The War in Vietnam and Myself, Part I

I don't remember when I first thought about politics. A child experiences abstractions (politics, religion) in terms of parental influence: Mom and Dad say it's important, Mom and Dad say "x" and not "not-x," so x it is. An ethical sense, maybe, comes first. I remember sometime before 1968 (we moved from Kansas to New York in 1968) sitting in the movie theater watching a western (I secretly went to the movies without permission), and a man was being dragged behind a horse by another man. My companion laughed and I reproached him: it wasn't funny to mistreat someone. That was from my mother.

I see that I have to discuss my mother a little. That's intense. I was going to say "embarrassing," "delicate," but not exactly, the generic "intense" will have to do, the thing is this: the story of my relationship with the war in Vietnam (that's what I'll call it, "the war in Vietnam"), of that historical event and my identity, is as autobiographical as I'll ever get. It's a book about the war in Vietnam, that's what makes it worthwhile for anyone else to read (granting it is so), but the only way to do it is to tell my story. This will in time become interwoven with a discussion of the military history of Indochina, the military and political history of the US, the Cold War and other matters. But to get there I'm going to have to tell you some things about my mother.

My mother and father were both born in 1924 - the same year that George H. W. Bush and his wife Barbara were born. (I was born in 1958.) My mother grew up in south Philadelphia ("South Philly" is what one calls it), the daughter of working-class Irish Catholics. She grew up to be an apostate Catholic. The nuns who educated her were a rough lot, and they told her and my uncle that they should go for vocational training, thereby permanently alienating them both. My mother worked herself through college, without support financial or moral. She got out of the Irish-Italian ghetto, married my ambitious WASP father, and moved on to cultural and social realms no one in her family had experienced before. In America in the 40s and 50s there was such a degree of social mobility that stories such as hers were common. "Don't tell your teachers that you're Irish," I'll never forget her telling me after we moved to Kansas. When my parents married in 1948 they chose the American Society of Friends (Quakers), and they stuck with that and I grew up in the Meeting (I was born into the Marion Monthly Meeting in Philadelphia). I'll have to talk about that too. And the Buddhism, I'll have to talk about that. But that comes later.

My mother was political early on. She did some volunteer work for the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign in 1952. I have the idea that she walked the sidewalk in a sandwich-board sign, but I'll have to ask her about that (oh yes, she's still very much with us, she'll be reading this this evening). She formed an intense dislike for the California congressman Richard Nixon during his race for the Senate in 1950 against Helen Gahagan Douglas, who Nixon relentlessly smeared as "pink" (a communist sympathizer). My mother's antipathy for Nixon was a defining characteristic of her political identity, that and her antiwar ideology. An old joke of mine is that during the Reagan years she never got that exercised about The Gipper; still too busy hating Tricky Dick (it was Gahagan Douglas who first called him that).

But I anticipate. Obviously my mother loved Kennedy. Remember he was the first Catholic, the first Irishman ever elected president, in a time when a mother might still warn her kids to keep their Irish heritage to themselves. But both of my parents were fiercely opposed to the war in Vietnam. Kennedy was in fact an enthusiast for that war, but my parents imagined that he would have got us out. His extremely tough south Texan successor, Lyndon Johnson, campaigned in the presidential election of 1964 against the Republican Barry Goldwater on a platform that included winding down the war (Goldwater pledged to settle things with nuclear weapons). When the years went on and "LBJ" (as everyone called him) escalated the war my mother felt bitterly betrayed. I remember sometime around 1966 or 1967 my mother was taking her nap and my younger sister and I went into the bedroom and were waking her up, as young kids do, and my mother pretended to still be asleep and to be dreaming and talking in her sleep. "Johnson," she murmured, "bad man." Such was her dedication to indoctrinating us properly.

And that brings me to what might have been my first real formative political experience. The war was very divisive in a society that was struggling with civil rights and what we now call "The 60s" at home, but very invested in a mythology of American goodness in World War II and our subsequent prosperity. In the Friends Meeting in Kansas (Manhattan Kansas, believe it or not: Kansas State University's town), I remember the adults arguing about the war. I remember imagining that the arguments were like paper airplanes that they were launching at each other, arcing up and then falling to the ground.

There was more substantial trouble, although I knew little of it at the time. The antiwar students seized the president's office at Kansas State, and my father (Dr. John Lott Brown, Jr. is my father's name), who was the vice-president for academic affairs, went in and spoke to them and had some part in resolving the situation (he has a funny story about the nervous cops, I'll have to ask about that). But then later a building was burned down. One of my parents' friends worked translating German opera librettos: her life's work destroyed. We have some haunting photos of her and my father watching the building burn in the night, their faces illuminated by the flames. Apparently there was one young man in particular who was suspected of the violence. He was known to have a gun, and he threatened my father's life. The KBI (Kansas Bureau of Investigation) staked out our house for a few days. I was not told of that until much later.

And then came the presidential election of 1968. 1968 was the year I turned 10, and we moved from Kansas to Rochester, New York, where my father had gone back to research in the Psychology Department. My mother could not bring herself to support LBJ. My father argued that the Democrat had to be supported to prevent the Republicans from winning. Mom and Dad disagreed! Most confusing. My mother voted instead for Eugene McCarthy's antiwar candidacy. McCarthy's primary victory in New Hampshire led Johnson to withdraw from the race. Hubert Horatio Humphrey ("HHH"), LBJ's vice-president, was the Democratic nominee. Richard Nixon was elected president by less than half a million votes.

A. Brown