American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  Corporate America picked up the thread. One characteristic version was produced in 1985 by United Technologies, a major defense contractor. It was an editorial advertisement published in major magazines to mark the tenth anniversary of the war’s end. Called “Remembering Vietnam,” this advertorial would have been better titled “Forgetting Vietnam.” It proclaimed: “Let others use this occasion to explain why we were there, what we accomplished, what went wrong, and who was right. We seek here only to draw attention to those who served. . . . They gave their best and, in many cases, their lives. They fought not for territorial gain, or national glory, or personal wealth. They fought only because they were called to serve. . . . Whatever acrimony lingers in our consciousness . . . let us not forget the Vietnam veteran.”

  The Jeep/Eagle division of Chrysler took it a step further. While United Technologies at least acknowledged that the Vietnam War had produced debates that “others” might want to continue, Chrysler’s major statement about Vietnam—a forty-five-second video advertorial—completely erased the ghost of wartime polarization and failure. The message was delivered by one of the most famous Americans of the 1980s, Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca. Iacocca’s status as media icon emerged from a number of sources: his successful restoration of a bankrupt car company (with the indispensable help of a government bailout); his memoir, Iacocca (a son-of-immigrants-to-corporate-titan success story that was the number one best-selling book for almost exactly the same time period as Bruce Springsteen’s 1984–85 Born in the U.S.A. Tour); his memorable appearances in his company’s television commercials; and his high-profile leadership of the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island restoration. Some people thought Iacocca might run for president after Reagan’s second term. Ron DeLuca, who oversaw many of the Chrysler ads, believed Iacocca had a key commonality with Reagan: “The two men epitomize the rebirth of patriotism and pride.”

  Iacocca’s advertorial appeared as an introduction to the video release of Oliver Stone’s first Vietnam War film, Platoon. It shows Iacocca strolling through the woods in a suit and trench coat. Along the way, he happens upon an old, rusty military jeep. After gazing thoughtfully at the object for a moment, he turns to the camera and says:

  This jeep is a museum piece, a relic of war—Normandy, Anzio, Guadalcanal, Korea, Vietnam. I hope we will never have to build another jeep for war. This film Platoon is a memorial, not to war but to all the men and women who fought in a time and in a place nobody really understood, who knew only one thing: they were called and they went. It was the same from the first musket fired at Concord to the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta: they were called and they went. That in the truest sense is the spirit of America. The more we understand it, the more we honor those who kept it alive. I’m Lee Iacocca.

  Written by the ad agency Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt, this celebration of military service was crafted, of course, to appeal to a broad audience of potential Chrysler consumers. The writers must have considered it a stirring and patriotic tribute to America’s veterans, linking them all to a long, historic train of honor, much like Reagan’s first inaugural address.

  Yet it is, in fact, a celebration of uncritical obedience to authority. When “called” to war, Americans go, without question. The true “spirit of America” is simply to serve. Citizens have no obligation to understand the purpose of their mission. They should bow to their government even when asked to fight wars “nobody really understood.” The possibility that dissent might be more American than blind submission is foreclosed by the terms of this ad. What is to be admired is “only one thing”—the obligation to obey.

  Imagine the outcry if Volkswagen ran an ad celebrating German veterans for answering the call of service under Hitler (“They were called and they went. That in the truest sense is the spirit of Germany”). Yet the Chrysler ad ignited no firestorm of protest. Indeed it was typical of the time, and many Americans no doubt found it moving and harmless. Like Reagan, Iacocca managed to strip Vietnam of all of its negative associations. Defeat, division, destruction, demoralization—all of it disappears. Only patriotic service remains. The ad is so determined to erase controversy it even offers the bizarre claim that Platoon is a “memorial” to Vietnam veterans. Viewers of Iacocca’s introduction might be shocked to see American soldiers abuse, rape, and kill Vietnamese villagers and then turn their guns on each other.

  There was an important precedent for finding honor in a lost and ignoble cause. After the Civil War, white southerners persuaded many northerners that both sides fought with distinction in our bloodiest war. White America rallied around a unifying tribute to military service, a nostalgic and comforting national memory of a bitter war. The focus on “honorable” service, north and south, made it easier for the white majority to ignore the dishonorable fact that one side had fought to defend a system of racial slavery and that the entire nation continued to deny African Americans basic rights and opportunities.

  Iacocca’s stripped-down definition of “the spirit of America” would have infuriated many viewers had it been shown in the rebellious 1960s. And even in the “conservative” 1950s such an authoritarian view of citizenship and patriotism would have raised doubts. In those days, high school history textbooks took pains to inform students that America was exceptional in its support for democratic rights like freedom of speech and open debate. Those books sugarcoated U.S. history, but they did not reduce the national ideal to uncritical support of American wars.

  Young kids coming of age in Reagan’s America and beyond could hardly imagine a time, just a decade or two in the past, when the military and the war it was fighting became so unpopular that more than half of all draft-age men took steps to stay out of uniform and out of Vietnam; a time when some 500,000 servicemen deserted the military; a time when many Americans rejected the idea that military service was always honorable and heroic. And because the draft ended in 1973, most post-Vietnam young people did not have to confront their own hard decisions about military service, making the earlier history less relevant to their own lives and thus easier to repackage.

  Political and corporate leaders were very adept at wrapping an American flag around ideas and symbols that had once inspired mass protest, thus transforming dissent into affirmation. In the mid-1980s, Reagan’s reelection team was not alone in thinking that Bruce Springsteen’s music might effectively sell any number of causes or commodities despite the social criticism in his songs. Iacocca’s Chrysler offered the rock star a reported $12 million for the right to use “Born in the U.S.A.” in its TV commercials. Springsteen rejected Chrysler’s offer, as he had Reagan’s, but the successful appropriation of rock music (and just about every other cultural expression) to promote consumption had skyrocketed since the 1960s. When Springsteen said no, Chrysler turned elsewhere—to New York jingle writer Joan Neary. She and her partner wrote a song called “The Pride Is Back,” a deliberate knockoff of “Born in the U.S.A.” “But the commercial didn’t really copy his song,” Neary explained. “It’s just got the spirit of his music.” Here it is: “The pride is back, born in America / The pride is back, born in America / The pride is back, born in America—again.”

  This upbeat little ditty ran in Chrysler TV ads in 1986 and 1987. In one short spot for the Plymouth Reliant, it accompanied a series of rapidly changing images: the stripes of an American flag, a field of grain and a distant team of workhorses, three cowboys on horseback, a white father teaching his son to twirl a rope (both wearing cowboy hats), a Reliant shooting around a corner, a black woman lifting a young child over her head, two white women riding horses in white cowboy hats and white blouses carrying pole-mounted American flags, the Plymouth logo (red, white, and blue), a Reliant getting airborne as it flies over a small rise in the road, a Reliant driving in front of a man on horseback in a white cowboy hat, a smiling young white couple, another shot of the Plymouth logo, three white kids with the youngest flexing his muscle, the Reliant riding through an urban landsca
pe, a friendly-looking Iacocca in an industrial setting, a little white kid in an oversized brown floppy cowboy hat, a group of bridesmaids grabbing for a tossed bouquet, the Plymouth logo, the American flag, and finally the Plymouth logo superimposed on top of the American flag.

  All that appears in thirty seconds—so fast it requires multiple viewings to count up the dozen horses, nine cowboy hats, four American flags, and four cars. Much more memorable is the jingle—the kind of cloying tune you can’t get out of your head. Advertising Age gave “The Pride Is Back” its “best original music” award. Shortly after this “original” appropriation of Springsteen played on TV, another team of songwriters transformed the jingle into a full-fledged song recorded by Kenny Rogers and Nickie Ryder (number 46 on the country chart).

  The song begins with a “good man” who “might have been down” but “can’t be beat.” He always rises up on “his own two feet.” It’s a comeback story, and his comeback represents nothing less than the restoration of an entire nation. Manly pride and national pride are together reborn and reiterated. The redundant claims of renewal sound like an exercise in self-persuasion. We’re strong again, manly again, proud again, indomitable again, patriotic again—American exceptionalism itself has been reborn: Americans are “born special, born blessed / Born different from all the rest.”

  The rebirth of America and Americanism is so overwrought it sounds defensive, so insecure it’s in need of constant reassurance. It’s as relentlessly upbeat as motivational guru Tony Robbins, whose first book, Unlimited Power (1986), appeared the same year as “The Pride Is Back.” All negative thoughts must be purged.

  The new nationalism of 1980s culture also had a deep strain of nativism. Even Springsteen’s song might be heard by some as an exclusionary tribute to native-born white men. The point was made in hilarious fashion by a Cheech and Chong parody called “Born in East L.A.” In response to a menacing immigration authority, Cheech belts out, “I was BORN IN EAST L.A. / Man, I was BORN IN EAST L.A.” But lacking a green card, Cheech is deported: “Next thing I know, I’m in a foreign land / People talkin’ so fast, I couldn’t understand.” In the end he slips back into the United States: “Now I know what it’s like to be born to run.”

  Nativist birth pride clashed with the common claim that the United States is exceptional precisely because it is so accepting of diversity, a “nation of immigrants.” The celebrations surrounding the 1986 reopening of the renovated Statue of Liberty paid homage to the “golden door” tradition (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”), but the tributes were mostly nostalgic, looking backward to a time when the vast majority of immigrants were white Europeans. All the fireworks, flag-waving, and corporate booze cruises filling New York harbor were expressions of national self-congratulation that obscured a profound hypocrisy: even as the United States celebrated its history of diversity and opportunity, the new nationalism mixed with the economic crises caused by deindustrialization and global competition to nourish a xenophobic hostility to foreigners and newcomers, particularly recent immigrants from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.

  Many of these newcomers would not have been allowed into the United States under the immigration laws prior to the 1960s, a flagrantly discriminatory system that was replaced by one of the most significant reforms of LBJ’s Great Society—the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The new bill opened the door to the widest range of immigrants in U.S. history. White people of European ancestry would remain the overwhelming majority for decades to come, but their percentage of the population would steadily decline. Emigration from Asia was among the fastest growing and was the key cause of a rise in the Asian American population from 1.4 million in 1970 to 6.9 million in 1990 to 16 million in 2010 (from 0.7 percent of the total population to 5.2 percent). Among them were more than a million refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

  Asian Americans have been crudely stereotyped in the media and by policymakers as a “model minority,” full of highly motivated, family-centered, law-abiding, education-hungry achievers. Those caricatures are not only insultingly reductive, but have served to mask the persistence of racism and inequality suffered by Asian Americans.

  For just as the model-minority myth was on the rise in the 1980s, so too was growing nativist hostility toward Asians. An extreme manifestation came in Detroit with the 1982 murder of twenty-seven-year-old Vincent Chin. Chin was with friends at a strip club for his bachelor party when they were accosted by two white men. One of them, a Chrysler plant superintendent named Ronald Ebens, was heard by one witness to yell, “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work!” He apparently believed Chin and his Chinese American friends were somehow responsible for the influx of Japanese-made cars that were competing well with U.S. autos. After a brief fight, the two groups left the club. A half hour later, the two white men tracked down Chin at a fast-food restaurant and smashed his skull with a baseball bat. He died after four days in a coma. Just as shocking, the judicial system allowed the killers to accept a manslaughter plea that led to a sentence of three years’ probation and a $3,000 fine.

  Nativist bellicosity was also fueled by mainstream media and popular culture. Japan-bashing became a cottage industry, ranging from a provocative Newsweek cover story (“Your Next Boss May Be Japanese”) to an inflammatory popular novel by Michael Crichton (Rising Sun). Crichton’s page-turner depicted Japanese businessmen as ruthless automatons determined to gain control of U.S. assets. His sympathetic white Americans say things like “I have colleagues who think that sooner or later we’ll have to drop another bomb [on Japan]. . . . But I don’t feel that way. Usually.”

  Made-in-America nativism was ubiquitous in 1980s advertising, and not just in the U.S. auto industry. American beer commercials were perhaps the most flagrant: “Miller’s made the American way / Born and brewed in the U.S.A.” Budweiser answered with its own “Here’s to you, America” campaign: “Made in America, that means a lot to me / I believe in America and American quality.”

  The commercialization of patriotism was not new, but its prevalence in the ’80s was a sharp contrast to the Vietnam War era. In the 1960s, many advertisers cashed in on youth (the Pepsi Generation), nonconformity (7-Up, the “Uncola”), individuality (Clairol: “It lets me be me”), and revolt (“Join the Dodge Rebellion”). Those ads skillfully appropriated the countercultural zeitgeist of the time, enacting what Thomas Frank has called “the conquest of the cool.” By the late 1960s, a significant portion of the business community—including Madison Avenue—was not only making money on countercultural trends, but had come to share its opposition to the Vietnam War.

  One of the most striking manifestations of business activism against the war was the Committee to Help Unsell the War, the brainchild of a Yale undergraduate who attracted the support of some three hundred advertising professionals. In 1971, they donated a million dollars of their time and produced 125 print ads, 33 television commercials, and 31 radio spots. No major network agreed to run their commercials, but more than 100 local TV and 350 radio stations did. The project also gained free space on some 285 billboards. The best-known product of Unsell the War was a print ad that transformed Uncle Sam from a pro-military recruiter into a wounded antiwar veteran. Instead of the famous World War II poster with Uncle Sam pointing his finger at us and declaring, “I Want YOU,” we see a badly bloodied Uncle Sam reaching out with an upturned, bandaged hand, saying, “I Want OUT.”

  One TV ad featured Henry Fonda, the World War II navy veteran and iconic star of such classic American movies as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Mr. Roberts (1955), and Fail-Safe (1964). In the 1972 ad, Fonda says:

  When I was a kid, I used to be really proud of this country. I thought that this was a country that cared about people, no matter who they were or where they came from. But now, when I see my country engaged in an endless war, a pushbutton war in which American
pilots and electronic technicians are killing thousands of Asians, without even seeing who they kill . . . when I see us each week stepping up the tonnage of bombs dropped on Indochina . . . then I don’t feel so proud anymore. Because I thought that was what bad countries did . . . not my country.

  The war undermined national pride for many older and quintessentially “American” figures like Henry Fonda. Yet the memory of their dissent is mostly lost. In the decades since the war, the rightward turn in American political culture transformed a once broad antiwar coalition into a few nasty caricatures, erasing the indisputable fact that a great diversity of people from all ages, classes, races, regions, and religions saw their nation in a far more critical light because of its war in Vietnam.

  One of the most prominent post-Vietnam stereotypes of the antiwar movement was “Hanoi Jane,” an image of Henry Fonda’s daughter as a traitor—an American Mata Hari who betrayed her country and demoralized American troops by issuing antiwar broadcasts from Hanoi and having her photograph taken while seated on a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun as if she would happily blast away all American bombers. That image hardly represents the wide variety of antiwar positions and it is not even a fair representation of Jane Fonda.