5. "Self-Pity" and other Character Flaws

The 50th anniversary was commemorated with cover stories in the major newsweeklies, articles in the press, and TV documentaries. Several were applauded by Wall Street Journal critic Dorothy Rabinowitz for their "unrelentingly tough historic view of the Pearl Harbor attack," with no ambiguities about the distinction between pure righteousness and absolute evil (December 2). She reserves her condemnations for the "journalists of the fashionable Left and the terminal Right" who "invariably" portray the Japanese "as victims" of the dastardly Americans. Examples of these lunacies are omitted; the actual historical issues receive not a phrase.

The opposite side of the page carries an article by Robert Greenberger headlined "U.S.-Vietnam Ties Remain Held Back By the MIA Issue," describing a Vietnamese plan "to solve the main issue blocking a resumption of relations: accounting for Americans missing since the Vietnam War." This news report is so conventional as to merit no particular notice, apart from the interesting layout. It is a staple of the media, and the culture generally, that we were the injured party in Vietnam. We were innocent victims of what John F. Kennedy called "the assault from the inside" (November 12, 1963), the "internal aggression" by South Vietnamese peasants against their legitimate government and the saviors who imposed it upon them and defended their country from them.²¹ Later we were treacherously assaulted by the North Vietnamese. Not content with attacking us, they also imprisoned Americans who had mysteriously fallen into their hands. Unrelenting, the Vietnamese aggressors proceeded to abuse us shamefully after the war's end, refusing to cooperate fully on the fate of US pilots and MIAs, even failing to devote themselves with proper dedication to locating the remains of pilots they had viciously blasted from the skies.

Our suffering at the hands of these barbarians is the sole moral issue that remains after a quarter-century of violence, in which we vigorously backed the French effort to reconquer their former colonies; instantly demolished the 1954 diplomatic settlement; installed a regime of corrupt and murderous thugs and torturers in the southern sector where we had imposed our rule; attacked that sector directly when the terror and repression of our clients elicited a reaction that they could not withstand; expanded our aggression to all of Indochina with saturation bombing of densely-populated areas, chemical warfare attacks to destroy crops and vegetation, bombing of dikes, and huge mass murder operations and terror programs when refugee-generation, population removal, and bulldozing of villages failed; ultimately leaving three countries destroyed, perhaps beyond the hope of recovery, the devastated land strewn with millions of corpses and unexploded ordnance, with countless destitute and maimed, deformed fetuses in the hospitals of the South that do not touch the heartstrings of "pro-life" enthusiasts, and other horrors too awful to recount in a region "threatened with extinction...as a cultural and historic entity...as the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size," in the words of the hawkish historian Bernard Fall, one of the leading experts on Vietnam, in 1967 -- that is, before the major US atrocities were set in motion.²²

From all of this, one single element remains: the terrible abuse we have suffered at the hands of our tormenters.

Reactions to our adversity are not entirely uniform. At the dovish extreme, we find Senator John Kerry, who warns that we should never again fight a war "without committing enough resources to win"; no other flaw is mentioned. And there is President Carter, the noted moral teacher and human rights apostle, who assured us that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any assistance because "the destruction was mutual," an observation so uncontroversial as to pass with no reaction. Others less inclined to turn the other cheek forthrightly assign the blame to the Vietnamese Communists alone, denouncing the anti-American extremists who labor to detect lingering ambiguities.²³

In the New York Times, we read stories headlined "Vietnam, Trying to be Nicer, Still has a Long Way to Go," with Asia correspondent Barbara Crossette reporting that though the Vietnamese are making some progress "on the missing Americans," they are still far from approaching our lofty moral standards. And a hundred others with the same tone and content. Properly statesmanlike, President Bush announces that "It was a bitter conflict, but Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past." Their crimes against us can never be forgotten, but "we can begin writing the last chapter of the Vietnam war" if they dedicate themselves with sufficient zeal to the MIAs. We might even "begin helping the Vietnamese find and identify their own combatants missing in action," Crossette reports. The adjacent front-page story reports Japan's failure, once again, to "unambiguously" accept the blame "for its wartime aggression."²⁴

As the 1992 presidential campaign heated up, Vietnam's savage maltreatment of suffering America flared up into a major issue: had Washington done enough to end these abuses, or had it conspired to efface them. A front-page New York Times story by Patrick Tyler captured the mood. Tyler reported that the White House had rejected Ross Perot's 1987 proposal that easing the pressures against Hanoi might be "a way to win the repatriation of any American servicemen still held in Southeast Asia." "At the time," Tyler observes, "Washington was taking a harder diplomatic line with Hanoi to achieve the same end." "History has shown that concessions prior to performance is death," said Richard Childress, NSC official supervising POW/MIA policy. "They'll take and take and take," he added. "We've learned that over 25 years." "United States negotiators were holding onto their leverage until Hanoi made progress on a step-by-step `roadmap' to improved relations, through cooperation on P.O.W./M.I.A. investigations," Tyler adds, without even the most timid query about Washington's declared intentions or a hint, however faint, that someone might fail to appreciate their righteousness.²⁵

As the country solemnly contemplated "the Mind of Japan," deploring the disgraceful "self-pity" of the Japanese, their failure to offer reparations to their victims, or even to "come forward with a definitive statement of wartime responsibility," the US government and press escalated their bitter denunciations of the criminals in Hanoi who not only refuse to confess their guilt but persist in their shameful mistreatment of innocent America. In a lengthy report on this rising indignation over Vietnam's morbid insistence on punishing us 17 years after the war's official end, Crossette wrote that expectations for diplomatic relations between the US and Vietnam "may be set back by a resurgence of interest in one piece of unfinished business that will not go away: the fate of missing Americans." Properly incensed by Vietnam's iniquity, George Bush, opened Year 500 in October 1991 by intervening once again to block European and Japanese efforts to end the embargo that the US imposed in 1975, while Defense Secretary Dick Cheney reported to Congress that "despite improved cooperation," the Vietnamese will have to do more before we grant them entry into the civilized world. "Substantial progress" on the MIA issue is required as a condition for normalizing ties, Secretary of State James Baker said, a process that could take several years. Meanwhile, officials in one of the world's poorest countries continue to show irritation, as they did "last week when the United States blocked a French proposal calling for the International Monetary Fund to lend money to Vietnam," the Times reported.²⁶

²¹ Adlai Stevenson, defending the US war at the UN. See FRS, p. 114f.

²² Fall, Last Reflections.

²³ Elizabeth Neuffer, BG, Feb. 27; Pamela Constable, BG, Feb. 21, 1992. Carter, news conference, March 24, 1977; see MC, 240.

²⁴ Ibid., 240ff. and NI, 33ff., for samples from the press. NYT, Oct. 24, 1992.

²⁵ Tyler, NYT, July 5, 1992.

²⁶ Crossette, NYT, Jan. 6, 1992. Mary Kay Magistad, BG, Oct. 20; Eric Schmitt, NYT, Nov. 6; Steven Greenhouse, NYT, Oct. 24, 1991.