If one peruses a timeline <HYPERLINK HERE> of 1960s America, one is immediately taken aback by the rapidity of tragic, and alb

III. A Godawful War It Was

Those who lived during the 1960s gradually witnessed a nation torn apart over the war effort. Unlike World War II, generally considered a ‘good’ war, and even unlike Korea, Vietnam quickly became unpopular. When it was obvious that the Lyndon Johnson administration had little idea about what it was doing and where it was going in Vietnam, it was only a matter of time before war draftees began resenting what the government was compelling them to do. The war was clearly a failure politically, and as a result, militarily. Dual failures led to frustrations, and eventual rage on the cultural home front. Universities became bastions of protest movements. Never before had America witnessed such an earth-shattering movement against the government.

The panoply of books published since then show this to be the case. Robert Dallek and Robert Caro’s books on Johnson prove how anguished the president was over the war and over his own vilification. Dallek’s most recent book on John F. Kennedy also aims to show how Kennedy realized Vietnam was a quagmire in the making, and he argues that Kennedy would likely have not committed additional troops had he been re-elected in 1964 (reversing an earlier assessment on Kennedy many years ago). Johnson, on the other hand, continued to expand the war despite his inner inclination to not become entangled. Historians today agree that it was the wrong war to wage, and that the United States underestimated the North Vietnamese’s staunch nationalism, their war experience, and their commitment to victory. Americans, it is known now, also exaggerated the Soviet Union’s influence on the North Vietnamese communists. In all, it was a horrible chapter that epitomized the anger and frustration of the 1960s. It was a damaging experience, as historian William Chafe states:

There is no way to assess accurately the incalculable damage done to the Vietnam, America, or international stability as a result of the war…. The wounds go deep and will live for generations – certainly through the lifetimes of all those who were there, and the children and grandchildren who must live with the legacy of what transpired.3

What did transpire was an aura of defeat in an era of American hubris, overconfidence, and a genuine, but fierce determination to stanch the spread of communism. The nation indeed “seemed to come apart as, one blow after another, it reeled from psychic and emotional wounds unprecedented in the modern era,” says Chafe. “With the media heightening the impact of each event…many Americans felt that the very fabric of their society was becoming unraveled, and that forces of destruction and violence were in ascendancy. No one could tell whether a different history might have resulted had these events not occurred. But those who might have been leaders in that history were now dead, and those who believed in them were crushed by the reality that they were no longer present to provide leadership, direction, and vision.”4

Thus, with the youth disillusioned, and adults just as confused by the course of events, it was only a matter of time before people would realize that a new outlook, and fresh start was necessary. Nixon promised this in his inaugural address in 1969, but his own indiscretions, would come to haunt him and the nation in just a short span of time. The early-mid 1970s would be just as painful as the 1960s, though there were signs of progress (Nixon did not entirely abolish Johnson’s liberal leaning Great Society efforts, but in fact augmented them, contrary to what had been expected of him. And, he moved to end the Vietnam War, this despite increasing the bombing while de-escalating; in hindsight, so typical of Nixon’s contradictory nature). As Bruce Schulman states in a recent book on the 1970s, the transitional years between the war’s end and the new administrations, were every bit as difficult:

Many Americans sensed that the nation had entered a period of decline. No longer able to lead the world, the U.S. could no longer even find its own way at home. These intimations of decline were everywhere to be heard and seen in the early 1970s – as the war ground to defeat, as the Watergate cover-up unraveled, as the Arab oil embargo humiliated a seemingly impotent nation, as the economy worsened. Even those who could not point to specific political events like the war or the scandal felt that something had passed – that the American Century, however abbreviated, had ended.5

The 1970s would remain stagnant and it would take some sobering to quell the anxious specters within the very delicate American psyche. The first of a countless number of memorials to the Vietnam era would be one of the first catalysts in the healing process. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, also known as The Wall, in Washington, D.C. would certainly help assuage the longtime wounds of the war. The Wall, in a sense has become the primary site of memory Americans use to place the anguish and distress of the 1960s to rest. Few other locales encapsulate this one-of-a-kind memorial that is both somber and yet, surprisingly, very promising.

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3 William H. Chafe. The Unfinished Journey – America Since World War II (second edition). Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 228.

5 Bruce Schulman. The Seventies – The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. The Free Press, 2001, 318 pp.