The Turning of the Tide

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In hindsight it is neat and orderly to say that the Tet offensive, which began in late January 1968, was the turning point in Vietnam.

And, strategically, perhaps it was.

But public opinion had been turning against the war for quite awhile. The escalation of the conflict in the mid–1960s had spawned Eugene McCarthy's insurgent presidential campaign that would force President Lyndon Johnson to abandon any plans he had to seek another term, and it would lead to Bobby Kennedy's campaign as well. There were protests — and chaos — in American cities. It was a turbulent and terrifying time in American history.

Through it all, I suppose, a majority of Americans continued to believe that victory was still possible in Vietnam — until the Tet offensive revealed the weaknesses of America's war effort. While the Tet offensive failed to meet its military objectives, historian Theodore H. White called it "the shadow on the walls."

Again, in hindsight, it was. But no one really recognized the shadow for what it was — at least at first.

Two days into the offensive — 50 years ago today — one of the most famous photographs of the Vietnam era was taken. It would lead to a Pulitzer Prize for the photographer, Eddie Adams of the Associated Press, who snapped a picture of the execution in Saigon of Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong operative who had been involved in the slayings of a South Vietnamese officer's wife and children.

It was a powerful picture, powerful enough to mobilize opposition to the war even — or, perhaps, especially — if the person looking at the picture did not know the details behind it. To the uninformed, it could well appear as if Vietnam was like the lawless old west with people being randomly murdered in the streets. The picture did not say why the man was being executed.

The executioner was Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, chief of South Vietnam's national police. He shot Nguyễn Văn Lém in front of Adams and a TV cameraman for NBC News. According to Adams, the shooter walked up to him and said, "They killed many of my people and yours, too," and walked off.

Film footage of the shooting was subsequently broadcast worldwide, invigorating the antiwar movement and providing the first of many shocking, unexpected and critical moments in what would be a thoroughly unpredictable year, filled with riots in the streets and assassinations.

But it could really be said to have begun on this day with the shooting of one man in the streets of Saigon.

Hindsight Is 20/20

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Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It really is. I believe it is an extremely good quality for a person to possess, to be able to look back at a decision that turned out to be the wrong one and learn from it.

The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was the wrong decision. I believed it was the wrong decision at the time, but that was not a popular position to take. It took a certain amount of courage, back in those post–September 11 days, to tell one's friends and co–workers, many of whom supported the decision to invade Iraq, that it was a bad decision, and I did not always have the strength of will to argue with people about it, especially as confident as supporters of the invasion were that weapons of mass destruction would be found.

After a certain amount of time had passed and it became clear that the pretext for the invasion — the alleged existence of those weapons of mass destruction — was based on faulty information, public opinion began to sour on the war. But I think it is important to remember that a lot of people supported the invasion initially — including Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in 2016 — no matter how much they may pretend otherwise today.

Mrs. Clinton wasn't the only Democrat who voted to authorize George W. Bush to use force against Iraq. When the Senate voted on Oct. 11, 2002, 29 of 50 Democrats joined 48 Republicans in a 77–23 vote giving Bush the authority he sought. Her colleague from New York, Chuck Schumer, voted to authorize the use of force. So did Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein and Harry Reid.

In my lifetime, I have had the opportunity to vote for national tickets with a Bush on them half a dozen times. I have never voted for one and, if Jeb is nominated next year, it will make seven times I have refused to lend my support to a Bush in a national campaign.

But I find myself sympathizing — to an extent — with his recent stumble on the question of invading Iraq.

Fox News' Megyn Kelly asked him, "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?"

Bush tried to answer a different question. "I would've, and so would've Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got."

He kind of got back to what Kelly was getting at when he elaborated: "In retrospect, the intelligence that everybody saw, that the world saw, not just the United States, was faulty. And in retrospect, once we … invaded and took out Saddam Hussein, we didn't focus on security first. And the Iraqis, in this incredibly insecure environment, turned on the United States military because there was no security for themselves and their families."

Kelly was dealing in hypotheticals, and what Bush should have said — but, obviously, did not — was that he won't answer hypothetical questions. I'm an amateur historian, and what–if is the kind of game historians love to play. But it is a game that really cannot be won because the past is what it is. It's no trick to look back on a bad decision and know it was a mistake, but human beings are not blessed with the ability to see the future. If they were, I guess many would not marry the people they married or invest in companies that go belly up.

Or bet on the wrong horse at the racetrack.

There seems to be an impression among many Americans these days that a president must be infallible, that he must be capable of all things — including superhuman stuff like seeing the future. But anyone who looks for an infallible leader, someone around whom everyone can rally, is just asking to be disappointed. In the life of every presidency, there will be those who think the president does everything right and those who think the president does everything wrong — and everyone else who falls in between those two extremes. To misquote Abraham Lincoln, you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all the people all the time.

A president can only act within the reality of his times — and hope, at the end of the day, that he made the right decision. Seems to me that the best presidents have been the ones who second–guessed themselves and tried to learn from each decision they made — and the worst presidents were the ones who would not admit to having made a mistake.

If one is going to answer Kelly's question, though, it would have to be something like this: "In hindsight, it was a mistake to invade Iraq." That's it. Bush's inclination to defend his brother is admirable, but it does not have to be part of his answer to that question.

It can be the answer to another question if it is asked. He is right when he observes that a president must act on the information he has. But that is not the question that was asked. So don't answer it.

Better still, though, not to answer hypothetical questions at all. Politicians can't win hypotheticals, and politicians always want to play games they can win. Hypotheticals require proving a negative, and that cannot be done.

One time, I saw illusionist Penn Jillette talking about Nostradamus' prophecies that supposedly predicted Napoleon and Hitler and many other events that occurred long after his death. Jillette complained that the prophecies, which were apparently written in a deliberately obscure way, never named names, places or dates. What good is that, he wanted to know, if we want to prevent or avoid a certain event?

It's a fair point.

Let me ask you something. If time travel was possible, and you could go back in time, would you kill an infant Adolf Hitler sleeping in his crib? It is safe to say, I believe, that nazism would not have seized control of Germany without a charismatic leader at the helm. Snuffing out an infant who, knowing what we know now, grew up to plunge the world into a war that claimed millions of lives could be seen as heroic.

But could you take the life of a baby? You might say now that you could, but, when the chips were down, you might find it incredibly difficult to kill a small child, even knowing that, by doing so, you could save millions of others.

In the two decades between his resignation and his death, Richard Nixon might have said that, in hindsight, having the taping system installed in the Oval Office was a mistake — but that would have been with the benefit of knowing how it eventually played out, producing the evidence that brought his presidency to an end. But when the system was installed, his motivation (ostensibly) was the preservation of the historical record.

As Dr. Phil would say, how did that work out for ya?

Forty Years Since the Fall of Saigon

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The picture at the top of this post is the image that comes to my mind when I think of the end of the war in Vietnam 40 years ago today.

As far back as I can remember, the war in Vietnam was a fact of life. To a young boy, it seemed that there had never been a time when U.S. forces were not in Vietnam. Anyway, it seemed that way to me. It was probably different for people who were even a year older than I; I was born at the right time to have no real memory of the pre–Vietnam era, but I know that older brothers and sisters of my contemporaries did know of that time, had memories of it.

I knew nothing of it, and I guess I've always assumed that the others who were my age had no memories of it, either, but I could be wrong about that. I can think of a few people I knew who were probably more aware of the outside world than the rest of us, but they were definitely the exceptions. Anyway, Vietnam influenced everything. It was on the news every night with updated casualty counts. Late in the '60s, if there was a demonstration somewhere or someone important was giving a speech, it was a pretty good bet that it was about the war. It was everywhere.

My father was a religion professor at a small college in my hometown. For a small college, it had some impressive things, though, like an Olympic–sized swimming pool. In the summer, one hour was set aside each weekday for faculty members and their families to have exclusive use of that pool, and my brother and I were regulars there. Anyway, on one of those occasions, I have a vivid memory of swimming in the pool and, for whatever reason, I started to muse about whether the war would still be going on when I got old enough to be drafted. I didn't think about it that much; after all, the prospect still seemed far away, and I was still just a boy, cooling off on a hot summer day in Arkansas. But that moment made enough of an impression on me that I can still remember it all these years later.

I don't remember how I imagined the war would end. I guess I pictured a Hollywoodesque finish with bombs and rockets bursting, and the Americans finding some way to win the thing in the end. I guess I imagined a John Wayne movie. It wasn't like that, of course. The fall of Saigon was far from glamorous. The Viet Cong swept the city, capturing all the important places, and South Vietnamese refugees evacuated.

In fact, the fall of the city actually came after many of the civilians and the Americans there had fled. In that picture, you can see some of the South Vietnamese trying to climb aboard a single helicopter on April 29, 1975. It looks reasonably orderly in the picture, but my memory is of chaos. I guess it was controlled chaos. In 24 hours, American helicopters evacuated about 7,000 people — roughly a dozen at a time — and it was not orderly.

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But there were times when I watched the news coverage of helicopters like the one in the picture struggling to get off the ground, so heavy were they with passengers.

Strange as it might have seemed to people at the time — which explains why I never mentioned it to anyone — I found myself sympathizing with Gerald Ford. I liked him when he first became president. He was such a likable guy, a breath of fresh air after the Nixon years, and then he pardoned Nixon and threw away all the good will the American people had given him. In hindsight, I have to grudgingly admit that he was probably right when he said that pardoning Nixon was the only way to close the chapter on Watergate and move on. At the time, I thought it was a flimsy excuse. So, too, apparently, did a lot of people.

The Nixon/Watergate matter wasn't the only challenge Ford faced. The loss of Saigon was another. Ford's approval rating, which had been in the low 70s right after he took office but tumbled after the pardon, had been hovering around 40% since before Christmas in 1974, which was when the North Vietnamese broke the 1973 accords and invaded a South Vietnamese province along the Cambodian border. In Gallup's last survey before the fall of Saigon, Ford's approval stood at 39%.

Ford had a reputation for not being too bright, but I have come to believe that was mostly a facade for him. He used that image to his advantage. It made his adversaries underestimate him, some more than others.

I don't think anything illustrated that quite as well as the Mayaguez incident a couple of weeks after the fall of Saigon. The Mayaguez, a merchant ship, was seized by the Cambodians on May 12. Three days later, a rescue mission was launched, making Ford appear decisive and assertive — qualities he would need in the campaign for the Republican nomination against former Gov. Ronald Reagan; if that was what he was seeking, I'd be inclined to say he got it. In Gallup's next survey, Ford's approval was over 50%.

Ford and his people were products of the Cold War — he had three chiefs of staff while he was president (Alexander Haig, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney), and they almost certainly influenced his actions in Southeast Asia. They were worried about the other Southeast Asian countries, whether they would be more likely to fall prey to communism after the fall of Saigon, and they were determined to make a stand.

At the time, the expectation had been that the South Vietnamese could resist the North Vietnamese until 1976. Obviously, that prediction fell a bit short of the mark.

It is a tricky proposition to see into the future.

Half a Century Since an 'Historic Mistake'

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Fifty years ago, in August 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked the American destroyer Maddox and, possibly, the Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin.

See, there were (reportedly) two separate incidents. The first occurred on Aug. 2, 1964, and it seems pretty certain that one did happen. The Maddox was attacked, and a sea battle followed in which the Maddox fired nearly 300 rounds at the torpedo boats.

Two days later, the Turner Joy was reportedly fired on after it had moved into position to provide support for the Maddox. The evidence of that incident was shakier. It was initially reported as a sea battle, implying that both sides had been firing weapons, but it later emerged that the firing of Turner Joy's weapons may have been triggered (so to speak) by "Tonkin ghosts" — false radar images.

(An internal National Security Agency report, which was declassified in 2005, found that "[i]t is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night.")

Real or false, President Lyndon Johnson used the attacks as justification for escalating American involvement in Vietnam — and winning political support from some conservatives.

What most Americans did not know was that the Maddox had been sent to the Gulf of Tonkin on a special mission — to provoke the North Vietnamese into using their radar. The Americans would then track the radar — "the naval equivalent of spotting enemy artillery positions so that they can be destroyed by counterbattery fire," historian William Manchester wrote.

But the Americans apparently hadn't expected their presence to draw enemy fire.

The outcome was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a joint resolution approved by both chambers of Congress a week later. It gave Johnson the authority — without Congress' formal declaration of war — to use "conventional" military force.

The House approved the resolution 416–0. In the Senate, only two senators — Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska — voted against it.

"I believe this resolution to be a historic mistake," Morse told his colleagues. "I believe that, within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake."

It didn't even take that long.

By 1967, opposition to the war was growing and the rationale for American involvement was under close scrutiny by the public. A movement to repeal the resolution began to gather steam. The repeal was achieved as an attachment to the Foreign Military Sales Act of 1971, which was signed into law by Richard Nixon.

To further limit a president's war powers, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973 over Nixon's veto.

But there weren't many critical comments in August 1964.

It was perceived as the logical progression of the anti–appeasement policy that had been in style since World War II.

"President Johnson has earned the gratitude of the free world," wrote the Washington Post.

Fifty years later, The Hill calls it a "tragedy." To me, that seems more accurate than "historic mistake," although I guess both are correct.

And Johnson's response to the perceived aggression of the North Vietnamese apparently shored up his support on the right. In July, Gallup reported that 58% of respondents had been critical of his handling of the military effort in Vietnam, but in August, nearly three–fourths of respondents approved. That was an impressive shift. And, in November, Johnson won a full four–year term as president by the widest margin in history.

Whether legitimately or not, it is clear that Johnson reaped considerable immediate political benefits from what historian Theodore White called a "deft response" to a threat.

"For all I know," Johnson told a group of visitors in 1965, "our Navy was shooting at whales out there."

They Call the Wind Korea

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"Out here they got a name for rain
For wind and fire only
But when you're lost and all alone
There ain't no word but lonely"

They Call the Wind Maria
From Paint Your Wagon (1951)

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Sixty years ago today, the final armistice was signed in Panmunjom, putting the Korean War (which had been labeled a "police action" by then–President Harry Truman) on hold.

As James Ragland of the Dallas Morning News observes, the war/conflict/police action in Korea is often called "the forgotten war." In fact, had it not been for the movie "M;*A*S*H" and the long–running TV series it spawned, most people of my generation probably never would have heard of it.

It all ended long before my time, of course, but, based on my studies, Korea received far less attention than either World War II, which preceded it, or the Vietnam War, which followed it — so, in the context of history, I guess it really has been forgotten — or, at least, ignored.

It's been given a lot of names, too.

South Koreans call it "the 6–2–5 Upheaval" — like the American shorthand of 9–1–1 for the hijackings that occurred in 2001, it is a reference to the date of the North's invasion of the South (June 25, 1950).

The North Koreans call it the "Fatherland Liberation War." (Eric Talmadge of the Associated Press reports that the official commemoration in North Korea was a "painstakingly choreographed military pageant intended to strike fear into North Korea's adversaries and rally its people behind young ruler Kim Jong Un.")

In China — where the Communists won their clash with the Nationalists in the late 1940s with North Korea's help — it is called the "War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea." The Chinese returned the favor and lent support to the North Koreans in their battle with the South.

Battle, police action, conflict, war — whatever you want to call it, Ann Curry and Becky Bratu of NBC News report that it has not been forgotten where it was fought; there, the armistice's anniversary, they report, was observed "with pomp and massive celebrations."

As it should be. An estimated 2.5 million civilians were killed or wounded during the conflict. Its end was worth celebrating then as now.

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Actually, though, the war never ended. Instead, an uneasy peace has descended on that trouble peninsula, and the uneasiness has only increased with the introduction of nuclear weapons into the equation.

See, what was signed 60 years ago today was an armistice, not a surrender.

An armistice is defined as "a temporary suspension of hostilities by agreement of the warring parties," and Curry and Bratu point out, "[A] peace treaty has yet to be negotiated."

Negotiations have been continuing between North Korea and South Korea in the same building where the armistice was signed 60 years ago today.

There were often jokes on M*A*S*H about the maddeningly slow pace of the peace talks.

But what hasn't been happening for the last six decades is no joke.

Was Gettysburg As Decisive As Historians Say?

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"If I had had Stonewall Jackson at Gettysburg, I would have won that fight."

Robert E. Lee

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I think I was in ninth grade when I was required, along with everyone else, to memorize the Gettysburg Address and recite it in my civics class.

I remember little about the day when I finally had to deliver that speech; what I do remember is that my mother endured hour upon hour of listening to me practice giving that speech at home. By the time we finished, Mom probably could have delivered the speech herself — and she probably would have done a lot better than I did.

(Of course, she probably had to memorize that speech when she was a teenager, too.)

Today is not the anniversary of that speech — nor is it the anniversary of the day I delivered it in class. Today is the sesquicentennial (the 150th) anniversary of the start of the three–day Battle of Gettysburg. The Union's victory at Gettysburg (with affiliated battles in the Pennsylvania campaign of 1863) is widely believed to have been the turning point in the Civil War.

That was the premise of an excellent mockumentary that I saw several years ago called "C.S.A." It was about the alternate history of America if the South had won the Civil War — presuming the South had prevailed at Gettysburg.

This was accomplished in the movie, as I recall, when the South persuaded Britain and France to support the Confederacy, seizing the moral high ground (before the Union could do so by making the conflict about a "rebirth of freedom," to quote Lincoln in the address he delivered at Gettysburg in November of 1863).

That didn't happen, of course. Britain and France did not intercede on the South's behalf.

In two days, it will be the 150th anniversary of George Pickett's ill–advised "Pickett's Charge" in a final attempt to reverse the outcome of the battle. Apparently, that anniversary is going to be a huge deal in Gettysburg.

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The charge failed, as Gen. James Longstreet had predicted, and the South never really recovered from the setback.

Robert E. Lee believed that he would have won the battle if Stonewall Jackson — Lee's right arm — had been alive. But Jackson was killed about two months earlier in the Confederates' victory in the Battle of Chancellorsville.

Confederate losses at Chancellorsville had been heavy — not as heavy as the Union's but heavy nonetheless. And, as far as Lee was concerned, the loss of Jackson made it a costly win indeed. He still had Longstreet, of course, but Jackson had been his finest commander, capable of quickly and accurately assessing battlefield situations and identifying weaknesses that could be exploited.

In Lee's eyes, he was irreplaceable.

No one will ever know if the South could have won the Battle of Gettysburg if Jackson had still been alive — or if Jackson could have kept casualties down. But we do know that, without him, it was the bloodiest battle of the war with roughly 50,000 casualties combined.

And no one can say with any certainty that Gettysburg alone was as decisive as it is said to have been. It was, to be sure, the largest of the war, but, as a student of history, I have always felt that it was Gettysburg and the series of battles in and around Vicksburg, Miss., at the same time that combined to deal the South a setback from which it never recovered.

While Lee, Longstreet and Pickett were trying to turn things around in Pennsylvania, Lt. Gen. John Pemberton's Confederate troops were engaged in a nearly seven–week battle for Vicksburg with Ulysses S. Grant's Union troops. When the Confederates, who had been cut off from reinforcements and supplies for most of that time, finally surrendered on July 4, 1863, the Union controlled the Mississippi River and the supply route it provided.

In most ways, the value of the Gettysburg campaign was symbolic. It effectively ended the notion that Lee was invincible — an important psychological hurdle for the Union troops.

That doesn't mean the defeat at Gettysburg wasn't costly for the Confederates in a very real sense. The number of casualties alone was staggering for the Southern cause.

But the loss of vital supply lines at Vicksburg had a very real impact on the daily lives of all Confederates. Strategically, I have to think Vicksburg was the more meaningful victory.

Those two Union triumphs demonstrated that the Union had deeper pockets when it came to both personnel and firepower and that it was far better equipped for a long–term engagement.

The war went on for nearly two more years, but the South never mounted an offensive attack again. All its subsequent military moves were defensive in nature.

When I was a child, my family frequently planned summer vacation road trips that took us to Civil War battlefields, and I remember walking around the grounds, observing the statues that had been erected in memory of the fallen and touring the museums that were often on the sites.

There probably wasn't anything special about the Gettysburg battlefield when we were there. It was like most of the others we had seen. What was different was what it represented in the story of the Civil War, the reputation it has for being a game changer.

Its place in American history may also account for all the tales of ghost sightings in the area.

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One of the more persistent of such stories concerns Devil's Den, a boulder–strewn ridge south of Gettysburg that was the scene of some of the most intense fighting of the battle.

For me, Devil's Den has always been one of the most fascinating parts of the three–day battle of Gettysburg. That dates back to the first time I heard about it — when I was a kid.

I was probably 8 or 9 when my family visited the Gettysburg battlefield, and Devil's Den was like an outdoor playground. There were boulders to climb — the same ones from which Union snipers picked off Confederate soldiers down below. There were caves. Some of the boulders and caves were restricted, probably for safety reasons, but there were many others that were not.

I'm sure it was a lot more fun for my brother (who is three years younger than I) and me than it was for the Confederates who tried to take it 150 years ago.

Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood (for whom Fort Hood in Texas is named) was assigned by Lee to assault Devil's Den. Hood didn't like the assignment and requested a different one that he believed had a greater chance of success, but he was turned down repeatedly.

Hood's assault began in the late afternoon of July 2, but battlefield factors (probably the 19th–century equivalent of the "fog of war") diverted his remaining troops from their intended course, and they wound up joining other Confederate forces in their assault on Little Round Top.

Even 150 years later, people try to rationalize the Battle for Little Round Top. Michael Rubinkam of the Associated Press writes of topographic evidence that suggests Lee didn't realize how many Union troops there were on that ridge.

Little Round Top is still regarded as the crucial defensive effort for the Union that day. Col. Joshua Chamberlain of Maine directed his troops, who were low on ammunition, to mount a downhill bayonet charge that completely caught the Confederates off guard.

A day of glory for Chamberlain was a day of loss for Hood, who not only lost the conflict but the use of his left arm as well.

Hood was a career soldier with a reputation for courage and a fighting spirit, but some said those qualities bordered on a careless disregard for consequences. Attacking Devil's Den had not been his choice, but he was determined to give it the best he and his men had.

A college professor by training, Chamberlain was praised and promoted for his daring at Little Round Top. After the war, he returned to Maine where, in part because of his exploits, he was elected governor four times and served as teacher and president at his alma mater, Bowdoin College.

What a difference a day made in the lives of those two men — and, perhaps, in the life of a nation.

Burst of Joy

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In my career as a journalist, I have known several people who truly were gifted at photography.

Personally, I have never been much more than an aim–and–shoot photographer. When I was a reporter, I occasionally took a camera with me and returned with acceptable photographs that ran with my stories. But I never mastered the intricacies of photography. Never came close to snapping a photograph that was worth the proverbial 1,000 words or a Pulitzer Prize.

I've always been a little envious of those folks who had a photographer's eye. I've been told that I am a good writer, and one person even told me that my writing was like music, which appealed to me because I love music even though I'm not terribly musical.

Music is an art form, and I love the arts. I get that from my mother, I suppose. She was a first–grade teacher, and she used her classroom to spread her creative wings. In fact, after she died, we received a letter from an old friend of my parents. He said that he had long suspected that, if Mom had not gone into teaching, her artistic gifts would have drawn her to the stage.

Anyway, Mom always encouraged a love of the arts — and writing was one of them. Her encouragement sure worked on me. I have always loved to read, and writing has always been more pleasure than work for me.

But writing has never seemed that artistic to me. Maybe that is because it has always come easily to me, maybe too easily at times, and I've always felt that great art requires great effort — like giving birth.

But, for some people, maybe it doesn't require a great effort. Maybe it really is as effortless as it seems.

Maybe that is how it is with great photographers.

Great photography, like the theater, excels at capturing dramatic moments in life, and there have been few moments in my lifetime that were more dramatic than when American prisoners of war started coming home from Vietnam in 1973.

I saw many dramatic photographs in those days. In fact — in hindsight — 1973 was filled with dramatic moments. It was the year that Richard Nixon famously declared that he was not a crook — an astonishing assertion for a president to make — a few months after it was revealed that Nixon had been recording Oval Office and telephone conversations for a couple of years. It was the year that Rose Mary Woods tried to take the heat for her boss — and failed. Her re–creation of her alleged error was preserved by many photographers.

But the most dramatic photographs of that year came when the POWs began coming home from Vietnam.

For the most part, America's veterans were treated shabbily by their fellow Americans. To an extent, it was understandable that Americans behaved as they did. They were frustrated by the waste of the war, and they felt deceived by their government. Being unable to take out their frustrations on the people who were really responsible, they lashed out at the most visible and most accessible symbols of the war — the young men who fought in it.

That wasn't fair. Soldiers carry out orders. They don't make policy. Even so, many Americans — to their everlasting shame — greeted returning Vietnam vets in the vilest ways.

Not so at Travis Air Force Base in northern California on this day in 1973.

Associated Press photographer Sal Veder happened to be in the right spot at the right time to snap a photo (above) that came to be known as "Burst of Joy." Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm was greeted by his family after spending more than five years as a prisoner of war. His 15–year–old daughter led the way, her arms outstretched. Her brothers, sister and mother followed, each face glowing in a radiant smile.

When I first saw that photo, it seemed to be the perfect bookend for a painful chapter in American history. It took many photos to tell the story of the Vietnam war — the photo of Vietnamese children running from their burning schoolhouse showed a side of war that non–combatants seldom see, and the photo of a young girl kneeling over the body of a victim at Kent State illustrated the divisions at home.

"Burst of Joy" allowed Americans to feel good again after years of feeling bad.

But there is a truth behind pictures that can't be seen — and the truth behind "Burst of Joy" was the fact that Stirm, who had been released by North Vietnam only three days earlier, had received a letter from his wife on the day of his release telling him that their marriage was over.

I don't know if the children knew about this so their smiles may well have been genuine. But the smile on Loretta Stirm's face, at least, hid a darker truth about the price of war.

Veder won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo he shot of the homecoming, and copies of it are on display in each of the children's homes.

But the focal point of the photo, Lt. Col. Stirm, does not. For him, it is a painful reminder.

Nevertheless, "Burst of Joy" continues to be "part of the nation's collective consciousness, often serving as an uplifting postscript to Vietnam," wrote Carolyn Kleiner Butler for the Smithsonian magazine eight years ago. "That the moment was considerably more fraught than we first assumed makes it all the more poignant and reminds us that not all war casualties occur on the battlefield."

War and Peace

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We'll be hearing a lot today about war and peace.

Mostly war, I suppose, and that is understandable. Today is, after all, the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor — the event that literally pushed the United States into World War II although one could argue that it had been getting more and more involved in the conflict in the months leading up to the attack.

It is an event that still resonates with people of my parents' generation. They were children when the attack occurred, and, although my mother has been gone for many years now, I remember her telling me of the peaceful Sunday afternoon that suddenly changed when the news came across the radio that Pearl Harbor had been the victim of a sneak attack.

It is hard for me to imagine anyone going through the American education system and not hearing a recording of FDR's famous speech to Congress, when he said that Dec. 7, 1941 was a "date which will live in infamy."

That date has certainly lived on in people's memories.

For me, today brings back memories of 20 years ago when I was working for a small daily newspaper, and I participated in the production of a special section commemorating the 50th anniversary of that attack. For weeks, we solicited 1940s era photos of local residents, both living and dead, who served their country — and we published articles about many of them and their experiences.

That project coincided with my graduation from graduate school. A week later, I was going to receive my master's degree. There were many things demanding my time and attention.

It was a grueling period in my journalism career, to be sure. I had no idea there were so many WWII veterans in the county where I was living — until we took on that project.

Most of them were living then. Far fewer are apt to be living today — and it does make me wonder when we will stop observing Pearl Harbor Day in the kind of semi–official way that we have in recent years. It seems we are moving in that direction with the attrition of people who still remember that day.

That happens with some of history's significant dates. So much time goes by and the people who remember the event pass away, and we are left with holidays and/or anniversaries for which we must be reminded the origin.

Take Veterans Day. It used to be called Armistice Day, which was the observation of the anniversary of the end of World War I.

Hostilities in that conflict ended in 1918, more than 90 years ago. The last time I recall anyone mentioning that event was when I studied history in high school — and my memory is that my history teacher really didn't spend much time on it.

To be sure, the outcome of World War I wasn't very popular in Germany, which paid a heavy price — and that could be said to have played a role in the eventual rise to power of the Nazis in the 1930s. Kinda depends on one's interpretations of things.

Chronologically, though, it is beyond dispute that anyone who was old enough to serve in that war would have to be around 110 years old today. There are a few of those left in the entire world, but not many. Armistice Day long ago lost its meaning as the World War I generation dwindled — so today it is known by the more generic designation of Veterans Day.

Which is not to be confused with Memorial Day. That is a completely different holiday in a completely different time of year — but it does have a similar history.

It started out as Decoration Day, a day for honoring those who died during the Civil War. I don't think there is a particular anniversary connected with it; the graves of Confederate soldiers were decorated in several Southern cities during the war and the practice simply continued after it ended.

Obviously, no one who was alive in the mid–19th century is still living — so there is no one for whom Decoration Day has any meaning. We continue to observe it, though, under the more generic name of Memorial Day.

The purpose evolved to include remembering those who fought in all wars, not just the Civil War, and in recent years it has expanded to include memories of anyone who is no longer living, even if that person didn't serve in the military.

George Carlin used to point out that sports like football that tend to emulate war are played in facilities that use such generic names as War Memorial Stadium or Soldier Field. It is part of the competitive nature of sports, I suppose, that the places where these games are played should bear names that conjure violent images — even though a sport will never be as violent as war.

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But not everything that happened on Dec. 7 has been violent.

Sometimes there has been peace and hope.

On this day in 1972, for example, Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon, was launched. As they left the earth and began making their way to the moon, the crew looked back and took a picture of the earth that is known today as the "Blue Marble."

Seen from that vantage point, the blue marble looks so peaceful, just floating along in the black velvet of space. One would never guess that so much turmoil exists on the surface of that marble, that there is savagery loose upon the land capable of causing great pain to millions without the slightest hint of remorse.

Yet the image of the blue marble sparks in many of us that wish for peace on earth and good will to men.

Not a bad thought to keep in mind during the Christmas season.

Back to the Future

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Today is the 42nd anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

When many people think of King, they think of his inspiring, uplifting messages — his "I Have a Dream" speech that he delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the August 1963 March on Washington or the speech he gave 42 years ago last night, the night before his assassination, when he told his followers he had been to the mountaintop.

In the 1950s and 1960s, King was reviled by segregationists, but he had the support of many who held positions of power in Washington and many who held positions of influence in the media. Among those groups, his work for racial equality was perceived as being on the right side of history.

But I have long believed that it was a speech he gave exactly one year before his assassination, at Riverside Church in New York, that changed his relationship with many who had supported and protected him. On that occasion, he spoke against American policy in Vietnam.

His allies would not stand with him on the subject of Vietnam. The war had nothing to do with racial injustice, they argued. Not so, said King, who believed that peace and prosperity went hand in hand. And he believed that to remain silent was betrayal.

(Or, as Edmund Burke put it, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.")

Because so many rejected his message in 1967, the tragedy of Vietnam went on, and thousands more Americans died needless deaths. In recent years, I have felt that we were repeating that mistake in the Middle East.

Apparently, Bob Herbert agrees with me, although the focus of his attention is mostly on Afghanistan, not Iraq — of the two, I have believed for many years that Iraq was the unjustifiable war.

King's message in that speech at Riverside Church in 1967 wasn't a radical departure from what he had been saying throughout his public life. But, as Herbert observes in the New York Times, it was controversial because he questioned what the government was doing in Vietnam.

Even the NAACP thought he was making a mistake in shifting his focus from civil rights to foreign policy. But King felt (and said so, in words that were far more eloquent than mine) that economic opportunity and peace were compatible, and economic opportunity was the key to equal rights. The war in Vietnam ran counter to the ultimate objective of the civil rights movement.

In 1967, to question the government's policy in Vietnam was seen as nothing short of heresy — and those who spoke out were often seen as advocating communism. Even entertainers (i.e., the Smothers Brothers) were censored when their comedy was believed to be contrary to national policy abroad.

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King was not a communist, and, eventually, a majority of Americans came to share his view of Vietnam. But his speech drove a wedge between him and many who had supported him in the past.

And things, Herbert argues, haven't changed all that much in four–plus decades. True, America has a black president now — something that even Dr. King may not have dared to imagine — but Herbert sees that president making the same mistake that Lyndon Johnson made in the 1960s — sending more troops (this time to Afghanistan) "in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support," to use King's own words.

"More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq and more than 1,000 in Afghanistan, where the Obama administration has chosen to escalate rather than to begin a careful withdrawal," writes Herbert. "Those two wars, as the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have told us, will ultimately cost us more than $3 trillion.

"And yet the voices in search of peace, in search of an end to the 'madness,' in search of the nation–building so desperately needed here in the United States, are feeble indeed."

Until America learns from the mistakes of the past, it will continue to make them.

And the madness will go on.

During his life, King was an advocate of civil rights, as everyone knows, but he advocated civil rights for all, not just one group. That is why the words he spoke still speak to us today. He spoke of fairness, not unfair advantage. And he knew that economic opportunity was at the heart of the human struggle.

No doubt he agreed with Gandhi, who said, "Poverty is the worst kind of violence." He certainly made it clear what he thought of a government that would commit so much money and so many lives to waging war overseas instead of dedicating those resources to programs designed to improve things at home.

I wonder how he would feel about an administration that, faced with massive unemployment and under–employment and budget crises in nearly every state, chose to escalate a war?

Well, just as in Dr. King's day, the poor, the hungry, the unemployed will pay the price for it.

Hero Worship

A new presidency is sort of like a new automobile. It retains its original value while it is in the showroom, but it immediately starts losing value when it is driven off the lot.

The most tangible way of measuring the current value of a president is via approval ratings. They weren't measured for the first 31 presidencies so it is only possible to make educated guesses as to how popular or unpopular any of those presidents may have been at a particular time. The Roper Center has been charting presidential approval in various surveys (mostly Gallup's findings until the Clinton presidency) since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Since Roosevelt's day, there have been 13 presidents (including FDR), and each has enjoyed, at some point, an approval rating as high as 67% — often higher. Barack Obama's high–water mark, according to Roper, was 76% — a level he reached back in February. From that time, Obama's approval rating has been sliding, as it does for all presidents although not in identical increments.

Obama's approval rating hovered in the upper 50s to low 60s into the summer, and the last approval number he had that exceeded 60 was recorded in a CNN survey back in June. CNN's findings are suspect in some circles because CNN is perceived to be a supporter of the president.

Then Obama's approval numbers slipped into the 50s as he and his vice president blithely dismissed June's job losses (nearly half a million) and turned their attention instead to a Supreme Court nomination that never appeared to be in jeopardy, a "teachable moment" over a beer with a white cop and a black professor, a speech to the nation's schoolchildren and the ongoing battle to reform health care.

A Fox survey in mid–October was the first to show Obama's approval rating below 50%. Some of the president's more ardent supporters will point out (and not without some justification) that Fox has been a frequent and vocal critic of the Obama administration, but Roper reports that Fox did find and report approval ratings exceeding 60% in all but one of the surveys it conducted between January and May.

Well, last month Fox reported that Obama's approval rating had fallen to 46% — which, coincidentally, is the same approval rating George W. Bush received in a Fox survey conducted the first week he was in office.

When the 2008 candidates for the presidency began lining up, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — mostly Iraq — were the hot–button issues. The economy hadn't imploded yet. And Obama was a consistent critic of the administration's Iraq war policies, which drew many young and minority voters to his campaign.

This week, Obama announced his plan for escalating the war in Afghanistan — as part of his strategy to bring American military presence there to an end. The decision may sound logical, even to diehard opponents of the war. In fact, a CNN poll indicates that most Americans agree with the president on this issue.

But Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reminds readers that liberal filmmaker Michael Moore posted an open letter to Obama at his website the day before Obama's speech at West Point and warned him that escalating the war in Afghanistan was the "worst possible thing you could do." Moore warned Obama that he was about to "turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics."

Milbank agrees with Moore that Obama's young supporters will be disillusioned by this move.

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"Even before the surge announcement, support among liberals for Obama's Afghanistan policy had dropped 22 points since July, to 59 percent from 81 percent, according to a Post–ABC News poll. Overall liberal support for Obama had drifted down to 80 percent from 94 percent in the spring — and, given the noisy complaints from the left last week, that number seems likely to fall further."

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Milbank writes that this "was bound to happen eventually.

"Obama had become to his youthful supporters a vessel for all of their liberal hopes. They saw him as a transformational figure who would end war, save the Earth from global warming, restore the economy — and still be home for dinner. They lashed out at anybody who dared to suggest that Obama was just another politician, subject to calculation, expediency and vanity like all the rest."

And Milbank says Obama has brought much of this anticipated negative response on himself "for encouraging the messianic cult as he stumped for change and hope."

All that may be true. And I admit that I have been bothered at times by the intense adoration of his loyalists, who often seem — to me, anyway — far too eager to let Obama off the hook for things they would be hesitant to overlook in someone else.

But, in Obama's defense, he did suggest during the campaign that he wanted to pursue a policy that would bring the conflict to a successful conclusion. At the very least, that means leaving a country that is stable enough to resist a Taliban takeover.

Obama was a frequent critic of the Iraq War and, if he sticks to his previously announced timetable, most of the troops in Iraq will be gone by next Labor Day. But his objectives are different in Afghanistan, and they will take longer to achieve because Afghanistan was neglected so much before Obama took office. His comments on the campaign trail indicate that he has always understood that.

His policy may not be popular, but it is consistent with what he said during the campaign. If his young and ethnic supporters don't get it, they weren't paying attention.

Well, I guess we'll find out when the next approval ratings come out.

Leaving Afghanistan

There's something kind of refreshing about a president who throws caution to the wind the way Barack Obama does — in spite of indications that he's digging a deep hole for his party in next year's midterm elections.

Is "refreshing" the right word? Or should it be "foolhardy?"

The latest such indication is his apparent intention to discuss, in a televised address tonight, why he believes the best course in Afghanistan is to deploy more troops in the next six months — with the ultimate goal of ending involvement in three years.

I have never been enamored of war. But, in the interest of full disclosure, I was in favor of a war in Afghanistan back in 2001 — because that is where the September 11 attacks were hatched.

Public opinion and I were on the same page in those days. And we seem to be on the same page today. In 2009, that page favors ending our involvement in Afghanistan.

And lots of Americans think the troops should be withdrawn immediately. Even with the terrible economy that was the primary backdrop to last year's election, there were many voters for whom the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and running a smart, cost–efficient foreign policy were the #1 issues.

Afghanistan's been an afterthought for years. In the public's mind, it was moved to the back burner after the Taliban were routed and Iraq was invaded. The troops have staggered gamely along, with no mission, no objective and no exit strategy. It is high time we stopped pouring lives and resources into that black hole.

Even so, I understand something that many Americans, impatient to save money and lives, do not appear to understand. Our long–term interests require that a war must be ended gradually. It cannot be concluded abruptly, especially in a place like Afghanistan, which needs far less instability than would be created by complete and immediate withdrawal for an environment that would welcome the return of the Taliban to thrive.

Three more years, though, is quite a bit more gradual than I favored. And I wonder how Americans will feel about increasing the nation's human and financial commitments to an unproductive conflict that is more than 8 years old.

Ed Hornick of CNN writes that "comparisons to the war in Vietnam are often invoked," although he is quick to add that "experts say while there are similarities between the two conflicts, there are more differences."

That's true, but it also reminds me of Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats during the Vietnam era and their pious proclamations that they were spending more money and risking more lives so the money that had already been spent and the men who had already died would not have been sacrificed in vain.

And that is at the heart of the comparison.

I'm sure office–holding Democrats who must seek re–election next year appreciate the distinction. "Vietnam" has become a euphemism for "military misadventure" the same way that any scandal is now referred to as "[choose a clever and appropriate substitute word]–gate" and a mass killing has become a "Columbine" (it used to be called "going postal").

In fact, recently, I heard someone use "9/11" as a euphemism for a sneak attack.

Under the previous administration, Afghanistan quickly got the short end of the stick when attention shifted to invading Iraq. Whatever opportunity may have existed initially to capture Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and bring him to justice evaporated, but American troops have remained to this day.

To a great extent, it has become the forgotten war, but not completely — the latest Gallup Poll says 55% of Americans disapprove of Obama's handling of Afghanistan. That's quite a reversal. In July, Gallup was reporting that nearly the same number approved.

"The decline in Obama's approval rating on Afghanistan is evident among all party groups," writes Gallup's Jeffrey Jones, "with double–digit decreases since September among Republicans (17 points), independents (16 points), and Democrats (10 points)."

Will Obama's approach in Afghanistan benefit the members of his party next year? It's hard to see how. Gallup has been reporting that Republicans are leading Democrats on a generic 2010 ballot among registered voters. They have been making incremental gains all year.

How can they be hurt on this issue? Obama may be motivated by a desire to end the war, but isn't increasing the troop strength likely to be perceived as almost an endorsement of the previous administration's policy, even if it is short term? It might even be interpreted as political pandering.

It seems to me that a complete withdrawal, however messy it might leave things in Afghanistan, would be a more powerful repudiation of the previous administration in the eyes of the voting public.

It is worth remembering that politicians don't get to decide what voters use to evaluate candidates and parties. Historically, Americans are more influenced by pocketbook concerns than foreign affairs, even wars, unless the war in question is extremely popular or unpopular. And polls, while neither infallible nor written in stone, are suggesting that the domestic issue that has the voters' attention is unemployment. On that issue, the administration's "record" is largely an unverifiable number of jobs that have been "saved," not jobs that have been created.

John Crudele observes, in the New York Post, that "the employment situation just doesn't improve that much from one month to the next" — which means that, unless something truly dramatic happens, there simply isn't enough time for the kind of clear economic turnaround on which Democrats need to be able to capitalize.

Well, things may look different as we get closer to the midterm elections. Maybe the jobs summit will be wildly successful.

A lot of things could happen.

Will the president find the words to persuade a dubious public that further extending an already overextended military is the right strategy?

Remembering Eisenhower

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These days, we hear a lot of talk about wars. We hear talk about the metaphorical wars, like the "war on drugs," and we hear talk about genuine wars involving real troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A man who fought in both world wars and was president when the cease–fire went into effect in Korea, Dwight Eisenhower, died 40 years ago today. He went to school at West Point (where he played football and once tackled the great Jim Thorpe, but a knee injury cut short his athletic career).

It can truly be said that few — if any — presidents in American history have seen as much war or as much killing as Eisenhower did.

And few may have loved peace as much.

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can," Eisenhower said nearly seven years before becoming president, "only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity."

So, when Eisenhower was about to leave office, he warned his fellow Americans about what he called the "military–industrial complex."

Maybe it was his background as a soldier that enabled him to see things that others never did. But the "military–industrial complex" has played a significant role in American life since long before Eisenhower's farewell address.

And it continues to influence policies and budgets.

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When Eisenhower sought the presidency in 1952, he apparently didn't mind being called "the General," although he seems to have preferred the more relaxed and informal "Ike," but when he left office, he was proud of his administration's record in foreign affairs. "The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration," he said. "We kept the peace. People asked how it happened — by God, it didn't just happen, I'll tell you that."

As his presidency was nearing its end, Ike tried to caution his countrymen about the new internal threat that existed. Did they heed his warning?

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience," he said. "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."