Quayle Candidacy ‘Opens Scar’ : Service in Vietnam War Emerges as Political Issue

As the first major party to put a member of the baby boom generation on its national ticket, the GOP has been forced to confront that generation’s most searing experience--the Vietnam War. And with it the nagging, guilt-inspiring, discomfitting question of who served, who did not and why.

Much remains unknown about the wartime record of Vice President George Bush’s chosen running mate, Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle: What role did his powerful family’s clout play in getting him into the National Guard? What explanation will he offer for choosing the Guard rather than an active-duty military unit at a time when many of his peers, at least, saw the Guard as a haven from combat?

Perhaps most important, has such a decision to serve in the Guard, which seemed acceptable to many people in 1969, now become politically damaging or even unacceptable--at least for a militant conservative?

Quayle’s candidacy “opens up a scar in the side of the body politic that a lot of people for a long time have wanted to stop thinking about,” said Neil Smelser, professor of sociology at UC Berkeley. “It opens up all the questions: What was commitment then? What was the right thing to do? Was it right to throw yourself in? Was it right not to go, as he did.”

“War records have always been looked at very closely, and for good reason,” said historian Stephen Ambrose, biographer of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, noting that a President is commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces. “And they’re always preaching patriotism at the rest of us. They darned well better have shown some themselves.”

What already is clear is that the handsome 41-year-old Quayle has suddenly, and unexpectedly, become not only the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, but also what Smelser called “a little bit of a Rorschach test.”

Standing at the fulcrum of such a sensitive issue, Quayle and what happens to his candidacy will almost certainly shape the rules for future candidates. It will begin to draw the line between the electorally passable and the politically unacceptable.

Perhaps only the Civil War compares to Vietnam in the depths of its divisiveness. But as a litmus test of political acceptability, historians say wartime service has a long history.

Political Points

Politicians throughout American history have tried to use their war records, or those of their opponents, to score political points. Nixon tried to attack George S. McGovern’s war record in 1972, Ambrose recalled. The plan, he noted, backfired when Nixon discovered that McGovern, despite his opposition to the Vietnam War, had been a decorated bomber pilot in World War II.

Bush too has often cited his war record. In his acceptance speech, drafted before Quayle’s military service became an issue, Bush made a point of saying: “I’ve fought for my country; I’ve served.”

Since the 1950s, virtually all national political figures--with the notable exception of Ronald Reagan--have had some World War II combat duty service on their resumes.

After the Civil War, former generals dominated American politics for a generation and politicians at all levels “waved the bloody shirt,” as using the war as a campaign device was called then.

Draft Loopholes

Not until 1885, 20 years after the war’s end, did the first non-veteran, Democrat Grover Cleveland, take office. Cleveland had taken advantage of the draft loopholes of his day and had paid a substitute to take his place in the draft. His lack of a military record became a major campaign issue, one that he overcame only because of a bigger issue--rampant corruption under the incumbent Republican Administration.

Even going back to the nation’s earliest history, the pro-British Federalist Party crippled itself opposing the War of 1812, fought in part to establish freedom of the seas. For more than a decade afterward, America was essentially a one-party state.

In fact, says historian Ambrose, the nation has almost never had a President who was of age to serve in a war and did not do so.

One exception to this rule was the Mexican War, which, like the Vietnam conflict, was opposed by many Americans as unjust. Philosopher Henry David Thoreau was one of those opponents, as was a young politician who later went on to hold national office named Abraham Lincoln.

‘Conscious Decision’

Nixon, Ambrose noted, made “a very conscious decision” to join the military in 1941, knowing that service would be necessary for him to succeed politically.

Similarly, Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), who tried to become this year’s Democratic nominee, made a calculated decision to enlist in the Army and go to Vietnam, a war he opposed.

Gore has said he also acted in part to protect his father, then a Tennessee senator facing strong opposition because of his anti-war views.

And while Quayle is the first national candidate to face the Vietnam service issue, the question has come up several times on the statewide level. In the 1982 California election, for example, Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Curb’s lack of Vietnam service because of an unusual draft status became an embarrassment.

Few Have Succeeded

The underlying fact is that war heroes have dominated American politics and those who opposed--or failed to serve in--the wars of their generations seldom have succeeded politically, said professor Dean Keith Simonton of UC Davis, author of a recent book on presidential leadership.

“Even unpopular wars become popular after the fact,” he said.

Clearly, something of that nature has been happening to the Vietnam War. Even if the conflict itself has not become popular, the stigma once felt by many who fought in it has faded. Successive amnesty and pardon programs by Presidents Gerald F. Ford and Jimmy Carter were a measure of how wide and deep the war cleaved the country.

After several years of silence, Vietnam has emerged as a major topic of drama, film and even a setting for comedy. Books about it have crowded the shelves and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington has become one of the capital’s most visited shrines.

Dirty Secret

Americans have also begun to discuss publicly what for years was the war’s dirty secret: Relatively few middle-class or well-off white men fought in it. About 27 million young men came of draft age between 1964 and 1973. But only somewhat more than a third, 11 million men, served in the military and only about 1 in 10, 2.5 million, actually were sent to Vietnam.

With vast disproportion, those who served in Vietnam--and even more of those who were killed or wounded--were blacks, Latinos and the poor. More than a dozen members of Congress had sons who died in World War II, Ambrose noted, but none had sons who died in Vietnam.

Only about 40,000 Americans fled to Canada to avoid the draft. Another 50,000 stayed home and refused induction.

Outnumbering them many times over were about 9 million who benefited from the deferments, such as those available to students, which allowed most of the sons of the middle class to avoid the military altogether and hundreds of thousands more, such as Quayle, to stay home by entering the National Guard.

Los Angeles military law specialist William Smith spent the years 1966 to 1973 counseling hundreds of men across the country on avoiding conscription. “I can tell you with 100% certainty--very few people went out and joined the National Guard because they wanted to be patriotic. They wanted to avoid Vietnam,” Smith said.

Detail and Nuance

Given the controversial nature of the war, it is hardly surprising that politicians, pollsters and Republican delegates here agreed that what happens next will depend to a high degree on detail and nuance.

Thomas Scarano, a psychologist and Vietnam veteran who specializes in treating Vietnam veterans and the former director of the Denver Veterans Center, said most veterans would accept that Quayle “did do his military time” even if that time did not involve risk of combat.

“Unless you can very clearly determine this man actually avoided service, I don’t think it will be an issue,” he said.

Charges of Hypocrisy

Others raised doubts. The fact that Quayle is young and rich makes voters quick to suspect that he did, in fact, use influence to keep himself safe, suggested Democratic pollster Harrison Hickman. Moreover, his public stance as a tough pro-military expert on defense opens him to charges of hypocrisy.

“The question is whether preferential treatment was given, that’s the question here, and I don’t know the answer to that,” said Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a GOP delegate here and one of two former Vietnam prisoners of war who have been elected to the Senate.

Bob Kerry, former Nebraska governor and now a Democratic Senate candidate, who lost a leg in Vietnam and won a Medal of Honor, posed a different test, focusing on Quayle’s explanations for his action.

Self-Preservation

“It’s not as if he did something cowardly; I don’t think so at all. But if he tries to hype himself as a young man waving a flag and feeling patriotic, most of us who went through that experience are going to know he’s full of it,” Kerry said. “When you’re 20 years old, you do things for self-preservation.”

William Broyles, the former Newsweek editor and author of a book about his experiences in Vietnam, made a similar point. “I don’t want to hold up the fact that someone has been in Vietnam as giving them a particular superiority in terms of wisdom,” he said, “I don’t think that Vietnam service should be used to judge a man of that age. But how he responded to the need to serve obviously says something about his character.”

Staff writers John Balzar and Elizabeth Mehren contributed to this story.