Vietnam War

In E. L. Doctorow's City of God, the Vietnam War is not merely a historical backdrop but the formative moral and spiritual crucible of Thomas Pemberton's generation. It is the event that separates Pem from his father's world, drives him toward the seminary, and ultimately shapes his understanding of faith, sacrifice, and historical atrocity. The novel repeatedly sets Vietnam against the Holocaust, using the American war as a contemporary lens through which the older catastrophe is refracted, and as a measure of how a nation and its people confront — or fail to confront — the evil they have witnessed or perpetrated.

The War as Pem's Spiritual Inheritance

The Vietnam War is presented as the true content of Pem's soul, even when he speaks publicly of the Holocaust. As one observer puts it, "Tom Pemberton may speak of the Holocaust, but it's Vietnam that's in his soul." This distinction is crucial: Pem's public vocation as a priest may be oriented toward the Jewish catastrophe, but his private, formative wound is the American war. The observation is made in the context of Pem's family history — his father, R. R. John Pemberton, Suffragan Bishop of Virginia, was a stern, High Church guardian of the faith who wanted no role on the national stage, yet signed on to the heresy charges against Bishop James Pike of California, an act of self-sacrifice that became his legacy. Pem's rebellion against this inherited clerical world is thus bound up with the political upheavals of the 1960s, when Vietnam and the civil rights movement convulsed American society.

The Sixties, Mississippi, and the Road to Seminary

Pem's trajectory through the Vietnam era is traced with precise biographical detail. A preppie who played hockey at St. Paul's and spent four years at Trinity College in Connecticut, he came of age as the sixties reached full blast — teach-ins, sit-ins, marches, and ritual draft card burnings. He spent a summer in Mississippi registering black voters, had his head cracked open, and then, "fully accredited," joined the Yippies around the Pentagon. The narrator observes that as the son of a stalwart churchman, raised in rectories from Seattle to the Upper East Side, the only thing Pem could meaningfully rebel against was his own house. Yet the narrator insists that beneath the confusion, the young man had genuine faith. In the "roiling madness of Vietnam and the agonies of the civil rights movement," Pem began to see the church as "an institution of truth and sanity." The antiwar clerics, liberation theologians, and models of principled civil disobedience — Martin Luther King, the Berrigans — who got themselves manhandled and thrown in jail became his models. Faith was the redoubt; raising hell was a matter of faith. The Gospels became, for him, "a manual for revolution." His religious belief swung wildly "from zero to three hundred and sixty," a needle in constant motion — this, the narrator insists, is the truth of his friend Father Pem.

The War as Unfinished Business and Moral Weight

The Vietnam War also haunts the novel's present-day action as an unresolved moral burden. The ex-Times reporter who travels to Cincinnati to confront the suspected Nazi war criminal reflects on his own lifelong role as an observer. He thinks of the Eichmann kidnapping — the identification problems, the surveillance, the eventual capture — and realizes he comes "from the other culture": the culture of reporting the fact, getting the story, getting the spelling right. This is "like a ball and chain" that drags on him. All his life he has looked on; civilization paid people like him for doing nothing, "for living subsidized, the way a farmer is paid for not planting crops." The Vietnam War is the implicit referent of this self-indictment — the war that a generation watched from afar, reported on, and failed to stop. The novel's meditation on the difficulty of "actually mak[ing] something happen in the world" is framed against this history of passive witness.

The War as Ecological and Moral Ruin

The novel's most compressed and bitter reckoning with Vietnam comes in a poetic fragment that asks whether there will be a monument to the victims "of the violin spider of Vietnam." The answer is that monuments are for wars, "And this was not a war, though we Americans" — the sentence breaks off, leaving the accusation unfinished. The image of the violin spider, a creature whose bite is venomous and whose name suggests both music and violence, condenses the war's peculiar horror: a conflict that was not a war, whose victims — human and ecological — will never be properly mourned. The fragment's incompleteness is itself a judgment, a refusal to grant the war the dignity of a finished sentence, just as the novel refuses to grant it the dignity of a monument.

The War as Counterpoint to the Holocaust

The Vietnam War's deepest function in the novel is as a counterpoint to the Holocaust, a way of measuring how different catastrophes are remembered and judged. Pem's own history — the sixties radical who became a priest — is set against the story of Sarah Blumenthal's father, a child runner in the Kovno Ghetto who wore a military-style cap and a star on his tunic and felt, with terrible irony, a perverted pride in his uniform. The ghetto's horrors — the confiscations, the deportations, the hangings — are documented in the archive chest that Pem helps recover, a chest impounded at JFK until a Justice Department attorney can be present at its unsealing. The Vietnam War, by contrast, is the American catastrophe that Pem's generation lived through and failed to stop, the wound that never received the legal and moral reckoning the Holocaust did. The novel's final, bitter irony comes when Pem learns that the Nazi who ran the ghetto, "Schmid, Schmitz, whatever the fuck his name was," died in his sleep in a home in Yonkers two months before he could be brought to justice. "We had him good and nailed, too," Pem says. "Damn!" The war criminal never had to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was. This failure of closure echoes the novel's broader meditation on Vietnam — a war that was never properly judged, never properly mourned, never properly ended. The unfinished sentence about the violin spider and the unprosecuted Nazi are twin failures of justice, twin refusals of the world to look squarely at what was done.