Connecticut and Vietnam

That’s some advertisement Linda McMahon has put up against Attorney General Blumenthal in the closing weeks of the race to succeed Senator Dodd. It resurrects the controversy that erupted over the attorney general’s penchant for suggesting he had served not only during the Vietnam war but “in Vietnam.” In fact he had served in the Marine Reserves, which is no small thing, but had never served in Vietnam. Mrs. McMahon’s advertisement runs footage that makes devastatingly clear the baldness of Mr. Blumenthal’s misstatements and concludes by posing the question: “If he lied about Vietnam, what else is he lying about?”

Mr. Blumenthal’s reserve service during Vietnam was completely honorable, but his dissembling was not. It was first raised in a front page story in the New York Times. At the time the newspaper noted that “many politicians have faced questions about their decisions during the Vietnam war” and that Mr. Blumenthal was not alone in staying out of the war. But “what is striking about Mr. Blumenthal’s record,” the Times reported at the time, “is the contrast between the many steps he took that allowed him to avoid Vietnam, and the misleading way he often speaks about that period of his life.”

Why is a man who, in Mr. Blumenthal, is one of the most liberal politicians in America feeling the need to be perceived as having served in Vietnam? After all, we can remember a time when the leftists on the very campus on which Mr. Blumenthal was educated were arguing that it was immoral, it was collaboration, to serve in Vietnam and that the more moral course was to avoid, or even dodge, the draft so as to not to have to carry a weapon against our communist foe. Two generations later the tide has long since turned against such views, and now even those who, like Mr. Blumenthal, wrote for the Nation magazine and maintained impeccable left-of-center credentials and sought to avoid overseas service by joining the reserves, even they suddenly feel the need to have appeared in arms in a war they once despised.

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This is a lesson to teach our children who are coming of age in a new war, one that is also the subject of great controversy. It is not a matter of whether our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen are welcomed home. Even with all the controversy in the current war, we have long since learned that lesson right down to our beer advertisements. Nor will this question be erased for the current generation by the fact that America is in the age of an all-volunteer army.* Connecticut lost 612 men in Vietnam, and the urge to honor them has been intensifying, rather than diminishing, with the passage of time. It may be that Mr. Blumenthal will win his senate seat. But a race that was supposed to be a walk is now too close to call, and it is something to think that the pretense to glory of an aging left-wing Democrat who yearns to be counted among those who, two generations ago, served in Vietnam, that this could be the issue that brings him down in a race with a Connecticut mother who comprehended the meaning of it all better than he did.

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* The only member of Congress who has been pressing persistently for a return to the draft is Charles Rangel.