The Lift of a Driving Dream

What America needs most today is what it once had, but has lost

Richard Nixon gave the first speech of his presidential campaign in February 1968 at the New Hampshire Highway Hotel in Concord. It was a volatile time in American life. One month prior, the Soviet Union had detonated a nuclear bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site, North Korea had seized the USS Pueblo, and the Viet Cong had launched the Tet Offensive, which would lead to widespread disillusionment among Americans and the eventual U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973.

Then as now, Americans lived with the looming threat of Russian aggression, North Korean hostility, and a distant war against barbaric forces that left American public opinion bitterly divided. We see the same disillusionment today over the war in Israel, as leftists again stage antiwar protests, so it wasn’t terribly surprising that I was reading the paper on Christmas Eve when what to my wondering eyes did appear, but a story in the New York Times suggesting a parallel between the Vietnam protests of the 1960s and the pro-Palestinian protests of today.

Decades later, in his 1987 book No More Vietnams, Nixon would darkly reflect on the war in terms that regrettably apply to Israel now, writing, “No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much.”

Reading the Times article, I was reminded of an argument the paper made in 2005 that drew parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. That piece was trounced by the late Christopher Hitchens, who took another swing when then-President George Bush made the same comparison. The Vietminh, Hitchens said, were U.S. and British allies during World War II, while the Iraqi Baath Party was on the other side—as were the Palestinians, I might add. Hitchens noted that Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence by quoting Thomas Jefferson, a man whose thinking was wholly alien to the jihadist propaganda of Baathists—or Hamas. He added, Vietnam was content with its borders, whereas Iraq claimed the entire territory of its neighbor Kuwait—just as Palestinians claim Israel. Vietnam had no quarrel abroad, while Iraq sought to murder all Jews and infidels—ditto Hamas. The Americans in Vietnam had targeted civilians, Hitchens explained, but no more, whereas in Iraq, killing the innocent was a badge of honor—as in Gaza today.