Acquired Plumage

By Michael Kinsley

"The boys of Viet Nam fought a terrible and vicious war . . . It was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march . . . They chose to believe and answer the call of duty."

-- President Reagan, Memorial Day, 1986

"I did not know in 1969 that I would be in this room today," said Dan Quayle last week about his decision two decades ago to pull strings and get into the National Guard rather than risk serving and dying in Viet Nam. It was the most accidentally revealing remark of the week, outdoing even Ronald Reagan's classic Freudian slip at the convention, "Facts are stupid things." As Fats Waller so aptly put it, "One never knows, do one?" In this day when politicians are created like androids by consultants and pollsters, using off- the-shelf parts for everything from hairstyles to stands on particular issues to deeply held moral beliefs, it seems almost unfair that this small item from the past should gum up the works of a state-of-the-art model like the young conservative Senator from Indiana.

Senator Quayle is just one of many so-called war wimps or chicken hawks: prominent, youngish Reagan-era conservatives who, one way or another, ducked the war in Viet Nam. Others include such Reagan Administration foreign policy hard-liners as Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle, Commentator Patrick Buchanan, and even Sylvester Stallone (who taught at a girls' school in Switzerland while the Commies were being beastly to his fantasy alter ego John Rambo). A similar Quayle-like controversy also surrounds the Rev. Pat Robertson, whose father, a Senator, may have helped him avoid combat in Korea.

It's wonderful to hear prominent Republicans suddenly discovering the vital role of the National Guard in preserving our freedom. Quayle himself said in his Thursday-night acceptance speech that he is "proud" of his National Guard service, during which he was trained as a welder and then put to work grinding out press releases. The same people who make a big issue of Michael Dukakis' veto of a law requiring people to recite the Pledge of Allegiance -- implying, though never saying, that this casts doubt on Dukakis' patriotism -- insist that it is somehow a cheap shot to ask what Dan Quayle's evasion of combat service in 1969 says about the boisterous hawkish values he professes to hold today. It's not hard to imagine what Republican hatchet men like Bush Campaign Manager Lee Atwater would do with this issue if the shoe were on the other foot.

Echoing a commonly expressed view during the New Orleans convention week, George Bush Jr. said of Quayle, "The thing that's important is ((that)) he didn't go to Canada." That is indeed an important distinction, but not in the way Bush Jr. seems to think. Those who went to Canada knew they were making a fundamental life choice. They, along with those who chose conscientious objection or outright draft resistance and jail, acted because they opposed the war. This may have been right or wrong, but it was a serious moral decision with serious moral consequences. The National Guard, by contrast, was a way to avoid Viet Nam and the moral consequences at the same time. There is no evidence that the war Quayle ducked is one he opposed, let alone made any effort to end. Perhaps these days, with no draft and no war, people really do join the National Guard out of patriotism. But the idea that a desire to serve one's country motivated anyone to sign up for press-release duty in Indiana while others were fighting and dying in Viet Nam is a conceit that won't fool anyone over the age of about 35.

No one is required to be a hero, of course. If a high draft-lottery number hadn't saved me, I would have been grateful for the opportunity to lay my fingers on the line in the National Guard typing pool. Two things make Quayle's wartime experience on the Indiana front a legitimate embarrassment to him. First is how he got in. It's not absolutely clear that connections were necessary to join the Indiana Guard at that time, but it's clear Quayle and his family didn't leave things to chance. A valid issue on its own, this also compounds the G.O.P. ticket's "silver spoon" problem. Second, it's hard for a politician to strike a martial pose and accuse his opponents of insufficient devotion to American military strength when he passed up his one chance to make a personal contribution to that strength.

As a matter of pure logic, what the war wimps did (or, rather, didn't do) two decades ago says nothing about the merits of aid to the Nicaraguan contras or Star Wars or other issues today. But it does say something important about a person's character if he hasn't lived his life in accordance with his professed values. And it obviously tests his commitment to those values as well. That's why the political-robotics technicians of both parties expend so much energy staging tableaux of loving family life, though strictly speaking the number of one's children, grandchildren and household pets is irrelevant in evaluating one's views on federal day care.

On the matter of war and peace, voters are especially entitled to feel that leaders have lived their beliefs. War has always been a matter of old men sending young men off to die. Sometimes that's necessary. But who wants to entrust that crucial decision to a person who, when young, apparently thought it was necessary for others to go but not for himself?

Ronald Reagan, who spent World War II in Hollywood and whose family life would win no prizes in a Leave It to Beaver look-alike contest, has been spectacularly successful as the political avatar of values he hasn't lived by. His line "Go out there and win one more for the Gipper" got the biggest response of convention week, as he and his party forgot for one last joyous occasion that his life is not a movie. In possibly unintentional but genuine tribute to Reagan's magic, the prosaic Quayle, in his acceptance speech three days later, chose to introduce himself to America with an extended reference to the movie Hoosiers -- which, in truth, bears comparison to Quayle's life more than Knute Rockne -- All-American bears to Reagan's.

Unfortunately for Quayle and the other chicken hawks, it is only the truly rare politician like Reagan who can get away with writing the movie of his own life.