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In a sense, the war in Viet Nam has dictated American political life for a generation. But for the war, Johnson might have served two terms. He might have made his Great Society work, or at least work better than it ultimately did, with program after program collapsing under the burden of unfocused - goals, unbridled spending and unbelievable bureaucratic bloat. He might have been succeeded by, say, Robert Kennedy. All of that is, of course, imponderable. As it was, the war shook the Democratic Party for years. Among a number of other divisions, in fact, the party is still split along the lines drawn years ago between hawk and dove, Johnson and Kennedy. Says George McGovern, who ran on an antiwar platform in the 1972 presidential election and was buried in the landslide that gave Richard Nixon a second term: "The Viet Nam tragedy is at the root of the confusion and division of the Democratic Party. It tore up our souls."
Because L.B.J. tried to have both guns and butter, the war brought on an inflation that, along with the oil crisis, destabilized the world's economy all through the 1970s. Then Carter gave way to Reagan, who has abetted if not entirely caused a resurgence of American self-confidence, an unexpected post- Viet Nam syndrome. The new mood of the nation is out of harmony with most of the countercultural forces that gave the U.S. a certain nihilistic energy in the '60s. The war and the counterculture could at certain moments seem part of the same rock 'n' roll, drawing their energy from one dark circuit. Grunts in Viet Nam sometimes carried their tape players into firefights. They would listen to the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.
The war has always been refracted rather strangely in the American mind. If time has moved on, it has also receded, in a psychological sense. Seven years ago, the war seemed much further away than it does now. During a long period in the '70s, the nation indulged in a remarkable exercise of recoil and denial and amnesia about Viet Nam. Americans did not want to hear about it, to think about it.
That denial was part of the special ordeal of the Viet Nam veterans, an ordeal that began when they arrived back in the U.S. and found that even their families were not interested in talking about what they had just been through, or were embarrassed about it. "I went over there thinking I was doing something right and came back a bum," says Larry Langowski, now an administrator for Illinois Bell. "I came back decked with medals on my uniform, and I got spit on by a hippie girl."
The veterans were mostly very young (average age in the war zone: 19, as opposed to 26 during World War II). The nation that sent them to battle now wanted to deny, to nullify their experience, their sacrifice. It made the veterans very angry. They learned to leave that period off their resumes.