Clinton Sees Vindication for Vietnam Protesters : Memoirs: President says that dissenters saw the war as a mistake and McNamara’s new book shows he did too.

President Clinton, wading into one of the most painful issues in the American psyche, said Friday that the newly published memoirs of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara vindicate the position of those who marched against the Vietnam War during the 1960s--including himself.

“Those who opposed the war believed the things that McNamara now says are true,” Clinton said, according to his press secretary, Mike McCurry. “I’m not the best person to make this case . . . but I’ve thought about it.”

McNamara, one of the chief architects of the war under President Lyndon B. Johnson, broke a 27-year silence on the issue this week and confessed that he decided as early as 1967 that the conflict was a mistake. “We were wrong, terribly wrong,” he wrote.

Clinton noted that he worked as a college student on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, and that exposed him to more information about the war than most Americans, McCurry said. “I had a good sense that things were going sour,” he quoted Clinton as saying, adding that McNamara “had a lot of courage to write the book.”

Clinton first talked about the McNamara book in an off-camera interview with CNN on Thursday, and then elaborated through his spokesman Friday after reporters requested further comment. The President’s willingness to comment at length on the issue--even though it recalls the controversial question of his own efforts to avoid being drafted into the armed services during the war--reflected the passion that Vietnam still stirs among Americans, nearly 20 years after the fall of Saigon.

McNamara’s book, in which he says he warned Johnson privately that Vietnam might become “a major national disaster” but remained silent in public out of loyalty, has opened an emotional debate over the war.

“We have never kicked our Vietnam syndrome,” said Stanley Karnow, a historian of the war. “We debated Vietnam during the war, we’ve debated it for the 20 years since, and we’ll go on debating it for centuries to come.”

Editorials and columnists in major newspapers have excoriated McNamara for remaining silent when his voice might have helped end the war sooner. “Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” the New York Times said. “His regret cannot be enough to balance the books for our dead soldiers.”

But leaders of the anti-war movement of the time, including former Sen. George S. McGovern (D-S.D.) and the Rev. Robert McAfee Brown of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, have praised McNamara for his candor.

And Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said he, too, has concluded that the Vietnam War was at least conducted badly.

“I don’t know” if the war was a mistake, Dole said. “If there was a mistake, it was that we just incrementally kept getting involved. It was always 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 more (troops), and it wasn’t a very good strategy.”

The number of Americans who believe the Vietnam War was a mistake has steadily risen in the years since. “It’s in the range of 80% now,” said John Mueller of the University of Rochester in New York, an expert on public opinion on foreign policy and war.

“But Clinton seems to get no credit for being right,” he noted. “No political candidate ever campaigns saying ‘I was right about Vietnam.’ ”

Indeed, for Clinton, the resurrection of the Vietnam issue could summon up the question of his own actions during the period, a painful issue during his 1992 presidential campaign.

In 1969, while a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, Clinton participated in an anti-war demonstration in London. Later that year, he received a draft notice. In a tangled series of negotiations with his draft board, he obtained a deferment based on a promise to enter an officer training program, but later dropped the deferment and never entered the program, after draft calls fell.

His opponent in 1992, then-President George Bush, accused Clinton of dishonorable behavior both for joining an anti-war demonstration on foreign soil and for avoiding the draft.

But some Democrats discounted the political significance of the issue this time. “Judgments about him in 1996 are going to have much more to do with the kind of President he has been than anything else,” said Democratic pollster Harrison Hickman, who worked for the rival 1992 presidential campaign of Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.). “I think people for whom Clinton’s Vietnam experience matters already have a judgment about him that isn’t going to be changed.”

In any case, the debate over Vietnam will not be stilled. The war divided a generation, destroyed a myth of U.S. military invincibility and shattered public confidence in the wisdom of the federal government.

“It’s a national trauma, something like the Civil War,” Mueller said. “In the case of Vietnam, people focus on it as the first foreign war the United States ever lost. . . . And it seems to spawn more myths per square inch than any other war.”

Asked how long the wounds of Vietnam would remain open, the scholar replied: “Presumably forever. Are we over the Civil War yet?”

Times political writer Robert Shogan also contributed to this story.