Is this the scariest time in modern U.S. history? A lot of us would say yes. An incompetent, vengeful dotard occupies the White House, and no one seems able to rein him in. A semi-deranged dictator rules North Korea. They're threatening each other with nukes.
But the Vietnam era was worse, I think. Vietnam cracked my world and my generation's world in two. It shattered our belief in the basic goodness of our country. It destroyed our faith in institutions and the people who led them. It took us to places much darker than the place we've reached with Donald Trump.
Hard to believe, perhaps. But Ken Burns's and Lynn Novick's wrenching PBS series on the Vietnam War shows that America's deep and bitter divisions are nothing new.
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Vietnam demolished the postwar narrative of the U.S. that I grew up with. We believed that the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents had made the world a better place. We were proud of the people who served in the military. We revered the president, or at any rate the presidency. We believed our leaders and our nation were mostly honourable. Not everybody shared equally in this story of national pride and solidarity, of course. Many African-Americans and other minorities were excluded. But even they were proud to have served their country in the Second World War.
By the time I got to university in 1967, that world of shared values and trust in institutions had begun to fall apart. By the time I graduated, it had vanished.
Assassinations, violence and race riots had swept the country. Protesters were battling police in the streets. The nation was bitterly divided. The president was soon to be impeached.
I was at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, a hotbed of campus activism. As an American-born resident of Canada, I was not quite sure which country I belonged to. Then, in 1970, the National Guard gunned down four students at Kent State. We were numb. It seemed as if the U.S. had declared war against its own citizens. The next year I moved back to Canada.
At the time, most Americans – the people Richard Nixon called the "silent majority" – sided with the National Guard. Even though they didn't like the war, they believed that those who publicly opposed it were contemptibly unpatriotic.
Eventually, even the silent majority turned against the war. One reason was self-interest. Once the draft lottery began, they knew their own sons might have to go. "What's your number?" everyone would ask the boys. The lower your number, the more likely you were to be called up.
In fact, hardly any boy I knew went to war. The offspring of the upper middle class (like Mr. Trump) were very good at getting out of it. I knew more boys who went to Canada. Vietnam turned into a class-based war, largely fought by kids who resented the spoiled-brat protesters back home.
Many of the veterans, like former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, became protesters themselves. Over the years, those divisions only deepened. Today it has become almost impossible for people on each side of the class divide to talk to anybody on the other side.
The other reason people turned against the war was that they realized their leaders were lying to them, and had been all along.
It was a war nobody particularly wanted, which the U.S. backed into by default. "What do you think about this Vietnam thing?" Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. president, asked the chair of the Senate armed services committee back in 1964. "Well, frankly, Mr. President, it's the damn worse mess that I ever saw," replied Richard Russell, the publicly hawkish senator, in an exchange recounted recently by Politico's Jeff Greenfield. "And I don't see how we're ever going to get out of it without fighting a major war with the Chinese and all of them down there in those rice paddies and jungles. I just don't see it. I just don't know what to do."
As Mr. Greenfield argues, every U.S. leader in any position of authority should read this conversation. The result of not knowing what to do was catastrophic: more than 58,000 Americans dead, plus 250,000 South Vietnamese allies, 1.1 million Communist fighters, and around two million civilians. It was a reputational and military defeat of staggering proportions. It brought down two presidents, including Mr. Nixon, whose obsession with Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, contributed to his impeachment and resignation. (Nixon was so cynical that he and Henry Kissinger, his national-security adviser, did their best to prolong the war so that South Vietnam wouldn't fall until after the 1972 election.)
Mr. Trump may go down in history as the worst president who ever lived. But Vietnam was America's heart of darkness. It was the greatest collective failure of U.S. leadership in the modern age. It set the country onto a trajectory from which it has not recovered. Next to that, the clownish antics of Mr. Trump are only farce.