As I read Steve Hochstadt’s guest column of July 11 on the character of the presidential candidates, I thought of the choices I made or, like professor Hochstadt, didn’t need to make during the Vietnam War.

Attending college in the late ’60s meant an automatic deferment from serving in the military. I remember, during freshmen orientation, being admonished by seniors to be thinking about Vietnam when our deferments ended and hard choices would need to be made.

It was nearly impossible in the ensuing years on most college campuses not to be affected by the lectures, articles and protests against the war, which tended to put students in the antiwar camp. As professor Hochstadt intimates, some of this reaction was simple self-preservation. But by then there was a sufficiency of evidence, culminating with revelations about the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident, which had ignited President Johnson’s push toward deeper involvement in Southeast Asia, for reasonable and impassioned objection to the war.

Emerson wrote that, “Our ingenious soul repudiates the false, out of love for what is true.”

I believe it to be true of the past, as it is today, that noble undertakings do not begin with falsehoods, with facts worked by the hand of dissimulation, or, for that matter, with the vilification of decent men such as John Kerry, who made brave choices when they were young.

It should sadden us that among those reviling him are some leaders who made less noble choices back then.

Paul Baribault, Lewiston

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