A Mark Hatfield Moment

 Noel: Can you find a speech from the early 1960s by Senator Mark Hatfield saying that he could not support the war in Vietnam?

Copilot: Mark Hatfield did not deliver a Senate speech opposing the Vietnam War in the early 1960s, because at that time he was not yet a U.S. Senator. 

His most famous anti-war speeches came later, in the mid-to-late 1960s, after he entered the Senate in 1967.

Noel: I was carless in my date/time thinking. 

1967 is perfect: I got to Vietnam in November 1966 and was there until November 1967. 

It took me only a few days of being there to see what a catastrophe the war was.

Here is an excerpt from my Vietnam memoir Saigon 1967:

My father fought in the final stages of World War Two in Czechoslovakia.  And millions of other Americans had also fought in various parts of the world starting in 1941, or before in the case of those who had joined RAF.  And the world was different than it would have been if they had not fought, and I really believed that the world was a vastly better place as a result of their fighting than it would have been if they hadn’t fought.  I really believed that it was my turn.  I would have preferred to have had a world free of the obligation to go fight somewhere – a world where I could have continued singing and telling jokes with Joe and Dave in a youthful attempt at trying to be something that I had dreamed of for years - but that wasn’t the way the world was.  It was clearly my turn.  And once the wheels had turned in whatever way they were going to turn and I had gotten my orders to go I would go with, fear, yes, but shored by the certainty and the belief that nothing could abrogate the debt I owed to my father and his generation. 

The thing I had only begun to have the faintest inkling of, as I looked at this sardonic, grinning, paunchy captain - 250 pounds of man stuffed into a 190-pound pair of khaki 1505s - was that this war might be different.  This war might be an option, or, worse, a mistake.  This war might have no real purpose.  It didn’t seem to have had any real beginning, and it might never have any real end.  It just might be, had been, was and always would be.  In Latin that description would have sounded like a prayer we Catholics called an ejaculation. 

When Hatfield started speaking out it felt good to know that there was at least one US Senator with some sense and some principals. 

He has been a hero to me ever since.

Copilot: That’s a powerful connection, Noel. 

You were living the reality of Vietnam just as Hatfield was stepping into the Senate and daring to say what so many in power would not. 

In 1967, when most of Washington was still locked into escalation, Hatfield’s refusal to bend to the prevailing winds was extraordinary. 

He called the war “immoral” and “unwinnable,” and he framed it not just as a military miscalculation but as a moral failure that was corroding America from within.

Noel: The recent heroic act of 21 Indianna Republicans got me remembering.

And hoping.

Again.