A Scar on the Nation’s Psyche: Vietnam War Without End

“We were wrong, terribly wrong.” That published word of judgment about the Vietnam War, which ended with the fall of Saigon 20 years ago today, will be quoted whenever Americans look back on the conflict that blighted the soul of America.

Those words, written “In Retrospect” by one responsible for “McNamara’s War,” Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, were intended to help heal a nation the author judges to be cynical. Yet, many charge that this decades-late public confession only breeds more cynicism. And it postpones healing. The Vietnam War is being fought again--this time emotionally and verbally.

Americans are relearning that war itself does less to change a nation’s psyche than do attitudes toward it. Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset was right: “Decisive historical changes do not come from great wars, terrible cataclysms or ingenious invention.” No, “it is enough that the human heart incline its sensitive crown to one side or the other of the horizon, toward optimism or pessimism, toward heroism or toward utility, toward combat or toward peace.”

The “sensitive crown” of the American heart did turn decisively during the Vietnam War. That will be obvious to any who compare the celebration this spring of events 50 years ago at the end of World War II, when that heart pulsed in gratitude and joy, with that of 25 years ago at the height of the Vietnam War, when its crown tilted toward cynicism, recrimination and suspicion--all evident again after the McNamara book.

On television now, the half-confessing McNamara weeps. The sympathetic weep with him, some weep for him and more yet seethe or rage as the “sensitive crown” of their hearts reveal their varying inclinations. Many applaud him for having come clean, at last. If this is a confession and repentance, who forgives? God? Families of those killed? Veterans? Do we, as a nation, keep on repenting; do we forgive ourselves?

Long after the current furor is forgotten and the Furies are quieted, the issue of America before and after the Vietnam War will demand revisiting. Without addressing this, it will be hard to measure or influence the inclinations of the sensitive crown of the American heart.

Before Vietnam, most historians judge, that national heart inclined toward optimism. World War II had united the nation after the Depression. We had won it and seemed capable of standing off a new foe in the Cold War, world communism, which the other side in Vietnam was seen to represent. This was “The American Century,” and citizens, many of them veterans, moving to suburbia, tried to make spiritual sense of “The Affluent Society.” The gross national product, Sunday schools and investments in technology, all prospered. The Eisenhower era was a new era of good feeling. The Kennedy and early Johnson Administrations provided liberal impetus for more of the same. Ortega’s “horizon” became John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, beckoning idealists.

In January, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a nation sobered by the assassination of Kennedy, announced the Great Society. Vietnam was a cloud on a far horizon. The spring of 1965 saw the nation, torn within over the civil-rights battles, begin to overcome cynicism and come to be healed in a burst of optimistic legislation that was pro-civil rights, pro-education, pro-domestic welfare.

Now, for the after: That summer, Johnson committed increasing numbers of troops to Vietnam and tried to promote an optimism that was dying in the streets of Watts. That Los Angeles conflagration set a pattern for the burnings of Newark, Detroit and other cities just as the war’s escalation sent the nation’s young into protest, whether out of what Ortega called moral “heroism” or “utility,” to save their necks or cynically pursue their careers. They had to think about careers: The “guns and butter” expenditures of the Vietnam era complicated the economy ever after. Their idealism, pre-Vietnam, was expensive; post-Vietnam, we were ever less ready to invest in the future.

Until the summer of 1965, Americans could look back more serenely on their wars. Bracketing the morally ambiguous Mexican and Spanish-American conflicts, they remembered the Revolution and the War of 1812, the Civil War and World Wars I and II as events that had moral purpose and some clarity of outline. After that summer, it has been hard, in Ortega’s terms, to promote heroism or to determine where combat might make sense, whether in Bosnia or Somalia or anywhere else. Yet, the sensitive crown of the national heart has also not found peace.

Certain kinds of healing do go on, and the McNamara book may unwittingly promote them. So it is that those who led dissent against “McNamara’s War” are as ready now as any others to mourn at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. They are moved to silence and tears as they watch aging parents trace with their fingers the granite grooves that spell their loved one’s names. Such grooves are the only public marks remaining to recall an irreplaceable child, killed because “wrong, terribly wrong” leaders kept the fighting going.

The post-Vietnam conflicts, including military forays in Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia and Haiti, are not what tear at or will heal the American soul. The “terrible cataclysms”--California earthquakes and Florida hurricanes and Mississippi River floods--have awful consequences, but response to them inspires cooperation more than cynicism and suspicion. A mere book like “In Retrospect” instead reveals where the restlessness and violence of emotions all center: in the souls of Americans and their nation.

A measure of optimism, a vision of heroism and an effort toward peace: These will be needed if Americans are to find resolve to fight “right, terribly right” wars in the future. Wars against policies threatening the environment around us. Against the development of a permanent underclass, hidden from view in urban ghettos and devastated farmlands and backwoods. Against conflict of race against race. Against the genocidal forces turned loose worldwide.

The poets and pastors, singers and counselors, politicians and planners who are to be of help are well-served by “In Retrospect”--to the degree that it helps reveal how the nation came to change as it did during Vietnam. They will have to draw on other agents of mind and spirit than McNamara and his book to find ways to heal. The author is no longer the issue. The horizons of the American heart are.

If response to McNamara’s book does not merely result in retrospective recriminations, it might lead the nation to see the creative side of repentance for all. Philosopher Max Scheler taught that repentance affects moral rejuvenation. Dormant “young” forces in every soul, he wrote, become “hampered, indeed smothered, by the tangled growths of oppressive guilt” that have “gathered and thickened within the soul.”

The jungles of Vietnam still entangle Americans; recall of them enduringly thickens forces in the soul. Scheler’s counsel might work: “Tear away the undergrowth,” and fresh forces and energies stand their chance of emerging. McNamara, in tearing away at the undergrowth in his own being, provides an opportunity for renewal of the American soul. Here is a bid for all who care for the American spirit not to forget Vietnam, but, in their own retrospect, to find new starts and resolves as it only partly recedes, with violent gasps, into history.