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Originally Posted by loquitur
the "spit" story is apocryphal, or at least it hasn't been documented. But Host, I was alive during that time and of news-watching age. There was plenty of abuse directed at returning soldiers that I remember quite well. And you're not that much different in age than I am.
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loquitur, my point is that it is not a black or white world. The "gray" is the color of clouds, and issues are always more clouded than many conservatives usually will consider or admit.
Do you remember the brutality of the Chicago police against peaceful protestors, members of the press, and innocent passersby at the 1968 Democratic party convention? The mindset of the country was literally torn apart in the Vietnam years. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, democrat and host of the '68 convention, was shocked by the comments of fellow democrat and senator Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut:
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NPR : Recalling the Mayhem of '68 Convention
Abraham Ribicoff interrupted his nomination of George McGovern and looked Mayor Daley straight in the eye. SOUNDBITE FROM 1968 BROADCAST Mr. ABRAHAM ...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=3613499 - Similar pages
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May15/1969 speaking to a news conference about clearing the protesters from the University of Califorina Campus, Gov. Ronald Reagan blurted.
"If its a blood bath, then let it be now."
May 3/1970 Republican Gov. of Ohio James Rhodes blurted.
"We're going to use every weapon possible to eradicate the problem."
<b>It was Gov. Rhodes Nat. Guard that killed 4 students at Kent State U. on that date....</b>
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Why do you suppose that the conservative "mantra" is similar to the sentiments that you posted, and I challenged....to the point that the phoney MIT"Study" that Mr. Fallows writes about, below, was drafted and touted?
Can you consider that the majority of the folks who served in Vietnam came from the working class that favored democratic candidates and policies/programs? That same party served up the Vietnam war, and many continued to be killed and wounded, even after Nixon was elected in '68 on the strength of his "secret plan", to end the war.
Clinton did not go to Vietnam, nor Bush, nor Cheney, nor Dan Quayle....but Al Gore did. If you were "college material", or your daddy had money and connections, you could "opt out" of going to Vietnam. The divide was about what it's always about.... class, money, influence, intellect.
You seem to want to make it about something else. The "left" were shot in small numbers, and had their heads clubbed open, in larger numbers, for protesting the war. Reagan's comments and actions were un-American, and inexcusable. Just because he has been elevated to "sainthood" by vast numbers of uninformed and nostalgic admirers, does not mean that he was a "great" man.
The "left" did not "let down" or villify "the troops" who served in Vietnam, any more or any less than Cheney did, via his excuse that he "had other priorities".
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http://archives.cjr.org/year/92/6/draft.asp
.....A few months after the fall of Saigon, Fallows wrote a memorable article called <b>"What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?"</b> Fallows, who starved himself to get a deferment, tallied his 1,200 Harvard classmates and found only fifty-six who had entered the military at all, and only two who had gone to Vietnam.......
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http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199304/class-war
The Atlantic Monthly | April 1993
Low-Class Conclusions
A widely reported new study claiming that all classes shared the burden of the Vietnam War is preposterous
by James Fallows
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I 'M waiting for someone to ask me what "sophistry" means. I'll pull out my copy of Operations Research magazine and say, "See for yourself!"
I'll be carrying the September-October, 1992, issue, and I'll point to an article called "America's Vietnam Casualties: Victims of a Class War?" The article was written by Arnold Barnett, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, and two recent graduates of the school, Timothy Stanley,and, Michael Shore. Operations Research is not a mass-circulation journal, and I am sure that most of the journalists who have written about this article never bothered to read what it actually said, as I'll explain in a moment. Still, the article is surprisingly important, for the impact it has already had on public discourse and for what it shows about the corruption of educated thought.....
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http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1227.html
Transcript for:
James Fallows on America
THINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG
#1409 James Fallows on America.
FEED DATE: April 13, 2006
James Fallows
Opening Billboard: Funding for this program is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.
WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Today we are joined by one of the most eclectic minds of journalism and editorial thinking in America: James Fallows. His topics have included Iraq, the market place, Japan, Vietnam, to just begin a long list. Today we are getting his general take on where America has been, where it is now, and where it is going. Fallows is the national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, chairman of the New America Foundation, and author of several books, including “Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine America Democracy”. The topic before the house: James Fallows on America, this week on Think Tank.
WATTENBERG: Welcome to Think Tank, Jim Fallows. You are a very interesting and eclectic man in American life and letters. Can you tell us a little bit about how you grew up and, mostly, what are the important events that you have covered or been involved in as an activist and what do you think about America?
FALLOWS: My personal story, in a very brief nutshell, is I grew up in Southern California. My parents were, sort of, working class people from Pennsylvania. My dad went to college and medical school thanks to the GI Bill. I was – went east to college at Harvard during the tumult of the late 1960s Vietnam War era. I sort of changed my political orientation then from a Reagan-supporter to a Vietnam War critic. I went to graduate school in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar shortly after Bill Clinton was there. But I met him soon after that. So I had known him in the early ’70s. And then I’ve worked mainly as a journalist since then, since the mid-1970s for a number of magazines, the Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly, Atlantic Monthly...
WATTENBERG: And a book author.
FALLOWS: Yes, I’ve written a number of books. The main stories and events, if I had to sort of tick off the things that have affected me, during college it was both working for a Civil Rights newspaper in Alabama and being sort of involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement was one. I worked for Jimmy Carter for two-and-a-half-years as a speechwriter...
WATTENBERG: So you’ve been on the ground.
FALLOWS: Yes.
WATTENBERG: You’ve had boots on the ground.
FALLOWS: I worked in politics one time. My argument there was that people who are going to be political journalists should work in politics once. Once rather than zero because you’ve done it. Once rather than more than once so that you’ve done it and you’re not going to go shuttling back and forth. I lived in Japan, in East Asia, through much of the 1980s. That was very important for me in sort of establishing how American I am in my roots and values. I’ve covered the military a lot. I think precisely because I’ve never been in the military myself. And, indeed, was deliberately avoiding service in Vietnam. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the realities in the military. I’ve covered technology a lot. I worked at Microsoft as a program designer for a while. And I like to spend time outside the U.S. since I’ve traveled to, I guess I could say, most countries of the world.
WATTENBERG: In some ways you have been a spokesman for at least a certain part of your generation. Although, as I say, very eclectic. Tell us about your refusal to serve in Vietnam. Because you’ve written about it.
FALLOWS: I was in college – started in 1966 and I graduated in 1970 – and for the last two or three years – a very clear memory of my freshman year at Harvard was Robert McNamara paying a visit to the Harvard campus. He was then secretary of defense. And it was the first real protest on the Harvard campus. And there was a kind of sense of shock in the fall of ’66. There was a sort of rudeness to the sitting secretary of defense and a friend of the Kennedy family, which was so important at Harvard. Two or three years after that it was just complete chaos there and at many other campuses in the country. When I was graduating in 1970 it was shortly after the Cambodian invasion, so there was no end to my senior year, so the school was called off while they reconvened people for graduation. And I was determined not to go to Vietnam, just because I was so much against the policies. It was going to be so ruinous for the country to be involved that way. And so – as I’ve written about in the Washington Monthly, there was the famous physical examination at the Boston Naval Yard, which they did by local draft boards: they had the Cambridge draft board, the Harvard and MIT kids, the Chelsea draft board, the white working class kids. All the Cambridge people had medical excuses. Mine was being too skinny. All the Chelsea people basically were sent on. And that was sort of the class division of the Vietnam War. So with complete retrospect, I would actually have refused rather than avoided.
WATTENBERG: Let me ask you about your refusal to serve in Vietnam. I mean, there were a number of arguments, one of which was that it was an immoral war. And not only did some of the people against it want - say we should get out, therefore, but wanted us to lose in a humiliating way so we would never do it again. And then there was another group that said it was the wrong war in the wrong place in the wrong time.
FALLOWS: I was in the camp saying this was a disaster for the United States. That it was, I think, it was originally well-intentioned, probably better-intentioned and more defensible in its beginnings than I would argue the current Iraq war is. But it just had become – certainly, by 1970 when this choice was sort of coming to me, Nixon had already announced that the U.S. was getting out. It was a question of sort of face-saving and the getting out period. And half the casualties were from that point onward. Half of the American casualties were from that point onward. And so, it just seemed to me, a disaster for the United States. And so that was the essence of my view, not immoral but a disaster.....
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