Share

Nostalgia can be a pleasant, comforting habit of mind – almost like the “Holy Spirit, the comforter” for Christians. Nostalgia can be very seductive. But like the Holy Spirit, it cannot be a cure-all for our troubles, regrets, or unhappiness with our lives and the current circumstances of our world. Indeed, it can be psychologically problematic.

I recently spent a few days in Paris in a conscious effort to test the strength and effects of my nostalgia. I sought to “repeat the past.” I first visited Paris in August 1966, the late summer between my junior and senior years at Harvard.

As so many Americans and others have over the centuries, I fell in love with Paris on first sight. Its beauty, its romance, its fascinating and often tragic history, its peoples’ gorgeous language and gift of expression in conversation and words on the page, in art, movies, and music – its boulevardiers (and “clochards”—a now-considered derogatory term for the homeless people hanging out in Metro stations) and its vibrant cafés, its passionate politics and literary life.

I had a wonderful French “nanny” when I was very young and learned from her to speak fluent Parisian French at the same time I learned English. “Madame” moved back to Paris after her second husband died and De Gaulle, whom she adored, became President. I tried to see her in 1966 but she was not at home in Clamart when I knocked on her door several times during my stay. She was on congé in the South of France. My wife Nancy and I did have a very nice visit with her in 1970, not long before she died.

I have been back to Paris many times since 1966, sometimes with Nancy and my daughter Abigail and her husband Theo and our two granddaughters, once with my sister Peggy—who lived in France for several years and speaks beautiful French—and several times on my own.

As I grow older, I’m conscious of the narrowing opportunities I will have to return to Paris and other places for which I have strong and nostalgic feelings. On this most recent visit, I set out to visit as many of my favorite remembered places in Paris as I could in a few days and try to recapture the feelings I had had on previous visits. I wrote my observations and perceptions in the remaining blank pages of the same journal book I had used in 1966.

I also wanted to practice my French, as my sisters Nan and Peggy and I have been having regular French conversation sessions on Zoom.

I stayed at the Hotel Beausejour Ranelagh in the 16^th Arrondissement– the very same building that housed the much simpler (and cheaper) Hotel Ranelagh, my Paris home in 1966. Nancy and I have also stayed several times at the Hotel Recamier in Place St. Sulpice, which used to be the pension in which my mother spent a summer in the late 1930s, when she was a high school student.

In 1966, I had seriously overslept almost every morning due to late nights out drinking, thus curtailing my planned sightseeing schedules. I had also spent an afternoon sitting by my open window in the Hotel Ranelagh drinking more than a bottle of Beaujolais, nibbling a baguette with cheese, and reading Fitzgerald’s great novella “May Day” and J.D. Salinger’s story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” with their similar suicidal endings. Yes, I was pretty fucked up.

As soon as I checked into my room this time, I went around the corner onto Ave Mozart to search for the café Royal Mozart that I frequented in 1966. I remembered how I’d tried to order a demi pression (small draft beer) but didn’t have the correct French words for it, and a “sandwich viandes froides” (ham and cheese sandwich on baguette) and the somewhat rude response of the bartender to my inept requests-- the French are very jealous of their language-- and the laughter and the unique aroma of the locals’ Gauloise cigarettes. The Royal Mozart is no longer there; it’s space now taken by an upscale butcher’s shop – the 16^th is one of the wealthiest parts of Paris. A few doors along the Avenue I found the Bistrot L’Amadeus. The waiter was very welcoming and patient with my French – this seems true of Paris in general. I had several glasses of Côtes-du-Rhône and listened on Spotify via my hearing aids to some music of 1966 – The Beatles’ Revolver (UK version that I had purchased in London on the same trip) – especially “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Eleanor Rigby” -- and some takes of Dylan songs from the Bootleg Series’ “The Cutting Edge: 1965-1966 – “Love Minus Zero,” “Visions of Johanna” et al. Ridiculously, I thought of Paris 1966 as my “cutting edge” – as I fancied myself a tragic romantic.

Tuesday, my full day in Paris, was gorgeous. A brutal heat wave had broken. It was sunny and breezy, in the 70s. I took the Metro to Chatelet and had a long walk onto L’Isle de la Cite, past Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, both with lines of tourists too long to wait on and Shakespeare and Co. Books, famous haunt of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and other avant garde writers (not the original location). The line to get into Shakespeare was also too long. Walking along the Seine I stopped at one of the sidewalk book stalls and bought a French Livre de Poche edition of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. More good language practice.

I continued across Ave St. Michel, through the narrow Rue de la Huchette, famous for its basement jazz clubs. In 1966, I had spent a late night with my Harvard roommate Warren and a French friend at one of these places called Les Strapontins – the meaning as described in my journal “comme les choses dans le métro, qu’il est interdit d’utiliser ‘aux heures d’affluence.’” French does have an elegant way of describing even the most mundane things as jump seats on the subway. But Les Strapontins is no longer there, its name perhaps changed to the Caveau de la Huchette (“80 ans de Jazz”). I noticed in its brochure that I had just missed Monday Blues: “Un mélange détonnant de feeling, de talent et de savoir-faire, au carrefour du blues et de la soul, du funk et du rock, des ballades et du boogie.” Times change, and Franglais continues trying to overtake Parisian French.

I continued to Rue Jacob, trying to find the door to the apartment of a French girl named Jacqueline, whom I’d met at a discoteque called Les Anglais. I was with a high school friend, the late David Wallace, whom I’d met completely by chance at Café Wagner near L’Opera. Jacqueline was with her friend Chantale, and David and I sort of picked them up and went back to their place on Rue Jacob. Nothing much happened, but I saw Jacqueline again a few times and hung out with their friends at some other cafes on Saint Germain, where we talked about the War in Vietnam and made loud fun of American tourists walking by. I had just met Nancy the spring before this trip and we weren’t yet a serious item so I felt free to seek out other female companionship.

Jacqueline’s apartment was in a traditional house with broad double wooden doors on the street opening into a large courtyard. I couldn’t remember the number of their place on Rue Jacob but took photos of several of these doors that could well have been it.

The door of 3 Rue Jacob

I kept going and soon turned into Rue de Verneuil, where I found the upgraded hotel where Nancy and I stayed on our first trip to Paris together in 1970, the summer after we were married and I had just gotten out of the Marine Corps. Here is a photo of that place, of which I have very happy memories.

Hotel Verneuil

Finally on this walk, I stopped for a citron pressé at Les Deux Magots on Saint Germain, another of the famous literary cafes of the 1920s in which I’ve posed as a brilliant writer on many trips to Paris. I remember particularly the night France won a World Cup semifinal match in 1998, on the way to the Championship. The city was one huge celebration into the wee hours.

I took Metro #10 from Mabillon to Jussieu, connecting to Metro# 7 to Le Peletier, just a short walk from Pho 98, where I met some Vietnamese friends for lunch. I always love riding the Metro. Madame had a pass from her husband who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad and she used that to take me on many trips throughout Philadelphia’s commuter rail network. I have always loved trains. Now, my aging body was challenged by the Metro’s lack of accessibility – only a few of the major stations have elevators or even escalators; otherwise, lots of up and down stairs. With plenty of rest stops, careful use of railings and very slow pace, I made it up and down just fine. It made me marvel, and thank God, that in my many drunken nights in Paris in 1966 I didn’t tumble down those stairs and kill myself.

On the Metro, one can see the Parisians and their families in all their socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic diversity and eavesdrop on their conversations—sometimes at very close range since the trains are often crowded. It is of course a much more diverse population than in the 1960s. This is great but, sadly, immigration has prompted right-wing political movements that threaten to win control of the government.

Pho 98 is billed as a Vietnamese Chinese restaurant. This seems strange, given the anciently troubled relationship between China and Vietnam. You would never see this in Hanoi. The Vietnamese food was very good and it was great seeing my friends. However, they shared some bad news about a new and very severe government crackdown on writers and journalists in Vietnam. This was apparently triggered by Nguyễn Thành Nam’s novel Chuyện với Thành. The author reveres Hồ Chí Minh and portrays him in a very positive light as “a regular guy” who faced a lot of difficulties in his life but was able to overcome them to become a great leader of his country. However, the Party considered this portrayal to be at odds with the official picture of Uncle Hồ’s life and career as perfect in every way.

The news of the crackdown in Vietnam caused me to realize that the places we love and treasure through our memories are never undilutedly happy and peaceful. Of course, Vietnam has suffered through centuries of invasions and war to secure its independence and unity as a nation. France and Paris have gone through horrible periods of occupation and war, including civil war and revolution, as in Vietnam. Even the mid-1960s Paris that I visited was not perfectly content and peaceful. The bitter Algerian revolution, cinematically captured in The Battle of Algiers, had just ended with independence for that former département (not a colony but a full-fledged part of France). The pied noirs, the European French people who had lived in Algeria, many for generations, were returning full of bitterness to the mother country by whom they felt betrayed. A documentary with the sarcastic title Le Joli Mai subtly depicts, largely through “on the street” conversations with ordinary Parisians, the economic and social discontent underlying a spring month in 1963. De Gaulle was the only major Western leader who publicly opposed the American war in Vietnam – he saw clearly that the U.S. was making the same tragic mistakes in Indochina that the French had not long before. However, the student uprisings of 1968 were already on the horizon.

In August 1966, I had just finished my second summer camp of Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Class. The War was getting worse and worse. Marines were engaged in bitter fighting with the NVA in the far north of South Vietnam, jut below the DMZ. This was documented in graphic photos by Larry Burrows in Life Magazine [October 28, 1966]. I would be commissioned a Marine 2^nd Lieutenant upon graduation from Harvard the following June and would certainly be ordered to Vietnam after I completed Basic School, teaching me how to be a good platoon commander of Marines. I had turned against the war sometime between late 1965 (learning about the Ia Drang Valley in November), Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in early 1966, and meeting Nancy in the spring. She and all my college friends were now against the war. So, on my European trip, I must surely have been thinking and worrying about what would become of me in the Marine Corps and in Vietnam. A sense of foreboding, even doom must have been present somewhere in my psyche. But nostalgia has mostly kept me from remembering that. Just as nostalgia has kept me from remembering or paying much attention to the difficulties of Vietnam and France in the times that I have happy memories of being there.

After lunch, I took the Metro to L’Opera and Harry’s New York Bar. This was a “Regular Haunt” (to appropriate the title of my friend Jerry Costanzo’s New and Selected Poems [University of Nebraska Press, 2018] of mine in 1966, during my heavy drinking days and nights. It was a favorite haunt of Hemingway and other hard drinking writers. Harry’s serves only hard liquor, cocktails, and very few beers, no wine and certainly no alcohol-free beers or wines. For “old times’ sake,” I decided to have a gin and tonic, my first drink of hard liquor in more than 20 years. Of course, I temporarily forgot that those old times included Nancy and I contracting Covid at Harry’s in 2023. In addition, as I was writing this essay, I forgot that I had penned some very similar thoughts about “the wages of nostalgia” in an eponymous Substack piece in 2023. As Jerry Costanzo wrote in a poem another part of which I used as an epigraph for my Vietnam memoir: “This is the voice of/ history saying/I keep repeating myself,/please forgive me [Costanzo, “Report from the Past,” in Regular Haunts, p. 122]. In the 2023 essay, however, I disputed the old assertion that nostalgia is a form of mental illness; now I at least consider that more seriously.

My Harry’s G&T

As I was saying…In my 1966 journal, I revealed drinking 3 or 4 G&Ts at Harry’s after numerous beers elsewhere. Now, my depleted tolerance meant I could barely finish one, and only then by repeatedly diluting the gin with more tonic water. I was afraid I would have to stumble out of the place dead drunk. But I prevailed by very slow drinking. I was able to make it down the Metro steps and get to Sevres Babylone, a reasonable walk from Le Jardin du Luxembourg. In this beautiful garden, Nancy, Abigail, and I watched the total solar eclipse in 1999 and our granddaughters rode the carousel in 2022. Unfortunately, Le Jardin was closed à cause de sécurité – unexplained. It was a mystery since there were many people inside and no apparent law enforcement presence. After asking ChatGPT and Claude about the situation and hearing from both, erroneously, that the garden was open as usual, I walked to Le Select in Montparnasse for a pre-dinner beer. This is my favorite café and perhaps the most famous of the “Regular Haunts” of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. It figures in scenes in both Tender is the Night and The Sun Also Rises. It is overpriced but full of atmosphere and memories. You get what you pay for. While sipping my demi-pression, I found the passages about Le Select in my Tendre Est La Nuit –actually, this is wishful thinking from nostalgia—I’m still looking for them.

Metro to my dinner place – Au Pere Louis – required a circuitous route due to closure of a long stretch of Metro #10 – also erroneously unknown to ChatGPT. Nice dinner of oysters, cheese, and salad, with a glass of very good viognier. I passed on the cassoulet, a specialty of this restaurant that I had planned to have – because it seemed not a good choice for warm weather.

I took the Metro back to Ranelagh— a long but very worthwhile day, not an entirely unmixed pleasure. Stopped for a nightcap (Biere Blanche) at L’Amadeus. I received a message from the daughter of my stepmother Mary Jane (my father’s fourth wife), that she had found among her mother’s things the Dartmouth phi beta kappa key of my great uncle and namesake J. Theodore Marriner. She asked if I would like it and I replied that I would. My Uncle Ted was a career diplomat who had served as Counsellor of the US Embassy in Paris from 1931 to 1936. It was his last post before he became Charge d’Affaires in Beirut, where he was assassinated in 1937.

I still had Wednesday morning in Paris, as my flight to Boston wasn’t until 5:30PM. I took Metros #s 9 and 6 to Denfert Rochereau to visit La Musee de la Liberation to see an exhibit of Robert Capa “Photographe de Guerre.” Capa covered every major conflict from the Spanish Civil War through the French War in Indochina, and the periods of peace among them. Capa made iconic pictures of the Spanish Civil War, World War II (campaigns in North Africa, Italy, D-Day and Normandy, the liberation of Paris, and the final assault on Berlin and the fall of Nazi Germany) and the founding of Israel, before heading to Indochina. He was killed by a mine on May 25, 1954, on the road from Nam Dinh to Thai Binh, 90 km southwest of Hanoi.

Capa was always in the thick of things, on the front lines. He landed with Americans on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, and documented key junctures of the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944. His coverage of the liberation made me recall my reading of the incredibly dramatic account in Is Paris Burning?[Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Simon and Schuster, 1965] just before I went to Paris for the first time. This was no easygoing cake walk. It would have been very hard for Collins and Lapierre to exaggerate the drama. Capa’s photographs, many of which were published in popular magazines in France and the U.S., represent some of the most powerful documentation of the horror, sorrow, and pity of war, but also the courage and resilience of soldiers, sailors, and resistance fighters, and ultimately the joy and relief of just triumphs and the tragedy of unjust defeats. History, the raw material of nostalgia, is typically a very mixed bag.

Spanish Civil War, including the iconic image of a Republican soldier at the moment of his death (top left). [Robert Capa: Photographe De Guerre. Musee de la Liberation de Paris, 2026]

D-Day: Omaha Beach. [Robert Capa: Photographe De Guerre. Musee de la Liberation de Paris, 2026]

Parisians take cover during La Libération. [Robert Capa: Photographe De Guerre. Musee de la Liberation de Paris, 2026]

Capa’s last photograph before he was killed: Indochina, 1954. [Robert Capa: Photographe De Guerre. Musee de la Liberation de Paris, 2026]

For my last stop, I returned to Le Select for brunch on this beautiful late morning in Paris. I enjoyed a Croque Madame and Café Crème—and the scenery.

Croque Madame and a blonde Parisienne: La Select

I then rode the Metro for the last time back to Ranelagh to catch my Uber to the airport. Metro #6 is elevated for a stretch after La Motte Picquet Grenelle, and there is a lovely view of the Seine and Tour Eiffel between Bir-Hakeim and Passy. I remember loving this ride and this view in 1966. I tried to get a photo but, damn, some Metro signage partially blocked the view. Still, I want to share it.

My flawed photo of the Seine and the Tour Eiffel, with Metro signage.

It was a great two days in Paris but, as I’ve foreshadowed, it was also a learning experience of the vagaries of nostalgia. First of all, the past of nostalgia is invariably not as perfect as one may recall it being. I continue to practice too much unrealistic or distorted nostalgia. I also spend too much time being lost in the past or obsessed with the past. Why, for example, do I like almost exclusively movies and books about the past? Why do I prefer Thomas Cranmer’s Rite 1 Morning Prayer and The King James Bible? In my remaining time, why do I generally want to travel back to places I’ve been in the past instead of exploring new places?

I find myself thinking – perhaps, to some extent, like every generation – that our times, particularly our youth, were more interesting, more urgent, more important, more fraught—but also maybe more hopeful. The music and literature that we loved were better. Is this because our best memories are from a time when we had more time left in our lives – when our time was not yet running out and we thought we’d live forever – except of course that it was running out from the beginning.

Excessive and unrealistic nostalgia can hamper one’s desire and ability to work, in the time remaining, for improvements in the present and future—for our children and grandchildren.

I doubt that I’ll ever completely get over being a nostalgic, but I hope I will be able to employ my tools as a trained historian – and the insights I’ve gained from almost a lifetime of therapy – to make more appropriate use of my nostalgia. At the same time, I still love Paris and certain other places of my fond memories and hope to return to them time and time again, as long as I am able. Ah, Paris!

I am finishing this essay in Long Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of New York—another place of deep and abiding nostalgia—a place where my cousin Jeff would start saying to me, by early August: “Well, Ted, the summer’s almost over.” Ah, but that is another story!

This essay should write itself. Boston and the Northeast are in the midst of a heat wave, as was Gettysburg, Pennsylvania the first three days of July 1863. Today is the 163^rd anniversary of Pickett’s Charge, the “High Water Mark” of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg—and its repulse by Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock’s II Corps of the Union Army of the Potomac. The determination and heroism of those American soldiers from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, Maine, Vermont, Michigan, and Minnesota—as Joshua Chamberlain’s 20^th Maine on Little Round Top the day before – saved the Union, our country, and made inevitable the end of human enslavement in the United States.

Nancy and I, and many of our siblings and other relations, travelled to Gettysburg last weekend to attend a lovely family wedding, so we had the chance to visit the battlefield a few days before the anniversary of the battle. We were worried that Trump’s outrageous effort to “sanitize” American history would have censored the story told at Gettysburg to “fix” the problem my racist father found with Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War – that there were “too many Black people in it.”

But this had not happened—at least not yet. The introductory film, museum exhibits, and guided tour continue to tell the true story of why the war was necessary--contrary to Trump’s throwaway crack that America’s sectional conflict could have been easily resolved without a war – especially if he had been president, perhaps with “one phone call” had the telephone existed. The introductory film ends with lines from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

We [emphasis, presumably, in the film script—meaning that this is intended for all who are hearing it now as visitors to Gettysburg] are met on a great battlefield of that war…testing whether…a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal… can long endure…It is for us the living…to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus so far nobly advanced…[T]hat we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Yes, I have reordered Lincoln’s words a bit here but I don’t believe he would have objected. The words are so familiar that I fear we often forget that they contain at least two essential truths: that Gettysburg saved the Union but also that the larger work of creating “a new birth of freedom” was “unfinished.” Plainly, it remains unfinished today and, arguably, the struggle for it has been set back in recent years.

The lessons of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s Address at the dedication of the Union cemetery there must continue to inspire and empower us to save our country and our freedoms yet again.

An essential part of the “unfinished work” to which Lincoln called us is to decide whether those who fought there, or in any war, for the “wrong side” deserve as much reverence for their determination and heroism as those like the Union soldiers at Gettysburg, who were demonstrably on the “right side.” To me, as to most historians, at least since the 1960s, it was strategically essential for the Union to “hold the high ground,” both topographically and morally. That repentance is required for a just reconciliation is an essential formula not only of Christian theology but of secular morality.

According to the National Park Service’s audio tour guide of the battlefield, there were no monuments to Confederate soldiers or units on the Gettysburg battlefield until the very late 19^th century – about the time that the mythology of the “Lost Cause” took hold in the South and on the pages of many histories. Now there are many Confederate monuments – most notably those to the soldiers of Virginia and North Carolina. The former is topped by the noble Robert E. Lee on horseback. The latter’s inscription, placed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, reads:

To the eternal glory of the North Carolina soldiers who on this battlefield displayed heroism unsurpassed: sacrificing all in support of their cause. Their valorous deeds will be enshrined in the hearts of men long after these transient memorials have crumbled into dust.

I would say that this comes much too close to praising the North Carolinians for devotion and heroism in a sacred cause. I do not object to memorials for soldiers of the “wrong side,” simply stating that a unit or an individual fought here and even that they fought “bravely.” But such memorials should neither explicitly nor implicitly endorse the cause for which they fought.

As a Vietnam veteran who opposed that war, I think memorials to its fallen should follow the same rule. Clearly, the Vietnam Memorial in Washington succeeds in that. There was at first much criticism of its design for not sufficiently celebrating the bravery of our soldiers, sailors, and Marines and the righteousness of our cause. For me, and demonstrably the vast majority of the American public, “the Wall” rightly symbolizes, and movingly memorializes, 58,000 tragic deaths in a senseless war.

It is now the morning of July 4, 2026, the 250^th birthday of our country and 163 years since the gallant Union forces saved our nation at Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln called us to complete the work announced in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to “form a more perfect Union.”

Who will lead the truly sacred struggle to implement finally and fully our avowed ideals. I’m afraid that my Baby Boomer generation has failed to play our part–indeed, we have screwed things up so badly that we are largely to blame for the mess we are in. We Boomers must do all we can to atone for our own neglect and complicity. But it is the Millennials and GenZers who must step up and save us now. Good and decent people like my great-nephew Joe and his new wife Kat, whose wedding we attended near Gettysburg, my daughter Abigail, her husband Theo, a naturalized citizen and newly elected City Councilor in our community, and their two feisty and beautiful daughters Ignazia and Alessia, give me hope for the future. May that hope be fulfilled.

How can we make and analyze these associations? Some ways are more positive than others. If we have faith, God (in whatever form we believe) may help us. I often experience insights and perceive connections during my daily reading of Morning Prayer. These may be directly related to the specific prayers or scripture readings but often are completely unrelated.

Science—the systematic collection and empirical testing of data – produces understanding of human health and other phenomena leading to the betterment of the human condition.

Absent illnesses of cognitive decline, aging may enrich perception. It may be simply that older people have a longer store of data and experience with which to work but it could also reflect a sense of urgency in that our time is running out.

Negative or problematic means of association include, of course, the obverse of positive aging and sound science– flawed memory and various forms of dementia, badly designed or biased experimentation, and pseudo-science such as racist theories of human intelligence and capacity. I am no statistician but I do understand that there is a difference between association and causation.

Recreational and therapeutic drugs may also be important but also potentially dangerous drivers of perception and association. During my student years, I was somewhat of a speed freak but I never liked marijuana because it made me feel paranoid. Dexamyl, Ritalin and other “uppers” helped me produce many brilliant essays, research papers, tutorial discussions, and my undergraduate thesis. I pulled an all-nighter on speed before the final exam in my American literature course to read Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. I wrote a particularly incisive essay on the book in response to a 30-minute question, but spent two and a half hours on it, leaving only 30 minutes for the rest of the exam. Miraculously, I was awarded a “gentleman’s C” in the course.

And now there is AI. My ChatGPT “agent,” who I know is not a person, did not and I hope could not have written this essay. In any event, I have never and will never allow it to conceptualize or write anything for me that requires any creativity or emotional engagement.

It is a truism that in the grand web of being, all things are related and almost all are interdependent in one way or another. History repeats itself, one thing leads to another or at least helps to explain it. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” – or not. The unlearned lessons of the Vietnam War helped produce the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the potential one in Iran.

This spring, I took an early morning walk in Mount Auburn Cemetery to listen for and observe migratory birds—warblers, vireos, thrushes et al. When I opened our lakeside camp in Maine, the Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds arrived almost immediately after I placed their feeder on the front porch. Birds and some animals have the freedom to migrate where they please – twice a year, the tiny hummingbirds travel more than 2,000 miles, including a non-stop flight over the expanse of the Gulf of Mexico. The slogan “free as a bird” is perceptive. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” is one of the most popular songs of all time, despite not being a favorite of mine. Bears are able to travel hundreds of miles to their desired homes after being displaced. Of course, this freedom is not absolute; it may be disrupted or extinguished by predators, weather, or lack of food.

Emily Dickinson wrote of birds that “hope is the thing with feathers.” Some argue that this poem is not “about birds” but rather about hope. I would argue that it is fundamentally about both. Birds and hope have a reciprocal relationship: birds are a metaphor for hope but hope is also a metaphor for birds.

Birds and animals arguably have more freedom than humans in many situations, past and present. Consider, for example, Black Americans seeking to escape from enslavement in the Ante-Bellum South. The bird/animal-human comparison that struck me most recently came during my volunteer observation of Immigration Court hearings. Many of our immigrant neighbors are detained and facing deportation for no other reason than civil violations of immigration laws. Increasingly, these immigrants have realized that the system offers them little or no hope of remaining legally in the United States, so rather than endure even more lengthy detainment, they opt to be deported, often leaving behind children and families here for return, either to their country of birth or another one with which the U.S. has made an agreement to take deportees, where they have no connections or opportunity and may face significant danger of mistreatment or death. Shouldn’t human beings have at least as much right to freedom as birds or animals? St. Francis, who loved all living things equally, would have agreed.[1]

Associations in art, music and literature can also be informative. This photograph, from an exhibition “Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts may prompt several associations related to the history of racial oppression in the United States. Despite its beauty, the garden traps the Black woman in a society that persists in systemic racism. However, she is not merely a victim, but is depicted as a strong and resilient person in a place where the beauty of the garden is available to her but the more wild jungle- or forest-like environment has been kept outside the fence—thus perhaps symbolizing racial justice and freedom as a work in progress.

Tyler Mitchell, “Cage” (2022). Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

In music, Bob Dylan and the Beatles reciprocally influenced each other’s songwriting and performance.[2] According to Ron Rosenbaum, the theological question of theodicy (broadly, “why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?”)[3] was the essence of Dylan’s purported “argument with God.” [4] The Odyssey and “theodicy” may be homophones (same sound, different meaning) or a cross between homophones and synonyms or derivatives. In any case, they are somehow related and this may contribute to the mutual understanding of their meanings and implications. A similar pairing is epidemiology and epistemology, as to the patterns, causes, prevention, and treatment of diseases.

As already suggested, not all learning from associations is constructive. Here is where my struggle comes in. It can spawn false ideas and hurtful outcomes. This is true of many conspiracy theories, which assemble real or invented facts into a tissue of lies. Also, “guilt by association” – at times in our history such as the McCarthy era, people who knew “Communists” or were members of “Communist” organizations were assumed to be traitors or spies. I sometimes wrongly assume that people who drive pickup trucks must be Trumpsters.

Associations of literature may help us perceive the prefiguring of patterns of social and cultural history. Emily Bronte’s Victorian novel Wuthering Heights may prefigure Joan Didion’s writings on the events and atmosphere of the 1960s. Two friends and I have been reading both for a project to consider how we feel about books we first enjoyed long ago. These reconsiderations have predictably led us to consider how the books changed for us as we changed with age. For me, Wuthering Heights devolved from a romantic tale with a surprise happy ending to pretty much of an interpersonal downer with a contrived happy ending that really made no sense.

During a half-awake early morning in Hanoi, I felt a jumble of insights and connections. Perhaps the ridiculousness of the happy ending was precisely Bronte’s point. If so, she was the Joan Didion of her time and place with an existential world view in which things happen and people behave most commonly without rhyme or reason – as in Didion’s America and especially California of the 1960s. Manners and morals are important and to be admired but they usually can’t defeat evil and randomness. Neither the “vastness” of Buddhist love that my Vietnamese friend Lan treasures nor the better forms of Christian faith and love may may never prevail. These thoughts resonated with me amid the horrible mess of Trump’s America.

In my declining years, I increasingly aspire to be a good Christian. But it is hard work, importantly because the teachings are not altogether consistent or persuasive and the very facts of the story cannot be empirically substantiated. Faith may overcome the latter problem, as Elaine Pagels has recently argued[5] but it can only partially resolve the former. Indeed, both the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) and the Gospels, Epistles, and other books of the New Testament are provably rife with contradictions: among, on one hand, the proclamations of God’s universal love and forgiveness for all humankind, the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount and, on the other, the Hebrew Bible’s endorsement of slavery, denunciation of homosexuality, and divine basis of an exclusive version of Zionism and, in the New Testament, Jesus’s declarations of his believers’ exclusive right to salvation with the condemnation of others to eternal fire and damnation. The Ten Commandments call for honoring one’s father and mother but Jesus later says that we have no parents but Him and his church. The list goes on and on. Perhaps the most baffling and potentially unresolvable is that God is all powerful but unable or unwilling to prevent there being bad people and bad things happening in the world, even to those whose suffering is of no fault of their own,

Arguably, the difference between good and bad Christians is how you pick and choose among these conflicting “truths.” Anyone who claims that everything in the Bible is literally true is really a fool. But, as C.S. Lewis wrote, perhaps God’s greatest gift to humankind was our free will. We have the right to choose what to believe and what it means for us and our world. Of course, no matter how good we are, what we wish or pray for may not come true.

The same may be said of secular law. Our constitutions and laws and their implementation and enforcement are fraught with conflicts. Courts were created to resolve these but, as we are seeing in America, the separation of powers and the checks and balances between the branches of government are gravely at risk.

Oxymorons and tautologies may be informative. Throughout the escalation and dogged prosecution of the American war in Vietnam, Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson both repeatedly voiced tortured versions of “there’s no way for us to win this war but also no way for us to get out of it.” Although this by no means exonerates them, the insolvability of such an oxymoronic equation does not make its proponents any less tragic.

W.D. Ehrhart, a Marine veteran and leading poet of the Vietnam war, hates it when people say “Thank You for your Service.” This phrase is worse than an empty cliché – it is both a tautology and an oxymoron. Ehrhart thinks no one should be thanked for their service in such an unnecessary and immoral war:

[Y]ou think I want your thanks

for what I did?...

You’ve no idea what I did, or why,

or what it cost a people who had

never done us any harm nor ever

would or could.[6]

Moreover, thanking veterans for their service in bad wars may validate those wars and lead to more of them.

In my Harvard 50^th reunion book on the war, a classmate may have offered a response to Ehrhart when he suggested that it was a “bad war fought by good guys.” I have some agreement with this sentiment. Most participants in most wars probably do so because they believe they are just or necessary and do so with honor and courage. However, my classmate’s formula fails full moral muster by ignoring the fact that there were far too many bad guys also fighting this bad war – on all sides, it should be conceded.

So, I have come full circle from considering ways of understanding to admitting that none of them always work – especially for answering some of the biggest questions of all. I apologize for what may strike you, dear reader, as a muddled and unsatisfying exercise in stream of consciousness. But maybe it’s not entirely unsatisfactory depending on “where you’re coming from,” as we used to say in the 60s. Joan Didion taught us that many things, especially bad things, that happen can’t be explained or fully understood. So, my “muddled” argument may really be a metaphor for genuine incomprehensibility.

At Christ Church Cambridge, Rev. Sarah Neuman concluded her sermon on “the movement of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost,” and the resulting chaotic “speaking in tongues” with this advice:

You don’t have to be witnessing miracles every day to practice clearing some space

for awe to take root in your life…Before too long, I bet you will find yourself asking an

old and familiar question, and I hope you will let God be part of the answer: what does

this mean? What does this mean?

My paraphrasing of C.S. Lewis offers some comfort in the answers: our faith and its objects may be stronger for being inexplicable. Indeed, the Holy Spirit is often called “the comforter.” I hope this is what Lewis really meant and that it is ultimately the truth. The Collect for the 2^nd Sunday after Pentecost this year puts the point succinctly:

O God, from whom all good doth come[7]: Grant that by thy

inspiration we may think those things that are right, and by

thy merciful guiding may perform the same.[8]

[1] Michael Patrick Pearson, The Road to Croagh Patrick: One Writer’s Literary and Spiritual Pilgrimages. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2026, Chapter 3.

[2] Jim Windolf, Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other—and the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2026)

[3] Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Schocken, 1981.

[4] Alex Shephard, “Bob Dylan’s Argument with God,” New Republic, May 13, 2026.

[5] Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. New York: Doubleday, 2025.

[6] W.D. Ehrhart, “Thank You For Your Service” in Thank You For Your Service: Collected Poems. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019.

[7] My friend Steve Saltonstall pointed out that all Good doesn’t come from God. It is true that not all Good comes directly from God. However, if we believe that God creates us then we can say that the Good done by humans does, in fact, come from God.

[8] The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1986, p. 178.

Pilgrimages

I’m staring at the blank page, wondering how to begin this essay on Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album. It got me thinking about my “Brother” Mike Pearson’s new book The Road to Croagh Patrick: One Writer’s Literary and Spiritual Pilgrimages, which I’ve just begun reading. It is, by title, a very personal account of Mike’s visits, literal, emotional, and spiritual, to places, authors, and books that have been and continue to be meaningful to him.

Mike’s book calls to mind one of my favorite hymns “He Who would Valiant Be,” aka “To be a Pilgrim,” with words after John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress and music from a Sussex folk melody adapted by Ralph Vaughn Williams, an agnostic who wrote much beautiful sacred music. It includes these words of inspiration:

Since, Lord, thou dost defend us with thy Spirit,
we know we at the end, shall life inherit.
Then fancies flee away! I’ll fear not what men say,
I’ll labour night and day to be a pilgrim.

You may listen to the hymn here:

It is ironic that this is a staple of Anglican hymnody, since Bunyan’s pilgrimage was as a 17^th century Puritan “Dissenter” from the doctrine and practice of the established Church of England. Indeed, Bunyan was imprisoned for holding to his personal version of Christian truth. Although the word “truth” appears in neither Percy Dearmer’s adaptation nor Bunyan’s original, it suffuses both –a pilgrimage is, after all, a search for truth, the struggle of truth over against falsehood. This, too, seems the foundation of Mike’s literary and spiritual pilgrimages. So far in my reading, they seem to have been successful – at least for Mike himself. But – and here, dear reader, I finally reach the ostensible subject of this essay – not so much for Joan Didion.

Joan Didion wrote brilliantly of her times – especially, in the essays considered here, the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s. These were among the most crazy and dangerous times in America, perhaps until now. But Didion was decidedly not a pilgrim, or at least a successful one. She was a dispassionate observer who deployed her intellect to craft depictions of the characters of these times with rich irony and cool, steely-eyed, even pitiless, clarity. But her “search for truth” was a failure, whether this mattered to her or not. This is not to say that Didion was merely an intellect without emotion, devoid of feelings or a sense of justice. These were on display in her later writings about the tragedies of her own life, the illnesses and deaths of her husband and daughter, and the racist framing of the “Central Park Five.” However, Didion’s writings from and about the 60s and 70s did not reveal much profound emotion or passion. Rather, they tended to describe the scenes – many of which were plainly frightful and portending of a bleak future -- often with even-handed ridicule of those on every side of political and social issues. Her dedication to reaching and stating “truth” seemed limited to her own correct interpretations and understandings – sometimes this represented an oxymoronic conclusion that she was retailing the “truth” that nothing was really true.

She was as “cool” as her writing. Maybe it was the coolness and the facile feelings and discourse of youth – particularly true in the aspirationally rebellious social, cultural, and political milieu of the 60s and 70s. I, too, fancied myself a cool participant-observer. I differed from Didion in that I at least aspired to be a pilgrim for truth and justice, but I ended up failing as badly as she did; that’s another story. For me, as for many, getting older can bring clearer perspective and more accurate insight into the past, and maybe more forgiveness, even as memory weakens and may itself turn more forgiving in the facts it recalls.

Didion’s “Epistemology”

Joan Didion doesn’t use the word, but a good deal of what she wrote, at least in the essays I’m focusing on here, is somehow about it. For her, it would be somewhat of an oxymoron, already noted. If you are presenting as a truth that there is no truth, what’s the point of asking, as epistemologists do, “how we know what we know?” Didion seems to adopt the maxim attributed to Socrates that “all I know is that I know nothing.” This leads her to a kind of philosophical hypocrisy. She seems very sure that no one can really know anything for sure. Thus, in her essay “On Morality” she suggests that it is self-righteous and insidious to preach a gospel of conscience if it’s impossible to know with certainty what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s true and what’s not – except at the level of truism, such as “the Holocaust was wrong.”

Then, the essay “On Self-Respect” seems to contradict “On Morality.” Here, Didion presents “Self-Respect” as a kind of intellectual selfishness – being sure of the rightness of one’s feelings and behaviors, almost no matter what.

These “mind games” resonate with me, especially on my re-reading of Didion’s essays. When I first read her, back in the 1970s – about the time my sister met her husband-to-be at a conference about epistemology – I thought it was a silly “new age” subject. Now it’s perhaps my greatest concern in life – especially as I’m running out of time to find the answers.

Didion’s California: The Ultimate America

Although Didion spent more of her life in New York, she was a Californian, and it is in her writings on California that we find the best examples of her “epistemology.”

She begins The White Album with the prescient line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Then she proceeds to tell a bunch of stories that, as in much of her writing before and after, are filled with contradictions and death. Well, I guess she could live with contradictions. California may be the ultimate contradiction in its environmental beauty of mountains, deserts, coastlines, stunning cities, “perfect weather,” punctuated by deadly weather events, fires, storms, floods, droughts, and earthquakes. A land of economic opportunity, Hollywood dreams, political idealism, sociocultural innovation and revolution, punctuated by the crimes of murderous cults like the Manson Family, and adulterous husbands and wives like Lucille Miller of San Bernardino (depicted in the classic noir films most of which are inevitably set there), race riots, and deadly materialism, greed, phoniness, and spiritual exhaustion.

In the eponymous title essay of The White Album, Didion doesn’t even mention the Beatles. I guess, then, this must be an allegorical title, meant to show that the essay offers up some of the same stories and ideas as the Beatles’ album of the same name. Of course, tellingly, that Beatles album is officially titled “The Beatles” while “The White Album,” is its universally used nickname. More importantly, at least two of the songs on the album – “Helter Skelter” and “Piggies” -- apparently inspired the Mansons and informed some of their most hideous acts.

Similarly, in her novel A Book of Common Prayer, Didion doesn’t mention The Book of Common Prayer, the principal document of Anglican/Episcopal worship. Episcopal Bishop James Pike’s life and death may have interested Didion because she was raised as an Episcopalian in Sacramento and was at least nominally of that denomination periodically during her adult life. Her funeral was held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. “James Pike: American,” Didion’s essay in The White Album, opens with the pronouncement that San Francisco’s Grace Episcopal Cathedral is “a curiously arrogant and secular monument” that “would never be finished” despite Joan’s mite box contributions. She presents Pike, who left St. John the Divine to become Bishop of California, as a deeply flawed man who finally left the church entirely and sought to “reinvent it as ‘The Foundation for Religious Transition’” and reinvent death as “The Other Side.” In 1969, this mission sent him and his new (third) wife into the desert near the Dead Sea in a rental car with only “an Avis map and two bottles of Coca-Cola.” Pike’s wife survived but he did not. Didion’s epitaph for Pike is that his “sense that the world can be reinvented smells of the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring, and in a way the Sixties were the years for which James Albert Pike was born.”

Didion writes rather unsparingly of Sixties California and its offshoots in the East. In the eponymous title essay of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, with its Yeats epigraph, she depicts San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” (1967) as another effort to reinvent the world, which foundered on self-centered and self-involved mind blowing through sex, drugs, and even good old rock ‘n’ roll.

In “The White Album” she shows us the depths to which the “highs” of the Summer of Love led just a few years later. This isn’t about the war in Vietnam, which she mentions only once and allusively, as how she “watched… the first reports from My Lai… on a verandah at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.” (As I’m writing this from Hanoi, I’m wondering irritatedly why the essay isn’t at least more about the War.) But no, this is about other kinds of weirdness and horror that Didion concludes by admitting – apparently not so regretfully: “writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.” This from the one whose “self-respect” consisted in always believing you are right no matter what – but what does it mean to be right when you don’t know what anything going on around you really means? This is more than just a conundrum.

It’s hard to convey in paraphrase; best to quote from the horse’s mouth. Here’s a pastiche:

I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable, but nothing was unimaginable….this sense that it was possible to go “too far” and that many people were doing it.

I was always writing down the license numbers of panel trucks…circling the block, panel trucks parked across the street, panel trucks idling at the intersection. I put these license numbers in a dressing-table drawer where they could be found by the police when the time came…So many encounters in those years were devoid of any logic save that of the dreamwork…

The Doors interested me. The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood….The Doors’ music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation…

I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full…On August 9, 1969, I…heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive…I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not. I remember that no one was surprised.

Remembering the misinformation, expecting the incomprehensible. The ultimate absurdity.

This sense also suffuses Play It As It Lays Didion’s novel of the same period on the emptiness of life in the movie industry. It is epitomized in a phrase, which I guess I imagined since ChatGPT assured me it doesn’t exist in the novel – ostensibly describing a conversation between the two main characters: “it was funny, but it was also not funny.” ChatGPT, in its usual flattering way, did credit me with “a reader’s paraphrase of [Didion’s] ironic tone.”

As to the “offshoots,” of Sixties California, Didion’s treatment of “The Women’s Movement” in New York strikes a related note. It’s her cynicism and apparent mission to find the trivial, misguided, hypocritical, and absurd in people and movements with serious and entirely justifiable moral, economic, and social points to make. This approach may have had some validity for the “Flower Children” of the “Summer of Love.” But arguably less so for Women’s Liberation. Instead of naming and assessing the serious ends it seeks, Didion focuses on skewering its admittedly sometimes crazy means and over-the-top rhetoric. In effect, she uses this tactic to bolster her interpretation of the culture of the 60s and early 70s that it was a meaningless dead end led by selfish and trivial people – and insane cult murderers.

To Didion, the New York Women’s Movement was peopled (or “womaned,” in todays “Woke” parlance) by sniveling strident women whose own weakness, victimhood, or bad luck had prevented their getting what they really want – namely, a good man, a traditional marriage and family, and a conventional sexual life. Of course, there is much more to it that Didion doesn’t recognize: real and systemic discrimination in work and economic life and in relationships. Didion’s characterization trivializes and distorts the Women’s Movement by blaming the victim for their oppression.

As I was writing this in our Hanoi Airbnb, I heard a noisy gathering outside and went to investigate. It was a group of about 20 women (and one man) from the neighborhood in a spirited celebration of International Women’s Day (March 8). They were seated in an oblong formation on the cement ground floor of a five-story house, sharing a hot-pot meal, toasting with their cans of 333 Beer, and engaged in loud and spirited “sisterly” talk. I waved to them, wished them “chuc mung Ngay Quoc Te Phu Nu!” and asked to take their photo – they agreed and raised their beers in another toast. I don’t know if they were talking about the challenges of women’s roles in Vietnam but they certainly displayed a spirit and enthusiasm to tackle them.

Then and Now

How do I feel about Joan Didion now, reading her commentaries on the 60s and early 70s in the midst of our crazy and perilous times? I still think she was a smart and terrific stylist. But I’m not as unequivocally positive as I was when I first read her shortly after The White Album was published in 1979. That was a time much closer to her subject matter. This poses questions of nostalgia vs remembrance, truth and meaning. Is my current more mixed review of Didion’s writing a product of a nostalgic idealization of the past or a defensive sense of guilt for not having participated more fully in the antiwar and Civil Rights movements? In true Didion fashion, I can only say “maybe.”

We certainly live in a time when, if anything, truth and its very existence, are even more under attack than they were by Didion – not to mention by LBJ, Robert McNamara, Jim Morrison, James Pike, Richard Nixon, George Wallace et al. -- in the 1960s and 1970s – and for far more nefarious reasons than Didion’s. And, I would argue, we may now be even more in need of pilgrims for truth and justice than we were then. Let’s hope that our contemporary pilgrims will ultimately be more successful and more fairly treated in the literature of our time.

We had a very “cozy studio” just off Lane 31, đường Xuân Diệu, Tay Ho – our old neighborhood -- midway between the houses we lived in during our two stints in Hanoi. The first of these was being torn apart in the inevitable Hanoi renovation, and the other has had a garish gold gate affixed to its front. Don’s Bistro, our favorite hangout, is long gone, its building replaced by a sumptuous lakeside residence.

On my every arrival in Hanoi, I remember John Converse’s lament in Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers: “If I could just get back over to Nam, I’d probably be all right. You can hole up forever over there.”[1] Unfortunately, not….

A few days after arrival, as I was enjoying a cà phê nâu đá (iced coffee with condensed milk) in a Highlands Coffee on Xuan Dieu, I saw the first reports of Trump’s war in Iran. Highlands Coffee – Vietnam’s Starbucks, a thriving chain established by a returning “Việt Kiều” (Overseas Vietnamese) -- stands as a symbol of the senselessness of our American War in Vietnam. And now we’re making all the same mistakes – “déjà vu all over again.” Yes, yes, the “still unlearned lessons of Vietnam.” They’ve become almost a cliché or a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The senselessness of the War, and by analogy that of almost all of our subsequent wars, struck me again and again during this trip to Vietnam. My friend and Harvard roommate Steve Saltonstall, a confronter of Robert McNamara outside Quincy House in November 1966,

informed me of the death of Country Joe McDonald, whose 1967 ballad “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” invigorated many a music festival and antiwar rally:

And it’s one two three four

What are we fighting for?

Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn

We’re off to Vietnam.

Five six seven

Open up the pearly gates.

You don’t have to reason why

Whoopee! We’re all gonna die.[2]

I drank a bia Hà Nội at Thủy Tạ beside Hoàn Kiếm Lake while reading Philip and William Taubman’s new book McNamara at War[3] as the usual crowds of Hanoians and tourists circled the iconic heart of the city on a beautiful early spring afternoon. The book, which might well have been subtitled “A Slow-Motion Greek Tragedy,” increased somewhat my empathy for McNamara and LBJ, although this by no means exonerated them. Both repeatedly voiced tortured versions of “there’s no way for us to win this war but also no way for us to get out of it.” The falsity of such an unsolvable equation does not make its proponents any less tragic.

Reading McNamara at War at Thủy Tạ by Hoàn Kiếm Lake

I stayed at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, site of the infamous “5 o’clock follies” -- the daily briefings at which Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) officers lied about the progress and prospects of the war. I drank a Sài Gòn Đỏ (Saigon Red beer) at the Rex’s rooftop bar and continued my reading of McNamara at War as a Vietnamese band played songs of the 60s – “I Saw Her Standing There,” Santana’s “Oye Como Va,” “La Bamba,” -- and even Trump’s favorite “YMCA,” and the ever rising skyline of HCMC flashed and glittered all around me.

I sat by the pool at La Residence in Hue, in sight of the Citadel, focus of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. I thought of Mr. Vinh, of whose passing I had just learned. He was an ARVN veteran who had worked as a translator for U.S. Army units, spent several years in a re-education camp after the War, and then returned to live in Hue and became a guide for “DMZ Tours.” Over the years, Mr. Vinh took me and my family members and friends on many informative and moving tours of the Quang Tri battlefields, including Khe Sanh. We became friends. With the assistance of the wonderful Ms. “Moon” of La Residence, I offered my condolences to Mr. Vinh’s family and we visited his grave.

I also visited the place where W.D. “Bill” Ehrhart, poet and memoirist of the War, was wounded.

Bill Ehrhart was wounded by an NVA rocket-propelled grenade while just inside the second-floor window on the right.

during the Battle of Hue. It is a renovated building that is now part of the 3-star Duy Tan Hotel. When Bill revisited Hue in 2011, he wrote that Vietnam “not a War but a country.”

I found some relics of the Quang Tri airfield just across Route 1 from the site of the 3^rd Marine Division’s field hospital where I served in 1968-1969. I saw a group of kids playing soccer nearby, just as I had seen when I visited the Hue Citadel in 1997 on my first trip back to Vietnam since the War. Again, I took a photo of the kids who were enjoying a peaceful life in their country.

Kids on the relic of Quang Tri Airstrip

And finally, I gathered with dear friends and colleagues for a “farewell, for now” party at Standing Bar overlooking Trúc Bạch Lake, where Lt. Cdr. John McCain’s parachute came down in 1967 and he was taken prisoner of war. Later, Senator McCain became a champion of U.S.-Vietnam reconciliation.

“Farewell, for now” at Standing Bar, by Trúc Bạch Lake (that’s the back of my head in the foreground)

I often wondered if the Vietnamese people had forgiven the U.S. for the war, I usually thought so, given how well Americans visitors are treated by the Vietnamese. This reminded me of Ho Chi Minh’s saying that the Vietnamese were fighting the American government, not the American people.

But a friend challenged me on the matter of forgiveness, insisting that the pain and suffering of the war would never be forgotten by the Vietnamese but that the government and people have decided it’s best to wish for peace with everyone. Out of politeness and a realization that harboring hate and resentment helps no one, the people try to avoid speaking about the war and its incredibly heavy cost, or America’s responsibility for Vietnam’s suffering.

The Bookworm, Hanoi’s English-language bookstore, no longer has a separate section on the American War. Books on War are simply interfiled with general non-fiction. Another important factor is that three-quarters of Vietnam’s population were born since the war ended in 1975 and so have no direct recollection of it. All this makes sense but I realize that these changes do not quite equal forgiveness.

Reconciliation between the U.S. and Vietnam has been slow and arduous but has achieved some important results. Project Renew, which I visited on this trip, has removed much unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Quang Tri, “the most bombed place on earth,” and other organizations are beginning to work in several other heavily bombed provinces. Still, much UXO remains and so community education and support for people disabled by accidents involving bombs and mines continues to be important.

Prosthetics at Project Renew’s museum in Dong Ha, Quang Tri

Agent Orange mitigation has been completed at Danang Airbase and is proceeding in Bien Hoa and the A Shau Valley. The work of locating the remains of hundreds of thousands of missing Vietnamese soldiers from both sides, has only just begun. The U.S has assisted in this effort by identifying and turning over to the Vietnamese government American military documents about battle sites and other possible locations of remains. Trump’s defense secretary Pete Hegseth visited Vietnam in November 2025 and voiced support for the various war legacies projects,[4] but U.S. funding cuts have severely imperiled continued progress.

Reconciliation within Vietnam also remains a work in progress. Discrimination continues against descendants of ARVN soldiers and partisans and officials of South Vietnam. However, the government has allowed Việt Kiều to return to live and establish businesses, such as Highlands Coffee. It has also begun allowing maintenance and improvements at several ARVN cemeteries at battle sites like “Charley Hill” in the Central Highlands, and erection of monuments to the fallen from both the ARVN and Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Army. However, many official accounts and museum exhibits continue to refer to the ARVN and South Vietnam government as “puppets.” Some people refuse to use this demeaning language, recognizing that the War was in an important sense a civil war.

A revised governmental account of the War emerges in the new Military Museum. The building is massive and its exhibits are celebratory.

The new Military Museum, Hanoi

Filled with big school groups, the museum presents what could almost be termed a “sanitized” version of Vietnam’s victory, justifiably called “glorious.” After all, this small, poor country defeated the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world in a remarkable replay of the David and Goliath story. The museum’s retelling focuses not on the details and costs of specific battles (e.g., virtually nothing is shown of the battles of Hue or Khe Sanh) but rather on broad themes and periods of victory – seemingly achieved almost automatically by the Vietnamese people. The heavy losses of U.S. and “puppet” forces are emphasized but NVA, Viet Cong, and civilian casualties are barely mentioned. The 58,000 American deaths–which would result in a much larger number if one totaled the estimates of losses in battles and campaigns from government accounts and memoirs -- are repeatedly emphasized, while neither the estimated three million Vietnamese dead nor the hundreds of thousands still missing are ever mentioned. Politburo head Le Duan’s reputation is sullied for many Vietnamese people by his perceived responsibility for this vast cost. He is largely ignored in the museum’s account despite the fact that it was his relentless, albeit costly, strategy that won the war for Vietnam.

The Women’s Museum is much more honest than the Military Museum about the suffering and bravery of Vietnamese women in the war. But it also presents a somewhat sanitized picture of Vietnamese marriage and domestic life. It must be said that male chauvinism is not unique to Vietnam but remains prominent in most countries, notably the United States. The Women’s Museum simply omits men from Vietnamese domestic life, recognizing no male role in birth, childcare, child rearing, or housework.

In the first fifteen years of this century, civil society blossomed in Vietnam – non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community-based groups, and social enterprises. They contributed substantially to improvements in Vietnam’s policies, practices, and services in many areas: public health, poverty reduction, environmental protection, and war legacies. This work has continued in more recent years, to the benefit of the Vietnamese people. But the strategy of civil society has had to change, as the government and Party became intolerant of policy advocacy from outside, especially when funded by foreign countries, especially by the U.S.

Despite the progress of reconciliation and the establishment of formal bilateral partnerships, Vietnam remains very resistant to outside interference, doubtless influenced by its difficult history. Indeed, the elimination of USAID and the drastic cuts in U.S. funding for health, environmental, human rights, and socio-economic development programs may have been viewed by the Vietnamese government as “a blessing in disguise.” U.S. government funding, including the HIV/AIDS programs I worked on, also supported substantial policy advocacy.

In order to survive, Vietnamese civil society organizations have had to focus on direct service delivery consistent with government policies and structures and eliminate overt policy advocacy. Some organizations have been unable or unwilling to shift focus in this way and have disappeared. Others, however, have been very successful and continue to provide valuable services in poverty reduction, disaster relief, environmental protection, war legacies, and some areas of public health. And, while overt policy advocacy is essentially prohibited, it is quite possible that demonstration of effective services could result in government adoption of improved policies. In fact, Vietnam has a history of adopting policies based on sound data and scientific evidence – as in its adoption of needle and syringe programs and other “harm reduction” strategies in HIV/AIDS prevention much more quickly than in the U.S.

The Centre for Supporting Community Development Initiatives (SCDI) stands as a prime example of a civil society organization that has evolved to survive and thrive. SCDI deserves public and governmental recognition and support for its valuable and effectively delivered services in public health, poverty reduction, and disaster relief.

Việt Phủ Thành Chương, a self-styled “art palace” and collection of spiritual and cultural buildings assembled by artist Thành Chương in a verdant setting on the outskirts of Hanoi, has become one of my favorite places in Vietnam. Its website terms it “the Residence of the Soul of Vietnam.”[5] Indeed, it is a place of natural and artistic beauty, and thus a very peaceful and soulful place. And, for aging visitors like me, Việt Phủ generously offers canes to help with the many steps without railings and lots of nice places to sit down, rest, and take in the peace, quiet, and beauty.

Việt Phủ Thành Chương, Sóc Sơn, Hà Nội

I have deep emotions about the War, shame, and regret for what my country did and also for my failure to resist the War. But during this visit I was, at some level, taken in by the new sanitized and almost “pain-free” presentation of the War. Việt Phủ Thành Chương seems to reflect the peaceful “soul” of Vietnam – or at least an important, perhaps aspirational, part of it.

This is very alluring. I found myself thinking about moving to Vietnam. But it’s impossible, of course. I have many powerful reasons to stay where I am –my family, my Vietnamese style three-generation home, friends, church community, our summer place in Maine, etc., etc. I also realize that John Converse of Dog Soldiers was wrong – there is no way to escape and nowhere to hide, even if one wanted to. I am inextricably “entwined” with my home, family, and native country. Nevertheless, I also remain “entwined with Vietnam” and I intend to return every year for as long as I can.

[1] Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers. New York: Ballantine Books, 1978, p. 127.

[2] For full lyrics, see https://genius.com/Country-joe-and-the-fish-the-fish-cheer-i-feel-like-im-fixin-to-die-rag-lyrics.

[3] Philip and William Taubman, McNamara at War: A New History. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2025.

[4] Damien Cave and Tung Ngo, “Hegseth vows stronger ties with a Vietnam skeptical of U.S. commitment,” New York Times, November 3, 2025.

[5] For more information, see https://www.vietphuthanhchuong.com.vn/

.

Dear Family, Friends, and Neighbors – This brings my hope and prayer that you will enjoy a safe and happy holiday season with those you love, or at least be able to endure these times that are so frightful for the vulnerable and oppressed among us.

At Christ Church Cambridge during this Advent season of watching and waiting, we are studying the Incarnation through which, according to John’s Gospel (John 1:1-14), the light of God’s Word came into the world in human form, “full of grace and truth.” John also warns that “the light shineth in darkness, but the darkness comprehended it not.” In fact, that light can be quickly extinguished by darkness, also in human form; mass murderers of Jews on a beach in Australia celebrating Chanukah, the festival of lights; a deranged man shooting innocent students studying for their exams and a former fellow university student apparently in obscene fulfillment of some decades-old grudges; a son stabbing his parents to death, which the President of our country attributed to the father’s “Trump Derangement Syndrome;” ICE agents handcuffing, shackling, arresting, and deporting a college student on her way home to surprise her family for Thanksgiving, and arresting Christian clergy and Rabbis seeking to deliver food packages at an ICE facility known to deny detainees all types of necessities.

During such times of darkness and fear, all of us need comfort but also resilience and inspiration to carry on. I have found some light and comfort in music, as during other unhappy or dangerous times like my wartime tour in Vietnam in 1968-1969.

I have listened several times to Handel’s Messiah all the way through. As Charles King wrote[1], this work grew out of a time of trouble and should remain a source of hope in the valleys of our lives. I was also grateful for the chance to sing beautiful Advent hymns at a friend’s caroling party and in church every Sunday. I particularly love “Comfort, comfort ye, my people” with these hopeful words in the third verse: “For the glory of the Lord/now o’er all earth is shed abroad/and all flesh shall see the token/that the word is never broken.” A different rendering of the words from Isaiah 40 appear in a recitative of the same name at the beginning of Messiah.

It takes all types of music. My wife and I have been watching The Beatles Anthology and rewatching Get Back,[2] which culminates in the Savile Row “rooftop concert” from January 1969. The concert, witnessed by some people on surrounding roofs and heard by growing crowds in the streets below, unveiled great songs like “One After 909” that harkened back to the band’s early purer and simpler rock n’ roll days, as well as some new songs like “Get Back” and “I’ve Got a Feeling” with more a up-to-date sound and several sexual references. The album Let it Be[3] includes the Rooftop versions of “One After 909” and “I’ve Got a Feeling” with others, including “Get Back” and the achingly beautiful title song, recorded in Apple Studios. In “Let it Be,” Paul assures us that “When the broken-hearted people/Living in the world agree/There will be an answer, let it be.” Fittingly, Ken Burns chose this song to end his powerful television documentary series on the Vietnam War.

Listening again to the great music of the Beatles and watching them perform it, even that from when they found themselves “in times of trouble (“Let it Be”) calls to mind how the Beatles bursting on the American scene in early December 1963 helped comfort us, at least temporarily, with music of such joy, humor, and love just a few weeks after JFK’s assassination. The Rooftop Concert took place as I was getting close to the end of my wartime tour in Vietnam, when I was also listening almost continuously in my hooch in Quang Tri to the tape of the White Album that my girlfriend had sent me.

I’ve also been re-reading Joan Didion’s The White Album (1978) for a project, in which two friends and I are re-reading, discussing, and writing essays about books that we first read many years ago. Didion’s essays in The White Album remind me of a period of vast craziness and fear not unlike today. In the title essay, she reprints the lengthy report of her own psychoanalysis (pp. 14-15), a case of “TMI,” if there ever was one, notes that “disorder was its own point” (p. 36), and describes “this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it” (p. 41). Regarding the Manson Murders as “the end of the Sixties,” Didion says “I remember that no one was surprised.” (p. 42; Italics in the original.) She doesn’t mention the Beatles White Album or explain why she named the book after it. Perhaps it was because Manson’s “family” made bloody graffiti of lines from two songs on the album, “Piggies” and “Helter Skelter,” at the scenes of their murders. She only mentions the Vietnam War once but she doesn’t need to do more as it’s always there in any case.

But rereading The White Album also reminds us that such periods can be survived and overcome. Didion begins the book with these words: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” (p.11) But it required more than comfort to get through them and learn from them. In Didion’s telling, the Sixties were also a time of optimism that the commitment and action of a new, younger generation could finally stop an unjust war and make the world a better place.

I hope we can all somehow find comfort, resilience, hope, and inspiration in these days. Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas, whatever you choose to believe in. And Donald Trump, you should worry that the real Christmas will never be abolished.

[1] Every Valley: The Desperate and Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah (2024).

[2] Both available for streaming on the Disney channel.

[3] Apple Records, released May 1970.

Theodore M. Hammett – November 12, 2025

I began this essay at Le Select in Montparnasse the afternoon before heading home from a wonderful and moving trip with my wife to London (revisiting the Turners at the Tate), Versailles, Normandy, Picardy, and Paris (returning to Harry’s New York Bar, despite having acquired Covid-19 there in 2022). It was a trip filled with history and nostalgia – more of my fool’s errand to seek doing justice to both. It felt inspiring and humbling trying to write in a café where Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound et al. actually produced masterworks of literature. I am finishing this on Veterans’ Day, originally Armistice Day, commemorating the end of World War I.

Our trip featured visits to battlefields of World Wars I and II and participation in a conference that considered the American War in Vietnam. Envision a scale on which to place wars from 0 (absolutely senseless) to 5 (absolutely necessary). I would put World War II at between 4 and 5 and both World War I and Vietnam at between 0 and 1. Perhaps I oversimplify, but this seems to me to cut to the chase: In 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, what should and could have been a reasonably resolvable international incident, instead triggered the falling dominoes of a complex of alliances, which also could have been interrupted at multiple stages. Instead, the major powers “sleepwalked” into a First World War[1], fought ostensibly to “end all wars,” which cost 10-20 million lives, plus millions more from a related influenza pandemic. Its outcome led directly to a Second World War, which -- while ultimately necessary and just -- cost 20-30 million more lives, including the Holocaust.

The Vietnam War had some political and ideological roots in both World Wars. It also offered multiple opportunities for peaceful resolution that were spurned, ultimately resulting in perhaps 4-5 million lives lost from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and the United States.

In addition to deaths and wounds on the battlefield and among innocent civilians, all wars have after-effects. Among these are “shell-shock” (WWI), “battle fatigue” (WWII), and PTSD (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq). Ron Milam, American veteran and scholar of the Vietnam War, stated that “in war, there are no unwounded soldiers.” This was arguably truer for the Vietnam War than for others that were less internally controversial and contested. And for the Vietnam War, the “wounded” should be expanded to millions of young American men of draft age, and their families, friends, and lovers.

All wars bring inspiring stories of bravery and sacrifice, which may be easier to embrace and celebrate when they occur in “just wars.” Horrific accounts of massacres, atrocities, and cruelty also attend all wars, but outrage and condemnation for these are easier to voice when they occur in senseless wars.

World War II: The Blitz

In London, we visited an exhibit in St. Paul’s Churchyard commemorating the “St. Paul’s Watch” who protected the Cathedral from destruction during the Blitz in 1940-41. The Germans were dropping small incendiary bombs, many of which hit the lead roof of St. Paul’s and were capable of burning through the lead and igniting the timber framework below, which would have destroyed the Cathedral. It was the job of the Watch to listen for the incendiaries to hit the roof, then rush up to disarm them with sand in the scant minutes before they would ignite. This was extremely dangerous and demanding work, but it succeeded. Bombs did cause damage to St. Paul’s a few times but the Watch and the Fire Brigades were able to contain it. The result was that the Cathedral survived the war while many of the surrounding buildings were destroyed, as shown in an iconic photograph that inspired the nation and much of the world.

World War II: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy

We went to Normandy, a beautiful part of France, and the scene of the D-Day invasion followed by the brutal two-month battles over the hedgerows and “Bocage” country to advance from the June 6 beachheads to liberate Paris and begin the last phase of the European war. My wife’s father served as a Navy ensign on an LST (Landing Ship Tank) at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

We saw a woman swimming on Omaha Beach in what must have been very cold late October waters.

World War II was the closest one could come to a “just war.”

“Les Braves” on Omaha Beach

Anilore Banon, the sculptor of “Les Braves” wrote of its three elements:

The Wings of Hope: So that the spirit that carried these men on June 6^th, 1944 continues To inspire us, reminding us that together it is always possible to change the future.

Rise, Freedom! So that the example of those who rose against barbarism helps us remain standing against all forms of inhumanity.

The Wings of Fraternity: So that this surge of brotherhood always reminds us of our responsibility towards others as well as ourselves.

There is a lot of sense in this.

At Pointe du Hoc, we saw the rugged cliffs that U.S. Rangers had to scale with their hands, arms and legs on ropes and ladders in the face of German fire from the fortifications above and guns on their flanks. This position was vital to securing the positions into which U.S. and British paratroopers had jumped the night before.

One of those paratroopers landed on the steeple of the church in St Mere Eglise. Now, a dummy paratrooper hangs on the side of the church to memorialize that soldier.

The American cemetery above Omaha Beach is vast and triumphal in tone. Headstones with Stars of David intersperse those with crosses. The German cemetery is, by contrast, sparse and somber, as befits the losing side. The headstones bear no names, which are relegated to flat markers at their feet, perhaps to downplay the fact that so many were so young (16-17 years old), pressed into battle with scant training or experience. It is unusual, but altogether appropriate, to find a “losers’” cemetery in the winners’ country. There is a cemetery for ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) soldiers in Bien Hoa, near Ho Chi Minh City. The Vietnamese government has not maintained this cemetery but has recently permitted families of those buried there to take care of it. Reconciliation takes time.

The Memorial at Caen, Normandy’s main city, is a brilliant museum of World War II and the Normandy Invasion, which includes a very moving exhibit on the Holocaust. In this, and indeed throughout the museum, the realities of French collaboration, the Vichy government, and participation in the Shoa are honestly treated. In addition, the museum’s exhibits do not falsely exaggerate the extent of the “French Resistance” before D-Day, when in fact most of the resistance fighters were Spaniards, Poles, Jews, and Communists. After the liberation of France, as the museum documents, collaborators, and particularly women who had slept with German occupiers, were very harshly treated.

The Caen Memorial shows how the city was bombed into rubble by the Allies after D-Day. This was a tragedy but one dictated by a considered judgement that it was less difficult and costly to fight and defeat an enemy defending rubble than having to fight through a medieval city building to building and street to street. This was the same calculus that convinced the U.S. to drop atomic bombs on Japan rather than suffer the likely horrific cost of a land invasion; a conflict between strategic and moral considerations whose resolution was arguably justified.

World War I: The Somme

The senselessness of World War I tips the balance overwhelmingly in favor of morality and humanity in any debate with strategic principles. To make matters even worse, while it might be argued that the Entente powers’ long-term attritional strategy succeeded in winning the war, the tactical decisions employed were regularly catastrophic. Nowhere was this more tragically true than in the Battle of the Somme, in Picardy, in 1916.

In the spring of 1916 Britain and France decided to launch a massive, concerted assault over a vast stretch of the Western Front, which had been locked in deadly stalemated trench warfare for almost two years. The trench lines were only a few hundred yards apart in most sectors and were heavily fortified and protected by extensive barbed wire entanglements, especially on the German side.

The plan was to conduct intensive artillery bombardment of the German defenses for five days and plant huge explosive charges in tunnels under the German lines. These charges would be detonated just as several hundred thousand soldiers went “over the top” to cross “no-man’s land” behind rolling artillery fire and easily seize and drive through the German trench lines, gaining miles of territory in one day. The soldiers who would make the assault were told that the artillery barrage had cut the German wire, destroyed their fortifications, and decimated their defending forces so that the attackers could walk placidly across no-man’s land to be greeted only by a few Germans eager to surrender.

None of this was true. In fact, it was a disaster, especially for the British Army. It lost 60,000 men – dead, wounded, and missing -- on that one day, July 1, 1916. The majority of these casualties occurred in the first 30 minutes of the battle. The wire was not cut, the fortifications were barely damaged and virtually all the German defenders remained to massacre the attackers with machine gun, artillery, and rifle fire even as they emerged from their trench ladders. The explosive charges caused huge craters in the German lines but British soldiers became trapped in them and were shot to pieces from German positions on their edges.

We visited Picardy, another beautiful region of France, now returned to rolling farmland and pasture after the horrors of two World Wars. The countryside is dotted with cemeteries, memorials, and museums that keep alive the tragedy and lessons of the Battle of the Somme.

At the Newfoundland Memorial Park in Beaumont Hamel, sheep graze on what was no-man’s land on July 1, 2016, and the trenches are now graceful and grass-covered. It is a peaceful scene, as with the swimmer on Omaha Beach, but shell holes are still visible. In this photo, the British line from which the Newfoundland Regiment attacked was just the near side of the wire fence and the German line was just the near side of the tree line only about two hundred yards away.

No Man’s Land, Beaumont Hamel

The sheep and human visitors must be careful because unexploded ordinance still remains on this ground. The volume of shells that were fired was huge and the proportion that were duds was shockingly high, which is part of the reason that the pre-attack bombardment failed so miserably.

Warning at Newfoundland Memorial Park

This photo shows one of the craters produced by the explosive charges in the tunnels.

Lochnagar Crater, Ovillers-la-Boiselle, near Albert

These frames from a grainy video show the Newfoundland Regiment receiving blessings from a chaplain and moving to the frontline trenches for the attack of July 1, 1916. They suffered 80 percent casualties that day. Almost all of the men in these photos were lost in the next few hours. This was true of many units of the British Army. Many of these were “Pals” units, all recruited from the same village. As a result, many English villages were decimated.

The cemeteries of the Somme seemed vast and grim. Because so many men were literally blown to bits, many of the headstones read “A soldier known only to God.” The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, designed by Sir Edwin Luytens and dedicated in 1932, commemorates the 72,000 British Army soldiers, including those from South Africa, Ireland, and Canada, who went missing on the Somme. All of their names are inscribed there.

Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, Thiepval

Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong offers a powerful account of the first day of the Battle of the Somme.[2] The most decisive scene for me comes only minutes after the attack begins. A chaplain watches the carnage from atop a reserve trench:

“This is half of England. What are we going to do?” he stammered…Horrocks pulled the silver cross from his chest and hurled it from him. His old reflex still persisting, he fell to his knees, but he did not pray. He stayed kneeling with his palms spread out on the ground, then lowered his head and covered it with his hands. Jack knew what had died in him.

A poem by John Oxenham appears on a plaque at the Newfoundland Memorial Park. It echoes the despair of Chaplain Horrocks:

Tread softly here! Go reverently and slow!

Yea, let your soul go down upon its knees,

And with bowed head and heart abased, strive hard

To grasp the future gain in this sore loss!

Vietnam

As Chaplain Horrocks lost his faith at the senseless slaughter of the Battle of the Somme, so the American people’s trust in their government collapsed because of the lies they were told about the causes and prospects of the war in Vietnam—lies told by men, many of whom like Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, did not themselves believe them. What could be more senseless than that?

David Starr and I presented at a conference in Versailles a paper on our project to chart Americans’ changing views of the war through the lens of my Harvard Class of 1967. My part focused on the existential choices my classmates faced as the senselessness and immorality of the War became clear from 1964 to 1967. It is based on more than two hundred classmates’ contributions to a 50^th reunion book called “The Choices We Made” (TCWM).[3]

The vast majority of classmates reported that their decisions had been difficult, often agonizing. JT (p517) wrote that “most people in our class spent countless hours… talking about the war and what we would do about it. We asked each other hard questions…Each of us had to decide where to draw the line, and it never ceases to amaze me how finely those lines were drawn.”

Sixty-five of the TCWM classmates served in the military, one-half in Vietnam (including me) and the other half elsewhere. Two members of Harvard ’67 were killed in the war: Charles Ryberg and John Martin.

PR (p 452) was “tormented” by a war he “strongly opposed.” He joined the Coast Guard but his “decision not to go to Vietnam still bothered me…Perhaps I had insufficient courage.” To compensate, he volunteered for the Coast Guard’s deep sea divers school, because he felt that he “needed to do something dangerous.”

Those who did not serve in the military made many different decisions. Eighteen applied for conscientious objector (CO) status. Eight TCWM contributors took the extreme steps of burning or turning in their draft cards and three left the United States.

Steve Saltonstall was “surprised and disappointed that the government didn’t prosecute me.” He had turned in his draft card on Boston Common in April 1968 and when asked by his draft board to explain the status of his card, he responded with “a familiar phrase that is symbolized by the raising of one’s middle finger.” In fact, only three TCWM authors were prosecuted, and only JM went to prison. Years later, when Steve’s father, asked General Hershey, head of the selective service system, why Steve had not been prosecuted, Hershey said the government “wanted to get me [but] the political atmosphere in Boston was such that they passed.” A ruling by Federal Judge Charles Wyzanski[4] that allowed CO status to be granted for moral but non-religious opposition to a specific war made it unlikely that anyone could be successfully prosecuted in Boston for refusing induction.

Thirty TCWM contributors did alternative service (without CO status). The majority of these served as teachers, Peace Corps or VISTA volunteers, or U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) officers.

Forty-two TCWM contributors avoided the draft through medical or psychiatric deferments, along a spectrum from deliberate fakery to marginal conditions that may have been technically but not literally disqualifying, to serious conditions that should clearly exclude anyone from military service. Notably, only seven contributors admitted to faking conditions that enabled them to evade the draft.

JL, a well-known actor (p. 249-51) secured a permanent exclusion (4-F). “In the week leading up to my physical, I lived the life of another person…I struggled to induce in myself a feverish state of anxiety, depression and near madness. … On the morning, I reported for my physical I was an ashen, quivering, foul-smelling mess…[M]y session [was] the most persuasive performance I had ever given.”

Thirteen TCWM contributors were able through various means to delay being called up until the draft lottery in November 1969 and then got “good numbers.” IB obtained repeated postponements of his draft physical: “the necessary forms were filed, and I never heard from the draft board again.”

Almost all agreed with the classmate who wrote that “the War in Vietnam profoundly affected my life.” After JLreceived his 4-F classification, “A sense of shame stayed with me for years and has never entirely disappeared. Some of that shame had to do with the vast suffering caused by the Vietnam War, suffering which I so conveniently avoided…There was another source of my shame. I didn’t get out of the army by acting. I got out by lying.”

His son enlisted in the military but RS didn’t tell him about his own “draft dodging…He paid his dues to his county. I didn’t” (AD 51). JO wrote of his own conflicted feelings during his time as a Naval officer (p 379): “On a military base, greeted at the gate by saluting Marines, I felt proud to be an American warrior, but …could no longer avoid my own… complicity…Once advocating for the oppressed, I had become one with the oppressors.” BL (p 241) was a PHS officer. “Looking back,” he wrote, “I feel a mixture of gratitude and guilt for having ‘served’ in what was sometimes derisively called the “Yellow Berets.”

JP (AD, p 49) wrote of the persistent “corrosive effect of the war on families…Multiplied by the number of families for whom the war generated anger and division, the cost was significant, and some of those wounds never had a chance to heal.”

PC (p 97) had been prosecuted for turning in his draft card but was able to delay his induction until he aged out of the draft. He concluded “I’m glad that I did it. It made me feel clean for the rest of my life.”

The war and the draft posed deadly serious and unavoidable questions, whose answers grew out of a tangle of moral, ideological, strategic, and, yes, selfish concerns. Our class faced them and answered them in many ways – but by and large we did so with thought, reflection, and often with pain, regret, and self-doubt, as well as with resolve, moral courage, and pride. Some of us changed our views on our decisions over the time since. But, regardless of what we decided and what we ended up feeling about our choices, we can probably all resonate with SG’s (p. 142) lament that Vietnam “was a war that can make grown men cry without warning -- years and years later.” We should certainly add, our Radcliffe sisters and so many other women—who faced the consequences of, among other acts of resistance to the War, “saying yes to men who say no.”

The senselessness of the Vietnam War amplified the tragedies that in more just or justifiable wars would somehow be considered “worth it.” As we approach Veterans’ Day and Marine Corps Birthday, the story of Ed Kochanowski of South Boston and Paul Grasso of Quincy, told by Kevin Cullen in the Boston Globe[5], exceeds mere “tragedy.” They were fellow Marine “grunts” and close buddies in 3rd Marine Division, in which I also served in Vietnam, as did my father in the South Pacific in World War II. On a patrol near Khe Sanh in April 1968, they were climbing a steep stream bank when Kochanowski fell and Grasso grabbed the barrel of his M-16 to help pull him up onto dry ground. Kochanowski’s rifle accidently discharged and killed Grasso. In his agony over having killed Grasso, Kochanowski suffered years of PTSD. Just a few months ago, entirely by chance, he met Paul Grasso’s son Ray. “I’m the one; It was me,” Kochanowski told him. “Both men began sobbing, folding into each other…Grasso …said ‘I want you to know, I hold nothing against you. We never blamed you, never’…Kochanowski is now an adopted member of the Grasso family.”

Ed Kochanowski (left) and Ray Grasso comforted one another at the gravesite of Ray’s brother, Vietnam Marine Paul Grasso, at Mount Wollaston Cemetery in Quincy. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff

This tragedy has a quasi-happy ending. But it is nowhere near enough to heal the hurt and anguish of Vietnam or America or to exonerate the men who brought us this senseless War.

[1] Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. London: Allen Lane, 2012.

[2] Faulks, Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War, New York: Vintage International, 1997, pp 205-221.

[3] Deposited in the Harvard University Archives: 209 total contributions, 183 from Harvard, 26 from Radcliffe; 5 withheld their contributions from the archives, 10 did not transfer copyright to Harvard, 4 restricted use of their contributions.

[4] U.S. v. Sisson 297 FSupp 902 (D. Mass., 1969). The defendant in this case was another Harvard student.

[5] Kevin Cullen, “After accidently killing a fellow Marine in Vietnam, a Boston veteran spend the next 57 years on a journey to find peace,” Boston Globe, November 6, 2025.

Why do we love a book or any work of art? What makes a masterpiece? We may simply accept its critical acclaim and reputation; we may admire its structure, quality of prose, or other technical strengths, or the creativity of its characters or subjects, or the story a great book tells; or, finally, its personal resonance, the shock of recognition it offers, may be over-riding factors. A masterpiece always speaks to a reader in a personal way. Moreover, personal relevance is not necessarily confined to a single or even a small number of individuals.

This is why I love J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Of course, the novel has been critically acclaimed and sold millions of copies and is dearly loved by many. I have not made a systematic study of the critical literature on Catcher but I suspect that its praise is less often based on its technical merits than on its emotional and sociopolitical qualities.

It would be difficult to imagine two more different literary “masterpieces” than Catcher and Moby Dick, which I recently read for the first time at the behest of my friend Steve Saltonstall who was outraged that it didn’t make “the Brotherhood 24.” Melville’s stylistic complexity, delivery of lengthy contextual essays, and use of symbolism contrasts dramatically with Salinger’s pretty straightforward rendering of a lonely and troubled adolescent boy in a world of “phonies.” Moby Dick is undoubtedly termed a “masterpiece” much more often than Catcher. In my mind, however, they qualify equally.

Holden and Me

Why is Catcher so personally powerful for me? Like many, I first read the novel when I was in high school. My generation of Americans came of age and reached young adulthood in the 1960s. Ours was really the first to challenge and reject the dictates and “truths” propounded by our parents and government. The men of my generation, and their lovers, friends, and families, faced existential decisions whether to participate in or support the Vietnam War, whose moral and strategic misguidedness were becoming clearer to many of us every day.

Holden Caulfield prefigured the Sixties generation. He was a forerunner, along with the “Beats” of the late forties and early fifties, in rejecting the empty materialism, insensitivity, and phoniness of post-War II middle class white American life. In my original reading, Holden Caulfield represented for me the sad and probably doomed romantic idealist I thought I was becoming and whom I weirdly considered a role model in my own privileged adolescence. I loved that he “was crazy about The Great Gatsby” (p183), which I reread every year. Salinger reportedly said “God, how I loved Fitzgerald when I was young. Hemingway, too, of course. But Hemingway has none of Fitzgerald’s intellectual power. He’s all instinct” (Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World, p 142).

In the summer of 1964, following my freshman year at Harvard and my first summer camp in the Marine Corps’ Platoon Leaders’ Class, I started writing a novel. This gave new meaning to the term “derivative.” I made an epigraph of the advice given Holden by his former teacher Mr. Antolini: “the mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one,” but added: “This, I hope to refute.” At the beginning, I quoted Holden about avoiding “all that David Copperfield kind of crap” but then I did “feel like going into it.” My plot also drew on one of Salinger’s Nine Stories, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” It was to be an autobiographical novel based on my predicted future life and death as a doomed romantic. I don’t know if I really believed my life would play out like this, but I sensed the story would certainly win me a lot of sympathy. My protagonist Will’s parents would be divorced when he was twelve, after his father left his mother for another woman (this was true of my parents). Will was broken up about the divorce and consequently slow to develop socially. He ends up living with his father and stepmother but misses his mother tremendously. “Christ, did he ever think a lot,” my narrator says. Will tries to find a substitute for his mother in repeated crushes on girls, who largely reject him for getting too serious too quickly.

Holden repeatedly comments on “girls:” “I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls, every time they do something pretty…you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy.” At the same time, Holden also realizes that girls can really make you happy. Like Jane, who “was terrific to hold hands with” (p. 103). That’s about as far as I went with my first “girlfriends.”

I wrote only two chapters of my novel but, long story short, my character was going to take his own life at an early age. In the introduction, the narrator tells the story of an older man who committed suicide by stepping out into traffic and was heard to say before he died: “It was beautiful, wasn’t it? I’m glad it turned out so well. Just like I planned.” Of course, thoughts of suicide are prominent in Catcher.

On rereading it, Salinger’s novel only reinforces my deeply mixed feelings for my past and that of my country. Even as I approach my 80^th birthday, I still wistfully remember myself as the doomed romantic I considered myself when I first read the novel 65 years ago.

Bob Dylan may be considered in some respects an heir to Holden. In “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1965), a rapid-fire mélange of rebellion, iconoclasm, and ridicule, Dylan sang, variously: “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters;” “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows;” and “The pump don’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handle.”

Holden is not explicitly political, but very much implicitly so, like many of Dylan’s songs. Similarly, Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 film The Graduate represents alienated and rebellious youth but there is no mention of the Vietnam War, civil rights, or other contemporary political issues. Holden is an iconoclast in his descriptions of things. On the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall, he offers that “Old Jesus probably would’ve puked if He could see it” (p. 178, although note the capitalization of He). And, famously, Salinger includes several “fucks” scrawled on school and museum walls. These transgressions of language etiquette have prompted attempts to ban Catcher immediately post-publication and again in the recent resurgence of book banning by evangelical “Christians” and other right-wingers.

My personal associations with Catcher appear in several other details of Holden’s story. Early in the book he tells of running away from his prep school campus toward the house of a sympathetic teacher on an icy afternoon: “I don’t even know what I was running for…” (p 8). At the end of a raucous cast party after our high school production of “Inherit the Wind,” we had pretty much trashed the absent parents’ house. Several friends and I went running through a stubbled corn field behind the house to burn some drunken energy. Whenever I have remembered and told this story, I always described it in Holden’s words: “I didn’t even know what we were running for;” or, in my inchoate youthful alienation, running away from.

Holden frequently expresses loneliness and sadness, often unexpectedly and inexplicably. During a conversation with his prep-school dorm neighbor Ackley, he says “I felt so lonely all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead” (p 62). Looking at the dress his hired sex worker had hung in his hotel room closet “made me feel sad as hell—I don’t know why exactly” (p. 125). Significantly, Holden does not have sex with her but simply asks if they could talk. When Holden’s mother bought him the wrong kind of ice skates, he says “Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad” (p. 67). I often recall feeling this way, too. I remember feeling particularly sad about receiving a certain toy car in my Easter basket, maybe because it happened during the time of my parents’ breakup.

After my parents were divorced and both remarried, I ended up living with my father and stepmother in Philadelphia. I would visit my mother and stepfather in Rhode Island at Thanksgiving and Christmastime. I remember my New Haven Railroad train stopping by the United Illuminating plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Suddenly, I began sobbing uncontrollably because I missed my mother so much. I was 12 or 13 years old. I don’t think I suffered from clinical depression, but I do recall episodes of deep but sometimes unfocused sadness.

On the other hand, as an adolescent, and continuing as an adult, I have treasured times from my past – such as the idyllic summers at my grandparents’ “camp” in the Adirondacks. And I have wished those times would always stay the same in my memory. Holden has a similar wish when he tells us how every time his sister Phoebe visits a museum and sees the same pieces of art, she is a different person and may perceive them differently. This troubles him: “Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone” (p 158). My daughter Abigail frequently notes in the logbook of our camp in Maine that it is always the same place of peace and quiet as it was when she first came here as an eight-year-old in 1989. (It is where I now sit writing this in view of the lake and mountains.)

Although this is somewhat vaguely revealed at the very beginning and the very end, Salinger has Holden tell his story from a psychiatric institution in California. As I was thinking of how to end this essay, I returned to perhaps my favorite Bob Dylan song “Chimes of Freedom.” This is an anthem for all sorts of courageous and miserable people, and most tellingly for:

The lonesome hearted lovers with too personal a tale…,

the aching ones, whose wounds cannot be nursed,…

the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse,

and for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe…

Strangely, however, hope comes in the form of a mixed metaphor: “And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.” This ambiguous ending may only confirm the power and endurance of the feelings of sadness and despair in Holden’s life (and sometimes in mine). As if to confirm this, Salinger ends the novel with Holden expressing regret for having “told so many people…about all this stuff…Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody” (pp 276-77). This is how I ended the first draft of my essay. But, then….

Jerry and Joyce

Mike and Kenny thought my draft was “too elliptical,” that I didn’t “connect the dots”

between Holden’s story and my life clearly enough. In an effort to do this, I turned – with some reluctance and trepidation – to the relationship between 18-year-old Yale student Joyce Maynard and 53-year-old J.D. (Jerry) Salinger in 1972-1973, more than 20 years after Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye. It took Maynard 25 years to be willing and able to tell this story in her memoir At Home in the World (Picador, 1998). Perhaps not coincidentally, my reading of Morning Prayer today included this advice from Jesus: “For there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light” (Mark 4:22).

At Home in the World was and continues to be quite controversial and its veracity – and, indeed, the appropriateness of Maynard’s revelations, even if true – have been questioned. I have not surveyed these issues from varying perspectives but, perhaps because of the powerful personal resonance for me of Maynard’s tale, I choose to take it at face value.

The story of “Jerry and Joyce” has caused me to question my initial take on “Holden and Me.” This has been disillusioning in some ways but enlightening in others. I began this essay with some reasons that a reader might love a book. But I was indeed “elliptical” in stating one of these reasons: the reputation of the author. Yes, this might refer to their authorial or artistic reputation, but it might also reflect their personal qualities and behaviors. As Claire Dederer writes, “monsters” can and do produce brilliant works of art (Dederer, Monsters, 2023). The story of Alice Munro provides further evidence of this fact. Joyce Maynard may not explicitly present Jerry Salinger as a monster, but her story surely merits at least Joan Baez’s comment to Dylan in the 2024 film “A Complete Unknown:” “Bob, you’re kind of an asshole.” In fact, I would argue for dropping the qualifier “kind of,” because Jerry does come across as a complete hypocrite who seriously abused Joyce emotionally and psychologically.

Salinger’s fundamental hypocrisy is that he creates Holden Caulfield as the doomed romantic, unflinching paragon of truthfulness and genuineness, and the unsparing identifier and critic of “phonies,” when in fact he is the worst phony of them all. Jerry is almost unfailingly kind, gentle, and respectful to others but belittling, contemptuous, and dismissive of them in private. Joyce writes that “Jerry can be moody and angry, and even his humor is tinged with a sharp, practically sneering bitterness that scares me. His assessments of most people around him are withering, even brutal…[He laments that] ‘God, the world is full of dreary fools.’”

Perhaps it’s just that Jerry has gotten bitter with age, but it's hard to fathom how someone like this could ever have produced Holden Caulfield. The scary implication is that Holden isn’t all that I, and millions of readers, have cracked him up to be. Maybe he’s really just, as a recent critic puts it, “a shrill, obnoxious, judgmental, whiney arrogant kid…[who] speaks for a distinctly narrow demographic – spoiled, horny, white, private-school educated agnostic American male children of privilege.” (https://salempress.com/Critical-Insights-The-Catcher-in-the-Rye.). I certainly fall into at least some of these categories.

If Holden is not really what we thought and think he was – the sensitive, ethical, moral, wise beyond his years youth – what does that make me and my supposed 60s generation of idealists and strivers for justice and peace?

Joyce Maynard is, of course, part of that generation. Her first memoir, published when she was nineteen, is titled Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties (Doubleday, 1973). As she reveals much later, this book left out the most important parts: living with Jerry, in whose house she wrote most of it, and her deeply conflicted relationship with her parents, including her father’s alcoholism. She left this stuff out because she wanted to present herself as the person others wanted her to be. Moreover, at some level, she believed she really was an exemplar of all that was good and admirable in the 60s generation.

She hadn’t read Catcher until after Salinger began writing to her at Yale after she published an article in the New York Times Magazine. They began a friendly and increasingly torrid correspondence which led to her leaving Yale and moving in with him in his mountaintop New Hampshire home. Maybe it’s just in retrospect, but fairly early in their correspondence Joyce hints at Jerry’s hypocrisy and emotional abusiveness: “In nearly every letter, he assures me he’s no sage. Then he gives me more advice…Even as he tells me I must never think of pleasing people, there is one person I want to please more than any other. Him” (p 76).

Joyce says she “read with particular interest the passages…about Holden’s dealings with girls. Like me [and I should say, like me as well, for a long time], Holden Caulfield remains a virgin…He has to like the girl a whole lot. But, in the end, the only girl he really loves is his little sister…Reading [Jerry’s] description of Phoebe makes me love her. I want Jerry to feel about me the way he does about Phoebe” (p. 88). Apart from this hope, which she doesn’t say she ever told Jerry, there are only a few other mentions of Holden or Catcher in her conversations with him.

In fact, part of Jerry’s emotional abuse of Joyce is that his love for her, such as it is, is more like that of an all-knowing adult for an entirely dependent child, which she is not – and neither is Phoebe, for that matter.

Holden hardly mentions his parents or his relationship with them but this could be considered attribution of guilt by omission. The abusive adult-child relationship between Jerry and Joyce and its painful effects brought me to a fuller realization of how similarly hurtful was my relationship with my father. He always seemed to treat me as a naïve, cowardly, child-like person no matter my age, and as a “shitbird” rather than a real U.S. Marine

So many tangled relationships and connections, among novelist, lover, characters, reader/essayist, and all of their families!

As noted, Holden is presented as sort of an apolitical idealist. But Jerry’s abusive hypocrisy goes well beyond this. Joyce writes: “The actual man behind the beloved character of Holden Caulfield…possesses contempt for much of what young people embrace on campuses like mine [Yale]…He barely mentions politics or world affairs—even in this election year [McGovern vs. Nixon, 1972], with the Vietnam War still going on and the early news of the Watergate break-in

soon to hit the news (p. 86). When Joyce fondly recalls singing “This Land is Your Land” at a Pete Seeger concert, Jerry responds “You can only go on for so many verses before people start remembering how much everyone else actually irritates the hell out of them” (p. 158).

Jerry is increasingly cruel and insensitive in his relationship with Joyce. He ends the relationship abruptly and sends her away: “I can never have any more children [they have planned to have children together and Joyce dearly wants to]. I’m finished with this…You’d better go home now.” She says he spoke “with a coldness I have never known before from him.” But this belies the clearly abusive tone and effect of so many things she has reported him saying to her over the course of their relationship.

Final Thoughts

I forced myself to stop reading At Home in the World on page 212, where Joyce says “It’s over that quickly.” There are 135 pages left. Joyce’s life goes on, and I think she largely prevails. I assume she has some concluding remarks to make about her relationship with Jerry Salinger. And so did many other people. Maybe I’ll get to them sometime. But for now, I have to stop and sort out what it means to me and my view of The Catcher in the Rye. I wonder how someone so morally and ethically flawed as J.D. Salinger could create a character who seems so perceptive, truthful, and morally and ethically demanding of himself and others. And if I see myself in Holden Caulfield and consider him a preview of all that was good and true in my 60s generation, what does this say about my own goodness, truthfulness, and genuineness, and those qualities in my generation?

My obsession with truth rears its ugly head – as it does so often now in the midst of this Trumpian assault on truth-telling and the very idea of truth. I’m afraid I can’t give a definitive answer to the question. I still love the book and love Holden, and Phoebe. Two very good old friends named their first daughter after Phoebe. I still hope that what I think I see in Holden and Phoebe is what was really there. And maybe what Jerry intended to be there, if only as better versions of himself. And I hope that, in the end, I can follow in their true footsteps. I’m sorry I’m still a bit “elliptical” about all this!

From our house at the edge of Moosehead Lake, the visual relation of water to mountains and islands shifts frequently from indistinct to sharply clear. This morning, as I looked at the indistinct version of this scene, I was continuing to reflect on my feelings about the American War in Vietnam and my complicit role in it. Then, my eye caught a paper on the table on which one of my granddaughters last summer had placed a number of dots with variously colored markers.

Last evening, I was listening to the music that comprises the playlist of my story of the War and my relationship with Nancy, who became my wife of 55 years, and still going strong. Then, while I was eating my breakfast, I received a text message from my brother-in-law Steve reminding that me today is the 81^st anniversary of D-Day. His (and Nancy’s) father had served as a naval officer on that day. The text included Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s famous letter to the invading force on the eve of D-Day. Inspiringly and truthfully, Eisenhower wrote:

“The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving peopleeverywhere march with you…. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!...Good luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking….”

I began to have a vision of the dots connecting, of the indistinct becoming clearer. Why am I so obsessed with the past, and particularly that part of my past that is about Vietnam? I chose for epigraphs to my memoir two excerpts of poetry. The first is from my friend Jerry Costanzo in “Report from the Past” a poem he dedicated to me in 1972, when I was a graduate student in history: “This is the past, /an intimate diamond, /reappearing.” I didn’t include in the epigraph the final line of that poem: “This is the voice of/history saying/I keep repeating myself/please forgive me.” The other excerpt is from Bill Ehrhart, who also wrote the forward to my book and has become a good friend. Bill modestly but I think wrongly resists his often-conferred sobriquet of “poet laureate of the Vietnam War.” Its accuracy is somewhat confirmed by the line I chose: “Vietnam. Not a day goes by/without that word on my lips.”

The realization that struck me last evening and this morning was that my obsession with the past may result from the stark importance of the era in which my generation came of age and entered our prime years of adulthood. The men of my American generation, and their lovers, friends, and families, faced existential decisions whether to participate in or support a war whose moral and strategic misguidedness were becoming clearer every day. As documented powerfully in “The Choices We Made,” a project of my Harvard College Class of 1967 for our 50^th reunion, these choices were not only grave in their immediate effects but also in our consciences years and years later.

Our generation was really the first to challenge and reject the dictates and “truths” propounded by our parents and government. The Vietnam War and Watergate were principal drivers of this rebellion, and the great music of the time provided not only its soundtrack but also the inspiration and endorsement of the resistance and the positive vision of the future it proclaimed and fought to achieve. Holden Caulfield prefigured the Sixties generation in The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which I recently reread with two friends as part of an exploration of books we had previously read; what they originally meant to us and what they mean now. Originally, Holden Caulfield represented the sad and probably doomed romantic idealist I thought I was becoming and whom I weirdly considered a role model in my own adolescence. Now, Salinger’s novel only reinforces my deeply mixed feelings for my past and that of my country. Bob Dylan may be considered in some respects an heir of Holden. In “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1965), a rapid-fire mélange of rebellion, iconoclasm, and ridicule, Dylan sang, variously: “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters;” “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows;” and “The pump don’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handle.”

The “vibe” and melody of the music, as much as the explicit lyrics, influenced us profoundly. In his memoir Hitchhiking Home from Danang (2024), Marine Vietnam veteran Gerald McCarthy names each of his fifty-two chapters for a song. But he rarely explains why or how that song informed that chapter or was related to the story told in it. This may have been because the connections are elusive and difficult to explain but nonetheless profound and enduring.

McCarthy’s story speaks painfully of the philosophical and emotional turmoil of the War and its legacies:

“I think the hasty enlistment [in the Marines] was born of the vague ideas I had about whatit meant to be a soldier, what the movies had fed me about glory and duty and the “old lies.”...I was just six months into being 18. I was idealistic, naïve, ignorant of the very truths that came in like waves, truths I was still unable to recognize….It took some time to lose the idealism, even after coming home—It was like a shadow I couldn’t shake, a logjam I couldn’t break out of, and things kept piling up and so I turned inward to drugs and drinking, anything to escape and pretend.” (pp. 105-06)

The “old lies” were not all untrue. Eisenhower’s letter to the D-Day troops was truthful about America’s ideals and purposes in that war. By contrast, the Vietnam War, even if you weren’t decidedly against it, was a war whose purpose and justification were at best unclear. This was largely because our leaders consistently lied to us about them. The result was a collapse of trust in the government. All of this made the people who served in Vietnam much more prone to post-traumatic stress, addiction, and other psychosocial suffering than those who fought in previous wars.

Of course, the positive visions of the Sixties generation were not fully achieved by the movements of the time or by the generations that followed. Still, their memory remains not only regretful and angry for its failures and perhaps dismissive of its naivete and myopic idealism, but also wistfully beloved. Maybe I’m projecting too much. Maybe I wasn’t angry enough and still am not angry enough to join the movements for justice and change more actively. My penchant has been to intellectualize what should be irresistible moral imperatives. Maybe that will always be my way. I may finally be getting old enough to forgive myself. But my evolving exploration of my feelings and doubts, and the current political situation of our country, may also portend some increase in commitment to resistance and justice. My thought is evolving on two dimensions— faith and patriotism – and their interactions.

Deepening Faith

In recent months, I have felt my Christian faith deepening. This deepening remains substantially intellectual, but I have experienced some inklings of God’s presence. During Advent, shortly after the 2024 election, I was feeling pretty hopeless and I decided that, for whatever it might be worth, I should start praying more. So, I began an effort to read Morning Prayer every day. It is a beautiful, and beautifully brief, service of psalms, scripture, and prayers. I guess from my obsession with the past, I chose to read the traditional Rite 1 version from the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible version of the readings, although their meaning is sometimes opaque. I did substitute some gender-inclusive language in the prayers. As I repeat the psalms, canticles, and prayers day after day and read long sections of scripture according to the “daily office” lectionary, my thoughts often focus on the abstract beauty of the language, but also increasingly on the spiritual teaching and moral and political guidance they offer. Frequently, my mind would wander as I read a familiar prayer, almost from memory. I would start connecting the dots. I realize that praying is not enough.

Maybe Trump advisor Kelly Anne Conway was onto something when she relied on “alternative facts.” This theory works if you’re a good, right-thinking person, but is dangerous if you’re not.

If there is such a thing as a “higher truth” it may be perceived by assessing facts and their implications or effects. We might call this “instrumental truth,” that is to say that the spiritual and moral value of a truth is based on its effects on the pursuit of justice, peace, and the greater good.

This morning one of the scripture readings was from the letter to the Hebrews which states that God’s “new covenant” (8:13) with Israel through Jesus “made the first one obsolete [8:13]…for they did not continue in [it] and so I had no concern for them” [8:9]. [1] This appears to be one of many passages in the New Testament that may contain facts but could also promote Anti-Semitism.

I always knew that Jesus was a Jew but, thanks to my friend Rabbi David Starr, who is also a fellow historian, I have realized the equally important spiritual truth that Jews and Christians worship and pray to the same God. I would argue that true Judaism is not the Judaism of Netanyahu any more than true Christianity is that of Christian Zionists or Christian Nationalists. True followers of Jesus and true keepers of God’s covenant with Israel share a zeal for justice and love that are required by the teachings of both.

Yesterday’s scripture passages included Jesus’s parable of the “Good Samaritan” who took care of the man beaten and stripped by robbers (Luke 10:25-37). This story typifies the Golden Rule: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12 NRSV)—a version of which, by the way, occurs in every major religion. Jesus provides the implication of the parable when he tells the lawyer who is questioning him about it to “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).

For me, repetition of instrumental truths somehow strengthens my belief in their absolute truth and force. I am aware that this can also be a dangerous tendency since Trump’s repetition of lies similarly leads some to solidify their belief in those. And even if repetition does not strengthen belief in instrumental truths, at least it increases hope that they are true. So many of the Psalms begin with seemingly quixotic laments about being besieged by one’s enemies and condemned by one’s own iniquities but end with assurances that God will intervene to save and forgive.

In March, New York Times resident Trump apologist Ross Douthat published a column titled "Can the Jesus of History Support the Christ of Faith?" This presented various esoteric arguments for and against the literal truth of Jesus’s resurrection. In response, I wrote Douthat a letter (which was not published):

“All this is beside the point. As a Christian, to me the most important answer to your title question is not whether Jesus literally rose from the dead or which historical evidence is most convincing on that point. Instead, it is whether we believe that Jesus taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves and whether our faith enables us to follow that challenging imperative. Sorry, but I find your writings on Christianity and politics, like those of many supposed ‘evangelicals,’ largely devoid of this perspective.”

I am trying to follow the spiritual truth of Jesus’s teachings while recognizing and seeking to correct the wrongs done in their disregard or perversion.

Nuanced Patriotism

I do love my country. One of the most insulting and outrageous of Trump’s lies is that all who oppose him hate America. I share the brand of patriotism articulated by Presidents Obama and Biden: I love the promise, even though not entirely fulfilled, of our fundamental values as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the principles of our system of government laid out in the Constitution. As a historian and a citizen, I celebrate the times we have lived up to those values – as reflected in Eisenhower’s D-Day letter – and faithfully implemented those principles but recognize where we have fallen short and need to measure up.

Tim O’Brien’s formulation of “instrumental truth” in The Things They Carried (pp. 88-89) is relevant here: “…in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true…Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” This is acceptable and often effective and valuable in a “Work of Fiction” as O’Brien was careful to label The Things They Carried. But this is not so for historians and citizens who genuinely love their country and are committed to telling the true and complete story of our past. Our telling of history should not contain any “true…stories [in] which nothing is ever absolutely true.” We should always tell what really happened or failed to happen, both good and bad, to the best of our knowledge and abilities.

Of course, history is not always or even most often peopled by humans of unadulterated good or evil. As Jesus taught, we should learn to respect and forgive people who may have acted bravely but cruelly in service of noble causes or even of questionable or misguided ones. For me, this has meant coming to love my fellow Marine Vietnam veterans, many of whom saw horrific combat and suffered serious physical and psychological injury. They did what they felt they had to do or were driven to do. They loved their country and continue to do so, even though many of them have come to see the wrongness of the war in which they gave so much. Marines and other Vietnam veterans have been leaders of the remarkable work of reconciliation between the U.S. and Vietnam since the war. This work has helped to mitigate and heal the wounds of war inflicted on Vietnam and advance the health and socioeconomic prosperity of the Vietnamese people.

As I got to know and become friends with more of my Marine compatriots at a series of reunions of our Basic School class, I realized that “Semper Fi” is not the empty slogan “Thank you for your service” too often is, but a statement of character that befits the vast majority of Marines. During last year’s reunion at Quantico, just a few weeks before the election, I had the chance to meet and thank Marine General John Kelly, who had been Trump’s Chief of Staff but had just referred to him as a “fascist” in a New York Times interview. Earlier that day, we had heard a briefing on the Basic School’s training curriculum. The briefing officer was careful to point out that all Marine officers, and indeed all appointed and elected military and civilian officers of the U.S. Government, swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, not the President or any other specific person. Fulfillment of this oath is currently under challenge by Trump’s illegal deployment of active-duty Marines to quell protests in Los Angeles.

For a long time, I shunned identification as a Marine veteran, but no longer. I can be proud of my service, even though I was a not particularly competent Marine officer who strongly opposed the war in which I served.

And so, I continue trying to connect the dots…and act accordingly.

[1] Here, I use the wording from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), in which the implications are even clearer than in the King James Version.

https://newrepublic.com/article/195302/vietnam-war-50-years-poignant-celebration-victory

In the 1960s, at least one-third of Americans[1] were forced by the draft to make an existential decision: whether to participate in an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. This was unique in American history, both before and since Vietnam—perhaps until now. Before Vietnam, there had been other wars into which men were conscripted, but these were not so controversial. And we have had wars after Vietnam, but they were fought by volunteers, since the draft had been abolished. We may now have entered the first comparable period of compulsory existential choices since Vietnam.

Harvard College has never been fully representative of America, despite its pretensions. In all probability, I would not have been admitted to the Class of 1967 had I not been a fourth-generation legacy. But the experience of Harvard students does offer some valuable insights into how Americans responded to the Vietnam war over time. This past fall, I audited Fredrik Logevall’s Harvard course on the Vietnam War. Fred invited me to give a guest lecture on my experience of Harvard and the War. Subsequently, David Starr, a friend and fellow historian, has joined me in a deeper inquiry into “Harvard’s Vietnam,” through the lens of my class.

We are reading Harvard’s daily newspaper, the Crimson, from 1960 to 1968, and the more than two hundred submissions to The Choices We Made, a project for our class’s 50^th reunion.[2] These sources demonstrate the seriousness with which we ultimately took the war and the decisions we were all forced to make about it. We were a highly privileged group who had many strategies available to us that most young Americans did not enjoy. Many of us arranged for medical and psychological exemptions – some real and some fraudulent. Many also resisted, turning in or burning their draft cards, thereby subjecting themselves to arrest and imprisonment. Some fled to Canada or Europe. Others were able to obtain conscientious objector status, with or without a religious basis. Quite a few exploited connections with their draft boards to simply be overlooked and “never get the letter.” Others were able to avoid the draft until the lottery in December 1969 gave them “good numbers.” Only about 40 (3%) of my classmates served in the war and two died.

During our years at Harvard College, our class and the university slowly engaged with a war that was at first just simmering but then exploding. President Kennedy was assassinated two months into our freshman year, and the Civil Rights movement was foremost for many. Many of our classmates were focused on their studies, but many (like me) were also partying, loving the great music of the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, the Byrds, and the rest, and cheering on Harvard’s football and hockey teams.

At first, the Crimson didn’t have much coverage of the war-- the Tonkin Gulf “incident” and subsequent “blank check” Congressional resolution happened during summer vacation in 1964 –and was followed by LBJ’s landslide election. Some parodied Johnson’s campaign slogan as “Part of the Way with LBJ.” The Crimson did not even report the first U.S. combat units landing in Danang in March 1965. This coincided with “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, which received more attention. As the war heated up and more American troops were sent later in the spring there were a few mentions of professors signing public statements against the war (one was side-by-side with photos of students climbing into a Radcliffe dormitory during a “panty raid”[3]), and several hundred students attending an SDS-sponsored demonstration in Washington. As late as October 1965, however, SDS disavowed any direct resistance to the draft.[4]

Escalation of the war continued through 1965 and into 1966 with intensified bombing, increased troop levels, and much more serious and costly battles with the North Vietnamese Army and main force Vietcong. Senator J. William Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in early 1966 began to expose the moral and strategic misguidedness of the war and our government’s “credibility gap.” I began to think that if Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom,”[5] Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction”[6] (a #1 hit, but banned by some radio stations, including Boston’s WBZ, as “too controversial”[7]) and the other music I was listening to constantly was right, the war must be wrong.

I turned against the war and decided to withdraw from the Marine Corps officer candidate program I had joined in 1964. My father threatened to disown me if I did this, but I was unable to stand up to him. I stayed in the Marine Corps and went to the war. I was a supply officer at a field hospital in Vietnam and saw no combat. The “silver lining” of my service was that it led me to jump at the chance to go back to Vietnam after the war and try to do something to atone for the harm we (and I) had done there. I lived in Hanoi for five years, working on HIV/AIDS projects, and came to love Vietnam as a second home.[8]

In a famous 1975 article, James Fallows lamented that “so many of the bright young college men opposed the war [but]so few were willing to resist the draft rather than simply evade it.”[9] But which was the chicken and which the egg: the wrongness of the war or the wish to avoid it? Regardless, the choices my classmates and at least one third of our fellow Americans faced were increasingly clear and present. Those choices loomed larger and more ominous as we advanced toward our senior year and the likely end of our student draft deferments. Hundreds of students confronted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when he came to Harvard in November 1966. In response to a question from my roommate Steve Saltonstall, McNamara claimed not to know how many civilians we were killing in Vietnam.

For my classmates and millions of young Americans, the war “became personal…it was a time of millions of very personal decisions.” The most prominent themes across all the contributions to The Choices We Made were the deadly serious implications of our choices, how many of us agonized over them, and how many of us felt troubled or ashamed about them. Many who evaded the draft said they regretted that their avoidance had made it necessary for others to go in their places and possibly be killed, wounded, or suffer irreparable psychological harm. Almost all of us wrote something like “the War in Vietnam profoundly affected my life.”

The War in Vietnam was a long time ago. All my fellow Vietnam veterans and Harvard classmates are now old. But we must and do remember what it was like to face those choices and then to reflect on our decisions over a lifetime since. One classmate wrote that the Vietnam war “can make grown men cry without warning, years and years later.”

Those who lived through Vietnam may have a unique perspective on whether our country has learned the lessons of that war. It is quite possible that America is now in a time when an even larger share of our people will face choices equally difficult yet perhaps even more momentous. Arguably, the vast majority of Vietnam veterans and certainly of my classmates who contributed to The Choices We Made, whatever their original views of the war, now believe it was at best a serious mistake. I hope our experiences and the evolution of our views will lead us to be in the vanguard of a movement to save our system of government and finally achieve the promise of its avowed principles.

[1] According to census estimates, there were 16 million draft-age American males in 1966. Assuming two parents and two friends or spouses/partners for each makes 64 million, or 33% of the total population of 195 million.

[2] Deposited in the Harvard Archives.

[3] Harvard Crimson, May 10, 1965, p. 1.

[4] “SDS Draft Position,” Harvard Crimson, October 28, 1965.

[5] For lyrics, see https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/chimes-freedom/.

[6] For lyrics, see https://genius.com/Barry-mcguire-eve-of-destruction-lyrics.

[7] “’Eve’ Destructed by Hub Stations,” Harvard Crimson, September 29, 1965, p. 1.

[8] Theodore M. Hammett, Entwined with Vietnam: A Reluctant Marine’s Tour and Return.” Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co., 2022.

[9] James Fallows, “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” Washington Monthly, October 1975.

The Trump/DOGE assault on USAID, CDC and other agencies that provide health and humanitarian services could destroy the U.S.-Vietnam strategic partnership. That partnership commits the U.S., through PEPFAR, the Global Fund, and other mechanisms administered through USAID and CDC, to provide lifesaving health and environmental support to the Vietnamese people. As reported today by Damien Cave, Vietnam correspondent of the New York Times, perhaps most important among these are programs addressing the legacies of the American War – removing unexploded ordinance, mitigating the human and environmental harms caused by Agent Orange, providing information and assistance to help Vietnam locate and repatriate the remains of hundreds of thousands of its soldiers missing in action, and supporting services for Vietnamese people and families who suffer from war-related disabilities. The loss of these U.S.- funded programs will seriously harm Vietnam’s people, not to speak of costing Vietnam thousands of well-paying jobs for people doing good and needed work for the country. Vietnam’s people and government cannot be entirely happy about this. As a veteran of the tragically misguided American War who subsequently lived and worked in Vietnam on HIV/AIDS and other public health issues, I love and care deeply about Vietnam.

Vietnam’s potential leverage to seek restoration of U.S. aid cuts lies in the bilateral strategic partnership, a pillar of U.S. policy to empower Vietnam as a regional counterweight to China. Drastic cuts in humanitarian and development aid arguably threaten U.S. strategic and security interests by opening more opportunities for China and Russia, among other adversaries, to come to the rescue, thereby increasing their influence and geopolitical power. Vietnam is an extreme case because of its proximity to China. This is a potentially effective card that Vietnam’s government could play if it chooses to do so.

However, Vietnam’s situation is complicated by the fact that its government has been cracking down on civil society organizations and NGOs, both domestic and international, that implement most of the humanitarian programs funded by U.S. assistance. The government has often withheld approval required to implement funded programs and jailed activists, policy advocates, and perceived dissidents. At the end of January 2025, a USAID-funded health project was finally approved by the Vietnamese government after more than a year of delays, only to have its funding shut down the very next day under the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid spending. Of course, Trump is a fan of authoritarian governments, so the Vietnamese government’s repression of “the enemy within” may not be of great concern to him. However, Trump should also be considering the value of Vietnam as a strategic ally.

It's possible that in this situation, “something’s gotta give.” Will it be Vietnam’s strategic partnership with the U.S. or its repression of civil society? Will the effects of these crosscurrents undermine the hard-earned reconciliation between the U.S. and Vietnam as we approach the 50^th anniversary of the end of the American War and the 30^th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations? If so, both countries will suffer serious short- and long-term harms. If not, our friendship and strategic partnership will prosper to our mutual benefit.

Top: Timothee Chalamet as Dylan at Newport, 1965. (Promotional photo for A Complete Unknown). Bottom: Bob Dylan “Goes electric,” Newport, 1965 (Alice Ochs/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images).

Why is this the title of the latest Bob Dylan movie? The line is, of course, from Dylan’s iconic “Like a Rolling Stone,” a song once, perhaps incestuously, ranked best rock ‘n’ roll song of all time by Rolling Stone magazine. In the song, Dylan’s line seems to be a putdown of a lover he has rejected or has rejected him, as he does even more pointedly in his contemporaneous “Positively Fourth Street.” However, it may also be about himself. As with so much about Bob Dylan, we must invariably add qualifiers like “may” or “seems.” The film prompted me to ask who Dylan was and is, both to himself and to others.

I liked A Complete Unknown very much and loved the music. As someone who lived through the Sixties and was profoundly influenced by the music of that time, it almost brought me to tears several times, not least when Dylan, Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper, and the band plunged into “Maggie’s Farm” at Newport, 1965. I wish I had been there to cheer him on, as most of the real audience ultimately did that night.

Not surprisingly given the subject, the film has met with wildly mixed reviews. Most praise the acting and singing performances and admit that, as a typical biopic, it tells a good and satisfying, if somewhat historically inaccurate, story. On the other hand, one reviewer dismissed it as a “disaster” made purely as “Oscar-bait” for Timothee Chalamet [Odie Henderson, “‘A Complete Unknown’ is a Complete Disaster.” Boston Globe, December 23, 2024]. Another has little to say about the film itself other than to imply that Dylan is such a worthless person and artist that he doesn’t deserve recognition in a prominent film [James Parker, “Bob Dylan’s Carnival Act.” The Atlantic, January 2025; in my original post, I mistakenly attributed this view to a different review of the film in The Atlantic].

Many of the reviews argue that the film lacks depth and character development and leaves out key facts of Dylan’s life or fails to explain them, such as his involvement in Civil Rights demonstrations, and how he was able to afford an apartment in the West Village without a day job. Principally, however, they complain that the film doesn’t help us understand Dylan better. As it’s the Christian season of Epiphany, we should be able to have one.

In hopes of deciding whether these criticisms were justified, I went back to see the film a second time and re-read Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric, on which the movie is loosely based. I liked A Complete Unknown even better the second time around. To me, Bob Dylan’s music is inarguably brilliant and evocative, but Bob Dylan the person remains a mystery.

Wald reveals that, in October 1962, between his first and second Columbia albums and more than two years before Bringin’ It All Back Home with its electric side, Dylan recorded several songs with a rock ‘n’ roll band. One of these, “Mixed-up Confusion” was released as his first single, which sank without a trace. Dylan claimed to have written it in a cab on the way to the studio [Wald, p. 82], but it contains several revealing lines: “There are too many people, all too hard to please;” “I’m lookin’ for a woman with a head mixed up like mine;” and “I feel like a stranger in the world I’m livin’ in.”

The film has Joan Baez, soon after meeting and sleeping with Dylan, telling him he’s “totally full of shit” and “kind of an asshole.” (To the latter accusation, screenwriter and director James Mangold felt compelled to add a qualifier.) Later, after he plays “Blowin’ in the Wind” for her, Joan asks Bob: “What is it?” His mumbled response: “I don't know.” A few years on, after the climactic electric performance at Newport, Joan tells Bob to “give it up, you've won.” Bob asks: “what have I won?” In an elevator scene, Bobby Neuwirth asks Dylan: “what do you want to be;” Bob answers: “whatever they don’t want me to be.”

Drawing on Wald’s book, the film shows Dylan lying in the fashion of a classic bullshit artist. He tells Baez and Sylvie (patterned on real girlfriend Suze Rotolo) and many others yarns about who he was, where he’d been, and what he’d done, including that he had traveled with a carnival [Wald, pp. 55-57]. Dylan could also be a chameleon [Wald, p. 59] as his portrayer Chalamet demonstrates. In a guest appearance on Pete Seeger’s TV show, Chalamet briefly has Dylan sounding and looking strikingly like J.J. Giddes (played by Jack Nicholson), the quintessential wise guy in Chinatown.

Thus, the film implicitly and sometimes explicitly presents a Dylan who doesn’t appear to know what the words and music he wrote actually meant, or who he was or wanted to be as a person or an artist. How did he perceive himself vs. how was he perceived by others? Was he ruthlessly and tirelessly ambitious to be a star or was he just a confused guy who wanted to be left alone to develop his talent as he wished, a “loner” who didn’t want to be a leader or even a member of any group or movement? When Studs Terkel asked Dylan if “Blowin’ in the Wind” was “a popular song,” he answered “God, I hope not.” In another interview, Dylan elaborated: “Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but…I still say it’s in the wind.” [Quoted in Wald, pp. 107-108].

Dylan sometimes seems not to know (or care?) whether or how his audience understood his music or how it influenced them in their own lives. Typically, with Dylan, we can’t be sure, because he rarely, if ever, openly discussed these matters. After all, one reviewer acknowledges, with some understatement, that Dylan is “a fascinating person.” At bottom, however, even if he was unsure who he was or how his work landed, many, many people took him squarely to their hearts and minds.

If there is any correct answer to whether Dylan knew what he wanted to be, it is that he wanted to be a mystery and always behaved so as to remain one. It was the secret to his success. Mangold and the filmmakers seem to have understood this and that explains a principal strength of the movie: the oxymoronic telling of the truth that some truths cannot be fully known. Dylan really was and remains the “complete unknown.” He rarely, if ever, comments on books or movies or any other writings or opinions about himself, but he seems to have approved of Mangold’s film. Again, the cautionary qualifier. Elijah Wald said that he found the film “factually inaccurate but poetically true.” This reminds me of Tim O’Brien’s even more complicated and eloquent formulation in The Things They Carried, his “Work of Fiction” on the Vietnam War. “In war,” O’Brien argues, “you lose your sense of the definite, hence…in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true…A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth…[A] true story that never happened” [pp. 88-90].

As a historian, I crave the facts and the truth, but they are sometimes unknowable. This is fine, if they are not presented as absolute facts, and are in service of a good story that is, as the typical disclaimer goes, “based on real people and real events.” A Complete Unknown does scramble chronology and the roles of various real characters, as multiple reviewers have shown. I can live with these. I also found it amusing that in the opening scene of Dylan riding across what appears to be the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey on his way into New York in 1961, one can see in the distance the towers of the Elizabeth container-port, which were not completed until a year later. This recalls the notorious view of tire tracks in the chariot scene of Ben Hur. I wonder if Mangold deliberately included this ahistorical detail as part of the mystery—did things really happen when and as we think?

Dylan rightfully goes unmentioned in Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma [2023], a book about great artists who were really bad people. His fellow Nobel laureate Alice Munro would surely have made the book had her true story been known when Dederer wrote. Most of us are probably “kind of an asshole” in some ways and at some points in our lives. Dylan was unfaithful and unkind to several girlfriends and acted like a jerk to many people quite frequently. Moreover, as my dear daughter has reminded me, he has rarely acted for peace, racial or social justice as his songs should have compelled him to do. Dylan did play an important role in the successful effort to free the unjustly imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter, thus fulfilling the passionate plea of his 1975 song “Hurricane.” More importantly, Dylan’s songs surely inspired countless listeners to take action that moved our country and the world along the arc toward justice.

While many of us, including Bob Dylan, may be assholes of varying degrees, relatively few of us are “monsters,” a category into which Alice Munro now clearly fits. Both Dylan and Munro knew whereof they wrote, but in different ways and with different effects. Munro knew firsthand of the horrors in her own family, which she used extensively in her stories about other families. While these stories may have caused some of Munro’s readers to address, atone, or offer healing for the harms they had inflicted, she herself never did so for her own appalling sins and, so perpetuated and worsened their damage [Rachel Aviv, “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice,” New Yorker, December 30, 2024].

One reviewer complained that the only thing A Complete Unknown offers is a trip down memory lane for old farts. Well, that’s who I am and there are still a lot of us around. This type of criticism may be largely generational, as was the traditional folkies’ criticism of Dylan’s new songs in 1965. Most of the reviewers, I suspect, weren’t alive during the Sixties or remember them very well. Sorry, this may sound like our parents, who never tired of reminding us that we couldn’t really understand the world because we hadn’t lived through two World Wars and a Great Depression. But still…it has some validity. It is hard for a person without experience of the time to fully know or understand how the music felt to us and what it meant. “How does it feel?!!!” will always be a pertinent question.

I am forever grateful to my Harvard roommate Steve Saltonstall for introducing me to Bob Dylan’s music in the very first days of our freshman year. I had come to Cambridge thinking of folk music as Peter, Paul and Mary. By 1965, I wanted to be like Bob – rebellious and inscrutable, yet also lyrical and sometimes tender, and dreamed that I was him or could become him. I began wearing “dark sunglasses,” too, as Dylan urged in “Outlaw Blues.” Mangold may exaggerate the abruptness of the change from the Dylan of the early 1960s to 1965, with the sunglasses and motorcycle, and the more personal and abstract songs. It was more of a progression over time, yet with periodic twists and turns – some “mixed-up confusion.”

Well, where does this get us? In the end, as I’ve argued in a previous essay, maybe the debate among “Dylanologists” and others about who he was or what he meant or what he did or didn’t do, doesn’t matter all that much. It just befogs the fog of Dylan. And that beautiful fog, whatever it contained or how it was composed didn’t prevent him from providing perception, joy, affirmation, comfort, acceptance, understanding and inspiration to massive chunks of several generations of Americans and who knows countless others elsewhere and ever since.

I’m sure every Bob Dylan fan has their favorite lines from his, oh so many, great songs. Here are some of mine. They’re all, I notice, from 1964-1965, the crux of the biggest changes in his music;^* the crux, too, of his songs’ resonance for me. Most of them, in one way or another, make the case for Dylan as a mystery man but also a sometime striver for justice and peace, for ourselves and for the world. One of them even gave the name (and inspiration?) to a violent element of the movement to end the Vietnam War. In case you wondered, these songs could never have been written by A.I. [On this general point, see Christopher Beha, “A.I. Isn’t Genius. We Are.” New York Times, December 29, 2024]. An “artificially intelligent” machine could never equal the “genius” who produced words of such gripping realism, passion, and, yes, truth.

“Chimes of Freedom”

Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing…

Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing…

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music

“My Back Pages”

My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.

Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music

“Spanish Harlem Incident”

I been wond’rin’ all about me
Ever since I seen you there
On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I’m riding
I know I’m ’round you but I don’t know where
You have slayed me, you have made me
I got to laugh halfways off my heels
I got to know, babe, will you surround me?
So I can tell if I’m really real.

Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music

“Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows…

Don’t follow leaders

Watch the parkin’ meters…

The pump don’t work
’Cause the vandals took the handles.

Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music

“Love Minus Zero/No Limit”

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire…

Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music

“Mr. Tambourine Man”

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Copyright © 1964, 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992, 1993 by Special Rider Music

“Ballad of a Thin Man”

You’ve been with the professors
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known.

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music

^*For an exhaustive list of the songs Dylan recorded or performed, including traditional songs and those written by others, as well as his own compositions, see https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/. This includes full lyrics, date released, first and last performance, and number of times performed. This “firehose” of information may belie regarding him as someone who wants to remain a mystery. However, the information he provides is just factual detail about his songs and performances. It provides little insight into who he is or wants to be.

On what is for millions of Americans a day of shock, dismay, and fear, the most common questions may be: “What happened?” and “What Now?”  In answer, I hope I am finally ready to follow some advice I have been receiving for a while: to make a genuine effort to listen respectfully to, and to understand the legitimate grievances, desires, hopes, and fears of the now even more millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump. This certainly does not mean agreeing with all of the feelings or beliefs in the mélange of MAGA motivations – and it no doubt harbors a lot of really bad stuff: economic greed, selfishness, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, trans-phobia, etc., etc.

We should not be listening and seeking understanding just so we can beat Trump-- a repulsive and dangerous man-- the next time out, although this is of course an important strategic objective. Instead, we should be doing it because we respect and seek to understand and address   effectively the economic and social problems and fears that have drawn so many Americans in all walks of life to embrace Trump. Then, we might be able to defeat Trump and the dangerous policies of Trumpism because we have demonstratively done a better job of solving those problems than they have.

I am a Vietnam veteran who remains a student of the war. One of the many lessons of that tragic war is that it is hard, perhaps impossible short of deploying nuclear weapons, to win a war without winning the “hearts and minds” of the people you claim to be fighting for. It is a lesson that our country has, sadly, still not learned. In part, this reflects an age-old epistemological question, as brilliantly debated in the correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, as they faced old age and became friends again after a long and bitter political rivalry. Jefferson originally took up this question in a famous letter to Maria Cosway in 1786, in which he presented an imagined conversation between the Head and the Heart, concluding as to which governs many of our most critical life decisions: “Morals were too essential to the happiness of man, to be risked on the uncertain combinations of the head. She laid their foundation, therefore, in sentiment, not in science” [Koch and Peden-eds., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, p. 404].

During the Vietnam War, the answer to the head-heart question revealed by the behavior of most South Vietnamese peasants was that the intricacies of political ideology were far less important than the simple, yet hugely important sentiments to be left alone to live their lives in peace and safety. Yes, these were largely selfish, quasi-libertarian sentiments, but surely understandable in the circumstances. Conversely, American policy was driven by a reliance on putatively “scientific” analysis of data and competing political ideologies. This analysis turned out to be fundamentally wrong because it ignored or disregarded, among other geopolitical factors, the sentiments of the very people we purported to be helping.

Analogously, I wonder if a reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) bears some blame for today’s toxic political situation. I am, admittedly an AI skeptic – indeed, perhaps even a Luddite on the subject. I fear that AI’s overuse or misuse threatens to cripple creativity and preclude “mixed-methods” analysis that combines and explores interactions among quantitative and qualitative variables. I consider AI to be a mechanistic rather than empathetic tool, which may miss or undervalue feelings and sentiments in favor of toneless analysis of numbers. I think it’s fair to speculate that the Harris campaign made more use of AI than did Trump’s and to wonder if that could help account for its failure to connect more powerfully with enough voters to win the election.

Of course, ignoring and disregarding feelings and sentiments have occurred on both sides of the political divide. Trump may have understood and capitalized on real and legitimate grievances, but he also cynically but cleverly misplaced the blame for them. It is inevitable that incumbents will be blamed for economic problems whether or not their policies were really at fault. Thus, some pundits are now saying that Harris faced “headwinds” that were impossible to overcome as the sitting Vice President in a very unpopular administration. I suggest that this smacks a bit too much of “Monday-morning quarterbacking.” What if Harris had, instead of some of her mass rallies of supporters, convened a series of town-hall style “listening sessions” with likely Trump and undecided voters? Here, she could have listened – really and deeply listened – to their concerns without arguing or asking for their votes – and then overtly used what she saw and heard to shape her policy proposals and speeches, and a genuine “vibe” for her campaign’s approach to voters.

Trump’s blame casting went far beyond the Biden-Harris administration. With clearly racist and xenophobic intent, it focused on immigrants, other marginalized groups, and other elements of the “enemy within” who were said to be “poisoning” and threatening America. Important parts of the newly diverse Trump coalition – especially Latinos and Black men – did not seem to recognize the sad irony that they and their families and friends will likely be the predominant victims of their chosen candidate’s promised policies on immigration, health, housing, education, and social welfare. Misogyny and toxic masculinity, evangelical religion, and other culture-war issues may account for some of this apparent “blindness,” but their real economic distress and their belief that Democrats do not care for them enough to fix it, were arguably the overriding factors.

Many of those in the Trump coalition are happy to accept the government benefits and assistance they need and feel they deserve. But they disregard or even endorse Trump’s plans to limit government in some areas such as social welfare but dramatically increase its power in others, such as authoritarian explosion of executive power. This simultaneous governmental contraction and expansion would have harmful and perhaps horrific effects on ordinary Americans of every identity group, excepting perhaps the super-rich. I am not arguing that those who fail to grasp the ironies and dangers of Trumpism do so primarily out of ignorance or bigotry, although this is certainly true for some. Rather, it results from some combination of tribal thinking and a weighing of different gut feelings such as what’s best for me and my family economically and how I feel about Trump as a person. Those who chose Trump did so for a variety of reasons or combinations thereof. Every American of every political stripe who voted or failed to vote, and who participated or failed to participate is ultimately responsible for the consequences of the election. In a democracy, after all, we get what we deserve but we may not deserve what we get.

**********

So, how did this happen and what can we do about it? First, I must humbly confess that I don’t come with clean hands to offer my thoughts on these matters. I have been, and continue to be, guilty of the flaws I diagnose and the failure to correct them.

I am a regular reader and admirer of Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters of an American.” However, I think her post-mortem on the election epitomizes an intellectual arrogance that too often colors liberal and “elite” commentary and attitudes toward Trump and his supporters. This “we know best” attitude is infuriating to and disrespectful and demeaning of its intended audience. It is not always intentionally patronizing but is universally taken as such. In today’s piece, Richardson seems to assert that the roughly 80 million Americans who voted for Trump were brainwashed by the torrent of misinformation and conspiracy theories gushing from right-wing outlets, podcasts, and social media, such that they could not recognize how great the economy really is for them in their own lives. I’m sorry, but this essentially says that 80 million Americans are too stupid or deluded to have an accurate sense of their own feelings and problems. To me, that assertion is itself the height of stupidity and arrogance, much like the “hubris” of the “best and the brightest” which, according to David Halberstam, gave us the American War in Vietnam.

Kamala Harris may have been dealt a losing hand that couldn’t be rescued. She conducted a brave, energetic and sound campaign in which she did sincerely try to empathize with the problems of ordinary Americans and promise policies that would address them. But it was too little too late, to counteract the powerful resentment among Trump voters that the current administration, Democrats, and coastal elites disrespect and do not really care enough to help them. We, as liberal Democrats, need to do much better or we face electoral and national catastrophe.

I am far from blameless. I have indulged in the tribal and Manichaean thinking that has rendered our country so polarized and bitterly divided. My privilege has given me a private school and Harvard education, helped me to find a successful professional career, and to own a nice house in a safe neighborhood in which to enjoy my retirement with my wife, my daughter and her husband, and my two beautiful granddaughters. I don’t have to worry about affording groceries or gas for my car. I have often thought, if not stated publicly, that Trump supporters must simply be stupid or bigoted or both. If this accurately describes even a simple majority of them, we might as well give up on our country right now.

I am not yet ready to do that. Maybe I’m befogged by wishful thinking, as my friend Steve often suggests, but I will try to be driven instead by C.S. Lewis’s alternative: “thoughtful wishing.” This means being truer to the Christianity I profess. It means taking seriously and seeking to follow the most challenging, but perhaps most important, teachings of Jesus: to recognize that we are all beloved children of God and to promise, in the words of the baptismal covenant, to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.” Faith can be based on both reason and sentiment, head and heart. Its truthfulness can neither be proven nor disproven. I hope my faith will enable me to do better, to have the courage to understand and, if necessary, to make sacrifices to help others have better lives. Obviously, there are many motivations for doing this – religious, atheistic, moral, secular, economic, political, strategic, simply utilitarian. They are all valid. Whatever works for each of us. As Kamala said in her concession speech, “This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves!”

In Halloween season, the big question, especially for kids, is: “What are you going to be?” Well, it’s Halloween today and that’s a big question for me, too – and it’s not just about a costume.

I went to a reunion of my Marine Corps Basic School (TBS) class 1-68 in Quantico, Virginia last week. The centerpiece was the dedication of “Courage,” a monument our class gave to the School. It is a sculpture comprising three pull-up bars – one with the figure of a young Marine lieutenant doing a pull-up and the other two vacant and available for lieutenants to use at any time, especially entering or leaving the mess hall. The inscription reads “ENDURING FOR ONE MOMENT”—as in having the courage to do one more pullup when you’re afraid you can’t. A Marine 3-Star general did 21 after the ceremony. Many lieutenants lined up to follow him and equal or surpass his performance. The monument’s placard recounts the courage and sacrifice of our class in Vietnam and after: fifteen of 220 killed in action and eleven medically retired due to combat wounds. Our classmates earned 15 Silver Stars, 22 Bronze Stars, and 87 Purple Hearts. I drove to the reunion from Boston with Jon Feltner and Peter Acly, two of those wounded, both in the bloody battle of Dai Do in May 1968. Our class and its predecessor had the highest casualty rates in the history of the Basic School.

Retired Marine 4-Star General John Kelly was the guest of honor at the dedication of “Courage.” It was two days after Kelly, in an interview with the New York Times, publicly called Donald Trump a fascist. He had served as Trump’s Chief of Staff and Secretary of Homeland Security. Kelly’s son, a Marine lieutenant, was killed in Afghanistan in 2010. Later, in front of Kelly, Trump referred to military service members as “suckers” and “losers” and refused to appear in public with disabled veterans. However, it was Trump’s promise to turn the military on “the enemy within” that seemingly motivated Kelly to go public with his views of the former president.

I was pleased to hear the Marine officer who briefed us on the TBS program state emphatically that the oath officers take on their commissioning is to follow the Constitution. Period. He also explained that, unlike in our day, TBS acknowledges the importance of young lieutenants’ mental health and provides support and resources for them. Our classmates had the chance to meet and talk with many of the young officers currently at TBS. The lieutenants I met were bright, patriotic, and committed. I told several of them about my memoir as a “reluctant” Marine who opposed the Vietnam War. They were gracious and genuinely interested in hearing about our experiences as Marine officers and after. I sent a signed copy of my book to a lieutenant who had requested it. Gen. Kelly spent almost two hours at the post-ceremony reception talking to all the many lieutenants who patiently waited their turn to meet him.

Of course, Kelly did not mention his political views in his remarks at the dedication, as that would have been inappropriate. However, in dedicating a monument to physical courage, Kelly tacitly stood as an exemplar as well of moral and political courage. Trump and Vance and their supporters, predictably dismissed Kelly’s brave words as those of “a disgruntled former employee” (Vance) who is “tough but stupid” (Trump). After the ceremony, I hesitantly approached Kelly, shook his hand, and thanked him for speaking out. This was my relatively trivial act of “courage.” Kelly appeared at first a bit surprised or confused by my thanks, but as I turned away, he gave me a gentle tap on the shoulder, seeming to say “Aw, shucks, it was nothing.”  

During the reunion, a classmate told me the sad story of his relationship with his father over the war, one even sadder than mine. My father bullied me into staying in the Marine Corps’ Platoon Leaders Class and going to a war I’d decided was wrong. I was lucky in that war. I was a supply officer who saw no combat and spent my 13-month tour as a “Rear-Echelon Motherfucker” at a field hospital, with plenty of cold beer and other booze to soften my experience and maintain my sanity. My classmate told me he had read my memoir, and I had “been right” about the wrongness of the war. His father, like mine, had been a Marine officer. At the time, my classmate was at Marine Officer Candidate School (OCS) preparing to go to Vietnam as an infantry platoon commander, his father was a lieutenant colonel about to be promoted to full Colonel. He had decided, however, that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and we never should have gotten into it. So, he declined the promotion and retired early from the Marine Corps. But he didn’t tell his son what had motivated his early retirement until many years later, long after that son had gone to Vietnam and was wounded in combat. My classmate wondered aloud to me: “How could my father not have told me this at the time? Instead, he just told me I had no choice but to complete OCS and become a Marine officer.”

The evening before the “Courage” dedication, we had our “open mike” session. An “Empty Table” with a place setting and a rose reminded us of those we have lost. There were beautiful tributes to our fallen by their classmates, widows, children, and friends. Beirne Lovely’s wife  and her sister were there. Beirne was wounded at Khe Sanh. He was one of a Boston-area group that reconnected at our first TBS reunion in 2015. Beirne died of a rare form of cancer in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. His wife was not allowed to visit him in the hospital but was with him when he died at home, soon after having seen a video with love and well wishes from many of his friends from the Marine Corps and elsewhere in his life, including the president of Dartmouth College, Beirne’s  alma mater.  His wife gave me a bracelet inscribed with the advice Beirne frequently gave and followed religiously in his own life: “Be kind. Do good.” Beirne’s cancer was very likely caused by exposure to Agent Orange, as he served in the most heavily sprayed area in all of South Vietnam. However, as in many such cases, the government rejected his claim citing insufficient proof of causation. Among other things, this means that Beirne’s name cannot be added to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. So much for the wages of courage.

I was tempted to raise my hand and say: “These were beautiful tributes to our fallen and their families. If you haven’t voted yet or are undecided, please read John Kelly’s interview in today’s New York Times, confirming all of the hateful things Trump has said about veterans and service members, including those lost in America’s wars.” But I held my tongue, deciding that it would have been inappropriate to bring politics into this conversation. I hope, however, that had anyone said anything in support of Trump, I would have had the courage to speak up.

*********

Perhaps the saddest and most troubling “truth” about our country today is the very “death of truth.” This is not entirely new or unique to the Trump era. It began much earlier, probably around the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. Vietnam veterans were not treated with the respect and support their service and sacrifice deserved. Instead, they were by far too many Americans shunned and ignored at best, and at worst collectively denounced as morally bankrupt murderers. Of course, this was true for some of them. But the vast majority did their duty courageously and in compliance with the rules of war. The Vietnam War and Watergate showed Americans that our government could and did lie to us, shamelessly and with impunity. But I think this mistrust has, in the Trump era, morphed into something even more dangerous – a feeling that there is no such thing as truth or that it doesn’t matter – in any case, it’s nothing to rely on in a chaotic and perilous world.

Trump and his followers are largely responsible for this “death of truth,” by their firehose of lies and conspiracy theories, and relentless divisiveness. I believe it will have been a primary driver of the election’s result, particularly if Trump wins. Ironically, I expect his margin of victory would rely on people who are completely exhausted and fed up with the chaos, the lies and absence of truth, the division and polarization, and all politics and politicians—even though Trump is largely responsible for all of these toxicities. These “disengaged,” “fed up,” and irregular voters will probably vote heavily for Trump because, at the end of the day, although they may dislike his personality, he is the one who says, “fuck it all,” just blow it up and start over.

Hard core MAGA followers, and some other religious and political extremists seem, contradictorily, to crave certainty but disbelieve in the need for truth to undergird that certainty. This may be why the statements of Gen. Kelly, Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, former Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis, and countless other former members of the Trump administration do not “move the needle.” Trump’s base is so solid that nothing can sway them. They believe he is the only one able to clean up the epistemological mess he so deliberately and cynically brought into being.

*********

It is election day. Maybe I am being too pessimistic. Of course, there are many who don’t believe that truth is dead – but rather that the other side in our polarized country can’t or won’t recognize it. I believe that far more of these people support Harris than Trump. It is up to us to have the moral courage to emulate Gen. Kelly, speak truth to power and act on it. My personal track record is poor so far. But I hope that will change, regardless of today’s outcome. I do hope that, as Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, “…in the end truth will out” and, as Jesus told his disciples, “The truth will set you free” (John 8:32). In the meantime, as Sara Sherbill titled her op-ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times, “You might consider praying” for our country, whatever your religious, spiritual, or secular persuasion may be.

Two views from This Place of Peace and Quiet

Election Day is 19 days from today. I am back in Maine, at the far northwest edge of Moosehead Lake. I feel so blessed to have this place of peace and quiet amid the troubles of the world. As my daughter Abigail typically writes in our camp log book, “this place is always here and always the same.” It provides time and space for quiet thought and reflection as the waves roll on and on from the mountains to the shore. Being here allows me to approach the reconciliation of conflicting currents that compose my mindset, and the resolution of doubts regarding politics, history, faith, and life.

In addition to sitting by the lake, my reflections on this visit were influenced by two books – Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (2019) and Noam Chomsky’s Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship (1969), and the music of Ralph Vaughn Williams. Holland’s magisterial account of the rise and vicissitudes of Christianity through the centuries lays out the horrible harms done by and in the name of Christianity and its churches. But Holland also shows how St. Augustine, Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, and Baruch Spinoza established that faith can be and was consistent with reason and later with science, both its apparent antitheses. Indeed, for some, it may be driven by those intellectual forces. The applied theology of St. Francis, Gerrard Winstanley (of the “Diggers”), St. Teresa, and many others acting sometimes on the “spirit rather than the letter of the law,” reveals Christianity as a real labor of love, as Jesus taught and as reason might also direct.

Martin Luther’s rejection of the Catholic Church and the Papacy and the founding of Protestantism exemplified the resilience of Christianity to reform itself, although Luther noted that this required combatting what appeared to him as a movement, as we see again today, toward the “end of truth.”  I read Morning Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer on my first morning at camp. Thomas Cranmer’s words reminded me again of God’s brilliant and (it is to be hoped) ever living creation, as I looked out over the lake.

Noam Chomsky, turning to scholars’ and Presidential advisors’ justifications for the American War in Vietnam, shows how “reason” can just as easily produce tragic human results as advance us along the arc of love and justice. The key actors in JFK’s administration who moved on to LBJ’s after November 22, 1963, and the scholars who wrote about them, were generally agreed that social science data, “objectively” and hard-headedly considered, should overshadow empathy and concern for human rights in driving policy decisions. It is ironic that today the political spectrum has shifted so far to the right that “liberal intellectuals” of the sort that favored the American War in Vietnam are now leading the fight against the authoritarianism and proto-fascism of the Trump/MAGA movement.

Nevertheless, my reflections over Moosehead Lake, were leading me to envisage how reason and justice could indeed be reconcilable and indeed interdependent. This feeling was reinforced as I listened to some of Vaughn Williams’ beautifully crafted music from the period of World War I, the horrors of which he experienced in the British Army. This includes “The Lark Ascending,”

“Norfolk Rhapsody No 1,” and “A Folksong Suite.” These pieces, inflected by English folk songs, were capable of instilling patriotism for the war, despite its agonies, but also a longing for the peace and beauty of the English countryside.

While my reflections gave me a dose of optimism about the possibilities for peace, justice, and reconciliation of people and ideas, I could not escape that progress on these fronts does often require conflict. After all, the “Collect for Peace” in Morning Prayer asks God’s protection from “all assaults of our enemies.” As a congenitally uncertain and indecisive person, I have mostly shunned conflict and real activism. For my own sanity and its projection to the good of our country, I crave reconciliation of ideas and people. I am doing the bare minimum of activism – writing “non-partisan” letters for Vote Forward to likely Democratic voters in swing states with irregular records of showing up at the polls. These letters require the writer to complete the sentence “I vote because…” with a personal story. Mine is the following: “I vote because I am a Vietnam veteran who loves our country, my family and community. I am voting for a bright future for our country and all of our people – especially my two beautiful grand-daughters!” I hope my story is effective in encouraging its recipients to vote, and to vote for Harris and Walz. However, I must admit that it is not entirely honest. I am a Vietnam veteran but one who opposed the war. I may still (barely) love my country, but I don’t think I will if it elects Trump. Am I just as selfish and lacking in empathy as MAGA folks in wanting a bright future “especially” for my own grand-daughters. I found myself looking repeatedly at photos of the girls as I was writing my letters.

So, you see, I can slip easily back into my doubts—particularly on one of those rainy days at camp when one seems to sit on ‘the very edge of the world” with zero visibility into the future. Writing out my story hundreds of times in these letters helps me to believe it more – maybe like the “Big Lie” increasing its credibility through sheer repetition! Lord, please help me to absorb what this place offers and take it into action in the world beyond. Contrary to etiquette, I have started leaving the American flag up all night at camp. I hope this convinces me that it can survive the dark.

July 20

This was Joe Biden’s last night as presumptive Democratic nominee. For Democrats, the vale of despair seemed deep. Since the horrible debate of June 27, there had been an ebb and flow of possibility that Biden would withdraw. By July 20^th it seemed possibly inevitable, but by no means certain, that he would.

I was at our place on Moosehead Lake in Maine. As I looked out over the lake, I was feeling pretty hopeless. All of a sudden, the leading edge of a reddish full moon eased out over Little Spencer Mountain. Fairly quickly, it had fully emerged and was on the rise.

My first thought was of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s great song “Bad Moon Rising” from April 1969, as the Vietnam War still raged with Richard Nixon in the White House. I had just returned from Vietnam. Here are John Fogerty’s lyrics:

I see the bad moon a-risin'
I see trouble on the way
I see earthquakes and lightnin'
I see bad times today.

Don't go around tonight
Well it's bound to take your life
There's a bad moon on the rise

I hear hurricanes a-blowin'
I know the end is comin' soon
I fear rivers over flowin'
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.[1]

That evening, I listened to CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” and also to a 1973 song by Judee Sill, a brilliant but troubled singer-songwriter who died of a drug overdose at the age of 35 and is only recently gaining the recognition she deserves. Her song “There’s a Rugged Road” is pretty dark but at least offers some hope:

There's a rugged road on the prairie
Stretchin' all across the last frontier
There a stranger strives solitary
Blessed is the lonesome pioneer

Roll on, roll on, roll on, night birds are flyin'
Come on, the light is gone, hope's slowly dyin'
Tell me how you come ridin' through
Still surveyin' the miles yet to run
On the long and lonely road to kingdom come

He can blaze a trail though the rumblin'
Dims his guiding light to just a spark
When the hour is low, he comes tumblin'
But when the moon is high he gives his heart

Roll on, roll on, roll on, night birds are flyin'
Come on, the light is gone, hope's slowly dyin'
Tell me how you come ridin' through
Gainin' steady till this round is won
On the long and lonely road to kingdom come.[2]

I went to bed soon with this picture and these songs in my head. I slept a bit fitfully.

“Bad Moon Rising” (?) over Moosehead Lake, July 20, 2024

The Emergence and Embrace of Kamala Harris

Well, July 21 was a new day. I won’t say much about what happened and how many people felt about it as it’s already been extensively chronicled. I spent most of the morning and afternoon reading, well past 2PM, when Biden announced his withdrawal. We are almost completely off the grid at our place, which is usually a welcome contributor to its precious peace and quiet. I didn’t hear the news until I turned on NPR’s All Things Considered at 6PM.

I shared what so many have described in this moment as a powerful wave of relief and a surge of optimism that this thing may actually be salvageable. Biden’s endorsement and Harris’s skillful and rapid consolidation of support, together with her effective early statements and speeches have fueled virtually unanimous support among Democrats and abundant hope of capturing enough of the critical independent and undecided voters, and anti-Trump Republicans, to swing the race in her favor. Tim “Weird” Walz, Harris’s VP choice, seems terrific.

Hillbilly Epistemology: The Enigmatic JD Vance

On the other hand, there seems to be substantial opinion among Republicans and perhaps even in their standard-bearer, that JD Vance was a bad choice. Perhaps Trump chose him with the hubris of someone overconfident in the inevitability of a victory in November. Maybe he was correct in his awkward non-endorsement of Vance’s ability to take over as President “on Day 1” that the VP choice doesn’t influence the election much at all. We’ll see. In the meantime, it’s worth exploring Vance’s tortured cultural and political journey.

I never read Hillbilly Elegy when it came out in 2016. I just turned to it this past week. I knew it was generally considered a powerful account of Vance’s overcoming a troubled and traumatic upbringing in a Kentucky “hillbilly” family that moved to Southwestern Ohio. Vance served in the Marine Corps for four years, including a tour in Iraq, graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State in two years, and went on to Yale Law School and a successful stint as a venture capitalist in the Bay Area. Hillbilly Elegy was a bestseller, praised by many liberals and conservatives alike, for its portrayal of the economic plight and political alienation of Appalachia and, by extension, other rural areas of the United States.

Around the time his book was published, Vance had a lot of highly negative things to say about Donald Trump, including that he was a “moron” and that he could become “America’s Hitler.” So, what happened to convert him to an ardent MAGA and Trump acolyte? Most observers seem to think it was pure cynical opportunism. Vance hitched his wagon to the star he thought would dominate the sky.

Plainly, opportunism was part of his calculus. But there was more to it, and I believe the seeds can be seen in Hillbilly Elegy. Maybe I’m projecting my own predisposition to doubt, uncertainty, and indecision onto Vance. But I think we can see in his book that he had deeply mixed feelings about some critical cultural and political themes characteristic of both right and left in America. He could have gone either way. He chose the right with a vengeance and then implied that there had never really been any choice.

I confess that at points I found Hillbilly Elegy moving and even inspiring. Its author comes across as introspective and self-reflective, qualities that Trump clearly lacks, and that Vance seems subsequently to have lost. It is in the cultural and political tensions Vance describes that the “new” MAGA Vance may be glimpsed.

Love vs. War

Vance seems ambivalent about the violence and abuse he witnessed and experienced so much growing up. He sometimes seems fascinated by and drawn to the hillbilly ethic of violence in defense of community and family. Not that he praises or approves of it full-throatedly, but he doesn’t fully condemn it either. He writes that “I started to like the drama of my parents’ fights…This thing I hated had become sort of a drug” [p 73].

Reflecting on his time at Yale Law School, Vance reports that “I began to understand why I used words as weapons…I did it to survive. Disagreements were war and you played to win the game. I didn’t unlearn these lessons overnight. I continue to struggle with conflict. Even at my best I’m a delayed explosion…Being a hillbilly meant sometimes not knowing the difference between love and war. When we graduated, that’s what I was most unsure about” [pp 229, 234].

Hillbilly Culture

Vance presents a seemingly contradictory view of hillbillies. Are they lazy bums and welfare cheats [pp. 139-140] or hard-working but ill-starred yet indomitable defenders of family, community, and country? Maybe all of the above. While at Yale, Vance felt “the inner conflict inspired by rapid upward mobility.” When asked by a woman he met at a New Haven gas station whether he went to Yale, he replied “No…but my girlfriend does.” Vance terms this “a pathetic attempt at cultural defiance…I had lied to a stranger to avoid feeling like a traitor” [p 205].

Vance touts the importance of family, but only of a certain type-- what he refers to as “intact families” [p 242]. Even though Vance admits his own family was “more non-traditional than most” [p 136], he seems to dismiss the value of such defective families. “Reams of social science attest to the positive effect of a loving and stable home” [p 149]. Yes, but there isn’t only one type of “loving and stable home,” or one type of “intact family.” It seems profoundly insensitive and unjust to provide, as Vance now advocates, major tax breaks and additional voting rights limited to his preferred family type.

Vance recognizes the hillbilly predilection for conspiracy theories based on mistrust of government and the media. He observes that “[t]here is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government… It’s not your fault you’re a loser. It’s the government’s fault” [p 194].

On the other hand, Vance celebrates the patriotism of hillbilly communities: “[M]uch of my family’s, my neighborhood’s, and my community’s identity derives from our love of country.” Vance’s grandparents “taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth.” This patriotism persists despite their living in a country that was “trapped in two seemingly unwinnable wars, in which a disproportionate share of the fighters came from our neighborhood, and in an economy that couldn’t deliver the most basic promise of the American Dream – a steady wage” [pp 189-90].

Self-Doubt and “Learned Willfulness”

Vance’s grandmother “Mamaw” is the heroine of his memoir. She personifies the tension and confusion in hillbilly culture “between love and war.”  Vance recognizes that “in Mamaw’s contradictions lay great wisdom. I began to see the world as Mamaw did. I was scared, confused, angry and heartbroken” [p 140].

After graduating from high school, Vance enlisted in the Marine Corps. He writes that “the trials of my youth instilled a debilitating self-doubt” but Marine Corps boot camp changed him profoundly: “If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching “learned willfulness” [pp 162-63]. As a Marine Vietnam veteran who has stayed in touch with Marine comrades over the years, I see Marine Corps culture and history as replete with great courage, devotion to duty, and kindness but also with the capacity for misogyny, savagery, and cruelty.

It seems clear now that Vance opted for the negative sides of all of these cultural tensions. No doubt, political opportunism played a significant role. We can observe some other potential sources of those choices in the contradictions of hillbilly culture but exactly why he resolved those contradictions as he did remains a mystery. Here’s one recent take, from Ezra Klein, one of my favorite political commentators these days:

Behind Donald Trump…emerged this very dark online set of subcultures, I would call it the sort of extended MAGA online cinematic universe, but it has white supremacists in it, it has very weird forms of…pronatalists in it. It has people who just are obsessed with race and immigration. It has neoreactionaries…. And JD Vance, his conversion went through this online world [Emphasis added]. What is weird about JD Vance is what is weird about somebody who spends too much time watching neoreactionary YouTube videos and then participating in the comments sections [“Transcript: Ezra Klein Discusses Kamala Harris’s VP pick.” New York Times, August 6, 2024].

Vance doesn’t spew the venom with quite the degree of anger and cruelty of Trump, who is, let’s face it, no mystery. Vance’s messages are just as toxic and unjust, even if they are presented in a slightly “nicer” tone. Perhaps we will learn more about what really makes JD Vance tick as the campaign unfolds.

[1] Listen to the song at:

.

[2] Since this song may not be well-known to you, please be sure to take a listen to it:

.

I have always considered myself an anti-conspiracy theorist. Memoirist and novelist Michael Pearson, a new friend, averred that the conspiracy theorists are “them,” not “us.”  Since Saturday, however, I have found myself almost hopefully believing that this “assassination attempt” was staged by Trump. I’m being sucked into the very “them” for whom I have so much fear and loathing. This is the most frightening development of all.

The assault on truth – an epistemological crisis -- continues. The vale of despair has deepened. What hope remains for our country? New Yorker editor David Remnick, like many other observers, called to mind the parallels between 1968 and 2024. Remnick recalled Robert Kennedy’s eloquent and calming speech in Indianapolis on the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination. He wondered who might give the equivalent speech today but could offer no answer.

I spent most of 1968 as a Marine supply officer at a field hospital in Quang Tri, in northern South Vietnam. On the Fourth of July, as artillery illumination shells were detonated in celebration just beyond our perimeter, I drunkenly sang the National Anthem in a sarcastic voice to demonstrate my opposition to the war. Weeks later, I argued with fellow officers that there had indeed been a “Police Riot” against antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. LBJ had dropped out of the Presidential race in March.

In 2024, the DNC will return to Chicago. Thus far, the sitting President has resolved to stay the course. It appears that Trump’s ascension to brave and defiant assassination survivor has further reduced Joe Biden’s chances of reelection. As bad as 1968 got, somehow it seems that our situation in 2024 is even more hopeless.

Rev. Sarah Neumann, our new curate (assistant rector) at Christ Church Cambridge, preached a sermon on Sunday, July 15 from King Herod’s commanded execution of John the Baptist (Mark 6:14-29). “Curating” the events in Butler, Pennsylvania the evening before, Sarah made some last-minute additions:

“When we see political violence in our headlines, like we have this weekend, may it be a call to us to turn away from senseless death in all of its forms. Christ’s redemptive love, his mercy which is the thing that shows us how to live with each other without violence and death…[is]…  a gift that God gives freely to all of His people.”

Most Christians profess that all people – literally, all of us, including wicked and misguided leaders – are equally children of God and beneficiaries of God’s love and forgiveness through the power of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. This glorious Incarnation (“full of grace and truth” [John 1:14]) calls Christians to love and forgive one another. John Lewis forgave both the young Klansman who had severely beaten him at the first Southern stop of the Freedom Riders and arch-segregationist Gov. George Wallace who later confessed the error of his ways.

I aspire to be a good Christian who believes and acts on all this. I’m certainly not there yet—not even close. What do I believe or disbelieve? Do I believe Trump is a child of God, just like me and all the rest of us, who is entitled to all the benefits deriving therefrom? Do I really care – for his sake and that of his family -- that Trump came within a whisker of being killed by an assassin’s bullet? Do I believe that Trump’s supporters are all stupid or evil or both? Do I think Trump staged the attempted assassination? Do I think that Biden’s “bullseye” statement might have been at least partly to blame for the would-be assassin’s act? Do I believe Biden should withdraw from the race? Right now, I can’t say for sure.

What I can say is that I will continue to pray for guidance, strength, and courage. I will pray to God or “to whom it may concern,” as Unitarians are sometimes jokingly said to do. This means praying that there is a truth I can believe in with enough certainty that it will prompt me to act for what I know well enough to be right and just, and best for our country. My therapist praised my essay as “balanced.” Well, yes, balance has its place. But I fear that I’m so balanced that I’m paralyzed on a high wire. I need to get unbalanced enough that I can risk doing something beyond despairing over how bad things are and how I can’t seem to decide what’s really true and not. I’ll start by writing letters for Vote Forward urging likely Democrats in competitive Congressional districts to vote in November. I hope I will then move on to bigger and better things.

A major obstacle to overcoming that noise and polarization in the real world and in real time is an interlocking dilemma of truth and trust. Jesus supposedly said that “The truth will make you free” (John 8:32). But in allowing Jesus to be crucified, Pontius Pilate famously asked “What is truth?” (John 18:38). It seems that Americans crave the truth and the comforts it may bring but deeply distrust, sometimes justifiably, the most important sources of truth.

This was not always the case. In a simpler time, people generally trusted the government, scientists, and “experts.” Trust for the government and support for the Vietnam War dramatically eroded as the Johnson administration’s “Credibility Gap” yawned wider and wider. Within a few years, The Pentagon Papers and the writings of Daniel Ellsberg conclusively demonstrated our government’s decades of dishonesty and deceit about Vietnam. Watergate and its related crimes and their coverup by Richard Nixon and his administration even further undermined trust in government.

Thus, much of the damage to trust was done by the mid-1970s. There had been some right-wing mistrust of government manifested between the late 1940s and early 1960s in McCarthyites’ denunciation of Communists in the State Department and elsewhere and the John Birch Society’s calls to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren.

It was only beginning in the 1990s and early in this century that much larger scale right-wing movements – such as the Tea Party and then MAGA and Trumpism -- emerged based on mistrust of government, “experts,” and “elites.”   In contemporary America, we have rampant conspiracy theories from various political perspectives: September 11; UFOs; Stop the Steal; Russian interference in our elections; January 6; QAnon (Pizzagate and human trafficking); Covid-19; Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce; Biden taking PEDs or amphetamines before the debate; etc. etc. etc. They have a common denominator of disbelieving the government and politicians. One may argue with some justification that conspiracies posited by the left are generally more credible than those coming from the right. Nevertheless, both sides can reasonably accuse the other of hypocrisy for picking and choosing the issues on which they choose to believe or disbelieve government. MAGA believes everything Trump says but nothing Biden says; and the converse is largely the case. Even our mistrust is deeply polarized.

Distrust in government, politicians, experts, and elites, and disbelief in the “truths” they offer are evident in multiple and often overlapping spheres of our lives and concerns beyond politics, including science, religion, foreign policy, and the law. Beginning in the early years of this century, distrust, misinformation, racism, polarization, and angry rhetoric of all stripes have been vastly promoted and facilitated by social media and the internet. Trump’s own social media platform is, ridiculously, called “Truth Social.”

Science

Trust in science and scientists has suffered serious decline. Climate change is a prime example. Despite what appears to be unassailable evidence, many people continue to deny the role of human behavior in climate change, and the very facts and prognoses of the change itself. In public health, trust in government agencies and scientific “experts” was damaged in the responses to pandemics, notably HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and Covid-19 in the 2020s.

In the early years of HIV/AIDS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other government agencies came under fire in disputes over how the disease was transmitted. At first, some scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, suggested that HIV could be transmitted by casual human contact. There were also sharp disagreements about the risks to the blood supply and what should be done to protect it. Some asserted that mosquitoes were vectors of transmission or that Haitians were, because of their ethnicity, disproportionately prone to infection, regardless of their behaviors. Some scientists predicted that, as in Sub-Saharan Africa, HIV would spread rapidly into the “general population” of the U.S., rather than remaining concentrated in “risk groups” such as gay men, people who inject drugs, and sex workers. Right-wing politicians, such as Sen. Strom Thurmond, and religious fundamentalists argued that AIDS was God’s righteous punishment of homosexuals, prostitutes, and drug users for their immoral behavior.

When highly effective treatments for HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1990s, some government leaders, most notoriously President Thabo Mbeke of South Africa, refused to make them available to their populations, which were then experiencing very high rates of HIV infection, on the ground that these treatments were not effective and that the disease could be treated successfully through diet and nutrition. Anthony Fauci and the Food and Drug Administration were condemned by many AIDS activists for rejecting a “parallel track” that would make the new therapies available to people with AIDS on an emergency basis before the process of clinical trials and FDA approval had been completed. Fauci and the FDA did quite quickly change their position and approved the “parallel track,” which saved countless lives.

Decades later, Fauci, still director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became a villain of the MAGA movement for his early statements about Covid-19 transmission that later proved incorrect –for example, that the virus was not transmitted through the air. Fauci continues to be criticized for arguing that Covid-19 probably originated in Wuhan’s “wet market,” rather than in a Coronavirus laboratory in that city. Fauci, the CDC, and other scientists and government officials were also condemned for instituting mask and vaccine mandates, lockdowns and excessive closures of schools and other public spaces. Conspiracy theories surrounding the actual incidence and death toll of Covid, and the side effects of vaccines, circulated widely. Ulterior motives were asserted – that these scientists and experts wanted to control the population and destroy individual freedoms, as matters of principal. It appears that all of these conspiracy theories are false. However, the real failure of the scientists, experts, and government officials, both during the HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 pandemics, was in not stating clearly or strongly enough that, especially with emerging diseases, the truth of how best to respond also evolves and changes as more data become available [Zeynep Tufekci, “An Object Lesson on How To Destroy Public Trust” New York Times, June 9, 2024]. Unfortunately, too many people want the absolute truth and simple answers, and they want them immediately. This is often impossible. The truth is, in reality, a moving target. The best response is a matter of probability rather than certainty.

Foreign policy

Foreign policy raises many opportunities for players and observers to choose truth or lies. On some issues, the conflicting narratives can’t be resolved in some middle ground between true and false. For example, Trump’s famous telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that led to the former’s first impeachment cannot have been both a “perfect call” and an extortionate quid pro quo. In the subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been numerous counter accusations of war crimes on both sides. Strong evidence exists for some but not for others.

The Israel Palestine conflict has produced numerous conflicting claims. In an interview with New York Times writer Ezra Klein, Israeli journalist Amit Segal asserted the following: that there had been “no blockade” of Gaza in the period before Hamas’s October 7 attacks and that life for Palestinians there had been very good; that the West Bank settlements were needed for Israeli security; that 90% of West Bank Palestinians supported the October 7 Hamas attack [The Ezra Klein Show (podcast), June 14, 2024]. Are these statements true? Or are they the product of an identity politics that can obscure or disregard the truth? Palestinians would surely dispute the veracity of all of these assertions by Segal.

Overarching these matters is, of course, the question of genocide. Do Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank, or the Hamas attacks, constitute genocide? The UN definition of genocide refers to an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” It seems clear that Israel’s actions in Gaza have indeed destroyed at least part of an ethnic group, as did Hamas’s attacks. There is little question of Hamas’s or Hezbollah’s intent, but Israel contends that its devastation of Gaza is unfortunate but unintended “collateral damage” of legitimate self-defense. Intent is difficult to prove. There is also the question of “how many?” constitutes a large enough “part” of a group to meet the definition. It does seem that at least some right-wing extremists in Israel do intend to destroy a large number, or even all Palestinians. Still, there are legitimate questions as to whether it is “true” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank or that a majority of Palestinians wish to obliterate Israel and the Jewish people.

The Law

Judges and the justice system -- particularly in cases involving politics, individual and human rights, and government policy -- apply various standards to ascertain the “truth.”  The conservative majority on the current U.S. Supreme Court, typically employs an “originalist” or “textualist” lens in deciding Constitutional questions. This means basing decisions, whenever possible and then exclusively, on the original wording of the Constitutional provision and evidence of the framers’ original intent. This doctrine led, for example, to one of Justice Samuel Alito’s arguments for overturning Roe v. Wade that the framers of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, on which Roe depended, had no notion of a right of privacy or a women’s right to abortion. This despite the fact that commitment to these rights in law and in public opinion emerged later and strengthened over time.

The justices in the liberal minority tend to rely on a much more expansive set of factors. Their philosophy typically follows former Justice Stephen Breyer’s more pragmatic “Active Liberty” approach. This encourages employment of “six interpretive tools: text, history, tradition, precedent, the purpose of a statute, and the consequences of competing interpretations” [Stephen Breyer, Wikipedia entry. Accessed July 7, 2024]. Collectively, use of these tools allows for a more flexible interpretation of the Constitution based, in part, on what has happened since its adoption.

The search for truth in criminal and civil cases relies on different standards of proof. In criminal cases, the prosecution, in order to bring charges, must present “probable cause” that the crime occurred, and that sufficient evidence exists to convict the defendant “beyond a reasonable doubt.” A guilty verdict must also be “beyond a reasonable doubt” and, in most jurisdictions a jury verdict of guilty must be unanimous. By contrast, civil verdicts only require a “preponderance of the evidence” and only a simple majority of a jury. Reaching verdicts in either does, however, require the weighing of the truth or falsehood of the evidence presented. Different degrees of certainty in the truth are thus required in criminal vs. civil cases.

Even if the truth cannot be known with absolute certainty, there are several forms of legal forgetting (but not quite forgiving) wrongs or crimes for which people were found guilty or liable – in a court of justice or in the court of public opinion. These include: an ancient tradition, with some recent revivals, of laws sending crimes to “Oblivion” [Linda Kinstler, “In Seach of the Lost Altar of Oblivion.” New York Times, June 16, 2024]; “Restorative Justice” programs; and “Truth and Reconciliation” initiatives, as in South Africa after the fall of Apartheid.

Such exercises in forgetting, recompense, or forgiveness may help to heal some wrongs or redress some injustices committed by the justice system. They will not, however, overthrow the widespread mistrust of that system, from virtually all sides in our political polarity. This distrust is both about truth and falsehood and about discriminatory application of policing or punishment. Trump and his supporters allege that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against him by Biden and the Democrats. He then threatens payback if he is reelected. People of color and their allies denounce police brutality, prosecutorial bias, and mass incarceration, which disproportionately affect them.

Religion

Despite the pronounced decline of formal religious affiliation, religious belief and its perceived imperatives clearly affect politics and public policy. The “originalist/textualist” vs. pragmatic/Active Liberty split on the Supreme Court, and the different standards of proof in criminal vs. civil cases, are akin to the differences between fundamentalist vs. mainline Protestant religious belief and their respective definitions of spiritual and theological truth.

Fundamentalist Protestant religions and some elements of Roman Catholicism profess the absolute truth of everything in the Bible as the Word of God and the all-sufficient direction for law and policy in the real world. Except, of course, that there are many contradictions in the Bible. The Word is not always clear. Leaving aside the internal conflicts in scripture, there are also conflicts between scripture and Constitutional law, science, morality, justice, and freedom as those realms have evolved over time. Nevertheless, Christian fundamentalists have driven many legal developments such as assaults on the teaching of evolution and the rights of women and LGBTQ people, and requirements that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms.

Mainline Protestant denominations like my own Episcopal Church take what seems to me a more reasonable view of Biblical truth. This is reflected in the Anglican-Episcopal three-legged stool of belief: scripture, reason, and tradition. This also allows for the welcoming and inclusion of many degrees of belief in God, Jesus, and scripture among members. C.S. Lewis has become my theological hero. He was a person who had a deep belief in the true “fundamentals” of Christianity but powerful yet sporadic, and consistently parallel, doubts about those very things. In a fictionalized debate with Sigmund Freud, Lewis spoke of his faith as “thoughtful wishing” as opposed to Freud’s characterization of it as “wishful thinking.”  Indeed, Lewis’s doubts and his faith were, paradoxically and perhaps counterintuitively, inter-dependent. “This impossibility of empirical proof is a spiritual necessity,” he wrote (How to Pray, p. 56)

Recently, my church friend Ned Hallowell shared with me his prayer about truth: “Lord, help me always to search for the truth but spare me the company of those who have found it.” Rev. Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, in a recent sermon to my parish congregation, counselled “letting go of certainty and self-vindication [which] means living a new way.”

“What is to be Done?” or What Should I do?

What are the implications of all this “kerfuffle” about truth for our real lives, our political choices, our votes, and our actions in the world?

Somehow, we/I can’t let ourselves be paralyzed, immobilized, or depressed into persistent inaction. We/I have to adopt and utilize some reasonable standard of proof short of the absolute, and find some basis of action even in the presence of some uncertainty and doubt. As you can probably discern from what I’ve written above, I do have pretty strong political loyalties and opinions about who is mostly right/truthful and who is mostly wrong/lying. The key is being able to act on those beliefs.

In my past, I have sometimes been immobilized and paralyzed by fear and uncertainty – for example, in my capitulation to my father over the Vietnam War. This capitulation ultimately rested on my inability to decide on the truth and commit myself fully to acting on that truth. I wrote about this in my memoir Entwined with Vietnam: A Reluctant Marine’s Tour and Return. And, on another level, like any memoirist I had to wrestle with the challenges of presenting memory as truth.

In the aftermath of the first Presidential debate of 2024, we are faced with a decision of immense importance: whether Joe Biden should step aside and allow the Democratic Party to choose a new ticket for the November election? There are undoubtedly huge risks on both sides. How should we decide? The morning after the debate, Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post:

“If the country is “failing” [as Trump repeatedly said during the debate], it’s because it is experiencing a relentless, disciplined and coordinated attack on everything that is true – and because the one person the reality-based community was counting on to save us has just shown himself to be unequal to the task.”

I believe that this is a correct – and true – statement. But I’m not totally sure. More than a week later, the controversy over Biden’s candidacy has intensified but remains unresolved. Increasing numbers of politicians and commentators have called for Biden to step aside, but the President himself has become, if anything, increasingly defiant. He still declares that he is the only candidate who can defeat Trump, despite the poll numbers. This issue is one on which the truth will not be definitively known until after the election. So, we are faced with hard choices based on a mixed bag of data and prediction.

As the Presidential debate ended, the book I most wanted to read was C.S. Lewis’s How to Pray. We should all be doing a lot of praying for our country these days, whatever our faith tradition or lack thereof. Lewis wrote (p. 56) that “All prayers are heard, though not all prayers are granted.” This is probably true but it’s not hugely satisfying. Still, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pray. It probably can’t hurt. My prayer is that truth still matters, and that we can discern it with sufficient clarity and resolve to act vigorously and appropriately to save our country and fulfill its glorious promise for all of our people.

BRANDEIS MAGAZINE

Summer 2024

Turning Points

The Fruits of My Indecision

Hammett in Vietnam in 1968

Photo Credit: Courtesy Theodore M. Hammett

By Theodore M. Hammett, GSAS MA’75, PhD’76

It was May 1966, the end of my junior year at Harvard. I was scheduled to report soon for my second summer camp in a U.S. Marine Corps officer candidate program.

But I had resolved to withdraw from the program; I believed the war in Vietnam was wrong. Now I needed to tell my father that. He had been a Marine infantry platoon commander in the South Pacific during World War II and seemed to want me to follow in his every footstep.

“You’re spitting on everything I believe in,” he shouted, in the course of a long argument over the phone. He summoned me home the next morning to explain why he shouldn’t take me out of school, which would likely have meant my being drafted immediately.

I asked my history tutor if I could get a scholarship to stay at Harvard without my father’s financial support. He said it might be possible. I was young and confused, though, and I gave in to doubt and fear. I didn’t want to risk a complete break with my father. I certainly didn’t have the commitment of the bravest opponents of the Vietnam War. Maybe I was driven by a dual cowardice, both afraid to fight in the war and afraid to stand up to my father. Maybe I avoided forming definite opinions because, if I did, I’d have to act on them.

At any rate, I capitulated. In 1968, I went to Vietnam as a Marine lieutenant. Luckily for me, I spent my 13 months there in relative safety, working as a supply officer at a field hospital near the DMZ. I did a disaffectedly poor job and stayed marginally sane by drinking a lot; listening to music by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and others; and looking forward to returning home to my girlfriend.

I still hated the war, and now I hated the Vietnamese people, too. Although I never fully broke with my father, I never really reconciled with him.

When I got back to the U.S., I began a PhD program in American history at Brandeis. The university was a center of antiwar activism and radical politics. The fall I enrolled, two Brandeis students were part of a group that robbed a Boston bank to get money for revolutionary action, a heist that led to the shooting death of a police officer.

I nominally supported the antiwar movement. I attended a few meetings of Vietnam Veterans Against the War but didn’t join any of their demonstrations. I didn’t even tell my fellow Brandeis students I was a Marine veteran who opposed the war.

But my personal history deeply influenced which historical topics I studied and how I interpreted them. I repeatedly studied groups who had historiographic reputations as radical but who, I concluded, eschewed revolutionary action in favor of a middle ground that preserved order and deference to authority.

After I got my doctorate, I embarked on a nearly 40-year career at Abt Associates, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based policy research and consulting firm, working in the areas of criminal justice and public health, with a focus on HIV/AIDS programs.

As time went by, I felt more and more guilty about my country’s devastation of Vietnam and my own mistreatment of its people. In 1997, quite by chance, I got the opportunity to go back to Vietnam as a tourist. Soon, I began working with the Vietnamese government and civil society organizations on improving HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs.

I lived in Hanoi for five years. I gained many incredible Vietnamese colleagues and friends. I came to love the country for its scenic beauty; its vibrant culture; its wonderful food; and the courage, energy, resilience, and communal spirit of its people.

This was my “second tour” in Vietnam, during which I came to call the country my second home.

My fumbling indecision during the bad old days? If I could do it over again, I’d refuse to serve in Vietnam, and I’d commit myself to the antiwar movement, whatever the consequences.

Ultimately, though, the course I chose led me to some of my most treasured experiences, not to mention some hard-earned intellectual and emotional growth.

Theodore M. Hammett is the author of “Entwined With Vietnam: A Reluctant Marine’s Tour and Return” (McFarland, 2022). He lives in a Vietnamese-style three-generation household in Watertown, Massachusetts. Read more of his writing.