Not Guilty

By Henry Grunwald

WHY WE WERE IN VIET NAM by Norman Podhoretz Simon & Schuster; 210 pages; $13.50

This book is 210 pages leading up to a punch line. The punch line is Ronald Reagan's remark that Viet Nam was a "noble cause." Norman Podhoretz, neo-conservative guru, editor of Commentary, author of that 1980 call to arms, The Present Danger, argues that Reagan's description of Viet Nam is close to the truth. He seeks to prove that much fulmination to the contrary, America's participation in the war was not immoral. While Podhoretz will not convince those to whom America's guilt is an invigorating article of faith, he does a good job in supporting his proposition.

The book correctly describes how the U.S. edged into the Viet Nam conflict with the best of motives, hoping to contain the spread of Communism, and how at first the idea was supported by all the leading liberals, including John Kennedy and Senator William Fulbright, later the Viet Nam War's Cato in reverse. Podhoretz rather briskly (perhaps too briskly) disposes of some of the cliches about the war: he argues that it was not really a civil war, that it was no more brutal than other wars (a view supported both by statistics and by the word of no less an authority than Daniel Ellsberg), that it was not lost because it alienated the "hearts and minds" of the people but ultimately because of conventional invasion from the North. The only conceivable way to victory, Podhoretz suggests, would have been for the U.S. to have been a different country capable of fighting a different war. He concedes that defeat was inevitable, but he nevertheless maintains that the attempt to win was worthwhile.

Podhoretz is bloodcurdlingly effective in recalling the outrageous and irresponsible charges of the anti-anti-Communist and radical opposition, which he accurately describes as "McCarthyism of the left." Here is Susan Son tag reporting from Hanoi that most of the world would be greatly improved by living in a society like North Viet Nam's, and adding that the government really loved the people (Sontag has since recanted and made the discovery that "Communism is fascism"). Here is Mary McCarthy, also in Hanoi, defending the regime's censorship by explaining that a free press can be unhealthy for a body politic, and Noam Chomsky proclaiming that America needs deNazification. Podhoretz contrasts this pernicious idealization of Hanoi and the guerrillas it led to the well-documented horrors the victors have since visited on their own people. The point is well worth making. However, when he observes that in any other country the war critics who were openly cheering for the enemy would have been treated as traitors, he fails to note that the war, after all, was never formally declared--which is not merely a legalism.

If there is something narrow and ultimately unsatisfying about Why We Were in Viet Nam, it is partly that there is little that is new in the book. Moreover, Podhoretz fails to evoke the war's anguish and virtually omits the mistakes and deceptions committed by various Administrations over Viet Nam, however defensible some of them were. Also, when moral arguments are applied to politics or war, logical rigor gets lost. The war critics tossed "morality" around with foolish abandon, but Podhoretz is not precise about it either. Thus the fact that an action begins with noble intentions does not necessarily make it moral, nor does the fact that other actions, in this case the behavior of the victors, were worse. Podhoretz ignores the classic moral problem of means and ends. In the theological concept of the just war, one tenet is that the means must somehow be commensurate with the end. That is a juncture at which moralists and pragmatists can meet. Somewhere during Lyndon Johnson's second term, it became clear that however desirable the end of stopping Communism in Southeast Asia was to most Americans, the effort apparently necessary to bring this about (if it could be brought about at all) was no longer in line with the gains that might. be achieved.

All things considered, it might be just as well to declare an intellectual amnesty on Viet Nam guilt and get on with the urgent question of how the U.S. should in the future cope with challenges overseas. The conventional "lesson" of Viet Nam, of course, concerns the risk of using military force in foreign conflicts. If anything, the U.S. has learned that lesson too well. Despite the fact that Viet Nam was a very special situation, the book suggests a few other useful lessons. One is skepticism about feckless advocacy of "negotiated solutions" between mortal enemies, which keeps reappearing today in the context of Central America and elsewhere. Another is caution about the demands for democratic reforms, especially in the midst of guerrilla war, demands that still erupt any time the U.S. finds itself trying to help a regime that does not pass democratic muster by Western standards.

One of the questions the Podhoretz book indirectly raises is whether America is wise in stressing morality so heavily in its foreign policy-- a habit of mind, incidentally, not started by the left. Most Americans today would surely agree with Podhoretz that the U.S. role in the war was no crime. But they would also probably agree with a famous French remark: "It was worse than a crime. It was a blun der."* That is a good place to leave things for a while.

--By Henry Grunwald

* Said of the execution in 1804 of the Due d'Enghien ,vho was unjustly accused by Napoleon Bonaparte of complicity in a royalist conspiracy.

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