off this unhappy chapter of their history as one might a bad nightmare. His repeated but loose references to tragedy seem little more than empty bows toward a generalized and diffuse feeling of emotional suffering – American suffering, it should be emphasized, since the Vietnamese never factored into his public rhetoric. The Vietnam War, in this discursive rendering, thus offered no essential insights into the purpose and character of the United States; it was little more, presumably, than an isolated, aberrant interlude in the national narrative of progress, achievement, and righteousness.

Yet this rhetorical strategy of preemption and premature closure, for all its potential short-term political advantages, had obvious limits. How could the most bitter and divisive national undertaking since the Civil War be extracted permanently and painlessly from the national memory? How could Americans simply look ahead with confidence to the future – a future, as Ford would have it, unburdened by, and presumably liberated from, the traumatic events of the recent past?

During the presidential campaign of 1976, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, Ford's principal rival, offered a strikingly different analysis of the Vietnam War's significance to the larger national story. The Democratic presidential aspirant periodically called attention to the continuing relevance of the war, citing it as an instructive, if painful, illustration of how overreaching, arrogant, and insulated governmental leaders can produce disastrously counterproductive policies. The secrecy and deception in which the Vietnam intervention was enveloped from its inception had led Americans to take actions “contrary to our basic character,” he charged in one speech. 20 In another, he declared: “We have learned that never again should our country become militarily involved in the internal affairs of another nation unless there is a direct and obvious threat to the security of the United States or its people.” 21 In the notorious interview that Carter granted Playboy magazine during the final stages of the campaign, most frequently remembered for the Georgian's clumsy admission that he had lusted in his heart after other women, the former governor offered a remarkably frank indictment of those responsible for the American commitment in Vietnam. Carter specifically blamed the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon for pursuing secretive governmental decision-making processes that excluded the American people and then misled them “with false statements and sometimes outright lies.” When asked by his interviewer if he would have done something different in his public career, if given a chance, the Democrat hopeful said: “I would have demanded that our nation never get involved initially in the Vietnam War.” 22

Yet the rhetoric of atonement so prevalent in Carter's campaign speeches and interviews faded rapidly once he moved into the Oval Office. In only one major speech of his four-year presidency did Carter again invoke the lessons of the war as a useful guide to future policy. Speaking at Notre Dame University in May 1977, the new chief executive pledged not to succumb to the hubris, blunders, and excesses that had led his predecessors into the morass of Vietnam. “The Vietnamese war produced a profound moral crisis,” Carter declared, “sapping world-wide faith in our own policy and our system of life.” Calling the war the “best example” of the “intellectual and moral poverty” of the interventionist policies of the past, he expressed hope that “through failure we have now found our way back to our principles and values, and we have regained our lost confidence.” 23

With the exception of the Notre Dame speech, President Carter studiously avoided the harsh criticisms of America's Vietnam-era decision makers that candidate Carter had made a staple of his campaign speeches. Indeed, when asked at an early press conference whether he felt that the United States had “a moral obligation to help rebuild Vietnam,” he responded: “Well, the destruction was mutual. You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people.” 24

Remembering – and using – Vietnam as an example of past blunders and an object lesson in the limits of American power soon gave way to a new discursive focus. In several major speeches delivered later in his presidency, Carter shifted from a concentration on the lessons the war held for American foreign and defense policies to a celebration of those Americans who fought in the conflict. This abrupt rhetorical volte face , reminiscent of a similar turn that occurred following the Civil War in both North and South, paved the way for a direct and simple discourse of memorialization: a discourse wholly consistent with the language of patriotism, sacrifice, and nobility traditionally employed by American leaders in remembering the veterans of previous conflicts. 25

Speaking at Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans’ Day, 1978, Carter first unveiled this new rhetorical tack. He praised America's Vietnam veterans as “no less brave because our Nation was divided about that war.” The sharpness of the divisions at home, in fact, meant that the American people actually owed those veterans a “special debt,” a point he elaborated on the next year, during a White House reception for the recently inaugurated “Vietnam Veterans Week.” 26 “Although all service people have been heroic,” Carter proclaimed, “veterans of Vietnam had to demonstrate an extra measure of heroism.” Because they could not have the “assured knowledge” that their fellow citizens supported their mission, those who served in Vietnam deserved the nation's special gratitude. Adding another layer of complexity to this new rhetorical thrust, Carter also emphasized that Vietnam veterans deserved the nation's special gratitude because they frequently came from the less privileged strata of American society. “Those who were conscripted to go to Vietnam were those who were most unfortunate, who were deprived, who were relatively inarticulate, and who were disadvantaged to begin with,” the president explained. 27

One might object, of course, that if such service was on behalf of an unworthy, ignoble cause – and, remember, Carter himself had made precisely that case during the 1976 presidential campaign – then would it not be more appropriate to show empathy for veterans as victims rather than to venerate them as heroes? In what, precisely, did the heroism of Vietnam veterans inhere? He did not say. This newfound emphasis on the veterans of the war, interestingly, recalls a similar process that took place following the Civil War as Confederate veterans came to be honored and admired, in the North as well as the South, for their honor, devotion, and commitment. In public commemorations from the 1870s onward, that trend marched in lockstep with a move toward Blue-Gray reconciliation, a common romanticization of combat veterans from each side of the “bloody chasm,” a “let bygones be bygones” approach to the nation's greatest physical and ideological conflict, and a related inclination to forget the rather stark differences in the causes for which Northern and Southern soldiers fought. 28 Whether knowingly or not, the Southern-born Carter was employing a rhetorical approach to national memory-formation that contained some striking parallels with the post–Civil War era.

In a remarkable speech of 1 July 1980, his last major address on the war, Carter pushed this veteran-centered memorialization project to even loftier heights. The occasion for his remarks was the formal signing ceremony for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Bill, the legislation that appropriated monies for what would become the stark, black granite wall along Washington's Mall to commemorate those who died during the conflict. “In honoring those who answered the call of duty, we do not honor war,” Carter said. “But we honor the peace they sought [and] the freedoms that they fought to preserve.” The man who only four years earlier had lamented that the war had led soldiers to take actions “contrary to our basic character” then quoted admiringly from Vietnam veteran and novelist Philip Caputo's sentimental paean to a close friend who perished in Vietnam. “Now we’ll build a memorial to the Walter Levys who died on the other side of the world, sacrificing themselves for others, sacrificing themselves for us and for our children and for our children's children,” Carter rhapsodized in closing. 29 By choosing not just to venerate the veterans, but to endorse without equivocation the cause for which they fought as well, identified here as the selfless defense of global peace and freedom, Carter was implicitly repudiating all of his earlier, critical insights about the Vietnam War. In an effort to honor the veterans of this highly divisive and unpopular conflict, one of whom incidentally included his own son, the Democratic chief executive thus wound up his term in office by transforming the Vietnam War into the moral equivalent of World War II. By so speaking, he also helped set the rhetorical stage for the far more radical historical revisionism of Ronald Reagan.

On 18 August 1980, in the midst of his campaign for the presidency against the incumbent Carter, Reagan unabashedly embraced the Vietnam War to the wild acclaim of the assembled Veterans of Foreign Wars. “It is time we recognized that [in Vietnam] ours, in truth, was a noble cause,” he declared. “We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt.” 30 Throughout the course of his presidency, Reagan regularly returned to and embellished those themes, emphasizing both the nobility of American involvement in Vietnam and the heroism of the veterans who fought there. “The men and women of Vietnam fought for freedom in a place where liberty was in danger,” the former California governor proclaimed in a speech delivered on Veterans’ Day, 1984. “They put their lives in danger to help a people in a land far away from their own.…All were patriots who lit the world with their fidelity and courage. They were both our children and our heroes. We will never forget their devotion and their sacrifice.” 31

Vietnam was for Reagan, as it had become for Carter by the close of his presidency, indistinguishable from World War II – the “good war” of the nation's collective memory. At one point, the Republican chief executive even insisted that the United States really did not even lose in Vietnam. “We continue to talk about losing that war,” he complained in a 1985 press conference. “We didn't lose that war. We won virtually every engagement.” After blaming the media for distorting the victory Americans had achieved with the Tet offensive, and chiding Congress for breaking previous pledges to come to South Vietnam's defense in case of a North Vietnamese attack, Reagan insisted that the war was lost only after U.S. troops were withdrawn. “And so, we didn't lose the war,” he concluded. “When the war was all over and we’d come home – that's when the war was lost.” 32

Reagan's secretary of state, George P. Shultz, knit together those vindicationist strands into a ringing defense of America's war in Vietnam in an April 1985 speech, delivered to mark the tenth anniversary of the conflict's end. A reassessment of the war and its impact was “not merely a historical exercise,” Shultz asserted. Rather, it stood as a necessary task for all who sought guidance concerning the nation's present and future policies. Highlighting the repression and brutality that he said had characterized postwar Indochina, Shultz insisted that “this horror was precisely what we were trying to prevent.” In other words, postwar developments just served to underscore the validity and essential nobility of U.S. intervention. “The president has called our effort a noble cause, and he was right,” the senior diplomat averred. “No one could doubt the morality of oureffort”; Americans fought “to save innocent people from brutal tyranny.” Shultz implied a direct and unbroken connection between Vietnam veterans and the heroes of previous wars, asserting that “no one who dies for freedom ever dies in vain.” Vietnam veterans “suffered abuse when they came home,” he pointed out. “But like their fathers before them, they fought for what Americans have always fought for: freedom, human dignity, and justice. They are heroes. They honored their country, and we should show them our gratitude.” 33

The effort to forge a positive societal memory of both the Vietnam War and the soldiers who served there, while ignoring the more problematic legacies of the conflict, has continued to the present day. For all their political and personal differences, Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton each invariably stressed the themes of healing and reconciliation when discussing the Vietnam War, emphasized the nobility of the nation's motives in entering the conflict, and praised the valor of U.S. soldiers. In his inaugural address of 20 January 1989, Bush offered a revealing comment about what he identified as the wrong kind of collective memory, in the context of an appeal for restoring the bipartisanship of the pre–Vietnam War era. “That war cleaves us still,” he lamented. “But friends, that war began in earnest a quarter of a century ago, and surely the statute of limitation has been reached.” He added: “This is a fact: The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory.” 34 Bush's plea for a new spirit of bipartisan cooperation thus rested on the peculiar notion that erasing unpleasant memories of the war stood as an essential precondition for rebuilding political amity and consensus on Capitol Hill. One could, of course, contend with much sounder logic that no great nation can long afford to avoid a genuine reckoning with troubling aspects of its past. But that remained a rhetorical path not taken, at least not by America's post-Vietnam presidents.

Bush, like Clinton, did not shy away from appropriating the Vietnam War as a useful reference point when it appeared politically advantageous to do so. Thus he repeatedly referred to Vietnam as an example of what not to do during the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990–1991, and he famously quipped that the nation had finally “kicked the Vietnam syndrome” early in 1991, after the successful conclusion of the war against Iraq. 35 Clinton, too, regularly used Vietnam as a point of reference in explaining why the United States was, or was not, willing to intervene in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and other international trouble spots.

This step will also help our own country to move forward on an issue that has separated Americans from one another for too long now. … This moment offers us the opportunity to bind up our own wounds. They have resisted time for too long. We can now move on to common ground. Whatever divided us before let us consign to the past. 36

Those remarks testify unmistakably to the triumph of a particular kind of official memory about the Vietnam War. The discourses of heroic sacrifice, reconciliation, and healing had, two decades after the end of the war, clearly trumped all alternative forms of remembrance in presidential rhetoric. Despite the passage of twenty years, the central theme of Bill Clinton's normalization speech mimicked that of Gerald Ford's April 1975 address at Tulane University. Like his Republican predecessor, Clinton was calling for reconciliation and, in an image favored by both, the binding of wounds. Each, significantly, was urging Americans to consign all unpleasant memories of the Vietnam War to history's dustbin. Neither Ford, Carter (one early speech excepted), Reagan, Bush, nor Clinton made any effort during their respective presidencies to divine a deeper meaning in the Vietnam War or to suggest what Americans might learn from the widespread societal discord and loss of faith that the prolonged conflict precipitated at home. And none of them, of course, ever acknowledged or tried to deal with the suffering and death of Vietnamese victims, or with the “collateral damage” suffered by Laotians and Cambodians. Nor did they ever broach the issue of American responsibility for the death and devastation that occurred throughout Indochina during the course of American involvement. My Lai and other atrocities committed by U.S. troops, the assassinations of Operation Phoenix, the free fire zones, the Vietnamese civilian casualties in excess of one million, the additional millions of refugees, the savagery of the most extensive bombing campaign in human history – those aspects of the war, aspects that had stirred so much domestic and international outrage at the time, were completely ignored in official commemorations. The appeal of America's national leaders has, instead, consistently been to a highly selective, unabashedly patriotic memory, one that would not disrupt, challenge, or subvert the glorious master narrative of U.S. history. 37

This approach mirrors the common historical trend, well identified by students of collective memory, toward state-sponsored triumphalism in official remembrances of national travails. Only within societies forced by absolutely crushing defeat – Germany and Japan after World War II serving as two of the more obvious cases in point – does the need to create a new narrative, and with it a new sense of national identity and purpose, achieve preeminence in the struggle over public memory (and even then not without powerful opposition). The obvious comparative case in American history would seem, once again, to be the South following the Civil War. Yet the American South, by successfully creating the myth-memory of the valiant, heroic “Lost Cause,” a regional story that achieved broad national acceptance as early as the 1870s–1880s, managed to avoid much of the stigma associated with its overwhelming defeat. The perceived need on the part of both North and South to achieve reunion and reconciliation facilitated the triumph of that peculiar form of myth-memory, even though it represented a wholesale repudiation of the alternative, emancipationist vision offered by President Abraham Lincoln. 38

Fundamentally unlike the American South after the Civil War, and Germany and Japan after World War II, the United States in the aftermath of Vietnam had experienced more of a political-psychological setback than a true military one. The difference is crucial. Had the war ended with North Vietnamese troops occupying American soil, or even with the nation's global power severely reduced, the politics of official memory would surely have developed in profoundly different ways. As it was, though, America's power stood virtually undiminished following the Vietnam War, its status as one of the globe's two superpowers fully intact. Consequently, U.S. leaders, as well as other elites throughout the society, did not reconsider the meaning of the war as part of an abstract history lesson or a philosophical exercise in national introspection, but in the context of a quite conscious effort to help forge a useful and usable collective memory to help guide future diplomatic and military commitments.

This brings us to a second, even broader, if overlapping, area in which the concept of collective memory proves instructive to any examination of the contemporary fight over the meaning and memory of the Vietnam War. Memory, collective and individual, is never purely the unfiltered recollection of past events. Rather, it is a constructed phenomenon as much as it is a reconstructed one; and an individual's or society's memories are invariably constructed so as to serve present needs. Because American power remained undiminished after North Vietnam's victory, and because intervention in Southeast Asia sprang from a broader Cold War that still dominated international politics, it was probably inevitable that the early struggle over the collective memory of the Vietnam War would be inseparable from the ongoing debate about America's present, and future, role in the world. And, indeed, the contest over the significance of and lessons to be derived from the Vietnam experience has, from the first, been intimately tied to practical, presentist questions about when and where to use U.S. power outside the country, and especially about the efficacy of overseas military intervention. Significantly, not even the end of the Cold War and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union have managed to dislodge Vietnam from its position as the functional prism through which all arguments for, or against, the use of U.S. military power must ultimately pass.

This dimension of the-war-as-contested-terrain has featured a much broader array of actors, and a much wider diversity of views. To simplify, two starkly opposed paradigms have been competing for public acceptance ever since the war's end, each of them representing a continuation and refinement of positions initially staked out by “hawks” and “doves” at the height of the conflict. The prowar position, well reflected in the presidential rhetoric discussed above, and sketched more fully in the writings and public speeches of a band of mostly conservative policy analysts, intellectuals, politicians, government officials, and journalists, has evolved into a ringing ex post facto defense of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. That defense is based on the fundamental nobility of American motives, the honorable and laudable conduct of U.S. troops in Vietnam, the despotic nature of the enemies against whom Americans fought, baldly exposed by the dreadful human rights records of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian victors following the war, and a strongly asserted connection between the Vietnam War and the wider Cold War, each rightly prosecuted against the evils of aggressive, freedom-denying communism. The failure to achieve victory in Indochina ranks, according to this perspective, as principally an instrumental problem; alternative military tactics and strategy could have brought victory. The vindicationists attribute defeat in Vietnam either to poor leadership, ill-conceived plans, or the traitorous disloyalty of, pick one: the antiwar movement, the media, the Congress. 39

Perhaps the ultimate vindicationist position holds that the United States actually won the larger struggle in Southeast Asia since its intervention bought crucial time for the noncommunist states of the region to establish political cohesion and economic vitality, and thus to withstand the communist threat. Former National Security Adviser Walt W. Rostow has argued, in Diplomatic History no less, that “we certainly lost the battle – the test of will – in Vietnam, but we won the war in Southeast Asia because the South Vietnamese and their allies for ten years were … ‘holding aggression at bay.’” His conclusion: “This was surely not simply a pointless, lost war.” 40

Another important element of this vindicationist appeal to the nation's public memory surfaced in the form of the neoconservatives’ attack, first launched near the end of the Carter administration, on what seemed to be the hesitance of U.S. leaders to employ military power. Concerned about the paralyzing effects that the still-prevalent antiwar paradigm might exert upon the nation's willingness to use force, the journal Commentary published, in 1980, a series of essays decrying what it termed the “Vietnam syndrome.” If the negative memories and lessons associated with the Vietnam conflict inhibited future U.S. interventions, the neoconservative periodical warned, that “could mean abandoning basic American values.” 41 One of Commentary's contributors, Charles Horner, specifically condemned President Carter's early statement that Vietnam taught the limits of American power. “That view,” he claimed, “is the single greatest restraint on our capacity to deal with the world, and that capacity will not much increase unless the view behind it is changed, thoroughly and profoundly.” 42 In a highly polemical book, Why We Were in Vietnam , Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz brought together those varied revisionist arguments in a no-holds-barred brief for the defense. He insisted that the United States went into Vietnam for idealistic, not selfish, reasons, and that the “hideous consequences” of the communist victory for the people of Vietnam proved that the American effort to save the southern part of that country from precisely such horrors was an eminently moral, and exceedingly admirable, action. 43

The present-minded political calculations behind such assertions are hardly difficult to detect. For some conservatives and neoconservatives, then as now, the need to forge a positive public memory of America's defeat in Vietnam, a memory consonant with the current and future needs of a superpower with still-vast global interests, was paramount. Adherents of this view have ofttimes been quite explicit about the direct connection they identified between historical memories and current policy needs – and about the dangers lurking in a society that might imbibe the wrong lessons. Understanding the Vietnam War “is not merely a historical exercise,” argued George Shultz in April 1985. “Our understanding of the past affects our conduct in the present, and thus, in part, determines our future.” Castigating the war's critics as anti-American apologists for communism, Shultz sarcastically asked: “Do the American people really accept the notion that we , and our friends, are the representatives of evil?” He then directly linked U.S. actions in Vietnam with the cardinal policy preoccupation of that moment: the communist challenge in Central America. “Our goals in Central America are like those we had in Vietnam,” the Secretary of State boasted: “democracy, economic progress, and security against aggression.” Although the United States suffered a “setback” in Vietnam, “the noble cause of defending freedom is still our cause.” 44

Twelve years later, but in precisely the same vein, Ernest Lefever opened a Wall Street Journal op-ed column about the Vietnam War with George Orwell's famous epigraph: “Who controls the past, controls the future.” Lefever then proceeded to rip, like Shultz, antiwar critics who he accused of continuing to harbor negative views not just toward the Vietnam intervention but toward America as well. “The cynical view of our involvement in Vietnam became part of a larger culture of shame, guilt, and self-flagellation that erupted in flag-burning and other attacks on traditional institutions,” he charged. “It also helped spawn the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ that all but paralyzed America from using military force abroad.” In a revealing admission, Lefever conceded that the Vietnam Syndrome had only been partially “exorcised” by Reagan's invasion of Grenada and Bush's prosecution of the Persian Gulf War. “We have yet to recover fully our pre-Vietnam confidence and our willingness to shoulder the heavy burdens of a humane superpower,” he lamented. For that to happen, the ongoing battle between the “two diametrically opposed interpretations of Vietnam” that were still “vying for acceptance in America's consciousness” needed to be decided in favor of the noble war perspective. “If our collective memory of pivotal events – like the Civil War or Vietnam – is split on ideological fault lines,” the conservative policy analyst warned, “it bodes ill for the future.” The memory problem, in this unusually candid analysis, thus reveals itself as the core issue in the struggle over the meaning and legacy of the nation's longest war. “To be healthy and courageous in facing the external world,” concluded Lefever, “we need to forge a more cohesive national memory of Vietnam,” one approximating that held about World Wars I and II and the Korean War as successive struggles to preserve global peace and freedom. 45

Yet, for all their bluster, Podhoretz, Shultz, Lefever, and other Vietnam vindicationists betray a deep-seated unease about the prevailing state of the nation's collective memory. Indeed, their special pleas on behalf of a reclaimed Vietnam War are probably best read as part of a defensive, rear-guard action against a decidedly different societal memory. Advocates of a redeemed Vietnam War narrative are quite consciously seeking to alter memories that, much to their often acknowledged frustration, remain largely shaped by widespread feelings of anguish, revulsion, and opprobrium toward the whole Vietnam experience. The redemptionists typically caricature the antiwar paradigm by associating it with a flag-burning, America-hating, procommunist, radical fringe. Were that truly the case, however, their task of reclaiming the war and silencing dissident voices would be far easier than it has proven. In fact, public opinion polls from 1969 onward have revealed that a majority of the American population condemned U.S. intervention in Vietnam as a tragic mistake. A 1982 poll, for example, two years after Reagan's “noble war” speech, revealed that 72 percent of a representative sample of Americans still considered the war “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” 46 More recent polls suggest that such negative attitudes have not significantly changed since then. 47 In short, a strong majority have long held, and continue to hold, that U.S. intervention represented not just an instrumental failure but a moral failure.

Negative views about the Vietnam War, coupled with unease about its place in the nation's history, have, since at least the late 1960s, been prevalent throughout mainstream America. Writing in 1969, one observer of the war's profoundly unsettling impact on U.S. society wrote: “The failure of half a million American soldiers with nearly a million allies, employing the might of modern military technology, to defeat a few thousand guerrillas in black pajamas has shaken our faith in our power, as the destruction we have wrought in the pursuit of what we conceived as noble ends has shaken our faith in our virtue.” No less a pillar of the establishment than Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., penned those words – no radical activist he. 48 And it was George McGovern, the presidential nominee of one of the country's two dominant political parties, not a member of the Weather Underground, who charged, in 1972, that “the Nixon bombing policy in Indochina is the most barbaric action that any country has committed since Hitler's effort to exterminate the Jews in Germany in the 1930s.” 49 Even Nixon himself publicly described the Vietnam years as “a nightmare [of] war without end.” It was a time, according to the Republican Party platform of 1972, when “to millions of Americans it seemed we had lost our way.” 50

Deeply rooted skepticism about the efficacy and morality of interventionism, as evidenced in every public and congressional debate about the proposed use of American military power abroad over the past quarter-century, stands as perhaps the most significant legacy of the Vietnam War in the nation's collective memory. Those who seek a return to the uncritical rally-round-theflag patriotism and unshackled presidency of the pre-Vietnam War era have collided throughout this period with a public less trusting of governmental authority, more wary of the perils of open-ended intervention, and far less willing to assume automatic national virtue, and inevitable success, in all overseas entanglements. For all Reagan's efforts to convince the American people of the vital need for U.S. involvement in Central America in the 1980s, appeals often cast within the Vietnam-as-noble-war rhetorical offensive, he made little headway with a skeptical citizenry whose memories of Vietnam had taught the limits of American power as well as the merits of caution and restraint. The Iran-Contra scandal was born of the desperation of Reagan and his key aides to find a way around the constraints imposed not just by Congress’ Boland Amendments but, in a larger sense, by society's memories of the Vietnam debacle. 51 Tellingly, in December 1988, aReagan administration national defense commission concluded: “Our failure in Vietnam still casts a shadow over U.S. intervention anywhere.” 52 A year later, following its controversial military action against Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, a ranking Bush administration official bemoaned the fact that whenever Panama or Nicaragua were discussed all anyone ever heard about was Vietnam. 53

When Clinton assumed the presidency in 1993, the constraints of memory proved just as strong. According to his first secretary of state, Warren Christopher, the word Vietnam still “evoked for most a memory of anguish, whether directly experienced or inherited.” Accordingly, each new “military challenge,” as had been the case ever since 1975, was “examined by the media, the public, and presumptively America's leaders, against the question ‘Could it be another Vietnam?’” 54 When a humanitarian mission in Somalia went awry, leading to casualties among U.S. military personnel, Democratic Senator Ernest Hollings muttered: “Vietnam all over again.” 55 That same year, a New York Times journalist surveyed heartland opinion concerning the worsening conflict in Bosnia. She found “an abiding fear that the Balkans are another Vietnam, a deep-seated angst that tends to outweigh concern that another holocaust is in the making.” 56 Those liberals who argued for humanitarian interventions in the 1990s thus found themselves grappling with the troubling specter of the Vietnam War every bit as much as had their conservative counterparts who, in the 1980s, pushed for military activism in pursuit of strategic, anticommunist ends.

The American government, if surely not for want of trying, had proved itself unable to mold societal memories of the Vietnam experience into the form it desired. For perhaps the first time in American history, the state seemed to be losing the contest over the public memory of a pivotal event, a turn of events further buttressed by the influence of popular culture.

Popular culture, the third element of collective memory that I will focus upon, has been instrumental in reflecting and reinforcing societal misgivings about the Vietnam War, thereby helping fix essential elements of the antiwar paradigm in the nation's collective consciousness. This is a vast, amorphous, and treacherous subject area, to be sure, but no less important for being all three. Although hardly monolithic, American popular culture – film, television, music, theater, mass-market fiction and nonfiction – has most typically represented the Vietnam War as a lost, pointless, morally ambiguous conflict, a war that not only scarred those Americans who fought in it but raised troubling questions as well about the nation's purpose and identity. It hardly exaggerates to point out that Vietnam has assumed, within American culture, the antithetical status of the “bad war,” much as World War II has long maintained pride of place as “the good war.” 57 The public memory of World War II as one of the nation's most glorious and righteous moments just seems even more firmly fixed with the passage of time, as attested to by everything from popular histories such as Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation and Stephen Ambrose's various common-soldiers-as-heroes bestsellers to the enormous popularity of recent films such as “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) and “Pearl Harbor” (2001). 58 “The enduring legacy of Vietnam,” on the other hand, “has been the disruption of the American story,” in the apt words of one scholar. 59 Journalist Tom Engelhardt has argued that Vietnam became the “graveyard” in which the nation's traditional “victory culture” was buried along with its self-image of virtuous innocence. After that war, he observes, children did not play with military toys in quite the same way; G.I. Joe, the prototypical action-adventure figure of the past, fittingly gave way to the other-worldly figures and landscapes of the “Star Wars” intergalactic battles. 60 Close to thirty years after the return of the last American combat forces, the Vietnam War still stands, as former war correspondent Arnold Isaacs has put it, as our era's “most powerful symbol of damaged ideals and the loss of trust, unity, shared myths, and common values.” 61

Popular culture has, for the most part, highlighted those transformative, and corrosive, aspects of the war. Its varied and diverse offerings have tended overwhelmingly to emphasize the negative, tragic, and morally dubious elements of the Vietnam War, representing the conflict as the great disrupter of the national narrative – the antithesis of World War II. Hollywood generally ignored the war, and its commercial potential, while it was still raging and in its immediate aftermath. An exception was John Wayne's banal and critically savaged “Green Berets,” which tried without much success to cast the conflict in traditional heroic mold. Allegorical films, such as “Soldier Blue” (1970)and “Little Big Man” (1970), did capture the way in which the war seemed to turn traditional national myths on their head by casting white soldiers as genocidal marauders and Indians as noble victims. But not until the late 1970s did a spate of big-budget, critically acclaimed movies appear that dealt directly with the Vietnam War: “Coming Home” (1978), “The Deer Hunter” (1979), and “Apocalypse Now” (1979). Each contained a different message and interpretive slant, to be sure, but together they powerfully reinforced notions of the war as a hopeless, pointless, morally tainted endeavor. As director Francis Ford Coppola explained in his program notes for the latter film: “The most important thing I wanted to do in the making of Apocalypse Now was to create a film experience that would give the audience a sense of the horror, the madness, the sensuousness, and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam War.” 62 With the important exception of the muscular, cartoonish Rambo films that sought to rescript the war as an American victory against a North Vietnamese enemy redolent of the barbaric villains of yore, cinematic representations of the Vietnam War have continued to highlight the problematic, morally tainted aspects of American involvement. It is of no small significance that nearly every one of those films includes an atrocity scene, as if by implication such episodes were routine and emblematic of the American record in Vietnam. The contrast with the consistently heroic character of World War II movies, in which certainty of cause and probity of conduct are givens, could not be starker. 63

Portrayals of the Vietnam War on television have followed a similar pattern. In the late 1970s, prime-time television routinely treated the Vietnam veteran as a “junkie, emotional cripple, or ticking time bomb.” 64 The medium's easy association of veterans of that conflict with mental instability, barely repressed rage, and the ever-present threat of unhinged violence almost certainly reflected anxieties within the larger society about the war and the damage it had done. The 1980soffered prime-time viewers a more positive take on veterans, with such popular weekly shows as “The A Team,” “Magnum P.I.,” “Matt Helm,” and “Miami Vice” starring male leads who had survived tours of duty in Vietnam with no visible damage to their mental stability. By the same token, the nature of their service during the war was almost never brought to light during those shows; it lurked, instead, as a dark, mysterious chapter in the lives of contemporary crime-fighters who had evidently recovered from the traumas assumed to have been suffered there. “China Beach,” a rare weekly drama that was actually set in Vietnam, featured female nurses who sought to mend bodies and psyches wounded by the conflict. Building upon the antiwar cynicism of the allegorical “M*A*S*H,” set in Korea but widely understood to be about Vietnam, “China Beach” focused more on the healers than the warriors of Vietnam, a richly symbolic choice. 65

PBS's fourteen-part series, “Vietnam: A Television History,” first aired in 1983, deserves special mention in any consideration of television and the war. The most watched documentary about the Vietnam War, and the most heavily used documentary in high school and college courses to this day, the PBS series attempted a balanced and objective treatment of the Vietnam War. It included interviews with numerous policymakers on all sides of the conflict as well as with ordinary American and Vietnamese soldiers, citizens, and peasants. Yet, to the documentary's critics – and the right-wing Accuracy in Media (AIM) vehemently attacked it from the outset – the multipart series contained a strong antiwar bias. Actor Charlton Heston, a spokesperson for AIM, complained that PBS was guilty of “distortion” and “disinformation,” and, most grievously, of transforming Ho Chi Minh into a hero and the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies into villains. 66 Those charges testify once again to the widespread perception among prowar activists that they are losing the struggle over the war's public memory. Even if AIM members exaggerate the extent to which “Vietnam: A Television Series” carries a blatantly antiwar message, they are certainly correct that the PBS series offers a hard-hitting, critical edge. It is also undeniable that the PBS version of the war has won substantially greater public favor and received infinitely more exposure than AIM's one-hour counterdocumentary, “Vietnam: The Real Story,” which aired on the same network in 1985 and largely slipped into obscurity soon thereafter. 67

[He] didn't know who was right, or what was right; he didn't know if it was a war of self-determination or self-destruction, outright aggression or national liberation; he didn't know which speeches to believe, which books, which politicians; he didn't know if nations would topple like dominoes or stand separate like trees; he didn't know who started the war, or why, or when, or with what motives; he didn't know if it mattered. 68

This little field, I thought, had swallowed so much. …There were times in my life when I couldn't feel much, not sadness or pity or passion, and somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been. For twenty years this field had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam, all the vulgarity and horror. 69

O’Brien's themes of loss, waste, vulgarity, and horror are pervasive in the literature of the Vietnam War. With few exceptions, the novels, memoirs, and oral histories dealing with Vietnam paint an exceedingly dark portrait of the war, invariably stressing its corrosive effects on those caught in its poisonous web. Novelist and critic C. D. B. Bryan has accurately characterized the typical Vietnam book as one that “charts the gradual deterioration of order, the disintegration of idealism, the breakdown of characters, the alienation from those at home, and, finally, the loss of all sensibility save the will to survive.” 70 To cite but one nonfictional example of this general pattern, Nathaniel Tripp relates his personal experiences in a “war which had left poison in my veins” in the memoir, Father, Soldier, Son (1997). 71 In fare typical of the genre, he provides, according to one approving – and accurate – reviewer, “a loose narrative of lurid reminiscences.” Within that structure, the former platoon leader “tells his tale in an austere style: men burned to blackened lumps, limbs blown off, decayed corpses floating eerily in stagnant pools, whitened skeletons heaped in piles.” 72 Grotesque vignettes comparable to those that constitute the core of Tripp's gripping tale can be found in virtually any memoir or fictionalized treatment of the war. The savage, the vulgar, the surreal, the incomprehensible – all become routine in these books. It is old-fashioned stories of wartime heroism and gallantry that remain largely absent.

Popular performing arts, such as music and theater, have reflected similar trends. If rock music offers the symbolic soundtrack for the war, and especially for its cinematic representations, it bears emphasizing that that popular musical form has most typically presented a sour, sardonic, and sarcastic vision of American intervention. Antiwar songs recorded and sung at the war's height, such as Country Joe and the Fish's satirical “Fixin’ to Die Rag,” Bob Dylan's eerily prophetic “It's All Over Now Baby Blue,” Neil Young's angry “Ohio,” and the protest anthems of folk artists Phil Ochs and Joan Baez well reflect that trend. So, too, do such postwar offerings as Bruce Springsteen's bitter “Born in the USA,” Billy Joel's melancholy “Goodnight Saigon,” the Charlie Daniels Band's haunting “Still in Saigon in my Mind” – and many, many more. The verdict on the Vietnam War rendered by popular recording artists of the past thirty-five years certainly offers little succor to the vindicationists. 73

Nor has Broadway. The only major play set during the Vietnam War, the blockbuster “Miss Saigon,” evokes comparably dark and unsettling images. The musical focuses centrally on the American betrayal of their South Vietnamese allies during the war's final stages, features a local pimp who savages the “American Dream” in Act II's big musical number, and contains the following lines from a well-meaning, young marine: “Christ, I’m an American; how could I fail to do good/All I made was a mess, just like everyone else/In a place full of mystery/That I never once understood.” 74 A year and a half before this British production even opened in the United States, conservative New York Times columnist and former Nixon speech writer William Safire was warning that the musical extravaganza, then playing in London to overflow crowds, would just contribute to what he identified as the “myth [that] has been set forth in dozens of apocalyptic films, novels, miniseries, biographies and memoirs.” Safire said that myth held that “the Vietnam War was an unjustified intervention by the West in the world of the east; the experience brutalized, desensitized or traumatized the soldiers forced to go; the whole business caused tragedy for individual Asians and brought international humiliation for an absurdly anti-Communist United States.” 75

Safire perceptively identified what was then, and has remained, the dominant tendency in American popular culture's representations of the Vietnam War. In decrying that trend, he was voicing the oft-expressed fear of conservatives that negative memories of the war would take hold in the country's collective consciousness, leading to a debilitating sense of national guilt and malaise and shackling present and future wielders of U.S. military might. The comments of top public officials, former officials, and vindicationists from the media, right-wing think tanks, and certain sectors of academe betray a palpable frustration with their failure to erase societal memories of Vietnam as the lost, pointless, morally repugnant war. They seem to realize that key elements of the antiwar paradigm still reign within the nation's collective memory; that Oliver Stone, Bruce Springsteen, and Tim O’Brien have actually struck much closer to the national pulse than have America's post-Vietnam presidents.

There's a part of me that wants to say to you all the memories that I’ve got are my memories, and I’m not going to talk about them. …We thought we were going over there to fight for the American people. We come back, we find out that the American people didn't want us to do it. And ever since that time we’ve been poked, prodded, bent, spindled, mutilated, and I don't like it. Part of living with the memory, some of those memories, is to forget them. I’ve got a right to say to you it's none of your damned business. 76

No other event in U.S. history since the Civil War has been quite so vigorously contested as the Vietnam War. The two conflicts remain pivotal to the nation's collective memory, since each raises core questions about American identity and purpose. Each, fittingly, prompted a vehement fight, from the first, over its significance to and place within the larger national story. As David Blight demonstrates in his recent book on the first half-century of struggle over Civil War memory, two opposing visions vied for national acceptance throughout those years. One was an emancipationist vision, first articulated by Lincoln in his epochal Gettysburg address of November 1863, which called for a rebirth of the republic, a rebirth rooted in the triumph of freedom over slavery and predicated upon a more just and more racially equal society. The second, advanced especially by defeated Southerners, embraced reunion and reconciliation within a highly selective recollection of the Civil War, one which celebrated the valor of each side's soldiers while ignoring the centrality of slavery to the war and repudiating the racial implications of the emancipationist tradition. The South's vision won, or at least held the upper hand, until the civil rights movement of the 1950sand 1960s forced a national reckoning with the long suppressed but never silenced countermemory of the emancipationists. In the end, “the first fifty years of remembering the Civil War” proved to be “but a prelude to future reckonings,” as Blight makes clear. “All memory,” he reminds us, “is prelude.” 77

That wise observation surely applies as well to the continuing contest over the meaning of the Vietnam War. Since so many diplomatic historians teach, lecture, and write about the Vietnam War, we are unavoidably participants in as well as observers of this evolving societal debate. It is a debate that holds unusual importance to a field that has itself been fundamentally reshaped by changes in the intellectual climate traceable directly to the Vietnam War – a field, moreover, that remains centrally concerned with discerning larger patterns of meaning in the external projection of American power and influence. The study of the Vietnam War and national memory is, for all of those reasons, far too important a subject for foreign relations specialists to abandon to the cultural historians, the cultural studies specialists, and the political polemicists.

Quoted in Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960 s (New York, 2000), 293.

Quoted in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Introduction: No Deed but Memory,” in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity , ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 9.

The phrase is from Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945 – 199 0 (New York, 1991), 314.

Gregory L. Vistica, “One Awful Night in Thanh Phong,” New York Times Magazine , 29 April 2001; CBS News, 60 Minutes II, 1 May 2001.

Time 157 (7 May 2001): 24–34.

Time 125 (15 April 1985): 16–61; Time 135 (30 April 1990): 18–29; Time 145 (24 April 1995): 22–48.

I am indebted to Fredrik Logevall, who participated in the session, for this information.

Ernest W. Lefever, “Vietnam's Ghosts,” Wall Street Journal , 21 May 1997.

Quoted in New York Times , May 3, 2001.

Mary Gordon, Shadow Man (New York, 1996), xx. On this burgeoning interest in memory, see especially Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, 1999), 1–35; Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY, 1998); Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (New York, 1999); and John Bodnar, “Pierre Nora, National Memory, and Democracy: A Review,” Journal of American History 87 (December 2000): 951–63.

International Theological Commission, Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past (Vatican City, 2000).

Among the important books that have dealt with this subject, see especially Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, U.K., 1995); Sherman, Construction of Memory ; Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (Melbourne, 1996); Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (New York, 1998); and David William Lloyd, Battle fi eld Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain (New York, 1998).

Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York, 1994); Robert G. Moeller, “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany,” American Historical Review 101 (October 1996): 1008–48; Wood, Vectors of Memory ; John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 1999); Yoskhkuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945 – 197 0 (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945 – 196 5 (New York, 2000).

John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 15.

Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), 3, 13.

In addition to the works cited above, see especially Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, U.K., 1999); Philip West, Steven I. Levine, and Jackie Hiltz, eds., America's Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory (Armonk, NY, 1998); Martin Evans and Kenneth Lunn, War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1997); John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ, 1994); and Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory (New York, 1996).

Works that have dealt with different aspects of collective memory and the Vietnam War include: Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation (Garden City, NY, 1984); John Hellman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1986); Richard J. Morris and Peter C. Ehrenhaus, eds., Cultural Legacies of Vietnam: Uses of the Past in the Present (Norwood, NJ, 1990); John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg, eds., The Vietnam War and American Culture (New York, 1991); Fred Turner, Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (New York, 1996); Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, CA, 1997); Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy (Baltimore, 1997); Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1998); Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley, 1998); Keith Beattie, The Scar That Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War (New York, 1998); Katherine Kinney, Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War (New York, 2000). See also Christian G. Appy, “The Muffling of Public Memory in Post-Vietnam America,” Chronicle of Higher Education (12 February 1999): B4–B6.

For an important analysis of the Vietnamese struggle over memories of the war, see Mark Bradley, “Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema,” in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam , ed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Berkeley, 2001), 196–226.

Brundage, “Introduction: No Deed but Memory,” in Where These Memories Grow , ed. Brundage, 3–14; Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, “Setting the Framework,” in War and Remembrance , ed. Winter and Sivan, 6–39; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory , trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, 1992); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, MA, 1989); Thomas Butler, ed., Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (Oxford, U.K., 1990). For an important examination of the significance of the memory literature to historians of American foreign relations, see Robert D. Schulzinger, “Memory, History, and the Study of U.S. Foreign Relations,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations , ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, forthcoming).

Ford, Speech at Tulane University, 23 April 1975, Public Papers of the Presidents: Gerald R. Ford , 1975, Book I (Washington, DC, 1977), 568–72 (hereafter cited as Public Papers ). On the reaction to this speech, see Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York, 1983), 667; Peter Ehrenhaus, “Commemorating the Unwon War: On Not Remembering Vietnam,” Journal of Communication 39 (Winter 1989): 96–107; William Bundy, A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (New York, 1998), 495–96. For a fuller examination of presidential rhetoric concerning the Vietnam War, see Robert J. McMahon, “The Vietnam War in American Presidential Discourse, 1975–1995,” Rhetoric and Public A ff airs 2 (Winter 1999): 529–49.

Ford, Remarks at news conference, 6 May 1975, Public Papers , 1975, Book I, 641. See also Ford, Remarks at news conference, 21 April 1975, ibid., 545–46.

Carter, Speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 15 March 1976, in The Presidential Campaign, 1976 , U.S. House of Representatives, Committee of House Administration (Washington, DC, 1978–79), II, 111.

Carter, Address delivered to the American Chamber of Commerce, Tokyo, Japan, 28 May 1975, ibid., I, 66–67. See also Carter, Remarks at the National Democratic Issues Conference, Louisville, Kentucky, 23 November 1975, ibid., I, 78.

Carter, Interview with Playboy , November 1976, ibid., III, 948–50.

Carter, Speech at Notre Dame University, 22 May 1977, Public Papers , 1977, 954–62.

Carter, Remarks at press conference, 24 March 1977, ibid., 501.

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

Carter, Remarks at ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, 11 November 1978, Public Papers , 1978, Book II, 2012–14.

Carter, Remarks at White House reception, 30 May 1979, ibid., 1979, Book II, 972–75.

Blight, Race and Reunion ; Gaines Foster, “Coming to Terms with Defeat: Post-Vietnam America and the Post-Civil War South,” Virginia Quarterly Review 66 (Winter 1990): 17–35.

Carter, Remarks on signing Vietnam Veterans Memorial Bill, 1 July 1980, Public Papers , 1980–81, Book II, 1268–71.

Quoted in New York Times , 19 August 1980. See also Reagan, Remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference dinner, 18 February 1983, Public Papers , 1983, Book I, 249–56. On Reagan's overall rhetorical approach, see especially G. Thomas Goodnight, “Ronald Reagan's Reformulation of the Rhetoric of War: An Analysis of the ‘Zero Option,’ ‘Evil Empire,’ and ‘Star Wars’ Addresses,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (November 1986): 390–414; Michael Weiler and W. Barnett Pierce, eds., Reagan and Public Discourse in America (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1992).

Reagan, Remarks at dedication ceremonies of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Statue, 11 November 1984, Public Papers , 1984, Book II, 1820–22.

Reagan, Remarks at a question-and-answer session with regional editors and broadcasters, 18 April 1985, ibid., Book I, 454.

Shultz, Speech, “The Meaning of Vietnam,” 25 April 1985, U.S. Department of State Bulletin 85 (May 1985): 13–16. For an important analysis of this speech as “a revisionist historical narrative offered to justify policy,” see George N. Dionisopoulos and Steven R. Goldzwig, “‘The Meaning of Vietnam’: Political Rhetoric as Revisionist Cultural History,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (February 1992): 61–79.

Bush, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1989, Public Papers , 1989, Book I, 1–4.

Quoted in New York Times, 2 March 1991. See also Bush, Remarks on signing the National POW/MIA Recognition Day Proclamation, 28 July 1989, Public Papers , 1989, Book II, 1032–34.

Clinton, Remarks announcing the normalization of relations with Vietnam, 11 July 1995, Public Papers , 1995, Book II, 1073–74. See also Clinton, Remarks on lifting the trade embargo on Vietnam, 3 February 1994, ibid., Book I, 178–80; and Clinton's major campaign address on Vietnam to the American Legion Convention, Chicago, 25 August 1992, reprinted in Preface to the Presidency: Selected Speeches of Bill Clinton, 1974 – 1992 , ed. Stephen A. Smith (Fayetteville, AR, 1996), 306–14.

On this point, see especially Appy, “The Muffling of Memory.”

Blight, Race and Reunion .

Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York, 1982); Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York, 1985); Guenther Lewey, America in Vietnam (New York, 1978); George C. Herring, “Vietnam, American Foreign Policy, and the Uses of History,” Virginia Quarterly Review 66 (Winter 1990): 1–16.

W. W. Rostow, “Vietnam and Asia,” Diplomatic History 20 (Summer 1996): 467–71. See also W. W. Rostow, The United States and the Regional Organization of Asia and the Paci fi c, 1965 – 198 5 (Austin, TX, 1986). For a critique of this perspective, see Robert J. McMahon, “What Difference Did It Make? Assessing the Vietnam War's Impact on Southeast Asia,” in International Perspectives on Vietnam , ed. Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger (College Station, TX, 2000), 189–203.

Norman Podhoretz, “The Present Danger,” Commentary 69 (March 1980): 27–40.

Charles Horner, “America Five Years after Defeat,” Commentary 69 (April 1980): 50–58, 56.

Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam , especially 197–98.

Shultz, Speech, “The Meaning of Vietnam.”

Lefever, “Vietnam's Ghosts.”

Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 198 3 (Chicago, 1983), 29. This poll is cited in Thomas G. Paterson, “Historical Memory and Illusive Victories: Vietnam and Central America,” Diplomatic History 12 (Winter 1988), 1–18, 3.

Richard Sobel, The Impact of Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy Since Vietnam: Constraining the Colossus (New York, 2001).

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of Con fi dence: Ideas, Power, and Violence in America (Boston, 1969), 11.

Quoted in Turner, Echoes of Combat , 49–50.

Quoted in Jonathan Schell, The Time of Illusion (New York, 1976), 137–38, 277.

William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977 – 199 2 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); Kenneth E. Sharpe, “The Post-Vietnam Formula Under Siege: The Imperial Presidency and Central America,” Political Science Quarterly 102 (Fall 1987): 549–69.

Quoted in Young, Vietnam Wars , 316.

New York Times , 9 October 1989; New York Times , 23 December 1989.

Warren Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime (New York, 2001), 291–92.

Quoted in Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows , 86.

Quoted in George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950 – 1975 , 3rd rev. ed. (New York, 1996), 312.

Compare, for example, the following popular oral history collections: Studs Terkel, ed., “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York, 1984); Kim Willenson, ed., The Bad War: An Oral History of the Vietnam War (New York, 1987).

Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York, 1998); Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers (New York, 1992); idem., Citizen Soldiers (New York, 1997).

Hellman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam , 221.

Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York, 1995).

Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows , 6.

Quoted in James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945 – 1995 , 3rd rev. ed. (St. James, NY, 1999), 270.

See especially the essays in Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, eds., From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990). See also Albert Auster, How the War Was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam (New York, 1988); Jeremy Devine, Vietnam at 2 4 Frames a Second: A Critical and Thematic Analysis of Over 40 0 Films about the Vietnam War (Jefferson City, NC, 1995).

Quoted in George N. Dionisopoulos, “Images of the Warrior Returned: Vietnam Veterans in Popular American Film,” in Cultural Legacies , ed. Morris and Ehrenhaus, 87.

John Carlos Rowe, “From Documentary to Docudrama: Vietnam on Television in the 1980s,” Genre 21 (Winter 1988): 451–78; Harry W. Haines, “The Pride Is Back: Rambo , Magnum, P.I. , and the Return Trip to Vietnam,” in Cultural Legacies , ed. Morris and Ehrenhaus, 99–120; Michael Clark; “Remembering Vietnam,” in The Vietnam War and American Culture , ed. Rowe and Berg, 177–207.

Quoted in Robert L. Ivie, “AIM's Vietnam and the Rhetoric of Cold War Orthodoxy,” in Cultural Legacies , ed. Morris and Ehrenhaus, 31–32.

Ibid., 27–37; Philip Wander and Melissa Kane, “‘Vietnam’ and the Politics of History,” in Cultural Legacies , ed. Morris and Ehrenhaus, 39–51.

Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (New York, 1978), 266.

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Boston, 1990), 210.

C. D. B. Bryan, “Barely Suppressed Screams: Getting a Bead on Vietnam War Literature,” Harper's Magazine 268 (June 1984): 67–72, 69. See also Philip Beidler, American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam (Athens, GA, 1982); Philip Melling, Vietnam in American Literature (Boston, 1990); Tobey Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (New York, 1992); Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows , 19–21.

Nathaniel Tripp, Father, Soldier, Son: Memoir of a Platoon Leader in Vietnam (South Royalton, VT, 1997).

David R. Gilmore, review of Tripp, Father, Soldier, Son , New York Times Book Review 2 February 1997.

Lyrics of some of these songs are reprinted in Stewart O’Nan, ed., The Vietnam Reader (New York, 1998), 281–96. See also H. Bruce Franklin, The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs, and Poems (Boston, 1996), 203–18; Terry H. Anderson, “American Popular Music and the War in Vietnam,” Peace and Change 11 (April 1986): 51–65.

Robert Stone, “‘Miss Saigon’ Flirts with Art and Reality,” New York Times 7 April 1992.

William Safire, “Some Enchanted ‘Saigon’,” New York Times 2 October 1989.

Vistica, “What Happened in Thanh Phong,” 51.

Blight, Race and Reunion , 397. See also Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York, 1992).

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History Resources

The End of the Vietnam War: Conscience, Resistance, and Reconciliation

By ron nash, unit objective.

This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based units. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical significance. Through this step-by-step process, students will acquire the skills to analyze any primary or secondary source material.

Historical Context

Vietnam was "America’s longest war." While US operations tended to be very limited between 1945 and 1964, escalation in the early months of 1965 eventually led to the deployment of more than 2.5 million military personnel to South Vietnam through 1973.

While the literature on the Vietnam War is voluminous, the issue of draft resistance has either been overlooked or misunderstood by historians. Most people in fact do make a distinction between draft evasion and draft resistance. The virtual omission of draft resistance from the historical accounts of the Vietnam War is a manifestation of the period’s nagging effect on American culture and memory.

In January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords officially ended US involvement in the Vietnam War, although the majority of US troops would not leave until August of that year and the fighting between North and South Vietnam would continue until the fall of Saigon in 1975. Americans faced the daunting task of reuniting their own country torn apart by participation in a politically divisive and brutal conflict halfway around the world. The American public had become polarized in a way that it had not been since the Civil War.

In April 1973, Senator Edward Kennedy wrote a letter discussing the need to care for those who served in Southeast Asia and to forgive those who "refused induction" for moral reasons so "that the nation can turn its attention to reconciliation and healing the wounds and bitterness created by this long and costly conflict."

Although the question of amnesty occupies more than half of the letter, Kennedy made it clear that caring for America’s servicemen was his top priority. The debate over both amnesty and how that issue related to the morality of the war in Vietnam is the focus of the following lesson.

Amnesty was ultimately tackled by Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter. On September 16, 1974, President Ford issued a conditional amnesty proclamation for those who had evaded the draft, provided that they reaffirmed their allegiance to the United States and agreed to serve two years in a public service job. In 1977, just one day after his election, President Carter unconditionally pardoned anyone who had avoided the draft.

Unfortunately, Kennedy’s hopes for supporting servicemen returning from Southeast Asia were not realized. Many returned home to hostile receptions, limited mental health care, and a public that did not understand or want to understand the horrors servicemen had faced in combat.

The students will analyze a chart and a letter written by Senator Edward Kennedy. They will also use graphic organizers to facilitate a close reading of the text as well as to track their understanding on both a literal and an inferential level. Student understanding of the text will be determined during classroom discussion and by examining the graphic organizers completed by the students.

Richard Nixon was reelected as president in November 1972. By December US troop strength in Vietnam had declined to 24,200. In order to motivate the North Vietnamese to return to the peace talks in Paris, Nixon initiated an intense "Christmas bombing" campaign, an operation called Linebacker II. During an eleven-day period, US bombers dropped over 20,000 tons of ordnance on North Vietnam. On January 2, 1973, the Paris Peace talks resumed and by late January a final agreement was reached. The terms of the final agreement were only slightly different from those offered earlier in 1972. With the stipulation that US combat troops would withdraw, Hanoi had achieved victory. Fighting between the North and South Vietnamese forces would continue until April 30, 1975.

Many issues continued to be debated even though the military operations were winding down. One was the matter of amnesty for those who had either resisted or evaded service. Other men had deserted after they had begun military service. The domestic debate focused on the morality of the Vietnam War.

It is against this backdrop that students and teachers can approach the following documents. At the discretion of the teacher the lesson can flow over one to three days. The simplest format is to engage with only the Kennedy letter and the two charts that illustrate the Vietnam generation and draft categories. If the teacher wants to drill deeper into the issues raised by the Kennedy letter, the class can proceed to the abridged congressional testimonies of John Kerry and John H. Geiger.

• Letter from Senator Edward Kennedy to Mr. Thursby, April 1973 (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC09526)
• Document Analysis Worksheet for the Kennedy Letter
• Chart of Military Service of the Vietnam Generation
• Draft Board Classifications
• Document Analysis Worksheet for Military Service Chart

At the teacher’s discretion the students may do the lesson individually, in pairs, or in small groups of no more than 3 or 4 students.

• Discuss the information in the introduction but don’t give too much away. Remember, we want the students to discover the meaning of text as they read.
• Hand out the Chart of Military Service in the Vietnam Generation and the Draft Board Classifications table. Analyze the chart and lead the class through an understanding of military service and draft evasion in the Vietnam era.
• Hand out the letter from Senator Edward Kennedy to Mr. Thursby. Decide if the text is at a level that is manageable for your students to read independently. If it is, let them do a close reading of the text and fill out the graphic organizer for the Kennedy letter. If the text level is too challenging, then "share read" the speech with the students by having the students follow along silently while the teacher begins reading aloud. The teacher models prosody, inflection, and punctuation. The teacher then asks the class to join in with the reading after a few sentences while the teacher continues to read aloud. This technique will support struggling readers and English language learners (ELL).
• The students should now fill in the worksheet for the Kennedy letter. If you are having students work with partners or in groups, let them negotiate what they think would be best to include on the document analysis section. Students can brainstorm in groups but must complete their own organizer in order to complete the assignment.
• Students now answer the critical thinking questions on the worksheet. Emphasize that they are to use the author’s own words as evidence for their answers. You may want to consider the first question together as a class.
• Class discussion: Have groups or individual students share both their important phrase choices and the answers to the critical thinking questions.

The students will read the congressional testimonies of John Kerry and John H. Geiger. Kerry represented Vietnam Veterans against the War, who opposed continuation of the war in 1971, and Geiger represented the interests of the American Legion, who defended the war and opposed a policy of amnesty. The students will also use the graphic organizers to facilitate a close reading of the text as well as to track their understanding on both a literal and an inferential level. Student understanding of the text will be determined during classroom discussion and by examining the graphic organizers completed by the students. This lesson will also assess student understanding through a writing exercise.

The movement of American people against the US government’s actions in Vietnam forms one of the most complex and controversial elements of the war. There is room to raise many questions, but the following two documents focus on two essential ones: Was the Vietnam War an immoral war? Should the men who resisted or evaded the draft have been granted amnesty?

In April 1971 members of the Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) descended on Washington and engaged in what they called Operation Dewey Canyon III, "a limited incursion into the country of Congress" (Dewey Canyon was the code name for an actual military operation in Laos in 1969 and 1971). On April 22 John Kerry, representing VVAW, made a statement before Congress regarding the war experiences of VVAW members.

One year later, Congress heard the arguments of John Geiger, the commander of the American Legion. Geiger’s views on both amnesty and the morality of the war were in stark contrast to those held by Kerry.

• Transcript of John Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 22, 1971 (abridged). Source: Legislative Proposals Relating to the War in Southeast Asia, Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 92nd Congress, First Session (April–May 1971) (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1971), 179–210.
• Document Analysis Worksheet for John Kerry’s testimony
• Transcript of John H. Geiger’s testimony presented to a Congressional Subcommittee, March 1, 1972 (abridged). Source: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure of the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate, 92nd Congress, 2nd Session on Selective Service System Procedures and Administrative Possibilities for Amnesty, February 28, 29, March 1, 1972 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1972), 237–242. Available at Internet Archive: http://archive.org/stream/selectiveservice00unit/selectiveservice00unit_djvu.txt
• Document Analysis Worksheet for John Geiger’s testimony
• Discuss the information in the introduction but don’t give too much away.
• Hand out the testimonies of John Kerry and John Geiger.
• Decide whether the text is at a level your students can read independently. If it is, then let them do a close reading of the text and fill out the graphic organizers. If the text level is too challenging, then share read the testimony with the students.
• The students should now fill in the important phrases and critical thinking questions sections of the worksheets. Students can brainstorm in small groups but must complete their own organizer in order to complete the assignment. Emphasize that they are to use the author’s own words as evidence for their answers to the critical thinking questions.
• Class discussion: Have groups or individual students share both their important phrase choices and answers to the critical thinking questions. Compare those with the responses from other groups.
• The assessment for this lesson is the assignment of one of the following essays. Remind the students that their arguments must be supported by evidence in the text.
• Given the two testimonies of John Kerry and John H. Geiger, which speaker is the more persuasive on the issues of the morality of the war and a policy for amnesty?
• Why has the Vietnam War remained so divisive for Americans? Use the testimony by John Kerry and John Geiger as well as the letter by Senator Edward Kennedy.

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• Modern History

Vietnam War Lesson

Learning objectives

In this lesson, students will learn about the complex historical, political, and social dimensions of the Vietnam War, including its origins, major battles, and the profound impact it had on both Vietnamese and American societies. They will also explore the war's lasting effects on international relations, the anti-war movement, and how it shaped contemporary views on military engagement and foreign policy. Students will have the opportunity to achieve this through choosing their own method of learning, from reading, research, and watching options, as well as the chance to engage in extension activities. This lesson includes a self-marking quiz for students to demonstrate their learning.

How would you like to learn?

Option 1: reading.

Step 1: Download a copy of the reading questions worksheet below:

Step 2: Answer the set questions by reading the following webpage:

Option 2: Internet research

Download a copy of the research worksheet below and use the internet to complete the tables.

Option 3: Watch video

Step 1: Download a copy of the viewing questions worksheet below:

Step 2: Answer the set questions by watching the following video:

The Life Guide.  The Vietnam War Explained In 25 Minutes .

Watch on YouTube

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Extension activities, resources for subscribers.

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