Distills it down quite well.

A lot of Democrats are trying to draw parallels between Iraq and the Vietnam war. Well, there are a lot of parallels, but maybe not the ones they're trying to draw.

After 1968, when the Republicans took over the Government, the Democratic Party as a whole could, and did, turn against the War, with its leaders becoming defeatists, followed, if not led, by a defeatist media, willing to put the worst construction on every military episode and certainly not doing anything to keep up the morale of the fighting soldiers, most of whom, like most of the country (as polls showed) were willing to fight until victory was gained. Although Chasen names several writers, journalists and others - Susan Sontag, Ramsay Clark, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Mary McCarthy, Frances Fitzgerald, Jonathan Schell - it was probably the mass of run of the mill journalists that did the damage.

There had now developed a vociferous and influential left-wing constituency that, far from being worried about an American and South Vietnamese defeat, strongly desired the Communists to win. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, one of the most distinguished Democrat senators lamented: "I do not want to see the Democratic Party become a party which gives any aid and comfort to people who applaud Vietcong victories or wave Vietcong flags", now standard behaviour at anti-war rallies. "But Jackson's was a lonely voice in the Democratic Party (p. 42)". After American forces had been withdrawn, the Democrat dominated Congress refused all aid to South Vietnam; "Edward Kennedy [brother of the dead President] mobilized a 43-38 Senate vote to forbid the expenditure . . . it needed to survive (p. 49)".

The antiwar consensus in the Democratic party was sufficiently strong for "John Kerry, tall, handsome and highly ambitious" to reassess his attitude and jump on its bandwagon, though perhaps without looking very carefully at the "veterans" he was associated with, whose lurid stories of atrocities, which he then retailed, have never been confirmed while some have been falsified; the account here of his political debut (pp. 44-46) and his anti-SDI activities (p. 164) long predates, of course, his presidential bid.

In the aftermath of the North's victory and occupation of South Vietnam (remnants of the local Vietcong guerillas, crushed during the Tet Offensive, were marginalised) a few of the antiwar activists had misgivings as "Boat People" fled the unified country, and large numbers (between 200,000 and 1,000,000) of the defeated or liberated, including discontented Vietcong, were sent to "re-education camps", while some 65,000 were executed (p. 49). Joan Baez, the Quaker pacifist singer, a rally fixture, appealed to 350 activists for signatures to a very moderate appeal to the North Vietnamese - she got 83, and a large volume of abuse. Jane Fonda, her "particular hope", refused: "I worry about the effects of what you are doing," she replied; it might encourage people "who continue to believe that Communism is worse than death (p. 53)."