Word: nam
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...fathers and sons who argued the Viet Nam War over the kitchen table, the scene was thoroughly familiar. The stern elder, graying hair neatly cropped and parted, lectures on the global responsibilities of a world power. The skeptical younger man, thick hair curling over ears, demands to know why American boys must be sent off to die in vain. Each loses his temper and falls to impugning the integrity of the other...
...table in this scene, however, was not in a kitchen but in the rotunda of Columbia University's Low Library in New York City. The older generation was played by Walter Mondale, the younger (nine years younger, anyway) by Gary Hart. The issue was not Viet Nam but its lessons and how they should be applied today in Central America and the Persian Gulf. The family was the Democratic Party, once again bitterly divided over the limits of intervention...
Hart's formative experience was the Viet Nam War; as George McGovern's 1972 campaign manager, Hart was a prominent opponent of America's military involvement in Southeast Asia. The real enemy, says Hart, is not Communism but "poverty, hunger and disease." In most internal disputes in foreign countries, he contends, the U.S. not only backs the wrong side-"repression and corruption and privilege"-but "inevitably the losing side." Hart charges that Mondale was slow to turn against the Viet Nam War and has yet to learn its lessons. A leader, said Hart, must know "not only...
Hart intensified his attacks on Mondale after polls of New York voters found that fewer than one in five favored military aid to Central America. A Hart ad showed a slowly burning fuse and asked, "Remember Viet Nam?"; his speeches warned that either "Reagan's or Mondale's" policies would lead to dead G.I.s...
...Beirut, when Hart claims he was calling for an American withdrawal from Lebanon, he actually voted to extend their mission for another six months. By feeding these examples to the press, Mondale aides hope to depict Hart as a feckless McGovernite who has learned the "wrong lesson" from Viet Nam. Aides portray Mondale, by contrast, as a steady hand who knows what it is like to have the nuclear-weapons-code briefcase at the ready. A Mondale ad shows a red phone ringing in the night and asks the voters who should answer...