A Politics of Empathy: Johnny Cash, the Vietnam War, and the ‘Walking Contradiction’ Myth Dismantled

Abstract

In the years since Johnny Cash's death in 2003, popular and scholarly writing has persisted in framing Cash's politics as contradictory—thus seeming to support Kris Kristofferson's line, often assumed to be about Cash: a “walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” This essay argues that, although Cash may have seemed conflicted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his political views on Native Americans, prison reform, and the Vietnam War, especially, were remarkably consistent in that they were based not on ideological views as much as on emotion, instinct, and an ability to relate to familial suffering. As a political artist, Cash practiced an uncommon public politics of empathy that appealed to a diverse audience.