Loon - Jack McLean [92]
We have from this war corporals and captains who may stand on equal elevation with their peers who trod upon the beaches of Normandy—the purpose was to serve. The shame, the bitterness, and the disgust we must feel is for our country which year after year after year ignored its people, betrayed its conscience, and grossly miscalculated its ego by using force, terror, and unprecedented belligerence, while trying to impose a way of life and government that abhors these very same things.
We must publicly proclaim our national guilt. We made a mistake. Is it so shameful to admit that we are human beings?
Rather than sulk in our mire as this nightmare painfully ebbs outward with the tide, we must learn to rule by example. Our books, our minds, our resources are for the world to admire and share if we keep our own house in order and our own sense of rightness and grandeur in perspective.
May we never again forcibly impose with grenades and guns and grand young sons what we tried to impose upon the people of South Vietnam.
Love,
Jack
29
THE THREE WEEKS BEFORE CLASSES BEGAN BECAME infamously marked in American history. On August 8, 1968, Richard M. Nixon successfully overcame challenges from former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and former California governor Ronald Reagan to gain the Republican nomination for president during the party’s quadrennial convention held in Miami Beach. The following evening, Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland accepted the nomination for vice president. Both would eventually resign in disgrace, victims of their own dishonesty and the ongoing war in Vietnam.
On August 20, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia with more than two hundred thousand troops, putting an end to the so-called Prague Spring, and began a period of enforced and oppressive “normalization.”
On August 26, while the Democratic party reluctantly nominated Hubert H. Humphrey for president at its convention in Chicago, thousands of students outside the hall were noisily protesting the war in Vietnam and the inability of the American political process to stop it.
Without provocation, the Chicago police stormed the crowd, injuring more than one hundred people before a live worldwide television audience. The protesters were chanting “The whole world is watching” for the international media that was filming. The following day, while speaking at a news conference, Mayor Richard Daley uttered the malapropism that became a symbol of the times: “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.” Daley was such an unwittingly galvanizing force that the statement perhaps defined the moment when opposition to the war in Vietnam became institutionalized in the United States.
Memorial Hall is one of the older structures on the Harvard University campus. It is a cavernous edifice of dubious architecture that was built in 1878 to commemorate those Harvard alumni who died (for the Union) during the Civil War. It was being used this day as a center for freshman registration.
The entrance hall was huge, drafty, and dimly lit. Upon its dingy old paneled walls were engraved the names of the dead, arranged by order of graduating class. This was the first war memorial that I had seen since returning. I wondered if Sid or Snowball would ever have their names carved on a memorial. I hoped so, but it didn’t seem likely. Those dead inscribed on memorials were older—our parents’ age or older—not kids like us. Besides, our war wasn’t like World War II or the other big ones. There didn’t seem to be any sentiment to remember those who’d died in Vietnam.
It became increasingly obvious during my brief month back that Vietnam was not a war Americans would choose to celebrate in the grand tradition of the great wars. Would Harvard later commission a noted architect to design a monument such as this to the sacrifice of her grand young sons who had served in Vietnam? It seemed unlikely.
Indeed, few sons of Harvard