Word: viets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...know in 1969 that I would be in this room today," said Dan Quayle last week about his decision two decades ago to pull strings and get into the National Guard rather than risk serving and dying in Viet Nam. It was the most accidentally revealing remark of the week, outdoing even Ronald Reagan's classic Freudian slip at the convention, "Facts are stupid things." As Fats Waller so aptly put it, "One never knows, do one?" In this day when politicians are created like androids by consultants and pollsters, using off- the-shelf parts for everything from hairstyles...
Senator Quayle is just one of many so-called war wimps or chicken hawks: prominent, youngish Reagan-era conservatives who, one way or another, ducked the war in Viet Nam. Others include such Reagan Administration foreign policy hard-liners as Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle, Commentator Patrick Buchanan, and even Sylvester Stallone (who taught at a girls' school in Switzerland while the Commies were being beastly to his fantasy alter ego John Rambo). A similar Quayle-like controversy also surrounds the Rev. Pat Robertson, whose father, a Senator, may have helped him avoid combat in Korea...
...choice. They, along with those who chose conscientious objection or outright draft resistance and jail, acted because they opposed the war. This may have been right or wrong, but it was a serious moral decision with serious moral consequences. The National Guard, by contrast, was a way to avoid Viet Nam and the moral consequences at the same time. There is no evidence that the war Quayle ducked is one he opposed, let alone made any effort to end. Perhaps these days, with no draft and no war, people really do join the National Guard out of patriotism...
...selection, Quayle became a political bumper car careering from one public relations crack-up to another. During an awkward press conference on Wednesday and five erratic television interviews that night, Quayle was constantly unhinged by the question that torments many of his generation: What did you do during the Viet...
...imagine what it was like to be a college senior in early 1969," says Jack Wheeler, 43, a Viet Nam veteran and chairman of Washington's Center for the Study of the Viet Nam Generation. "Winter, ice and a dreadful uncertainty gnawing at you." At that time, less than a year after the Tet offensive, Americans were shocked by the stories and televised images of an increasingly bloody and, to many, pointless war in Southeast Asia. In university dorms and dining halls around the country, students endlessly discussed their overarching obsession: the draft and how to avoid it. "The stress...