Zeus, the sky and weather god of the ancient Greeks, had a hitherto inimitable method of wreaking vengeance on the ungodly; he hurled a thunderbolt at them. The Vietnam War mobilized a small, ragtag army—mostly Americans—of modern thunderbolt-throwers whose targets, they loudly proclaimed, were the immoral leaders of an immoral America. What credentials can these deputies of Zeus offer as to their own moral eminence? What quality of moral insight attaches to their denunciation of countrymen and county?
One of the greatest handicaps to understanding a critical period in human experience is the distorted account by contemporary explainers. In American experience, the Vietnam War was such a critical period, and the antiwar critics contributed a generous measure to the gallimaufry of myths that still abound. We are living today with the effects of those distortions, and we will continue to live with them for some time.
The antiwar movement included a variety of opposition to American Vietnam policy, from a number of intellectual and psychological perspectives. The heterogeneous contributions included:
Some balanced, thoughtful criticisms by well- informed analysts of international and domestic affairs who understood the ramifications of the real foreign-policy alternatives that have been available to any American administration over the past 15-25 years. Few among such critical analysts adopted any moral stance.
Some passionate denunciations by sensitive, well-meaning people who understood little about foreign policy and less about Vietnam, but who evaluate public policy by the degree of its conformity to their personal biases and private morality.
Some foreign and domestic enemies of America, including but not limited to Communist party members and sympathizers, determined to erode the effectiveness of American influence and institutions, including the armed forces. Almost all of what they have said about Vietnam is false or distorted.
Some paranoiac elements, heaping on the Vietnam War the blame for their personal hangups and emotional disturbances, or individual and group frustrations. For them, nothing about American performance in relation to Vietnam was too weird, outrageous, or scurrilous to be believed, especially if it emanated from Hanoi; they avoided learning real facts about Vietnam and preferred exclusively the diabolizing horror stories which they accepted among themselves.
A good deal of political exploitation, for a variety of reasons.
This essay is concerned with the most obtrusive gaucheries of the third, fourth, and fifth groups identified above; and I have grouped their representatives as "Deputies of Zeus.” To be sure, even the New Left is not as monolithic as it is sometimes thought to be.
At best, some of its simplistic insights have sprung from anguish over lingering inequities and have presaged more enlightened perceptions. At worst, some of its representatives constructed their polemics out of manipulation and deception, distorting and damaging the American condition. Active today as enemies of government in an open society, they do not seem to perceive that they are enemies of themselves.
Prominent among their polemics is meagre or nonexistent understanding of a number of fundamental factors: of the nature of the international context of power (there are other international contexts also, but that of power remains formidable); of the complex roots of any nation’s involvement in war; of the role and imperatives of war (for example, the cogent reasons for the overland incursion into Cambodia, adequately explained at the time); of the less overt but still relentless drive among Communist regimes toward weakening and discrediting the principal obstacle, America, to extending their linked hegemony; of the profound contrast between the status of the individual under Communism as a utopian theory and the individual’s status in every existing Communist state; of the increasingly complicated vortex of decision-making in open societies; of the conflicting options, none of which may be satisfactory, available to public officials who must respond promptly, without benefit of clairvoyance, to ambiguous but pressing circumstances; of the agonizing major dilemmas which sometimes force the highest decision-makers to do, not what they want to do, nor what would be popular to do, but what, in the nation’s best present and future interests, they must do; of the difficulty of determining what choices American consensus prefers, distinguished from what atypical activists or other special interests demand; of the unbridgeable chasm between what is good and attainable, and what would be best but unattainable; of the enigma of motives, including our own; and of similar elements of the real, live world.
One of the characteristic features of their accounts is the absence of the other side, as though the Communists posed no threat to world or regional or national security. As the Canadian John Holmes put it: "…the Communist states have no existence in their writings except as figments in the overheated imaginations of Cold Warriors.”
Despite the repeated refusal of senior American courts, for example, to endorse challenges to the legality of American policy concerning the Vietnam War, the deputies of Zeus repeatedly characterize American participation in the war as "illegal.” They have been abundantly wrong about causes, events, motives, and results. On the whole, the prevailing tone of much of their discourse has been snide and churlish. One eventually concludes that any national policy opposed by, say, Noam Chomsky, Gloria Emerson, Tom Hayden, George Wald, Anthony Lewis, and their fellow-polemicists, is bound to have much going for it.
In a time of profoundly disturbing change, it is hard enough for conscientious officials to be subjected to arbitrary and distorted evaluations of the Vietnam War emanating from the ignorant, the biased, and the self-seeking; but the hardest source of distortion to accept with equanimity is the morally vindictive, the morally superior. Much of the moral denunciation of the Vietnam War, frequently comingled with mindless denunciation of all war, was presented on premises, in terms, or from sources which were hardly morally impeccable themselves. Even if one is denouncing what he regards as a lie, can his denunciation carry moral weight if it is itself a lie?
Ethics and morality constitute a most amorphous area of judgment in human affairs, perhaps the most difficult of all in which to feel confidence in one’s own insights. And moral judgments are likely to blow up in one’s face when one attempts to formulate them out of that most unreliable of materials: the divining of other people’s motives.
Among the explosive thunderbolts hurled with abandon were charges that American political leaders, military persons, and others involved in substantive ways with the Vietnam War were immoral persons, performing immoral acts stemming from the involvement of America in the Vietnam War.
A sampling of representative broadsides is offered below:
Ronald Steel, revisionist: "Security through terror, peace through war, truth through lies; this has been the model for United States foreign policy for nearly two generations. . . [The United States combines] murder in Indochina and the most gargantuan war machine the world has ever seen...”
Susan Sontag, writer: "America has become a criminal, sinister country.”
Tom Wicker, New York Times writer: "The Amen can people do not seem to realize that their air power is carrying out one of the most terrible mass exterminations in history…”
Anthony Lewis, New York Times writer: "The American strategists of the Vietnam War tend to thin in large abstractions uncluttered by human beings.”
Ann Trowbridge, in a letter to the New York Times: "[Our] vast armada of warships, aircraft carriers and bombers ... are now engaged in the most criminal, irresponsible use of military power the world has ever witnessed…”
Senator Gaylord Nelson: “…The cold, hard and cruel irony of it all is that South Vietnam would have been better off losing to Hanoi than winning with us.”
The foregoing statements all partially involve situations of fact. Either the American strategists of the Vietnam War "tended to think in large abstractions uncluttered by human beings,” or our strategists did not tend to think in such terms. Either American airpower carried out one of the most terrible mass exterminations in history, or it did not. Objective evaluation of the facts involved in each of these statements reveals one outstanding characteristic they hold in common: they are all false. Except for the impracticality of assessing gratuitous assertions about thought processes, the absurdity of all of these assertions can be established through accurate and honest analysis.
A number of additional polemical assertions thrust deeper into the area of explicit moral assessment:
Richard Falk, professor at Princeton: American "high public officials” have pursued "illegal, immoral, and criminal war policies . . .”
Grace Paley, in a letter to the New York Times: "There’s a good deal of sentiment and dreamy invention attached to the American prisoners of war in North Vietnam…In reality, they were fliers shot down out of the North Vietnamese sky where they had no business to be…”
Steven V. Roberts, book reviewer: “…Undoubtedly, Vietnam is partly responsible. The crime is so heinous, and the need for commitment so great, that for many, rationality is no longer possible nor desirable . . .”
Gloria Emerson, writer: "Surely any American who still has a truly open mind about the war possesses almost no mind at all.”
A graduating speaker at a New England commencement: "…I say the most unjust peace is infinitely superior to a just war.”
Henry Steele Commager: "Why do we find it so hard to accept this elementary lesson of history, that some wars are so deeply immoral that they must be lost, that the war in Vietnam is one of these wars, and that those who resist it are the truest patriots?”
These statements, too, bear several features in common. Insofar as facts are involved in any of them, most of the facts cited are also wrong. They certainly share arrogant certainty and offensiveness. In the current context, however, I wish to emphasize their common air of moral superiority.
While we are engaged in citation, let us also take note of the activities of the Stockholm-based International Commission of Inquiry into United States Crimes in Indochina.” This movement recalls the insidious charade of a few years earlier, also hosted in Stockholm, and headed by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, both America-haters of long standing. Is it noteworthy in connection with morality that Stockholm (or New York or Boston) intellectuals have never sponsored any "International Commission of Inquiry into North Vietnamese Crimes in Indochina?”
A remarkable account was recently published of a 1971 survey of 2,600 children, aged 8 through 14, concerning their attitudes about the Vietnam War. The press account said that 45% of them believed that President Nixon told "lies about the war” and 40% believed that President Nixon was "not doing the right thing” in Vietnam. Eight-year-olds? Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the survey is that it was taken at all. Whose views would these children be parroting, except those of "committed” adults? What effects on society can be expected from indoctrinating eight-year-olds with highly partisan biases on controversial political issues? It is significant that 30 other elementary schools would not permit such young children to be surveyed with these questionnaires.
On 2 March 1969, George Wald, a Harvard professor of biology, gave an address to hundreds of students at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, containing these subjective passages:
"I think the Vietnam War is the most shameful episode in the whole of American history. The concept of war crimes is an American invention. We’ve committed many war crimes in Vietnam; but I’ll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, even before Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes started. The saturation bombing of German cities was a war crime, and if we had lost the war, some of our leaders might have had to answer for it…
"How many of you can sing 'the rockets’ red glare, bombs bursting in air’ without thinking, those are our bombs and our rockets bursting over South Vietnamese villages? … Now we are supporting real or thinly disguised military dictatorships all over the world, helping them to control and repress peoples struggling for their freedom.”
Like the statements cited earlier, there is hardly one word of truth in these venal passages. Did some fair-minded American journal refute this exercise in scurrility? Quite the contrary, as the Boston Globe and that eminent center of strategic analysis, the New Yorker magazine, reprinted and distributed tens of thousands of copies. The Globe, in one of its masterpieces of Groupthink, called it "perhaps the greatest speech of our time!”
In a landscape dotted with so much heroism held to be contemptible, such heavy responsibilities borne despite contumely, so much poisoning of American community relationships, it is difficult to choose the most reprehensible examples. But certainly among the most repellent activities was the manipulation of the prisoners-of-war issue by American antiwar activists. For all their marches and riots, trips to Hanoi and Stockholm, mockery of democratic processes, their rhetoric and moral denunciation, they gained notoriety for themselves and platforms from which to denounce the American government; but, as returned American prisoners-of-war have overwhelmingly agreed, their collaboration with Hanoi produced the greatest stress for our captured servicemen, sustained Hanoi, damaged American relationships in foreign affairs, and lengthened the war.
An example of some of their values and analytical prowess was provided by Jane Fonda, lecturing to 2,000 students at Michigan State in 1969: "I would think that if you understood what Communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees, that we could someday become Communist.” Such activities, denouncing both democracies and totalitarians of the Right, but praising totalitarians of the Left, play a part in making anti-Communism respectable. It is interesting to note, in passing, that such benign exhortations about Communism are always offered by apologists while speaking in a free country; few, if any, of them ever demonstrate their convictions by actually moving to practice their life-styles, or praying on their knees for anti-Communist causes, in a Communist society.
In contrast to the violent bombardment by the deputies of Zeus, it can be held that had the United States approached the Vietnam War as a unified nation, the war might well have ended several years earlier, with a fraction of the casualties and the destruction that actually occurred on both sides.
In all sincerity and moral candor, the Vietnam War can be held to have pursued objectives of the highest morality on the part of America: It defended the weak against a predator, at considerable cost to itself. The fact that one or more My Lais occurred no more characterizes American performance in the war than the vicious falsehoods of some intellectuals represent the views of the American intellectual community. The fact that people were killed (or that wars are not nice under the best of circumstances) does not make American participation immoral. More Americans are killed in one year on our highways than were killed throughout the entire Vietnam War; does that carnage make automobiles or traffic immoral?
Who are these hurlers of moral thunderbolts? What credentials can they offer as to their own moral eminence? What quality of moral insight attaches to their denunciations?
Many of those who deputized themselves as moral denouncers regard peace as the highest good in a society’s condition; some have no hesitation in projecting their notions of morality in personal situations onto relationships among nations; some appear to think their moral opinions are as good as anybody else’s, that individual moral judgments possess general validity; some use moral denunciation toward anything that displeases them; some appear to be under the impression that morality requires only emotion, not reason; some are Utopians; some are simply victims of their own great elitist eagerness to denounce other people.
The accusatory stance sometimes misleads an observer into assuming that the accusers have earned some lofty moral eminence from which to denounce others. Yet, as the old preacher remarked, "Not everybody talkin’ about Heaven is goin’ there.” Some deputies of Zeus have no standing whatsoever in the area of ethics and morals, have developed no moral analyses that have been accorded any respect, have no reputation as moralists, are not sought after to reflect on moral issues, and give little indication of knowing any more about morality and ethics than they know about Vietnam. Some appear, in fact if morality is to become a prominent criterion for judgment, to be particularly vulnerable themselves.
Here is another moral paradox: it has not gone unremarked that many a young student-graduated-into-faculty-member, excused from military service by an indulgent nation at the peak war years while his contemporaries served in his place in Vietnam, experienced guilt feelings. The guilt was worked off, not by volunteering to serve his share, but by developing the conviction that the Vietnam War was "an evil, immoral war,” and then by bending every effort of protest, propaganda, and moral accusation to have the American experience in Indochina so branded, "a vile, immoral war.” For, of course, if the war were to be widely considered to be vile and immoral, one’s own non-participation could be turned from a handicap to an advantage; one could rationalize one’s non-participation as highly virtuous, as morally superior.
Of course, one corollary is that many a man who actually fought for this country "lost” on both counts, he actually endured and survived the hazards of war, only to be assured afterwards that by so doing he performed an immoral act. Many a critic, on the other hand, demands a "win” on both counts: he escaped first-hand experience with the dangers and miseries of battle, and actually wants to be accorded superior moral approbation for having done so. Yet, there are relevant tenets in old common law that the critics of the war might well ponder in equations of morality. One is that those who seek equity must perform equity. Another is that those who seek equity must come with clean hands.
Let me advance here an unequivocal proposition: Every citizen, whether he acknowledges the debt or not, benefits from the freedom, power, and prosperity constructed and maintained for this country by its builders and defenders; and no citizen who risked his life in honorable service for this country owes any apologies, moral or otherwise, to other citizens who benefited from his participation, least of all to those who did not similarly serve.
One peculiar principle prominent in the polemics of the antiwar crowd was the principle that the conscience of the individual, no matter how ignorant or perverse his understanding of the issue involved, is Superior to the moral conclusions of others, superior t0 the moral consensus of the society, and superior to the law. Hardly anyone would quarrel with the endeavor of American society to provide the greatest possible elbow-room for the individual—politically, economically, and morally; but there must be some limit to individual autonomy. As Emile Durkheim Pointed out, man’s desires are infinite; his society must impose limits upon their actualization.
This principle has arisen particularly over the issue of selective objection to a specific war. This seems to me indefensible on moral grounds. For no individual citizen, insofar as his society requires his services, is a competent judge of the morality of a particular war, elective objection, carried to the point of refusing to serve, removes the issue of moral objection to war, and becomes merely a political act. It assumes that the individual is completely informed of the entire range of political, economic, social, and all other issues on all sides of the particular war and is competent not only to assess all these issues but also to make correct moral evaluation of them.
His position is too dependent upon expediency; it is too nearly self-serving. Many citizens are certain to object to any particular war, on a multiplicity of grounds: personal inconvenience, or misunderstanding, or racial prejudice, or economic interests, or any of a thousand reasons.
Nietzsche noted the anomaly that "everyone claim- eth to be an authority on 'good’ and 'evil’,” but, of course, everyone is not an authority. A minority on the National Commission on Selective Service in 1967 wanted to recommend that exemption be granted to objectors to particular wars, but the majority could not agree with that view.
John Courtney Murray, the eminent Jesuit theologian, insisted that before such an exemption could be granted, society must be able to devise tribunal procedures that can determine whether such individual claims are "truly held”—a function not now feasible.
"Suppose a young man comes forward and says: 'I refuse to serve in this war on grounds of the Nuremberg principle.’ Conversation discloses that he has not the foggiest idea what the Nuremberg principle really is. Or suppose he understands the principle and says: 'I refuse to serve because in this war the United States is committing war crimes.’ The fact may be, as it is in Vietnam, that this allegation is false…What then is a tribunal to do?”
The moral dimension cannot be exclusively reserved to the individual citizen. Ralph Potter writes: "The nation is ultimately a moral community. To challenge its well-established policies as illegal, immoral, or unjust is to pose a threat, the seriousness of which seems at times to escape the critics themselves, whether by the callowness of youth or the callousness of usage.” (Italics added)
The inevitable outcome of the supremacy of individual judgment is suggested, among many examples, by the acts of Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and Arthur Bremer.
The premise that one’s sincerity and personal conscience are sovereign, no matter what the social context may be, has been ubiquitous among opponents of the war. Some insist that resisters were "sincere,” but so was Hitler, and the Inquisition. One representative advocate is the historian, Henry Steele Commager:
"What we cannot deny is that the vast majority of evaders [war resisters who fled the United States, and deserters] acted on principle; that they felt…that the war in which they were required to participate was misguided or immoral…May not the deserters and evaders claim that their error is to have been ahead of public opinion and of government policy…?”
Aside from wondering how Dr. Commager could know what motives the "vast majority” pursued, one contemplates such a passage and reflects that, if its premises were ever to become pervasive, America (or any other society) will be moribund. Even Rousseau, that great libertarian, suggested in The Social Contract that any person may renounce his citizenship by leaving his country, "provided, of course, he does not leave to escape his obligations and avoid having to serve his country in the hour of need.”
One vigorous (sometimes violent) denouncer was the peace activist. Some peace activists exaggerated wildly a uniqueness that they seemed to ascribe to their own small numbers. A symbolic action was to advertise "Another Family for Peace.” This seemed a wholly gratuitous exercise; they might as well have advertised "Another Family That Belongs to the Human Race.” For almost all human beings want peace, including military men. To be for peace conveys no moral distinction whatever. Except in very special circumstances, peace is far more likely than its alternatives to be a highly moral choice, and to be the universal preference.
This raises the question of priorities among moral choices. A portion of the peace movement has always held that peace is the highest moral condition; it chooses the maxim that "there never was a good war or a bad peace.” This is sanctimonious nonsense. Let us recognize that, though there are evils in every war, there are also evils in every peace—otherwise, there would never be any reason to disturb the peace. There is at least one choice morally superior to peace; that choice is justice. As John Rawls begins his much hailed recent work, A Theory of Justice: "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.” So long as injustice exists among men and nations, justice will be sought, and peace will continue to be contingent on the prior achievement of justice. Thus, while the search for peace is universally endorsed, peace must defer in any moral hierarchy to justice. In turn, the pursuit of justice may involve war, as being morally superior to peace. This position does not constitute advocacy of violence or war.
Anyone who presumes to engage in the arena of debate about the morality of a war must cope with the concept of the just war, which was hammered out of very long human experience, by people who were quite as moral, and quite as devoted to peace, as anyone alive today. Moreover, whether war comes to a nation or not, does not depend upon a nation’s virtue, or its morality, or the correctness of its views, or even upon its desire; war may come to both sides at the will of only one side: that of the predator.
The perception of war as an aberration, a vile activity beyond human comprehension, is essentially a copout. That approach avoids the real problem; it gives no hope of ever contributing to erosion of the role of war in human affairs. The reality is that man is not solely a creature of good, but a mixture of good and evil. Man should not sin, but he continues to sin every day; sin is a part of the normal human condition. I leave it to others at the moment to analyze why this is so, and also why some people are able to ignore their own sins and denounce only the sins of others as being the worst kind, or the vilest. War is not an aberration outside the range of justifiable human response. Along the ladder of increasingly violent national responses, war occupies the most extreme step; but it is still part and parcel of that ladder of available responses. No solution will work if only some states renounce war, for such an act amounts to acceptance of the possibility of national suicide. And, while individual suicide may or may not be a moral option, the option of committing a nation to collective suicide is not available, morally speaking, to a nation or its leaders.
So long as major injustice remains entrenched in the human condition, so long as man remains a perverse mystery even to himself, it will be vain and irresponsible to delude oneself that he is helping to reach a solution by blanket denunciation of all wars and all men who fight them.
As a final general point, we may question the role of the deputy of Zeus, the individual who, no matter how inexperienced, uninformed, or unethical he or she may be, feels entitled to hurl moral thunderbolts at others, particularly at public officials. This is a complex, sensitive area, involving freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the status of the critic, the role of the political representative, the obligations of citizenship, and similar knotty issues. Nevertheless, as suggested earlier, a moral judgment resting wholly on the individual opinion of the proponent involves no moral principle at all; it rests on a moral vacuum.
It remains to relate these abstract propositions to the reality of the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, limited space precludes detailed analysis of that highly comply affair.
One fundamental thrust of the international Communist movement has been the basis for broad free-nation resistance. It is not primarily the fact that the movement is Communist that has repelled free people5’ nor even the fact that it is totalitarian. It is my belief that no large proportion of the people of America were passionately concerned that even the Soviet movement was Communist and totalitarian, so long as it stayed within its national boundaries. What roused them to militant resistance was the additional characteristic of that particular totalitarian movement, namely, that it set out to impose its system on other nations, by subversion and illegal assumption of power if possible, or by force if necessary. Yet it had no right whatsoever to take control of any nation. It was to that militant expansion of the Soviet control network that threatened Nations responded, for it ultimately threatened them all. This was the primary basis for American participation in the Cold War, and eventually, in the Vietnam War.
Of course, some of the purposes of some moral denouncers extended well beyond morality into purposes of political and economic activism, and of ideology. Their intention was to discredit any reasonable foundation for American participation in the Vietnam War. If America’s defensive stance toward militant Communist expansionism over the previous three decides could be successfully held to be unnecessary and unjustified, and especially immoral, the linkage with subsequent American participation in Vietnam could be discredited as simply American "imperialism, genocide,” "murder,” and all the other cliche-thunderbolts repeatedly hurled by the deputies of Zeus.
Ho Chi Minh led the movement of the Vietnamese to seek something they apparently wanted: achieving freedom from being a colony of France. So far, so good, however, he and his associates then conned the North Vietnamese; under the pretense of The Great Liberator continuing the same struggle, he gained control of North Vietnam and imposed a totalitarian regime on its people, at great cost to themselves, but with no more moral justification for doing so than any other Communist (or other totalitarian) regime.
He also determined that he and his small band would impose the same totalitarian regime over the People of South Vietnam. Of course, he had no shred of moral justification for doing that, either. Despite his Fifth Column in South Vietnam, the overwhelming Majority of the South Vietnamese repudiated him, and so he launched a war of conquest and terror against them. Why should the South Vietnamese people have been expected to throttle their own self-determination in order to please Ho Chi Minh, to satisfy his ambitions? Why should they not have been expected to cry for help to any nation strong enough and willing to help them? It was legally and morally impeccable for them to do so, and for America and other nations to respond.
Among the deputies of Zeus, balance, fairness, an objectivity are scorned. The presentation of one interpretation of events as a mere hypothesis, one possible explanation, appears to be considered a sign of weakness. Hindsight is vigorously exploited. Modesty is considered quaint, out-of-fashion, tragi-comic. Insulting language is excused as "rhetoric,” as though insulting rhetoric were defensible.
Perhaps many citizens will be pardoned for doubting that the Vietnam-War-period shoes of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, or Dean Rusk, for example, could have been filled better, or as well, by Tom Wicker, Noam Chomsky, James Reston, David Halberstam, Mary McGrory, or any of the others on the same wavelength. It may even be doubted that the deputies of Zeus have really sought, with some of their moral thunderbolts, to enlighten the American people with the truth about the war. One may suspect that their real audience is each other, engaging in a sort of orgiastic Group-think.
Referring to intellectuals who castigate American society, Irving Kristol wrote: "Though there has been a mushrooming of polemics against the inequalities of the American condition, most of this socio-economic literature is shot through with disingenuousness, sophistry, and unscrupulous statistical maneuvering.” True, indeed. And how much more distorted are the polemics against the target that attracted their principal efforts: The Vietnam War. They have excoriated unjustly many Americans in connection with the Vietnam War, none more savagely than the good men of competence and courage who had to fight that largely peripheral, widely controversial, but possibly necessary war. Why do so many engage in fanatical polemics? Why are the absurdities of the Left supposed to be more palatable than the absurdities of the Right? How can such bright people be so wrong?
Unfortunately, we have not the time or space here to probe the roots of the discontent of these artists and intellectuals. Despite their violent words and their moral thunderbolts, many intellectuals never really gave a damn about the Vietnam War. Indeed, as I have suggested, many of the most passionate polemicists knew very little about the reality of it. The War provided, however, a timely club which they found useful for beating on their real target: imperfect American society, which does not show them enough deference.
The delusion persists among some intellectuals that Americans are a simple, unidimensional people; yet we are highly complex. Almost a century and a half ago, de Tocqueville commented on paradoxes he observed in the American psyche; some of these observations have telling, if disturbing, force today:
"…noble and generous spirits praise slavery, while low, servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are the enemies of all progress, while men without patriotism or morals make themselves the apostles of civilization and enlightenment. Have men always dwelt in a world in which nothing is connected? Where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor? Where love of order is confused with a tyrant’s tastes, and the sacred cult of freedom as scorn of law?”
Let me suggest a few tentative propositions relevant to this whole movement. Where true morality lies concerning each proposition might profitably be pondered by the deputies of Zeus:
How close to, or far from, morality are those who purported to tell the story of the Vietnam War, in whole or in part, but who belabored real and fancied incidents in the sparse record of non-deliberate American atrocity, and who ignored the truly enormous record of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese atrocities, carried out as deliberate acts of national policies of terror, carried out in pursuit of aggression aimed at imposing a totalitarian regime on people who did not and do not want it?
How moral are the denunciations of those who, benefiting from the security (hard won by others) of their campus, faculty club, editorial tower, studio, or other safe harbor, sought every opportunity to hurl passionate denigration at those who carried responsibility and danger, while they themselves never shared the responsibilities for agonizing moral dilemmas, or the risks, fears, and privations of lethal combat?
Of what significance, if any, is the morality associated with those who described the American military performance in Vietnam in terms of the one or more My Lais that occurred among platoon-sized or smaller units, or individuals? Whereas, the true measure of the American military performance in Vietnam was firmly established in the possibly one hundred thousand platoon-sized incidents (and related air and naval actions) which did not result in My Lais, in which, frequently at the cost of greater risk and suffering to the Americans involved, the American military actions were conducted in accordance with the prevailing rules of war.
What is one to make of the morality of those who have relentlessly recapitulated the destructive effects of American acts of war, but never, never, even hinted at the colossal record of constructive effects: the villages rebuilt, the refugees resettled, the houses and apartments built, the classrooms and factories fabricated, the wells dug, the roads and bridges constructed, the food and clothing distributed, the medical care administered? Not all of these were accomplished by American government programs, either; but many, as is characteristic of the American serviceman around the world, were contributed freely in the serviceman’s spare time, from his pocketbook, by the sweat of his personal effort, from the depths of his good will. Is it worthy of moral comment on critics and media that very few people even in America, are aware of this substantial outcome of American presence in Indochina?
What are we to make of the morality of those who knowingly disseminated false or distorted accounts of the war, who endeavored to rally contempt for citizens carrying out their obligations and fighting the war, who poured invective on the public officials who had to cope with the real international world, who impugned the morality and demanded punitive action against those relatively few who bore the burdens for the many?
What morality, if any, can be claimed by those who aided the efforts of a totalitarian regime against their own country, who helped to hamstring American efforts to end the war quickly, and who, in the process, helped extend the war, increase the destruction, and swell the list of American and Vietnamese casualties?
I do not insist that the moral judgments that might emerge from all the foregoing propositions are perfectly obvious, or easy to reach. I merely suggest that they merit far greater consideration than they have received.
This discussion will be read by some as an attack on the critic’s role, but such reading wholly misses the point. Why would one attack a role which everyone plays with greater or less frequency? The constructive critic is invaluable. But dissent in the sense of destructive nihilism serves no useful purpose, except to provide psychic relief for the critic. The great institutions of man—universities, systems of law, cathedrals—were built, not by destructive dissenters, but by assenters.
The trouble with constructive critics is not that we have too many, but that we never have enough.
However, to the deputies of Zeus, I would recommend, like Learned Hand, that the impulse to hurl another moral thunderbolt be stayed long enough to weigh the import of Oliver Cromwell’s famous caution: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
Dr. Wermuth spent 32 years in military service, from private to colonel, Regular Army, commanding infantry units from platoon to combined-arms brigade, and serving on staff elements of SHAPE, USAREUR, and the Pentagon, and on the faculties of the U. S. Military Academy and the Army War College. A 1940 graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, Dr. Wermuth earned M.A.s from Columbia and George Washington Universities, and a Ph.D. in political science from Boston University. At the time of writing, Dr. Wermuth was Director, Social Science Studies, Westinghouse Center for Advanced Studies and Analyses; but he has recently joined the Strategic Studies Institute of the U. S. Army War College.