The gods work in strange ways. Just as CBS television was preparing to reveal the identity of the serviceman who became the Unknown Warrior from the Vietnam war, the man who became the most famous evader of that war looks set to become the second president to face impeachment.
It is so American in more ways then one. First, the US memorial at Arlington with its gruesome olde-worlde term "warrior" and bog-standard sarcophagal mawkishness: "here rests in honoured glory . . .". Then, the DNA witchcraft, revealing what should have remained secret forever: the name of Lt Michael Blassie, USAF, killed in action 26 years ago this May.
But just as American is that splendid determination to get to the truth, which yet might do for Clinton, just as it did for Nixon.
It's a good moment to ask a question about that war. For the liberal orthodoxy since that time - to which I once fully subscribed - was that the US involvement in Vietnam was an unmitigated evil born of American imperialist ambitions in Asia. The US was not the only imperial power in the world then - it was in conflict in every corner of the globe with the Soviet empire, which has since been extinguished, without exception, wherever people have been able to overthrow it.
Empires collided
Vietnam was the crucible wherein these two empires collided. We need not detain ourselves for long about the morals of either side, nor about the methods used in the war which ensued. The Diem-Ky regime in Saigon was utterly venal and intermittently homicidal. Virtually everybody in government was on the take but, provided you kept your nose clean, it left you alone. It didn't criminalise economic activity, merely taxed it, and often enough, then embezzled the tax.
No, we are not talking about nice people here; and we are certainly not talking about nice people in North Vietnam. When Ho Chi Minh came to power he had some 20,000 opposition socialists murdered. Hundreds of thousands of Catholics and Buddhists were forced to flee south, where they formed the most ardent opposition to the Communists. Like many other Communist leaders, he made nationalism his hallmark, promising a united Vietnam.
The North sponsored a guerilla war in South Vietnam, which was so badly run and so unstable that it would have fallen in the early 1960s if the US had not propped it up. The issue here is not the goodness or the badness of the regime in Saigon. Nor is a matter of whether or not the North, which had no elections at all but simple state dictatorship, had any moral justification for levying a war against the South (which had elections, after a fashion) - though I would have thought the moral justification for plunging a people into war were completely absent.
Global communism
The real issue today, nine years after the Berlin Wall fell (and just as the man who did not fight in the war looks as if he might go the same way) is: what would have happened to this world if Vietnam had fallen to the Communists in 1964, as it would have done without US intervention? The cuddly Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh belonged to the Joe Stalin school of homicidal avuncularity. He most probably would have gobbled Laos and Cambodia - then who next? Might not global communism have been revitalised, the imperial thinking of its leaders dangerously encouraged by the supinity of the US response to its spread of communism by armed subversion?
For such totalitarian leaders, push-overs were for pushing over. The spread of communism wasn't just another item in government policy; it was a historical imperative. The much-derided domino theory of the time - that if Vietnam fell, then all of south-east Asia might fall - did not actually apply: but only for the good reason that for 10 years the Americans kept the dominoes upright.
How different would this world have been if the dominoes had fallen across Asia three decades ago?
Vietnam was not Denmark, the Mekong Delta not the Tivoli Gardens. As in the Spanish Civil War, which Vietnam greatly resembled, civilised methods with a straightforwardly benign conclusion were not available options. What was available was one of the cruellest wars in this century of cruel wars.
The outcome for a while appeared to be a US defeat (which Hollywood bizarrely turned into a series of victories) and an obsession with the war deaths, which over a decade barely exceeded the annual cull on US roads. For Vietnam, the result was a complete horror - its landscape devastated by bombardment from the air and poisoned with napalm and with chemicals, its young people conscripted and sacrificed in their hundreds of thousands by an unblinking and ruthlessly single-minded leadership in Hanoi: not the boys to play poker with.
And yes, initially it seemed that the Vietnamese communists had won their struggle, and many people - including myself, God forgive me - secretly relished the American defeat. History has shown such schadenfreude to be both stupid and misplaced. The Vietnam war was but one chapter in a half-century-long volume, and now we know the outcome. Communism everywhere has been routed, its fellow travellers silenced. Democracy flourishes in places where, a decade ago, people were impoverished and imprisoned by totalitarianism. The Americans won in the end. Would they have won if they hadn't fought for so long in Vietnam?