Late on a Friday afternoon in the dead of August in 1967, Lyndon Johnson went to East Room of the White House for a press conference he had to have known would involve questions about Vietnam. That war had already turned bad, but the commander in chief was nothing if not resolute and certain of his purpose.
"Our policy in Vietnam is the same: We are there to deter aggression," he declared. He went on to praise the efforts of the South Vietnamese to become a free people outside the evil grip of the Communist North: They were on the verge of elections; freedom was on the march, and the United States, in advance of its own interests and affirmation of its higher purpose, was going to make sure they succeeded. "It is remarkable that a young country, fighting a tough war on its own soil, has moved so far so fast toward a representative government," the president marveled.
Johnson declared his intention to stay the course: "So far as this government is concerned," he said, "our policy has not changed. It remains the same. We are steadfast in our determination to make our pledges good, to keep our commitments, and to resist the attempts to take over this country with brute force."
We are well aware of how those pledges and commitments turned out, and how we eventually survived the whole episode. Despite the sense of loss most Americans of a certain age feel about Vietnam, the relationship between the two countries is almost fully repaired. George W. Bush has been to Vietnam as president of the United States; the Vietnamese president has been to Washington and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is now an emerging economic dynamo on the world stage.
Thirty years later, another war time president would seek to reassure the American people. Telling them that despite their grave misgivings about a controversial war abroad, his considered and unshakable judgment was that American honor was on the line and he intended to vindicate it. "In Iraq, our moral obligations and our strategic interest are one," President Bush told an audience in Kansas City this week.
Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, a lot of time and effort has gone into convincing us that this conflict bears no relationship to Vietnam. The president has dismissed Vietnam as a "political war" saying that he does not share the widespread view that it was a military failure.
This week of course, all of that changed when he lamented in Kansas City that Vietnam was a "complex and painful subject for many Americans." The speech is notable now already famous for the many historical analogies deployed in defense of the current Iraq strategy -- the war against the Japanese, the fight against Hitler, the face-off with North Korea, and of course Vietnam.
The president even raised the specter of Alden Pyle, the protagonist of Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," whom Bush described as "a symbol of American purpose and patriotism -- and dangerous naiveté."
The president's point is that premature withdrawal from Iraq would result in a disaster like we saw in Southeast Asia after U.S. troops left Saigon. "… One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens." There is no denying the ugliness that followed the U.S. exit from Vietnam, particularly in Cambodia.
But Bush is drawing the wrong lessons. Once the forces of terror and genocide were unleashed in Southeast Asia, we were powerless to contain them again. Our military might and political will were not up to the task and in the end the carnage would simply run its course with horrible consequences, followed by a decades-long period of painful healing and rehabilitation. It's hard to imagine how we avoid that fate in Iraq.
The more apt lessons to be drawn from Vietnam, however, are not about how to get out, but the caution with which you should approach getting in. That moment, alas, has passed.
During that 1967 press conference LBJ was asked about one family who had lost a son in Vietnam and had publicly rejected the president's note of sympathy: They called the war senseless. That is a hard tide to hold back once it starts to roll in.
Today Bush faces the same kind of visceral rage from families of those killed in action. First it was Cindy Sheehan's Camp Casey outside his Crawford home. Then the day before his Kansas City speech, the local section of the Washington Post carried a story about a young soldier, Sgt. Princess C. Samuels, who was killed a week earlier in Iraq.
Noting the recent happy news coming out of the White House, Stg. Samuel's mother, Anika Lawal, reacted angrily: "I want to know why I'm planning a funeral while George Bush is planning a wedding?"
There is no reasonable answer to that question: It is not a reasonable question. But it speaks to the desperate, collective yearning for an answer on Iraq that has developed among most Americans. We want some satisfactory explanation of how we got here and how we get out.
In that hot summer 30 years ago, Johnson said that, of course, he understood the family's grief: "I just wished that it was possible for me have enough time to sit down and express the gratitude this nation feels for the service of the young men such as the one who belonged to this home," he said, " and perhaps give them a little better explanation of what we were doing there, and why."
Anika Lawal, and much of the rest of the country, would welcome such and explanation from the current commander in chief.
Terence Samuel last wrote about the connection between Iraq and Vietnam in May. He argued then that the true connection between the two wars was the erosion of public trust in their government.
