404 Object Not Found

Thus it is with the notion that no one (or practically no one), from guilt-ridden liberals to hawkish conservatives, wishes to hold former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey to account for what he and his fellow SEALs may or may not have done in the tiny Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong one night in February 1969.

To summarize in a way that would make the editors of USA Today wince: Kerrey says he and his fellow raiders, thinking they had been fired upon, raked the village with machine-gun fire, only to discover afterward that they had accidentally killed about 14 unarmed women and children. But one of those former raiders, Gerhard Klann, now says the civilians were actually executed at close range on Kerrey’s orders so they could more easily escape.

The idea that no one wants to ask difficult questions was one of the main premises of a piece I wrote earlier this week (www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/top/features/documents/01442153.htm). Yet now it seems that so many observers have called for further investigation — and have criticized the pro-Kerrey side for its willingness to look the other way — that it’s starting to look as if it’s really Kerrey and his supporters who are outnumbered.

Critical mass was reached in the editorial in the brand-new issue of the New Republic, which argued that “there is something a little grotesque about the alacrity with which Bob Kerrey seems to have been understood and forgiven.” At this date it is fair to ask, “By whom?” After all, commentators from U.S. News & World Report columnist John Leo to Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Hitler’s Willing Executioners) have called for further investigation of Kerrey’s actions, criticizing what Atlantic Monthly editor Michael Kelly, in his Washington Post column, called “this rush to avoid judgment.”

By my incomplete count, the New Republic’s editors, Goldhagen, Leo, and Kelly have been joined by:

• Weekly Standard pundit Christopher Caldwell, writing in the New York Press: “The question at hand is not whether Bob Kerrey should keep his Bronze Star but whether he should be prosecuted. He won’t be, of course. A coalition of conservatives, veterans and Vietnam War defenders has come together behind Kerrey.”

• Slate’s Timothy Noah, Jacob Weisberg, Mickey Kaus (also of KausFiles.com), and Scott Shuger. Shuger, that rarest of creatures among the media — an actual military veteran — wrote that “the ‘been there’ defense is insulting to any vet who at additional personal risk to himself managed somehow to not only be brave but also just.”

• Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who complained that the rush by veterans to defend Kerrey from those who hadn’t served (see Shuger, op. cit.) is “like a secret society with its own rules and its own awful initiation.”

• New Republic columnist and Stakhanovite word processor Andrew Sullivan, who on his own Web site, AndrewSullivan.com, wrote that “what’s amazing to me is the almost unanimous view of the establishment that, whatever the facts, Kerrey should not be criticized, and that no-one who wasn’t there can say anything.”

• Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, who, despite expressing queasiness over the idea of investigating Kerrey further, nevertheless quoted former Marine Corps sergeant Michael Norman as saying: “You just don’t let allegations of war crimes go. Kerrey’s [memory] may be absolutely right, but at least give it a preliminary inquiry — then you’re doing your duty to the dead and to Bob Kerrey by exonerating him, instead of writing it off to the vagaries of history.”

To be sure, Kerrey, who won the Medal of Honor several weeks after the incident in question for trying to save his men in a firefight even after his leg had been blown off, still has plenty of defenders, from media commentators such as NBC’s Tim Russert and syndicated columnist Mark Shields to Vietnam veterans such as Senators John Kerry and John McCain. And Kerrey deserves the benefit of the doubt. Media attempts to corroborate Gerhard Klann’s version of events have yielded mixed results. The rest of Kerrey’s former raiders stand behind their commander, and a Vietnamese woman who told the New York Times Magazine and 60 Minutes II that she personally witnessed the killings has since partially recanted.

But the notion that no one wants to hold Kerrey to account, which seemed right just a few days ago, is clearly no longer operative.