The 30th anniversary of the communist conquest of Vietnam invites reflection. The anniversary comes in the wake of an American presidential election that was all but consumed by questions of the war. The thing that struck us about the just-ended campaign is that, while Senator Kerry eventually emerged against the war in Iraq – as these columns predicted he would – and while he cloaked himself in the aura of a veteran of the riverine war in the Mekong Delta, he never focused on his opposition to the war in Vietnam itself. Oh, he said he was proud to have opposed the war, though he indicated he overstated some elements of his criticism in his notorious testimony before the Senate in April of 1971. But he never really carried that argument forward. It was in his service in the war, not in his collaboration with the antiwar movement, that he sought to cloak himself.

We have a theory about why this is so. It has to do with the notion of which Lincoln spoke, about how one can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. Eventually, the people are going to figure it out, for Americans are, as a group, smarter than any one of their leaders. And our theory is that the way history has worked out, Americans have long since come to realize that we were, at the end of the day, on the right side in Vietnam. Our cause was just. The enemy’s cause was unjust. Its boasts were false. Its backers have been defeated, and its survivors are craving for the blessings of the capitalist system that the enemy insisted, during the war, was on the wrong side of history.

It is true that there are still those – and their numbers are large – who are invested in the notion that there was no meaning to our expedition in Indochina, that war “then, as now,” as the New York Times put it in an editorial back in 2001, seemed to lack any rationale except the “wrecking of as many lives as possible on both sides.” But the numbers in that camp are diminishing now, for in the years since the war, the light of history has illuminated a different landscape. The war is more clearly than ever visible as a part of the long, twilight struggle against a vast communist advance. Millions died in the lands that communism conquered, while millions of those who could escape fled for their lives. We are only now entering the period when the meaning of the war will be retrieved for those who lost sight of it and will be taught to the next generations.