Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private

by Anna Quindlen

  RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED

  February 24, 1991

  The group of veterans marched down the street, and as they came into sight the crowd at the curb seemed to move forward to greet them, to hold them like a hug. They were youngish men, and their camouflage clothes were as different from the neat uniforms of the other groups as their war had been from other wars. Beside me an old man waved a flag. “We’re with you,” he shouted, as though he were putting all our cheers into words, and then he added, “We should have let you finish what you started.” And the smile froze on my face, and fell.

  It was five years ago that those Vietnam veterans marched by on Memorial Day, but I’ve thought about that scene more than once in the last forty days. From the beginning, it has been difficult to publicly oppose this war, to express reservations or even to forgo the exuberant displays of national accord.

  A basketball player at Seton Hall University who did not wear a flag patch on his uniform was heckled so relentlessly by fans that he quit the team and the school. The editor of The Kutztown (PA) Patriot was fired, and while the owners said there were other reasons, the ax fell just after he ran an antiwar editorial with the headline “How About a Little PEACE!”—the last word in letters as big as your finger. What amazed him afterward, he said, were the people who called him eager to talk geopolitics, as though they were all members of a sub-rosa self-help group: Hi. My name is Joe, and I have reservations about the war in the Gulf.

  Reservations are not accepted. There were antiwar demonstrations. But mostly there was the majority rallying around the president, and a silent minority, constrained by the atmosphere of high-octane Amerimania, a prettified second cousin of her “Love It or Leave It” forebears. Some of us were ambivalent, but we don’t do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.

  Some people say dissent is a matter of time, that opposition to Vietnam took years to build. But I believe it’s a sign of the times instead. America had become the Muhammad Ali of nations, battered by foreign competition, by a faltering economy, by domestic problems as big as our national ambition. In the last six months Americans saw themselves as the leaders of the world again, assured of their inherent greatness and the essential evil of the enemy.

  But the line between such convictions and jingoism can be very thin. Everyone talked about standing behind the soldiers even while deploring the policy. “Support the troops—bring them home alive,” one protest sign read. But, like my neighbor at the parade, Letters to the Editor columns in dozens of newspapers made clear that people believed the way to show support was to agree that the troops were engaged in a necessary and a noble enterprise. If not, keep quiet. The idea that our true greatness lies in our diversity and freedom of speech was, if anything, a P.S.

  This war has taken on a momentum of its own. The troops of August led to the buildup of autumn, and that to the combat of January 16. The cumulative effect was epitomized at a rally in California several weeks ago: as though they were in the bleachers, a bunch of boys were chanting, “We’re Number One!”

  When the Soviet Union stepped in as a deal maker, our former dark star, our one-time evil twin, it was hard to bear, especially when the negotiations included Saddam Hussein’s survival. His face has been plastered on dart boards and Ping-Pong paddles, and his mustache has become an instant metaphor for evil. The U.N. resolutions called for making him leave Kuwait. The grassroots agenda, forged over heady days of the United States leading the world to war, is to destroy him. It is an agenda that lends itself to ultimatums, not negotiations.

  “We should have let you finish what you started,” I keep hearing that man yelling. Some of us believed that our national agenda in the Gulf War was murky from the start. But it has grown even clearer: we must win, and Saddam Hussein must lose. Trouble is, it’s not that kind of world, and this isn’t that kind of war. Saddam Hussein could lose big and still be a hero in some parts of the region. We could run a devastating military campaign and still wind up hated and reviled. But for some short time, the war in the Persian Gulf has made the world a simpler place. Black and white. Good and bad. Win and lose. But not for long.

  THE MICROWAVE WAR

  March 3, 1991

  Barely eighteen hours after the war ended, a man was on Broadway near Times Square hawking victory T-shirts, WE WON! they said on the front, the words flanked by two American flags—OPERATION DESERT STORM. JAN. 16—FEB. 27. All I could think of was some smooth small-time entrepreneur, standing with one eye on the television and one on the boys in the back room, yelling “Roll ’em, Harry” at the moment that the president said, “I am pleased to announce that at midnight tonight.…” This is some amazing country, where you can turn a commemorative item around in less than a day.

  It was like that from beginning to end, the microwave war, ready to be consumed, digested, and cleared away in a fraction of the usual time. No wonder the television people seemed to be running on 78 rpm for the first week. The ground war took less time than it takes to get over the flu. And fewer Americans died in combat over the six weeks of the Gulf War than are habitually murdered in New York City during a comparable period of time.

  To read over the early predictions is an exercise in the fallibility of political scientists, retired military men, pundits, politicians, and the press. The war on the ground would be long. It would be bloody. The Iraqi Army would use chemical weapons. Their numbers were great. They were relentless. It all seems like a parody now.

  Throughout this brief and enormous encounter, I kept remembering a peacenik line from my past: What if they gave a war and nobody came? The enemy never really showed up. When we were in the air, we supposed he was saving his knockout punch for the ground. Instead, on the ground, he marched beneath a flag of white. We talked at home about not automatically associating the troops with the policy. It turned out the troops not in tune with their policy were the ones on the other side.

  Euphoria has been one of the war’s buzzwords. We have been repeatedly cautioned not to feel it. The president said the other night this was not the time for it. It has never crossed my mind. I am reasonably sure of only three things today: that George Bush will be reelected president in 1992; that if he chose either Colin Powell or Norman Schwarzkopf as his running mate, he might win by the largest landslide in the history of the nation; and that we are incredibly skilled at war.

  I know that the last should provide a certain security. When I was trying to feel something the night the peace began, something more electric than fatigue and relief, I pictured all the homes in which people must be holding one another and grinning with wet faces because someone who meant the whole world to them was alive and whole and coming home. There were many more of those scenes that night than we ever expected when we talked about thousands of casualties, when we wondered how many lives were too many.

  The lesson we learned from Vietnam was that it was possible for the United States to be an abject failure in the theater of war. The lesson we’ve learned from this is that we are a smashing success. Because of technology and tactics and training, we are a staggering fighting force.

  We have learned that we do this superlatively. And that frightens me.

  Oh, if it makes each nation in the world think thrice about aggression because it fears the biggest kid in class, I say hooray. But if it makes us cocky—and a cocky American is the cockiest creature on earth—that will be a disaster. The failure of Vietnam made us gun-shy for almost two decades. It is a much greater failure to be trigger-happy. If the Iraqi rout becomes our model of conflict resolution, we will have suffered a great defeat.

  Too soon to tell. That is our refrain. Never has the first rough draft of history been produced under such deadline pressure.

  Not far from the T-shirt stand was that spot on Times Square where people celebrated the end of World War II, and where a photographer took that picture of a soldier kissing a woman,
with the celebration raging around them, that is one of our great visual images of the euphoria that can accompany victory and peace. Perhaps we will see images like that when the soldiers come home.

  The test may be the T-shirt, twenty years from now, a relic at the bottom of someone’s dresser drawer, a reminder of the last time we went to war. “Every twenty years it happens,” a soldier’s father said to me when this all began, all those years ago, in January. Maybe now we have the authority, and the confidence, to allow that span to stretch. This is the peace before the storm. Now comes the testing of our mettle.

  NO THERE THERE

  May 6, 1992

  On a campaign trip to a South Carolina college campus twelve years ago, George Bush told his audience, “I’ll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.”

  At the time it was a throwaway line. In retrospect it sounds like something that should have been needlepointed on a pillow. Maybe that’s unnecessary; the do-what-sells gene in George Bush’s character seems so overdeveloped as to be ineradicable.

  Last week, watching the president on the first day after the Rodney King verdict was like watching a man in sweatsocks negotiate a freshly waxed floor. Slip, slip, slide. Slip, slip, slide. He went from saying the jury system had worked to expressing shock at the verdict. You could picture him studying polls and modifying the stance.

  He finally gave a neat little speech, a generic speech with no real sense of what the most powerful leader in our nation was thinking and feeling at one of the most powerful moments in recent history. Instead of reaching deep inside himself for some anecdote about his own feelings on racism, he had a generic tale of black samaritans superimposed on a law-and-order riff. He announced a federal investigation. He called up the Guard. He committed money.

  That is government.

  The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul.

  Supporters of Governor Bill Clinton have asked over and over when those of us who crank out copy are going to bring character questions to bear upon George Bush. And by that they seem to mean questions about the president’s personal life or about his son’s business dealings.

  But the truth is there is an enormous character issue here. The problem is that it is not true/false or multiple choice. It is an essay question.

  What does Mr. Bush stand for?

  His old friend C. Fred Chambers, an oil-company executive, once said, “George understands that you have to do politically prudent things to get in a position to do what you want.” Problem is, Mr. Bush has been in position for three years and we still don’t know what he wants to do other than be politically prudent for seven more months so he can win reelection. It is the opposite of the emperor’s new clothes. There are clothes, all right, depending on the prevailing winds, but nothing inside the empty suit.

  Mr. Bush couldn’t bring his great personal passions and ruling principles about race to bear on this crisis because he has none. Early this year The New York Review of Books ran a history of Mr. Bush’s stands on civil rights issues that is a kind of road map of political expediency, from leading a campus drive at Yale for the United Negro College Fund in 1948 to campaigning for the Senate in Texas in 1964 by opposing the Civil Rights Act, to embracing a 1970 plan that advocated goals and timetables for hiring and promoting minorities, what the president today denigrates as quotas.

  In fact he has done this on many of the great issues of our time. From the day in 1980 when the New York State Right to Life party said that his presence on the ticket ruled out an endorsement for Ronald Reagan to his position today as an anti-abortion ally—but not a champion, never a champion, champion is risky, champion is out there—Mr. Bush has slid from one politically convenient abortion stance to another.

  My most enduring memories of the first Bush administration will be of a man needing principle and having only polls. He waffled on raising taxes. He went from being part of an administration that had propped up Saddam Hussein to dubbing Saddam a Hitler figure. He seemed at first flummoxed by how to react to the Soviet coup and then was halfhearted in his support for economic aid, as though even the traditional Red Menace philosophy was too rich for his blood.

  Trollope, who created fictional politicians who were the mirror image of real ones, wrote in his autobiography that a successful politician “must be able to confine himself and confirm himself, to be satisfied with doing a little bit of a little thing at a time … If he have grand ideas, he must keep them to himself, unless by chance he can work his way up to the top of the tree.” But by that time a fellow may have gotten out of the habits of grand ideas and nonconformity. There is a character issue for Mr. Bush in this campaign. The clothes have no emperor. There is no there there.

  JUST SAY YES

  April 1, 1992

  Here’s a suggested response for elected officials of a certain age when asked whether they smoked marijuana:

  “Of course.”

  When political handlers are putting together position papers in the years to come, they should include an appendix they might as well call “The Rolling Papers.” Exhibit A might be the way in which Governor Bill Clinton handled the dope issue when it came up this year. He backed, he filled, he clung to the letter of the question (“I have never broken the laws of my country”), and finally he said that, like so many other people of his generation, he did smoke marijuana when young, at Oxford when he was a Rhodes scholar. He then went on to explain.

  Never explain.

  One result was that Billy Crystal, who has made the Oscar telecast finally worth staying awake for, looked into the camera the other night and said, “Didn’t inhale?” to a great guffaw from the audience. Mr. Clinton’s suggestion that he smoked dope without inhaling made him look like either a fibber or a dork. Saying you smoked dope but didn’t inhale is the equivalent of saying you drank beer but didn’t swallow it.

  I’ve been told that we’re being particularly hard on Mr. Clinton this year, and I understand why some people are saying so. But they’re missing the point. The point is that in some sense he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, running for president during a period of intense exploration of character issues. Like the rest of us, he’s still not sure where the land mines lie, so he’s wound up dancing around some questions best served by standing pat.

  There are still purists who contend that character is not the point, that we should look solely at where candidates stand on the issues. That’s foolish. We elect a whole person, not just a position paper on national health insurance or tax cuts. If George Bush loses in November, it will be for many reasons, but one will be that he just didn’t seem like a real guy, who understood sad songs, shrunken paychecks, and macaroni meals.

  Certainly the comely and charming Mr. Clinton, who promises to stick with us until the last dog dies, is running in part on his personality, and we’ve decided to explore it fully. We’re still working out which culs-de-sac in the lives of candidates are dead ends and which teach us something important about the landscapes of their lives, which issues are character issues and which are peripheral ones. Sometimes we get it wrong. Ultimately the voters decide.

  We assume that voters care about cheating, lying, lawbreaking. But we still don’t really have a handle on whether people think infidelity counts as cheating or lying. And we have a pretty good idea that they’re not much bothered by the breach of laws that accompanied smoking a joint. Character issues are changing things, peculiar to their time. It would be a ho-hum story today to uncover a candidate’s short-lived first marriage when, just three decades ago, divorce was by way of disqualification. No one then talked much about sexual harassment; today it could torpedo a campaign.

  Drug use has become ho-hum, too. The unwritten rule for public officials seems to be that they have to say they only did it once or twice and that they didn’t enjoy it. For all of us who lived in dorm rooms with Indian-print bedspreads on the walls at around the sa
me time they did, this seems not only foolish, but shortsighted.

  One of the things that were so surreal about Nancy Reagan, in her trim little Adolfo suits, cruising the country to tell kids to just say no, was that she didn’t have a clue as to why so many of them were saying yes. You could make an argument that those who have had a brush with drug use have some perspective on drug abuse. Instead of insisting that they didn’t like it, why not admit that part of the allure of drugs is that they’ve been known to make you feel temporarily terrific? That’s why people wind up using them to excess, particularly if they have lousy lives.

  In the long shadow of crack and alcohol abuse, smoking marijuana has come to seem pretty tame. And it’s apparent that soon it will be an anachronistic footnote in discussions of the character of the candidate. The drug issue has become insignificant as it has become unabashed. Short, sweet, without excuses or caveats: just say yes.

  ADVANTAGE, MR. CLINTON

  April 8, 1992

  The daffodils are pressing skyward, the winter coats are ratty and in need of a good rest, and July will be here before we know it. It is time to get serious. We’ve enjoyed our season of none-of-the-above, the complaints that Mr. Right never stepped up to a podium and into our lives. Like the stages of serious illness, we’ve passed through anger and denial during this primary season. It is time for resolution, reconciliation, what the existential or the insurgent might call peace.

  Bill Clinton is going to be the Democratic candidate for president.

  And it’s hard not to say that Mr. Clinton deserves it, impossible to think that a draft movement at the convention would be anything but grossly unfair. He has the experience; he’s done the time. For a few more minutes we can entertain the notion of a composite candidate: the orator’s gift of Cuomo, the war record of Kerrey, the labor support of Harkin, the sheer decency of Tsongas. A pinch of Bradley, a bit of Nunn and Gore and Gephardt. And a dollop of regret, too, at all the good candidates who stayed out of the race and must be kicking themselves today.