Looking Back to Look Forward: Inheriting Unpopular Wars
It’s a defining issue in the 2008 presidential election:
what to do next in the war on terror. Barack Obama wants to end U.S. involvement in Iraq as soon as possible.
John McCain says U.S. victory is the goal, no matter how long it takes. This week, in the final installment of our election series, “Looking Back to Look Forward,” KPLU’s Bellamy Pailthorp examines 20th-century presidents who have inherited unpopular wars � and what they might teach us about the promises of the current candidates.
REPORTER: War is an issue that tends to raise people’s passions. And here in the Pacific Northwest, it’s not hard to find folks who are directly impacted by the decisions of our commander in chief.
MARY JO BOGDEN: I have a son in Iraq.
BERRY CARTER: I have a grandson in Iraq.
LISA HOFFMAN: My husband is currently serving with the Marines in Afghanistan and he was in Iraq in 2006.
REPORTER: That’s just three of a group we invited into KPLU’s studios to talk about how they’re voting in this election.
But, before I tell you what they think, let’s go back in time, to the first unpopular war of the 20th century - a conflict many people now refer to as the forgotten war: Korea. In 1952, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower made a famous promise on the campaign trail.
PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER: I shall go to Korea! (applause)
REPORTER: The crowd you hear in is Detroit. Eisenhower was a military man of the highest order -- the commanding general who had led allied forces to victory in World War Two.
Seven years later, the U.S. was backing South Korea against Communist aggressors, who had invaded in 1950.
There was a draft in the U.S., and tens of thousands of American soldiers were coming home wounded or in caskets.
Eisenhower promised the first task of his administration would be to review and re-examine every possible course of action.
PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER: �with one goal in view: to bring the Korean War to an early and honorable end.
REPORTER: Eisenhower handily beat Democrat Adelai Stevenson with that pledge - not to win the war - to end it. And he made good on his promise. Six months after Ike took office, the Korean War was over. Contrast that with the next unpopular war � one tthat dragged on for sixteen years and was inherited by three presidents: Vietnam.
U.S. involvement there started quietly under Democrat John F. Kennedy. After JFK’s assassination, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, won re-election in 1964 with a promise to stay the course.
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Our goal is peace in Southeast Asia. What is at stake is the cause of freedom.
REPORTER: Johnson’s public speeches about Vietnam were controlled and deliberate. But privately, LBJ was tormented by the war. He knew that it was robbing children of their fathers and maiming veterans who survived it. Listen to him here in 1964, talking on a Whitehouse phone with one of his closest friends, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia.
SENATOR RICHARD RUSSELL: I’ll tell you, it’ll be the most expensive venture this country ever went into�
Reporter's Notebook
Bellamy Pailthorp
 The economy has eclipsed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the number one issue swaying voters in this election.
But earlier this year, these conflicts and the United States’ standing in the world – our foreign policy - fuelled a big surge in voter turnout. It seemed clear that where you stand on the war and diplomacy would determine how you vote. Democrat Barack Obama appeals to people who, like him, opposed the war in Iraq before US troops invaded. Republican John McCain is critical of the US invasion too, but he’s a decorated veteran of war who insists we must not leave without securing some kind of victory. Now all of that has changed � polls indicate the economy is the number one issue.
What do you think? How important are the candidates' positions on the wars? How big a role is that playing in your choice of a candidate in this election, now that the economy has taken center stage?
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PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON: I’ve got a little old sergeant that works for me over at the house. And he got six children. And I just put him up as the United States Army and Air Force and Navy every time I think about making this decision and think about sending that father of those six kids in there. And what the hell are we going to get out of his doin’ it.
REPORTER: Despite that, Vietnam became known as Johnson's war. By the end of 1968, more than half a million troops were stationed there. TV images of the horrors of Vietnam inspired a new generation of protesters and cost Johnson his political career. Under pressure from fellow Democrats, he announced he would not run for re-election. Later that year, Republican Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey. Nixon won on a mandate of change. Here's his campaign pledge as he accepted his nomination.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: The first priority foreign policy objective of our next administration will to be (sic) bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. (applause)
REPORTER: But the war dragged on after Nixon took office. In 1969, he gave a speech, on national television, appealing to the silent majority. He said he respected the idealism of protestors, and that he wanted nothing more than to not have to sign letters to the families of fallen soldiers.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: I want to end the war, to save the lives of those brave young men in Vietnam. But I want to end it in a way, which will increase the chance that their younger brothers and their sons will not have to fight in some future Vietnam some place in the world.
REPORTER: Many people now think of the war in Iraq as that new Vietnam. In the current election race, Democrat Barack Obama has mobilized huge crowds with his stump speeches criticizing the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Before the economy started melting down it was the number one issue. He told the overflow crowds at Seattle’s Key Arena in March that it was unwise and that he opposed it from the start.
SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: ... and that is why I will end this war in 2009. And I will bring our troops home. (applause)
REPORTER: Since then, Obama has revised his timetable - he now says we coulld get out of Iraq in the summer of 2010, with a residual force remaining indefinitely. But he says the main objective of the military should be to get out. He wants the focus instead on Afghanistan, because he says that’s where the terrorists of Al Queda are gaining the most ground now. He would put more troops there after a phased withdrawal from Iraq.
John McCain is also critical of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. But he says putting any kind of timetable on ending the war now would embolden Al Queda terrorists and the countries that harbor them. McCain says the Bush Administration’s recent strategy of adding more troops in Iraq - the surge - is working. Here he is at a town hall meeting in Rochester Michigan in May.
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: ...and as the Iraqi military takes over more and more of the responsibilities and Americans withdraw, then I’ll bring ‘em home. I’ll bring ‘em home. But I’ll bring ‘em home with honor, and I won’t bring ‘em home in defeat.
REPORTER: So what about those people I mentioned earlier who have relatives in the military? What does the wife of a Marine Corps Reserve Officer think?
LISA HOFFMANN: We should do something if not honorable at least moral, so that we don’t leave a situation where we leave a civil war and massive killing.
REPORTER: Lisa Hoffman is one of a diverse group of voters we invited to our studios who expressed an interest in the war.
She teaches urban studies in Tacoma and says she’s found her own left-leaning tendencies challenged since her husband, who votes Republican, volunteered to go to Iraq. Hoffman is voting for Obama, but says she has mixed feelings.
LISA HOFFMANN: I think that much of what McCain says about how long we need to stay there is a strategic mistake. But I also think he’s right that the reality is we don’t have enough people to do this, that we need to have some kind of an expansion and I’m not sure how that is going to happen.
REPORTER: Hoffman thinks re-instating a draft might get the public more engaged. Mary Jo Bogden says that would be a big mistake.
She’s a secretary from Redmond with a 24-year-old son in Iraq, who she talks with every day. She says she’s following her son’s advice and avidly backing McCain.
MARY JO BOGDEN: I think if we left, it would be like Vietnam. We left Vietnam and the slaughters that went on. It’s - the same thing will happen, to the Iraqi people. We have to stay strong. We’re there. We have to finish the job.
REPORTER: Berry Carter, a retired army command sergeant major who lives in Spanaway and has a grandson in Iraq, himself served during Vietnam. He’s suspicious of the rhetoric he hears from past presidents and current candiates. He says he’s leaning toward voting for Obama.
BERRY CARTER: I’ve never seen an honorable war. All wars do the same thing. They kill and destroy.
REPORTER: Sargeant Carter calls Iraq a quagmire with no clear enemy. He thinks its imperative that we get out.
BERRY CARTER: I mean, you stay the course, what have we gone from - a multi-billion dollar surplus to a trillion ddollar deficit. How do you pay it off? You know, that’s our future that we’re squandering out there.
REPORTER: The ultimate cost of the war will depend on hard choices facing our next Commander in Chief and the generals he selects. Bellamy Pailthorp, KPLU News, Seattle.
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