"Peace with Honor," Then and Now

Daily Kos diarist Jazzmaniac reports coming across a clipping from the old Chicago Daily News "squirreled away" by his father, dated January 24, 1973. It was a column written by Mike Royko the day Nixon announced a peace treaty ending the Vietnam war, after more than 50,000 American deaths. Jazzmaniac’s take: "It reads as though it could be written today, or more accurately, at some point in the future, after our amnesic nation once again disengages from our latest quagmire."

When the peace treaty was announced, Royko went out to the corner of State and Madison in downtown Chicago, the epicenter of the wild celebration that marked the end of World War II. Here's Royko's report:

Mike, the newsstand man, was alone at State and Madison, shivering in the cold night."Nah, nobody's been around celebrating," he said. "What's to celebrate?"

The end of the war. Mr. Nixon said it on TV, half an hour ago.

He shrugged. "That so? Now maybe we can take care of things in this country, huh?"

It wasn't like 1945, when the end of the war brought a million people downtown to cheer... And that's as it should be. There is nothing to cheer about this time, except that it is over...

On January 24, 1973, I was 22 years old and living in Boston with my girlfriend. I was a college drop-out, a former Navy ROTC guy who was glad the military draft had passed him by. That previous November, I had voted for the first time in a presidential election. I cast my ballot for George McGovern, a fellow High Plains westerner who knew Nixon was lying. Massachusetts was one of two places (D.C. being the other) who believed McGovern had a better way out. So we were stuck with Nixon and Kissinger for four more years (or so we thought). Little did we know that Kissinger would come back to haunt us in a new war in a new century.

More quotes from the Royko column:

"Peace with honor." [Nixon] had used the wilted phrase that has been with us most of the war. He said we obtained it. It is hard to see the honor....Before it ended, we had put our own men on trial for murdering civilians....

Almost 20 years ago another war ended in a draw and we were told that our boys had died for somebody's freedom….Why kid ourselves? They didn't die for anyone's freedom. They died because we made a mistake. And we can't justify it with slogans and phrases from other times.

It tore us internally. It left many with a lust for revolution, and others with a lust for repression.

If we insist on looking for something of value in this war, then maybe it is this: Maybe we finally have the painful knowledge that we can never again believe everything our leaders tell us. For years they told us one thing while they did another. They said we were winning while we were losing. They said we were getting out while we were going in. They said the end was near when it was far.

Maybe the next time somebody says that our young men must fight and die somewhere we will not take their word that it is for a worthy cause. Maybe we will ask them to spell it out for us, nice and slow, nice and clear.

And maybe the people in power will have learned that the people of this country are no longer willing to go marching off without having their questions answered first. If we haven't, then we are as empty and as cold as the intersection of Madison and State.

I discovered Mike Royko’s columns through Bob Page, one of my college roommates in Gainesville, Fla., in the mid-seventies. Every few weeks, Bob received a bundle of Royko’s Chicago Daily News columns. Bob was an education major from the South Side of Chicago. His whole family loved Royko’s hard-hitting and witty commentary. They seemed to think that a bundle of Royko columns was the best care package a college boy could receive. And, once I started reading them, I agreed. I was an English major taking journalism courses and working on the school paper just in case my intended career as a best-selling novelist didn’t work out. Once Bob turned me on to Royko, I was hooked. I read "Boss," Royko’s portrait of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago. Daley hated reporters about as much as he hated anti-war protesters. His bodyguards once beat up editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin of World War II "Willie and Joe" fame.

Royko looked at life through the lens of a lower-middle-class upbringing. He hated corruption and despised people like Daley and Richard Nixon who wielded power like a big club. They were drunk with power, and Royko wanted to take them down a peg or two – or maybe all the way down. I don’t remember Royko’s column on Nixon’s fall in 1974, but I’m sure it was terrific.

Mike Royko died in 1997 at age 64. I often think of him when I write political commentary. When I was a columnist for a Denver arts and entertainment weekly in the 1980s, Royko often was at my side.

He is still.