Free Who Let the Dogs In? by Molly Ivins

historical sensitivity.
    There are three qualities that make Clinton such an effective campaigner—energy, stamina, and joy. Of the politicians I have watched, he is most like Hubert Humphrey and Ralph Yarborough. He loves doing this—he gets energy from people.
    A lot of politicians, Lloyd Bentsen, for example, move through crowds smiling and shaking, but the smile never reaches their eyes, and you can tell they’d much rather be back in Washington cutting deals with other powerful people. In his book
What It Takes: The Way to the White House,
writer Richard Ben Cramer suggests that Bush despises politics, considers it a dirty business, and consequently believes anything is permitted.
    The different thing about Clinton is that he listens to people as he moves among them—Humphrey and Yarborough were always talking. Clinton listens and remembers and repeats the stories he hears.
    I have read several of the poetic effusions produced by my journalistic colleagues about Clinton’s bus tours and laughed. On Thursday evening, in the late dusk, moving among the thousands gathered on the old suspension bridge over the Brazos in Waco, I realized why so many of us wax poetic about these scenes.
    It’s not Clinton who’s so wonderful—it’s America.
     
    August 1992

 
    Class War
     

     
    L OS ANGELES, CALIF. — All right. Once more, Vietnam.
    For those of you who are too young to remember; for those of you too old to have felt it intensely.
    There were no good choices in those years. Early in the war, you might have believed in it. You might have been like John Paul Vann. Or even David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, because the press believed in it, too, at the beginning.
    But by 1969, no one believed in it. We had been told too many lies about why we were there. God knows the men running the war had long since stopped believing in our stated purposes there. David Beckwith, Dan Quayle’s press secretary, said the other day that even Dan Quayle was opposed to war “as it was being fought” by 1969.
    And what did he do to stop it? He voted for Richard Nixon, who had a “secret plan” to end it. More than twenty thousand Americans died in Vietnam after Nixon was elected, not to mention millions of Vietnamese.
    There were no good choices. You could go to jail. You could go to Canada. Or you could go to Vietnam and kill or die for a cause you didn’t believe in. You couldn’t get conscientious objector status until later in the war. But you could get out of it if you were middle- or upper-class.
    Because Vietnam was, from the American side, a class war from the beginning. It was planned that way.
    General Lewis Hershey was in charge of the Selective Service System. His infamous pamphlet, “Channeling,” made it all too clear that young American men had been divided into future members of the professional classes and cannon fodder. If Bill Clinton had stayed in Hope, Arkansas, and never gone to college, his butt would have been shipped to ’Nam. When Clinton says he got an induction notice while he was at Oxford but didn’t pay much attention to it, of course he’s telling the truth. No one was going to draft a Rhodes scholar, for God’s sake, and everyone knew it.
    As I recall, five men from Harvard were killed in Vietnam. There were a hell of a lot more from Odessa, Texas. For those of us who opposed the war, the rank unfairness of who had to go fight it was part of what we hated. When Dan Quayle joined the National Guard, 1.26 percent of Guardsmen were black.
    Joining the Guard was a way to stay out of Vietnam, period. Yes, there were a few Guard units sent to ’Nam, and boy were they surprised. I had to laugh when I saw the quote from Retired Colonel Robert T. Fischer of the Indiana National Guard in last Sunday’s
New York Times:
“Headquarters detachment just didn’t take every turkey off the street. It was where the general was, and there were some of those guys they just didn’t want. If they walk in the