and so we're going to do all we can to stay on schedule. so we're getting started. so we're pleased to be a co-sponsor of today's conference alongside the wallace foundation and the carnegie corporation of new york in its mission to explore the deeper meaning and lasting impact of this transformative era in american history. you will not only hear from former diplomats, military leaders, politicians and veterans, but also noted historians, journalists, poets and music educators aligning well with the colombian college's pursuit of a multidisciplinary and engaged liberal arts experience. there may be no individual well gw alumnus who better embodies an engaged liberal arts experience than dan weiss, who brought this conference idea to me a year ago, an idea that gained momentum and enthusiasm

with each passing day. dan, who is president and ceo of the metropolitan museum of art, formally served as president at lafayette and haverford college and dean at johns hopkins krieger school of arts and sciences at gw. dan studied psychology and art history on the heels of this turbulent era that we examine today. it was dan's book that time michael o'donnell and the tragic era of vietnam, highlighting the remarkable and courageous life of a promising poet amid the tragedy of the vietnam war that inspired this conference. dan, i'm proud to count you as a graduate of the columbia college, and i'm grateful for your leadership role in this conference, accompanied by peter osnos and thom shanker. thank you. and welcome back to your alma mater. it is now my privilege to introduce you to gw as president

mark wright and president wright and came to gw after almost 24 years as chancellor and chief executive officer at washington university in saint louis. as president reagan's term comes to an end this spring, it's my honor and pleasure to share this special experience with him. president reagan, will you please come to the stage. good morning, everyone. those in person and those watching. i appreciate very much. dean welbeck's introduce action. and i think we're in store for a very good program today. i'd like to echo paul's thanks to dan weiss, peter osnos and tom schenker. i appreciate the sponsors that have joined us in this important undertake. today, the panelists we are about to hear from will walk us

through the many stages of the vetting war era, reflecting on its lasting impact and parallels with our own time. we seek deeper meaning as a research university in the heart of our nation's capital, the george washington university is committed to having a very high impact on the world, especially through the creation of new knowledge. this is not only relevant in looking toward the future, but is also relevant as we examine and reexamine important historical events in the past, such as the vietnam war. we're very fortunate to have the opportunity to convene such a high impact event as today's and to bring together experts, research and scholarship in ways

that help us reflect and better understand the past. and i hope that the presenters today are able to share aspects of their personal involvement in the vietnam war era. i myself was 20 years old in december of. 1969, when there was an announcement of a lottery based on your birth date. and i had number 134. my brother had number 35. ultimately, neither of us was called to serve. i was wrapping up my undergraduate experience at florida state university in december. of 1969.

i went on to the california institute of technology in january of 1970. i am the son of a career navy man. my father graduated from high school and immediately enlisted in the u.s. navy. he was an enlisted man for his entire career. i'm very proud of his achievement. he rose to the highest rank in in the enlisted ranks as an nine. but he was as many would appreciate a person who built his career in the military and though my brother and i vigorously argued with my father, he believed very

strongly in the chain of command in the military regarding the president as commander in chief and you should report your president, right or wrong, and that military perspective stuck with me. and as the months unfolded in 1970, as i began my ph.d. experience at caltech, we were involved in many challenging times. my ph.d. advisor, dr. george s hammond, was a great chemist, and at the same time a very politically engaged individual. he gave a speech at caltech after the cambodian invasion. that speech was very critical of president nixon, and my advice

her was removed from a list of nominees to be a high level official at the national science foundation. the good news for me is that my advisor continued at caltech and subsequently there were a series challenges to many organizations, including all academic institutes missions across the country. today, we live in a time of controversy from rulings of the supreme court to divisions about the role of politics in. higher education policy. one of the strengths, i believe, of american higher education is a degree of autonomy. and i believe that we need to work to sustain higher education

in america as the world's best. so. so those are a few person reflections about my time in my early twenties. proceeding through graduates school and then joining the massachusetts institute of technology as a junior professor. when i arrived at mit as an assistant professor in 1972, i heard about the occupation of the mit president's office and then howard johnson, who was president, how well he handled the protests surrounding the vietnam war. i believe that many people were deeply touched by the vietnam war. and of course, so many people were injured and lost their life in connection with that

conflict. i look forward to hearing a portion of the program today and it is now my privilege to introduce one of our three moderators and organizers of this event. peter osnos. peter is the founder of public affairs books. was a vietnam correspondent for the washington and post and is the editor of robert mcnamara's. in retrospect. peter, i extend to you a warm welcome to george washington university. way. thank you. hi. looking around, i realize that when we said we were going to start this at 9:00 in the morning on time, we lost the students. those of us who are here, as i look around, have probably very kind of direct experience with

the vietnam era. and the vietnam war. war is almost always have a name. there's the revolutionary war. civil war, good war, forgotten war. however, else the vietnam war is portrayed. it's almost always associated with some version of tragic or tragedy, for that is what it was. the american war in vietnam, the years between the early 19 oh sixties and 1973, when the last gi and p.o.w.s left the country still at war, was meant to prevent a communist takeover in southeast asia. barely more than a decade after mao tse-tung communist victory in china and the war in korea,

where communists held on to half the korean peninsula. the effect on vietnam itself, north and south, was catastrophic. but death and devastation has not prevented a unified socialist republic of vietnam from becoming a substantial asian nation. and ironically, a source of commercial and political collaboration with the united states. it is in the u.s. this country where the consequences of the war are still being felt in ways existential, a sense that america is a superpower in some measure of global decline and with a democratic system at risk

and really profound. the social and cultural changes the country has undergone over the past 50 years that can be traced to the war years of the 1960s and seventies. for the 2 million vietnamese americans living in this country. succeeding generations have been absorbed and on the whole, welcomed and successful. but what about americans in the broadest sense? how did a military failure shaped the strategies and policies of our era? how did the antiwar movement, the drive for racial equality and other social reform that were a factor in the war years shape the ways the country has evolved since then? what has happened to patriotism as a foundation of the american way of life?

those are the questions we'll be discussing today in our panels over lunch here. and for the viewers on c-span today and thereafter. and we once again want to say how glad we are that all of you have chosen to spend the time with us. dan weiss, about whom you've heard. i just want to say one other thing about dan wise. i'm an editor. when his proposal for that book in that time came in, i said, clear the decks. that's going to be one of the more important books ever. on vietnam, it's about michael o'donnell. one soldier of the 58,000 who died. dan. good morning, everyone, and it's a real pleasure to have you with us for this day. our hope is, as peter said, that we can spend a day reflecting on an extraordinarily important moment in our history that in all kinds of ways, i think we can agree, changed almost everything about how we live, what we believe, how we select

governors, governance, how we think about the military and so forth. we hope to dig into those questions and many others today in our discussion and there will be opportunity for us to discuss with the panelists as we do these these sessions. each panel, there'll be five panels through the day and in between the panels there will be breaks and opportunities for discussion. but we won't be taking questions from the audience during the period of the of the sessions. for those of you who stay with us, you get a free lunch and it's going to be delicious. i promise you, books are available in the lobby, so we have a nice plan for the day ahead. i'd like to just conclude briefly by saying in a moment for a moment what it is that my what brought me to be interested in this subject in the first place about michael o'donnell. and it was this poem that he wrote on new year's day in 1970. he was a 24 year old helicopter pilot working in vietnam. and on new year's day, he was reflecting on his circumstances. and in a letter to his best friend, marcus sullivan, who is here today as well, he wrote the

following poem if you are able save for them a place inside of you and save one backward glance when you are leaving for the places they can no longer go, be not ashamed to say you love them, though you may or may not have always take what they have left and what they have taught you with their dying and keep it with your own. and in that time, when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind. o'donnell wrote that on new year's day in 1970 and about two months later, his helicopter was shot down and he was listed as missing in action with his crew for 28 years. eventually, the helicopter was recovered and michael o'donnell was buried with full military honors. two weeks before 911. so for his family and all of those who knew him and loved him, just as for so many of you, this war doesn't seem to end or go away. and our goal today is to reflect on all of that together.

so it is now my pleasure to introduce the first panel. peter. turn it over to you gentlemen. come on up and take your seats. now you've got to sit in a specific place or you'll be misrepresented on c-span and i don't have that list in front of me. if we have to move you around, one movie around doesn't have it. we're going to need to be a little less formal and perhaps some of you may have suspected that's just it's vietnam after all. so let me make a quick introduction. when i call these three gentlemen, i said to the first one, i said, secretary hagel said, call me chuck. and i called bob kerrey. i said, senator kerry. he said, call me bob. then i called general eaton. he said, call me paul. so you can see that we've got a

certain i don't know what rhythm here, which is to say that while these gentlemen are could not be more distinguished, each in their own ways of service, we're all at a stage of reflection. and that's what i really want us to, to talk a bit about. so what i'm going to do is ask each of you a really very specific question to start with, and then try to move into a sort of more general discussion. i have not gone into a long and labored introduction. you, of all people, do not need one. we only have an hour. we want to keep a tight and get as much done as we can. so my first question is, chuck. mr. secretary. you and bob. how is it that we have to. former senator from nebraska, what are the odds? right. and you just got lucky. and one was, if i'm not

mistaken, a republican, and one was, if i'm not mistaken, a democrat. neither of it is past tense yet. i would say that. and so both of you served with great distinction in various ways. and then both of you came home and chose a life in politics. and at over the years, let's face it, your success in politics was very substantial. what i'm kind of curious for chuck and then bob, how did the vietnam experience how did the vietnam experience both of you had real experience wounded. wounded came home to a country that really wasn't welcoming to you. how did that experience the vietnam experience shaped the way you went about your political lives? chuck thanks, peter and i thank my two colleagues for taking

time this morning and all of you and all of those who had something to do with putting on this retrospective because i think it's very important for all the reasons that already have already been noted this morning. but i think war's become as we move away from them and they become part of our history, they actually become more important because they can help guide us as especially in what not to do and understand the mistakes we made as well as the noble efforts that we made and what america's leadership role is in the world to come, as to as to your question. peter, i think you start with in everybody has their own story on this. we're products of our environment.

we're all products of where we come from, what shapes us, what molds us. our experience is and i don't think there's anybody who served in vietnam, including especially my two friends here, and i use the term liberally with kerry. but he warned me that keeping kerry under control was going to be today's, that that that experience has shaped all our lives and it doesn't really matter if you were and i don't think if you were in politics you're not a united states senator or secretary of defense. bob was a governor as well as a senator. you are shaped by that experience. and and i was every decision i made in some way, i had some reflection on times in vietnam. it wasn't with me every day on every decision. but it was there.

and on some of the decisions that bob and i made based on votes in the senate on foreign policy, military affairs, intelligence, surely were were reviewed in our in the receipt of our of our memories and minds about our experiences in vietnam. so i have to say, it's it's helped me and i have to go back and review all those times. sometimes it's difficult. i was there with my brother in 1968, which was the worst year, and so anybody who's been to war in any war, it's not always pleasant to go back. but sometimes you need to go back. not just to help you with the decisions you've got in front of you, but just to remind you of some things that are important in life. so that that would be my response. peter.

bob well, adam, if you've read elizabeth becker's book, no, i had nothing to do with it. which one is it? where are you? elizabeth hager. but i just asked you a question, so elizabeth becker wrote a book, the title of it is you don't belong here. and i think it's a pretty good summary of our involvement in vietnam, and it might be a pretty good summary of my presence here today. so. but she described not just her reporting, but kate webb, frances fitzgerald and katherine leroy. it's a remarkable story and it i actually connected in some ways to two other books that i read once in 1972 and then again recently, which is fire in the lake, and then a delusional woman. my name is svetlana, alix. they have called, you know, second hand time and the reason there was two books are important to me is i do think

one of the problems with discussing the vietnam war is we get self-indulgent. it's all about us. it wasn't fought in rome and omaha. it was fought in vietnam. and the impact on the vietnamese is larger than the impact on us. by considerable amount. after i stepped down as governor and after a single term and i was invited to go to santa barbara to teach a class on the vietnam war, about which i knew nothing, and i've only increased my knowledge at the margin since then. and full disclosure, i had a choice do i want to spend january, february, march in santa barbara or january, february, march in omaha? and that was a pretty easy choice. and we talked about the impact at that time. bear on us and on other veterans, including vietnam. and one of the people i invited was a guy named gary parrot, who is a very close friend of mine from seal team. and as he got up on stage and leaned in the podium and he says, if there's if there is

reincarnation, i want to come back as a vietnamese. and i think that to me, i feel the same way. i mean, i started going back to vietnam in 1989 as a cold war was about to about to end. and one of the thing is really two things i'd say that are under appreciated that happened at that time. the difficulty of normalizing relations. it was really hard to resolve the p.o.w. market issue, the battle cry was no written until we get a full accounting, we can't normalize relations. and the second was a peace agreement in cambodia. so the first president bush negotiated all that and had a roadmap to normalization. then he lost. and bill clinton, who famously did not go to vietnam, not running against bob dole in 1995, signed the normalization, an agreement, and before that, in 1975. the two heroes for me are gerry ford and ted kennedy. those two guys made it possible for a million and a half or so vietnamese to come to the united states of america. that didn't happen by accident.

we may have been just as anti-immigrant in 1975 as we are today. it was a wonderful thing that they did and they get way too little appreciation for it. so i think the summary for me is the question for us needs to be how do we sustain peace? peace in some ways is a hell of a lot harder than war because you have to constantly work at it. you have to constantly work through the disagreements, you have to constantly work through. people say, oh, you're making peace with the communist. so it's to my mind, my work right now is much more about making fulbright university successful because i think it's a way for us to do something positive and give us one sentence on fulbright university, because it's very likely that not everybody knows what it is. i mean, we don't know each other well, and i can't say one sentence on good morning. so look, it's a university we put it in and the normalization legislation in 95 and we actually did it in a little inappropriate way, but we did it nonetheless. i appreciate this is more than one sentence, although we haven't heard a comma or a period yet.

and we we build a graduate program first in our building, an undergraduate program first. we have an independent license from the government, vietnam, which is really important. they let us do our own curriculum and if i could fill this room with those students who would say, holy --, these kids are great. they're trying to figure out their own future in vietnam. they're trying to figure out what does a war mean to them. and i think it's very important for us, as i said in this in the second hand time book this what she does and she talks to people and gets her story and puts it all together in a wonderful piece of nonfiction as does. and my view is frances fitzgerald in fire in the lake. but we need to be sympathetic and try to understand and become friends with the people of vietnam. you've just had an illustrator of what it's like to talk to senators. yes. name one. ask and you ask you ask your question. i got it. i got a very good, concise answer from the republican. the democrat went off the rails. yeah. there you go. yeah, i did warn you that i did.

i've been warned. i've been duly warned. yeah. paul, your situation is really quite different because, after all, it was your father who was shot down when you were a playboy at west point. and you went on to serve in what essentially was the cold war army. how do you think going into the military at the end of the vietnam experience affected your own? you know, years as you rose through the ranks to major general and first of all, tell us a bit about your father and why that had an impact on you and then the years you spent in the military. sure, peter. so when i told my younger son a special forces officer, what i was doing, he said, why are you here? because you didn't go to vietnam. and i said, i'll let you know after the conference. he also said, i don't know who the other panel members are, but

i hope you have a noncommissioned officer and a special operator. you got that. was so my dad went over there to fly the 5780, which was a a small bomber retrofitted to to perform night trail interdiction over the ho chi minh trail, wherever it might be. and he had the section over laos and a he was 41 years old when he went over. he was a lieutenant colonel, air force, and on the night of january 19, and he didn't come back and i get a phone call from my mom while i was at lunch at west point, and it was her

birthday, her 40th birthday. and she said, your dad's lost. they got a beacon. they don't know anything other than we don't know. and some 38 years later, we get a call from my mom that remains recovered and buried with full military honors. so it closed the chapter. but i'll tell you that one, the air force covered itself in glory the way they treated my mother and my brothers and me and we owe julia more. hal moore's wife, who was famous for the book, we were soldiers once and young and all of that memory is an piece to a young person. i was 18 when it happened and it changes your your outlook on life. so what did it do to change my

outlook on the armed forces. right after that happened, i went over to germany to perform platoon leader duties for 30 days with the 14th armored cavalry regiment, which was right on the border between east and west germany. i was not impressed with the equipment. i was not impressed with the willingness to execute combined arms operations and all of my classmates came back and we went through that question. we had an opportunity to to change our future, but the majority of us stayed at the military academy. but that experience was informative. the next punctuation point was, as a platoon leader with 44 young americans who had volunteered. it was 1973 and we just going to

the all volunteer army. so all these men were volunteers to serve in the armed forces of the united states. my squad leaders and my platoon sergeant. were two tours, vietnam veterans. i came in with zero experience and it's repeated itself with the iraq and afghan wars. but that is intimidating because they knew so much about everything. they were young men. my platoon sergeant was staff sergeant ray july. he was raised in guam. and that man had the wisdom of a man far older than he was. and everything that we did was a reflection on their experi ence in vietnam.

overlaid on the fact that we were preparing our unit for the cold war operations with a warsaw pact. so a completely different war because america kind of shelved our experience in vietnam. ranger school in 72 was all about vietnam, but the american army turned the page just instantly when we came out. different preparation for war, but with an overlay of experience from the vietnam war and the young men. and it was all infantry. so we did not have women then at that time. but they listened to our vietnam veterans. and i did not have a boss who

was not a vietnam veteran until i was 53 years old. hmm. they were all vietnam veterans. and they stayed with your army and made it what it is today. so one of the things that characterized stick of that period was that americans showed not all certainly, but ultimately a majority of americans showed disrespect for the effort in vietnam. certainly the guys who came home were treated that way. and yet today, if you go to a sporting event and there's a veteran there often a woman, 18,000 people will get up and cheer. so why do you think what was that fact in the seventies? a young man like you, paul,

that's like you guys. when the country was turning against the war and turning against the military. how did that make you all feel? how angry were you if that was what you were or resentful that you went to serve? you lost your father. you lost part of your leg. you're wounded twice. how did you all feel about the fact that this country was not behind your efforts? chuck, you want to try? well, i think the first part of your question. yeah, is or can be explained by an understanding of finally the american people separated the war and the warrior. it wasn't their fault that they went. america told them to go fight that war. they did. and they did it for their country. and those of us in the baby boom generation who fought that war,

our fathers, most of our fathers or uncles served in world war two at least. that certainly was my brother tom. in my situation. and i think it was a situation for for most of us. and so you did what the country asked you to do because it's the right thing to do. my dad did. my grandfather, my uncles did it. and i think that was kind of the beginning. but more to your point, as were able to mature as a society about what the hell happened over there and why were we there? we eventually separated the war and the warrior. i think today is different for probably two or three things. number one, certainly in 911, nine, 11, really coalesced the country behind our men and women in the military and all the

consequences that were still playing out, i think, to just a better general educated public on not just vietnam, but issues like geopolitics and world and trade and what's happened over the years is this i think made us our society a little smarter, a little wiser and a little better with with a bigger appreciation, a wider lens, a view of of mankind, of world, of service. and i think number three and it kind of gets to its something paul was referring to, the quality of our armed forces, the people who who stepped forward after vietnam. and i recall many times talking to colin powell about this and paul especially knows this, how

many of those guys like colin powell stayed after vietnam and said, we're going to we're going to improve this army, we're going to make a better army, i'm going to do the right thing. and they did. and it was because of mccaffrey and powell and all these as well. well, well, that we'll get to that as you get to that. but but it's a good point on your behalf, of course, is. but all our armed forces just improved. i mean, just because there was no draft and because everybody's a volunteer. well, that was part of it, too. but just, i think, a new sense of where it was going and the people who stepped forward to make it. and then what paul said, too, and i'll end with this, paul was just coming out of west point, and i remember serving with marty dempsey, who was chairman of the joint chiefs when i was the secretary, and he was coming out of west point right at the end as well.

and these were really pretty special people. and they they saw it to. and i'll let paul address that. but and that helped us and that helped us. and i think last we want to put that chapter behind us. sure. bob, you're were there. roughly 15 years after the end of world war two, the height of the cold, the chinese commies, the reds, this that did you know why you were there? did you have a sense that you were there to make the world safe or going to make up for the previous answer i gave you? you're going to be no good. thank you very much. no, but no. but how? you know, how did you feel about the way the country treated the war and the warriors? well, first of all, you have to know a little bit about me. so i was on a panel a couple of

weeks ago of bill bradley, who's a dear friend. and the question and somebody's asking a question about politics today and bill's answer was, we just got to learn how to disagree without being disagreeable. to which i said, no, there's nothing wrong with being disagreeable. and and i can be that way i can be very. and if you provoke, i'll be disagreeable. no. so it's a he's not kidding. it was a 68 was a defeat year for the united states. right. we were being disagreeable. but i mean, malcolm knox was killed. dr. king was killed. bobby kennedy was killed. and that's just sort of the tip of the emotional iceberg. it wasn't just vietnam that was provoking americans into being disagreeable by far. there was great civil rights and cultural changes going on in america at that time. and the war happened to be one of them. the next thing i'd say is i think the worst thing i'm speaking to the men and women who of our veterans of war. i think the worst thing we can do, especially those of us who were hurt, is to become begin to

be feel sorry for ourselves. i get that way every and then it's dangerous, really dangerous. i had one of my best friends. i was in the build up a naval hospital full of marines in 1969, and one of my best friends was a guy. but i remember this, paula, and louis paula called me while he was listening to fortunate son creedence clearwater revival song. i was the basis of his book called fortune song, and i was the last person to talk to him before he shot and shot himself, because that's where it leads. that's where despair goes, and you got to find a way to get over it because it's a deadly condition. so for me, an end when i came home, i don't i didn't give a -- if somebody didn't like me, what do i care? i got other problems other than whether or not there's a group of people. i think the vietnam war is wrong. i got a i've got to put my my broken little body back together. and thanks to the united states government who, you know, it's fair to say, almost killed me before i was able to put my life back together.

so i think, you know, we were treated poorly in part because everything that was going on at the time, it was not just a war. when you've got a president of the united states saying, i'd like to tell you what where we're bombing in vietnam, but i don't want the enemy to know is, excuse me, we're dropping the f ing bombs on the enemy. don't you think they know where the bombs are dropping? there were many examples where our leaders were just lying to us, and it tends to. to put it mildly, be very discouraging. and i think that one of the things that's characterize stick of all the years since yeah that it was in vietnam and when that when the government was telling people x when reality was y that that began a process with which we are deeply immersed today, which is a kind of lack of confidence and a belief that they're telling us things that are not true. that's true. so, paul, you go out there, you

finished west point, you've lost your father. you're going to serve the country. you could have done a hell of a lot better. go into business school. but you didn't. you stayed with it and you watched the military recover because that's what it did. it was broken. and morale certainly by the end of the war, the united states had never retreated in the way we did. you know, we talk about the the last guys because that's why we're here is last year left in april 73. but the war didn't end until 75. and the image and everybody's mind is those folks on the top of that was not the embassy, but a building downtown. so you were there picking up the thread of a very demoralized, i would guess, in some respects, senior military leadership. they knew they had failed. so how did you in the decades

see the recovery of pride? well, you already talked about the recovery of the skills and so on. but one of the things that fascinates me is when a poor individuals, how they cope with the broader sense of failure, how did you think that you, as an officer, as a as a west point graduate, how did you kind of manage the changes in the way the country was treating the military and the way you felt about the country. so in 1972, chinese premier jo enlai was asked the implications of the french revolution, and he said, it's too soon. tell. the long view and. when i arrived at fort carson, colorado, with my 44 brand new soldiers and my four vietnam veteran noncommissioned

officers, we worried about the first sergeant. that's our focus. lieutenant. and the men are our troopers. as long as first sergeant gerry washburn was happy, we were happy, and so was our company commander. so there there is this fact of a demoralized army in the aggregate. but we were not the moralized as individuals. and everybody who stayed in the army after 1970, after the summer of 73, was a volunteer. and every day we went to work knowing that we could make a whole lot of money on the outside. but we liked what we were doing. if our chain of command was good and i was supremely lucky with

my chain of command, one boss after another, one platoon sergeant, one first sergeant after another. charlie wilson. my first sergeant. when i took a 180 man rifle company in germany, all volunteer was about 20%, 25% black. we had not conquered our racial problems by then. by 1975. but charlie wilson, who was black, and his wife, peggy, also black, became my wife and my best friends. and were we inwardly focused? yes. so we weren't worried. the fact that vietnam may not have turned out to our satisfaction. we were worried about our

mission and the welfare there of left and right up and down. and i'll make a comment that and or witnessing it right now between russia and ukraine. armies can lose wars, but it takes a nation to win a war. and you can vietnam with. 550,000 of the best americans you can possibly find. but if the national strategy and if the national will isn't there, it will not be a success. i made a trip to to vietnam in 2009 with my brother and what we saw was wonderful and the question that we had was, is the vietnam that we see today, which is what's wonderful, the vietnam

that we see today, was that because of the french and american involvement, or in spite of it. i say the same thing about the us army. is the army today. because of our vietnam experience or in spite of it. and i give it to a handful of extraordinary generals and senior noncommissioned officers who took what we got out of vietnam and created this marvelous instrument for foreign policy that we have right now. and i believe in spite vietnam. but if i want to make sure i get this right, that you were one of the military who spoke out against the invasion of iraq in 2000. i read about that, indeed. okay.

talk a little bit about why you as a career military officer, when once again, your president was saying we're doing this because we think it's in the best interests of the united states. why you who would never have disobeyed an order in the military stood up and said, as what you did forthrightly, that this is a mistake or whatever it was you said. talk about how you came to that view. so in that happened and i'll start off with at the war college, we send our best and brightest to at the age of 41, 42 years old, to to the war college. every service has one. and the army, when they start off with welcome practice, owners of the military are. we're going to talk about two things. one, the rest of government application to foreign policy and vital or national interests

and a vital national interest or an existential interest. in theory, you're all in when this second attempt to go into iraq was being tossed about. for those of us who believed what we heard in the war college, it was not a vital national interest and all of us had been exposed to what my two colleagues on this stage have been exposed to men who had to vietnam and had returned and the experience that meant for the nation, the iraq war was the dumbest thing that we've done in a long time. and that because of better than 4400 families who lost men and women over there.

that's a that's a tough pill to swallow. but and also my brother, who was a lawyer, said. you know, you're subject to the uniform code of military justice and you are because i was retired at the time. but if you're retired and you're drawing a pension, you are subject to military law and the commentary that i wrote for the new york times about mr. rumsfeld triggered an article. yes, mr. rumsfeld could court martial the generals that that had not occurred to us when we took our position. but it looked great and strikes me it was an unlikely event. so. so let me ask the two others of you who were in very significantly in public life at the time of 911 in iraq and afghanistan. remind us of what your positions

were. chuck, you want to start with that? what did you think? 911, you said, was a turning point. then we wanted to afghanistan and made a quick job of it. then came iraq. and we didn't. we? what did you think at the time? i forgotten where you were in the hierarchy of the world that time. where were you in 2003? i was in the united states senate foreign relations committee, foreign relations committee, intelligence committee in 2001. after 911, i supported, i think every senator did, except we had one vote against it. mm hmm. going into afghanistan in iraq was a whole different story. yeah and i spoke out against it. took a very similar position. paul did, reflecting on the first question you ask is our experience in vietnam, did it affect our lives and how we viewed things in and came to

decisions? that was a clear example of how i got to my position on iraq. that was wrong. i gave a floor floor speech, senate floor speech on it. i, i became ostracized from my own party. i was called a traitor and a rhino, which is worse. i don't know. rhino is not an attractive fellow. it may be purebred or something would be better the rhino. but in any event, for the same reasons that paul noted in more why i thought iraq was a mistake. we didn't need to do it and something it's always really astounded me. the news media, especially lose and did lose this point. you know, after desert storm, when we and i think george h.w.

bush handled that exactly right. you push him out, you finish the mission. but but we didn't just leave. here's what's missing that people forget. we had overflights over the northern part of iraq and northern and southern part of iraq, where he saddam hussein, couldn't control his own oil. a matter of fact, he couldn't even sell his own oil was being sold to the united nations. he was he was just a broken down old general. he would have been overthrown. he didn't control 60% of his country. and the kurds flourished for ten years up in the north. and joe biden and i drove down into kurdistan in december of 2002, a couple of months before we invaded iraq. and we spent three days up in or in iraq. biden and i did. and to see what what was going on up there. so i talked to the present president bush personally on this a number of times, as i did

rice and rumsfeld. but that decision had been made months and months before. and the administration didn't tell the truth, quite frankly. and with this, there was a speech that vice president cheney gave in kansas city to the vfw convention in august of 2002. and he very clearly said, we're going to war in iraq and we're going to invade iraq. and in within days after i, i noted that in a floor speech that i made in the senate, but nobody really picked it up. i mean, it wasn't unusual for nobody to pay attention to me, but you got an audience here now. well, captive. yes. so, yeah, i it was it was very bad. were we started something in iraq that some of us warned about that all of what's

happening in the middle east? i would say in some way can be traced back to that invasion of iraq. and then then we got kicked out. and then 2008, while bush was still president, prime minister maliki says the bush i'm not going to take of forces agreement to the parliament to protect your troops because you're occupiers. now, this is 2008. get out, get out. and that's what happened. mean obama didn't it didn't take the troops out. obama was opposed to it in the campaign in iraq. but bush had to sign that deal in 2008 to remove all troops because we were seen as occupiers. and that's always going to be the case when you stay too long, when you don't even understand why you're going in to start with. it was all on lies and so on, but anyway, i had that was my but i'm not surprised. i mean, i'm not going to expect

you to say you were in favor of the iraq operation. what do you expect me? but going to ask you another question. no, let me you can deal with that. but then i want what you ask me. i'm not going to answer it. no matter what, we're now 40 minutes into this. i figured that out. but i one of the things that that's stayed with me most and the my own vietnam experience and years since was when john paul van said the trouble with the united states in vietnam was, not that we only had ten years, but that we had one year, ten times in iraq was in many ways a repeat of some of the same mistakes. we went into a country that we didn't understand. i think it's a -- analogy, just to be clear at the outset. well, that's why i'm asking the

question. well, a couple of things i want to say. first of all, you do know that we're on live television. we're going to believe you. you don't know i'm a former senator, right? so the the draft was ended in 1972 because the draft was unpopular, not because the congress. oh, we're going to do something enlightened. they eliminated draft in 1972 because the draft itself was unpopular, not because we thought it was going to improve the quality of the military. i'm not sure it did because. i served the people of all walks of life because i was you know, i was i was essentially drafted, although i volunteered for the navy because i didn't want to go to vietnam. that was a smart thing to do. so. secondly, i remember the balkan war and in the balkan war, people were said, oh, we can't intervene. it's not in our interest. we're not going be able to do anything anyway because they're still thinking about the battle policy in 1423. so don't intervene. we intervene. and -- holbrooke went to dayton, ohio, negotiated a peace agreement, and most of the smart people said, you can never enforce it, never enforce it.

and we did. the defense intelligence agency monitor that whole process and the killing stopped as a consequence of the us military intervening. so i'm cautious. and the final thing i'd say, peter, is that i watched the other day on youtube an interview of john kennedy in 1962. and it's remarkable. they ask him, was there anything harder than you expected it to be? and remember, when the iraq war was started and i cited because he said, you know, yes, i realize it's it's a lot easier to tell people what to do than it is to actually make the decision to do it. so i wasn't in the senate at the time and i had a relationship with the kurds, and i believe that they could have establish a, you know, a representative government, knew what the nature of the prisons were in iraq. so i think my opinion is what should have been done, could have been done, is not much more than somebody setting on the

sidelines cheering on their team. so let me be sure i understand. what you're saying is you thought they would be more specific. what did you think the mission in iraq was and what should it have been? i think they got badly confused. look, we did have international sanctions on iraq and all they had to do is disclose where their weapons of mass destruction are. and it did leave the impression that they must have had them. we didn't realize that the sanctions were enabling saddam hussein to make a whole bunch of cash off. it was in his interest to keep sanctions on. so it wasn't a it's not impossible for me to be sympathetic to somebody say, oh, they've got weapons. based upon his behavior. but i think we got lost. i think we i think rumsfeld wanted to demonstrate that he could do with the smallest possible. he obliterated the power doctrine, which was really important. it's sort of that lesson i learned in demolitions. calculated amount of c4 you need and multiply it by two. that's what he did. this is what it's going to take to win desert storm.

you multiply it by two. and if the american people are not supportive, we're not going to do it. and then it turned the whole purpose around. he didn't care about democracy in iraq the same way in afghanistan. we drove the taliban out in six months with special operations and cia people. and then what did rumsfeld do? we can't stop until we can kill bin laden, which is, what, eight years later? so, yeah, there's so much. and the decision making about the both the iraq war and the afghan war that i am extremely critical of. but i'm again, reminded what john kennedy said is he's 100% right. you're in the arena making the decision. it's a lot harder than sitting on -- running the new school up in new york city. peter, we took bob's point. we lost our way. we really never understood why. we went into afghanistan either. iraq was a different, but we never had a real plan. and we stayed and stayed. and i remember asking questions of foreign relations committee of senior administration officials. is this nation building?

oh, no, it's not nation. what is it? we'll be out of there in five, six months. give us more men, more money, and we'll be home by christmas. year after year was that same answer. and we just eventually went off the cliff and didn't realize any more. why worry there when we got in so deep and we had so many business interest consultants? billion dollar contra acts and on and on and on. and congressman and senators were benefiting too, because those contracts were going back to their districts and their states. in fact, bob. so you're another generation. we know where these folks were and we now know where you were on that. where do you think has happened to the country since iraq and afghanistan? where do you think we are. in 2023 as a country?

first of all, as a military. second of all, and i would say that one thing that's been striking to me is really for the first time since world war two, the folks fighting the war in ukraine are people we admire. we didn't admire the south vietnamese. we didn't admire the koreans we didn't admire the, you know, of the afghan army. we always treated our. as though they were clients, which is to say we didn't have much respect for them. but we seem to have a great deal of respect for the ukrainians, partly because we're not losing anybody. but where do you think the country is now in the broader sense and in the particularly in the military sense what should we be thinking about on those two big issues and the military. i am 72 years old. oh, to be 72. and i have all my family is

military. my my three children, two sons are are still active. well, my younger son just retired. a daughter served. two noncommissioned officers. one officer. i grew up in the air force. my father in law was a career marine and we tend to view the world in an insular fashion when we're active duty and we're looking. but as a as a guy looking out right now, i live in key west, florida, a small town with a drinking problem, we say. and it's a it's a great place to live, but it's a small town and i go to little league games. my my family's little girls are 13 and 15 are great athletes and i watch small town america operate. then if you turn on one of the

cable news programs, you get a different perspective you get this politicization of just about everything. and a a political environment is is as divisive as i've seen in the time that i've been conscious. so. it's kind of like military units, small units tend to operate as they have always operated. good leadership and good men and women doing what they're told to do, preparing for the eventual. and then you get into the politics and my colleagues can can speak far more eloquently than can. but if you're bombarded at at the national level by by increasingly sufficed dictated means of transmitting ideas and

conceptions as opposed to news, it's a hot mess. and then if you start querying and i, i think that it would be helpful to answer your question in in polling to to to reach out to a retired lieutenant who was wounded in afghanistan and, who has just retired, how he feels about what we did leaving afghanistan in a less than elegant manner and the way we left iraq after, committing nations resources. and, you know, and our youth to a cause that we did not completely understand, which is a little reminiscent of what we're talking about today. so we have as a nation, we have

repeated what we did in the sixties and seventies and there are a lot of young americans who are very unhappy and because of the nature of who they are, they are coming to grips and putting packages together to go back afghanistan and rescue people who need rescue, to bring them back to america and safety because of the personal relationships that are always important critical. it's a small level. so addressing america, we're going to we're doing great. we're it's i i'm a pollyanna ish. you know, glass is half full. i'm i always have been that way. and i trust in the youth of america and what they will do,

they'll do the right thing. we've got a great economy going on right now and we've got some frictions out there. but i am i'm positive. so the fact that you lost your father in vietnam, that you thought the iraq war was a terrible mistake, but your general view is that americans. well, so why do we keep making all these terrible mistakes? is it politics. gentlemen, that i'm going to if you don't want to answer the question, i'm because i what we're hearing from from paul, is the quality and commitment of the military forces and the quality of american life generally. let's put the little league and

the big league. but what we have is a very, very, very complicated, to put it mildly, vexed political system. so in a democracy, peter, the most dangerous force is uninformed public opinion always has been, always be. and when i read for the second time fire the lake, i mean, she goes into phenomenal. detail of the various different religions and sex. and so if i had no understanding, likewise until 911 peter if you ask me to tell you the difference in a shia and a sunni, i couldn't i'm not sure i still can, but we had to the congress needed to rapidly increase its knowledge in order to answer the question what did we do and might and ukraine by the way in some ways is easier because they look like us. it's easier to understand their culture than it is to understand the culture of the vietnamese, of the culture of the iraqis. so i think it does get back

politics, but it isn't what the politicians are doing. it's what we as americans know, it's don't push your politician to do something unless you really understand what it is that's going to happen when they do what you want them to do. you know, i take that on the politics of why is it that we have this distinction between in the american spirit on the ground and the military spirit on the ground and, the very dystopic politics that we find and the kind of politics that leads to, well, disaster sixties was vietnam, the nineties was iraq. and here we are. so how do you resolve contradiction? well, we've got 5 minutes left. i say wrap up so yeah that's that's that's a question i would take all day to answer. we don't have all day. so i'm going to tell you this.

iraq and afghanistan were the products of 911 america was. all americans responded to that just judging from the congress in the house and the senate, how that vote was to go to afghanistan, we were attacked. that's not going to happen. and so that's different. vietnam different from other than world war two. when we were attacked by the japanese. i think that's where you got to start on those two wars. but to your bigger question on the on the politician bob's right. i've always said that does not lead politics follows. society. society at. the ballot box in november makes decision who's going to be the president and who's going to be in the senate and the house and the governor. and so it's society that informs its society with the power it's society with the votes and

politics just responds to that. it just reflects to that. and bob's point is a really good one. and by the way, he's never said that before. yeah, well, maybe, you know, maybe they're trying to get their right to say that again. but. but also you've got the other variation of social media, of lack of trust. i mean, trust is the coin of the realm. everybody knows that in personal relationships or anything, business, politics and when we've destroyed in this country truth, what is truth? i don't know what fox says or what says or politician lie. i mean, you can't trust anybody. you've got that kind of of a world today. the world is complicated, is intercut. and so it doesn't do any good to just sit and talk about and wring our hands. we've got to manage it just through a cursory reading of

history down through the last few centuries. all the problems that that society has had to deal with every revolution in technology all my god is what do how do we handle this? you're going to put people out of work so i think that's not a good answer to the question, but i think. as long as we can understand the challenge ahead of us and you'll never understand all of the challenge because you don't get it all, you're the future and i'm confident that we can do that. i spend and i'll end with. i spent some time with younger members, the house democrats and republicans, the senate, they have a whole different attitude toward all this. they that we look like a bunch of jokes. i mean, really who joke. but there's different members, younger members, and we all you guys are. but no the well how, we're

governing or or pretending to govern. and the difference is, the political differences that you're talking about that paralyzes and polarizes and us, we've got to stop that. we've got to break out of that. and these younger ones understand that they haven't yet reached a authority position yet in the power. but what they're doing, it's interesting, they're putting caucuses together so it isn't just one or two members is a caucus of like 50 members. now, new york times wrote a wrote a great story about it, about a week and a half ago. the five families of of mccarthy and the republicans and so on. and i don't want to get political here, but but that's people are responding to this. chuck. we got one hour and we have one minute and 2 seconds left before they give us the hook. i just want to ask all three of the one looking at the four of us. we have something in common. we're all white men of a certain old, old well, i call it seasoned.

anyway, the thing i wanted to ask, though, is it time for us to get out of the way. should joe biden, the president of the united states, be running again. well, i'm delusional about lots of things, but i am out of the way. so. well, speak for yourself. you're not out of the way. i just i i'm saying that seriously, i want to i want to the question of the age of the vietnam generation who are still extant and joe is one and all of us are except a little younger. but where do we fit in? today's how how to influence the world experience? count. his experience. count. sure, sure. experience counts, but there are a variation of qualities of leadership that you need. experience is of them, but energy, new focus, discipline. i mean, all those things are

part leadership. look, i just want to say thanks very much thank you, bill. kept as much as we to the subject. thank you very much. thank. thank you very much. mr.. nice.

oak oak. so we're going to get started with our second panel. we spent the first hour talking about the of war and something about the military issues and strategies associated with it. in this hour, we're going to talk about writing about war. what it means to be on the ground in the place, sort of study it and reflect on it from. a historical or literary point of view. and i'd like to start with we have panelists. i'll introduce them very briefly, although i suspect

known to all of you, robert brigham, the shirley ecker. barsky professor of history and international relations at vassar and author of numerous books on vietnam war, including reckless henry kissinger and the tragic tragedy of the vietnam war and vietnam and the limits of american power. bob brigham. next, we have philip caputo, a vietnam vet and author of 71 books, including a rumor of war, one of the most important early books on vietnam. and indeed, it helped to establish a whole genre. winner of the pulitzer prize for investigative reporting, along with other awards. next, we have frances fitzgerald, a pioneering american journalist and historian who has written many books on a wide variety of subjects. her book, the fire in the lake the vietnamese and americans in vietnam, which has been discussed quite a bit already this morning, won the national book award and the pulitzer prize, among numerous other.

and then frederick the vol the lawrence dee belfer, professor of international affairs at harvard university. he's the author of pulitzer prize winning the embers of war the fall of empire and the making of america's vietnam, and more recently, jfk coming of age in the american century, 1917 to 1956, the first of two planned volumes on jfk. so welcome. it's great to have the four of you with us for this next hour. and if we if i can, i'd like to start with frank with a question about indeed, you're a pioneer. your work in vietnam helped to establish an extraordinary level of of journalistic scholarship and significant engagement with the issues on the ground. but can you talk a little bit about what it meant for you as a young woman in vietnam to be writing about war? how did you understand that experience? well, all i can say is that that fire in the leg was the most

difficult book i've ever had to write. and the reason was not so much the subject matter. it was a matter of tone. i mean, i'm talking in writerly way and. the subject code came up immediately that. i got to vietnam. i remember getting there on a plane from vientiane, and the plane was going along and so on, and suddenly went almost vertically to a land and the we got out and they said, well, you know, they were mortaring the airport just now. and so we had to do that. so then i got through the customs and so forth, and i was met by a. friend and he said, we've got to

hurry. and i said, why? he said, because i have a tennis game. and he did. so i thought, you know how, how do i write about that? and that evening we went to not he and i, but you know, the whole press corps gang went to a birthday party given by the sailors for nbc correspondent for his photographer girlfriend, and it was on the roof, the caravelle hotel and. there was roses and champagne and there were firing in the distance all the time. was of it was outgoing, but some of it was incoming. and we heard even. gunfire in the streets just

below. and nobody paid any attention at all except me and i thought, well, how do i write about this? and then then the next thing i remember very well was i went up to quinlan, which is the capital of indian province, finding out who had been a viet cong forever. i mean, it might as well have been in the north. and the americans were putting on an enormous more than operation. it went on for a couple of weeks and somehow the first place i got to was the hospital. and they said, well, it's over there. so i went and this beautiful old french building, i went inside the courtyard and there was

nobody there at all. so finally i saw this american leaning over one of the balconies and so i went up to him and he was a doctor who was there for six months. and he said he was practically his hair out. he said, you just can't believe how terrible it is. you can't believe it. you can't believe it. you can't believe it. and he showed me along this corridor where we're there. there were stretchers with people lying on every one of them not able to get into the rooms and the people were so horribly disfigured, they they they were up to twice their size. and a lot of them had terrible wounds as well. and of course, it was napalm or c-4 that had done it. and it was clearly.

initiative. so. he couldn't speak to them. he had no medicine even even to make them make it more comfortable that he was he didn't he? you know, he saw himself when it came there as being in a nice clinic with some some children. you know. but there it was almost all by himself with these impossible cases that and he didn't know who they were, what where they came from, what had happened to them. so on and i remember him, whereas we were looking over over the courtyard there was a dog walking along with a bone in his body in its in its in its mouth. and he said, you know, that's a human bone because they dug,

they, they don't bury them very deeply. and so dogs often just don't dig, dig the bodies up and and chew the bones and and you know, the whole spectacle was so terrible that i really had no idea how to how how to how to deal with it. i mean, i could have sort of screamed like he did know in writing, but i knew that that nobody could read that, you know, it would just turn everybody off and they would think that was a little crazy. and equally, i could not sort of take that distance from it because the i'd be if i did.

and so, you know, i would go back forth while i was there between these two things were four things, you know, the sort of general ease of life in saigon and and these horrors outside and so that that's when i started to worry about how to how to write about the whole thing. and it and i learned more about the context about the war and about the vietnamese who still was there. and so when i started writing this book, i still didn't quite know how i was going to be able to deal with. it's really paradox in some ways that wandered into this circumstance and found to be as complicated as you did, but you set out to write an extra ordinarily ambitious book and as

a very young journalist on the ground, you recognize at the time you were beginning work the level of ambition that would be required to pull it off. i guess not. i wouldn't. well, it worked out, which is good. well, i thank john for for boosting it. very kind of him. well, thank you. so, fred, you have as a historian who has studied the vietnam a great deal from the distance of the aftermath of the war, can you tell you something about your own interest, this work, what drew you to it in the first place and how you see the evolution of thinking about this issue since you published the embers of war? well, i think i i'm originally from sweden and i think developed an interest early on down in us foreign policy. we emigrated to canada and i don't think you can't help when you live in canada to be if you care about foreign affairs, to

think a lot about the us, what are they up to down there? and so i think i developed this interest. i read and i'll come back to this in a second. i read david halberstam's best in the best and the brightest college blew my mind. and then in graduate school, i decided, need to figure out how this whole thing started. and initially, that had to do with kennedy and johnson and their decision to americanize. and i think something that happens to all of us or many of us is that we begin to write about this conflict and then we visit the country and something takes hold. and so all of a sudden you find yourself committing to do another book. and so that's a that's how i got into this in terms of the the literature. dan i guess i'd make a couple of remarks. you know, we're as historians to we're trained to believe that you a certain period of time before you can really good history. i think that's true.

but i'm also conscious of the fact that so many of the early works, we might call them first cut histories. second cut have just stood up so incredibly well and the certain person just my immediate right, i, i think fire in the lake belong is on any short list today. any short list of essential books on the war. halberstam. george herring. bernard faull, arguably one of our great writers, still on this conflict. so it's striking to me. dan chester, there are a number of these early books that i think right now if you picked them up, you would find you learned a great deal about this conflict. it should also be said, maybe my second point is that, of course, the scholarship that's come out over the last couple of decades i've contributed a bit of this to this myself, i think has been incredibly important.

it's given us a whole new a whole new understanding in some respects of the of the struggle. some of it based, obviously, on vietnamese sources, sources in france that i've made use of and others have made use of an incredible outpouring of documentary materials in this country. and and it's it's it's been so important. and yet there's irony here which i think that this new scholarship has really changed the terms of the debate in this country. i'm conscious of the fact that we're still debating the core questions. why did the united states get involved? why did the united states escalate its involvement? why did it perpetuate wait this war? why did it fail to achieve its objectives? i guess what the new scholarship is really doing is allowing to debate those questions with more sophistication than we had before, which it seems to me is an interesting. and if i may, just one final

thought on this, and that is what's striking to me after 25 years of studying this war is, that american leaders and this includes john f kennedy, who did research and writing about right now, kennedy, johnson and nixon, as i see it, were realists behind closed doors. they were gloomy realists about this war, i think from the beginning to the end, robert mcnamara would later say to us, if only we had known it was a kind of of the latter day mcnamara. he sells himself short. he did know. they did know. and so what i find striking for me is the degree to which they were realists about the war. dan and they escalated, it seems to me, and perpetuated a war that they privately doubted was either winnable or necessary. that's a rather gloomy

conclusion that i've reached on the basis of my research. well, it raises themes that i'd like us to discuss in this hour. one of them is the role of leadership in decision making that that maybe we can come back. and the question is, why is it today still we seem to devalue integrity, transparency, a certain commitment to honesty. and in way in which leadership is practiced in this country politically, when we learn much after the disclosures of, mcnamara and johnson and nixon, we knew what they were really thinking because actually that became public, which was revelatory. but i want to back up just a bit and stay with you for a second, fred. it seems to me, anyway, it was self-evident by the late 1970s that if we learned nothing else, we'll never do that again. we will not go back to a place like vietnam, not understanding the nature of the conflict that we are engaging. and we spent much of our time this talking about afghanistan and iraq. so from a historical point of view, what we learned or not, in your view?

well, in the final paragraph of my first book, which is called choosing war, i wrote, and i remember thinking about, should i put this in, should i not put this in? but i put it in and i remember i wrote the last conclusion about the escalation, the war in vietnam. is this something very much something very much like it could happen again. so some of me understood that eternal temptation of politicians to pursue their short term interests, to push to do what's best for them in the short term will continue to be there, even this misbegotten adventure in southeast asia, southeast asia. and i think down that that's what we've seen. we've seen in terms of their calculation of best for them in the short term pursuing a military option in these later conflicts works for them. it gets to something that i haven't mentioned, which i think

is central to understanding. certainly the war in vietnam, but also these later interventions, which is that i think it has a lot to do with domestic politics and maybe democrat in particular being nervous about being tarred with the soft on communism or later soft on terrorism label and in domestic political terms and in careerist terms. let's not underestimate the importance of playing old careerism, making these commitments, even if you're saying something else behind closed doors matters, which is i guess a way of saying, dan, that maybe we haven't learned, maybe we haven't learned that much or. maybe it's really about leadership and we'll come back that. thank you, phil. most everyone knows, i think about your first book, which certainly anyone who has any interest in the vietnam war has

encountered a rumor of war. i certainly have. and i thought it was an extraordinary achievement. can you say something about why you decided to write about vietnam in that way? what was your process that led you create a rumor of war and then reflect a little bit about what you've learned since you wrote it. well, i had no idea what process was. i don't even know if i had a process. i think we all need to make a distinction between the kind of book that i wrote and and what my fellow panelists up here or wrote and mine was basically an account, an intensely personal experience. it had nothing to do with politics or with the geopolitical causes of the war. and what i basically wanted to write about what the was like

for those were in it. the the i have two problems with that. one was, is that in the past novels or memoirs, convention or wars call them that, whether it was norman mailer, james jones or siegfried sassoon of world war one, had a narrative that was imposed on them by the event itself. in other words, like, say, norman mailer wrote about the philippines, the philippine campaign in his novel the naked, the dead. well, that had a beginning, a middle, an end of the vietnam war just seemed to have no coherence or pattern to it at all. and i had almost no idea about how to go about writing an arc to that or putting it a narrative arc on that

experience. and the other one, of course, was that at the time i was writing it, it was it was still an intensely debated topic here in the us and elsewhere. so it was difficult to get away it to get a perspective on it. but what saved me in that was, is first of all, as i read, i was in london and i read sid fritz as soon as memoirs of an infantryman officer, which was best, it was a memoir, thinly, thinly, thinly disguised as a novel and i said, that's i've i've got to do the arc is what happened to me and my who were over there. that's the arc that's the narrative arc, not the event itself. and then i said i wanted to write about it in such a way that was it was such fidelity to the experience that those who

were debating the war back here would take a pause and say, what do i think about now? i mean, everybody struck me as almost smug in their attitudes about the war, whether they were, you know, pro-war or somewhere in between. and that's what i wanted. i wanted the book to undermine been there, assumed the attitudes. so that's why i wrote about it the way i did. but there was no process to it. i just if i may, i started that book when i was still in and in. i started it and at camp lejeune, north carolina and got nowhere with it and i continued to it around with me literally all over the world for something like nine years before i was

finally able to put it all together. and then i think i'd written one third of it in those nine years. and then in the last six months, i wrote the rest of it. it all came together. well, one of the things i think you accomplished brilliantly in the book is it's there's no question the hardest thing about writing about war is giving people a sense of really what it feels like to be in a war. that terror can only be known by people who have lived it. but you tried in a literary way, and i think quite brilliantly to evoke something about how awful it and what it feels like to be in a war. and i know you've spoken about that that hadn't really been done in that way before. so my question is how did you come about doing that? and at the time were actually writing the book? nobody wanted to talk about the vietnam war. it wasn't you were ahead of your time. this was not a moment when people were talking about memorials and memory though nobody wanted to talk about the war. so how did you come to terms with those issues?

i you know, i was i've never experienced in my career since then what i did there was a compulsion to create this narrative that i could not overcome and nothing outside of me could overcome it. i mean, if i say this in all sincerity, if somebody had told that if you write this book, you will be shot by the government, i would have written it anyway. and. the. and so there was there was that compulsion that was that was that was just driving me. and i don't know if that answers question, but. well, the best reason to write a book is because you can't figure out anything better to do. so i think that's yeah, i had something better to do. i was a i was actually if i was a newspaperman for ten years,

that's one of the reasons it took so long to write. so yeah, i had very little bits, little spare time to work on it. i, by a certain irony i got shot in another war in lebanon and it put me in the hospice or on crutches for something like nine months and that's when i truly had nothing better. write book. did you have any inkling that the book actually might sell? no. you know, i was quite certain it would just i think i got an advance of $6,000 for the book and i and i remember telling my wife that i said, you know, i think i think it might earn the advance and we could maybe take a nice holiday somewhere. and i had no idea i was going to have the the impact, the effect that it did. and it still does.

437 holidays later. yeah, right. and you know, the title of the book that was inspired. oh, so i don't know who came up with that, but i just think it works beautifully for. oh so maybe that has something to do. well, it could be that's actually who came up with that was matthew. i got that quote from the verse in the gospel of matthew. it works. okay. oh, great. thank you, bob. you have built a career on writing a great deal about vietnam war in various ways. i wonder if you could tell us a little bit about why. well, this is going to be a strange story for those of you who don't know me very well and for those of you who do know me, you've heard this repeat oddly. so i apologize. oh, i was born to an unwed mother in the salvation army in inner city buffalo. spent some time in foster care, was finally adopted upstate new york, and shortly after my

adoption, my new parents divorced and a social worker came by our house to see how i was doing. and in a conversation, a new mom, she whispered the word vietnam. and it was september 1967, and i was in a working class town in upstate new york. so vietnam was no stranger to me. and in my seven year old mind, vietnam represented a thing that was destroying families. so on the spot in that moment, i created story in my head about my father being vietnam and that is why my biological family whole and i told that story to myself on walks and from school, changing some details. my father would return to vietnam, find my mother. i never knew where she was in these daydream and we would be reunited all adoptees have discovery fantasies and we all tell stories fit in.

mine just happened to be a war story. and as time went on and no father up, i changed the narrative in my head. and eventually, after april 1975, that narrative meant that he was dead and so i led from that moment on with being the son of who died in vietnam. the first time i met many of you in. this room, that is what i told you. first time i met fred, first time i met francie, peter hank, brian. that was the story that i told myself because that was the way i constructed a life that had a history when i had no history of my own. and i had not a shred of evidence my mother, my adoptive mother told me years later that that conversation with a social worker never even took place. i think she's wrong that so i

literally reading as a young person, reading the books, many of the people in this room convinced myself that not only was that my story, but way to really get connected and a past and and have feet the ground was to become a historian of that war. and so that's what i did and that's who i am. and one sense and then four years ago, a dna test brought me to the biological father i never knew. and would never meet. and it turned out that he had been with me for much of my life, and i had never known it. the first paper i wrote in college was on a photograph he took in vietnam in february of 1968. he was a marine corps sergeant. he was a combat photographer with alpha one one the first reaction force into way during the tet offensive. i wrote my first college paper on his for a photograph.

i didn't know he was my father. my first trip to vietnam in 1989. charles o'shaughnessy of national archive gave me about two dozen photographs because he knew i was going to way and i wanted to improve my lectures on way. i use these photographs to retrace the steps of of that of that long siege in way they were my father's photographs. i did not know that for 40 years i have taught the vietnam war and especially the tet offensive, using my father's photographs that i not know where my father's photographs. so that's what i'm writing now, but it's the 10th book of nine books on vietnam. many of with with peter osnos. thankfully. and so i've kind of feel like i've come full circle, but i have a lot more to say about this war. it's an amazing revelation and it reminds us of mysteries of all kinds that you don't anticipate in our lives. but i guess the question

therefore, is how has it affected your work since? well, now i have to learn how to write a memoir. so that's affected it. i, i think i don't know. i haven't done anything except the memoirs since this discovery re i mean, it's affected my personal life in some strange ways. i was all alone. my adoptive sister died, my adoptive mother died, my adoptive father died. and now i have nine brothers and sisters, 101st cousins. so and they know nothing about this war, even though most of them were in the military. so i. i i'm learning more about the war to tell them and i'm more about my father through, his photographs and through his letters and through his diaries, my outlook as a historian hasn't changed. i don't think when i first wrote the memoir, i did several drafts and they were just awful because i was a historian writing, someone else's story. and that's not really what a

memoir is. so i think one of the things that's changed is i've learned how to write in that way. and i don't know how that will impact the next book, but we'll have to wait and see. well, the news is everybody in this room is going to buy. i hope so. that's good news there. so i'd like to a little bit about the theme of leadership which comes up in your work for of you in various ways. and maybe, phil, i like to start with you because maybe it was least selfish consciously an issue for you in your own writing. i the question of leadership when you were there, when you were in vietnam was a question that both bob and chuck answered in the prior panel. how thoughtful were you about why you were there and the nature of the leadership who were setting the policies that led to your your actions? was that present for you? no, no, no. every now and then it it came up. it could because i was there early in the war, but even early in the war, we who were fighting

it were beginning to question about what what what are we here for? what's going. and every now and then one of my troopers or squad leader would say, hey, l.t., you know, what in the hell are we doing here? and i would just say, you know, we're marines here because we've been ordered to be here, period. that was that was about the best answer i could give. but the it's difficult for me to to explain it in this kind atmosphere when you're in that kind of environment, you are so focused, a, accomplishing whatever mission you've been assigned, but also be keeping all of your people alive and wounded. and that's all. and yourself, obviously, that's that's all you really have time

to think about and to say nothing of the fact that you quite often you get 2 hours sleep a night and so you're so tired, you can't about these deep thoughts about why are we here and what's the gop political reason to be in indo-china and so forth. yeah, when i was writing the book on vietnam in that time, i had great conversations with jim, who was in the audience here, who was a who served with michael o'donnell in vietnam, a fellow helicopter pilot. and he told me in great detail how their focus each day not on the larger political questions. it was staying alive every day. how do we get through? what do we have to do in order to get the day? how do we make sure we take care of each other? and according to jim and i'm sure this is true for many who serve, it just wasn't time to think about leadership. that wasn't why they what that was on their radar dimension. so what you say, of course, resonates. and that's also what we heard earlier. but stepping back, all of you

have reflected on leadership and frankly in your work, has your have your own thoughts about political leadership developed since the fire in, the lake. what are your views about about political leadership and the war making? and and has that taken news for you? yeah, i think it has. i pentagon papers was was published just before i finished the book and that that had an enormous impact on me that that those papers and i actually knew people who wrote them and so they were they while some didn't tell me at the time they described this and there was a book that dan ellsberg wrote was someone else called what it called papers on the war maybe. no, it was. oh, that's just something about irony of the i forget.

anyway, it i think the central idea was that when you started out with these very small wars and then in the case of vietnam and everybody thought, you know, it could it could be kept at that small distance and it and it didn't because the vietnamese were too good. and so more were going in. and so everybody well, why doesn't someone stop at some some point or another and and the the cynical but i think real answer was that was that that each president would put off defeat until the next and. that really sort of horrified me. and, you know, i have to have to

worry about presidents and war ever since. does it matter who they are? yeah. thank you. so fred, this is an unfair question, but i bet you've been asked it 100 times. you're on jfk. the next volume of your biography and i've certainly been asked many times what my reflection are as to what would have happened if jfk had not been assassinated and what would have been his policy in vietnam. yeah, you know, with students, we do a lot of a analysis of counterfactuals. a lot of professional historians. that is to say, what if questions a lot of my fellow professional historians say, well, no, we shouldn't be doing a doing that kind of analysis. we have enough difficulty explaining what did happen in history. let's not waste time with what might have happened to which i say no. on the contrary, counterfactuals help us better understand what did happen. it's not a parlor game. so in this case, speculating in

a careful way. and i do think there are ground rules rules, a careful way about what a surviving kennedy. he returns from dallas alive, what he would done in vietnam, not only. is, i think, intellectually interesting helps us understand him, but it also actually helps us better understand what johnson did do. so i've written a little bit this and it's going to come up, as you say, in my in in the second volume. basically, my is this stand, which is that i don't agree with those who suggest that he had already decided withdraw when he withdraw from vietnam when he left on that fateful trip to texas. i just don't think the evidence is there. i know evidence is being presented. i just don't think it quite shows what these people suggest. i do think that though we can never know. obviously, it's a counterfactual counterfactual, inherently unanswerable.

i do think that for me, the best argument is that a surviving kennedy does not americanize his the war does not opt for a large scale escalation. his his his doubts about the war and went back and i cover this in volume one of my biography and it's also in embers of war actually his go back to 1951. he visits with his brother bobby during the french war and both of them, but in particular jack, remarkably prescient about what's going on, the french and what's likely to happen for. any western power that might seek to defeat what he means revolution. i don't think that those ever go away. so for the next 12 years until his death i think john f kennedy is of view that any large military intervention is likely to to fail. so there's a paradox because if

that if i'm right about that, how do we explain the sizable escalation that occurs on kennedy's watch and that's something that i'm grappling with now in the second volume of the book, i think as i suggested earlier, has something to do with a lot to do with his perceived domestic political imperatives. and i hope that maybe some measures of the type that we're now implementing will succeed will stabilize the south vietnamese government and will allow this thing to take maybe a a course little bit similar to what happened in korea, where south korea is stabilized. we can say that we succeeded. and then as frankie just said, maybe i can hand this off to the to to to the next person. so that's my best guess. that counterfactual, i'll say one other thing about this, because it speaks to to the point about leadership down. you know, i just think that i think peter pointed this out in the first session.

vietnam changed how view leaders and leadership and how they how they how they view government because they realized as peter pointed out, that the government was lying to them and i think it made people and i'm not going to suggest that all of the problems that plague our society today their roots in the vietnam era. but on point i think peter is exactly correct that that americans became cynical about government and cynicism is corrosive of because cynicism seizes it stops from believing in change. it stops you from believing in what government can do. i mean, think about this. you do not build the interstate system. you do not build hundreds of public universities and colleges. you don't send a man to the moon if you don't believe in what government can accomplish. and of course, the us government did that.

ironically, during the vietnam era. and so i'm concerned that that this leadership that that that americans have learned something through the vietnam experience that we're still needing to grapple with. would you say, please, frankie, i just want to to respond to this a little bit. that if you if if you consider vietnam as stable. in the midst of its war, it wasn't the had just been overthrown. the generals had just taken over. things started happening in vietnam that were quite different, quite new and it it really looked at a certain point and perhaps kennedy foresaw this better than we could that the whole thing was coming apart the

seams because. none of the generals were any good as leaders and if that happens, you have a very stark choice. it's very soon. you either have to withdraw, let the south vietnam into chaos, or else you you put in troops problem. yeah. thank you, bob. have made studying leadership a major part of your scholarly work over the last generation. can you talk little bit about the nature of that work and perhaps about your work on mcnamara and then kissinger both very examples of leadership failure in this context? well, i think one of the things that struck me when i was working on book with bob mcnamara for peter, brian vandermark had the same experience. sure. when he was working with bob on in retrospect, which just how

divided, especially the johnson administration really was, i'll just tell. 11. on this. you know, bob mcnamara, by the summer of 1967 was convinced that the war was going to have to end and through negotiation in july of 1967, he and nick katzenbach went to saigon for two weeks and they came back and mcnamara was convinced that he had to do something public to to show that there was no military to this. and he appeared before the stennis committee the next month and strom thurmond called him a communist sympathizer because he wouldn't approve new target. and that was the beginning of bob's deeper commitment to this idea that know it was going to have to be negotiations. and so in a national security council meeting, it came up that there was this a initiative that had been sitting on dean rusk, secretary of state's desk, for a long time. and bob thought it had some some legs, so he asked johnson for permission to do it.

but it it did it it didn't. it was called pennsylvania. it didn't go anywhere for a variety of reasons, but it did have some legs for a short period of time. but why on earth is the government organized or the secretary of state has washed his hands completely of any diplomatic initiatives and the secretary of defense is picking up what could be, you know, the 172nd secret peace contact. i just think that's partly due to the leadership with chuck cooper telling a story. when we were gathered in hanoi that in one nsc meeting, they around the table and chet straw wrongly disagreed with the president, with president johnson on a point. and he was going to say no, mr. president, that's not right. even if i have to resign and we're going to do that. and they went around the table and everybody said, yes yes, yes. and chet, who had had more experience in vietnam than anybody else at the table, and he pursed his lips to say no, out came yes because johnson wanted a yes. and that's the way as yes as

fred, fred and frankie and another did and bryan and others have written. i mean, that was what was expected. so if you have as the as the management ethos, i don't think you're going to get good decisions. and i think kissinger was much the same way, except had a hold on. kissinger yes, sure. going with this other with mcnamara, one of the great advantages we all now is if you want to know what they were talking, we can listen to the tapes and hear what they were talking about. and there's a powerful it's clear that johnson was not interested in hearing points of view that might differ from his own. and you can see in magnum hear it in mcnamara's voice. and the question is, how did he reconcile that at the time worked with peter and produced in retrospect, which a very brave and important publication, which in some ways changed everything about how we understand what government officials think. but prior to that moment, he was on the ground acquiescing to these these from johnson. have you did you talk to him about that and have a sense of

how he lived with that? like like brian, we talk that's all we talked about for a decade. i mean, i think part of it is i think he really thought that he could he could control rash or impulses better from the inside, the outside. so if you you know, if you did a venn diagram of the kind of like the troop that westmoreland was making, that mcnamara having, i mean, i think he thinks that was the way that he was trying to manage this crisis. i think in to borrow a title he thinks that management wasn't always as successful because johnson didn't want it to be successful. i mean, that's bundy left government, you know, you just thought he had lost all influence. and i think by the of 67 i think bob was probably there you can tell that in a voice on the tapes. yeah. thank you. okay kissinger i think it's just a completely different animal altogether either because i think a lot of what kissinger was about was, was helping nixon

with this radical bureaucratic revolution, foreign policy that they both agreed on. they needed each other. they didn't always like each other, but they needed each other to to centralize foreign policymaking in the white house. i mean, when nixon was giving the inaugural address, was actually sending out memos to the national security bureaucracy telling everything's changed, you know, all decisions now are going to through the basement of the white house and the old country file system is done. and so i think that had, you know, that radical revolution, bureaucratic revolution had an awful lot to do with the way that nixon and kissinger saw foreign policy and it changed the way that they they governed. no, thank you. the purpose today is to reflect as it were, in retrospect, on what we've learned about war. so i want to ask each of the four of you who have thought very carefully about this or written about it in profound ways, if you could identify, what you think the most important lesson or two, we should carry us now from this

war, what would the what would those be? maybe start with fred. i would say a couple of things. i guess in response to that question. one, i think important takeaway for me that all wars are won politically. if they're going to be won at all and, that was something i think the united states and the french before them. i haven't talked about the french today, but in embers of war. i look very closely at the french war and french civilian leaders, french generals, at least again, behind closed doors, came to realize this thing in political terms was just going to be a loser for them and pure men. this france, when it comes in, has the courage act on that basis. so one conclusion then would be that you have to win wars politically and think in later us this again applies i think a

second lesson maybe that i take away from this is that counterinsurgency is a very difficult proposition. it's going to take a long time. and even though the emphasis in counterinsurgency is to some extent on winning hearts and as the phrase goes, great violence will almost be used. and is something that i think again, americans came to see american commanders and civilian leaders, i think, came to see during the long war in vietnam. and yet maybe adequately understand and terms of later implications. and then i guess the final thing i'll say on this is and if i may, i'll bring it back to kennedy, since he's much on my mind these days. jack kennedy was really interested in from his college days at harvard right through to

the end of his life in the problems of democrat leadership and challenges of democratic leadership. and let's remember, he's at harvard in the late thirties, a pretty tense time in global affairs. and so i think from then on he's interested in this question of. how, as a leader, if if you're if you're parochial constituents are wanting you to go in one direction and you think what's best for the country is to go in this direction, how do you reconcile all this because you want to win reelection. if you're if you're a successful politician. but your sense is that maybe these constituents or these interest groups are wanting you to do something that you don't think is in the nation's. i think that's an eternal challenge for us and for leaders and i think kennedy didn't get that always correct, but it was something that interested him. and i deal with this in volume one of the biography, and it's going to be a theme also in volume two. and so i guess the the final

takeaway there down is that we have to hope that our leaders will have as, he would put it political courage to make careful distinctions, certainly taking into consideration what their constituents want. this is an elected person we're talking about but also act the basis of his or her own her own sense, honest sense of the situation. yeah, and bob kerrey talked about that in a different way in the last panel where there's when there's a lack of alignment between what you think the right thing to do is and what the public might be interested in or how prepared they are. and i think we all face in this environment today, the irony that never in the history of the world have people had more access to information than they do now. and all that has happened. we have curated our own insular ways of understand in the world, so we're more limited than we were before. yeah. well, thank you so, francie.

well, a couple things. one is that. i think what we've been doing ever since the, you know, all through the cold war. really? yeah. when we fought hot wars is over wars of decolonization and that we kept we kept thinking that. it was. we were. we were anti-communist all the time. but really it had to do with internal disputes over, over, over decolonized ocean and if we realized that we would have done better better. so i think, you know, to take that lesson further along, we have to understand in what sort of geopolitical context we're we're talking about and if we're

wrong, we're really wrong because it's not going to work out for us. and i think that part of that is understanding the countries that we get involved with one way or another. i don't think you can, you know, prop up dictators and but it's very difficult because, you know, in some countries, alternative is chaos. and i think that that's a very hard problem to solve, even if you're just looking at the foreign policy and forget the other one. yeah. thank you, phil. well, to be succinct about it, i think the lesson of the vietnam war is is that we should never again become directly involved in a civil war in southeast asia

asia. and it's a good lesson. i'm not being facetious about that. i think it was it was a very i don't think that that that that experience over there really trends leads to much. maybe it did a little bit in iraq and afghanistan, but not much. yeah. well, by implication, southeast asia is far away. the the degree to which our policymakers and and leaders understood very little about what was happening on the ground is just stunning. yet they were willing to commit the resources and the people to a war they didn't fully understand. that's a lesson we've all learned. bob, i think war happens to real people in real time. and in a democracy that should demand a full and frank discussion about whether you're going to put people in uniform in harm's way. we have two people here that engaged in full and frank discussion, but it doesn't usually happen.

and that's a failure of democracy. well said. thank you. well, we come to the end of this panel and we have a break ahead now and will reconvene at 1130 sharp. thank. thanks so much. thank you. and.

she's got one on one screen, 17. rick wagoner, you heard it that way. and now look at the misery we have there. two successes.

but in the area of two months ago, there was no new hampshire report of 1000 six. all units now being usually area 34, northwest. six, 1497. and so. in an area office area. okay. so you haven't got any order for 619? i have another large start. and get down. for report for us year in a row. and before i do.

oh think oh oh. oh. oh. yes. well this was the spring offensive, the mobilization of masses of people at a given time and place attracts worldwide news coverage and attention. the protest organizer, insider and promoter. it is a vital and necessary tactic. on april 24th, 1971, the national peace action coalition supported by welfare rights groups, labor unions and others, held a massive demonstration in washington, d.c. some. 175,000 people from all walks of life with differing ideologies and purposes, marched from the white house to the capitol.

washington has grown accustomed to this method of voicing dissent, though larger than most. this was an organized demonstration with parade permits, marshals and responsible leadership. the demonstrators came their position was on the war. racial discrimination and other political issues were made known throughout the rally, officers of the metropolitan police were directed to maintain a low visibility profile. their role was, as always, to protect the constitutional rights of citizens. intervening only to meet unusual or emergency statute issues. there were few laws broken. few arrests. most who came in the name of peace returned to their homes, jobs or schools. but some who came to break the peace stayed on in west potomac park. for them, the april 24th rally was only a prelude to may day, an opportunity to advance their

own well defined aim to shut down the federal government. the country should respond from coast to coast with demonstrations and universities and communities that are crisis country. the months before these militant and violence prone members of the new left decided that the style, discipline and tactics of peaceful assembly were no longer acceptable. black and white. as early as june 1970. strategy conferences were held by radical leaders in milwaukee and ann arbor. here, a new tactic was adopted. massive civil disobedience and confrontation. instead of large crowds, peaceably assembling to petition their government activity would move to unlawful direct action to stop the government paralyze the judicial system, challenge law enforcement, and embarrass the establishment.

a detailed 24 page tactical manual was printed and distributed across the country, prepared by the may day collective of the people's coalition for peace and justice. it's scheduled ten days of massive civil disobedience between april 26 and may seven to take advantage of the planned april 24th, march. early disruptive activities focused on the selective service help educate and welfare. internal revenue service and the justice department. in each action, the tactics vary, but the objective was the same to disrupt the government. on tuesday, april 27, may day action called for demonstrators to obstruct entrance to the selective service building when federal employee is refused to be intimidated. demonstrators turned to less violent forms of protest money

and draft guards were burned. the national anthem and the american flag were made a mockery. of. the next morning may dares again took up their positions at employee entrances. police ordered them to disperse. those that did not were taken into custody, leaving behind only their traces of glitter. and oh, -- of people.

and that is right. it is not. although rain canceled wednesday's march on the internal revenue service, the may day collective joined demonstrators at the department of health, education and welfare on thursday. when they will refuse access to the entire building. they ripped down on love and later upturned white house. again. liz ordered the crowd to disperse again. those that did not were methodically arrested. shouted out in in each action, recognized organizations such as the quakers, the southern christian leadership conference, us national welfare rights organization, and others played a role in the agenda planned by the may day lehman brothers. and the.

on friday may day leaders unveiled a new strategy at the department of justice. demonstrators moved in, in waves to block entrances up here on the lawn and thrown their. manual, instructed units of 10 to 25 people to sit down and pass the pipe and play music until arrested. they. as each unit was broken up or

arrested. another wave took its place. the tactic was designed to test the ability of police to handle arrests of large groups. but the action failed every time they played around the. police utilized field arrest reports on the scene to facilitate booking procedures. and. that afternoon, southern christian leadership members acting under a parade permit authorized by the city were joined by more may day demonstrators at the justice department.

the building owned by people. when the permit expired, the police command was given to disperse those who refused to leave were arrested. from april 26 to april 30th. metropolitan police arrested over 1000 lawbreakers. each was properly process, collateral or personal bond was posted and the demonstrate was released. many would be arrested again in other may day demonstrate. during this period, the west potomac park campsite became the command communications and training center for all may day activities. initial may day tactics called for headquarters in rock creek park, a rugged, wooded, 1700 acre park that runs through the heart of washington.

recognizing the surveillance and logistics problems with such a site, the departments of justice and interior limited their assembly permit to the more confining west potomac park area. although the permit prohibited camping the may day, emanuel advised people to bring tents, blankets, food and communication equipment. the list of essentials also included wire cutters for fences, water bottles for tear gas and dope to share with fellow demonstrators. by early saturday morning, may 1st, armies of blue denim and khaki had streamed into west potomac park. collegians, hippies and high school students. professional freaks with their drugs and well-heeled agitators with pamphlets and newspapers. subsequent investigations and arrests showed 75% of the protesters came from outside the

washington area. and. some came for a widely publicized weekend marathon rock festival. some came to get high. some came for some action and some came to stop. the war. during the rock festival, hundreds of cases of drug overdose and excessive drinking were reported with a mobile unit set up to disseminate drug information, quickly turned into an emergency treatment center. the attending physician personal. he treated over 600 narcotics cases. by midday, police aerial surveillance indicated the crowd

had grown to over 25,000. early evening photos showed 45,000 had spilled over the confines of the park, posing health hazards and threatening the destruction of public property and these repeated and flagrant violations of the park permit, which was negotiated and accepted by the may day leaders, left no alternative but for the government to close the campsite down. it was up to chief wilson to execute the revocation. a singularly challenging and delicate assignment for the men of the metropolitan policeand.

first. 30 seconds. we're on. we're on schedule. we'll hear it. it is now one minute and 59 seconds. anyway, i guess we're getting organized and it look at 58 minutes. all right, so this next panel is a little different. the first two, in a sense.

you had a military power. you had a panel. and this is what i call a disparate panel. each of these folks represents something quite different. but the theme that brings it together is, postwar vietnam and all the different ways it has evolved. and rather than go through the tedious nature. long introductions. keith washington posts brilliant foreign correspondent man about town currently runs the journalism at the university of hong kong, which is worth its own panel. right. and hong is a professor of distinction at columbia and. i can tell you, having been to one of her events just the other day, it was completely fascinating for reasons i think we'll get into, which is what is the nature of today's vietnam and ambassador burckhardt was

not an ambassador when i first met him. he was a junior service officer who, unlike the rest of his people, actually talked to a reporter, which may have been the reason it took him so long to, get to be an ambassador. but that's nature of these three folks. and really, i want to do i want to start with you hank. so yesterday, susan and i were in atlanta. we went to this great big food mall, which is now a big hot thing. everybody has, these multiple and the biggest and most successful one in the place was a vietnamese one. she had three boots. she left in 79. her family just had to go and they got and they came in and i said, so how do the 2 million vietnamese or as many of them as we could guess, feel about vietnam today? and she said, you know, the last ten years we've become very

proud, proud of our vietnam which i think is a is a is an irony of great consequence given we went through. so talk about the vietnam of today. first and then the vietnam of the vietnamese americans who have now been here. 50 years. big questions we have 10 seconds big question great question. i wanted to change the panel a little bit to say and vietnamese after 1975, that's and i think that that might tie some of the points i want to make about sort of where the vietnamese today and vietnamese are global vietnamese and, you know, over the past, close to now, 50 years, particularly as we get to 25, one of the things i was going to say about legacies is that, you know, that that that

war that ended and april 30th, 75, really did it in many ways and that it continued for the vietnamese so vietnam of course has that great quote that even after you know the last american leaves the war doesn't end and that's particularly true for the vietnamese in vietnam as well as the vietnamese who left in the diaspora. and it felt like for of us in country and then also abroad that this was our forever war. and in many ways the vietnamese civil war continued in vietnam as well as, in the united states of america, in particular, the largest diaspora group of vietnamese live. and i can only say, you know, to the second part of your question that what i hoping to see today is that reconciliation really needs to happen with. regards to vietnamese in vietnam and vietnamese in the diaspora. i think that is the is the you know, the area that can can get the can basically needs the most

work done not so much us vietnam reconciliation not states to sort of state relations not you know american veterans and viet veterans of vietnamese descent but really between vietnamese and i'm starting to that so i will hopefully come back and say it's no longer the forever war and that it's changing and i we were joking around that we want to be the bob kerrey of the panel. and i want to i'm going to be the bob kerrey here and say that, you know, there is one institution that's really promoting that and that's fulbright university, vietnam. and so i think through what is basic, i think the best face of us, vietnam reconciliation, this university, it's also for me, i see it as a vehicle to allow vietnamese vietnamese in vietnam and vietnamese in the diaspora to really promote reconciliation, reconciliation amongst ourselves. okay, ray, you were there in the

seven days as a young foreign service officer, and then you came back as the american ambassador. a post war, vietnam. so when you were there as a junior political officer, could you have imagined what you find when you came back as ambassador spanned those two experiences for us. when we when we were there, i was and i began my time in vietnam in the seventies up there from 1970 to 73. i think i seven months with a private with a u.s. advisory team, one of the provinces mainly dealing ethnic vietnamese who had fled from long knoll's pogrom against in cambodia and then two years in the embassy we had a small group of seven young guys, all men all mostly in their twenties, who spoke vietnamese. and we were out there dealing with the vietnamese every day.

the civil society, my kids, religious groups, veterans groups, a lot of angry student groups and we sometimes felt we were like the only americans who were doing that. there day and what we came up with was a sense, yes, there was a real civil war. there were large parts of the population, particularly the catholics, that i was dealing with. the the the whole howard religious group down in the delta, others, they really were very were very anti-communist. they really not want the government to fall. the other things the other thing we came to understand was this was probably not going to turn out. this was as frankie fitzgerald put it, very i mean, this was a government of one of one lousy general after another. and it was completely top down rule. there was no there was no no popular support. this government. absolutely not. and you know, even even a 25 years old or whatever we were we

were to figure out that probably was not going to turn out well, whereas the people on the other side had real dedication, real dedication to their fight. but one thing, you know what? i came back to vietnam. i mean what year was it when you came back? i went i actually made a brief trip to vietnam, 82. it just to begin the negotiations on the issue of allies in reagan administration. i with richard armitage, who was a just a deputy assistant secretary of state. i a look, you know, you know, sort of middle level guy in the state department, just the two of us. it only took 13 years from then to finally get normalization. but we took the first step. then i really went back in and at the end of 2001 as ambassador, and i've been and was there for three years, and i've been back many times since then and most recently last. you know, i think the one the greatest constant really was it was obvious to anyone who worked

with vietnamese in any period in the last 50 years or maybe longer, that these were very entrepreneurial, these were hard working, entrepreneurial people. they also had, as my chinese friends always point out, these are these are fellow you know, these are people who education, who respect the values of parents pulled, you know, have given them they're they're they're they're they're and as a result very successful people and as a result we chinese want to talk about my taiwanese friends. we want to invest there and it's you know we've done well so that entrepreneurial spirit was still there and that and the sense of humor that has also kept going. humor or irony? both both. you know, the fact that some some vietnamese like to say, you know, actually we are a lot like chinese culture and everything,

but we're chinese with a sense of humor, you know, so that's my vietnamese sort of joke, you know that's true. that's true. with no disrespect for. my chinese friends. so those were constants. and so i, i wasn't i was not surprised that vietnam taking off even in 2000 when you could see it taking off. i was not at all surprised. it was also interesting to see that the south was taking off economically a bit better than the north. you know, if there any legacy that came from horrible experience of french and then american rule in that in in the south for all those years it was that did develop a sense of to operate a private sector and and it's one of the reasons why it continued today. like you know when intel was trying to decide where to go

and, you know, when they made their, you know, critical, that turned around the sort of the nature of american investment in vietnam in thousand three, 2000, four. they they said we have to go to the south, know at that. that's where the skills are that's where the also the best part of government wanted them to go to the north. but they they so so you know it was it was wonderful see what had become but it was not total surprise. so you anticipate that the war the american war end as it did? yeah and when you came back, you were not altogether surprised that the country had started to what it has become, correct? that's good summary. and when when i was at your event the other day, which was discussion between a group of vietnamese, as i guess they were all officials, i took an american in and.

the consensus seemed to be on the american that it was the decisive mission to enable the internet that made such a profound difference in vietnam that 60 million vietnamese are on facebook. that's a astonishing fact. what is it you think, aside from the spirit and the sense of humor what was it that has given modern vietnam its character in the way that it has it? i wish i could take ownership of that feel about the, you know, the that the the most important event is the deregulate of the internet and facebook. but that belongs to that man over there in the audience should probably pull up a chair here and that's mr. tommy balsillie who really you know the founder of fulbright university vietnam, tom valley, as chair of the fulbright chairman, of the board of chairman of the board of the fulbright, just and so you know,

i, i definitely agree with that, i think vietnam in certain goes a different way of china. i know if that will continue in the future as, vietnam may continue to i mean, could clamp them down but that was a huge decision that did change the face of the way vietnam is developing and, going to our great event that we had with this committee that is going to inform the next party leaders regarding the party congress, about capitalist development and what road vietnam should take. you know, i thought it was amazing. i amazing for me, as someone who's parents were actually from south vietnam and father fought in the republic of vietnam and of the things that struck me when i told them, like they're going to come to columbia, they're going to have this this, you know, meeting with with with call them practitioners are capitalist country to academics who study capitalist development in the 20th century, in the 21st

century. and one of the things he said to me and i thought this was quite striking, the fact that they came you to set up this meeting and to bring about academics, the practitioners really means a lot to him. now he from he was from the north, from ireland and left in 1954 at the partition following the geneva conference. and then of course, we fled in 1975. you know he kept drawing this line for me each time i would go back because i'm a historian of actually of of north vietnam of party politics during war era. and he kept saying, you know, and i was meeting more and more vietnamese government officials. i met the former president, the former prime minister, and would always say, this is fine, just don't meet the general secretary of the communist party and then after this, there's this meeting we had that. peter, thank you so much for and making great points. he said, know what?

it's over. vietnam is, you know, the government really knows to lead. you know, the people in the 21st century to develop the economy. who are we to say the losers in? the united states of america, the vietnamese of the former republic of vietnam? how do we know we would run the country any better? now, i'm not saying that vietnam and the current government won't encounter problems or won't the wrong decisions in this process. but i love to hear those words from my father because for me what that meant too, was that living particularly in america, that we can now see our future in this country, you know, with that that shadow cast by history of that war. so that i mean, you know, we i know we'll get around and there's so many people who are much more of an than me on vietnam road to development. what will happen to vietnam, the 21st century.

but one of the things i always take away and as my teach my students at columbia, is vietnam. the vietnamese suffered the most the global cold war. we suffered, as frank said, you know, because the global cold war really became about decolonization in the third world. and it was not about this east-west rivalry in many places. it much more about the sino-soviet split. but the vietnamese suffered the most, in my opinion. but we cannot let that happen in the 21st century. and so in many ways, vietnam has this you know, it's in this great position to oversee and potentially hopefully kind of point the world towards peace, particularly in this rise and in tensions between the united states and china. that's markedly different from where vietnam. and the vietnamese stood in 1945. keith, you've got a double barreled responsibility partly, and you are where the southeast asia correspondent of the washington post, based in thailand, is i recall where based on the philippines alternative, even worse. so you would go back and forth

into vietnam i want you to talk a little bit about what it was as a reporter postwar. you were not one of the generation that covered the war were the generation that came after it. i mean, and then i'm going to come back and ask you to carry the responsibility of an african-american because vietnam was a it was, in a sense, the first fully integrated war and a great deal of the american culture, black african-american culture comes out of that war. and you study it, although you did not live it. and i'd like you to talk about first, what's it like being a reporter, going back to a country that we lost the war first? yeah, sure. absolutely. to put it into some perspective, i was born in 1958, so 1968, i was ten years old. i became a reporter because i became journalist. i wanted to be a journalist from a very young age because of two things watergate and vietnam.

i wanted to become a reporter because of watergate, and i wanted to become a foreign correspond it because i remember watching on television the vietnam war. you know, i remember watching these dramatic reports about the tet offensive. my parents, you know, walter cronkite, you know, i know up there. and i said, well, i want to i want to do that. and then they would switch in the next the next segment always be from paris. the paris peace talks. and that would be peter jennings in his trench. i said, well, i want to go to paris, too. so so ultimately, i got my wish because i got to go southeast asia. then i went to paris as a correspondent so so that was how i went there. but i kind of went there like a lot of reporters. so my first trip to vietnam was probably 1988 or so, and this was just after lang van nguyen announced the doi, the opening and reform was kind of the vietnamese version of glasnost and perestroika. i went there with really the wrong thing. i went there. i went there to, cover the war. i went there to cover the aftermath of the war, not to cover what was happening in vietnam. right away. i wanted to go see wanted to go

see these places i had seen as a i wanted to see hawaii. i wanted to see, you know, you know, where would the where were the tunnels. where are the where is the whole chi minh trail, really? all these battles i had known about as a kid, i wanted to go write stories about that. jeon bin fu. so i did go and i did. i'll do all of these. i went to hawaii. i went to you know, i went to kaesong, i went to the dmz and all this stuff. so i was writing about war, but the vietnamese were interested in saying, you know, that's past that's over. know right about where we are now. that's what i thought was most interesting. it and there was no, among other things was absolutely no hostility towards an american there. they kind of indulge me it's you know saying oh, yeah, yeah, we'll take you to see the ho chi minh trail. we'll take you to see this. but why do you care about all that? that was all in the past. we don't care about that anymore. so one of the things i found in that period, this was late early nineties, was they were for normalization with the us they really were desperate for normalized and they couldn't understand we had a trade embargo. and so it was, you know, in the late eighties, it was still desperately poor.

they didn't want to be reliant on the russians. you know, there was a statue. there still is, i think, of lenin and, you know, of of gentleman jean bien phu street in, hanoi and the vietnamese used joke standing there with one hand in his pocket and pointing in the vietnamese. yes. hands in his pocket, because the russians are so cheap, you know, i'm not making this up. the vietnamese would say, yes, the russians are so cheap. how come the americans aren't here? you know, we should be you know, the americans should be here. and so, you know, over by time, many, many trips going in and out, i started say, you know, they're kind of right. why don't we have a trade embargo on vietnam? why aren't we here, you know, doing business? these are really interesting. you know, you know, entrepreneurial, industrious people. but we have a trade embargo on getting into vietnam in. those days was very difficult. you had to actually you had to send in a telex until they got fax machines and you had to send in a fax machine. you had to say where you wanted to go, and then, you know, and then sometimes they would fax back or telex you back. and it took months to actually organize one of these trips. parenthetically, i was in the

philippines, was based in the philippines at the time. that actually was one of the easiest places to get in and out of because the philippines recognized vietnam and they had they they opened direct flights on philippine airlines and vietnam airlines going from manila to ho chi minh city, other that you had to do this kind of, you know, trek bangkok and you had that you always had to go to hanoi. but because i was in the philippines, they allowed me to fly in directly to ho junction, which was terrific. and overall, over time, i got to actually realize that, you know, this is not a place that we should be, you know be enemies with. and i'll tell you one other story. once i was in, i had to cover i was based in hong kong in the nineties, had to get into china for some thing. but i was actually in vietnam doing some stories, so i thought i'd, take the train over the border. and they had just reopened the border. and so i took this. i was one of the first foreigners. they actually allowed on this train to go up the route from hanoi through the north, and you end up in southern china there. and i saw the absolute deepest station that the chinese had wrecked during that small border. it was just these villages literally just wiped out. and this was years later and nothing had been rebuilt.

there it was just horrific. and vietnamese were telling me, yeah, yeah, we know we hate the chinese more than we ever hated the americans. so why aren't you here? so that was kind of what i was hearing. yeah, you're laughing, too, right? absolutely. yeah. so what i've just heard in this is that interestingly that the too you said the war is over. come back to the vietnamese as in this country, we're still struggling with the war and you re said the vietnam you encountered when you came back as ambassador was not a surprise because were watching the vietnamese the war went on with a certain degree of expectation for what would what would come of them. so we had this extraordinary thing where in vietnam itself, war was over dust off move on right? the vietnamese were left. who came here found it more

difficult to do that. and god knows, lord knows the americans have wrestled with, which is again, one of the major themes of this entire day is the reckoning that we've gone through for so long since the end of the. keith, i want to take to the second part, because i think we all know that race issues. you know, the original sin in american society and. you're of course we're not there and are not of that generation. but when you look at what the role of the black gi was and how evolved into american culture, music, language. society's interest in black culture, i think it actually started to very large extent in vietnam. what's your sense of it as someone who is not of that generation has benefited, i

suppose, or been part of the generation that came after? yeah, not not none of that generation, but my l i have older we went to vietnam. in fact they back and one of them gave me his army jacket. so thought it was kind of cool walking around the neighborhood wearing this, you know, army jacket. even though i was too young. they had gone to vietnam. but, you know, vietnam was of i grew up in detroit, michigan, by the way. vietnam was ever present. you know, one of the earlier guest, fred was talking about, you know, being in canada and how always look to the u.s., you know, when you're in detroit, you always look to canada, because my parents said, oh, boy, if you get drafted, are you going to go to canada? are you going to try to join the national guard? what are you going to do? because windsor was just literally 10 minutes over the bridge from detroit, michigan you know, but so it was it was ever present in my neighborhood, you know, because young black kids were, you know, get drafted and sent off vietnam. but, you know, the it's interesting, the the the civil rights and the vietnam war were kind of intertwined. you know, in many ways i mean, people forget, you know, lyndon signed the voting rights act, you know, in 65, you know,

around the same time as the, you know, 65. right. of august, i'm sorry, right around the same time that he signed the gulf of tonkin resolution 64. and so the and the escalation kind of began at the same time. and it was only around 1967 that martin luther king decided to come against the vietnam war. and then once that happened, you started to see the civil rights leaders saying, you know, we can't have civil rights, the vietnam war at the same time. and you started to see this kind of split and it was really a lot of kind of anti-war sentiment that was coming along know in detroit, you know, the up there, the biggest memory i have from being ten years old or nine years old was the 1967 riots that happened very difficult. 43 people killed. still one of the worst riots in urban history. people forget how it actually started. there was a there was a welcome home party, two black gis who had come back to detroit from vietnam. and they partying in this after hours place. they called the blind pig. and the police decided raid it.

and that kind of crystallized for a lot of people who then were rioting in detroit this idea that they were fighting for liberty in vietnam and they come back and they're being harassed by police back at home. and so this kind of and this this kind sentiment kind of, you know, went along for a long time to get to the 1968, you had the tet offensive and then you had the assassination of martin luther king's. you had people protesting on military bases in vietnam against the king assassination. they had the order no protest would be allowed. but it was you know, that kind of crystallized this sentiment that even the you mentioned music, even the black music coming along at the time. you know, it was right around. it was 1968, right after, you know, the assassination of king, the telephone said that. martin that james brown started to sing say it loud, i'm black and i'm proud. right? the next year, john lee hooker started his famous came out. i don't want to go to vietnam, you know, and the line in there is, i don't want to to vietnam, because i've got enough trouble here at home. it's like you started to see this, you know, and a couple of years later, marvin gaye was singing what's going on?

you know, in a war is not the answer. so again, you started to see this kind of anti-war sentiment taking hold in the united states and in my neighborhood, just, you know, at the same time, you started to see the public opposition, you know, because the tet offensive, you know, growing against the war at home know. but, you know, you talked about also the cultural going on because of the riots of 67 in detroit and then 68, the most other places, the military actually started to change. you know, the military was was integrated in the sense that there were a lot of black soldiers working alongside white soldiers. you can't look at a pulitzer prize winning of, you know, soldiers in vietnam without seeing black faces in there. but until then, 68, 69, if went into the is the military bases, you know, most of the most of the products, most of the magazines were not they didn't have jet magazine or ebony magazine in there. they started to suddenly stock those. they started started the stock black hair products for the black gis radio armed forces,

the armed forces and television used to play mainly country music. all of a sudden they started playing more r&b and soul music and all that, recognizing that you had 300,000 black soldiers in vietnam, but many of them in combat units, like 30% of the combat units, were black, you know, far higher than the percentage of the population. and you had blacks and blacks soldiers and white soldiers suddenly working together on things and doing things, you know, some of you know, the old what's the old saying? there's no color in the foxhole. right. and that's i do think that the vietnam war helped integrate america because you had black soldiers and white soldiers coming back who had worked together, who had saved each other's lives, etc. so i do think that, you know, the integration really didn't start happening until after 668, really, 69? yeah. that had a huge impact back here. and the vietnamese, i should say tried to exploit that as the back home as well. you know, the the propaganda broadcast out of hanoi were constantly saying, hey soul brother, why are you fighting

here when your people are being killed back home? you know, and i think that had an impact. and i just want to show there were a lot of gis who left behind children, many whom were black. what was the vietnamese attitude towards the children of black parents and vietnamese, i guess mothers, yes, i'll answer that question. and then tied into something that you had said earlier about about how the how the vietnamese in vietnam have either let go or there wounds of war have healed quicker. i would actually disagree with that with myself, i'm just saying that. but in short, you know, the children left behind after the war in 1975 were called. you know, they were called task children. they were lower than the dirt that you walk on. so there were painful reminder of of war, of devastating war. and so it wasn't until the 1980s

that you had the amerasian homecoming act first in 82 and then in 87, that allowed for these children to come to the united states. 87 was when it allowed the parents as well to come. but that gets to a bigger which, you know, one of the things that one of the lessons or legacies that i understand of that war is that it actually flips, you know, who won and who lost. and here again, i'll talk about it from, the prism of the vietnamese in ways, of course, you know, the the country was reunified under communist party in 1976. and so in that way, of course, the north vietnamese were the victors. but if you look at, you know, sort of voting with your feet in many ways, another one of these themes that comes out post 1975, vietnamese is basically people moving. and in that, you know, the four waves that came after 1975, i think testament to actually know that that says something else

about victors. why was there all of this, you know, sort of why was there was this exodus from from vietnam not only in 1975, but then again in 1979, and then pretty much through the eighties and nineties, speaks to a different kind of record, another sort of example of, you know, sort of the vietnamese and vietnam being unable to really get past that war, and understandably so again, vietnamese suffered disproportion nearly 3.3 million vietnamese died. and from 65 to 75. but you have what we're called reeducation camps. and while there about 100 to 200000 south vietnamese officials and in the military who remained in vietnam, 1975, more than 1 million would pass through the doors of those reeducation camps. they closed down late into the 1980s, early 1990. so that says something about, you know, the inability to move past that war. and then again, if you look at how well vietnamese are doing in

america, again, war wounds, they heal very well. but where the vietnamese up until recently, you know in comparison to their vietnamese brethren in country are very different. we have to question victor's and losers. and then i guess the i lost my thread. oh, the final thing i'll say and this gets to generational change. i think one of the one of the big changes and this answers your question about, you know, sort the the the change taking place in vietnam is demographic. i the more that you have vietnamese after 1975 we don't have the same kind of baggage about that war when they get into positions of power then we will actually real change and we'll see reconciliation between the vietnamese. but just like the united states of america, you right now the most powerful man in vietnam will win put down who should not be in an office because they do have a law that says, you know,

older than 65, you have to retire. he's in his eighties. and while i don't think he be general secretary for president of for for perpetuity like jinping you know you have a lot of young asking what going on when is it our time and in many ways i think you know the the sea change that i hope to see happen can only happen when you have you know, these postwar generations really have a say in policymaking, have a say in the way the country is run and. i have to say i have to point out another group in addition to fulbright university, vietnam but the u.s. institute for peace that, you know, andrew wells dang is here, really promotes conversation between the vietnamese and next to him, aaron steinhauer with vietnam is really trying to, you know, sort of adopt this sort of global vietnamese posture. and i think in this way, this is how you can have real reconciliation. you know, one of the more interesting things i saw in recent years when i was going back was how many viet q who

were born in the states or, you know, because you know, their parents left in 75, but they decided they could make their money back in vietnam and they were going there doing investment banking instead of doing startups because they had the language, but they had us university degrees to reinforce that and in 2001, before i went out as ambassador to vietnam, i met with a group of vietnamese expatriates in in an arlington outside and i it was a little tense there the there were people who got up and said, we know you, we respect you. we think you're going to do a better job than that guy who was who who was who just left. but we we don't think there should be. an american ambassador in vietnam and there was a certain amount of, you know, real hostility and and then and then later when there was some food served afterwards as their own,

it has to be in a vietnamese meeting. so very good food, a young guy came up to me, he said, i said, that was my father it gave you a hard time there. he said, i'm sorry about that. i said, i understand us down here. i mean, i know all about the reeducation camps. and said, yeah, he was in a reeducation camp. he's still pretty bitter. he said, but just want you know, i go back to vietnam every year and i've got to start a business going there. so in the first two panels, particularly first one and two very large extent, the second one we were talking about the failures of american policies, strategies and military activity. ultimately between 63, four and 73. so the three of you can assess how american policy towards postwar vietnam has evolved, because if look at it from the

perspective 2023, it looks pretty good. so how is it. that having screwed up so badly? we somehow found way to deal with postwar vietnam in a kind of logical programmatically success artful way, right? you want to start with i just we we rebuilt. i'm not sure what we were brilliant enough to think at all out ahead of time. but the the way we rebuilt relationship, first of all, very important that the relations started to between nongovernment groups, very important ngos were very active in vietnam in the years before normalization, vietnam veterans of america and their foundation, which bob and i were both on the board of for a while, we were kicked off and and then there was the there were a lot of artists american artists who who worked with vietnamese artists that had that had actually had a fairly fairly

interesting impact. and then finally, bit bit the normalization process was also first we put it well even long before we actually had an embassy. we put an office in in ho chi minh city, which dealt with reunifying divided families and had american officials in that office. then we put an office, hanoi, which was to search for the remains of of american sold of of amis, and those were there before. we took the first step toward normalization, toward toward, you know, more serious normalization, which was january eight, 1995, when we put a sort of an interest section, a kind of not totally official embassy in hanoi, followed by the embassy in july, was the first ambassador and expo w i right about that. the first ambassador was an expert. w first passenger was an expert ex p.o.w. i was the second

ambassador to a normal tour, you know, reunified vietnam. but then then from then on there were these layers of and the first layer was dealing with the legacy issues, which was reunifying families searching for remains is clearing up mines and. and and and i unexploded ordinance which a lot of private organizations like the v va were involved in and many others and working from chapter two of the economic relationship our bilateral trade relations was signed the week before got there in december 2001. clinton administration. no, no. well it was negotiated mostly during the clinton administration and so assigned during a by the very beginning of the bush administration. and then then the question was, when i went there, the mission i was given by bosses in washington, colin powell others was rich.

rich armitage was there are three things missing. we're not totally normalized yet. we don't have military military relations. we don't law cooperation, and we don't have we don't have an intelligence liaison relationship in which we're sharing intelligence. and of course, those are all the hardest things to do because. they were the people on both sides who would be most wary of of of improving relations. but we did it. and it really the major came from the vietnamese in the summer of 2003. they had a party plenum in which they concluded they didn't they didn't like the way the world looked. and that all had to do with and they were as they were, they came to to me, they came to my defense. i had a chair. they said the triangle out of balance triangle in their minds even now is the us, china and

vietnam. and they had patched up lot of things with china in turn, including their land border differences. that was a great accomplishment, but they did not like the increasingly aggressive attitude china was taking in the south sea. they did not like the way countries they thought they were their clients like laos and cambodia had. now really moved into a chinese orbit. they didn't trust tuckson and thailand. they didn't like the picture, and they wanted to be closer to us and being vietnamese. they took a very pragmatic, businesslike approach to it and they said, you know, that visit by our minister that you proposed, we want that to happen this year. you know, that ship it. you keep requesting. we want that to be that to be right after the defense minister goes. and then they came back the next day and oh, we have another item

we want our deputy prime minister to visit the united states and meet with your leaders about two weeks after those other things were finished. and it all happened. boom, boom, boom, right like that. and and it completely that all of that that happened in the end. and the second half of 2003 set the course for for relations from then. so what you're saying it wasn't we we moved on to the geostrategic relationship you're not saying it was our shrewd careful we thought out right it was that the vietnamese knew what they wanted the vietnamese knew what they wanted. so the one thing the vietnamese going back to some of the things we're talking about before was on the one thing i think we maybe could take some credit was that we sort of push them to try to reach out to improve with the vietnamese americans, and we pushed them. i remember having meetings. we went on zoom when he was the

deputy prime prime minister, soon after became prime minister. you know, maybe it just sort of sent some delegations there and then they decided to do it. they actually did it. and then we looked at the delegation list. i said, these are all northerners know. i mean, you need some southerners the list. and zuma said, yeah okay, good point. and they them over. i'm friends of mine in the states said, maybe you should suggest that they invite to visit, you know, and did he came doing khaki the former prime minister he came when he but was he armed we suggested to him yeah yeah he came of course it wasn't a total because then i heard that a lot of vietnamese in america said, well, you know, he was a northerner, so, you know, prove anything. so, you know, so. but, but you know, all these things were and then there was a whole the whole of how they dealt with the the, the x south vietnamese military cemetery. and there had been war and that had been kind of not ignored. and, you know we would sometimes

think that maybe you ought to, you know, show some respect there and fix it up and, you know let people come back and visit it and they you know, it was of on and off all the time. but they got it you know, i mean, they were sort of open ideas about how to bring the vietnamese back and from your perspect it. how did american policy evolve towards vietnam given let's stipulate the of the war how did american policy having left failure how american policy evolve. one kind of thread see run through is the sort the focus too much on china when the united states figures out policy towards vietnam. and i think you can see that pretty much in the post 75 era

all the way to today. and there's problem with because you know again, if do say there is a 20% pre cold war going on, it is so much more complex it because the integrated economic systems not just between the united states and china but then looking at southeast asia, the number one trading partner for all of these southeast asian countries is china. so one of the things that i see for vietnam. so i'm going go in tianjin, but i will answer your question about the us policy is that know the vietnamese have to figure out vietnam's policy towards china. you know, right now what you is cambodia, laos and thailand is tilting towards china. vietnam, indonesia, others. no, not so much. and in fact i would say probably the number one ally to the united states is either vietnam or singapore. this point. and so one of the things that i think vietnam has that even singapore doesn't have to worry

is how china can look around vietnamese party politics in, ways that the way they would do, how they muck around and singaporean politics is more disinformation. what they're basically in other regions of the world, in other countries. but for vietnam think it's much more direct. so you have potentially on the ground mass protests and demonstrations anti-chinese. what the party has to deal with. this is much trickier. that's, i would say, about vietnam. these would be china. and in terms of the united you know, i think pretty much all the way, you know, when when carter makes the decision. listen to brzezinski and not vance and follow much more sort of pro chinese line one again it wasn't about vietnam in terms of reconciliation. and then fast forward through the decades, it's still in the sort of, you know, the way that united states sees vietnam sometimes. it's about, you know, healing war wounds. it's about our shared past. but when it is not about that.

it's about china. and i think that that's going to be very limiting and constraining for the united states, as it deals vietnam and once vietnam did do certain things, once you know, the united states to potentially or how should step up to china, that can't happen for for a whole myriad of reasons so that would be my one takeaway i would just say to to random things i live down the street from church, which is where martin luther king made his when he ties the civil rights civil rights movement and the vietnam war movement. and when i first decided to be a historian of the vietnam war, my said, you will be beat up by the vietnamese american community, because i decided to on hanoi and politics and not not write a glowing history of the republic of vietnam, the south vietnamese war effort. i never got beat up, but i always feared that. and at some point after my book came out with scott hanoi's war, i was both labeled a maoist, but i was also labeled basically a,

you know, a sort of an apologist winckowski and others like that. i think it's a good thing when all sides hate you. good. well, that's speaking of all sides hating you, keith as a journalist and one of our one of our one of our basic axioms as journalists is to look at situate actions with precision and skepticism what do you see as a postwar correspondent in asia? what do you see as the role of the united states in a as a as factor and? is it something that when you look, you say, well, maybe we have gotten some things right? yeah, i mean, you know, you could say that's a good question. you could say, we did get some things right. the whole idea behind the vietnam war was, number one, to prevent this domino from

falling. but it was also to give the southeast asian countries time to consolidate their their political systems and to build up their economies, which did happen. the asian the between the time that we got in vietnam and the time we left the asian tigers, you know it became, you know, economic leap, you know, you know, thailand you know, became wealthier singapore, became, you know, one of the wealthiest countries, you know, so so you could argue ably say that the american involvement there did give time for the southeast asian. don't forget, they were battling their own communist insurgencies. you know, in malaysia in indonesia, in thailand at the time. so, you know, but by the time we left vietnam, you know those those insurgencies were basically negligible. nothing left going there. and then those countries were economically more solid, you know, but for us, for the americans, i think this legacy, fear and failure kind of lingered for many, many years after the southeast asians had forgotten about it. you know, i remember covering

somalia. i was based in nairobi in the early when we went into somalia. and i remember the smith gemstone was the ambassador then, and i remember he wrote a piece about how this could be another quagmire, another vietnam. so the fear was always, we don't want another vietnam. whenever we thought we got involved in any military adventure anywhere, you know, but to go back to the geopolitics of it and how you know, how the normalized ocean came about, interestingly i would say, you know, when i again, go back to the late when i first started going in and out of vietnam on a regular basis, i remember thinking it's nuts. not only did we not have relations we had a trade embargo, you know, we had sanctions. i couldn't use my credit card, had to go in with wads of cash because was no other way to pay. your the washington post gave wads of cash at the time i did my time, i you this was the so we still had display ads you know you would go in with literally with thousands of dollars in your pocket because you couldn't use a credit card. now remember, you know, while you're there, you see that you know the french are there. the japanese are there, the

korean products are in the marketplace. i was thinking to myself, this is insane we don't have relations with this country. you know, why is that? and don't forget, then you had the invasion, cambodia, and then for a while the excuse and i'll use that term, but for lack of a better one for for us not normalizing relations because they had gone in and toppled the khmer rouge regime in cambodia, which was a cambodia, which was a chinese backed responsible for a million deaths, but because vietnamese to topple them, that was a reason and we would not normalize relations until pulled their troops out of cambodia. and i remember this was so insane that when i when i left, i took some time off and went to the east-west center in hawaii in 1999, 1991, i wrote a piece of cover story on foreign affairs magazine, basically saying, you know, we need to normalize with vietnam. this is insane. let's get the cambodia thing which is off the front burner. that should not be the issue, holding this up. let's get going. i'd like to that is responsible for us normalizing, but absolutely no impact whatsoever.

but i would say the two things i would say that very prescient. the two things besides my foreign bs, which i think would have an impact was number one, you had a new government in thailand under a prime minister named chuch h and hogan, and he started thailand investing and begin being involved. vietnam, which to the us, to the us, was basically just, you know, not not involved, not interested in this at all. but thailand, you know, basically just started going in and just doing more investment in business. and i remember interviewing this prime minister and he said, we have to start. you americans have, to start remembering vietnam is a country not a war. so that was his famous thing. very good point. the other thing that happened, i would say would be besides bob kerrey, john kerry and john mccain, but that push to get. yeah. so you had to have people who had fought and were who had recognized credentials be the ones leading that effort. and they came out with their famous, which concluded that we had not, in fact, left any any people behind were who were still being kept as prisoners in

hanoi. that was yeah, there was american p.o.w. whose entire issue was was getting back our who were being held in hanoi. and it was the kerry mccain report which actually directly led to the trip that i made with john armitage in 82 after that. exactly. and i mean, the irony the irony of that is, you know, a lot of vietnam veterans were ones who were the first ones going back in there saying we need to get involved here. people like chuck who still there, he started there on a lot landmine clearing project, etc. so i think in the us, the americans, if i may say so, i think the american left was terrified of vietnam they didn't want to you know, they didn't want to go anywhere near. it so it took people who had fought there had been there and had the credentials to actually, you know, it's time to move on. this is what's fascinating about this is because if you if we all agree that the vietnam, american vietnam war was a tragedy.

somehow and one of the reasons it was a tragedy because our level of ignorance when we went in was so profound. i mean, i've always thought that the revelation in the pentagon papers was how ignorant we were when we went in. we just had no idea. so what do you think the subtle with which we've handled it, if you call it that or the way we've handled the postwar vietnam, is a reflection of what our ignorance so therefore we leave them alone, let them do their own thing. the lessons of failure is another possibility. and, you know, the whole nation notion of just time does heal because what those of us who see the rest of the world, our relationship with the russians our relationship with the chinese, the relationship to the

middle east are so fraught. yeah. and here's a war we lost, and yet we've managed to navigate the postwar period. and what i think would all agree is a successful way how to set i, i, i think part of it is, is we for once we listened. we listened to the vietnamese getting back the point hung right about also about about the china angle the vietnamese from the beginning we when when they told us in 2003 that they now wanted to have a geopolitical relationship with us and that they thought we had finally woken up to the dangers of some of the problems that china to the region. they said. but, you know, we're going to have to be careful about this. there are things we can't do. you are people saying you want to reopen a navy base in cameron bay? you know, that's not going to happen. and as one very wise vietnamese

who was still around an important vietnamese, i won't name him, but he told me, he said, look, there are three things we always say about our relations with china. they're very big. they're right next door. and most important, unfortunately, they're always to be there. and no bases. no, no u.s. bases in cameron bay. and and the vietnamese are always very careful about managing aging. this relationship, this triangle. so very often see if they are going to have an american visit or if one of their officials is going to go to the united states. there'll be a trip to china right around the same time. you know, it was done with great with great, great finesse and care. and i think we took that on board. we understand that china's always going to be there. there's case to be made that our handling of the rise of china has actually been better than perhaps some of our other forays

around world. i just have an interesting looking at this. the people here today, how many of have a phone now? how many of you how many of you the people who chose to come today had a direct relationship to vietnam? between 65 and 75. raise your hands. well, i mean, you were there. you had a relative who was there. you were drafted. well, i'm just interested because because and let me do it again. because at the lights here, whoever a great many of you, but not all what i'm interested in is the degree to which when we're talking about. vietnam in the seventies, 50 years after the fact, in the

seventies, where were we talking about the 20, 50 years after the fact. and what's very interesting and striking to me is much more on the whole vietnam present in our culture in the way we see the world, the lessons we've learned than you would think after half a century is that is that a you know, how would you deal with that particular proposition hey, i agree. i see it in teaching my students that know there's vietnam still resonates and whether that be because even you know, as as baby boomers we want to have recede in the background still exert a very you know, powerful over american cultures society consciousness even even you know if that generation steps even further back there's still something about vietnam that stays and that could be because of the memory of the war, even

afterwards into the subsequent decade. i think now it's, combined with vietnam's meteoric in the region going from being a regional power to potentially now know in the next few decades becoming a global that more young people will be like, what? what was that country? what was that? what's that country about? we the shared history, my great great grandparents, you know, had an involvement with with that country in some form or other but i want to be there because you know, there's this amazing economy and society that i want to be a part of. so so i think, you know, it's going to be that kind of of combination of factors that you're to have vietnam still stay a part of of the united states. so i lost my tour i keep losing my train of thought today but i was the last thing i was going to say is i mark you know, sort of how how much we've i was born in 74, so getting close to 50 that, you know this generation and when you ask this question of the future, we're not going to have as many people.

so we only have a very one minute and 52 seconds, right? yeah, right. what's your answer to that? why is it that vietnam is so present in our lives? it's a it was a great national drama that we went through and it's a it's still fascinates us or and still frustrates to try to understand it. and i think also the vietnamese have risen and have created a vital economy and and and great food and and and other and people know about it it's gotten the attention of of of of people of of so many generations in america and so that. keith what's your vietnam lives on in in the music we listen to

it lives on you know because backpackers are going i'm amazed now when i'm in and they're like american backpackers going around young people who are saying, well, wait, you mean we fought a war here? why? and the food is delicious. i've been to that spot where it where obama ate with anthony bourdain and that i love does become a tourist attraction now. and people young people can't believe we actually were fighting in vietnam and it's since one of them are extraordinary elements of we're about to finish the morning speaking of food there is a lunch for everybody and i want to urge you, if you can to stay for the afternoon because the panels in the afternoon are also touching on exactly point, which is the presence of in our current american life and society. but thanks very much. this is really good. thank you.