Marvin Kalb: The Other War Haunting Obama

Marvin Kalb is a former network correspondent and is an emeritus professor at Harvard and a co-author of “Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama.”

TEN years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, an odd specter haunts the Obama White House — the specter of Vietnam, a war lost decades before. Like Banquo’s ghost, it hovers over the White House still, an unwelcome memory of where America went wrong, a warning of what may yet go wrong.

When the United States loses to a “raggedy-ass, little fourth-rate country,” as Lyndon B. Johnson described his North Vietnamese foe, the loss leaves an unshakable legacy. There is no escape from history. Every president since Gerald R. Ford has had to weigh the consequences of the Vietnam defeat when he considers committing troops to war.

Of all the presidents since Vietnam, Mr. Obama may be the most fascinating, because — unlike Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — he was too young to have fought in Vietnam or to have gamed the system and avoided service in it (as both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush did).

Barack Obama was 3 when Johnson escalated the war, and 13 when Ford ordered Americans to leave Saigon. As David Axelrod, one of Mr. Obama’s political advisers, explained, “the whole debate about Vietnam — that was not part of his life experience.” Nevertheless, time and again, he has found himself entangled in its complexities....

During his presidential campaign, he visited Iraq and Afghanistan accompanied by two senators. What did they discuss on the long flights to and from the war zones? Mr. Obama kept asking: What could we learn about Vietnam that should now be applied in Afghanistan?...