The Things They Carried: Generational Effects of the Vietnam War on Elite Opinion

Do foreign policy elites who shared formative political experiences also share similar views on subsequent policy issues? Proponents of a generation effect suggest that they do, but this argument overlooks two facts: (1) not everyone experiences major historical events in the same way and (2) different experiences might give rise to quite different policy views. Here we investigate the impact of the Vietnam War on elite opinion about foreign policy during the following two decades using elite surveys conducted by the Foreign Policy Leadership Project (FPLP) from 1976 through 1996, assessing their susceptibility to what has been called the Vietnam Syndrome. Not surprisingly, we find that age and military service influenced elite opinion about the Vietnam War. More importantly, we find that different trajectories of opinion about the Vietnam War influenced later views about a wide range of foreign policy issues during the Cold War, even after controlling for party identification and ideology. However, we see little evidence that these effects persisted after the end of the Cold War. This finding holds even on matters like civil war intervention, for which we might expect the experience of the Vietnam War to remain relevant. Our analysis suggests that the Vietnam Syndrome is restricted to matters involving Cold War rivalry.