Saving Virtue

It could almost be the title for an Allen Drury novel: Apologize and Repudiate. The U.S. used that transparent device last week to free Captain David Crawford, Warrant Officer Malcolm Loepke and SP4 Herman Hofstatter, the three helicopter crewmen shot down over North Korea in August. The American representative at Panmunjom, a Marine major general, signed a Communist-drafted document, confessing to a "criminal act" and to infringing upon North Korean sovereignty. The general then announced that "there was no criminal act or intentional infiltration." He acted, he said, "in the humanitarian interest of securing the release of these men."

The U.S. went through almost exactly the same ritual a year ago to spring Commander Lloyd Bucher and the 81 other surviving Pueblo crewmen. However laudable the end, the routine is disquieting: a nation's word ought not to be solemnly pledged and then disavowed. Yet the technique has the virtue of saving face for both sides, and suggests that the U.S. may be acquiring the sophistication of Oriental civilizations. There may be a touch of this in President Nixon, who combines rhetoric about success in Viet Nam with steady U.S. troop withdrawals.

Not that Nixon is nearly so Oriental as Senator George Aiken, who half seriously suggested that the U.S. end the war by simply declaring itself the victor and pulling out. The ancient Greeks would have understood even that. Wrote Aeschylus: "God is not opposed to deceit in a righteous cause."

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