An About-Face? : Vietnam-Era Protesters Who Back Gulf War Get Uneasy Feeling They’ve Adopted Parents’ Views

They wore black armbands decorated with white doves of peace. They marched in Washington and Northridge and Hartford, Conn. They picketed Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts. And they blockaded the streets in Westwood and shut down UCLA.

They were neither the ringleaders nor the storm troopers of the movement to stop the Vietnam War. But they were its body and soul. And now, 20-odd years later, the rebellious students who became lawyers and writers and business executives are catching glimpses of their younger selves as a new generation of war protesters marches across the television screen.

For many veterans of Vietnam moratoriums and student strikes, it has been a disquieting experience. Like more than three-quarters of Americans in their late 30s and early 40s, they tend to support the allied war against Iraq. It’s a different war, they say. That was then, this is now.

Yet many express admiration for the courage and the idealism of the young protesters, despite the burden of naivete, and welcome the stirrings of activism after a decade whose watchwords seemed to be greed and excess.

But woven into conversations with a dozen men and women who marched against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s is a vague sense of discomfort, or perhaps just self-deprecating irony--the feeling that maybe we, after all, have become our parents.

Lisa Ross, a 38-year-old communications lawyer in Washington, ran into a college acquaintance the other night at a grocery store in suburban Bethesda, Md., where she lives with her husband and young daughter.

“His passing comment was, ‘I’m really opposed to this war, but I guess I’m really in the minority.’ He was shaking his head, kind of joking about himself, because he felt he was a real holdover from the ‘60s.”

Ross supports the Gulf War, although she strongly opposed the Vietnam War and still believes the United States made a serious mistake by getting involved.

But she is not so sure that she wouldn’t be in the streets today if she were 18 again. “I probably would be, given that much of the protests that went on were probably as much opposition to the authorities and the Establishment as the war itself. . . .

“I think the main thing was being part of a very large group of people with a common cause and feeling that cause was very important to fight for. That’s very different than the feelings I have in my life today, the concerns about how to provide for my family.”

The pollsters and sociologists have yet to fully probe the attitudes toward the Persian Gulf War of those who fought to get the United States out of Vietnam. The specific question has not been asked, according to researchers at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut.

But some information is available. In late January, a CBS News survey asked respondents if they believed the United States made a mistake getting involved in the Gulf War. Among those ages 33 to 40, 78% said no. The figure was even higher--82%--for those 41 to 47.

Twenty-three years ago, in February, 1968, the Gallup Organization asked a similar question about the Vietnam War. Among those same 41- to 47-year-olds, then ages 18 to 24, only 51% said the United States did not make a mistake sending troops to Southeast Asia. (Opposition to the Vietnam War peaked in May, 1971, according to Gallup surveys.)

“There’s an element of the old Aristotelian interpretation that comes through,” says Everett C. Ladd, a political scientist and director of the Roper Center. Older people “become more hesitant and cautious and reluctant . . . and the young are inclined to be rash and committed.”

Frank Farley, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has conducted extensive studies on the psychology of protest. Not coincidentally, he taught at both Madison and UC Berkeley during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Former Vietnam protesters confronting the Gulf War today can find themselves in a psychologically tough spot, Farley says.

“If they feel that they basically support (the war in the Gulf) for a host of pragmatic reasons, and yet they would like to be idealistic about it, they’re kind of caught. . . .

“If there had been no war, they might not have thought so much about this. But now they’re reflecting their pragmatic economic interests, conservative interests, perhaps, and so on--yet they have memories of one of the great eras of protest in this century, in which many of them participated. So it must promote a lot of tension in some people.”

Leslie Paonessa, who lives in Santa Monica and works as a script reader, has been doing a lot of soul-searching lately. “I consider myself a pacifist. I have a real hard time with the way we’ve chosen to deal with this, by using force and bombing ,” she says. “Yet it feels like a different set of circumstances.”

Paonessa is 44. She grew up in Van Nuys and graduated from Birmingham High School in the San Fernando Valley in 1964. After marriage interrupted college, she earned a degree from Cal State Northridge in 1972, where she remembers countless protest marches.

“Vietnam to me seemed more a matter of us imposing our will (on another country). This is more a matter of fighting a tyrant. He seems so insane and so crazy, I kind of do feel like somebody has to put a stop to him. The issues are very confusing to me.”

Susan Kosar is 37. She lives in Pasadena and is a free-lance writer and producer, specializing in promotional spots and commercials.

In the fall of 1969, she recalls vividly the day that she and her classmates at Northwest Catholic High School left classes and marched through nearby Hartford, Conn., to a rally in Bushnell Park to protest the Vietnam War.

“I dealt more from an emotional base than a logical base,” she says. “You’re 15 years old, and you see a war going on that you feel we have no business being in. I think I responded much more emotionally than logically.”

In recent days, she says, she has watched as television cameras penetrated the nation’s classrooms. And she hears a lot of familiar echoes in the students’ idealistic talk about human rights and the evil of wanton killing.

Kosar says she feels this war has more to do with oil than tyranny. Yet she is genuinely worried about Saddam Hussein. “I think attitudes change. When you get older, you understand what it’s all about to have to work and pay taxes and create your own life and your own way of life. And you don’t want that to disappear. . . .

“I’m trying not to get as emotional,” she adds. “I can look at it and say I have to support what we’re doing there. This man has to be stopped. . . . I’m not naive. I see both sides. I know we’re not perfect, what we’re doing isn’t the best thing. But I don’t see any alternative.”

Stephen M. Rivers will be 36 next week. He handles press and politics for one of the most powerful businesses in Hollywood, Creative Artists Agency.

In addition to representing people such as Jane Fonda, CAA just brokered the biggest acquisition deal in Hollywood history--the buyout of MCA by Matsushita, the giant Japanese conglomerate. Rivers does not have trouble getting a window table at Spago.

Before he worked for CAA, Rivers handled publicity for Fonda. Before that, he was Tom Hayden’s longtime press secretary. And before that, he worked for the United Farmworkers Union in Los Angeles and his native Massachusetts.

Before that, he was carrying anti-war picket signs outside Westover Air Force Base, near his home in Springfield, Mass., where he graduated from Cathedral High School in 1972.

The Gulf War leaves him with “a lot of conflicting emotions,” Rivers says. “I don’t know that it all adds up and is coherent and makes sense.”

Because he sees the U.S. population as generally apolitical, Rivers says he has “nothing but admiration for anybody who cares enough about what they believe to go out and demonstrate and protest, whatever side of the issue they’re on.”

But that said, Rivers adds, “Saddam Hussein is no Ho Chi Minh. . . . . They are totally different wars. I think Saddam Hussein is a guy, if you don’t stop him now, you’re going to have to deal with him later. I think that would have been as clear to me (in the early 1970s) as it is to me now.

“I’m more disposed toward peaceful solutions rather than military conflict. The Democrats made a compelling case in the congressional debate (arguing that sanctions should be given more time). The religious leadership has been very clear (in its opposition to the war), and at the same time, it’s hard not to want to just take the guy out.”

At 39, Jeff Snyder is a public-relations executive with a major national hospital chain based in Santa Monica. He is married and has a young daughter.

Snyder graduated from UCLA in 1973 and recalls sitting with hundreds of students in the middle of the intersection of Wilshire and Veteran one spring day in the early 1970s to protest the war. He also remembers the guns carried by National Guardsmen as they stood atop buildings on campus.

“I totally support the rights of the protesters,” Snyder says. “I see a lot of myself in those people, and I don’t find myself looking down on them, or thinking that I went too far in my own opinions about Vietnam. I just think this is the wrong war for the peace movement.”

But there are revisionists who, unlike Snyder, Rivers, Kosar and Paonessa, regret their opposition to the Vietnam War.

One is Joseph Farah, editor of the conservative Sacramento Union and a former senior editor of the defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

In the spring of 1971, when he was in high school in Fairlawn, N.J., Farah marched on Washington along with thousands of other students from all over the nation.

“We overturned cars, we blocked traffic, we built barricades in the streets, we burned American flags, we paraded around with the Viet Cong flag and so forth,” Farah says. “As a teen-ager, I was actively working on behalf of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Communists, which is absurd.”

Farah says now that he was naive and was misled by student activists, as he believes the current generation of protesters is being misled. Either that, he says, “or they are patently anti-American.”

In retrospect, Farah says, “I don’t know how you can look at the history of Vietnam, look at what happened to that country, after we pulled out our troops and say we weren’t justified in being there.” He says there is equally valid justification for our participation in the Gulf War.

Tell that to Aimee Grunberger, an unreconstructed opponent of both conflicts. She is a poet, 37, and lives in Providence, R.I., with her husband and twin sons.

“I think sometimes that hyper-rationality is a function of aging,” says Grunberger, who graduated from Stamford High School in Connecticut in 1971 and Brown University in Providence, R.I., four years later.

“Reasons can be found for anything. As you get older, you trust your rationality more and distrust your emotions. There’s a hardening of your emotional arteries.”

She has an alternate explanation for the feelings of those who opposed the Vietnam War but find reasons to support the war in Iraq:

“The flip side is, maybe people who were opposed to the war in Vietnam did it because they thought it was the thing to do and it was not out of heartfelt idealism. It was out of a desire to conform which is what they’re doing again, except it’s on the other side.”