Vietnam Yet Again: Thinking Honestly

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

Still thinking, thinking again, about Vietnam...thinking how much it still reveals about people, in their views of the war.

I'd asked a brother at church, who'd been in Vietnam, if he'd seen Ken Burns' documentary on the war.  He had, and said it focused too much on the Vietnamese, and on the Americans who protested the war, creating too much sympathy for them.

When people tell me things I find it hard to believe they believe, I usually listen quietly...because I'm too stunned to respond.  So I listened to him, as he continued with the claim I've heard many times: the protestors and the media made America lose the war.

I still find it incomprehensible that people believe that, or ever believed it.  That idea was put about by Richard Nixon, as his excuse to take any blame off himself for losing the war, simply because our part in the war (which he rightly saw as not a "victory") ended during his administration.  The historical record shows that Nixon had an abiding fear that he would be seen as "the first American President to lose a war:" he talked about that fear often, in public and (we know from the Watergate taps) in the privacy of the Oval Office.

Nixon shouldn't have worried.  There were many reasons the United States did not "win" the war in Vietnam: if by "win" we mean the United State stopping North Vietnam from reuniting the country under Communist rule.  None of those reasons originated with Nixon.

There were Vietnamese reasons America "lost" the war: the corruption of every South Vietnamese government the U.S. supported, for example, and Vietnamese nationalism.  There were American reasons: Robert McNamara later especially singled out the false "domino theory" thinking by which Presidents Kennedy and Johnson entered and conducted the war.

Nixon shouldn't have worried.  President Johnson and Robert McNamara, who'd had charge of conducting the war before him, had both privately come to the conclusion that the war couldn't be "won."  They were both aware that America was already "losing" the war when they turned it over to Nixon, so they could hardly have blamed him for the inevitable "defeat."

There's no honest reason to judge Richard Nixon "the first American President to lose a war," as he feared.  But the historical record shows that Nixon too, very early after he took charge of the war's conduct--if he didn't know it before--realized the war would not be "won," and could not be "won."  

So what should be our judgement, historical and moral, of a man willing that thousands of people die for no purpose but to protect his self-image ?

The claim that "the media and war-protesters caused America to lose the war" was likewise Nixon's hypocritical defense of his image.  Nixon knew, as did most of America, that the war would not and could not be "won:" but he needed a scapegoat to blame for the inevitable "defeat," lest he be seen as "the first American President who lost a war."

Nixon's reason for telling the lie is clear, and the historical evidence is clear that he knew it was a lie, when he told it.  What baffles me is why so many members of the "American public," the target of his deception, believed it.

What baffles me even more is why so many continue, long after Nixon's beyond telling them the lie, to deceive themselves to believe it ?  How do they do it ?  To believe that lie, people must convince themselves that except for "the media and anti-war protestors," the United States would have "won" the war in Vietnam: a premise that was in Nixon's time, and is even more clearly now, nothing short of delusion.

It all comes down to the same question I've wrestled with all my life: why do people believe a lie ?

The only answer I've ever been able to arrive at is "because they want to."

What seems to me the wisdom of that answer is that what a person most deeply wants shows who he most deeply is.  On Vietnam...or anything else...there are people who want to believe the truth, and people who want to believe a lie.

For anyone who takes seriously Jesus' identifying Himself as "The Truth" (John 14:6; and His identifying satan as "the father of lies" in John 8:44), what we want, truth or lie, is ultimately a spiritual question.  And it is the ultimate spiritual question.  Amen.