Who got the United States out of Vietnam?
It wasn't the naive children crusaders who supported anti-war
candidate Eugene McCarthy in the snows of the 1968 New Hampshire
primary, nor was it the demonstrators who flocked to Chicago
that summer to wreck the Democratic convention. It wasn't
even the rioters who disrupted the tranquility of too many
campuses by screeching "Hell no! We won't go!"
The political leaders who extricated American forces from
the Vietnam War, men like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger,
came of age during the Great Depression and World War II.
Indeed, most of the political, media and academic elites
who fostered substantive changes and socio-political progress
in the '60s and '70s were men and women educated in the
1940s and 1950s. By contrast, the "turn on, tune in,
and drop out" revelers of the 1960s were children playing
at revolution -- with an emphasis on "playing."
For today's radical left, comprised largely of graying or
balding remnants of those campus revelers of yesteryear,
the bad news is the current anti-war movement reflects a
whiter shade of pale. Here is why:
First, while young people fueled the fires of the anti-war
movement, the draft ignited that fuel. By 1969, two-thirds
of college males were selecting academic majors leading
to draft-exempt career fields. Furthermore, as graduate
programs in universities and seminaries expanded, accommodating
administrators lowered academic standards, opening their
doors even wider to as many draft-dodging young men as possible.
For the American academy the result was a generation of
scholarly decline as curricula forsook traditional academic
subjects for courses more attuned to multi-cultural, gender
and class-oriented themes. On the American religious scene
there followed a 40-year membership decline in mainline
Protestant denominations where church leaders -- seminarians
of the '60s -- seemed more concerned with pushing "progressive"
issues like gay ordination and women's reproductive rights
than with presenting the gospel.
Second, the current student body differs markedly from that
of the '60s. Women constitute a majority of today's undergraduate
cohort, especially in the liberal arts. Male students, more
concerned with future career aspirations, tend to practical
majors in business, engineering and the hard sciences. Across
American academe as graduate programs in the liberal arts
shrink, new offerings in subjects associated with national
security studies and intelligence analysis expand.
Third, the Vietnam anti-war movement started small in early
1965 with teach-ins and then mushroomed into massive demonstrations
by the decade's end, its growth driven by the rapid escalation
of American involvement and rising draft quotas.
By contrast, the current anti-war movement started large
then rapidly dwindled.
One big reason is the absence of any threat of conscription.
"Hell no! You won't go!" (currently expressed
as "Bring the troops home now!") doesn't hack
it when America's best and brightest fill the ranks of our
all-volunteer military. Furthermore, the left's continuing
insistence on its "support for the troops" echoes
of nothing so much as the proverbial skin of a lie stuffed
with a reason.
Fourth, while the moniker "war on terror" lacks
strategic precision, most Americans understand the vicious
nature of those Islamist terrorists who murdered 3,000 innocent
people on 9/11. The reasons for fighting this war are much
more apparent than were those ill-defined objectives offered
by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Furthermore,
while some trendy 1960s academic lefties waxed eloquent
about the Viet Cong constituting the "moral equivalents
of our founding fathers," only the most jaded adherent
to "America-as-behemoth" world view could dismiss
the pernicious evil motivating terrorists who bellow "Allah
Akbar" while slaughtering their victims.
Where have all the flower children gone? For the most part,
after turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, we grew up,
prospered, and got old and now are headed for retirement
communities in our high-end sedans and sports utility vehicles.
For most of us, "we support the troops" does not
constitute a preamble to anti-war statements. Rather, we
support the troops because we know how important it is for
good people to stand firm against evil. It seems a significant
number of our children and grandchildren understand that
as well.
Dr. Earl Tilford is professor of history and fellow for
the Middle East and terrorism with the Center for Vision
& Values at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. As a
graduate student at the University of Alabama in 1968, Tilford
"came clean for Gene" then in 1969 began service
as an Air Force intelligence officer by volunteering to
serve in Vietnam. He later earned his Ph.D. in military
history at George Washington University. Currently he is
writing a book titled "Peace Now ... Roll Tide, Ya'll:
A History of the University of Alabama from George Wallace's
Stand in the School House Door to the Anti-War Riots of
May 1971."
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