THE RUBBLE from the World Trade Center was still burning when the first so-called peace protesters took to the streets more than two months ago. Anxious to emulate the powerful coalition that pressured the United States to abandon Indochina three decades earlier, they would have us believe that our cause is unjust, our strategy illegal, and our goals unwise.
Fortunately, to date they have been totally ineffective. The American people fully understand what happened on September 11 and why our government must respond decisively in self-defense after years of empty threats to hunt down and punish terrorists. Even within the academic community, criticism of the war effort is thus far subdued. But things can change. The public rallied around President Lyndon Johnson when he first ordered air attacks against North Vietnam: Between July and August 1964, LBJ's approval rating shot up from 42 percent to 72 percent, and the Gallup Organization attributed it to his tough stand in Vietnam. But little by little, in the following years, that support was lost.
War is by its nature a horrible thing, and we should not ignore the temptation for idealistic students, hoping to emulate the great protests of the 1960s, to be lured into the streets by radical faculty and peers. The Constitution quite properly protects the right of even uninformed and misled citizens to peaceably assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances. But there is one thing we can do: We can educate our country about what really happened in Vietnam and about the actual consequences of the peace protests. For one of the great enduring myths from our tragic Vietnam experience is that the protesters were right, and that their courageous actions ultimately ended years of folly and brought peace to a troubled region.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Since the United States withdrew from Vietnam in the early 1970s, new information has emerged both in our own country and from the statements and writings of some of the leaders of Communist Vietnam. And although few people discuss it, it is now clear that on almost every major issue, the protesters of the sixties got their facts wrong.
Indeed, at the time of the protests this was evident to anyone who made a serious effort to ascertain the truth. I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on Vietnam, and before entering the Army in 1968 I took part in more than a hundred teach-ins, debates, and other public programs where I listened to the protesters' arguments. The litany never changed. Between 1965 and 1968 I debated several professors and radical leaders of the "New Left," but few ever agreed to a return engagement. Even fewer bothered to change their spiel after I had demonstrated that their facts were wrong. On the few issues that were ever really debatable during the war, Hanoi has subsequently acknowledged that the protesters were duped.
We were told that the United States first became involved in Indochina after World War II when it tried to reimpose French colonial rule, and that after the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the United States conspired with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem to violate the 1954 Geneva Accords by refusing to hold free elections in July 1956. According to the protesters, our reason was simple: Even President Eisenhower had admitted that Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would have won the elections by 80 percent of the vote.
Denied the free election they had been promised, it was alleged, South Vietnamese nationalists had no choice, given the repressive nature of the American puppet government, so in 1960 they formed the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam. Indeed, perhaps no issue was more hotly debated than the origins of the NLF, which the State Department insisted was a creature of the North Vietnam Communist party. Professors at teach-ins and senators in Washington disparaged this assertion, accusing the State Department of lying to the American people. Self-righteous peace activists also gleefully quoted NLF programs calling for peace, democracy, freedom of speech and religion, and other promises seldom associated with Leninist movements. And they told us, in contrast, that South Vietnam was a dictatorship holding 202,000 "political prisoners" and that anyone there who spoke out for peace was incarcerated in subterranean "tiger cages."
