Fifty years ago we were at war with Germany. An 18-year-old college student George Bush-volunteered to serve in the United States Navy. Somewhat older, I was a young professor at Harvard teaching in an officer-candidate program. Although I was deferred from the draft, both on occupational grounds and because I had a 14-month-old daughter, I volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Corps. Both George Bush and I believed then, and I am sure each of us believes today, that every citizen has an obligation to serve his nation in peace and war.
Twenty years later, five weeks after I had been elected president of Ford Motor Co., President Kennedy asked me to serve as secretary of defense. I accepted. Almost a decade before, the seeds of U.S. involvement in Vietnam had been sown. Early in the Kennedy administration, and more rapidly in the Johnson administration, U.S. participation in the conflict increased. The actions were bitterly divisive at the time. As the war dragged on for an additional decade, leaving nearly 60,000 Americans dead, the divisions among us grew.
Since leaving the Defense Department in 1968, with the exception of my testimony during Gen. William Westmoreland’s libel trial against CBS, I have not spoken of these matters. I do so now, as we prepare to observe the 10th anniversary of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., to urge that we honor those who served in Vietnam-both those who volunteered and those who were drafted. They felt then, and they have had reason since to believe, that their sacrifice went unrecognized.
But I write also to say that I knew then, and I know now, the anguish of those who honestly and sincerely-and perhaps correctly-opposed the war. I tried to keep in touch with them while our decisions were being made: Sen. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, chaplain at Yale; the young Quaker who subsequently burned himself to death below my window in the Pentagon; Sam Brown, a friend of my children, who, after leading marches of protest against the president and me, would dine at my home.
Although I did not know Bill Clinton at the time, and have not met him since, I think I can understand the thoughts that lay behind the words of his letter to Col. Eugene Holmes, director of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas:
“No government really rooted in… democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose … a war which, in any case, does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation. The draft was justified in World War II because the life of the people collectively was at stake … Vietnam is no such case.”
To this day, many who supported the Vietnam War argue that it prevented the spread of communism across South and East Asia, contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union and hastened the end of the cold war. Whether they are right or wrong, it is undeniable that our nation paid a terrible price for its participation-a price which those of us in power at the time had not foreseen.
At the age of 23, Bill Clinton, by his statements showed a deep feeling for our nation. His thoughts were exactly those which I would hope any president would consider as he struggles with the decision of whether to commit our young men and women to fight and die for their country.
I write these words to urge that at long last we properly recognize those who served in Vietnam and to plead, as well, that we respect those who agonized with grave doubts as to whether their nation was on a morally acceptable course.
