I think even in foreign policy Americans tend to be more dovish than our leaders. Even there we can be critical, if we’re not indifferent. That is something to come back to: Why there isn’t more outrage. But when you ask Americans still if it is the greatest country on earth, you get a big majority saying yes. I think people want us to be exceptional. I think people want us to live up to our ideals, so it’s not necessarily just a kind of careful objective or empirical analysis of things as they are but what people want them to be.
I want to talk about memory and forgetting. You mention the great forgetting, and we are the world’s champion forgetters at this point. How do you see that? What do you see as the causes and, more important, the consequences?
One of the things historians of memory always say is that remembering is also forgetting because when you remember one thing you are displacing or forgetting another. So we, in the decades after 1975, found a way to remember the war that displaced many of its most troubling aspects and substituted one kind of mourning for another.
There was a kind of national mourning, but it was all about what came to be known as “an American tragedy.” This allowed us to stop thinking so much about what we actually did in and to Vietnam and to lick our own wounds and think about the ways that it had divided us—all those things people like Ronald Reagan said the war had hurt, if not destroyed: our natural pride, our international prestige and most of all our power.
There was a kind of reconstruction project, and much of it took place at the level of memory and public discourse about the past. It’s amazing how successful that project was. Of course, memory can’t be defeated or completely erased. There is a legacy of dissent that continues in these decades. There is certainly an incredible proliferation of literature, much of it expressing dissenting viewpoints, but at the broad level of collective or public memory, this epic event gets reduced to a tiny set of images. Most of them focused on the American combat soldier. Some small unit of Americans walking through very menacing and dangerous jungle environments and endangered, physically and psychologically. That’s a way of worrying about what the war did to us, particularly to our own soldiers. I still have students who grew up persuaded that maybe the most shameful thing about the war was the way we treated returning veterans. That’s a classic example of how we transformed [Vietnam] into an American tragedy.
It’s complicated question because we didn’t treat them well, but it’s hardly the most shameful thing about the war, and I think that’s your point.
Right. And what needs to be pointed out is the most shameful abuser of veterans was the government itself, for having first of all lied to everyone, including soldiers, about the war’s origins and conduct and the realities of Vietnam, and when they came home failing to provide the kind of support and services that had been offered to earlier generations of veterans.
What are the consequences of this form of remembering and forgetting? Do you know this quotation from Ernest Renan in “What Is a Nation”? “A nation is a people who remember certain things together and also forget certain things.” Vietnam seems to me a rather outsized occasion for forgetting with, for my money, extremely large consequences, since we’re living with these consequences. What’s your take on this?
The most obvious and dangerous consequence is that after 9/11, we embarked on a set of open-ended and apparently endless wars with amazing parallels to Vietnam. Once again, we embarked on wars under false pretexts in far-away countries where our military was perceived as an unwelcome foreign invader in defense of governments that didn’t have popular support, and there’s no successful conclusion. Since we formally left Iraq in December 2011, we’ve gone off to other places by way of drone warfare, and now we’ve even gone back into Iraq. The very enemies who weren’t there to begin with are there because of our interventions.
And you read this from your corner as a direct consequence of our failure to recall the war?
I do. History has no clear lessons and they’re always contested, but there is what we didn’t learn from the experience. And what we did learn were unfortunately the wrong lessons at the highest levels. But, again, I think the public is not entirely blameless because we do, to the extent that we still adhere to this idea of America as “indispensable,” to take Madeleine Albright’s phrase, and a force for good in the world. We still hang on to this, and it allows us to acquiesce as the war-makers continue.
I suppose the real question here is whether we should look at Vietnam singularly or as the logical or illogical outcome of, again, our arc of history, our stance, let’s say since 1898.
The origins of the modern American empire are deeper than Vietnam, for sure. We’ve been building it for 75 years. I think it begins with World War II.
Do you? I’d put it to the Spanish-American War.
Well, that’s why I said “the modern American empire.” Clearly, the real American empire begins much earlier than 1898. We did actually rethink things in an interesting way after World War I. The public and even a significant number of people in places of power really begin to doubt whether that war was a legitimate American intervention. But with the legacy of World War II, what was taken out of that and launched us on to the present was this notion that we had stood by while fascism was on the rise [in the 1930s]. The lesson policy makers took from that was that never again should aggression be allowed to spread without our intervening. Even after the Cold War this continues. We look forward with this unquestioned idea that we must be the world’s hegemon and, if we don’t take that role, chaos and disorder will ensue. To the extent we continue to assert imperial power, we’re unable truly to look forward—or backward—and we create more disorder and animosity.
We cannot see that.
We don’t seem to see it. I don’t think you can be a part of the foreign-policy machine and the tiny elite that conducts policy unless you buy into this assumption—that we really are a necessary force for good.
I’ve constructed a sort of psychological progression within the frame of your book. We had defeat in April ’75. We had, with Carter, a half-hearted effort to accept defeat and reflect constructively. While Carter got shouted down, I’m convinced he’ll have his revisionist historian one day. He wasn’t the milquetoast we were supposed to think he was.
Yes, there was that famous speech he gave.
“The malaise speech” you note in the book.