Low-Class Conclusions

A widely reported new study claiming that all classes shared the burden of the Vietnam War is preposterous

I'M waiting for someone to ask me what "sophistry" means. I'll pull out my copy of Operations Research magazine and say, "See for yourself!"

I'll be carrying the September-October, 1992, issue, and I'll point to an article called "America's Vietnam Casualties: Victims of a Class War?" The article was written by Arnold Barnett, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, and two recent graduates of the school, Timothy Stanley,and, Michael Shore. Operations Research is not a mass-circulation journal, and I am sure that most of the journalists who have written about this article never bothered to read what it actually said, as I'll explain in a moment. Still, the article is surprisingly important, for the impact it has already had on public discourse and for what it shows about the corruption of educated thought.

A brief digest of the article's conclusions was sent to news organizations last fall, and it generated a lot of coverage. The interest was natural: according to the summary, the article disproved one of the major planks of the conventional wisdom about the Vietnam War. "Everybody knows that Vietnam was a class war, whose burden was borne disproportionately by the inner-city and rural poor and minorities," Time magazine said in its story about the report. "Well, it seems that everybody is wrong." The Wall Street Journal ran a story with the headline "CLASS WALLS BREACHED BY DEATH IN VIETNAM." William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a column about the study, saying it proved that the war in Vietnam was an "all-American effort." Most other stories were similarly respectful of the MIT study and its startling claims.

If true, the MIT findings would obviously be important, both in changing the standard version of Vietnam War history and in raising questions about how we know what we "know." If Vietnam really was an "equal opportunity war," as Time said in its report on the study, how could so many people have believed the opposite for so long?

Someday we may have to ask that question. But not now. The MIT study is preposterous. It raises questions, all right, but they concern the academics who conduct such scholarship and the journalists who pass it on without checking the details.

Now the necessary disclaimer: I have one large bias, but not the one the MIT authors might suspect. Their study is presented largely as a rebuttal to an article I wrote eighteen years ago called "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?" It appeared in The Washington Monthly, and it argued that because the sons of the nation's economic, professional, and political elite were generally spared the costs of the Vietnam War, the war went on longer than it otherwise would have. The MIT authors say that I was wrong: "In terms of the bereavement it brought to America, Vietnam was not a class war."

I don't mind the disagreement. My real bias is more primitive: I would prefer never to raise this subject in public again. For me it involves the Oprahlike spectacle of rehashing the way that I and people like me dodged serving in the war. The subject is also becoming the Baby Boom's version of the Rosenberg case: when aging cranks start haggling over the fine points of their old arguments, everyone else tries to get out of the room. But the reaction to Bill Clinton's and Dan Quayle's draft histories suggests that the inequities of service in Vietnam, perceived or real, still matter to many Americans, which is why the MIT study matters too.

HERE is how the study worked. Some 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam. From a list of the dead the MIT scholars made a random selection of 1,525 names, a sample easily large enough to achieve statistical significance. To determine whether any class bias was evident among the dead, the scholars decided to concentrate on income alone as an indicator of class. Money, after all, is a good rough measure of where people stand. But how could the scholars figure out the financial backgrounds of the casualties? These people died twenty to thirty years ago. America being what it is, their families have moved, dispersed, or died.

Facing huge obstacles, the MIT scholars came up with an approximation. From military records they determined each dead soldier's home town. From census data they determined the median income for each of those towns -- or at least any town with a population of 2,500 or more, the smallest unit for which the census reports median income. The scholars then assumed that each soldier's family income was the median income of his home town. If Bill Clinton had been drafted from Oxford or Yale Law School, then, he would have counted as a poor boy rather than as a member of the educated elite. From other census data the scholars determined the income distribution for all men of military age during the Vietnam War. Then, with all the data in place, they moved through an increasingly elaborate set of correlations and "disparity" calculations to find whether there was a sharp economic difference between the people who died and America as a whole. When all the computer runs were finished, the team discovered that the economic difference was surprisingly small.

What's wrong with this approach? The logical error is so grotesque that I'm almost embarrassed to point it out. The study assumes the very hypothesis that it is designed to test. That is, a study purporting to test whether casualties were representative rests on data that defines each casualty as representative. As a basic axiom of statistics, the variation between two large groups will almost always be smaller than the variation within either of the groups. The structure of the study limits the range of possible economic variation to the relatively small city-by-city differences across America, rather than to the much larger family-by-family inequalities within any city. The variations are limited more dramatically still by the assumption that each soldier who died came right from the middle of his home town's economic structure.

Let me make this specific: My home town, Redlands, California, had in those days a median income about 14 percent above the national average. The people I knew from Redlands who died in Vietnam included one Mexican-American who did not go to college, one white who went briefly to junior college, another who went into the army after high school, and a third who, anomalously for our town, went to an Eastern prep school and then to Harvard on an ROTC scholarship. Their stories illustrate both the chanciness of life -- the ROTC student was one of only twelve from Harvard College to die in Vietnam -- and certain larger sociological patterns. But for the purposes of the MIT study, these four people are all the same person, and each of them is 14 percent above the national average in income.

The MIT scholars would wave away this argument as "anecdotal," the kiss-of-death term social scientists use to dismiss any evidence that can't be reduced to mathematical models. The question is, What violates reality more grossly: my memory of one high school in one small town, which other people can test against their own experience and information, or the MIT model, which purports to be scientifically accurate while systematically misclassifying people like the ones I knew?

The MIT article also writes off as anecdotage an episode I witnessed firsthand and described in my 1975 article: the draft physical held at the Boston Navy Yard in May of 1970, a few days after Richard Nixon ordered troops into Cambodia. Several hundred Harvard and MIT students, and several hundred locals from South Boston and Chelsea, were summoned to the same place at the same time. Virtually all the college boys were deferred, because of a weird assortment of "ailments." Virtually all the local boys were approved to go to war.

It is of course possible for careful quantitative studies to reach conclusions that are not obvious from anecdotes. For instance, despite the impression that disproportionately many blacks died in Vietnam, surveys have determined that by the end of the war the proportion of total black casualties was almost exactly the proportion of blacks in the U.S. population. (Blacks did suffer disproportionate casualties in the early years of the war.) The question, therefore, is how carefully each study is set up. Researchers had direct means of figuring out whether dead soldiers were black or white; the MIT scholars had no way of determining just how rich or poor their dead soldiers were. So they simplified reality.

The three-page summary of the MIT study omitted several of the study's potential skews and limitations. For instance, on the researchers' first pass through the data, they had to wrestle with the fact that the census had no median-income figures for towns smaller than 2,500 people. They solved that problem by simply throwing out all the dead from towns smaller than that even though such people represented a fifth of all soldiers killed in Vietnam and were almost certainly not from America's wealthiest class. On subsequent passes the authors reinstated those soldiers and used approximations based on the median incomes of their counties' rural populations -- not a big step toward realism. They assessed and analyzed the data in countless other ways; they offset some of the most obvious distortions of their median-income approach in ways too complicated to go through here.

The most impressive part of the study -- the only impressive part, to my mind -- involved a separate sample of 467 dead. These were drawn from four cities: Chicago, Baltimore, San Antonio, and Portland, Oregon. The researchers tried to find the exact home address of each dead soldier, and from that drew conclusions about his family's economic standing. This study found a relatively small skew in death rates -- although it had limitations of its own. Each family's income was still defined as the median of a surrounding area, though in this case it was a census block containing about a thousand people rather than an entire town.

At the end of all their labors, every correction in place, the authors concluded that there was, in fact, a disparity in death rates. They broke the casualties into "deciles" -- groups each containing 10 percent of the total -- on the basis of family income, subject to all the doubts about how income was defined. They found that the wealthiest decile accounted for 7.8 percent of the casualties, or 22 percent less than its proportionate share. The second-poorest decile suffered 13.1 percent of the casualties, or 31 percent more than its share. (The very poorest had a lower-than-average death rate, for reasons I'll explain.) The poorer, therefore, were 68 percent more likely to die than the richer.

Leaping abruptly from statistical arcana to political and historical opinion, the authors concluded that this disparity rebuts the class-war hypothesis, since it is surprisingly small. "Most people instinctively think as many as three, four times more of the poor died than the rich, which is not true," Arnold Barnett told an interviewer from the Boston Herald. ("Most people"? The stench of anecdote is in the air.) This mistaken impression, the authors say at the end of their study, "demeans the sacrifices of the wealthy by implying that such sacrifices were nonexistent."

BY forming historical judgments, the authors guaranteed that their study would get more attention than a purely statistical exercise. But they also put themselves on terribly shaky ground, since questions about sacrifice and class war are not going to be resolved by bogus "disparity" studies.

Taken even at face value, the study's findings confirm, rather than challenge, part of the conventional assessment of Vietnam. No one I'm aware of contends that it was a "lowest decile," poorest-of-the-poor war. Many of the poorest Americans were disqualified from service, as anyone who observed the process knows, because they couldn't meet medical, educational, or disciplinary standards.

Rather, the class-war concept asserts two things about the American Army that served in Vietnam: it was principally made up of men from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds, and the American elite was conspicuously absent. "Conspicuously" does not mean "totally." Service academy graduates came from relatively privileged backgrounds and suffered heavy casualties in Vietnam. Two of the most dangerous specialties in Vietnam were those of pilots (especially helicopter) and infantry lieutenants. Because of the educational requirements for those jobs and the role of ROTC in providing lieutenants, they drew many men from affluent backgrounds, many of whom died. It is possible that death rates in Vietnam were more evenly distributed across income groups than were other measures of hardship which created the impression of a class war. The most obvious of these is that draftees and draft-induced volunteers lost several years of their youth while their contemporaries were starting families and careers.

In political terms the real burden of the war -- a family's sense that it was feeding its sons into a machine over which it had no control -- was shunted away not just from the truly rich but from most of America's upper-middle class. According to the version of history offered by the MIT study, the Bill Clinton of the 1960s was an aberration: while other men, regardless of background, were going off to do their fair share, he was a scheming shirker. But according to the version of history available from every other source, he was typical of people with the same education at the same time. It is anecdotal but significant that sons of Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph P. Kennedy, and Prescott Bush were in combat during the Second World War. It is anecdotal but also significant that the next generation of those families was generally not involved in Vietnam.

If the political conclusions of the MIT study were accurate -- if the burdens of the Vietnam War really were more or less fairly shared -- you would think that someone would have mentioned it by now. At least one reporter watching troops in combat, one novelist re-creating the scene, one politician remembering the rise and fall of domestic support for the war -- one of these people would have said what the MIT group does.

I mentioned the MIT conclusion to David Halberstam. "No!" he thundered. "All you had to do was see them to know that this was America's lower-middle class. Vietnam was a place where the elite went as reporters, not as soldiers. Almost as many people from Harvard won Pulitzer Prizes in Vietnam as died there." I asked James Webb, the novelist, Vietnam veteran, and former Secretary of the Navy. whether he had ever heard anyone involved with the war express a "shared burden" view. He said, "No." In the 1980s Webb called the registrars of Harvard, MIT, and Princeton, and asked each for two figures: the number of men who graduated from the undergraduate school from 1962 to 1972, and the number of those men who died in uniform. A total of 29,701 men graduated from the three schools; a total of twenty died in Vietnam, according to Webb. The classic study of who did and didn't serve in Vietnam, Chance and Circumstance, by Lawrence Baskir and Wllliam Strauss, found that men from disadvantaged backgrounds were more likely than average to be in the military, to serve in Vietnam, to be in combat units.

I asked Donald Rumsfeld, who was Secretary of Defense just after the fall of Saigon, whether the Army in Vietnam had been representative of America. "It was very clear what had happened with the draft," he said. "There was an accommodation between the government and the academic community. Students, teachers, and people who figured out how to work the system were exempted. It is inconceivable that a system designed and operating the way the draft did could have produced a true cross-section of America in the military."

Even William Buckley, who embraced the study's findings in his column, has implicitly rebutted them. I asked him whether his own experience squared with the assertion that the war had been "all-American." "I am lucky enough not to know anyone who died in Vietnam," he replied. "The only one I know who was wounded there is John Kerrey, who was in Skull and Bones." Buckley's own son, Christopher, has himself propounded the class-war thesis, on the basis of the way he and his Yale classmates avoided the draft.

"This is the same bogus scientific worship of 'hard data' that got us in so much trouble during the war," said Wllliam Broyles, the former editor of Newsweek and a creator of China Beach, who served as a Marine during the war. "I always wanted to grab those social-science nitwits and take them into the villages they insisted were safe because the computer said so."

Indeed, the problem with the MIT researchers may simply be that they missed their time. Thirty years ago they would have fit in perfectly. They could have worked with Robert McNamara on his studies proving that we were sure to win the war.