At one time, many baby boomers pointed to their lack of military service with pride. The war was, after all, an immoral, tragic mistake, and any participation in the antiwar movement, no matter how peripheral, was seen as vastly superior to going to Vietnam and killing babies (as the smugly self-satisfied liked to put it). But in recent years antiwar sentiments have been overcome by a wave of World War II nostalgia, fed by Tom Brokaw’s best-selling book The Greatest Generation and Steven Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan. Even if liberal forty- and fiftysomething journalists haven’t changed their minds about Vietnam, they have learned to feel awkward and guilty around those who served in their stead.
This guilt has been on full display in the aftermath of the Kerrey story. The most ludicrously over-the-top example was Alex Beam’s column in Tuesday’s Globe. Abandoning his characteristic skepticism, Beam wrote of Kerrey’s media inquisitors: “Where do these Peacetime Charlies get off? Who among these journalists has ever come under fire, in war? I certainly haven’t. How dare they attempt to pass judgment on a man who lost his leg just a few weeks later, serving in a conflict he was rapidly losing faith in?”
Well, I’ve never served either, and I fully understand that that puts me at a huge disadvantage — intellectually, emotionally, morally — in attempting to judge the actions of those who did serve. But the military answers to civilian authority for a reason, and the reason is that it acts in our name. Judging isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. My own judgment is probably pretty much the same as that of most people: if Kerrey’s version is correct (as seems likely), then what took place in Thanh Phong was a terrible accident, but nothing more; but if Gerhard Klann’s version is correct (as seems less likely), then Kerrey and his men were lucky they weren’t prosecuted for war crimes, as about 100 of their peers were.
Kerrey’s fellow veterans have rushed to his defense, too, including Senator John McCain, writing in the Wall Street Journal, and Senator John Kerry, writing in the Globe. In such an atmosphere, it’s hard even to ask a question, no matter how legitimate — although some, such as Mickey Kaus, of KausFiles.com, and John Leo, of U.S. News & World Report, have tried.
Columnist Richard Cohen, in Tuesday’s Washington Post, wrote that “in choosing to accept his [Kerrey’s] version of events, to forgo an investigation, we are in a sense rendering a verdict: We fear what we will find. Like Lot’s wife, we are being told not to look back.” Cohen got it exactly right, and it’s a mindset that’s dangerous in a democratic society.
• The media war. In a matter that involves nothing less than the meaning of life and death, it seems almost trivial to note that the Kerrey story was also the object of some slick media maneuvering, with Kerrey proving as slick as anyone. (And how would you like to be Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe, whose piece on Kerrey’s new life as president of New York’s New School University appeared on April 24, the day before Kerrey’s admission that he had killed civilians was first reported? Unfortunately for Feeney, he says he interviewed Kerrey three weeks before the piece finally appeared.)
The two strands of the media story are Newsweek’s seemingly inexplicable failure to follow up on the tip it had received in 1998, and Kerrey’s largely successful effort to spin the story his way before the Times Magazine and 60 Minutes II could have their say.
Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker made a good case for himself over the weekend when he appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources, hosted by Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (incidentally, Newsweek is owned by the Washington Post Company). According to Whitaker, Gregory Vistica heard about Gerhard Klann’s story in 1998, while Vistica was employed by Newsweek, but he was unable to get Kerrey to go on the record in any detailed way. Whitaker said that after Kerrey decided not to run for president in 2000, the magazine’s editors didn’t want to be seen as having hounded him out of the race. But Whitaker added that he urged Vistica to stay in touch with Kerrey and try to get him to give his side of the story. Unfortunately for Newsweek, Vistica left the magazine before Kerrey was ready to talk.
“The reason it took two years for this to come out was it was only after two years that he was prepared to come forward and to talk openly about this,” Whitaker said. “He went back to Vistica. But by that time, Vistica had left the magazine.” Fair enough. But Newsweek’s editors knew about Klann’s account too. Thin though parts of Vistica’s story may be, it was within Newsweek’s grasp, and some version of it should have appeared within its pages first.
Kerrey’s spin game was smartly analyzed by Kurtz in the Post and by Seth Mnookin and Stephen Battaglio in Inside.com. Kerrey had first alluded to the killings in a little-noticed speech the previous week. Then, last week, he handed his story to the Wall Street Journal and the Omaha World-Herald, getting his own confession out before anyone even realized there was worse to come. The Times was able to recover quickly by posting Vistica’s story on its Web site five days before publication. But Kerrey, by placing it in the Journal and the World-Herald on a Wednesday, ensured that 60 Minutes II couldn’t come back for a week. And, of course, by the time it finally aired, the dramatic interview with Pham Tri Lanh had already been called into doubt.
Kerrey also won a tactical advantage, pitting the Journal and the Post against their archenemy, the Times. The Journal has weighed in with an unremitting wave of pro-Kerrey, anti-Vistica material, even recycling on its OpinionJournal.com Web site a negative review of a Vistica book that the Journal first ran in 1996. And after Kerrey and his fellow Raiders drafted their statement condemning Klann’s version of events, they gave it exclusively to the Post, which promptly put it on page one of its Sunday edition.
The events of the past week may have ruined Kerrey’s presidential aspirations, assuming he still had any. But he showed that he’s still got the moves.
PERHAPS FITTINGLY, the revelations about Bob Kerrey do not seem to have changed many people’s perceptions of him as a serious, thoughtful, truthful, even moral man. There is, after all, an understanding that something uniquely awful happened in Vietnam, and that the things men did over there do not define them as human beings.
Kerrey should be held accountable somehow if more definitive evidence emerges that he committed war crimes. There’s no statute of limitations on the kinds of acts described by Gerhard Klann. But even if it’s true that Kerrey, for a moment, became a monster in Thanh Phong, that doesn’t mean he was a monster before that moment, or after it. Kerrey says he’s been haunted by the events of that night ever since. He should be.
“When a veteran is in distress about things like this, as far as I’m concerned it’s a sign of his humanity. I’m a great admirer of Bob Kerrey,” says Jonathan Shay, a Boston psychiatrist who’s treated veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder and who is the author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (Atheneum, 1994).
A final observation. Earlier this year Harper’s magazine published a long, passionate, exhaustively detailed piece by journalist Christopher Hitchens arguing that Henry Kissinger should be prosecuted for the war crimes he committed in pursuing the Vietnam War, as well as other misdeeds (see “Don’t Quote Me,” News and Features, March 9). Hitchens’s essay — since turned into a book — quickly disappeared, almost without a trace, as Slate’s Timothy Noah observed last week. It’s a cruel irony that Kissinger got away scot-free while Kerrey, who carried out Kissinger’s obscene policies on the ground, is now being called to account.
“You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever,” wrote Tim O’Brien in “How To Tell a True War Story,” part of his fictional memoir The Things They Carried.
The Kerrey story may be winding down, but the Vietnam War goes on and on and on. Every time we think it’s behind us, there it is again. In his interview with Vistica, Kerrey spoke eloquently of his lost innocence, of never again “feeling in church like God was smiling warmly down upon me as if I was the most special thing on earth.”
It was a loss of innocence for the nation as well. And it is something we are still coming to grips with.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.
Read Dan Kennedy's May 4th follow-up to this piece.
www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/this_just_in/documents/01467654.htm
Read Seth Gitell's This Just In on what makes sense about Bob Kerrey's war account – and what doesn't. www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/this_just_in/documents/01434352.htm
