A corrupt Selective Service system allowed many, including George W. Bush, to avoid fighting.
Despite many misgivings, I’ve decided to support John Kerry for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination and for the presidency.
Why?
It’s not his votes for NAFTA, the Patriot Act or the resolution giving President Bush a green light to go to war in Iraq.
Nor is it his effort to keep afloat a home-state boondoggle or his ties with influential lobbyists.
It’s not his patrician pedigree, his education at a tony prep school and Yale, or his hooch on Beacon Hill.
It’s not his second wife’s fortune, nor is it his hair or lantern jaw.
It certainly isn’t the endorsement of Ted Kennedy (or, for that matter, any other public figure).
To be sure, I’m a Democrat and I find it appealing that he has the best chance of unseating George Bush.
But there’s another, equally compelling, if largely personal reason why I favor John Kerry. Like me, he’s a Vietnam veteran who came to oppose the war he fought in.
Since my discharge from the Marines in 1970, I have been hoping for a matchup between a Vietnam veteran who is at least modestly progressive and a flag-waving draft dodger. A Kerry-Bush race promises to be that kind of contest, and it’s one that has generational significance.
Here’s why I think this way.
When President Lyndon Johnson – a Democrat, I admit – sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to fight in Vietnam, he faced a critical manpower crunch. Yet he steadfastly refused to call up the reserves or the National Guard, nor did he or any other politician move to abolish student or work draft deferments.
Predictably, the reserves, the National Guard, colleges and universities, and certain job categories, such as teaching and the ministry, quickly became havens for vast numbers of the lucky, the well-heeled and the well-connected seeking to avoid conscription. That meant that millions of middle-class and wealthy guys like John Kerry, George Bush and me could escape an increasingly divisive war while our less fortunate peers had to bear the burden of the fight.
It’s pretty clear why President Johnson and almost every member of Congress and most war supporters did not want to tap these rich sources of able-bodied manhood. They knew that activating the reserves and the Guard and eliminating social inequities like student deferments would provoke even greater resistance to the government’s misadventure in Southeast Asia.
I know John Kerry felt as I did. At the beginning of the war, we both thought the United States was doing the right thing, felt obliged to enlist in a struggle we supported, and did not want to leave the dirty work to others. Later on, we realized that U.S. intervention in Vietnam was, at best, a terrible mistake. To his credit, Kerry became a key organizer of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, one of the most powerful groups to emerge from the largely ineffectual antiwar movement.
I don’t know what young George Bush thought about the Vietnam War, if he thought about it at all. I suspect he supported it. If he did, he evinced no willingness to risk fighting in it. Quite the contrary, he joined the Texas Air National Guard, knowing as everyone else did at the time, that service in the Guard was a way to avoid going to Vietnam. His behavior matches Bill Clinton’s equally unsavory evasions during that period.
I don’t think American society has yet come to terms with the impact of the widespread elite avoidance of military service that took place during the Vietnam War. It was fostered by the U.S. government’s unjust and corrupt Selective Service policies, and it has had a corrosive effect on the body politic to this day.
Lest I be accused of beating up on President Bush, I acknowledge that he did what millions of other able-bodied, military-age males of our generation did or tried to do. And the ultimate responsibility for this disgraceful state of affairs rests with President Johnson and members of Congress. They knew about the abuses and did nothing to correct them.
Still, public figures such as George Bush and Howard Dean, who was given a medical exemption for a bad back and then lived off a trust fund as a ski bum in Colorado, have to reckon with their earlier conduct during an agonizing period in our nation’s history.
John Kerry has struggled to come to terms with this conflicted legacy. There’s no evidence that George Bush has.
A Vietnam veteran, Chris Beam served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1967 to 1970. He lives in Lewiston.
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