Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes’ powerful essay, “Vietnam: The War that Killed Trust,” recently published in the New York Times to mark the 50th anniversary of what the Times called “a year that changed the war and changed America,” has prompted me to post my own response to those troubled times in the form of a chapter from a memoir-in-progress.
Vietnam:
A Political Education
…burned human flesh
is smelling in Viet Nam as I write.
--Denise Levertov, 1966
I dropped out of graduate school in
June of 1967 at the height of the war in Southeast Asia. While the war, which my wife and I had
opposed from the beginning, was not the primary factor in my decision to leave
what I had come to experience as the inhibiting life of academia, it played a
significant role in an act that earned me the disapproval, if not the enmity,
of both of our families. Graduate school
was considered by my own immigrant family, as well as Jeane’s family of
scientists and physicians, to be the gateway to a rewarding professional
career; indeed, to a certain level of affluence and social standing. I had never sought either, but I’d eagerly
applied three years before because I wanted time to read and write, which I
believed graduate school would offer, just as college had gratifyingly done so
for me. My rejection of those
possibilities was a further signal to our families, who were already skeptical
about my responsibility, that I would probably not amount to much, especially
after we told them that I’d relinquished a doctoral program in English and
American literature, with its assurance (at least in those days) of a
tenure-track position, to become a writer with no regular or guaranteed
income. The common rationalization that
one could always write and teach was not worth arguing. One year in graduate school had been enough
to demonstrate that scholarly and imaginative writing were, at least for me,
mutually exclusive.
I had no delusions about academic
life. I loved teaching. I’d been a willing, if conflicted, teacher of
English in Italy and at two senior high schools in Massachusetts. But I knew that if I committed myself to
earning advanced degrees, I would need to demonstrate superior scholarly
skills, along with the commitment to a lifetime of teaching and writing about
literature. I was confident that I could
lead students through the most demanding texts, but I didn’t really imagine
myself producing works of scholarship or criticism in order to receive tenure,
even if they might be studies of writers like Lawrence or Thoreau, who had always
meant a great deal to me. Not that I
couldn’t—I just didn’t want to.
So I applied for and entered
graduate school with a divided consciousness.
My love of literature propelled me toward its further study, while my
passion to write imaginatively acted as a brake on my scholarship. Even though I threw myself into the study of
American social and intellectual history, British Renaissance drama, the poetry
of John Milton, Puritan theology, and the Transcendentalism of Emerson and
Thoreau with the same enthusiasm that I’d approached undergraduate work,
another part of me dreamed of the next novel I wanted to write. Instead of perfecting my critical prose with
papers analyzing the shapes Satan had assumed while tempting Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost (even as a Poundian I
became fanatical about Milton’s verse), I sketched out short stories in the
quiet of my study on Farrington Avenue, while my wife programmed computers at
Gorton’s so we could make ends meet on my small graduate teaching fellowship.
From the beginning I was doomed as a
graduate student. Though I made good friends at Tufts like Joe and Lannie
Liggera, who shared my enthusiasm for Thoreau, I was put off by the competition
and back-biting I observed among faculty and graduate students alike, their
closed-mindedness about the kinds of experimental writing and avant-garde art
that excited me (when I mentioned Olson to one of my teachers, he thought I was
referring to the Chicago academic poet Elder Olson). So as the years went by
and I commuted from Gloucester into Medford, sitting in classes, teaching
freshman composition and introduction to literature, attending faculty
seminars, and studying in yet another great library, I began to plot my
escape. Now that I was past my
twenty-sixth birthday, married and with a child, I was exempt from the draft
and, therefore, the war in Vietnam, so I could drop out with impunity. I made a deal with myself: I would remain a graduate student for as long
as I could stand it. I’d write as
rigorous a master’s thesis as I was able to, organizing it so that with the
addition of, say, a further chapter, the essay could also be offered as my
doctoral dissertation, providing I could force myself to complete the requisite
course credits and prepare myself for the comprehensive written and oral
examinations expected of a successful doctoral candidate.
I worked hard for three years,
taking nearly two of those years to complete the master’s thesis on Thoreau and
his relationship to place, in which, under Olson’s influence, I attempted to
analyze Thoreau’s evolving method of living in, learning about and describing
the world around him. My advisor, Jim
McIntosh, a Harvard and Yale trained scholar of Thoreau and Dickinson,
despaired at the length of time it took me to prepare for and ultimately
complete the thesis. But when it was
done and I had successfully defended it in May of 1967, both Jim and the other
two members of my thesis committee agreed that it had both the rigor and the scope
of a potential doctoral dissertation.
That was all I needed to hear. MA degree with honors in hand, I left
graduate school and prepared for what I hoped would be a lifetime of
writing. The reality of how naïve I was
about what lay ahead, or how little I was prepared for the consequences of my
decision, would not catch up with me for some years.
But it wasn’t simply my conflicted
relationship with academic pursuits or my desire to jettison certainty in order
to write the kinds of books I yearned to write that underlay my decision to
drop out of graduate school. The other
motivating factor, as I’ve mentioned, was the war in Southeast Asia, already
some years in prosecution, a war that was convulsing American society and
driving many of its young people to the brink of insurrection in their attempts
to stop the slaughter and to remake a world most of us between the ages of
eighteen and thirty had thought gone crazy.
It was this war and the growing national and international opposition to
it, not to speak of my own agony about my country’s repulsive behavior in
Vietnam, that made me think seriously about committing myself entirely to
writing as an existential and political act rather than continuing to
teach. After years in school and
college, I yearned to live again in the “real world,” or what I believed such a
world to be like, quite apart from the pressures of exams and deadlines for
papers.
I was about to turn thirty when I
left Tufts. That was old for what has
been called “the Vietnam generation,” a generation that came of age with folk
and rock music, and with TV and movies, not books. In contrast, jazz had been the music of my
connection with the world beyond Gloucester, the culture of race and
transgressive art; and books had been the major sources of my instruction and
inspiration. Though we drank in
college—a great deal, I’ve already admitted—we knew nothing of drugs. I didn’t smoke my first “joint” until my
brother Tom brought some marijuana back from the road in 1964 for my wife and
me to try, along with Amphetamines and some “downers.” My students at Tufts used dope regularly and
many had already experimented with psychedelic substances like LSD, psilocybin,
and mescaline, which I didn’t touch until the Seventies.
So just as I was in conflict with a
society—The System, as we called it—that had taken us into what so many of us
believed was an unjust and unnecessary war, invading a tiny country that posed
no threat to us and firebombing its people, I was also in potential conflict
with my own students, who were already throwing over their educations (in the
view of some faculty), shutting down classes and entire universities, dropping
out to demonstrate against war and racism, or joining revolutionary groups like
the Maoist Progressive Labor Party, to organize electrical workers, as my best
student Danny O’Neill had done. My
students took dope and I didn’t. They
listened to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, while I doted on John Coltrane and Carmen
McRae. They read Richard Brautigan’s A Confederate General from Big Sur and
Richard Farina’s Been Down so Long it
Looks Like Up to Me, if they read at all; while I was catching up with
Ruskin and Henry James. In fact, when I
tried to introduce The Ambassadors
into our course in basic literary genres, they denounced the novel as an example
of “bourgeois decadence” and refused to read it. Worse, they came to class in T-shirts and
cut-offs—some even sported Indian cotton blouses and wooden beads. I still wore Italian cut suits and British
ankle boots, and my hair was short.
In the end, it was I who changed,
not them; and it was my students, and my wife, who adored Joan Baez, who were
the agents of my change. No, I didn’t
grow my hair out yet, and I didn’t throw away my father-in-law’s 1940s Brooks Brothers
seersucker suits, which I’d had retailored to fit me after his death in
1966. I couldn’t bear to go that
far. I couldn’t bear to give up Henry
James whom I’d finally come to appreciate, after resisting my teachers at
Bowdoin, who had tried mightily to introduce us to the dense textures of The
Master’s novels and stories. Not only
did I read James, I also settled into a intensive study of Henry Adams—and I
forced my students to read The Education
with me as I exulted in Adam’s ironic condemnation of his own matriculation at
Harvard, which I was certain my students would (and did) relish—“He could not
afterwards remember to have heard the name of Karl Marx mentioned, or the title
of Capital. He was equally ignorant of August Comte. These were the two writers of his time who
most influenced its thought.”
But the stereotypical beads and the
long hair, the folk music, not even their courageous anti-war beliefs or
political activism—this was not what my students or the rising college
generation were about. The kids I knew
and taught, the ones I loved, marched with in Boston Common, sat next to in
teach-ins, and gave higher grades to, hoping to keep them from getting drafted
and killed—these young people were idealistic.
In 1969, one of their contemporaries had this to say from his Harvard graduation
platform:
“For attempting to
achieve the values which
you taught us to cherish,
your response has
been astounding. It has
escalated from the
presence of the police on
the campuses to
their uses of clubs and
gas. I have asked many
of my classmates what
they wanted me to say
today. “Talk with them
about hypocrisy,” most
of them said. “Tell them
they have broken the
best heads in the
country. Tell them they
have destroyed our
confidence and lost our
respect.”
My students went off to live in communes or
to organize citizens against the war.
Others got married and went to graduate school themselves. Some even went to war. Most simply went to work after college. They have become teachers, doctors, lawyers,
famine workers in Africa. Mothers, fathers. On the whole they are probably more liberal,
and they probably took greater risks than their dutifully bourgeois
parents. But none of us were ultimately
able to make a better world, or to stop a criminal war.
I came home to Gloucester, in a manner of
speaking, because I had lived here since my return to America in 1962. I came “home” to write and I tried to put
into practice locally what I’d learned from my students. At first I only wanted to write. For twenty-five dollars a month I rented an
airless room at the rear of a real estate office in East Gloucester
Square. Daily, when the weather was
good, I walked from Farrington Avenue to my office and I wrote until 1 p.m.,
returning home to take over the care of our son Jonathan from his mother, who went
off to work herself. Other times I wrote
all day long. I finished a novella, Landscape with Boy, that later appeared
as the inaugural volume in the Boston University Fiction Series. I began what I hoped would be a long novel
about expatriation in Europe and political upheaval at home; I wrote a lot of
stories, each more experimental than its predecessor. Some of these stories were eventually
published in the usual short-lived little magazines and reviews. None brought us any money.
My political life at home began when a
group of friends organized to fight the proposed placement of a Sentinel
Anti-Ballistic Missile site on Dogtown Common, the rugged, terminal moraine
wilderness at the heart of Cape Ann, where I had been taken as a child by my
grandmother to pick berries. If the
Pentagon achieved this goal, we argued, they would be bringing the war in
Vietnam, if not the entire Cold War itself, home to our neighborhoods in
Gloucester. The reaction to our campaign
against the missile emplacement, timid as it was—we placed an advertisement in
the Gloucester Daily Times with a
coupon, which those who agreed with us could clip and send to the mayor’s
office in opposition to the base—was both extreme and edifying. We were called “commies,” “traitors” and warned
that if we didn’t want missiles defending us against Russian and Chinese
enemies we should go and live in those countries. Some even said they “felt proud” the
government had chosen Cape Ann for a missile base, though one wondered what
suicidal tendencies they harbored.
“Better dead than Red” was one of the slogans of the time.
As we leafleted against the proposed
missile base on Main Street or at supermarket plazas, we were dismissed as
“fucking hippies,” though only a couple of us had incipient beards. Our group consisted mostly of artists and
teachers. My friend Ray Bentley, another
member, was an editor at Beacon Press in Boston. Soon, however, we were joined by older and
more prominent citizens, who may not have worried about missiles but who cared
deeply for Dogtown itself as an historic site of early settlement, a wildlife
habitat of rich blueberry barrens, and a place of vernal pools and remarkable
geological formations. It was these
members of our group—naturalists Elliott Rogers and John Kieran, MIT scientist
Frederick Norton, and environmentalist and staunch Republican Lloyd Waring—who,
finally, had the financial and political clout to appeal directly to
legislators and administration officials in Washington to get Dogtown
eventually scrubbed from the Pentagon’s list of potential sites.
As a result of this campaign I met and
joined a group of local anti-war resistors and peace activists that called
itself the Cape Ann Concerned Citizens.
The war was escalating and our group felt that it was time for new
tactics, though I felt I had learned something from the anti-missile
campaign. I’d had a taste of power
politics, when I observed the apparent ease with which those older men had
access to its sources by virtue of their wealth and their connections. I also learned that Gloucester, a city that
had, since the American Revolution, sent thousands of its sons and daughters
into war, was a patriotic community, never questioning the reasons for war,
simply doing its duty when the military called for volunteers. It became clear to us that beyond
demonstrating we would have to make a more compelling case to our fellow
citizens about why the war was wrong and why America should withdraw from.
Yet
you felt absolutely impotent when all you had to do was turn the television set
on at dinnertime, or before you went to bed, to hear the daily body count. You could watch the bombs dropping, the
napalm fire you learned to recognize from its incandescence. You could actually hear the screams of Vietnamese
women and children as they ran for shelter, the phosphorescent jelly sticking
to their clothes, searing their skin.
You heard the rasp of machine gun fire, the dull thudding of
mortars--all the sounds of the engines of death.
The
war got into everything I did, between every line I wrote, until finally its
hyper-reality and my own outrage became so pervasive that I found it impossible
to write fiction. No event I could
possibly have imagined; no situation, scene or character I might create, seemed
to have any validity for me after the enormity of Vietnam. At one point, without ever having served in
the military myself, I began to draft a story about a veteran returning to his
hometown after the conflict. I wrote
about a search-and-destroy mission I'd seen documented on public
television. I told about the daily
events in the life of an infantryman, part of whose journal I had discovered a
few days before in Look
magazine. In my story I tried to draw a
parallel between the combat veteran and myself, both of us having come back to
our birthplace to reflect upon our lives so far.
On
the day I completed my first draft of that story I arrived home from an errand
on Main Street to find my wife on the kitchen floor sobbing uncontrollably, the
news blaring on the radio.
"I
just can't take it any more," she cried, as I held her to me, scarcely
recognizing her eyes that burned so.
"I feel like going to the Pentagon and tearing my hair out in front
of them all and shouting MURDERERS! MURDERERS!
I want to set fire to myself. I
want everyone to see my flesh and smell it burning!"
It
was a ghastly day in December of 1967, dark and unfriendly, with a threat of a
northeaster. Bitterly I regretted having
separated Jeane from her friends in Cambridge, and the couples we’d shared
children and anti-war sentiments with at Tufts, to bring her to Gloucester,
where I could work in familiar surroundings.
Most of that afternoon we lay on our bed in the stucco cottage we had rented
on Eastern Point. While our son slept,
we held each other, talked little, both of us wondering what we could do now to
help stop this war. What could two young people like ourselves
manage to achieve against all that power that was destroying a country and a
culture we knew so little about?
A
day later, on my way back from the library, I caught sight of a young man in
army field jacket and fatigues leaning against a stone wall while thumbing a
ride to Main Street. As I passed him, I
recognized my old friend Bobby Duerdon's little brother Jackie, who was always
butting into our touch football games.
I
wanted to wave to him, but my hand just stuck to the steering wheel of our
VW. Home from the war, Jackie was on
crutches, he had only one leg, and he seemed to stare right through me. In my rearview mirror I could see that cars
were passing him and no one was offering him a ride. He stood, almost at attention, away from the
wall now on his crutches, stiffly, and I knew it was freezing out there.
When
I got home, I went to my workroom. I
took the draft of my war story, tore it into strips and put them into a straw
wastebasket. In the back yard I lingered
in the cold air over the incinerator, until I could break up and disperse all
the ashes of the manila manuscript paper.
The
next evening, resolved to do whatever was necessary to stop this horrendous
war, I attended another meeting of our group.
We voted to create a newsletter to coordinate our anti-war activities
with those of nearby communities. We
would call the paper Soundings and I
was asked to edit it. Peter Smith, a
local reprint publisher—and a Republican—agreed to subsidize our efforts. He offered his mimeograph machine to produce
the newsletter. His office staff would
do the mailing once we established a mailing list. Then we decided to create a speaker series,
inviting prominent anti-war activists like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Jerome
Letvin, to come to Gloucester. Perhaps
they could bear witness better than we could, we hoped.
Still,
ours was a diverse and experienced group.
Rockport painters George and Ellen Gabin, who had founded the Cape Ann
Civil Rights Council and brought with them from New York a long history of
activism, were among the members most experienced in political work. They were joined by historian Joe Garland,
the dean of Gloucester writers, who had been a newspaper union organizer after
the war. My friend Jay McLauchlan,
cabinet maker, sculptor, and Korean War veteran, came on board, along with Ray
Bentley, who was working at Beacon Press when they published the Pentagon Papers, which blew the cover
off the entire Vietnam debacle. There
was Jay Keyser, who taught linguistics at MIT with Chomsky, librarian Jeff
Gardner and his freelance journalist brother Dave, nurse and activist Rene
Gross, Rockport weaver, Ruth Perrault and her African-American husband Burt
Tinker. Our proudest addition, however,
was Johns Hopkins graduate Martin Ray, a former officer in Vietnam, returning
like so many combatants who’d experienced the horror first-hand, to educate the
American people about the wrongness of the war.
We
leafleted on weekends, we held seminars and meetings. Our speaker series drew large crowds, and our
newsletter was quoted in the Gloucester
Daily Times. We all took turns
writing editorials and commentaries.
However, listening to Howard Zinn connect the war in Vietnam to national
liberation struggles the world over, and reading Chomsky’s stunning essay “The
Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in the New
York Review, I realized that I knew very little about history and less of
politics.
In
1959, I had arrived in Florence as a largely apolitical person. More particularly, having met students who
were socialists or young communists and having studied under Marxist
professors, I was introduced to an analysis and a world view that I hadn’t
encountered in college. I barely knew it
existed in the sheltered Cold War America of the 1950s. But in Italy, politics, la politica,
was part of the total culture. The writers I most admired—Pavese, Moravia, Pasolini,
Morante—were all openly political, mostly on the Left, and political life was
rich and diverse. Workers went on strike at the drop of a hat. You’d see
demonstrations in the streets of Rome and Florence in which communists
contended with neo-fascists, while Christian Democrats and socialists debated
on television. This made me realize how pale and inauthentic political life was
in the United States, how fearful Americans had become of expressing any
opinion they felt would be considered subversive; how bland our news media had
become. It seemed to me then that Italy had emerged from fascism and the war as
a much more vital democracy. Contentious, yes; governments often rose and fell
like the tides. But Italians lived their politics, while with us political life
had devolved into a spectator sport, if that.
I
was in love with a young woman named Rita, who came from the Abruzzo. She was
an ardent communist with coal black hair and riveting eyes, and she was reading
political science at the university. We
would go out dancing with a group of friends, architects, painters; or we’d sit
in the cafes of Piazza della Repubblica, or at Rivoire in Piazza
Signoria, drinking espresso or cappuccino, reading French and
Italian newspapers and talking by the hour about the films we’d just seen by
Fellini or Antonioni, the American-influenced novels of Pavese, those
extraordinary narratives of post-war alienation, which the intellectual young
had such a passion for then, and still do, I’m told. (As I’ve written, I first
encountered Pavese just after I arrived in Italy and his books swept me off my
feet. The story of his life—his imprisonment by Mussolini for anti-fascist
activities, his monumental translation into Italian of Moby-Dick, the
prize-winning novels and stories he wrote in a pared down, anti-rhetorical
Italian, his struggle with and eventual abandonment of communism, and finally,
his suicide in a dingy hotel in downtown Torino—is one the great tragic stories
of modern Europe).
It
was the time of the Algerian uprising, when the French “paras,” who’d been sent
in to quell the insurgency, the violent demonstrations, and to frustrate
further anti-colonial actions, began to perpetrate unconscionable brutality on
the indigenous population. Petitions were being signed all over Europe against
the French response to Algeria’s natural desire to be independent. There were
demonstrations in solidarity with the Algerian people. It was the main topic of
the day. Of course, I had no idea what the struggle was about because I had
never thought about colonialism. Imagine! My own country had fought a
revolution to throw off the shackles of British rule and I couldn’t make the
connection. I even defended the presence of American bases in Germany and
Italy.
One
day Rita and I were alone. We’d taken a walk along the Arno after classes and
were sitting in a café near Piazza Beccaria, sipping Punt e Mes under a warm spring sun. The night before we’d been to
see Il bell’ Antonio, with Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale.
Based on a novel by Vitaliano Brancati, the film is about a young upper class
Sicilian, who makes love easily with working class women but becomes impotent
with women of his own circle. After some strained talk about the film, during
which Rita tried to help me see how Antonio’s dilemma was a metaphor for class
struggle in Italy, she turned to me. By then we’d only kissed on park benches,
or fondled each other fleetingly on the couch in my room in Via dei Servi,
always attentive to the presence of my landlady on the other side of the wall.
“I
like you, Pietro,” Rita said. “And it’s fun spending time together. But you
remind me of myself when I was in liceo. We’re miles apart politically,
and you’re still very young emotionally.”
Like
Rita, the Italian students I met during those years were quite mature; and they
were very serious, serious about their studies and serious about politics,
about the world. I was serious about literature, about things intellectual, but
in retrospect it’s clear to me that I didn’t know how to be in a mature
relationship. And I was in kindergarten politically. I’d never really thought
through the myths we were conditioned to accept in school and college; the
often-repeated propaganda that the United States is the great bearer of democracy,
that our intentions toward the world are always honorable, that we are
committed to protecting the weak. Though they were grateful to us for our war
efforts and for the Marshall Plan that followed, Europeans remained skeptical
about our intentions. My Italian friends used to say: “Never mind American
rhetoric, just look at your government’s behavior!” And when I heard stories
about OSS agents with suitcases full of dollar bills buying votes for the
Christian Democrats after the war, when it looked as if the Italian Communist
Party might actually come to power, the scales began to fall from my eyes,
though they didn’t fall completely until Vietnam, which, as I’ve said, was the
turning point. After all the outrages—the charade of the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution that allowed Lyndon Johnson to go to war in the first place; the
secret wars we later waged in Laos and Cambodia; the napalm; the burning of
villages; the massacre at My Lai of women and children by American soldiers;
the lies about the body counts and about our reasons for intervening—I never
felt the same about my government again or about America.
Rita
broke up with me. We saw each other from time to time, but it was clear she’d
drawn a line. The fact of the matter was that I needed to grow up. I needed to
grow up emotionally and I needed to come to some mature understanding of
political life, especially if I wanted to write. That didn’t happen immediately. During the years in which I taught or
attended graduate school my focus was still on literature, but once I became
involved in the anti-war movement, once I tried to place the war in Vietnam in
the larger context of colonialism and imperialism, as Zinn and Chomsky were
helping us to do, I realized that I needed to educate myself politically.
I
began reading the major political and social theorists of the 19th
and 20th centuries: Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Herzen, Lenin,
and Trotsky, supplemented by Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, C.
Wright Mills’ critiques of American capitalism, and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man. I immersed myself in Arthur Schlesinger’s
three-volume study of the nation under FDR and Isaac Deutscher’s equally
illuminating life of Trotsky. I scoured the major books on the Russian Revolution,
from John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World to Adam Ulam’s The
Bolsheviks. I read a number of significant American proletarian novels,
books like Mike Gold’s Jews without Money
and Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited
that had never appeared on my college syllabi; and I studied the Sacco and
Vanzetti case, which transformed my view of American justice. During this time
I continued reading left-leaning political analysts like Dwight MacDonald and
Richard Rovere, while also seeking out some of the major thinkers on the right
like James Burnham and Eric Hoffer. As a
result of this reading I no longer viewed the world through purely literary
eyes, and no longer did I trust anything on its face. I’d finally become a skeptic, which is what
my teachers at Bowdoin had always exhorted us to become. Most of all, I came
away from my reading in history and politics with a profoundly tragic view of
life. What I’d only understood intellectually from studying Shakespeare and the
Greeks, that life is essentially transitory in nature and human beings seem
doomed to repeat their mistakes, I now experienced viscerally.
As
for Vietnam, it didn’t appear that our small local group had much impact on
public consciousness. A few kids from
high school and college joined us, including our anti-war pediatrician’s son,
David Lacey, a promising poet. Bright
and idealistic, they would have come to an understanding of the utter futility
of the war on their own; but we loved their energy and their youthfulness, as
we marched together, sometimes renting buses to transport the group to Boston
or Washington to join the hundreds of thousands of citizens, who were now
protesting not only the war in Vietnam, but the secret incursions into Laos and
Cambodia. We didn’t shun the political
process either. Some of us worked in
Senator Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination
against Lyndon Johnson, a campaign that drew thousands of young people and
ultimately forced Johnson to drop out of the race. Spurred by McCarthy’s victories, Bobby
Kennedy entered the race as well.
Chastened by the murders of his brother and Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Kennedy reached out to the poor and disenfranchised before he, too, was killed. On top of the war, those murders were almost
too much to bear. Yet somehow we
revived, throwing our energy behind Michael Harrington, a bright, young,
Harvard educated lawyer from Salem, who ran as a peace candidate for the Sixth
congressional seat in Massachusetts, beating the Republican candidate by a
landslide. Once in Congress, Mike kept
his promise, voting to defund the war and against every measure that would have
continued it. Equally, Mike exposed the complicity of the Nixon administration
and the CIA in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of
Salvador Allende in Chile. So there was
some small sense of being able to effect change, though the war continued.
Ultimately,
the public tired of the war, turning against it not because it was wrong or
illegal, hardly because of the immorality that lay behind our prosecution of
it. The public turned against it, even
as they elected Richard Nixon whose “surge” widened the war, because they felt
it had become too costly, too much of a liability. They’d also gotten tired of watching it every
night on TV, while the Media, through its constant distortion and
sensationalization of the anti-war movement, turned the nation against us,
too. So in the end, nobody won and the
country was more polarized than ever.
In
place of a national dialogue we were left with what the Right called “Vietnam
Syndrome,” a function of the anger and frustration of having lost a war,
followed by recriminations, and a determination on the part of ruling elites
that such a loss would never happen again.
In other words, revenge and retribution instead of understanding,
acceptance, and a desire to learn from our mistakes.
In
the end, after the actual horrors of killing and atrocity, it was the loss of
my innocence that affected me most. I
had loved my country, not uncritically, though I hadn’t up till then realized
how conditioned I’d been by education, Second World War propaganda, local
patriotism, family values, and personal idealism to believe that America was
the light of the world, a beacon of freedom and tolerance. Vietnam ripped those scales from my eyes; so
violently, I came to realize, that my loss of innocence was as much a trauma to
me as the war itself had been.
My
wife went back to school, eventually earning a doctorate that led to a
distinguished career in teaching and research.
She joined a consciousness raising group and became deeply involved in
the women’s movement. I continued to
write. I completed a novel I couldn’t
sell about an anti-war activist who returns combatively to college for his
tenth-year class reunion; I wrote more stories, some of which were
published. I also composed essays, book
reviews and newspaper columns. Finally,
with the help of Ray Bentley, I signed my first publisher’s contract, receiving
an advance from Beacon Press for a book about the struggles of the Penobscot
Indians of Maine against the pressures and demands of acculturation. My friend and college classmate Mark Power
agreed to do the photographs for it.
Like Blacks and women, Native Americans were asserting their rights, not
only to participate in a society that had marginalized them, but also to
practice their own politics and spirituality without government restraint. As I worked on the book, spending longer
periods of time among Indians I came to love and respect, my marriage
unraveled, ending in divorce just as the book was published. For whatever it was worth, I had finally
become a writer, though I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, write fiction for another
twenty years; and I was to have enough of that “real world” I’d so desired when
I left graduate school as anyone could possibly bear.
(This is a chapter from my memoir-in-progress, From Gloucester Out.)
