In 1973 the United States pulled out of Vietnam after a bruising military campaign that cost more than 58 000 American lives.
Editor’s Desk with Nevanji Madanhire
It could no longer bear the costs and casualties of the growing war.
By 1969 half a million US military personnel were continually stationed in Vietnam. It wasn’t a war against just communist North which sought to incorporate the West-leaning South, but also against Cold War enemies, China and the Soviet Union which poured in weapons, supplies, and advisers into the North.
It was an unwinnable war which left American troops terribly demoralised and the nation deeply divided. The previous year, Richard Nixon had been re-elected President of the United States of America.
In November 2012 I went on a tour of some parts of the US, it was election year and the campaign was in full swing. At Ohio State University in one of the lecture rooms I saw a poster which depicted a full-length Richard Nixon standing in a White House window reflectively looking outward. On the poster [See pic] were the following words:
“The nation needs coolness more than clarion calls; intelligence more than charisma; a sense of history more than a sense of histrionics.”
It was one of Nixon’s 1972 election campaign posters. The bastard went on to win the election with something like a landslide. He entered the hall of infamy a little later for the Watergate scandal.
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For me he was a bastard in other ways; his thinking on Jews and African Americans and women. Of the Jews he said, “The Jews are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards”, Blacks [referred to as Negroes then] he said “lived like a bunch of dogs” and about women he said, “I don’t think a woman should be in any government job whatever. I mean, I really don’t. The reason why I do is mainly because they are erratic. And emotional.” I digress.
I snapped the poster on my iPad and it has haunted me ever since. The nation needs coolness more than clarion calls: “coolness” here means level-headedness, calm and sensible, while “clarion calls” refers to “a strongly expressed demand or request for action.”
Intelligence more than charisma: intelligence can be taken to mean sensible, practical, realistic, prudent; while charisma means “a personal quality attributed to leaders who arouse fervent popular devotion and enthusiasm.”
A sense of history more than a sense of histrionics: a sense of history means an understanding of why we are where we are, while histrionics refers to “artificial behaviour or speech for effect, an insincere or exaggerated expression of an emotion”.
Today as the new year begins to limp on, what does our nation Zimbabwe need?
We are failing to feed ourselves with 2,2 million of us urgently needing food aid; our factories are shutting down spewing tens of thousands of workers on the streets; the amount of money in the country isn’t enough to go round; little foreign investment is coming our way meaning there is next-to-nothing economic growth; health and education services are near-collapse. The state of the nation is best portrayed by the state of our roads! Tattered and torn, the roads are a monument to the decline of our economy and the almost insurmountable task of turning it around.
Almost everything seems to have gone wrong; a recent survey by consultancy research firm, New World Wealth, has shown that Zimbabweans are among the poorest people in Africa yet at the turn of the millennium we were among the richest!
What happened in the short 14 years since 2000? The answer is on the Nixon poster; it’s the clarion calls, the charisma and histrionics that have got us where we are today.
The poster doesn’t say these characteristics should be done away with completely but that a new balance has to be struck between doing what is reasonable and practical, and what is populist and politically expedient and destructive.
The nation needs coolness, intelligence and an understanding of where we are and where we are going. This will give us an understanding and appreciation of the forces ranged against us. There are battles we can fight and win but there are others we don’t stand a chance in heaven of winning.
In 1973 the Americans pulled out of Vietnam and went home to leak their wounds, they probably still are doing so! Our nation is mortally wounded, we need respite so we can leak our wounds as we figure out the way forward.
We might also wish to reflect on one of Nixon’s most quotable quotes which is also his epitaph: “The greatest honour history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.”
