Going through my "files" from my tenure as Editor of a short-lived DC weekly, Washington Newsworks, I came upon a letter I'd saved. It was a self-proclaimed "fan letter" that said: "I think your introduction to the recent special section on 'Amnesty and Amnesia' is one of the best pieces of its kind I've ever read." It was on Northern Virginia Community College stationery and signed Terry Alford.
It's very flattering no matter who sent it, and I didn't know the sender at all. But after looking at the letter on my desk the past week I finally got the idea of looking him up. Terry Alford turns out to be Professor of History Emeritus from NVCC, and a prominent US Civil War era scholar, the author of several books including the definitive biography of John Wilkes Booth. He was a consultant to Steven Spielberg on his film Lincoln. So, even better.
The occasion for this special section on the Vietnam war and the war against the war in the fall of 1976 was Jimmy Carter's proposal for a blanket amnesty for war protestors, so that those who fled to Canada could come home. Carter was then the Democratic candidate for President who was elected a few months later, and issued this amnesty.
If I hadn't run across this letter I may not have even re-read this essay, but I did, and then I did. My first impression this time was that I had outlined the conditions that, in four more years, would lead to the election of Ronald Reagan, and a sea change in American political culture that arguably has led to the sorry state we're in at the moment in 2025.
When I wrote this I didn't have the Jungian concept of "denial" in my head, and it certainly wasn't the near-cliche it has become. But without that concept the description of how it was working in America then regarding the Vietnam war gives a groping substance to the reflexive name of denial. So current attitudes towards climate distortion and Covid-19 become more explicable, if not less discouraging.
Vietnam, I wrote, "drove us to the edge of recognition," and apparently what it showed was too difficult to face--something that applies to climate distortion denial now. On the other hand, the idea that the 1970s were like the 1950s is heretical now--we have opposite and much too easy images of those decades. Tom Wolfe successfully dubbed it the Me Decade, and it certainly had more obvious excesses than the 50s. But you just have to read John Updike, John Cheever and other writers to realize the 50s had their own excesses that don't match the cliche of the sweet Eisenhower era when nothing happened and everybody was happy.
Another moment in the piece stands out to me now: I described the previous presidential election in 1972 between Richard Nixon (the winner) and George McGovern as a clear moral division, "and evil won." There have been several such elections since, including the last one, with the same outcome. Again, not encouraging.
Another reason I reprint this is that it contains probably my only published reflection on the experience of being against the war and of draft age, particularly in the late 1960s. It's only a brief description, but I don't think I got anything more in print, though I wrestled with the subject for years. The experience in general may not have been as unique as I say here, except in the number of young men involved, but it was in some respects particular.
A few minor historical references: "Lifeboat Ethics" refers to articles and a recent book by Garrett Hardin, mostly about the global population boom, suggesting that the "lifeboat" of Earth was getting so crowded that some people would have to be thrown overboard. Debate ensued. The reference to "Greening" was shorthand for the 1970 book by Charles Reich, The Greening of America, positing a new generation with the post-Organization Man "Consciousness III" of ecological values and other attitudes of the late 1960s counterculture.
I assume I don't have to explain disco music and the Hustle ( if in doubt, see Saturday Night Fever, which hadn't come out yet. But Washington, where it is said the 60s never happened, was an early adopter for the dressier disco culture.)
In the fall of 1976, Gerald Ford was President and the Republican candidate. One of the elements said to have doomed his reelection was his complete pardon of Richard Nixon, who had faced imminent Impeachment for a list of crimes historically associated with Watergate.
As for the Newsworks cover story on draft resistor Johnny Perrin who disappeared, he is still officially a missing person. The article suggests the FBI and/or CIA might have been implicated in his disappearance. The author of it later became a consultant on cyber threat strategies, whose clients included the CIA.
Vietnam is on our heads: a price, a bounty. The ghost of the war is the hunter now; it haunts us deeply, invisibly. Jimmy Carter wants to declare a general pardon, but like Ford's of Nixon, it leaves much unresolved, because there has been no trial, no examination. We just want to forget.
We may get long-overdue amnesty for antiwar exiles, but we will still suffer amnesia. The war was unpleasant and consuming. It is more pleasant to forget. It may even be a psychic necessity. We seem to be in a classic post-war period of frivolity and materialism.
Yet, this is not merely a time of healing and released: it is a retrenchment. Part of the war's effect was to intensify and pressurize what had been going on deep in the culture through the 60s. But with the war over and the pressure off, we have reverted. Society has been changed, but not that much; not as much as our forgetfulness would justify.
The language reflects the amnesia. No one speaks of alienation against the society of misplaced, ignoble values--nobody speaks of values at all. Once again, as in the fifties, our concern is adjustment, of making it instead of changing it. No one is throwing themselves in the gears of the machine anymore, but what is different about the War Machine except that at the moment it is not fighting a fully visible war?
We are in an era of fooling ourselves, denying responsibility, closing our eyes, being one of the crowd. Again. We aren't even fascinating anymore--nothing is "far out," not even Mars. The innocence of "Oh, wow!" has been replaced by the reinforced pragmatics of "really."
The dance of the 70s is called the Hustle. Perfect. We are all show and unexamined rituals of pseudo-materialism. Our ethics are Disco Ethics--hustle, jive: survive.
Of course, it is dangerous to slip back now. Disco Ethics makes way for Lifeboat Ethics, the abandonment of the rest of humanity, of our own humanity, while our greed drives us to panic. That's what was beginning in the Cold War 50s, and now it's back in somewhat more sophisticated form.
The war drove us crazy. It also drove us to the edge of recognition. What went wrong? Is Disco Ethics a direct reaction to Vietnam, a postwar fling into sensuality and cynicism? Or more--a frenzied realization, a repressed flight from the society we know we will have to become, one which we glimpsed slightly in the sixties, which will require more personal sacrifice, more intimacy?
Or did we give up the ghost of our new selves--admitting we weren't up to the Greening without our ego-trips, without devoting massive energies to repressing, or at least channelling and diffusing, the insanity we were opening into--of dealing directly with guilt and all the unattractive qualities we fear are buried in our hearts and minds?
Why have we given up on not only creating new forms and values, but of questioning old ones? We have abandoned the very concept of dissent.
We are all casualties now. The 70s are a decade without identity. The 50s surround us again. The pursuit of our society's material goods, once exposed as phony and a useless, self-destructive way to live, is no longer even questioned.
Now we face another presidential election, having progressed far enough that only abortion threatens Jimmy Carter--Amnesty and Acid, the rest of the trio that sunk McGovern, having become moot.
But have we really absorbed what the last election told America about itself? When there was a clear moral division, and America chose evil? That Nixon was elected because labor and the young stayed home, that the anti-war movement faded precisely when it was needed most, and thousands of people died because Nixon won? The Christmas bombing of 1969-70 is still on our heads. All the more because it was, like everything Nixon did, a tactic: he did it to keep his job. That is still the American excuse for everything.
The generation that fought both the war and the war against the war has not been fully heard. We need an amnesty that frees the facts of what happened to us, that focuses on the many effects sprung loose by what happened to us.
In this section we've tried to tell something of this. Viet Nam was a different kind of testing for a generation of young Americans. Thousands of young men discovered their manhood not in fighting but in refusing to be forced to fight. That is something new in American history, perhaps in the history of humankind. The Movement was partly responsible for changing the way women saw themselves, too; for they learned their own competence, felt their anger at often having only supportive roles in the war against the war. Ironically, their revolt has somewhat buried the meaning of what happened to the men of this generation, of their re-defined identities.
Those who fought the war against the war learned many things. As the stories collected here in"...The Unknown Soldiers" show, they learned about the comforts and insidiousness of the law; they learned how it can absorb, distort, and obsess, how it is only a battleground between those with most of the power and those with some. They learned about how class structure works in our flimsily democratized America; simply by how money, education and even geography made so many differences in fighting the draft.
Most importantly, it was a generation that had to confront moral choices and gauge effectiveness of actions: do I refuse induction and go to jail? Or to Canada? Is it fair to those who have to go to evade at all? Do I go into the army and draw the line at going to Viet Nam, or at combat? Do I refuse them my participation by any means--is the war against the war a guerilla war? These choices were endlessly discussed, debated, agonized over. Decisions were made--and these stories show how fixed those beliefs remain in some cases. But largely the decisions are forgotten, or mitigated now. The necessity--the very existence--of moral decision-making appears to be forgotten, which is the most dangerous symptom of the general amnesia.
The war within the war and the war against the war had their casualties, their wounded, their grief and pain. They had their POWs: the men who went to prison for their beliefs. They had their MIAs, like Johnny Perin, whose loss to their families is as painful and inexplicable as it is to the families of those lost in Viet Nam. John Perrin's story tells so much of what went on in so many lives, that we have devoted considerable length to it. It is a fascinating tale on its own, yet one rich with implications for the whole era.
The wars against the war also had their wounded and disabled--not just the physically scarred and burnt-out veterans of the Movement, but those in Canada who can't come home, or ever feel really at home here again; those whose wars with the draft prevent them now from being where they want to be in this society, either because of their records or simply because of their wounds.
There may be no quick healing of any of these wounds, for society or the individuals. But the cure is not forgetfulness. Not yet--not until the story has all been told, all the lessons truly learned, the facts admitted, the judgments made, and all the ghosts are laid to rest.
