Historic Truths / Looking at Earth

For my generation, the "conquest" of space and the war in Vietnam were twin foci of an elliptical career, equally important but literally worlds apart, each adrift, seemingly unto itself in a mental void. It was a coincidence that President Eisenhower should make America's first commitment to defend South Vietnam just five days before the first class of astronauts was announced on 9 April 1959. It was likewise a coincidence that four hundred Green Berets should leave for Vietnam on 10 May 1961, five days after Alan B. Shepard left earth on America's first manned spaceflight. On 14 February 1962, President John Kennedy permitted American troops in Vietnam to return fire if shot at, and a week later, on 21 February, John Glenn safely orbited the globe. Vice President Lyndon Johnson called for a "strong program of action" to defend South Vietnam on 9 May 1963. On 25 May, President Kennedy announced an accelerated, top-priority space program that would put astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade. Sometimes tragic setbacks coincided. The Tet Offensive began on 31 January 1968, as the Apollo program still struggled with the deaths of three astronauts in catastrophic fire during launch rehearsal the previous year. Other times, achievements in space counterpointed horrors on earth. On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, an event that took place at fantastic distance in the American imagination from the simultaneous bombing of Cambodia. The space program and the war in Vietnam were antithetical propositions, and whatever happened in Vietnam, the moon project was America "at its best," clean and ever innocent.

But in the most brazen of these dis/junctions, ground was broken in Washington, D.C., for the National Air and Space Museum on 20 November 1972. This was only three months after the last American combat troops departed from Vietnam, and the event occurred in the calm between President Richard Nixon's Linebacker I bombing of North Vietnam and Linebacker II, the two largest bombing campaigns of the war. The first shovelfuls of dirt were lifted for a monument to American air power in the breather between more ferocious earthmoving displays half a world away. From its inception, the museum was what Michael Rogin (1990: 100) would call an "amnesiac spectacle," a history museum raised in distracted forgetfulness. The National Air and Space Museum is America's first, if unintended, Vietnam War memorial. It is so through contradiction: this is a museum that turns away from the past, a memorial that looks away. Curiously, the official name makes no reference to exploration, history, or even technology. The institution is most commonly called (and will also be designated in this essay) simply "Air and Space," perhaps reflecting a touch of American bravado in the face of emptiness.

This museum is the most popular site on the Mall; only the Vietnam Veterans Memorial exerts a similar pull on the American public. But whereas the veterans memorial brings us to the earth and, indeed, below it, the air-conditioned expanses of Air and Space give thousands of families vicarious participation in America's achievement of looking at earth from a point far beyond it. This looking is, of course, not at earth but at the power that comes with technological innovation. In a perpetually new museum it is possible to overlook, at least momentarily, what comes later—whether the victims of Hitler's V-1 and V-2 rockets (poised next to American missiles) or the targets of "smart" bombs also on display. The museum eulogizes an adventure that, like America itself, is always "only beginning." Every artifact must look brand new, even if it in fact is not.

The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City offers, among many other things, a commentary on Air and Space. It exposes the "cultural anesthesia" of the American museum and can lead us down a "reflexive passageway into historical consciousness" (Feldman 1994: 407). If Air and Space...