Biden, who largely sat out his generation’s defining conflict, could cement the U.S.-Vietnam alliance.
President Joe Biden salutes after awarding the Medal of Honor to Capt. Larry Taylor, an Army pilot from the Vietnam War who risked his life to rescue a reconnaissance team that was about to be overrun by the enemy, during a ceremony Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2023, in the East Room of the White House in Washington.
The trip will not be complicated by the personal history that many Americans of his generation have with the region. Biden never served in Vietnam, unlike the late Sen. John McCain , whom he befriended; gave soaring antiwar speeches, unlike Robert F. Kennedy, whom he admired; or agonized publicly over the conflict, unlike John F. Kerry, whom he worked alongside for decades and who will be joining him on the trip.
Former senator Chuck Hagel , a friend and Senate colleague of Biden’s for many years, said Biden sought to learn the lessons of Vietnam despite not personally experiencing the conflict. Biden received five draft deferments, mostly as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware and a law student at Syracuse. In 1968, following a physical exam, he was exempted from service because he’d had asthma as a teenager.
“For God’s sake, stop the Madison Avenue, sugar-coated garbage,” Biden said in prepared remarks for a June 1972 campaign speech, according to the Wilmington Journal. “Don’t talk to us about a generation of peace when every day hundreds of planes cut through the skies of Indochina, and countless women and children and old men run from their liberators, their flesh burned with napalm.”
The 1972 messaging worked, as Biden narrowly upset a two-term Republican incumbent. “He’s a senator because of antiwar sentiment,” said Vallely, who has known Biden for decades and who is now a Southeast Asia expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School.At a 1987 news conference during his first run for president, Biden was asked how he could run to represent the baby-boom generation when he was not a child of the protest movement. He launched into a lengthy, somewhat defensive answer.
During his time in the Senate, Biden developed a close friendship with McCain, despite their different party orientations. But certain topics were off limits.
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