St Edwards University - Tower Yearbook (Austin, TX)

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With Not A Cheer, But A Sigh Good evening. I have asked this radio and television time tonight for the purpose of announcing that we today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. A nd so it was over. With Mr. Nixon’s spare words from the White House and two brief ceremonies in Paris, the nation began at last to extricate itself from a quicksandy war that had plagued four Presidents and driven one from office; that had sundered the coun- try more deeply than any event since the Civil War; that in the end came to be seen by a great majority of Americans as having been a tragic mistake. It was a wound to the spirit so sore that the news of peace stirred only the relief that comes with an end to pain. A war that produced no famous victories, no national heroes and no stirring patriotic songs, produced no memorable armistice-day celebrations either. America was too ex- hausted by the war and too chary of the peace to celebrate. In Wayne, Michigan, Mayor Patrick Norton interrupted a debate of the city council to ask if the councilmen would like to hear President Nixon’s speech on the set- tlement. They preferred to continue dis- cussing a proposed apartment building for senior citizens. “I thought it all very strange,” said the mayor. “We waited all these years for the war to be over, and then we were too busy to hear the announce- ment.” The Boston Globe commented that the war was concluded “not with a cheer but a sigh.” Its tension afflicted every corner of American life. It inflamed relations between the White House and Capitol Hill: the —President Nixon, January 23, 1973 leaders of Congress gave Mr. Nixon a stand- ing ovation at a briefing on the truce—and went back to an agenda including legislation to keep him or any other President from waging an undeclared war again. It infected the political process, reducing the Democrats from the landslide LBJ majority to the factionated and gloomy minority that went down with George McGovern. It ignited riots on the campuses, sent draft resisters in exile to Canada and deserters in flight to Sweden, produced a series of showcase conspiracy trials from Dr. Spock to the Chicago Seven to the Berrigans. It accelerated the growth of a counterculture turned off on America and turned on to rock, drugs, love, alienation and, sporadically, violence. It debased lan- guage, destroyed civility, reduced debate at moments to a shouting match between those who wore flags and those who burned them. It eroded the authority of institutions—not just the government but the universities, the churches and the military itself. Most of all, Vietnam drained America’s confidence in its ability to master its own problems. The Great Society was already a flickering dream when Mr. Nixon inherited it; the one sustaining hope of its architects was that it might be revitalized and advanced when the “Peace dividend”—the money America had been sinking in the war— became available. But the peace dividend has already disappeared into Mr. Nixon’s tight budget, and the pinched mood of America after Vietnam no longer favors spending for social change. The war has been even more chastening to the nation’s sense of what it can achieve in the world. The U.S. arrived in the °60’s committed by John Kennedy to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hard- ship ...to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” It entered the 70’s with the Nixon doctrine—the greatly scaled down declaration that America will meet its obli- gations abroad but will expect its allies to do more for themselves. The Cold War assump- tions that involved the nation in Vietnam— the perception of Communism as monolithic and relentlessly expansionist—have yielded to the thaw with Moscow and Peking and an emerging three-way balance of power in the world. “We are not as omnipotent or as omnivictorious as we had been able to think we were up to now,” said historian Daniel J. Boorstin. The discovery may be a risky one if it leads America into isolation and retreat: it will be happy indeed if it means no more Vietnams. It was fitting that America’s celebration of the peace was not dancing in the streets but the cadenced tolling of church bells at the hour of the ceasefire. “How,” asked one saddened liberal in the ashes of America’s longest war, “do we accept the fact that, as a country, we re not innocent any more?” Compiled from reports in Time and Newsweek, February 5, 1973.

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There’s not a high green hill where lovers lay belongs to them they think it does climbing up planting flags of flowers saying here but in the shadows of the bloody flag flowers cannot breathe as deep and die and I the sole ambassador to hills bring heavy messages to tell them that America is mean Jane Stembridge oo e—=eee — ee

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% Once the symbol of triumphant homecoming for American servicemen from a job well done, San Francisco’s Golden Gate soberly welcomed a new generation of soldiers from a job that... well, was simply done. 199 sigiereres ELST SSF