Sometimes, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words and in this case the photograph on the cover of Professor Sandra Scanlon's The Pro-war Movement: Domestic Support for the Vietnam War and the Making of Modern American Conservatism is filled with the faces of angry white men waving American flags, which, in some respects, is a commonly held portrayal of conservatism today. While the picture comes from a pro-Vietnam War rally in New York City in 1969, it is not so very different from those taken at Tea Party rallies around the country in 2014.

There is much to be learned from Scanlon's analysis of American conservatism from the Vietnam era because she presents a well-researched and clearly written history of the philosophical and political threads that, woven together, make up that movement's whole cloth. William Buckley, a dominant voice of the time, viewed the Vietnam War as part of the larger conflict with international communism which he advocated in the National Review. Another conservative leader was Senator Barry Goldwater, who promoted a more muscular military campaign in Vietnam which was a main theme in his 1964 presidential campaign. A third group, the campus-based Young Americans for Freedom, became involved in a bitter internal fight with libertarians and, having finally purged them from their ranks, became less focussed on Vietnam. Social conservatives, like Phyllis Schlafley, argued that Vietnam was really President Johnson's war, a distraction from more important domestic social issues. Other more populist groups focussed on the return of prisoners of war and operated outside the Republican Party organization. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, most conservatives rallied around President Nixon's policies, which eventually led to a gradual withdrawal of American troops and increased emphasis on Vietnamization of the war while he sought “peace with honor” at the Paris peace talks.

Professor Scanlon notes that war supporters did not engage in much analysis of Vietnamese politics or culture – either of the South or of the North. They did not question whether or not the South Vietnamese government was capable of defeating the North under Nixon's policy of Vietnamization of the war. Neither did they consider the obvious strength and tenacity of northern forces led by Ho Chi Minh. Focussing only on the war as a crusade against communism, pro-war supporters rarely doubted that Americans should support any of the governments formed in Saigon.

One area where both pro- and anti-war activists agreed was that the war at home centered around conflicting definitions of patriotism and American values. For war supporters, patriotism meant supporting the war, the troops and the President. Questioning any of these elements was unpatriotic and violated the sanctity of national honor and pride.

Finally, Scanlon argues that after the war, all of these pro-war supporters converged around Ronald Reagan's version of the war as a “noble cause,” a war that we entered with honorable intentions and that we could and should have won if only unpatriotic anti-war liberals and their allies in the press hadn't prevented the military from achieving victory. The military war thus became an abstraction for the culture wars that continue to this day.

Contemporary conservatives reflect many of the divisions of earlier times. Social conservatives, then as now, are more concerned with domestic issues than with foreign policy. Traditional Republican Party leaders worry about American isolationism. Neoconservatives advocated getting over the Vietnam syndrome of limited engagement in “no-win wars” promoted by Secretary of State Colin Powell and referred to as the Powell Doctrine. Unfortunately neoconservative policies led America into two more “no-win wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Libertarians, once purged by the YAF, have reasserted their place within conservative ranks and continue to challenge traditional Republican Party leadership.

Professor Scanlon often refers to other authors without explanation or context, which, while acceptable in academic dissertations, is perhaps less useful in more public discourse. In addition, there's not much in the way of presentation of the colorful personalities here, which is unfortunate given the wide range involved. Still, this is a solid contribution to the argument that the 1960s was just as much the birth of modern conservatism as it was of the New Left – an argument that, given the divided political climate that we live in today, cannot be denied.