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  • Essay / The Memory of the Vietnam War and the Nixon Administration

    The battle to reconstruct the collective memory of the Vietnam War is a battle to reinterpret America, and it began before the war even ended and continues to the present day. George Orwell summed up the importance of such struggles in his novel 1984: “He who controls the past controls the future; whoever controls the present controls the past. Since national leaders invariably play a leading role in developing an official memory of traumatic events in a nation's history, the article begins with Nixon's efforts to redefine and reconstruct the war. like Birchesque. He redefined the war using the POW/MIA excuse and successfully reconstructed America's memory of the war. When the antiwar movement criticized these measures, Nixon did what any Bircher would do: he denounced the antiwar movement as a communist conspiracy that was prolonging the war and deserved to be treated as a threat to internal security. During this time, he redefined war by creating a POW/MIA myth and succeeded in creating new visions of war for Americans. Nixon campaigned for the presidency in 1968 as a peace candidate promising to bring the troops home, and his campaign also ran under the slogan that he would end the Vietnam War and bring "the peace with honor” and he reiterated it in the years to come. In Frost's third interview, he emphasized that his actions were intended to "attempt to win an honorable peace abroad." However, this is only half the story, and here we should clarify the misconception of the term "honor." Here's what exactly he said in the interview: The actions I took with great reluctance, but recognizing that I had to do it... middle of paper ...... sympathy does not was more for “the man who fights and dies.” on the front", which "went virtually unnoticed as attention was focused on the prisoners of war", who had become "the objects of a virtual cult". Schell probed the heart of this growing obsession: “Following the president's lead, people began talking as if the North Vietnamese had kidnapped four hundred Americans and the United States had gone to war to get them back. Perhaps the most surprising and insightful judgment came years later from Gloria Coppin, VIVA's longtime president. Although she remained a fervent believer in the existence of living prisoners of war, she had painfully realized the extent to which she and many others had been manipulated. As she said in a 1990 interview: "Nixon and Kissinger simply used the POW issue to prolong the war." Sometimes I feel guilty because with all our efforts we killed more men than we saved.. ”