Transcript of About My Country, Part Two
Hello, this is Glenda Taylor. Welcome to the OneAndAllWisdom podcast.
This is the second in a series of podcasts “About My Country.” In the last podcast, I spoke about the actions of two individuals during the Civil War, about their definitions of duty and patriotism, and about how their behaviors marked my country’s history.
In this podcast, I will speak about two other individuals in positions of power in my country, as I look at how their actions shaped our history.
I am a lifelong student of history, and I believe that attention to history can inform us in the present. So, I hope that these reflections will speak directly to what is happening in our country today.
As I said in the last podcast, I, for a time, worked in Washington DC. I spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill and also interacting with individuals in the Kennedy administration. And as I said, I was in John F. Kennedy’s presence on more than one occasion when he was president.
As many people know, during his early time as a senator, Kennedy was bedridden, suffering from Addison’s disease, and while reading, he noticed a passage from a book, The Price of Union, about an act of courage by an earlier senator from Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts. Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, who had worked for a publishing company, encouraged Kennedy, while he was bedridden, to occupy his mind by writing a book about the courage of other senators. Kennedy liked the idea and asked his staff writer Ted Sorensen to see if he could find other examples. This Sorensen did, and together they created the book Profiles in Courage. The book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, profiled eight senators who had defied the opinions of their party and constituents to do what they felt was right and as a result had suffered severe criticism and losses in popularity,
It should be obvious why this is of interest to me today. I wonder how many of our current senators, or other politicians, or civilians for that matter, have read that book, Profiles in Courage, or thought deeply its message, about having the courage to do what is right, to speak up and say what is right, even at the risk of criticism or loss of popularity or loss of seat in Congress. I wonder.
Some people have said that Kennedy was, during the writing of that book, also thinking about his own lack of courage in not standing up to his fellow senator Joseph McCarthy, during McCarthy’s so-called anti-communist hearings that demonized so many people, destroying their careers and even their lives, on hear-say, or rumor, or innuendo.
Today, once again, we have this vile and horrifying spreading of innuendo and hearsay and outright lies, affecting the lives of many people, and our country. Again, I wonder, what courage does it take for politicians to speak up and to denounce such behaviors that is doing so much damage to our people and our democracy?
It is not easy, of course, to be open with one’s opinions or behaviors when one is a politician or in a position of authority in government.
I idolized John Kennedy for years, being for a long time unaware of some of the aspects of his character that would later be revealed that I wasn’t happy to learn about.
But, over time, I have learned this. It is as wrong and dangerous to become a “true believer” in someone, to idolize them or to join that person’s cult following, as it is to demonize someone. We do a disservice to the person, and to ourselves, either way. We are all many-sided, complex.
But we have a lot of “true believers” in our country today, it seems, and the volatile and violent divisiveness that we are all caught up in is, I think, largely the result.
Just a couple of years after I last saw John Kennedy in person when I attended a major foreign policy address in DC, Kennedy would lie buried in Arlington National Cemetery, a victim of assassination, My heart was broken, for my country, for all the bright hope of our “new generation” of change he had represented.
Years later, I would stand beside his grave with my children, looking at the “eternal flame” that is kept burning at Kennedy’s gravesite in Arlington Nation Cemetery, and I would wonder then, as I do now, if it is possible to keep alive the flame of liberty. I wonder if the torch of freedom will continue to be passed to the next generation now, a torch lighting the way for democracy to exist in my country, or anywhere in the world, whether the flag of our country, the symbol of pride in country would continue to fly, as our national anthem wonders.
When I was working in DC, I saw so many, many American flags daily, flying everywhere. The flag was and still is a symbol of pride of country, to be sure.
So it hurts me today to see or hear about our country’s flag being flown upside down, or being co-opted by one side or another of the partisan divide as representing one ideology and no one else’s. Our country’s flag has many individual stars, yet represents the United States of America.
But back when I was in DC, it was, in fact, also a turbulent time, as this time is. Then, long-standing conflicts in Viet Nam had finally spread to officially involve the United States during Kennedy’s administration. It was not many years later into that war in Viet Nam, while Lyndon Johnson was president, before the American flag was being burned by peaceful protestors, acting against what many believed to be a tragic act of over-reach by the United States. To burn the flag to them meant, “We do not have pride in our country in what is being done now.”
To protest, peacefully, back then, to refuse to participate in that war even if it meant going to jail for “draft dodging,” or, having been in the war, later to renounce it, was, many felt, an act of very public patriotism, while many other people, for a time most other people, strongly disagreed and abhorred the flag burning and the protests.
In the midst of that war, to speak out and say that we were wrong in what we were doing in Viet Nam, to say that publicly in the face of the majority of citizens who disagreed and supported the war, took a kind of integrity and courage that was not easily come by. And there were perhaps few profiles in courage within the government at the time. And, what was said by public officials in government, what was said publicly, or not said, by people in positions of power in the government mattered greatly.
We would, for example, learn, much later, long after the war was over, that the US Secretary of Defense during the war, Robert McNamara, eventually came to agree with the protestors, though he did not make that public until years after the war.
On the last day of McNamara’s time as Defense Secretary, at a cabinet meeting, the National Security Adviser at the time, Walt Rostow, was still arguing that the United States was on the verge of winning the war, urging President Johnson to continue on, to send 206,000 more American troops to South Vietnam to join the half-million already there and to drastically increase the number of bombing raids on North Vietnam. [1]
At that point in the cabinet meeting, it was recorded by those present, McNamara snapped in fury at Rostow, saying: “What then? This goddamned bombing campaign, it’s worth nothing, it’s done nothing, they have dropped more bombs on North Viet Nam than on all of Europe in all of World War II and it hasn’t done a fucking thing!” McNamara then broke down in tears, asking Johnson to just please accept that the war could not be won. [2]
Henry McPherson, an aide to the president, present in that cabinet meeting, later recalled the scene: ” The rest of us sat silently, I for one with my mouth open, listening to the secretary of defense talk that way about a campaign for which he had, ultimately, been responsible. I was pretty shocked.” [3]
The country would have been shocked if this incident had been public knowledge.
McNamara resigned on November 29, 1967. The war continued. In the following year, 1968, just the time between February 11 and February 17 saw the highest number of US solider deaths during the whole war. In March of 1968, at the US attack at Mai Lai, more than 500 Vietnamese civilians were killed by US forces, stirring outrage back in the United States. And the war continued, until 1973, when Richard Nixon, then president, signed the Paris Peace Accords, ending direct US involvement in the Viet Nam.
Shortly afterward, incidentally, North Vietnam returned 591 American prisoners of war, including future U.S. Senator and presidential candidate John McCain.
More than 3 million people were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians.[4]
When writing in his book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, published in 1995, McNamara unsparing blames himself and his government colleagues, including President Lyndon Johnson, for what happened in the war. McNamara wrote: “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”
That statement makes me think of the bombing going now on in places in the world, in the little strip of land that is Gaza, for one, and of Ukraine, and of my country’s involvement, or lack thereof, in whatever way, in either, and I wonder, yet again, what opinions and positions held by governmental officials and people in Congress are, for whatever reason, now unknown to the public, and how is that affecting all of us, our people and our country?
And again, how many politicians are doing and saying only what is politically correct or to their personal advantage rather than what is morally correct and important for our country, about Gaza, about Ukraine, about Israel, about anything?
We all wonder what goes on in any administration, what is being planned, with the best of intentions, or the worst of motives, and what really goes on in Congress, as I sought to learn every day during my work there, when I was employed to try to influence what did go on there. But that’s another story.
What I learned back then was that most choices facing governing officials are difficult. The conflicting information and interests, the varying circumstances, opinions, considerations, behind the scenes, are usually obscured from the public, perhaps necessarily so, and they are always complex.
It is all always complex, yes, as it was back then…in the Viet Nam war…
The history of the Viet Nam War is without question tragic. By the end of the Viet Nam war, some 58,220 Americans had lost their lives. And, Vietnam estimates that 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters were killed, up to 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died, and more than 2 million civilians were killed on both sides of that war. [5]
There was much to heal after Viet Nam.
When I was at a Women’s International Peace Conference in Scotland some years ago, I met an American woman who was working in Viet Nam on a special project, first, to help clear away still-unexploded live ordinance on the ground all over Viet Nam, and second, instead to plant trees, “peace trees.” She told us that since the end of the war, after the war, more than 100,000 Vietnamese civilians have been killed or maimed by land mines, cluster bombs, and other weaponry stumbled upon unexpectedly. We were told that elementary school children in Vietnam are as accustomed to identifying unexploded grenades as American children are to fire drills. Her stories were vivid and tragic, and yet they were also uplifting in that more and more Americans, including American Viet Nam veterans, have joined in this effort of clearing away the deadly past, and promoting healing and reconciliation.
In November 1995, twenty years after the end of the war, McNamara returned for a visit to Vietnam, possibly to find healing and reconciliation himself, since McNamara met with his opposite number during the war, North Vietnam’s Defense Minister, Giap.
The American historian Charles Neu, who was present at that meeting, observed the differences in the style of the two men. He said that McNamara repeatedly interrupted to ask questions, usually related to something numerical, while the North Vietnamese gave a long leisurely monologue, quoting various Vietnamese cultural figures and poets, and recounting Vietnamese revolts against China from around 100 BC. Neu wrote that his impression was that McNamara was a figure who thought in the short term while the other thought in the long term. [6]
Long term, we didn’t win the Viet Nam War. We got out after the fall of Saigon, some say disgracefully, others say, at least, gratefully.
US soldiers coming home from Viet Nam would carry their own version of McNamara’s emotional burden about the war. For many Americans, the wounds of that war still linger, as do the wounds from the more recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars do, as the wounds from the Civil War still linger. Many people, veterans and others, do not trust the government to be honest, at least, with the public, even to do what is right, to correct errors made. This too divides our country, on issues of patriotism and politics.
But, I know that, bit by bit, we can find the grace to reach out past our divisions, to cross over old forbidden boundaries, to speak our truth, to heal ourselves and our country.
I think, for example, again, about John F. Kennedy.
During World War II, Kennedy had received an injury when a Japanese destroyer Amagiri rammed and sunk Kennedy’s patrol torpedo boat and the entire crew including Kennedy was thrown into the Pacific Ocean. After fifteen hours at sea, eleven survivors made it to a nearby island with Kennedy, injured as he was, towing one injured crew member to land. With the help of a message carved by Kennedy into a coconut carried by local islanders to Allied forces, the survivors were finally rescued. For his courage and leadership in rescuing his crew, Kennedy was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and a Purple Heart. Kennedy’s injury caused him pain for the rest of his life.
But after the war, when Japan had lost, Kennedy’s government, that of the United States, helped in rebuilding Japan, transforming Japan from an enemy into a major ally. Kennedy was to play a major role in that achievement.
Jennifer Lind, government professor at Dartmouth College said in a column for CNN, that Kennedy planned to reunite the crew of his PT boat with the crew of the Japanese ship Amagiri, the ship that sank Kennedy’s boat. Perhaps that planning on Kennedy’s part occurred after the following remarkable thing happened.
An article had appeared in Time magazine about the PT boat and Kennedy’s experience, and this article was seen in Japan by the Japanese person who had been the commander of the Amagiri, the Japanese ship that had sliced Kennedy’s PT boat in two. After seeing the article, remarkably, that Japanese commander wrote Senator Kennedy a long detailed letter, concluding with the following:
“I take this opportunity to pay my profound respect to your daring and courageous action in this battle and also to congratulate you upon your miraculous escape under such circumstances.
I come to know from the Time magazine that you are going to run for the next election of Senators. I am firmly convinced that a person who practice tolerance to the former enemy like you, if elected to the high office in your country, would no doubt contribute not early to the promotion of genuine friendship between Japan and the United States but also to the establishment of the universal peace. …
I do wish the best of your success in the coming election in your country.
With personal regards, Sincerely yours, (Signed) Kohei Hanami, Former commander of the Destroyer “AMAGIRI”[7]
When Kennedy was elected president, there were protests in Japan against renewal of the U.S.-Japan alliance, which was in a critical stage. When Kennedy took office, he immediately set about to mend relations with Japan. He even began planning a presidential visit to Tokyo. This visit – to be first ever by an American president –was meant to highlight the transformation of US-Japan relations since the war.
As Jennifer Lind said in When Camelot Went to Japan:
“Although President Kennedy would never make the trip to Japan, (because of his assassination) his Administration helped establish a new era in US-Japan ties. The two countries would construct a network of bilateral organizations, conferences, and exchanges – many of which continue today. Because of leadership by the Kennedy Administration and their Japanese partners, the alliance that nearly fell apart instead expanded beyond a narrow security alliance into a rich, multifaceted relationship, with broad support in both countries.”[8]
Turning enemies into allies.
I think about that sometimes. About Commander Kohei Hanami’s amazing letter reaching out to Kennedy, across the memories of war, to speak of peace. And of Kennedy’s willingness to respond, despite his injury and its life-long burden of pain.
I think about the success of the reconstruction of Japan, and Germany, turning both wartime enemies into close allies and friends, compared to the relative failure of reconstruction after the Civil War in the United States, where many of the divisions and the enmity even lives on today, in tragic ways. Enemies, allies.
I think of Kennedy. Severely wounded by the Japanese; Kennedy, whose father, an ambassador to Britain, had basically been an isolationist before the war and so remained a controversial figure while his sons would fight in the war, including John Kennedy’s brother, who was killed in the war. What ambivalence did Kennedy feel about all of it, his father’s position, his own duty and service, the remaking of the world afterward by the generous actions of our country toward our defeated enemies, the willingness of the Japanese authorities and people to reconcile with the reality of having lost the war and to transform itself into a newness of being, at peace, as an ally instead of an enemy. The reconciliation of any conflicting feelings on Kennedy’s part contributed to the history of our country. We do not know, because of his assassination, what Kennedy would or would not have done in Viet Nam.
But we do know that many US veterans have had to work through their own conflicting feelings to achieve reconciliation within themselves.
I had occasion once in California as a counselor to work with a particular Viet Nam veteran. I sat and listened to him pour out his memories, his heart-breaking stories, of atrocities on both sides, of his own unspeakable terror and his own horrible actions, and, later, his addictions to chemical substances to try to avoid the memories of Viet Nam, and of the instability of his ongoing life.
It has been years since he sat in my counseling office, or since I knew what was going on with him afterward, recently, amazingly, due to Facebook and the internet’s abilities to make connections, I heard from him, surprisingly, after all these years, and he said how important it had been to him to have that chance in my office to be honest, to attend to his own soul’s healing, as I was so privileged to witness.
And, I watched on YouTube some time ago a documented account of a group of US veterans of the Viet Nam War who returned to Viet Nam and met with a group of those who had been their enemies, a group of North Vietnamese soldiers. The weeklong meeting was fraught, as you can imagine, with all kinds of emotions, honest, heartbreaking, compassionate, forgiving, and ultimately at the meeting, the human stories that were shared obviously did provide much heart healing, soul healing and reconciliation.
More and more groups of US veterans have made such a journey, physically or otherwise, back to that place where their own lives were so dramatically changed, as their own wounds, physical and emotional, their PTSD, had not yet been healed. Our veterans, of any war, deserve our compassion, our respect, our support. And they deserve the respect and the integrity of people in positions of power in our government.
The construction of the Viet Nam War Memorial in DC, dedicated some seven years after the end of the war, was built in the hope of healing some of the emotional wounds of division, a way of honoring those who fought and died in the war.
I once stood at the Viet Nam War Memorial, touching with my fingers the engraved name of J. V. Patrick, one of my high school classmates who died in Viet Nam. Only a few years before being drafted into that war, he and I had both attended our high school graduation, along with the other 19 members of my senior class. J. V. was just an ordinary farm boy, not having gone on to college, just starting to work somewhere, just beginning his adult life. And then he was dead, in my country’s complicated war he no doubt never really understood. But he did what I’m sure he considered his patriotic duty, probably without question or, he probably thought, without any choice.
Again and again, I have stood at places like the Viet Nam War Memorial, or the Lincoln Memorial, or on the steps of the Robert E. Lee’s Arlington House, and I have contemplated the importance of every decision made by those in positions of governmental power, decisions that determine the fates of millions of citizens. I think about how important it is to have in place as leader of our country someone with character, with appropriate values, with the ability to take the long view, the big picture…
I have wondered many things in this podcast, and there is more, but this podcast is getting long, and I must let it end here. I will continue this ramble in my next podcast, when I will again look at the complex notion of enemies and allies, of conflict or civility.
For now, though, thanks for listening, and if you have found value in this podcast, please share the link to it in whatever way you can, and, if you choose, visit the OneAndAllWisdom.com website where you will find the written transcript of this podcast, complete with footnotes for the statistics and the quotations I have used here. There on the website, too, you will find a place where you can make any contribution you choose to help keep these podcasts and the other work on the website coming.
Again, thank you for listening, until next, time, this is Glenda Taylor.
[1] Library of Congress, https://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0828/2007019373-s.html
[2] Library of Congress, https://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0828/2007019373-s.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McNamara
[4] https://www.highpointnc.gov/2113/Vietnam-War
[5] https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-timeline
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McNamara
[7] Source: Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files. Cases and Projects. General Files, 1953-1960. General files, 1953: Japan: PT-109. JFKSEN-0481-014. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
[8] Jennifer M. Lind , Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College
Jennifer Lind, “Learning to Share the Stage,” New York Times, February 6, 2012.
Jennifer Lind, “When Camelot Went to Japan,” National Interest, July/August 2013.
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