Museum of Vietnam War Finally to Open

The nation’s first museum dedicated to the Vietnam War opens today, after a three-year struggle over radically different views of the conflict held by veterans and historians. A committee organizing the Vietnam Era Educational Center in Holmdel, N.J., spent most of the last year rewriting every word of the museum’s text panels and arguing about the role of the media, the legitimacy of the antiwar movement and whether the effort could have been won. Just before the museum’s opening, text about prisoners of war was rewritten to eliminate language that was said to suggest a government conspiracy to hide evidence of POWs and personnel missing in action.