Pointing out similarities between the Vietnam and Iraq wars has become a favorite tactic of the current war's opponents. Critics see history repeating itself in what they claim are the two wars' specious justifications(the Tonkin Gulf attack, the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction); the attempted handoffs to native forces (Vietnamization, the training of Iraqi soldiers); and the overall effect (quagmire). Many think of themselves as carrying on the 1960s tradition of protest. Whether you were on their side or not, to hear Peter, Paul and Mary sing at an antiwar rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to experience a remarkable sense of continuity.
But there is a striking difference between the protests then and now -- and it is in the quality of debate. We've seen only a shadow of the impassioned opposition that eventually made waging war in Vietnam so politically risky for President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democrat who gave up the White House rather than stand for reelection. And we've heard little of the eloquence that rang out four decades ago -- and transformed me, a take-life-as-it-comes student raised in a Midwestern suburb, into a strict constructionist of the proposition that war can be justified only if every alternative has been exhausted.
A man of many words: Norman Thomas, then 81, stirred the crowd at a 1965 antiwar protest on the Mall. Inset, Thomas in 1947.
(Above, Bettman/corbis; Inset, Oscar White -- Corbis)
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In a sitcom and sound-bite culture that puts a premium on the lightning comeback, the one-liner, the wisecrack, the catch phrase and the political mantra, the Iraq war has highlighted just how few true orators we have today. The war has also evealed how few of us are willing to listen to a political speaker intensely enough to risk having our mind changed. And when war is on the table for discussion, a tongue-tied culture becomes not just a flaw but a crying shame.
In the '60s, speakers eager to talk about the war seemed to be everywhere. Spiro Agnew, the pro-war vice president, certainly seemed to be everywhere. But there was also a wave of eminent men and women in opposition, appearing on campuses and at rallies, putting their prestige on the line as they inveighed against what they regarded as -- again, this may sound familiar today -- a civil war in a country where we had nothing essential at stake. This traveling corps of advocates included Dr. Benjamin Spock, Democratic activist Bella Abzug, independent journalist I.F. Stone, MIT professor Noam Chomsky and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. Their paladin was Norman Thomas.
I heard Thomas speak at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was a graduate student in English, in the fall of 1965. I was in the audience because encountering people like Thomas -- a legendary crusader who'd made his first run for president on the Socialist ticket in 1928 -- had been one of my main motivations for coming East. I was prepared to be impressed by an historical figure, not to have the sheer power of a brilliant thinker and speaker force me to rethink my support of the war.
And it almost didn't happen. When Thomas began walking -- or, I should say, tottering -- into the auditorium, I was tempted to get up and leave. In his eighties, he was nearly blind and so hobbled by arthritis that his daughter had to help him every step of the way. Once he got settled and opened his mouth, however, the years melted away. There was nothing frail about his voice, which boomed out with no need for amplification, or his mind, which had an astounding amount of information at its command. And he was winging it. Without script or note cards (which he couldn't have read if he'd brought them), his delivery was so devastatingly cogent that you could feel the crowd quickening and becoming enthralled. Hearing someone speak at such a high level over an extended period of time can be as exhilarating as watching a great sporting feat, and this was the kind of excitement Thomas generated that night.
He knew he was good, too. He was a wit -- he once quipped to an editor of whose grammar he disapproved, that if the editor had been Shakespeare's, a certain play would have been titled "Like You Like It" -- and his enjoyment of his own sallies was infectious. He'd honed his speaking skills as a Presbyterian minister and perfected them as a perennial political candidate. It hardly mattered that he could barely see his audience. He could hear us, and he obviously relished the give-'em-hell-Norman cheers. H.L. Mencken's assessment, written during Thomas's 1948 campaign for president (his last), was just as true nearly two decades later: "He never starts a sentence that doesn't stop and he never accents the wrong syllable in a word or the wrong word in a sentence. . . . It is not often in this great Republic that one hears a political hullabaloo that is also a work of art." I stayed for every word of Thomas's "hullabaloo" and the follow-up Q&A, and I went home that night with my position on the war in tatters.
Whom and what have we heard this time around? Sen. Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat, gave a rousing antiwar speech on the Senate floor just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but this isn't the same as taking the case to the people in town halls and student centers nationwide. An informal survey of universities in the District of Columbia turned up only a handful of dissenting speeches on the war over the last year or so: by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and at George Washington; and by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and Scott Ritter, former head of the U.N. weapons inspection team in Iraq, at Georgetown. Todd Sedmak, director of media relations at American University, cautioned me, however, not to mistake the lack of speechifying for collegiate apathy. "Those events are just one approach," he said. "You've got to search the blogs and the online student newspaper."
Point taken. But I can't help thinking of Internet advocacy as a bit synthetic. Give me flesh-and-blood humans, thinking on their feet if you don't mind. And they're getting hard to find. (I don't count written-down remarks on state occasions or the blurting of insults on radio talk shows and gotcha Sunday-morning TV programs). Thomas didn't have to write down his talk in advance because it came from within; it was part of his fabric and part of his training as a man and a moralist.
And although he was near the end of his days (he died in 1968), Thomas was living in a world in which oratory still had a secure place. A great speaker without a good audience is just someone flapping his gums, and such an audience should include careful listeners who are willing to be won over if the case is convincingly made. More and more today, Americans tend to tune in only to those with whom they already agree. I'm no different -- I'm not spinning the radio dial looking to hear what's on Rush Limbaugh's mind. But if we were true sons and daughters of Athens, wouldn't we pay some attention to speakers with different views from our own?
It's not fair to chide our wise men and women for not speaking out more effectively if we don't render ourselves "docile," as the old rhetoric books say, when we sit down to hear them. If we aren't careful, the art of speaking from the heart on public issues may become a curiosity, like writing longhand. Not only do we need leaders who can talk with acumen and passion, we also need audiences listening hard and with enough commitment to raise the possibility of a conversion.
Author's e-mail:
drabelled@washpost.com
Dennis Drabelle works as a contributing editor in The Post's Book World section.
