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By Root 383 0

” Only by stemming that erosion would it be possible to get national security policy back on track. Humphrey, the former vice president who had returned to the Senate, bemoaned the fact that after Vietnam so many Americans “seem afflicted with syndromes of self-condemnation over our past mistakes and self-pity over what we perceive as a lack of appreciation.”28 The United States may have overreached in Vietnam, but people needed to pull up their socks and move on. David Abshire of the Center for Strategic and International Studies urged “a true dialogue on foreign policy out of which can emerge a new and sound consensus.”29 To reassure confused and angry Americans, elites in Washington needed to reconstitute a bipartisan image of confidence and self-assurance.

For his part, Lake warned against the possibility that the United States might succumb to a “mean-spirited foreign policy,” reminiscent of the period between the world wars. He worried that “a Vietnam analogy” could “amend or replace the Munich analogy,” with Americans concluding “that the United States should avoid foreign wars not by nipping them in the bud, but simply by staying out of them.”30

Until Vietnam intruded, had U.S. national security policy since World War II consisted of nipping foreign wars in the bud? Only a true believer in the Washington rules, devoted to the proposition that American global preeminence had been and remained benign, essential, and irreplaceable, could think so. Yet there exists no reason to question Lake’s sincerity.

After Vietnam, the noisiest and most noxious of the 1960s revolutionaries gravitated to academe, eventually becoming “tenured radicals.” These devout leftists seized control of American colleges and universities and severely compromised the quality of American higher education—this at least is the perception that persists, even today, among devout right wingers.

Yet even if we stipulate for the sake of argument that this is true, a mirror image of that process occurred in the realm of national security policy. With real, if by no means radical, change in the wind—amending or replacing the Munich analogy does not exactly qualify as storming the Bastille—defenders of the Washington rules rallied, intent on restoring consensus, control, and legitimacy. They quietly but firmly excluded from serious consideration views that smacked, however remotely, of being heretical. They dismissed the charge coming from the Vietnam War’s most vehement critics that the war itself testified to something essential (and essentially defective) about U.S. policy and American society—that Vietnam, in the words of Martin Luther King, had been “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”31

Members of the foreign policy establishment offered a carefully crafted interpretation of the war’s significance that served ultimately to demonstrate its insignificance. The conclusion was obvious: Revisiting or reassessing the core assumptions informing U.S. policy was simply unnecessary. Things went awry in Vietnam as a result of specific misjudgments and miscalculations, not deep-seated systemic flaws in the American way of life, in the American tradition of statecraft, or in the triad of principles guiding U.S. military policy: This defined their position.

The rebuttal, of which The Vietnam Legacy is an artifact, succeeded brilliantly. The defenders of the Washington rules achieved—and retain today—a level of mastery that “tenured radicals” on university campuses can only dream of.32 Indeed, the range of acceptable opinion in a typical faculty lounge is orders of magnitude greater than that which prevails in precincts where U.S. national security policy gets discussed and formulated.

So, in remarkably short order, Vietnam became enshrined as a one-off event. Briefly challenged during the 1960s, the conventions to which Washington remained devoted emerged unscathed. The precepts of American global leadership remained fixed. Even the Democratic Party—acutely burned by its association with Vietnam and presumably more sensitive to