Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (21 page)

Here again, with Giuliani, we found the most common and defining attribute of the would-be right-wing male leader: the toxic combination of a life devoid of physical courage and warrior virtues, combined with a drooling desire to send others off to war in order to feel and be perceived as powerful and brave.

What is most striking about the mind-set of the right-wing chicken hawk is its stark contrast with the way in which actual war veterans think. To fake right-wing tough guys, war is exactly like a video game—some distant, abstract battle where one can feel pulsating sensations of excitement and toughness from winning, but suffer no real consequences by losing. It is risk-free fun, and thus easily cheered on.

Senator Joe Lieberman has become one of the nation’s most tenacious war advocates, not only steadfastly supporting the endless occupation of Iraq but also becoming one of the first figures of any national significance to call overtly for an attack on Iran. He never stops talking about “resolve” and “strength” and “Churchill” and “toughness”—as though he is the embodiment of those attributes by virtue of his glee in sending others off to fight wars and bomb other countries.

Lieberman’s cheap warmongering is directly the by-product of his complete lack of connection to any real wars. Like most of his fellow war-cheerleading neoconservatives, Lieberman was of prime fighting age during the Vietnam War yet steadfastly avoided service. As a result, Lieberman—like most of the right-wing pro-war contingent in America—views war the way an adolescent does. As Jeffrey Goldberg recounted in his 2007
New Yorker
profile:

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was
Behind Enemy Lines,
in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”

That is about as vivid a profile of the neoconservative warrior mentality as one can get: paranoid and frightened guys who derive personal and emotional fulfillment by giddily cheering on military destruction from a safe and comfortable distance. As an actual warrior—Gen. Wesley Clark—pointed out in mid-2007, the sort of chest-beating, casual war threats that come spewing forth from the likes of Joe Lieberman could only be made by someone completely unfamiliar with war, and would rarely be made by any real military officer:

Senator Lieberman’s saber rattling does nothing to help dissuade Iran from aiding Shia militias in Iraq, or trying to obtain nuclear capabilities. In fact, it’s highly irresponsible and counterproductive, and I urge him to stop….

The Iranians are very much aware of U.S. military capabilities. They don’t need Joe Lieberman to remind them that we are the militarily dominant power in the world today.

Only someone who never wore the uniform or thought seriously about national security would make threats at this point.
What our soldiers need is responsible strategy, not a further escalation of tensions in the region. Senator Lieberman must act more responsibly and tone down his threat machine.

Clark’s criticism applies to virtually the entire top level of the American right. Its loudest, most flamboyant warriors—beginning with George Bush, Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and on down—are not only individuals who never went anywhere near the military but are people who actively avoided combat when their country was at war. And real warriors are beginning, with increasing clarity, to make that point. From
New York Magazine
in 2007:

“If Giuliani is the nominee, we’re going to hammer him with ads, and it’s going to be easy because the issue is simple: He’s a draft dodger,” says Jon Soltz, an Iraq vet who served as a captain and runs VoteVets.org, a left-leaning version of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. “Giuliani gets a zero-zero,” says General Wesley Clark, an adviser to the group. “He wasn’t willing to risk his life for his country, and he has no relevant experience that’s in any way useful to be commander-in-chief. He hosted the U.N. and had a large police force.”

Giuliani was born in 1944, which placed him at prime fighting age throughout the mid-1960s and into the early 1970s as the Vietnam War raged on. Yet this supreme Tough Guy obtained one deferment after the next—including one under highly questionable circumstances—to ensure that he did not have to fight for his country, instead sending other Americans off to die. As Joe Conason reported in
Salon,

During his years as an undergraduate at Manhattan College and then at New York University Law School, Giuliani qualified for a student deferment. Upon graduation from law school in 1968, he lost that temporary deferment and his draft status reverted to 1-A, the designation awarded to those most qualified for induction into the Army.

At the same time, Giuliani won a clerkship with federal Judge Lloyd McMahon in the fabled Southern District of New York, where he would become the United States attorney. He naturally had no desire to trade his ticket on the legal profession’s fast track for latrine duty in the jungle. So he quickly applied for another deferment based on his judicial clerkship. This time the Selective Service System denied his claim.

That was when
the desperate Giuliani prevailed upon his boss to write to the draft board, asking them to grant him a fresh deferment and reclassification as an “essential” civilian employee.
As the great tabloid columnist Jimmy Breslin noted 20 years later, during the former prosecutor’s first campaign for mayor: “Giuliani did not attend the war in Vietnam because federal Judge Lloyd MacMahon [
sic
] wrote a letter to the draft board in 1969 and got him out. Giuliani was a law clerk for MacMahon, who at the time was hearing Selective Service cases. MacMahon’s letter to Giuliani’s draft board stated that Giuliani was so necessary as a law clerk that he could not be allowed to get shot at in Vietnam.”

The very idea that a law clerk for a federal judge—fresh out of law school—is “essential” in any way is absurd on its face. Yet Giuliani was so desperate to avoid fighting for his country that he invoked this rationale in order to ensure that someone else was sent in his place.

What makes Giuliani’s evasion of military service all the more galling is that—like so many of his right-wing comrades—the cultural and political divide illustrated by the war in Vietnam was the centerpiece of his right-wing appeal. Indeed, in September 2007, Giuliani published a lengthy article in
Foreign Affairs
intended to outline his overall approach to foreign policy, and this Vietnam-era draft dodger had the audacity to cite America’s lack of resolve in finishing that war as a major cause of weakness. Giuliani wrote,

America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency.

But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South. The consequences were dire, and not only in Vietnam:
numerous deaths in places such as the killing fields of Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and
a weaker America.

If fighting and winning in Vietnam were such a critical prong in protecting America’s national security—as he contends now—where was Giuliani when the war was being waged? Why did he hide and avoid the fight? And what possible excuse is there for allowing him, in light of this behavior, to parade around as some sort of Father-Warrior-Protector while demeaning others as weak and cowardly and without the resolve to fight for the United States?

With the exception of John McCain, who was revealingly attacked by most of the Hard Right, the same can and should be said for the other leading GOP presidential candidates in 2007—Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson, and briefly, Newt Gingrich. They pranced around as tough guys, sounding as bellicose as possible, even though the reality of their own lives when it comes to war is indistinguishable from Giuliani’s. All were of prime fighting age during the Vietnam War, and all engaged in one maneuver after another to ensure that they did not fight.

In November 2007, a
New York Times
profile detailed what Mitt Romney was doing during the Vietnam War. Although the article reflects quite poorly on his character, it demonstrates why his candidacy began to resonate among our country’s right-wing war-cheerleading faction. Romney’s life mirrors that faction’s perverse “values” perfectly.

While many of his fellow citizens from 1966 to 1969 were being killed in Vietnam, Romney—“a sheltered child of privilege,” as the article put it—spent those years in Paris and other cities in France trying to convert the French to Mormonism, which enabled him to obtain a “missionary” deferment. When Romney and his fellow Mormon missionaries encountered anti-American sentiment from war opponents, they decided that the French—unlike Romney and his war-supporting, war-avoiding friends—were “weak”:

The missionaries had often met with hostility over the Vietnam War. “Are you an American?” was a common greeting, Mr. Romney recalled, followed by, “‘Get out of Vietnam!’ Bang!” The door would slam.
But such opposition only hardened their hawkish views. “We felt the French were pretty weak-kneed,”
[Romney’s fellow missionary Byron] Hansen said.

So early on, Romney shared one of the defining values of the political movement he sought to lead: namely, the belief that those who want to send other people off to fight wars are “strong” and “courageous,” while those who oppose sending others off to war are “weak.” As Romney’s co-missionary put it, perfectly encapsulating the right-wing war cheerleaders of both then and now,

Most of the missionaries, though, were also relieved that their service meant a draft deferment. “I am sorry, but no one was excited to go and get killed in Vietnam,” Mr. Hansen said, acknowledging, “In hindsight,
it is easy to be for the war when you don’t have to worry about going to Vietnam.”

What’s particularly reprehensible about all of this is that so much of the Republican Party spent years mauling Bill Clinton for avoiding service in a war
that he opposed.
But for years, Romney emphatically supported the Vietnam War yet actively avoided service and never enlisted:

Many church leaders considered the war a godly cause, and Mr. Romney said at the time he thought that it was essential to holding back Communism….

Eventually, the great debates of the day intruded even at Brigham Young. In the fall of 1970, the student government president and others distributed a pamphlet encouraging opposition to the Vietnam conflict by quoting past Mormon leaders on the evils of war, stirring a predictable campus fury.

Mr. Romney wanted no part of such things. “If we had asked Mitt to sign that pamphlet, he would have had a heart attack,”
said Terrell E. Hunt, a fellow Cougar who signed it.

Mitt Romney, then and now: showing what a supertough patriot he is by cheering on wars that other people—but never he or his family—risk their lives to fight. What makes it all the more repellent is that while many Mormons did enlist—Brigham Young University was one of the few campuses that was a hotbed of
pro-war activism—
Romney actively avoided service, first with his missionary deferment and then by obtaining a student deferment once he got back from France.

And now he has the audacity to claim that he wanted to fight, but cites his high lottery number as a reason why his supposed desire was never fulfilled—as though there was no such thing as voluntary enlistment:

Mr. Romney, though, said that he sometimes had wished he were in Vietnam instead of France. “There were surely times on my mission when I was having a particularly difficult time accomplishing very little when I would have longed for the chance to be serving in the military,” he said in an interview, “but that was not to be.”

Note the lack of agency that he tries to insinuate—military service “was not to be,” as though he so desperately wanted to fight but it was just a matter of bad luck, having nothing to do with his own actions, that he never managed to make it to the glorious combat fields of Vietnam. It’s exactly the same deceitful little act that we heard in 2007 from our brave, combat-avoiding Warrior-in-Chief whom Romney wants to replace. As the
Washington Post
’s Dan Froomkin reported:

President Bush wishes that he could be alongside the troops in Iraq—except that he’s too old.

At least that’s what he reportedly told a blogger embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq…. “N. Z. Bear,” one of the eight guests sitting around a table with Bush at the White House, reported: “Responding to one of the bloggers in Iraq he expressed envy that they could be there, and said he’d like to be there but ‘One, I’m too old to be out there, and two, they would notice me.’”