Forging Hawks Out of Longtime Doves

Sen. Barbara Boxer got her start in politics protesting the Vietnam War. But when it comes to the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, she sounds like an unabashed hawk.

“It cannot stand,” the California Democrat declared.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler is another veteran of the antiwar movement. But the New York Democrat hasn’t the slightest hesitation about a war on terrorism.

“When someone attacks you,” he said, “you’ve got to respond.”

The passion of battle fever is gripping many who have been skeptical about the exercise of America’s military might.

The Sept. 11 assault was so sudden and so shocking that it seemed to obliterate many of the doubts that were the legacy of the country’s tortured Vietnam experience. Polls show that up to 90% of Americans support a military response. Ambiguity is gone.

“This is as clear-cut as it gets,” said Sen. John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who, as a decorated Navy officer, helped found Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Others see worrisome parallels between the quagmire that was Vietnam and the nation’s new cause. America again faces a shadowy enemy and uncertain battle lines in a broadly defined mission with no clear-cut definition of victory.

The United States “has in law and in morality a right of response,” said New York University’s Todd Gitlin, who has written extensively on the 1960s. “But there is a legitimate debate to be had on what action is called for.”

For now, however, dissent is limited mostly to scattered demonstrations and, in Congress, the voice of Rep. Barbara Lee, the Oakland Democrat who cast the only vote against the use of force in response to the attacks.

As it happens, Lee’s House seat was held by Berkeley’s Ronald Dellums until he retired in 1998. Dellums, who entered Congress in 1970 as a fiery antiwar protester, counted among his allies Nadler, Boxer and, later, Kerry.

Today, those three are united in supporting the war on terrorism, a stance that required none of the soul-searching their backgrounds might suggest.

Said Kerry: “When you are attacked the way we were attacked, you don’t have to think about it for 10 seconds.”

Boxer’s Rebellion

As the mother of two, Barbara Boxer had her hands full in the late 1960s. But the turbulent times and the Bay Area’s hothouse atmosphere made politics irresistible.

In upscale Marin County, she dived into discussions of women’s rights, the environment and the Vietnam War.

Swept up in the era’s idealism, Boxer began channeling her abundant energies into political causes. There were fights to preserve open space and promote after-school programs. A personal turning point came in 1970, when she helped push a local ballot measure urging President Nixon to bring Americans home from Vietnam.

“I felt it was wrong,” she said of the conflict, “that it was a civil war, and that it was tearing our country apart.”

Although Marin County leaned Republican, the measure easily passed. Boxer had found her calling. Eventually she won a seat on the county Board of Supervisors, moving to the House in 1982 and the Senate 10 years later.

In Congress, Boxer’s efforts exposed the buried costs of $7,600 Air Force coffeepots and $600 toilet-seat covers.

Her skepticism extended to major weapons programs and to the 1983 invasion of Grenada and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

“I tried desperately to find another means to resolve the conflict,” she said of the Gulf War, suggesting that the U.S. failed to exhaust all diplomatic attempts to chase Iraq from Kuwait.

Today’s circumstances are different, Boxer insisted. “This was an attack on us,” she said of the terrorist assaults. “We’re acting out of self-defense.”

She likened the situation to World War II, when the Nazis liquidated Jews and others based on their religion or ethnicity. On Sept. 11, she said, anti-American zealots killed people who did nothing more than show up for work or a scheduled flight.

“I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do everything I could to stop that from happening again,” Boxer said.

She said she respects those who oppose war--any war--on principle. “I hope you understand me,” Boxer said. “My highest responsibility is the safety of the people that I represent. The safety of the children, so they’re not going to be subjected to bombs exploding in our streets. Period. That’s it.”

Nadler’s Turning Point

Jerrold Nadler was at the dinner table when he lost faith in President Lyndon B. Johnson. It was April 28, 1965.

The lead story on the 6 o’clock news was the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, an effort to prop up its anti-communist government. Nadler, a high school senior, was shocked.

His disenchantment only deepened with growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

“I thought it was a waste of lives,” he said. “It was not in the national interest of the United States to spend lives and treasure as to whether the Communists or nationalists ruled Vietnam. . . . That was their affair.”

Exempt from the draft because of asthma, Nadler enlisted in the peace movement. He became a leader of protests at Columbia University and, in 1968, organized support for the presidential campaign of Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose strong showing in the New Hampshire primary prompted Johnson to abandon his hopes for reelection.

After several years as a legislative staffer, Nadler was elected to the New York Assembly in 1976. In 1992, he went to Congress.

His Manhattan-area district, which includes the World Trade Center site, is one of the most liberal in the country.

He cuts against popular opinion, however, when it comes to the Sept. 11 attacks. His phone calls and e-mails have been running 3 to 1 against military action, though Nadler suspects that at least some of the sentiments are part of a campaign orchestrated outside the district.

His stance “doesn’t mean I believe we have to bomb everybody or everything,” Nadler explained. “But with a whole set of people who have murder in their hearts toward us and an ability to carry it out . . . we can’t kid ourselves.”

Vietnam never threatened America, Nadler said. “These

people do.”

Kerry: Vet and Protester

John Kerry said he volunteered to fight in Vietnam and then returned home to oppose the war for the same reason: patriotism.

His Brahmin background and private school education made him an unlikely volunteer. His three Purple Hearts and Silver and Bronze stars made him an improbable agitator.

But Kerry began to turn against the war in 1968, during his first tour of duty, when he saw “the language barriers, the cultural barriers” between Americans and their supposed South Vietnamese allies. “I saw the inconsistencies and the contradictions and some of the betrayals firsthand,” Kerry said.

Upon his return, Kerry gained national attention as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

In 1972, Kerry made an unsuccessful try for the House. Ten years later he was elected Massachusetts lieutenant governor. In 1984, he won a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Kerry has favored free trade and active engagement overseas. He pushed for normalization of U.S. relations with Vietnam.

Kerry opposed military involvement in Central America and voted against the Persian Gulf War. He said he supported the goal of ousting Iraq from Kuwait but believed that the nation’s leaders had not done enough to ensure that “when it got tough, the country would be there.”

Now, however, the fight against terrorism has galvanized citizens in a way unseen in decades.

“We have been attacked at a cost of life larger than any seen in this country since the Civil War,” Kerry said. “These [terrorists] are people who clearly will stop at nothing.”

Still, a distinct note of caution creeps in when Kerry speaks of how exactly to prosecute a war on terror.

“We can’t just start killing civilians,” or make short-term calculations at the expense of longer-range interests, he said.

Nor, he went on, should Washington ignore the voices of today’s skeptics, who challenge the prevailing wisdom the way Vietnam War protesters questioned the conventional thinking of their day.

“One of the lessons of the period is [that] we better be listening to people,” Kerry said. “We better be open to dissent.”