TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022492/0224100.000

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                                                                                NATION, Page 18

THE CAMPAIGN

The Long Shadow Of Vietnam


What Bill Clinton did during the war -- and how he explained
his actions then and now -- reflects the anguished memories
of millions of Americans

By LANCE MORROW -- Reported by Sam Allis/Manchester, Barbara
Burke/New York and David S. Jackson/San Francisco


    Bill Clinton in those days slept on a mattress on the
floor of his bedroom at 46 Leckford Road in North Oxford,
England. He ate bad Indian and Chinese food -- curry, dim sum
-- from restaurants on the corner.

    It was a cold, gloomy late November in 1969. Clinton, a
Rhodes scholar from Hot Springs, Ark., fed sixpence and
shillings into the meter of the electric fire in order to warm
himself. He sat at a rickety table lighted by a gooseneck lamp
and worked on a letter about Vietnam, moral principles and the
draft.

    Sometimes, to clear his head, Clinton put on an old
Georgetown University sweatsuit and went for a run on the Port
Meadow about half a mile away. His hair was shaggy. He wore a
full beard. He was an American male, 23 years old, and like
millions of other young American males, he was trying to figure
out what to do about going to the war.

    His housemate Frank Aller, another Rhodes scholar, from
Spokane, Wash., had come to a decision. He would resist the
draft. He would become a fugitive from his own country. Clinton
and Aller talked endlessly about the choices that were closing
in on them. The conversations were urgent and anguished -- and
by no means theoretical. Toward the end of 1969, the number of
Americans killed in Vietnam climbed past 40,000.

    The letter that Clinton composed in a chilly room at the
end of 1969 was addressed to Colonel Eugene Holmes, the
director of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas. In
three typewritten pages, Clinton explained why he did not enroll
in the university's ROTC program as he had previously agreed to
do. Getting into ROTC at the university's law school would have
given Clinton a four-year draft deferment, but he told Colonel
Holmes that he had decided to take his chances with the draft.


    The letter was a search of conscience and also a
surprising exercise of precocious political calculation. Clinton
said that he opposed the draft and the war and that he was "in
great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill and
maybe die for their country . . . right or wrong." But he would
not resist the draft. He would "accept the draft in spite of my
beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability
within the system."

    It seemed startling that Clinton at the age of 23, in the
midst of the turmoil of Vietnam, would think so clearly about
his long-term trajectory. In relation to other college
graduates of the time, the letter placed Clinton about where he
stands now in the political spectrum -- in the role of an
anguished moderate.

    Clinton was never called for the draft. His stated
intention to enter an ROTC program had already given him two
months of exemption. The Nixon Administration cut back on the
draft. When the new draft lottery system began on Dec. 1,
Clinton drew a very high number (311), and so was never
summoned.

    Frank Aller, the housemate who resisted the draft, would
become a casualty nonetheless. After living for a time as a
fugitive in England, he returned home to try to sort out his
life. Not long afterward, he shot himself.

    Vietnam, Michael Herr wrote in Dispatches, "was what we
had instead of happy childhoods." The war, a generation's
defining event, still operates with a surprising power upon the
American psyche. The war has a way of making Back to the Future
loops, crashing into the American consciousness after long
absence or quiescence, chafing the conscience, reviving bad
memories, starting the old arguments again. Last week Clinton's
23-year-old letter came firing out of the past and landed in the
middle of the New Hampshire primary campaign.

    The document, given to ABC News by Colonel Clinton Jones,
a retired ROTC recruiter, and then released to the press by the
candidate, raised questions:

    -- Did Bill Clinton manipulate the ROTC program and his
draft exemptions in order to dance out of harm's way? And if he
did, would American voters blame him for behaving as millions
of other young men of the Vietnam era had done, keeping
themselves out of the war if they could honorably do so?

    -- Did Clinton's real problem in the evaluation of voters
lie elsewhere -- not in any questions about his behavior in
1969 but in the answers he gave in 1992? Was he evasive, less
than candid, about the exemptions and his motives? Did he leave
the impression of being an opportunist who trimmed the truth?

    -- Or was a prosecutorial press stirring up artificial
controversy about something relatively unimportant that happened
years ago when Clinton was young? Were the political media
roaring along heedlessly aboard a sort of Heisenberg Express,
distorting the process even as they observed it? Says Berkeley
sociologist Todd Gitlin: "This is largely a creation of the
press. There's not any evidence that people are walking around
demanding to know whether somebody did his service."

    -- And most deeply: Has the statute of emotional
limitations run out on Vietnam? Does the war still reawaken the
old blood feud in the Vietnam generation -- between those who
protested and those who served? Or have the wounds of that
bitter civil war in America now healed?

    Vietnam has a vivid place in the history of American
politics, culture and metaphysics. And of mass American
psychiatry, perhaps. Vietnam was the Big Bang that set loose,
it seemed, mysterious new American energies of overstimulation
and creativity and excess. To those who lived through the era,
Clinton's letter, dated Dec. 3, 1969, might bring back an entire
world. History in that narrow slice of time was densely,
fiercely compacted. Humanity made especially wild swoops,
veering between brilliance and atrocity, pushing limits.

    The Apollo 12 astronauts returned from the moon. Joan Baez
had a baby. Jack Nicholson appeared as a charmingly drunken
lawyer in Easy Rider and said, "This used to be a hell of a good
country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it." Old
Joseph P. Kennedy died. The Chicago police raided Black Panther
headquarters and killed Fred Hampton. At the end of November,
Lieut. William Calley was arrested and charged with
responsibility for the My Lai massacre of 567 Vietnamese
peasants, which had occurred 20 months earlier. A lot of
Americans refused to believe that it had happened, and even
suspected that reporting the killings was a kind of antiwar
trick. The Los Angeles police arrested Charles Manson and three
of his followers and charged them with the Sharon Tate murders.

    On Nov. 15, 250,000 protesters marched from the Capitol up
Pennsylvania Avenue to the Washington Monument, demanding that
President Nixon end the war. They carried coffins printed with
the names of the war dead. Hundreds of paratroopers with loaded
rifles stood on alert inside the Justice Department and the
Pentagon. The White House was surrounded by Washington city
buses parked bumper to bumper as a barricade.

    Among the protesters were Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow
Coretta King, and Arlo Guthrie and Leonard Bernstein and Peter,
Paul and Mary, and Democratic Senator George McGovern, who
would run against Nixon in 1972, and Eugene McCarthy, who got
into the New Hampshire primary in 1968 against Lyndon Johnson
and helped force him to withdraw from the presidential race.
McCarthy, now 75, has entered the race this year as well: he has
come back like another echo.

    The Administration turned loose Vice President Spiro Agnew
to lead the charge of Middle Americans, the Silent Majority,
and speak against the war protesters. The truculent young
speechwriter putting the words in Agnew's mouth was Pat
Buchanan. He had Agnew delivering a sort of W.C. Fields line
about "an effete corps of impudent snobs." Now candidate
Buchanan prepares the rhetoric for himself.

    So the Clinton letter had a certain amount of turbulent
historical context. If the letter had any importance, it needed
to be judged in terms of the agitated time in which Clinton
wrote it.

    There was some evidence in New Hampshire that the press
was considerably more fascinated by Clinton's behavior in 1969
than the voters were. The morning after Clinton appeared on
ABC's Nightline to talk about his Vietnam draft status, a
morning when the letter was front-page news across New
Hampshire, Clinton took five questions from an audience in
Concord. The topics were college scholarships, day care, public
education, Japan bashing and the likelihood of a tax increase.

    Many of the young men who served in Vietnam did so with
honor and bravery. And some with distinction. Some went to the
war unreeling John Wayne movies in their head and then changed
their mind. They found that the reality was viciously different
from their fantasies. But human nature is not rescinded, and
most young American men of draft age did not want to go to
Southeast Asia to be shot at, so they did what they could --
honorably or less than honorably -- to avoid it.

    "Virtually every young man faced the war dilemma," says
Berkeley's Gitlin, who wrote a superb history, The Sixties. "It
was not self-evident what was the right thing to do. For some
it was to leave the country; for others, to be a conscientious
objector, or seek an exemption by having children or working in
some protected occupation, or by staying in school." For some,
of course, the right thing to do was to go to Vietnam and serve.

    But a normal 23-year-old does not wish to die. And every
draft-age American in 1969 knew that the U.S. had given up any
intention or hope of winning the war in Vietnam. To go there to
fight at that late stage meant joining a demoralized army that
was sometimes fragging its officers, smoking dope and avoiding
enemy contact where possible. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
had configured the war to end, they hoped, in "peace with
honor," or anyway to have the battle "Vietnamized," the allied
cause assumed by South Vietnamese forces. For American boys in
1969, the war did not look like an inspiring cause.

    Americans may have adopted a sort of mellow realism about
Vietnam. Among those men who remember the era and once were
vulnerable to the draft, Clinton's answers have occasionally
sounded like trimming -- although that impression could also be
made by someone having trouble remembering exact details of
something that happened many years ago. The letter that he wrote
in 1969 had hard clarity: a ring of truth and pain of
conscience. In this campaign, the authenticity has sometimes
been smudged by political calculation.


    That may be understandable. The press has kept probing at
the Clinton campaign on the tabloid controversies, on the
matter of his relationship with Gennifer Flowers and on the
long-ago playlet involving the draft.

    The memory of Vietnam retains a curious emotional power.
Yet oddly, distinguished service as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam and
a Congressional Medal of Honor do not seem to have endowed Bob
Kerrey with much magic. Sometimes audiences have become almost
uncomfortable as he discussed his war and the wound that cost
him part of his right leg.

    In his Inaugural Address, George Bush asked Americans to
bury the divisions of Vietnam forever. Many Americans thought
that the brief, decisive brilliance of Desert Storm dispelled
at last the country's queasy reluctance to take military action
abroad if it is necessary. Desert Storm did prove that the
American military at least had learned the lessons of Vietnam
and acted upon them. The American military that faced Saddam
Hussein had been rehabilitated.

    But much of the deeper Vietnam syndrome persists in the
American psyche and in American politics. The war in Vietnam was
a profound wound to the nation. Among other things, it severed
the wires of trust that transmitted authority from the older
generation to the younger. For years, the two sides of the
Vietnam generation have been at war with each other. That
conflict within the generation has been demoralizing,
corrupting. And perhaps unnecessary.

    The true cause of the Vietnam trauma to America was that
the fathers failed. The grownups poured their children into a
devouring misconception -- a bad war that was a vast elaboration
on the theme of lying, almost of hallucination. Lyndon Johnson
won election in 1964 by promising that American boys would
never go to do the job that Asian boys should do. As late as
1968, Hubert Humphrey told munitions salesmen at the White
House, "Vietnam is our great adventure . . . and a wonderful one
it is." After deciding in 1969 to withdraw from a hopeless
cause, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger allowed 18,000 more
Americans to be killed so that, bizarrely, the snarling and
bleeding Americans could exit from Vietnam with sufficient
style, an illusion of credibility.

    The young, like Bill Clinton, should never have been faced
with the dilemma of either fighting that war or being traitors.
It was as if American power, like an Aztec sun god, required
terrible infusions of blood. Either sacrifice yourselves upon
the altar of Vietnam, the drama demanded, or slay the fathers,
tear down their house.

    Somewhere within the generation now taking power, Vietnam
may have installed the suspicion that leadership and authority
are a fraud. That view may have subtle stunting effects upon
moral growth. If sons don't learn to become fathers, a nation
may breed politicians who behave less like full-grown leaders
than like inadequate siblings, stepbrothers with problems of
their own. Vietnam was a fairly thorough exploration of American
folly. The war still reverberates through American politics
today.