The battle to reconstruct the collective memory of the Vietnam War is a battle to reinterpret America, and it began even before the end of the war, and continues until present day. George Orwell summarized the significance of such struggles in his novel 1984: “He who controls the past controls the future; whoever controls the present controls the past.” Because national leaders invariably take a leading role in developing an official memory of traumatic events in a nation's history, the article begins with Nixon's efforts to redefine and reconstruct the war. The Nixon Administration: Reconstructing Collective MemoryNixon's approach to the war has been seen as Birchesque. He redefined the war using the POW/MIA excuse and successfully reconstructed America's memory of the war. When the antiwar movement criticized these measures, Nixon did what any Bircher would have done: he denigrated the antiwar movement as a communist conspiracy that was prolonging the war and deserved to be treated as a threat to internal security. In the process he redefined war by creating the POW/defective myth and successfully created new visions of war for Americans. Nixon campaigned for president in 1968 as a peace candidate promising to bring the troops home, and his campaign was also under the slogan that he would end the war in Vietnam and bring "peace with honor" and he reiterated it in the years to come. In Frost's third interview he emphasized that his actions were "sought to obtain an honorable peace abroad." However, this is only half the story and here we should clear up the misunderstanding of “honor”. Here's what exactly he said in the interview: The actions I took with great reluctance, but recognizing that I owed... middle of paper... sympathy were no longer for "the man who fights and dies." at the front", who "went practically unnoticed because attention was concentrated on the prisoners of war", who had become "the object of a virtual cult". Schell probed to the core of this growing obsession: "Following the president's lead, people began to talk as if the North Vietnamese had kidnapped four hundred Americans and the United States had gone to war to recover them." Perhaps the most surprising and insightful assessment came years later from Gloria Coppin, VIVA's longtime president. While she remained a fervent believer in the existence of living POWs, she had come to the painful realization of how she and many others could be manipulated. As he said in a 1990 interview: “Nixon and Kissinger simply used the POW issue to prolong the war. Sometimes I feel guilty because with all our efforts we have killed more men than we have saved. ”