Good Morning, Vietnam
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Everyone has a theory about the election. Some say it was about Iraq. Others insist the election was about the economy, President Bush’s tax cuts, and Senator Kerry’s warning about jobs. Still others claim the election was about gay marriage, which was on the ballot in 11 states. And then there are those who reckon the issue was religion and values. They’re all good theories, but my own is that what this election was really about was Vietnam.
I recognize it’s a minority theory, one that resonates primarily for those of us of a certain age. But the fact is that this is the first election in which a candidate made Vietnam a central issue. John F. Kennedy never stood for office on the Vietnam issue, though he triggered the war by authorizing the coup in which President Diem was assassinated. The war hadn’t ripened into an issue when Lyndon Johnson ran against Senator Goldwater. Four years later, LBJ stood down rather than run on the war. Nixon’s race against Hubert Humphrey wasn’t a clear clash on the war, and when Nixon ran against McGovern, even Nixon was advancing a plan to bring the troops home.
Neither Presidents Ford, Carter, nor Ronald Reagan ran on Vietnam, though Reagan called it a noble cause. Governor Clinton and Senator Bob Kerrey scrapped about Vietnam in 1992, when the Nebraskan sought to disparage Mr. Clinton for dodging the draft. Though Senator Kerrey holds, in the Medal of Honor, the one medal that cannot be alloyed, he was soundly defeated by Mr. Clinton. So when it came to the general election of 1992, Vietnam was not on the table.
It was not until John Kerry put Vietnam front and center in the election that Americans had to look hard at the war from a historical perspective. Mr. Kerry may be a decorated veteran of the riverine war in the Mekong Delta. But he is much better known for his activities after he left the Navy and joined the anti-war movement, where he participated in a protest – financed in part by Jane Fonda – called the Winter Soldier Investigation.
The effort of the anti-war activists to don the mantle of the winter soldier was a play on the famous phrasing of Thomas Paine, who wrote of the “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” who will “shrink from the service of his country.” As Americans began to think about that history, thousands came to see that what the young John Kerry and his comrades in the anti-war movement were doing was the opposite of the winter soldiering. They sought a retreat, an abandonment of the war.
In recent months thousands have read Mr. Kerry’s testimony before the Senate in 1971, when he accused American GIs of routinely committing war crimes in Vietnam, confessed to having committed war crimes himself, warned that America had created in its veterans a “monster,” and belittled the idea that the communists in Vietnam were a threat to America. I can remember thinking, early in the campaign, that it would be hard to imagine Americans letting this pass. But I had not yet heard of the Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth.
Their appearance on the national scene was the most important single event of the campaign. There has been a lot of quibbling over the fine points of the Swiftvets’ brief against Mr. Kerry, particularly in respect of the engagements for which he was awarded his medals and his Purple Hearts. But there has been no quibbling about the sincerity of their anger over Mr. Kerry’s antiwar activities, including the young ex-lieutenant’s decision to travel to Paris to meet with enemy envoys during the thick of the war, while our own GIs were still in the field and our airmen were being held prisoner in Hanoi.
Every time the senator declared that he would not stand for people questioning his patriotism, more people took another look at the record. The Internet provided easy access to the Dick Cavett show in 1971, when Mr. Kerry debated the Annapolis graduate who would eventually help launch the Swift vets, John O’Neill. It is a film that, from the perspective of 33 years, casts an excruciatingly cruel light on Mr. Kerry and the way he dismissed Mr. O’Neill’s plea for the logic of giving the free South Vietnamese Republic time to establish a democracy before we brought our troops home.
What the film made clear is that it was Mr. O’Neill who was the winter soldier and Mr. Kerry the summer soldier. There may have been many honorable, idealistic people in the anti-war movement. But when, a generation ago, the anti-war movement prevailed, the result was that nearly 100 million people in Indochina were condemned to life in the darkness of communist rule. Hundreds of thousands escaped, but millions died. As voters thought about this, they began to associate Mr. Kerry, in ways he did not anticipate, with a history of which they were not proud.
That Mr. Kerry tried to make Vietnam a metaphor for our time can only have worked against him. Once again our GIs are in a desperate fight to protect a people in a far off land as they seek the time to enable a democracy to take root. Once again Mr. Kerry turned against that struggle while asserting that he was doing so out of patriotism. For most Americans, I believe, that called to mind the old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” And fools is one thing Americans are not.