President Clinton is expected to have a difficult stay in Europe this week.
Part of it is performance art. Every American chief executive since Franklin D. Roosevelt has had to endure the self-important scrutiny of the diplomatic aristocracy.
The British and French must be wooed with “substantive discussions,” as The New York Times intoned last week, and the failed, wildly unpopular leaders of those countries must then be allowed to offer their critiques.
More difficult for Clinton will be the ceremony at Normandy, where he will mark the 50th anniversary of the Allied attack on Hitler’s “Atlantic wall.”
Unlike his predecessors born in this century, Clinton is without a link to World War II. And like millions of his generation, he went to some effort to avoid military service during the Vietnam War.
This reality has given Clinton problems with the U.S. military hierarchy, veterans groups and many Americans of the World War II generation, at least many of those interviewed on television recently.
Apparently, these groups were altogether comfortable with Ronald Reagan, who spent World War II pretending to be a combat soldier while making training films in Hollywood.
Last week, British political analyst Stephen Ellis suggested many Europeans were “disappointed” that an American chief executive of Clinton’s age and ilk was coming to pay homage to the war dead.
For the record, British Prime Minister John Major, 51, never served in the military. Indeed, of the European leaders assembling at Normandy, only French President Francois Mitterrand saw action for the Allies in World War II, or any significant military service at all.
Like so many of Clinton’s critics, however, the British analyst is not inclined to let facts intrude on the mythology. And one of the prevailing myths these days is that, like World War II, everybody sacrificed in the Vietnam era and everybody went.
It isn’t so. Most Americans not only avoided the Vietnam War, they ignored it.
Nowadays, millions of Americans turn away from recent history, forgetting their own lives, forgetting there was no consensus for the war in the year Clinton wrote his draft board, forgetting that Richard Nixon was a “peace” candidate in 1968.
With that in mind, it seems fair to ask whom analysts such as Ellis would like to see in Clinton’s stead.
The actuarial tables are non-negotiable. If, like Clinton, you were born in 1946, you could not have been at Omaha Beach.
George Bush served with great valor in World War II, and Clinton fills the working definition of a draft-dodger, but that didn’t help Bush in 1992.
Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) is a genuine war hero, but the Republican class behind has at least as much to answer for as Clinton, if that’s how these matters are going to be decided.
So, one more time, let’s call the roll on the Vietnam generation, with an eye on 1996:
Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, a fierce Clinton adversary and “family values” Republican at age 51, was practicing his economics at Texas A&M University during Vietnam.
Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), 50, enjoyed a graduate student deferment (married with children) when the bullets were flying, a lifestyle shared by former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.
Patrick Buchanan, currently leading the culture war on CNN and in his syndicated column, had a bum knee. Former Education Secretary and author William Bennett, one of Buchanan’s aides in the culture war, didn’t go, either.
Former Vice President Dan Quayle, as we all know, protected the private golf courses of his native Indiana from godless communism in the late ’60s.
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The essential difference between Clinton and his GOP adversaries as it relates to Vietnam appears straightforward:
To a man, they thought the Vietnam War was a splendid idea. But they decided the prosecution of that conflict was best left to others.
Clinton opposed the war, protested it, but has been unable or unwilling to articulate a choice that millions of his countrymen made without guilt.
Sooner or later, Baby Boomers are going to have to stop wondering what they would have done after Pearl Harbor. We can honor our parents for their sacrifices, but we cannot relive their lives, nor expect Bill Clinton to pay the psychic price for our uncertainty.
And, sooner or later, Clinton is going to have to stop apologizing for his conduct in 1968.
He must honor his parents’ generation at Normandy, but, sooner or later, he’s going to have to lead his own.