Approaching thirty, Roberta and I began to think of children. No one we knew had them. No one we knew really wanted them. In the age of the Pill, “accidents” didn’t happen the way they used to, and if they did, the Supreme Court had ruled that abortions were a constitutional privilege. In the past, the age of cumbersome and imperfect contraception, children had been almost inevitable, a penalty of spontaneous carnality. Now they were optional; we could be childless without being chaste or even very careful. The brief moment between courtship and parenthood had become elastic, and in our case it had already stretched across five years of married life, but we began to feel the pressure of middle age and mortality. If we were going to have children, now was the time.
These deliberations felt entirely new. My parents had dived into childbearing with characteristic postwar fervor. For them, marriage was a license to get on with what they really wanted in life, which was several children as soon as possible. My father married my mother six weeks after he met her, and by the time he was shipped off to Europe he had accomplished his biological task. That first baby was born dead, but by the time my father came home from Korea in 1952, his three children were waiting for him. “It seems rather strange now,” my mother had said to me, “but nearly everyone wanted to have a baby. Somehow the fact that the father might never return made the wives even more eager to have a child. It must be some sort of biological instinct to preserve the race.”
My generation felt a different urge. The planet was already too crowded, too polluted; we lived with the prospect of nuclear apocalypse. Bringing babies into such a world seemed irresponsible and cruel. When I saw people my age with two or three children, I quietly condemned them. They must be greedy, naive, obtuse. I certainly didn’t envy or admire them. They were the wrong people to have children; the right people were people like me, who knew better.
These were all rationalizations of a culture that had turned against children. I wasn’t really planning my own family on the basis of world population growth or the likelihood of nuclear war. Children made me nervous. I was uncertain how to behave around them. As an adult I thought that the introduction of children into restaurants or movie theaters was a savage breach of etiquette. Their mere presence was a rebuke. In a purely animal sense, Roberta and I understood that we were designed to procreate, nurture, and die, leaving our progeny behind, but as a twentieth-century man and woman we felt a different imperative, which was to get ahead. Children were dead weight, a renunciation of our modern-adult lives.
This was a contemporary moment: deciding to go off the Pill. It was a decision to be chewed over at length during late-night dinners we would never enjoy again, or idly speculated upon some lazy Sunday morning when we were cuddled up in bed with the newspapers—how could we choose to surrender such quiet pleasures for the chaos of children? We were not afraid of the big responsibilities of parenthood; it was the day-to-dayness, the dreary moments of standing in line at the grocery store with a bawling infant, the countless diaper changings, and the middle-of-the-night feedings that wore down our imagination. At the same time, we had a primitive longing for consequences. We wanted our marriage to have an object other than companionship. We were ready to get on with the serious moments of life. We wanted—what? To create our own people, to become a family and not just a married couple. And so we went off the Pill. It was like taking off the final vestment, becoming naked in a thrilling way known only to the ancients; one felt exposed to the sky and the whims of the gods.
Now that I was a prospective parent, I looked at the world through a different lens. To have children, or even to imagine having them, required certain political adjustments. One need not become more conservative, although it seemed every parent did, but one must become less blithe. One must focus on schools and property taxes and interest rates, and upon the background wash of pornography and violence and drug use. Tolerance ebbed. I wanted to clear a safe space for my children, but safety was expensive and hard to find. I began to dream about money. For the first time in my life I looked at the Dow Jones industrial averages and saw a connection between the capitalist economy and the rest of my life. I did not really approve of these changes in myself, because conservatism, even in my hesitant turning toward it, was a movement backward, to the Dallas of my childhood. It was tied in my mind to square values, religious extremism, racism, and rabid anti-Communism. Nonetheless, I was beginning to see myself not as a liberal bohemian writer but as an uninvested, uninsured, marginal American.
This was a time when my values were being shaken for other reasons as well. Charles Manson had taken the radical chatter of revolution, the fantasy literature of Heinlein and Hesse, the interior mysteries of the Beatles’ music—all of them secret signposts of my generation—plus a kind of idle, collective feeling that we were all more like each other than we were like our parents, and he had breathed it all horribly to life. He had forged a hippie commune into a gang of murderers. They killed between thirty-five and forty people, most of them not wealthy or well known or even much missed, but because they had killed actress Sharon Tate (who was eight months pregnant), and coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and hairstylist Jay Sebring, and a wealthy grocer named Leno LaBianca, and his wife (they stuck a fork in her abdomen), and because they had scribbled on the walls in their victims’ blood the radical slogan of the day, “Death to Pigs,” Manson became a hero in the radical community. “Offing those rich pigs with their own knives and forks, and then eating a meal in the same room—far out!” cheered Bernardine Dohrn at a Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) convention. During a recess in the Chicago Seven trial, Yippie leader Jerry Rubin went to Los Angeles to speak to Charles Manson in jail. “I fell in love with Charlie Manson the first time I saw his cherub face and sparkling eyes on TV,” Rubin wrote. Manson became an underground hero. He had his own column in the Los Angeles Free Press. Rolling Stone described him as “this smiling, dancing music man [who] offered a refreshing short cut, a genuine and revolutionary new morality that redefines or rather eliminates the historic boundaries between life and death.”
Until then, when I spoke of revolution it was nothing more than an emphatic way of speaking of economic and political changes. I did not mean murder. After the Manson killings, I began to speak more carefully. I pulled back from the easy loathing of the middle class, which had become habitual in the writings of the underground press. Being a liberal had always involved having certain sentimental ties to the radical Left. After Manson, those ties snapped.
It’s strange that my generation would find so much significance in assassinations and sensational murders. But we lived in an age of symbolic action. Manson was important to us because we saw in him the degeneration of our own lives and thinking. He had fostered the idea that he was Jesus, which his disciples truly seemed to believe. One underground paper published a sketch of Manson nailed to the cross, with a plaque above his head that said HIPPIE. There had always been, in the hippie movement, a spiritual yearning, a search for the countercultural Jesus, who was not clutched by the capitalists and the hypocritical, warmongering middle class. One could reject Jesus, but to accept and worship Manson suggested the insanity that yawned ahead when old values were thrown aside without new ones to replace them. It showed the bankruptcy of the revolutionary agenda, which was calling not for a new order but for chaos. When one of Manson’s followers, Lynette (“Squeaky”) Fromme, dressed up in a Little Red Riding Hood outfit and tried to shoot Gerald Ford in the genitals, it seemed to me that symbolic action had raced into new territory, the age itself had broken loose from anything like familiar reality, and the weird gesture had become paramount.
The airports were filled with religious extremists, but they were strangely different from the hot-eyed fanatics I had known in Dallas. They were selling not salvation but bliss. There was a monastic allure about the cults, which beckoned even to reasonable people who felt bewildered by their lives and wanted to retreat from complexity. One could shave one’s head and put on saffron robes and sell Tootsie Rolls on the street corner. I felt a similar urge at times, but it was like the small compulsion one feels to jump out of windows when one is high, high off the ground. It was a call to the withered spirit to take flight from the towers of material desire to the self-effacement that awaits like a concrete slab. And of course one knew friends who made the leap.
The cults reconstructed the idea of the family so that it ran horizontally across the generations, and not vertically from one generation to the next. People wanted to be together without the burdens of children and aging parents. It seemed to me a way of staying in school, a dormitory life that might last—well, if not forever, at least for longer.
There was a gravitation from radical politics to radical religion. Loss of faith in the one led to a search for faith in the other (perhaps this is a cycle). Rennie Davis, for instance, cofounder of S.D.S., a man whose politics I had followed with interest, went to India in 1973 and became an acolyte of the sixteen-year-old guru, Maharaj Ji; Davis said he would “crawl across the face of the earth to kiss the feet of the Perfect Master.” The line between matters that were properly spiritual and those that were necessarily political had become smeared. How were we supposed to deal with Third World insurgencies, now that our confidence had been shaken in Vietnam? During the Nicaraguan revolution, when the Sandinistas were fighting in the suburbs of Managua, the dictator Anastasio Somoza was hiding in his bunker, and an American delegation was desperately trying to negotiate peace, another American group of fifty transcendental meditationists booked a room in the Intercontinental Hotel and tried to levitate for peace. Newsmen found them hopping around the ballroom “like frogs.” They said they had been sent by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to persuade Somoza to surrender his weapons and follow TM. Was this the future of the resistance?
I could criticize these religions because they seemed to me so transparently bogus, so rash and dramatic—and in the cases of Manson and, later, of Jim Jones, cults of personality, not of the spirit, which could become so crushingly evil. And yet I too felt spiritually empty. The prospect of parenthood made me feel it all the more keenly. I disagreed with what my parents had told me about God, but as a child I had been reassured by their belief. Now my belief in the supernatural was limited to an embarrassed half-acceptance of certain truths of astrology.
This was not a religion one could pass on to children. It did not answer questions about how and why we are here. It did not make one feel a part of a larger effort. I could face being an adult without answers to these questions, but as a parent I wanted to give my children the same religious comforts I had experienced as a child, even if they rejected them. Agnosticism was a chilly prospect for children, no matter what their sign.
And yet having children, the deliberate act of creation, was such an act of faith that it mocked my doubt. I thought about the resolution I made as an undergraduate, as I was wading through the existential philosophers, never to have children until I understood the purpose of life (undergraduates are allowed to think categorically). The point of life can’t be just to go on and on, aimlessly, one generation producing the next, with no goal in mind. That is what I told myself, fiercely, at the age of twenty. At thirty, I was ready to accept that life must be perpetuated, regardless of its object, and that the act of making more life was both grave and joyful, a godlike power, the most severe responsibility and the closest approach to divinity I was likely to have.
John Gordon Wright was born April 10, 1976. His sister, Caroline Murphy Wright, came five years later, on October 20, 1981.
In the realm of politics I remained a believer, which is to say I was still a liberal. But ten years after the birth of the Great Society I was no longer devout. By now it was evident even to me that the primary consequences of liberalism were bureaucracy and taxes. Some of the good things that were supposed to happen did happen. The proportion of Americans living in poverty in 1959 was 22 percent; ten years later it was 12 percent; by 1979 it was down to 6 percent. Schools were integrated. Women entered careers that previously had been closed to them. The quality of our air and water was improving. In these respects the Great Society was a triumph.
But in other respects I was outdone with liberal thinking. Serious crimes had risen by 232 percent between 1960 and 1975. Liberal thinking replied this really wasn’t so, it was an apparition, a function of better record keeping, although the truth was obvious to everyone. Murder, rape, robbery—these were regular features of every daily paper, but no longer front-page material. Enormous tragedy had become an ordinary event. During the New York City blackout of 1965, police reported fewer than one hundred arrests; when the same thing happened in 1977, more than three thousand looters were arrested. One didn’t have to be robbed or beaten to feel intimidated by the advance of crime. I recall how, when I was growing up, my father would leave the car unlocked and running at the curbside while he ran into a store. People seldom thought about locking their houses at night. Now my parents’ house was protected by an expensive security system, every door was bolted and chained, and despite these precautions they had been burglarized several times. Roberta was a modern working woman, and yet she was afraid to go out after dark. We assumed that bad things would happen, and when they did we blamed ourselves for not being properly prepared.
I agreed that poverty and racial oppression engendered crime. I supported programs, such as legal aid, designed to protect the rights of the accused. I approved of the Supreme Court rulings in Miranda, which required that every suspect be notified of his right to counsel, and in Furman v. Georgia, which briefly outlawed the death penalty. But I was disturbed by the apparently guilty people who were allowed to go free because of technicalities in the law. For some reason these people had become a part of the liberal constituency. There was a general sense of approval in the liberal community for defense lawyers, and a corresponding loathing for prosecutors. Punishment was seen as repression. It was the same mentality that encouraged shoplifting, looting, and telephone fraud as a means of striking back at the Establishment, of “ripping off the system.” However, as an investigative reporter I spent many hours in various prisons talking to convicts, and my liberal reflexes began to change. Most of the men I met had been damaged in childhood. It was easy to see how their miserable lives would direct them into lawlessness. But there was as well a contempt for their victims. The rapist who was stimulated by the way a woman dressed, the hitchhiker who murdered the man who gave him a ride—they believed that their victims had deserved what had been done to them, as if beauty and kindness were provocative acts. I had no way of knowing if this was a modern attitude, encouraged by a permissive society that excused the criminal and blamed the victim; perhaps criminals have always pardoned themselves in this manner. Being a liberal, I believed in rehabilitation; however, I was certain that nothing could be done to repair these men until they acknowledged the pain they had caused other people. The missing emotion was remorse.
There was a class of criminals, especially black criminals in the South, who were designated “political prisoners.” My first published article was about the trial of three such men in North Carolina, who were convicted of burning down a stable and killing fifteen horses. They became known as the Charlotte 3, or the Lazy B 3. I had written of the trial as an injustice, because like most liberal whites I was impressed by the defendants, who were attractive, well-educated black men. One was a published poet, another had a doctorate in chemistry, another was a college student majoring in business administration. They had been organizing in the black community, using money from white churches. After their convictions they became an international cause célèbre. Angela Davis came to Charlotte to raise money for their defense fund. “Another year, another Christmas, has passed,” wrote Tom Wicker in The New York Times, “and T. J. Reddy, James Grant and Charles Parker are still in prison.” Amnesty International listed them as “prisoners of conscience,” in the same category as political prisoners in the gulags of Siberia or the dungeons of Chile. Two years after reporting on their trial, I went back to North Carolina to write a story for New Times magazine and uncovered two previously unknown witnesses to the crime. In effect, I proved that the convicted men were guilty, certainly one of the most indifferent triumphs in a reporter’s career. What surprised me was the response from white liberals, who felt betrayed—not by the Charlotte 3, but by me. For many of them, the guilt of the men was not as important as the cause the men represented, which was the black political revolution in its terrorist phase. At bottom, liberals approved of the crime.
Liberals believe in the perfectibility of man. By the middle seventies this hypothesis had swollen to include the corollary notion that we are all perfect in our own way and no one can stand in judgment of another. Liberal judges became the enemy of the patrolman, who watched criminals go back on the street before the cops had finished their paperwork. Teachers lost their philosophical warrant for issuing grades; students who would otherwise be failed were passed along and ignored. The falling standards of education were reflected in the plummeting Scholastic Achievement Test scores (Is it significant that the fall in SAT scores began with the Kennedy assassination?) and also in lawsuits brought against schools by high school graduates who were unable to read. When I reported on education, I was dismayed by the willingness of administrators to simplify textbooks in order to give the appearance of success. In all of this there was a retreat from the rigor society requires in order to distinguish success from failure and to reward good and punish evil.
I had a small political epiphany in a grocery store in 1974 while I was standing in line behind a young man with modishly long hair, a mustache, a pipe in his mouth, and a copy of the The New York Review of Books under his arm. He might have been me in every particular. We could easily have exchanged grocery carts—yoghurt, Orowheat bread, organic fruits and vegetables, Perrier water, et cetera—we were just beginning the health phase; jogging and quitting smoking loomed ahead. He was hip, he was intellectual, he was discriminating—like me. When he paid for his groceries he used food stamps.
I was shocked because my liberalism was directed at people who were not like me. My first reaction to the young man ahead of me in line was outrage. It seemed an especially low form of stealing, like taking money from the collection plate at church. At home, when I considered the episode more coolly, I wondered about the condescension that was at the heart of my liberalism. Government subsidies such as food stamps and welfare and even unemployment compensation were for people hindered by race or circumstance, not for people like me. And yet I too could qualify for some forms of relief. I realized I had different standards for minorities and the underprivileged, standards I would never accept for myself. My politics were compensatory, patronizing.
And I had gradually begun to hate the degradation that accompanied the liberal attitude toward freedom of expression. I had grown up in a city where cleanliness and order were prized above all other virtues, where sexual expression was highly controlled, and conformity was enforced through churches, schools, parents, and the abundant presence of policemen. Dallas was stricter than most cities, but in sixties’ America it was not out of place. It may have been a repressive society, but one felt safe then, and the decorum that still existed between the sexes allowed for the play of romance. Oh, I had hated living in that breathless confinement. Now I wanted to retrieve something from that time—the discipline, I suppose, and some of the innocence. Once in Brooklyn I was pushing Gordon in his stroller through a park at twilight. There was broken glass everywhere. The walls were spray-painted with profanity. A park bench had been burned. I had a strong sense of apocalypse. I could understand the wild-eyed certainty of the street-corner preacher when he said the end was near. And when I turned the corner I came upon two people fucking on the sidewalk. I was frozen. It was as much as I could stand.
Another blow to my liberalism was the fall of Saigon. I had been expecting it, without really caring very deeply. I suppose this is the sin the world resents most about America, that it can create such mischief in the lives of other people without giving much thought to the consequences. It was April 29, 1975. On the news, I watched the helicopters taking off from the roof of the American embassy, leaving behind thousands who had come to depend on us, who stood outside the gates with their possessions in their hands. Their state of mind may be understood by the fact that while they stood there a rain of singed but intact hundred-dollar bills fell unnoticed among them, as the marines on the roof tried ineffectually to dispose of seven million dollars with a flamethrower.
We were abandoning them, and abandoning their country, which had by now become partly American, so powerfully had we affected it. For months we had seen the end coming, as the South Vietnamese troops retreated from the highland provinces and millions of refugees fled toward Saigon and the coastal cities. The North Vietnamese watched them flee, seldom harassing them; in one case, when South Vietnamese troops were evacuating Hue, the North Vietnamese rolled a column of tanks to the edge of the city and lit the evacuation route with their powerful headlights. And yet the panic that ensued was spectacular. Three hundred South Vietnamese soldiers stormed a World Airways jumbo jet in Da Nang and pushed the civilians off the plane; many people died trying to board the flight, some had already been killed on the runway when the jet had landed, and when it took off, people were clinging to its wings and undercarriage. They all fell into the sea. The remaining soldiers stripped off their uniforms and went on a rampage, killing, in one instance, twenty-five refugees crammed onto the fantail of an American ship, apparently for no other reason than their anger that others would escape, but not them. In this chaos, Americans had seized the idea of getting as many orphans out of Vietnam as possible. There were massive, confused airlifts of children, only some of whom were offspring of American servicemen and not all of whom were orphans. It was a bewildering exodus. One of the C-5A transports crashed, killing over a hundred children. The North Vietnamese charged us with kidnapping.
In the middle of this fantastic downfall in the last days of South Vietnam, two Hollywood producers at the Academy Awards ceremony accepted their Oscar for the film documentary Hearts and Minds by reading “greetings of friendship” from the leader of the North Vietnamese Communist party. There was an outcry, but what struck me is that the catastrophe of the fall of Saigon would be played out in much the same fashion in America as the war had been: that is, as a controversy on TV.
I felt ambivalent. I wanted to believe the North Vietnamese were better than we, and ready for friendship. In the meantime, in the other war, the real one, people were selling their children and burning their money, mothers were wading into the sea with their babies, and chaos, frenzy, and fear had broken down anything like ordered behavior.
As I watched the fall of Saigon from my living room, I was heaving with relief and guilt. It was like a final release from a long and ugly illness, a death one had come to wish for. The Vietnam War was over. Fifty thousand people gathered in Central Park to celebrate peace and sing the old songs of the antiwar movement and hear the speeches one more time.
Two weeks before Saigon fell, the Khmer Rouge completed its conquest of Cambodia; the Pathet Lao consolidated its victory in Laos a few months later. Since Eisenhower, I had been hearing about the domino theory, and although I had ridiculed it, I had to admit that some of the dominoes had fallen as predicted. Who knew what consequences lay ahead? Vietnam was now the third-largest Communist country in the world, with the third-largest army in the world, larger even than our own. What would I propose to do if Vietnam marched on Thailand? I had no answer.
The news from Southeast Asia suddenly stopped. The reporters were expelled. We were living on rumors, and the rumors were awful. We heard that the capital of Cambodia had been evacuated, hundreds of thousands of people were being sent into the countryside; it was a bizarre, almost prehistorical attack on urbanity. In Vietnam much of the population was being sent to reeducation camps, for indoctrination or execution. We heard these things through diplomatic sources, but there was not the usual film footage that had documented the history of the war. Then the boat people began to appear, often hundreds of them on a single fragile raft, drifting in the South China Sea in hopes of reaching the international shipping lanes. At first it was not so dramatic. One expected the end of the war to cause panic and dislocation before the new order took hold. But the boat people kept coming. Passing freighters would pick them up, but there were so many of them, and more and more every month, so that the freighters would steam two hundred miles off course just to avoid the burden of taking on these passengers, who would cause them to be refused docking rights in most Asian countries. It had become one of the world’s major emigrations, increasing each year, and the stories of the refugees were appalling. Vietnam was purging its entire ethnic Chinese population, more than a million people, and the government was charging them as much as $3,000 apiece for the privilege of being driven into the sea in open boats toward freedom or death. By 1979 this heinous extortion had replaced the export of coal as Vietnam’s primary source of hard currency. The migration continued more than a decade after the fall of Saigon. According to the United Nations, more than half a million Vietnamese have fled their country by boat; the American ambassador to the United Nations places the total number of boat people at four times that figure. The estimates are complicated by the likelihood that as many die on their journey as those who survive to be counted.
At the same time hundreds of thousands of refugees were walking out of Laos and Cambodia, many of them settling into camps on the Thai border. They spoke of the bloodbath that had often been predicted, but that I had never believed. A quarter of the population of Cambodia, starved to death or murdered? Two million people dead? Had my father proposed such a figure to me, I would have said, “What kind of monsters do you think they are?” The monsters were on our side, I believed. I could quote the terrible figures. We had dropped seven million tons of bombs in Vietnam, twice as many as we dropped in World War II; that was five hundred pounds of explosive for every human being in Vietnam. It was genocide, I said; we were waging a war against the people and the land itself. But the truth was that the rate of population growth during the war in both South Vietnam and North Vietnam was approximately twice what it was in the United States during the same period. One could scarcely call this genocide; it was merely war. In fact, the percentage of civilians killed was far lower than in Korea, and no higher than World War II. Now that the war was over I was learning what genocide really meant.
“Certainly today the record is clear for all to see,” Nixon summed up from his bitter exile: “a Communist peace kills more than an anti-Communist war.” I wasn’t ready to swallow this axiom entirely, but I realized that for most of my life I had accepted a certain willful blindness toward any negative consequences of Communism.
I was shaken by my willingness to disbelieve the truth, which was evident all during the war, that our enemy was not perfect after all. Did this mean that the war in Indochina had been morally defensible? Had I been wrong all along? Or was Vietnam simply a tragedy we could not prevent, and had made worse by trying? I now began to reconsider America’s role in a world that was, to me, newly complex.