Word: viets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Americans have never been able to respond to the misguided excesses of idealistic youth with a Gallic shrug. That is why the furor over Dan Quayle's Viet Nam record has become such a polarizing issue. Once again the nation is reminded of all the unresolved passions of the 1960s, a time of both angry and antic generational rebellion, when national leaders were reviled, patriotism was mocked, and drug taking exalted...
That, of course, was then, and this is now. Twenty years later, almost every cause that animated the '60s has been repudiated by the revisionism of the sedentary '80s. The interplay between Ronald Reagan and shifting cultural attitudes has created a new orthodoxy of patriotism and restraint: Viet Nam (a noble if tragic cause), drugs (just say no) and sex (play it safe). As the pendulum swings to the right, woe betide any baby-boom politician who spent the '60s doing anything more daring than swallowing goldfish and doing the Frug. Before the nation gives way to a new slogan...
...Quayle quandary has led many to behave as though Viet Nam battle stars and scars should be an entrance requirement for public office. Not only is it a bit unfair to single out Quayle for taking refuge in the National Guard, but ; the belated embrace of combat chic, which now stretches from movie screens to comic books, seems a disturbingly one-sided way to redress the inequities of the Viet Nam-era draft. Away from the heat of political campaigns, many Americans acknowledge that the Viet Nam War was fraught with moral ambiguity and that honor could be found...
...Even before the Viet Nam War consumed Lyndon Johnson, his dark rantings sometimes shocked the White House press corps. The first serious criticism of his conduct of foreign policy came in 1965, when he sent 20,000 troops into the Dominican Republic to quell domestic violence. Stung, Johnson summoned a small group of reporters to an off-the-record lunch that began at 1:30 p.m. and did not end until 5:30. The four hours were taken up by the President's pacing, raving, justifying his action. When it was over, the numbed newsmen hurried to a nearby...
...speechwriter and aide to L.B.J., has taken such recollections several steps further. In his memoir of the 1960s, Remembering America (Little, Brown; $19.95), Goodwin writes that Johnson was at times literally crazed and that his episodic madness helped propel the U.S. into "a needless tragedy of such immense consequences ((Viet Nam)) that, even now, the prospects for a restorative return remain in doubt." He brazenly diagnoses Johnson's large eccentricities as "incursions of paranoia," which led to leaps "into unreason" that "infected the entire presidential institution...