About a month before Pope Francis’ election, you wrote an op-ed in The New York Times titled “New Pope? I’ve Given Up Hope.” Then the cardinals elected Francis. Are you feeling a little better now? Christian Appy, an accomplished historian of the Vietnam period, is a model case of what can be done with clear sight and commitment. Appy, who lectures at the University of Massachusetts, takes as his topic not Vietnam per se. To put it precisely, his books concern the consequences of the war for the American consciousness—or, as he put it in the interview that follows, “the broad question of the war’s impact on us as a culture and a people.”
To take on this topic is to map a certain kind of tragedy. And with “American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity,” his new book, Appy declares himself a leading cartographer of the Vietnam era. This is psychological terrain, over which American thinking advanced—not truly the word—from the hubris of the 1950s to the desperate escalations of the ’60s to the defeat of the ’70s and on to the denial syndrome of the 1980s and beyond.
One reads this era differently by way of Appy’s work. Beyond Reagan’s famous faceoff with the “evil empire,” Star Wars and all the rest, for instance, he licensed Americans to avoid the truth of defeat and recast themselves as the Vietnam war’s victims, so entering upon the hyperpatriotism that has since prevailed. Appy lights the long, strange trip.“Reagan gave Americans psychological permission to forget or mangle history to feel better about the country,” Appy said in an e-mailed remark after we met.
Among much else, what comes through in “American Reckoning” is the immense opportunity we missed post-1975. Defeat being the mulch of renewal, we forwent its many rich lessons when we flinched from it. We still live with this, of course. In this respect, Appy’s book about the Vietnam era is a book about us, now, amid all our nearly congruent messes.
What did we make of ourselves as we waged war in Indochina, and what has since become of us? These are Appy’s questions. He is an excellent guide through a kind of sentimental history, not least because he lived the Vietnam years and possesses that ’60s consciousness still recognizable to some of us but another country to many.
I met Appy on a late-winter’s day at his home in Amherst. This is a lightly edited transcript of our exchange.
As I read “American Reckoning” it seemed to be four things, and I moved from one to another and then back and forth between them. It is a psychiatric study of Americans after Vietnam, and then an attack on exceptionalism, and then a treatise on the dynamic between memory and forgetting, and then a chronology of what amounts to a national neurosis born of a process of denial that began on April 25, 1975, the date I assign the fall of Saigon—or its rise, as I think of it. How do you describe the book?
It’s all of those things, but, in addition, the ambition was an act of recovery. Historical recovery. I was most interested in trying to recover what I would call the great awakening of the 1960s. Not a religious awakening but a political awakening, which challenged every kind of authority, including the war-making in Vietnam—which in my mind, even as a young kid, struck me as very positive. I thought it would change us forever for the better, naively. The other recovery I thought we needed because of the historical post-Vietnam amnesia that you alluded to is trying to recover a sense of that—now we are talking about religion—deep, fervent faith in American exceptionalism, the idea that we’re always a force for good in the world, a beacon, a supporter of democracy, freedom and human rights. Of course, that really explodes in the ’60s, this fundamental challenge to the [exceptionalist] concept. It struck me that it’s not just sort of left-wingers who think it was broken apart by Vietnam. I quote Henry Kissinger early in the book as mourning the death [of the idea].
Henry says remarkable things sometimes, doesn’t he?
He does. This was the big casualty we’re most worried about. Not the 3 million Vietnamese or 58,000 Americans. So that, along with what you’re saying, the book’s an effort to document and assess the ways Vietnam came gradually into the American consciousness after World War II and how our views changed quite radically through the ’60s, and then how the memory of the war gets repackaged in a way that’s much more palatable for American sensibilities.
This word “revelation” caught me as I read, Vietnam as a moment of revelation. Was a certain self-revelation inevitable at some point, given the arc of American history since 1898 or, depending on how you’re counting, Jackson’s Indian wars or the “self-and-other” paranoia of the 18th century? Was America fated to come face to face with itself one way or another? I suppose the question is, What’s the larger context of Vietnam?
We might have expected that the idea of American exceptionalism would’ve crashed and burned much earlier.
It keeps popping back up like one of those inflatable dolls with a weight in its foot.
Of course, it has been around with us for centuries. There was the famous sermon aboard the Arbella in 1630 as the British sailed into Boston Harbor, in which John Winthrop said, “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of the world are upon us.”
So it started then?
It’s often marked as the origin of the thought. But the conquest of the continent, displacement of native people, an aggressive war against Mexico, the history of slavery, the counter-insurgency in the Philippines and many other moments in our history—all of it evoked criticism and resistance. There has been a narrative of dissent throughout our history. But nothing quite challenged the [exceptionalist] idea as the ’60s did in the Vietnam context.
Do we want to say that the American story, fully and honestly developed, is a story of unresolved identity? I mean, our identity consists of an ever-unresolved identity as to who we truly are? It’s there from 1630 onward, and it doesn’t get much earlier.
One indication of how profound the revelatory aspects of the 1960s were is that it in the historical profession the period generated this re-questioning of every part of our history. There were some progressive historians going back a hundred years who had already started that process, but in many ways—I studied in the ’70s and consider myself a beneficiary of all the thinking that was generated in the ’60s. There was a whole new approach to doing history (which very quickly became a cliché), that we should do history from the bottom up and that everybody’s history counts.
I take it you consider this profound identity crisis unresolved. It is resolvable?
I’m not that optimistic that it’s going to be resolved soon.
Can I backtrack briefly? My earlier point was that our identity may be a people who live eternally with an identity crisis.
Yes, I agree, I like the phrase: Our identity is to have an identity crisis. To resolve it requires us to dispense with this idea of American exceptionalism. It’s very dangerous. First, because it is not substantiated by the historical record. Second, because it creates more animosity in the world than it does friends. It’s completely annoying to the rest of the world. And third, the effort to maintain a military basis for the claim has us all over the globe with nearly 1,000 military bases and is unsustainable economically. But for the idea behind all this to go—that’s a tricky matter. I think Americans have the capacity to be self-critical. If you ask Americans, “What do you think of public schools?” for example, they could be super critical. “What do you think of our roads and bridges?” “What do you think of Congress?” Approval ratings lower than 10 percent.
But you can’t find this on the foreign side.