Today most Americans agree that the Vietnam War was a mistake, politically
and morally; so do most political analysts, including such men as Robert
McNamara and Clark Clifford, who waged the war.^17 If we concur with this
now conventional wisdom, then we must concede that the more educated a
person was, the more likely s/he was to be wrong about the war.
Why did educated Americans support the war? When my audiences learn
that educated people were more hawkish, they scurry about concocting new
explanations. Since they are still locked into their presumption that educated
people are more intelligent and have more goodwill than the less educated,
their theories have to strain to explain why less-educated Americans were
right. The most popular revamped theory asserts that since working-class
young men bore the real cost of the war, “naturally” they and their families
opposed it. This explanation seems reasonable, for it does credit the working
class with opposing the war and with a certain brute rationality. But it reduces
the thinking of the working class to a crude personal cost-benefit analysis,
implicitly denying that the less educated might take society as a whole into
consideration. Thus, this hypothesis diminishes the position of the working
class—which was more correct than that of the educated, after all—to a mere
reflex based on self-interest. It is also wrong. Human nature doesn’t work that
way. Research has shown that people of whatever educational level who
expect to go to war tend to support that war, because people rarely don’t
believe in something they plan to do. Working-class young men who enlisted or
looked forward to being drafted could not easily influence their destinies to
avoid Vietnam, but they could change their attitudes about the war to be more
positive. Thus, cognitive dissonance helps explain why young men of draft age
supported the war more than older men, and why men supported the war more
than women. While less-educated families with sons in the Vietnam conflict
often formed pockets of support for the war, such pockets were exceptions to
the dovishness that pervaded the less-educated segments of our populace.^18
By now my audiences are keen to learn why educated Americans were more
hawkish. Two social processes, each tied to schooling, can account for
educated Americans’ support of the Vietnam War. The first can be summarized
by the term allegiance. Educated adults tend to be successful and earn high
incomes—partly because schooling leads to better jobs and higher incomes,
but mainly because high parental incomes lead to more education for their
offspring. Also, parents transmit affluence and education directly to their