My Swampscott friend Ralph Edwards and I have worked on many projects together over the years. We continue to do so. One of the most memorable took place in the Fall of 2016. We arranged Voter Registration Days at every Community College in the Commonwealth. It was done in a non-partisan way. None of the materials we handed out made a partisan argument. The simple message was “Without participation in the electoral process of our democratic republic, the American experiment will fail.”
At several of the Community Colleges I was given the opportunity to speak to classes where I would describe coming of age in the 1960s.
“You think things are difficult today?” I’d say, “Let me tell you…the 60s were years of assassination… of JFK, of Medgar Evers, of Malcolm X, of Martin Luther King Jr., of RFK. As the struggle for civil rights became more heated, hundreds of thousands of Americans were in the streets demonstrating against a war that ultimately cost 55,000 American soldiers to lose their lives in Vietnam as well as untold numbers of Southeast Asians. After the assassination of MLK, streets in American cities burst into flames. The decade culminated in National Guard troops killing four unarmed student protestors at Kent State, followed by State Police killing two more at Jackson State.
The war in Vietnam was a war advanced by two Presidential administrations, one Democratic, one Republican. Its roots were in the 1950s. The US walked away from the negotiations to end the colonial war between the French and Vietnamese. A Catholic dictator was installed to rule predominantly Buddhist South Vietnam. When JFK entered the White House in 1961, he assigned military advisors to shore up the rocky Diem regime, careful not to get too involved. But things were not going well in Vietnam. Diem was assassinated. Three weeks later, JFK was assassinated and a new President came to power. That President accomplished many things domestically around civil rights and the establishment of Medicare. He was less successful in Vietnam. He didn’t want to be the first President to lose a war. And he wasn’t. It was his two successors who did that. As we look around today, it is interesting to note that one of them, Richard Nixon, employed something he called “The Madman Theory.” He thought that projecting a volatile, irrational military image toward the Vietnamese, his whacky, nuclear-armed unpredictability would strike fear into the hearts of his adversaries. It didn’t. It was Operation Frequent Wind that evacuated some 7,000 Americans and others from Saigon in 1975, an awkward end to (at that time) our longest war.
A little more than twenty-five years later, the World Trade Center was hit by a hijacked airliner flown by Arabs, mostly Saudis, based in non-Arab Afghanistan. It was the beginning of what was to become the longest war in American history. One President got things started by invading Afghanistan and then Iraq. Three Presidents couldn’t bring it to an end. It was the fourth, Joe Biden, who got that done.
And where are we today?
We, and the State of Israel, are bombing the Persian nation of Iran, and threatening to “bomb them back into the Stone Age,” a colorful, unsuccessful notion from the 1960s. But not the only one.
Many think that, with Donald Trump, Richard Nixon’s Madman Theory has returned. What sane leader would singlehandedly order Elon Musk to eviscerate the American government and impose tariff taxes on every American? And, in the middle of all that, would a sane President start a war on a whim? Trump “had a feeling” that Iran was going to attack the United States, so he joined Netanyahu and began an extremely violent war for the second time in less than a year!
What else could he do?
In 2015, a deal had been negotiated among Iran, China, France, Germany, Russia, Britain, the European Union, and the United States… the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Iran’s refinement of nuclear fuel would be closely controlled and monitored, not by “boots on the ground” but by sandals and shoes filled by international monitors with “eyes on the ground” all over Iran. Most importantly, a process had been started where all parties were engaged and talking with one another. Day by day the possibilities of even more progress could be explored through diplomacy and negotiation.
Following two World Wars where perhaps a hundred million human beings around the planet had died, the JCPOA reflected the kind of progress those who had suffered through those wars 70 years before had hoped to see.
Ah…but Trump hadn’t personally made the deal. It had been signed by President Obama based on years of formal diplomacy. Trump preferred to send his son-in-law and old business partners to “make a deal.” What could go wrong? Well… look where we ended up.
Some of the most important lessons learned by leaders in the 20th century have been intentionally unlearned by Donald Trump. Following World War I, the French, British, and Americans almost gleefully punished Germany for its bad behavior. It led to the rise of the Nazi Party. As the end of World War II approached, a similar but even harsher plan was submitted by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Turn conquered Germany into a potato patch, he advocated. Instead, the Marshall Plan was adopted, NATO was created, and a prosperous, united Europe, free of war, came into being until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Our country has been far from perfect since 1945, but, as we’re seeing now, Trump has the power to make things far worse.
Nixon acted like a crazy man to intimidate the North Vietnamese. The difference now is that Trump is not acting. Not only has he threatened to bomb a whole civilization to complete extinction…not just back to the Stone Age. On his personal social media platform, Truth Social, he attacks the Pope as “Weak on Crime, Weak on Nuclear Weapons,” and then posts a picture of Trump as Jesus…the Prince of Peace.
Unbelievable? Almost.
Between now and November 3rd, Americans must use our constitutional tools to protest Trump’s plan to rip our democratic republic apart and empower Congress to bring him under control.
Jim Walsh lives in Nahant.
