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Not So SwiftJohn Kerry's dubious Vietnam revisionism.

By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Aug. 23, 2004, at 3:11 PM ET

George Orwell once wrote a column about an anecdote concerning Sir Walter Raleigh which, as he put it, deserved to be true. While imprisoned in the Tower of London, Raleigh (as we know for sure) decided to beguile the weary detention by writing a History of the World. One day, his efforts were distracted by a commotion below his cell window. He looked out and saw a brawl in progress among the warders. It ended with a man lying dead on the ground and the others running away. Well-connected as he was in the jail, the learned eyewitness Raleigh could not find out what the quarrel had been about, or who had started it, or who had struck the fatal blow. At that moment, he abandoned his History of the World, and only a fragment of it has come down to us.

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I have no idea whether John Kerry is or is not telling the unvarnished truth about his service in Vietnam. (I am pretty sure, though, that he was unwise to prompt the release of the photograph of himself with his latest long-silent defender, William Rood of the Chicago Tribune. The shot of Kerry awkwardly shouldering a rocket launcher for the camera makes him look like a complete poseur.) It's obviously ridiculous for either side to accuse the other of using their recollections for "partisan" purposes. What else? Kerry himself didn't make a fetish of this until he sought a party's nomination (which is what "partisan" means) and his nemesis John O'Neill has been silent since the last time this all came up, which was in the Nixon era. Did Kerry imagine that if he dressed up in his old uniform again, his former critics would decide to keep quiet? What, if anything, was he thinking?

On that previous occasion, though, Kerry was using his service as a warrior to acquire credentials as an antiwarrior. Now, he is cashing in the same credentials to propose himself as alliance-builder and commander in chief. This is not a distinction without a difference.

A few years ago, the graduate students at the New School in New York (where I should say that I teach part-time) voted on whether another Democratic senator—Bob Kerrey of Nebraska—should lose his job as president of the university.* He had been accused of committing war crimes in Vietnam. Some of his squad said that he'd personally slaughtered some old people and children, others said he'd been there but not taken a direct part. Nobody disputed that an appalling atrocity had occurred under his command. Whatever the truth of the matter, I thought that Kerrey himself was not telling it. He had, for example, claimed that these cold-blooded murders took place on "a moonless night" when easily consulted records showed this not to be so. The grad students of the school for which I work voted for his resignation, but he sort of copped a pass by having lost part of a limb in a later engagement and having gone on to be anti-Nixon, and a general consensus emerged that one mustn't pass judgment on actions committed in the fog of war.* (Incidentally, this was an absolutely astonishing proposition for the New School, which was home to a generation of anti-Nazi refugee scholars, to have accepted.)

John Kerry actually claims to have shot a fleeing Viet Cong soldier from the riverbank, something that I personally would have kept very quiet about. He used to claim that he was a witness to, and almost a participant in, much worse than that. So what if he has been telling the absolute truth all along? In what sense, in other words, does his participation in a shameful war qualify him to be president of the United States? This was a combat of more than 30 years ago, fought with a largely drafted army using indiscriminate tactics and weaponry against a deep-rooted and long-running domestic insurgency. (Agent Orange, for example, was employed to destroy the vegetation in the Mekong Delta and make life easier for the Swift boats.) The experience of having fought in such a war is absolutely useless to any American today and has no bearing on any thinkable fight in which the United States could now become engaged. Thus, only the "character" issues involved are of any weight, and these are extremely difficult and subjective matters. If Kerry doesn't like people disputing his own version of his own gallantry, then it was highly incautious of him to have made it the centerpiece of his appeal.

Meanwhile, even odder things are happening to Kerry's "left." Michael Moore, whose film Kerry's people have drawn upon in making cracks about the president and the My Pet Goat moment, repeatedly says that you can't comment on the Iraq war—or at least not in favor of it—if you haven't shown a willingness to send a son to die there. Comes the question—what if you haven't got a son of military age? Comes the next question—should it only be veterans or potential veterans who have a voice in these matters? If so, then what's so bad about American Legion types calling Kerry a traitor to his country? The Democrats have made a rod for their own backs in uncritically applauding their candidate's ramrod-and-salute posture. They have also implicitly subverted one of the most important principles of the republic, which is civilian control over military decisions. And more than that, they have done something eye-rubbingly unprincipled, doing what Reagan and Kissinger could not do: rehabilitating the notion of the Vietnam horror as "a noble cause."

Correction, Aug. 31, 2004: This article originally stated that the faculty of the New School voted to ask the school's president, Bob Kerrey, to resign. It was actually the New School's graduate students who voted for his resignation. (Return to the corrected sentences.)

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

"The experience of having fought in such a war is absolutely useless to any American today and has no bearing on any thinkable fight in which the United States could now become engaged."

Let's just restate that to highlight its import:

[Insert personal experience] is absolutely useless to [Insert person] and has no bearing on [Issue under discussion]."

A pragmatist is someone who believes that our wisdom is shaped by combining the quality of our judgment with the life-lessons we encounter.

Then there's Hitchens...

--GeoffsPneuma

(To reply, click here)

Hitchens makes an uncomfortably apt observation about Kerry and the Vietnam War.

…I think Kerry may have overplayed his hand, and too early in the game.

The salute; the talk about how he "defended his country;" the absence of anything comparably chest-puffing for his anti-war agitation; the reluctance to formulate an Iraq critique -- these formulations and emphases invite charges of opportunism. Better, I think, would be for Kerry to thump the tub for his military record and his antiwar record at the same time. He was, after all, brave re the former, and correct about the latter. I say this, btw, because I think it would get him more votes.

--JimmytheCelt

(To reply, click here)

…What makes Kerry capable of drawing upon his Vietnam valor for a presidential election if he denounced the war and characterized participating American vets as war criminals 35 years ago?

Why is it OK for Democrats to question Bush's reading of "My Pet Goat" for several minutes after learning about the attacks of September 11, 2001, when even if he immediately ran screaming from his chair that day upon hearing the news, history would have remained the same?

Why is it OK for George Soros to spend millions on 527s attacking Bush unfettered, but Kerry calls for Bush to silence the Texas Republican man's 527 supporting the SBVT, headed by a guy who has had this problem with Kerry since 1971?

--faithbased1

(To reply, click here)

Hitchens would do well to heed his own lesson from the Tower of London, and avoid commenting on subjects he clearly doesn't understand.

There may be a good case to be made against Kerry's decision to campaign on the merits of his service in a war he himself once termed an atrocity. But Hitchens, shooting slimeballs wildly from the hip, misses the target by a wide margin…

…according to Hitchens, this effort to portray his service in Vietnam as an honorable act serves to "rehabilitate the notion of the Vietnam horror as a noble cause." As if the motives for service were inseparable from the cause. Hitchens clearly insinuates that all Vietnam vets should be ashamed of their service. So where does that leave our troops who are serving bravely in Iraq? Must we continue to pretend that the cause they fight for is noble and just... in order to avoid besmirching their honor?

Is that what Hitchens and his cohorts have been doing for the past year?

It is precisely this sort of Manichean worldview, combined with bloody ignorance about the outside world, that gets us stuck in quagmires in Vietnam and Iraq…

--ShriekingViolet

(To reply, click here)

…What should Kerry do, then, to overcome the undeniable advantage Republicans hold on issues of "national defense". George Bush, despite never fighting in war, describes himself as a "War President" and repeatedly invokes his prosecution of the War on Terror as evidence of his superior capacity to protect the country. He's been incredibly successful in promoting this image, so Kerry must somehow establish himself as a President capable of defending the country. How else is he to do this but by pointing out his actual experience? Hitchens implies that Kerry's participation in such an egregiously immoral war should not be celebrated. True, but Kerry does not necessarily endorse the war by having participating in it; to the contrary, though he did fight there and did commit self-described "atrocities," he was one of the most vocal critics of the war once he realized its immorality and futility. When our current President campaigns on his military leadership, it seems critical for Kerry to point out Bush's own lack of first-hand wartime experience. When a President establishes an advantage in national defense issues by simply throwing money at battlefields he himself created, it seems crucial for Kerry to point out the opportunism of the wars-by-proxy that Bush takes credit for prosecuting. Bush has created this debate, Karl Rove has shaped it, and Kerry is left to try and spin it the only way he knows how: by relying on personal experience.

--NathanMcIntire

(To reply, click here)

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