Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society, 1975–2001
Author(s): ROBERT J. MCMAHON
Source: Diplomatic History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 159-184
Published by: Oxford University Press
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ROBERT J. MCMAHON
SHAFR Presidential Address:
Contested Memory: The Vietnam War
and American Society, 1975-2001
"The past is never dead," William Faulkner once famously remarked. "It's not
even past.'" The celebrated novelist was alluding, of course, to the powerful grip
that the Civil War and its troubled aftermath continued to exert on his native
region. And one need only scan contemporary newspaper headlines about the
controversy that still surrounds the flying of the Confederate flag in South
Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and other Southern states to appreciate the
acuity of Faulkner's observation. "Memory is a living thing," noted Eudora
Welty, another distinguished Southern author - "it too is in transit."2 The
tangled connection between past and present - or, in the idiom that has become
so common in our postmodern era, between history and memory - seems
particularly apt when considering the place of the Vietnam War in American
culture and society. Arguably the second most traumatic, contentious, and
problematic event in U.S. history, the Vietnam War, like the Civil War, remains
a "zone of contested meaning."3
Recent revelations about ex-governor and ex-senator Bob Kerrey s involve
ment in the killing of more than a dozen Vietnamese women and children
during a botched intelligence operation over three decades ago serve as but the
most recent reminder of the Vietnam War's enduring hold on the national
psyche.4 "The Ghosts of Vietnam," screamed a Time magazine cover story about
the Kerrey incident.5 It joined a long pantheon of searching reassessments of
the Vietnam War by that newsmagazine and its counterparts in the mainstream
media. For the war's tenth anniversary, in April 1985, Time's cover story pro
claimed: "A Bloody Rite of Passage, Viet Nam Cost America Its Innocence and
1. Quoted in Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s
(New York, 2000), 293.
2. Quoted in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "Introduction: No Deed but Memory," in Where These
Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill, NC,
2000), 9.
3. The phrase is from Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1943-1990 (New York, 1991), 314.
4. Gregory L. Vistica, "One Awful Night in Thanh Phong," New York Times Magazine, 29 April
2001; CBS News, 60 Minutes II, 1 May 2001.
5. Time 157 (7 May 2001): 24-34.
Diplomatic History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 2002). © 2002 The Society for Historians of American
Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 350 Main Street, Maiden,
MA, 02148, USA and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 iJF, UK.
>59
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l6o: DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
Still Haunts Its Conscience." Five years later, its cover st
"Vietnam 15 Years Later. Guilt and Recrimination Still Sh
Perception of the Only War It Ever Lost." In 1995, the weekly's
a more concise lead: "Vietnam 20 Years Later, It Haunts U
persistent conceptualization of the Vietnam War as a haunting,
the United States has become a staple of such retrospectives,
that shows no sign of ebbing. Indeed, just this past April, the a
Times Book Festival featured an overflow session entitled, "W
Go Away?" The panelists' conclusion: probably not, or at least
long time.7
"Vietnam won't go away," bemoaned conservative policy ana
Lefever in 1997. "Its ghosts still haunt the American psyche lik
twisted nightmare."8 From the other side of the political spec
Walsh, a liberal activist who left his seminary back in 196
involvement in Vietnam, echoed Lefever in a recent interview
coming back," he commented in response to the flap ignited by
"it's forever."9
This essay examines the ongoing struggle within Americ
society over the meaning and significance of the Vietnam Wa
that was joined first in the mid- and late 1960s, when raging d
morality and efficacy of U.S. involvement triggered the most
divisions since the Civil War. It has continued without surcease
war's end as various claims-makers, operating from a wide dive
— political leaders, military officers, veterans, intellectuals, fi
sion producers, writers, artists, monument-builders, and more
fit this turbulent chapter of America's recent past into the wid
nation's history and purpose. Although the ultimate triumph o
came in 1975, two years after the withdrawal of the last U.S. co
South Vietnam, the war's outcome constituted a humiliatin
United Stares and was widelv viewed as such Plainlv. desnire the deaths of
over 58,000 Americans and somewhere between two and three million
namese, Cambodians, and Laotians, the expenditure of billions of dollars, a
the most extensive bombing campaign in world history, Americans had fa
in their principal purpose. They could not preserve the independent S
Vietnamese government that so much U.S. blood, treasure, and prestige ha
been tied to; nor could they prevent the emergence of communist regimes
any of the three countries that once constituted French Indochina.
Critical questions loomed in the war's immediate aftermath. What lesson
should Americans learn from defeat in Southeast Asia? How would they ap
those lessons? Who, or what, should be blamed for the debacle? How could
6.
7.
8.
9.
Time 115 (15 April 1985): 16-61; Time 135 (30 April 1990): 18-29; Time 145 (24 April 1995): 2
I am indebted to Fredrik Logevall, who participated in the session, for this informatio
Ernest W Lefever, "Vietnam's Ghosts," Wall Street Journal, 21 May 1997.
Quoted in New York Times, May 3, 2001.
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SHAFR Presidential Address : 161
deep societal ruptures opened by the war be closed, the wounds still festering
within the body politic healed? And, most fundamental of all: How would, and
should, the war be remembered? How would, and should, ordinary Americans,
and their political leaders, fit this colossal national failure, and the enormous
sacrifices in lives, money, and domestic comity it had entailed, into the overall
American narrative? My central purpose here is to explore in a very preliminary
way how the process of remembering the Vietnam War and fitting it into the
broader national story has played out over the past quarter-century. How, I
ask, has the war been explained, rationalized, memorialized, represented,
understood?
My chief subject here is not history per se, but memory. The obsession
with memory, individual and collective, seems to be a defining feature of
our age. "Everyone's talking about memory," notes the novelist Mary Gor
don: "French intellectuals, historians of the Holocaust, victims of child
abuse, alleged abusers.'"0 She might have added the Vatican, which publish
ed just last year a lengthy document entitled Memory and Reconciliation: The
Church and the Faults of the Past, in which it confessed and sought forgiveness
for its role in the Inquisition and other past injustices committed in the name
of Christianity," and South Africa, whose Truth and Reconciliation Commis
sion has pioneered a brave approach to reconciling the competing demands of
history and memory, of forgiveness and justice, in the process of seeking to
account for and mend the depredations of the apartheid era. Numerous
modern societies, forced, like South Africa, to confront traumatic episodes
in their recent histories, have agonized about the memory problem. Follow
ing World War I, victors and vanquished alike searched for appropriate ways
to memorialize and find meaning in the millions of lives taken or shattered
by that catastrophic conflict.12 Germany andjapan continue to wrestle with
the legacy of their aggression and brutality during World War II. How can
it be atoned for? How should that era be remembered, taught, presented to
the public? So, in a less direct and tortured way, do nations such as Austria,
Switzerland, and France grapple with the emotionally freighted events of
io. Mary Gordon, Shadow Man (New York, 1996), xx. On this burgeoning interest in memory,
see especially Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, 1999), 1—35;
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz ( Ithaca, NY, 1998); Nancy Wood, Vectors of
Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (New York, 1999); and John Bodnar, "Pierre Nora,
National Memory, and Democracy: A Review," Journal of American History 87 (December 2000):
951-63.
il International Theological Commission, Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults
of the Past (Vatican City, 2000).
12. Among the important books that have dealt with this subject, see especially Jay Winter,
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, U.K., 1995);
Sherman, Construction of Memory, Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (Melbourne,
1996); Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (New
York, 1998); and David William Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great
War in Britain (New York, 1998).
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l6z : DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
that same era: were they victims of the Nazis, or willing co
perpetrators?'5
The concept of collective, or public, memory offers a
construct for examining each of those cases, as it does for exp
of meaning over the Vietnam War. A diverse array of scholars
of academic disciplines have been drawn of late to the impo
function that public memory plays within societies. Nation
come to grips with traumatic events of the recent past. Mon
memoirs, popular culture, political debate, public rhetor
arenns of contestation in that reirard arenas in which collective memories are
forged. Public memory, according to historian John Bodnar, refers to
of beliefs and ideas about the past that helps a public or society underst
both its past, present, and by implication, its future."'4 Memories, of c
national as well as private, are by nature highly selective. This is so, arg
historian Michael Kämmen, since societies "reconstruct their pasts rathe
faithfully record them" in order to serve the "needs of contemporary
. . . manipulating the past in order to mold the present.'"f As individua
polities choose to remember certain aspects of the past, they foreclose —
to foreclose — other aspects. In the end, alternative memories come
silenced. The stakes are extraordinarily high in this struggle over
memory since, as so many scholars have demonstrated, our reconstruct
the past prove as, or even more, important than the actual past (if the lat
ever be recovered — a philosophical problem of no small import). A
theoretical and case-specific literature has developed around the general
ject of collective memory, a substantial amount of it focused specifically
question of war and remembrance. I will draw liberally from that literat
framing the remarks that follow."5
13. Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identi
bridge, MA, 1988); Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Ne
1994); Robert G. Moeller, "War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Rep
Germany," American Historical Review 101 (October 1996): 1008—48; Wood, Vectors of Memory, J
Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War //(New York, 1999); Yoskhkuni
Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, ip^y—iyyo (Princeton, NJ, 200
Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western
(New York, 2000).
14. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the T
Century (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 15.
15. Michael Kämmen, Mystic Chords of Memory The Transformation of Tradition in Am
Culture (New York, 1991), 3,13.
16. In addition to the works cited above, see especially Jay Winter and Emmanuel Siva
War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, U.K., 1999); Philip West, Steven I.
and Jackie Hiltz, eds., America's Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory (Arm
1998); Martin Evans and Kenneth Lunn, War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (New Yor
John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics ofNational Identity (Princeton, NJ, 1994); and M
J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory (New York, 1996).
Works that have dealt with different aspects of collective memory and the Vietnam
include: Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing.• Vietnam and the Haunted Generation (Gard
NY, i984);John HeUman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1986); Richard J
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SHAFR Presidential Address : 163
Although there is nothing approaching scholarly unanimity on the topic
of collective memory, several broad conclusions emerge from much of this
literature. First, memories, individual and collective, are typically constructed
rather than emerging as the simple, unfiltered recollections of past events.
Individuals and societies choose what they will remember about the past - and
what they will forget. Second, memories are constructed to meet present needs.
The process of collective memory formation within societies is tied up with
utilitarian ends. There are conscious purposes and goals behind these efforts;
they never occur in a social or political vacuum. Third, the project of forging
a collective memory of important episodes in the histories of nations or groups
is invariably led by elites, with the state itself often playing a dominant role.
Finally, collective memory formation is intimately related to larger questions
of group, or national, purpose and identity.'7
The study of memory has, of course, tended to fall within the ever
exnandine boundaries of cultural history. But the topic is far too important to
be left to the cultural historians alone. It is quite germane, moreover, to our
field, one whose boundaries have also been expanding of late, particularly into
the cultural realm. A growing number of U.S. diplomatic historians have begun
to recognize that American culture, broadly conceived, helps explain some of
the distinctive tendencies that have shaped the American approach to and
encounter with the wider world. The struggle over societal memories of the
Vietnam War, a struggle with enormous foreign policy implications, belongs to
that broader culturalist trend.
In the remarks that follow, I will examine three important aspects of this
struggle. I begin by analyzing the role of official rhetoric in setting some of the
and Peter C. Ehrenhaus, eds., Cultural Legacies of Vietnam: Uses of the Past in the Present (Norwood,
NJ, i99o);John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg, eds., The Vietnam War and American Culture^ New York,
1991); Fred Turner, Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (New York, 1996); Marita
Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidetnic, and the Politics of Remembering
(Berkeley, CA, 1997); Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy (Baltimore,
1997); Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1998);
Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial ( Berkeley,
1998); Keith Beattie, The Scar That Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War (New York, 1998);
Katherine Kinney, Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War (New York, 2000). See also
Christian G. Appy, "The Muffling ofPublic Memory in Post-Vietnam America," Chronicle of Higher
Education (12 February 1999): B4-B6.
For an important analysis of the Vietnamese struggle over memories of the war, see Mark
Bradley, "Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnam
ese Cinema," in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. FIue-Tam Flo
Tai (Berkeley, 2001), 196-226.
17. Brundage, "Introduction: No Deed but Memory," in Where These Memories Grow, ed.
Brundage, 3-14; Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, "Setting the Framework," in War and Remem
brance, ed. Winter and Sivan, 6-39; Maurice Flalbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser
(Chicago, 1992); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, MA, 1989); Thomas Butler,
ed., Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (Oxford, U.K., 1990). For an important examination of the
significance of the memory literature to historians of American foreign relations, see Robert D.
Schulzinger, "Memory, History, and the Study of U.S. Foreign Relations," in Explaining the History
of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G.Paterson, 2nd rev. ed. (New York,
forthcoming).
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IÖ4 : DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
terms of the debate. I turn next to the public and congressional clashes over the
memory of the Vietnam War, clashes intimately connected to debates about
the present and future U.S. world role. Finally, I probe the crucial influence
exerted by popular culture in the formation of the nation's collective memories
of the Vietnam experience. Since national leaders invariably assume a lead role
in the development of an official memory of traumatic events in a nation's
history, I begin with their efforts.
On 23 April 1975, less than a week before the final collapse of the Saigon
regime, President Gerald R. Ford delivered a speech at Tulane University in
New Orleans in which he appealed for a permanent moratorium on any
additional debate about the Vietnam War. "Today," he proclaimed, "Americans
can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be
achieved by refighting a war that is finished - as far as America is concerned."
His appeal for closure, however premature, seemed to mirror the prevailing
sense of national exhaustion with a war that had for so long divided the
American people and fractured the country's political system. Indeed, Ford had
personally inserted those last lines, categorically foreclosing any possibility of
a last-minute U.S. reinvolvement, into the prepared text of the speech just prior
to its delivery. They met with deafening applause from the audience.
"The time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future," Ford
continued, "to unity, to binding up the nation's wounds and restoring it to health
and optimistic self-confidence. I ask tonight that we stop refighting the battles
and recriminations of the past." The president pleaded with Americans, instead,
to "look now at what is right with America, at our possibilities and our
potentialities for change, and growth, and achievement, and sharing." Dwelling
on the country's failures in Vietnam, he warned, could just sap national
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