John Steinbeck was the most revered American novelist on the planet in 1966.
Hemingway and Faulkner were dead. Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut were in their literary infancy or just beginning to peak. J.D. Salinger already was a recluse.
Meanwhile, Mr. Steinbeck had won a Nobel Peace Prize just four years earlier -- albeit for his work from the 1930s -- and he was still an active force in the world of letters. What he said mattered, which is why his decision to travel to Vietnam that year and into 1967 was a relatively big deal.
The peoples' author -- whose Grapes of Wrath (1939), Of Mice and Men (1937), and East of Eden (1952) were so important to developing America's post-Depression heightened sense of social justice -- was going to serve as a war correspondent just as simmering national anger over the war was beginning to build to the boiling point.
In his excellent compilation Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War, University of Toledo honors dean and English professor Thomas E. Barden gathers 58 of the author's columns for Long Island, New York-based Newsday newspaper, providing a glimpse into the great author's thinking about the war.
The book also illustrates just how wrong even a literary giant can be in the historical context of the times and raises a profound question that will never be answered:
Given that Mr. Steinbeck's initial gung-ho attitude about the Vietnam War began to change dramatically during his time in the besieged country, what if he had gone public with his eventual misgivings about the war?
'Still up for grabs'
For Mr. Barden, a passionate advocate of Mr. Steinbeck's published works, the question has a strong personal slant. When the author was in Vietnam writing columns that generally supported the war and his good friend President Lyndon B. Johnson, Mr. Barden was a nervous college student hoping for deferments that would keep him out of the fighting.
If Mr. Steinbeck, like CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, had come out strongly against the war, then perhaps Mr. Barden and thousands of guys like him wouldn't have found themselves in the country a few years later risking their lives -- and dying -- for what was already a lost cause.
"I kind of have a horse in the race. I was in college with a 2F deferment during this time, and when I graduated, Johnson had done away with graduate deferments, so when I graduated I got drafted," Mr Barden said.
"It all got so fraught around then. Nixon got elected and spent four years sort of slowly winding the war down enough to get elected and that pissed me off because the only reason I was there was because he was doing that.
"And when I got there [in 1968] everyone said this thing is winding down, don't be John Wayne, keep a low profile, and keep your troops safe. But during that period that Steinbeck was there, it was still up for grabs on what could happen."
'Scholarly quest'
Mr. Barden, 66, has a doctorate in English from the University of Virginia and has long studied the works of Mr. Steinbeck in addition to publishing a number of papers on folklore, Vietnam, and other literary issues. He has been at the University of Toledo since 1976 and is a well-known local musician.
After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he decided to start an honors seminar on "American Myth and the Culture of Vietnam" to let students know about the "unfinished business" of that war and how it affects current thinking. The seminar proved to be popular because many students said their high school history teachers generally never got around to teaching about Vietnam.
Over the course of the class, he rediscovered Mr. Steinbeck's columns for Newsday, written in 1966 and 1967, and a "scholarly quest" began when he realized that all of them were not readily available.
"The more the students and I talked about it, the better a story it became, and I tried to find them so we could read about them, and they just weren't available," he said. "Then the scholar in me got interested in it. Why aren't they available? This is John Steinbeck."
'His own man'
In between other projects, Mr. Barden eventually rounded up all 58 of the columns and was fascinated in them, both from a literary perspective and for their historical story arc. By this time Mr. Steinbeck was 64 years old and President Johnson was one of his and his wife's closest friends. The author also had a son fighting in Vietnam.
So his decision to become an in-theater war correspondent at that age as what Mr. Barden described as an "out-of-shape smoker" was intriguing on a number of levels. "Here was this guy in his 60s knocking around in fatigues, saying basically he wanted to find out for himself while all the pundits back in America were saying, 'The war is good' or 'The war is bad,' but they were doing it from their journalistic desks."
Because of his connections with the highest levels of U.S. government, Mr. Steinbeck was afforded access to Vietnam, albeit from a largely stage-managed point-of-view. He dined with Gen. William Westmoreland, and most of his tours of the country were of a highly official nature.
"I don't know whether he's genuinely being duped or letting them do that and then thinking he's still his own man," Mr. Barden said. "He said from the beginning to his wife, 'I'm not going to go as Johnson's man, I want to see for myself.' "
'Glorious knights'
There is almost a jaunty feeling to the early columns, which were syndicated in about 30 papers. Mr. Steinbeck treats going off to war as a grand adventure, perhaps affected by his stint as a correspondent during World War II when things were far more clear-cut and morally unambiguous.
He calls it a "proud moment" when he fires a high-caliber weapon from a helicopter and later he offers a strange, almost-goofy description of the North Vietnamese soldiers -- whom he refers to as "Charlie" -- as leprechauns. Mr. Steinbeck reserves any negative thoughts or misgivings for protesters in the United States, who he clearly doesn't think are on the same character level as U.S. soldiers, China, and the Vietnamese enemy.
"He believed the domino theory. He believed we were there to help the people like the Okies and that the U.S. soldiers were glorious knights," Mr. Barden said.
'We cannot win'
Over the course of the dispatches, the tone begins to change, becoming far more serious, recognizing the nuances and ideological complexities that made the war so fraught with misunderstandings and raw anger.
But Mr. Steinbeck never just comes out and says he thinks the war is wrong.
"To me, the almost Greek tragedy to the crux of this thing is that he was getting his eyes opened, but he didn't want to betray his friend, LBJ, and his son who was in the war, and sort of his own notion that America would ever do anything that wasn't glorious," Mr Barden said.
Mr. Steinbeck left Vietnam in 1967 as his health was failing and he would die the next year. One of the great tragedies of his life was that he never publicly revealed his misgivings regarding the war, according to Mr. Barden.
The professor includes a private letter that Mr. Steinbeck wrote after his time there in which he says unequivocally:
"I know we cannot win this war, nor any war for that matter. And it seems to me the design is to sink deeper and deeper into it, more and more of us. When we have put down a firm foundation of our dead and when we have by a slow losing process been sucked into the texture of southeast Asia, we will never be able nor will we want to get out."
For Mr. Barden, it is difficult to support Mr. Steinbeck's refusal to state this view publicly.
"You can read the letters that were going on privately and it's clear that Steinbeck is having greater and greater qualms, but he won't say it," he said. "That's kind of hard to defend, although there's a point at which, according to his wife, he got there. He was just too sick to go public with it."
Time capsule
The book was published through the University of Virginia Press, where Mr. Barden has published two other books. (He received his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the university.) He said he hopes the book adds to the canon of Mr. Steinbeck's literature and while it doesn't represent the author's best writing -- much of it was written on deadline in hotel rooms and far-flung locations -- it's important work.
"Everything that he wrote, to me, ought to be on the shelf," Mr. Barden said.
He also feels like it adds to the body of knowledge about Vietnam and for people of his generation and younger illuminates the overall picture of this intense time in the country's history.
"It's like I dug up a time capsule. I've been trying to put it in a nutshell and that's what I'm thinking a lot of people my age are going to feel when they read this," he said.
"It's like, 'Oh man, this was so confusing.' Your emotions are going every which way. You don't want America to be the flies that have conquered the fly paper, but here we go."
'Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War' by Thomas E. Barden is available at www.amazon.com.
Contact Rod Lockwood at: rlockwood@theblade.com or 419-724-6159.
First Published April 8, 2012, 4:00 a.m.
