Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (24 page)

Time
magazine named George Bush “Men of the Year” at the beginning of the month, declaring him adept at foreign affairs and fuzzy on domestic issues. It was the first known case of a multiple-personality defense for an elected official. Now the president has a mandate to play to his strengths and to forget the national weaknesses. And his own.

A one-track mind is not enough for government. If the president thinks only of war, the home front will have disintegrated, in some cases beyond repair.

The soldiers he invoked to such rousing effect the other night will come home. Some of them will lose their houses if the recession continues. Some of them will watch their children die on city streets if we do not do something about crime and drugs. Some of them might even wind up someday in a bus terminal, sleeping on the floor, in the home of the free and the brave. When that happens we will know that we have lost the war, the war we turned our backs on while we were busy with yellow ribbons.

REGRETS ONLY
February 7, 1991

It’s often used as a sour quip, the sentence “Hindsight is always twenty-twenty,” a dismissive remark, a coda. But then you see hindsight with tears in its eyes, and realize that perhaps this is one of our greatest tragedies, that our mistakes become clear to us only when we see them over our shoulders, trailing us like an ugly dog.

Hindsight is 20–20 for Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense who raised the Vietnam War from its childhood through its horrid years as an uncontrollable early adolescent. Hindsight is 20–20 for Lee Atwater, the twangy campaign whiz who never met a clever, nasty remark he didn’t like and who helped make George Bush palatable, and president.

Both men are troubled by their pasts, which would be only terribly sad if it were not that their pasts are our history. Because of that, their torment is a national tragedy, and their regrets prefigure our future.

Mr. Atwater writes in the current issue of
Life
magazine about
the days since he discovered that he had a malignant brain tumor. The pictures are heartbreaking. Somewhere inside the bloated, limp body in bed and wheelchair is the sassy guitar player who celebrated the 1988 Republican victory by throwing a blues concert. But you can’t see him here.

He talks about the triumphs, but what it all comes down to is this: that he has found God and discovered the sheer meanness of his professional style. “In 1988,” he says, “fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate.’ I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not.”

Mr. McNamara appears in
Time
, talking to Carl Bernstein, and his words make you want to weep, for him and for our bungled opportunities. Of Vietnam he says, “because of misinformation and misperceptions, there are misjudgments as to where a nation’s interests lie and what can be accomplished.” It is a statement with great resonance these days. Of the exaggeration of the Communist threat he concludes, “We could have maintained deterrence with a fraction of the number of warheads we built.”

The regrets of two men, one aging, the other dying. Mr. Atwater helped poison the level of electoral discourse, so that those two words may never seem seemly in tandem again. Mr. McNamara was a primary architect of the war that cost this country thousands of young lives and its illusions about itself. In different ways, at different times, they contributed to the notion that we are a nation of bullies.

Can George Bush’s second thoughts on the war in the Persian Gulf be many decades behind?

It reminds me of fathers who come to their children, now grown, and say, “These are the mistakes I made. Please forgive me.” And we do forgive, but we are saddled with our characters, shaped by those mistakes.

It reminds me of what that graceful writer Paul Fussell, who is at work on an anthology of writings about war, once said, “If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.”

And Mr. Atwater’s words about one of his daughters, pretending to interview him: “She had seen me interviewed so many times on TV, perhaps she thought that was the only way she could find out the truth. Watching her, I felt guilty about the degree to which my career—and my illness—have robbed me of crucial time with my children.”

And Mr. McNamara, who says that his wife’s death may have been hastened by the national trauma of Vietnam—“She was with me on occasions when people said I had blood on my hands”—and who is asked by Mr. Bernstein about the people who really know him, the real McNamara, the inner man. Here is the answer: “People don’t know, and probably not my kids. And let me tell you that’s a weakness. If you’re not known emotionally to people, it means you haven’t really communicated fully to people. I know it’s a weakness of mine. But I’m not about to change now.”

We’re not about to change now. Manhood stands with its old definitions: aggression, winning at all costs, work over family, control over vulnerability. And, finally, regrets as corrosive as Mr. Atwater’s disease, as sad as Mr. McNamara’s eyes—about what we did in the world, about who we are at home, two things that are inseparable.

War was inevitable. And inevitable, too, someday, will be the hindsight, the documents that tell us this was unnecessary and ill advised, the advisers who reveal their misgivings years too late. The regrets, in hindsight.

RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED
February 24, 1991

The group of veterans marched down the street, and as they came into sight the crowd at the curb seemed to move forward to greet them, to hold them like a hug. They were youngish men, and their camouflage clothes were as different from the neat uniforms of the other groups as their war had been from other wars. Beside me an old man waved a flag. “We’re with you,” he shouted, as though he were putting all our cheers into words, and then he added, “We should have let you finish what you started.” And the smile froze on my face, and fell.

It was five years ago that those Vietnam veterans marched by on Memorial Day, but I’ve thought about that scene more than once in the last forty days. From the beginning, it has been difficult to publicly oppose this war, to express reservations or even to forgo the exuberant displays of national accord.

A basketball player at Seton Hall University who did not wear a flag patch on his uniform was heckled so relentlessly by fans that he quit the team and the school. The editor of
The Kutztown
(PA)
Patriot
was fired, and while the owners said there were other reasons, the ax fell just after he ran an antiwar editorial with the headline “How About a Little PEACE!”—the last word in letters as big as your finger. What amazed him afterward, he said, were the people who called him eager to talk geopolitics, as though they were all members of a sub-rosa self-help group: Hi. My name is Joe, and I have reservations about the war in the Gulf.

Reservations are not accepted. There were antiwar demonstrations. But mostly there was the majority rallying around the president, and a silent minority, constrained by the atmosphere of high-octane Amerimania, a prettified second cousin of her “Love It or Leave It” forebears. Some of us were ambivalent, but we don’t do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.

Some people say dissent is a matter of time, that opposition to Vietnam took years to build. But I believe it’s a sign of the times instead. America had become the Muhammad Ali of nations, battered by foreign competition, by a faltering economy, by domestic problems as big as our national ambition. In the last six months Americans saw themselves as the leaders of the world again, assured of their inherent greatness and the essential evil of the enemy.

But the line between such convictions and jingoism can be very thin. Everyone talked about standing behind the soldiers even while deploring the policy. “Support the troops—bring them home alive,” one protest sign read. But, like my neighbor at the parade, Letters to the Editor columns in dozens of newspapers made clear that people believed the way to show support was to agree that the troops were engaged in a necessary and a noble enterprise. If not, keep quiet. The idea that our true greatness lies in our diversity and freedom of speech was, if anything, a P.S.

This war has taken on a momentum of its own. The troops of August led to the buildup of autumn, and that to the combat of January 16. The cumulative effect was epitomized at a rally in
California several weeks ago: as though they were in the bleachers, a bunch of boys were chanting, “We’re Number One!”

When the Soviet Union stepped in as a deal maker, our former dark star, our one-time evil twin, it was hard to bear, especially when the negotiations included Saddam Hussein’s survival. His face has been plastered on dart boards and Ping-Pong paddles, and his mustache has become an instant metaphor for evil. The U.N. resolutions called for making him leave Kuwait. The grassroots agenda, forged over heady days of the United States leading the world to war, is to destroy him. It is an agenda that lends itself to ultimatums, not negotiations.

“We should have let you finish what you started,” I keep hearing that man yelling. Some of us believed that our national agenda in the Gulf War was murky from the start. But it has grown even clearer: we must win, and Saddam Hussein must lose. Trouble is, it’s not that kind of world, and this isn’t that kind of war. Saddam Hussein could lose big and still be a hero in some parts of the region. We could run a devastating military campaign and still wind up hated and reviled. But for some short time, the war in the Persian Gulf has made the world a simpler place. Black and white. Good and bad. Win and lose. But not for long.

THE MICROWAVE WAR
March 3, 1991

Barely eighteen hours after the war ended, a man was on Broadway near Times Square hawking victory T-shirts,
WE WON
! they said on the front, the words flanked by two American flags—
OPERATION DESERT STORM. JAN. 16
—
FEB. 27
. All I could think of was some smooth small-time entrepreneur, standing with one eye on the television and one on the boys in the back room, yelling “Roll ’em, Harry” at the moment that the president said, “I am pleased to announce that at midnight tonight.…” This is some amazing country, where you can turn a commemorative item around in less than a day.

It was like that from beginning to end, the microwave war, ready to be consumed, digested, and cleared away in a fraction of the usual time. No wonder the television people seemed to be running on 78 rpm for the first week. The ground war took less time than it takes to get over the flu. And fewer Americans died in combat over the six weeks of the Gulf War than are habitually murdered in New York City during a comparable period of time.

To read over the early predictions is an exercise in the fallibility of political scientists, retired military men, pundits, politicians, and the press. The war on the ground would be long. It would be bloody. The Iraqi Army would use chemical weapons. Their numbers were great. They were relentless. It all seems like a parody now.