CHAPTER 9: SEE NO EVIL: CHOOSING NOT TO

LOOK AT THE WAR IN VIETNAM

1 George Swiers, quoted in William Appleman Williams et al., eds., America
in Vietnam (New York: Norton, 1989), ix.

2 Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” (New York: Riverside Church
sermon, 4/4/1967).

3 Gen. William C. Westmoreland quoted at Brainy Quote, brainyquote .com,
5/2007; Antiwar, antiwar.com/quotes.php, 5/2007; and elsewhere.

4 Frederick Douglass quoted on inside cover of Robert Moore,
Reconstruction: The Promise and Betrayal of Democracy (New York:
Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1983).

5 Student ignorance is no accident. According to the historian Michael
Kammen, writing in Mystic Chords of Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1991), 661-62, President Ford wanted us to forget Vietnam. President Reagan
slashed the National Archives budget and kept documents “secret” longer, to
interfere with our producing and knowing the history of the recent past. In A
Shared Authority (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 16-18,
Michael Frisch cites an astounding classroom incident in which a student
thinks the United States won the Vietnam War. In an interesting analysis, he
argues against mere failure of her memory and agrees with Kammen that our
political leaders, presumably influencing our popular culture, habitually refer
to a need to put the war “behind us” to avoid discussing it.

6 Indeed, one inquiry textbook, Discovering American History, gives less than
two pages to the entire war. But Discovering American History focuses its
coverage on causes and results, precisely what the traditional narrative
textbooks botch, and thus provides a more coherent and memorable account of
the war than the much longer accounts in other books.

7 Lewis H. Lapham’s analysis of the importance of “a sequence of brutal
images” reinforces the foregoing. He describes just three, including the first,
third, and seventh of those I list. See America’s Century Series Transcript
(San Francisco: KQED, 1989), 57-58.