CHAPTERS IN AN UNFINISHED WAR:

...Throughout the course of the Vietnam war, the accelerations and the ironies of history have created a state of worldwide flux in which further disintegration rather than sudden reintegra-tion appears to be the order of the day...

...Support for the war ran strongest among those furthest away from the fighting...

...To compress a long and now familiar story into a few words-by 1972 Nixon had personally devised and installed a new Committee for the Re-Election of the President, by-passing the Republican National Committee and the 1972 Congressional campaigns the better to concontrate on the re-election of the Nixon-Agnew ticket...

...Great oaks from little acorns grow...

...Now comes Alexander Kendrick's, The Wound Within: America in the Vietnam Years...

...Meanwhile, events themselves have made 1974 into one of those watershed years like 1968 when a succession of upheavals shook the world, leaving nothing quite the same as it had been...

...I believe," Kissinger has written, "in the tragic element of history...

...In assuming this double role Mr...

...During 1973 the elaborate Watergate cover-up disintegrated...

...During the watershed year of 1968 the Vietnam war reached and passed its peak...

...In The Wound Within Alexander Ken-drik has interlaced a full account of the war to date with a correspondingly complete account of that war's repercussions on the United States...

...But the acceleration of history went right on...

...By the summer of 1973 Senator Ervin's Watergate investigation which had its roots in the Vietnam war already dominated that war's aftermath...

...James F. Mersmann's frank appraisal of antiwar poets and poetry acknowledges that the war brought forth no single first-rate poet or poem, but did stir some fresh talents...

...I must emphasize," he writes, "that the war was planned by college-educated and relatively affluent Americans in Washington and fought in the field by the less-educated, the economically disad-vantaged and the poor...

...But the fourth Arab-Israeli war of October, 1973 and the Arab oil embargo in November signaled the approach of another watershed year- this time of worldwide inflation, recession, energy crisis and depression...

...Helmer had little space...

...Such un-American behavior made no appeal to Richard Nixon who had cultivated a no less un-American passion for the politics of polarization, fortified by a conspiratorial view of history...

...In the case of The Wound Within, the thirty-year time-span that Mr...

...For the roots of the American involvement in Vietnam extend back to the turn of the century when the Spanish-American war, the annexation of the Philippines, and the slogan of manifest destiny, popularized by Theodore Roosevelt, inspired the United States to follow the star of empire's westward course...

...The events of this watershed year cannot but overshadow the events since the previous watershed year of 1968...

...In 1969, Nixon began withdrawing ground troops from South Vietnam...

...To re-appraise, at this juncture, the impact of the Vietnam war on the United States illuminates both past and future...

...1945-1974, proving that one journalist can encompass an instant history of the Vietnam war, including its impact on the United States...

...The services of Liddy and Hunt in Los Angeles won them desks in the White House where -in the name of "political intelligence" -they specialized in political espionage and sabotage...

...And then there is the even more bitter tragedy of the man who gets what he wants and then finds he does not want it...

...History's acceleration condemns the dead of that war to bury their dead while their survivors deal with its legacies...

...Veterans of the Vietnam war exceeded veterans of the First World War by 25 percent and of Korea by 17 percent...

...armed forces since the Second World War did so in South Vietnam...

...Whereupon Nixon, remembering his successful prosecution of Alger Hiss, took the law into his own hands and enlisted former FBI agent J. Gordon Liddy and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, Jr...

...The Kendrick and Helmer books complement each other...

...Let the Henry Adamses in their ivory towers play intellectual games with acceleration of history theories...

...Each of the other four covers a more restricted field...

...Kendrick covers can hardly outlast this watershed year...

...Helmer: "Almost half of the six million men who served in the U.S...

...David Mantell's perceptive interviews with twenty-five war resisters and twenty-five Green Berets focuses on the human side of the war for which Mr...

...Back in 1910, Henry Adams warned bis fellow-historians that during the new century history would move at accelerating speed, bringing "Thought to the limits of its possibilities in the year 1921...

...True to form, five would-be burglars were caught red-handed...

...Their crowning achievement took the form of the Watergate break-in of June 17, 1972...

...Hunt and Liddy escaped but were later arrested...

...On the other hand, the Bannans' summaries of half a dozen trials of peace militants contribute to a record that too many of their contemporaries continue to ignore...

...to break into the office of the psychiastrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press...

...Also, according to Mr...

...If it takes a journalist to write instant history, it takes a sociologist, with a Ph.D...

...Later, he acknowledged that his calculations might prove to be as much as a hundred years ahead of schedule...

...What with the Nixon resignation, the Ford succession, and the Ford-Brezhnev detente, the watershed year of 1974 makes a tough act for the bi-centennial of 1976 to follow...

...For of no other war in our history can it be said that the American Army was a poor man's army and was so by design...

...For another, having defected as foreign policy adviser to Nelson Rockefeller and assumed the same duties for Richard Nixon, Kissinger proved himself a consistent Bismarckian in small matters as well as large...

...Two World Wars, one world depression, and one cold war later, the heirs and assigns of Franklin Roosevelt-himself a disciple of his wife's Uncle Ted-now find themselves inheriting MacArthur's Japan, Chiang Kai-shek's China and the shambles that the Vietnam war has made of Indochina...

...To foreshadow is not to ensure...

...At the time the United States dropped those atomic and nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nobody foresaw that the threat that they posed of worldwide nuclear extermination would bring forth a nuclear balance of terror that has thus far maintained world peace a lot longer than Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations did...

...Specifically, it took no more than last year's Arab oil embargo to expose the deterioration of American economic, political and military power at all points of the compass...

...from Harvard, to compile, organize, and interpret the raw material in thousands of questionnaires, interviews and statements supplied by low-income, working-class, combat-veterans of the Vietnam war...

...It happened in June, 1971 when the New York Times and Washington Post began publishing the so-called Pentagon Papers which depicted, through secret government documents, the deepening American involvement in Vietnam since 1945...

...Secretly at first and openly in 1970, he extended hostilities into Cambodia, and in 1971 into Laos...

...President Nixon's resignation followed on August 10, 1974...

...but more than half a century later, they make more sense than Spengler's or Toyn-bee's, as more and more journalists try their hands at instant history...

...If two of these books on the Vietnam war seem to be trying to do too much too soon, the other four suffer more from a dearth than from a glut of material...

...Opposition to the war ran strongest among combat ground troops...

...No journalist or historian has even attempted to write an instant history of so vast and complex a convulsion as the Second World War, but some historians and more journalists have reconstructed instant histories of some of that war's phases...

...As a European, born and bred, Kissinger took out emotional insurance against the frustrations of political life by cultivating a wry sense of irony at his own expense...

...At the same time, the signs do multiply that the forces of transcendence-religious, scientific, political, even mystical-that have always asserted themselves at all times and places could introduce a new stabilizing force...

...Now, The Wound Within expands instant news analysis into instant history, bringing to bear on the recent past the immediacy of personal experience and on the immediate present the perspective of the veteran journalist...

...This is not to suggest that this nuclear balance of terror will continue to keep the peace for the next two years, two decades, or two centuries...

...During his long service as a broadcast journalist for CBS, Mr...

...For one thing, it looked like classic European balance-of-power, reversal-of-alliance policy on a world scale...

...But the breakers and enterers who had hoped to find and photograph medical records damaging to Ellsberg got nothing...

...by promising to end that war, Richard Nixon won the presidency...

...Kendrick has mastered the art of instant news analysis...

...The Kissingers of this world are makers of history first and writers of history afterward, and as such, they prefer to focus on real-life ironies and tragedies...

...Because Lyndon Johnson could not win that war, he lost the presidency...

...It is to suggest that the acceleration of history which the pessimistic Henry Adams feared so much and which the equally pessimistic Henry Kissinger has not so much as mentioned may well have still further surprises in store...

...When it deviates, reverses, or leaps its bounds, a new chapter begins...

...Kendrick writes with the same urgency of the 1940s and 1950s as he does of the 1960s and 1970s...

...In Bringing the War Home: The American Soldier in Vietnam and After John Helmer combines statistical tables with bis own summaries and commentaries...

...Far from foreshadowing an Arab, a Soviet, or a Chinese take-over of the Third World, the events of 1974 foreshadow a worldwide breakdown of which the Third World will become the first, but not the last, victim...

...For the first time in American history a President of the United States tried to "impose prior restraint" on the press only to have the Supreme Court sustain the newspapers, by a vote of 6-3, on the ground that neither the documents nor the accompanying summaries and commentaries violated national security...

...Sandy Vogelgesang's re-appraisal of the American intellectual left's response to the war expresses disappointment in the quality if not the quantity of its protests...

...But at the same time he began sounding out the Chinese and Soviet leaders on easing world tensions by improving their relations with the United States and persuading their North Vietnamese comrades to accept the American proposals for a settlement of the Vietnam war...

...To help the anti-Communist Nixon do business with three different Communist parties at once appealed to Henry Kissinger...

...The peace with honor that followed the Christmas season bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong in 1972 brought no peace to Vietnam, no honor to the United States...

...But as Moscow and Peking saw it, Nixon was not so much repudiating his anti-Communist past as he was seeking to play off the two Communist superpowers against each other...

...I believe there is the tragedy of the man who works very hard and never gets what he wants...

...Accelerated instant history proceeds uni-directionally and irreversibly, within fixed limits of time and space...

...And so it came to pass that before Nixon gave himself over to Bismarckian diplomacy, he plunged into a countervailing and counter-productive domestic ploy...

...That illegal war, in its turn, brought forth the Watergate scandals which, in their turn, have contributed mightily to the erosion of that worldwide power balance of which the United States had been the keystone since 1945...

...Vietnam also produced wounded servicemen at three times the rate of the Second World War and twice that of Korea...