Stanley Karnow's Vietnam

...Wedgwood remarked about a much earlier war, "The final dispassionate history cannot be written until the problems have ceased to matter...

...Even as late as late 1982, while Vietnam veterans gathered around the war memorial, the Washington Post's Robert Kaiser could be found declaiming how striking it was "that no one in command has ever been held responsible.., there has never been a formal national accounting...

...George Witney, Emblems (1586) Every summer vast masses of tourists slosh across the frontiers of Europe...

...We are now allowed to look at ourselves not as miserable sinners who deserve the scourge and lash, but as intelligent and complex people mixed of altruism and selfishness, honesty and deceit...

...Just as they are recruited from all classes so tourists now come from all age groups...

...It also overlooks the essential perspective of those who fought against us and are now willing forthrightly to describe their struggle...

...But we should becareful not to confuse political acumen with literary merit, and so the question remains: Is Hook, like Wilson, a major American essayist...

...And so while we gain insight on American and South Vietnamese leaders, their North Vietnamese counterparts remain essentially one-dimensional and remote...

...Viewers are left with several vivid impressions from which to draw their own conclusions, but they will search in vain for a similar examination of the Vietcong's assassination campaign that wiped out a generation of South Vietnamese village chiefs...

...Episode Three tells the story of Ngo Dinh Diem, "America's Mandarin...

...Young people isolate themselves to avoid being overwhelmed, just as some among their parents use guide books as weapons against the onslaught of the unfamiliar...

...Because we get none of this, "Vietnam: A Television History" is fundamentally flawed...

...And children, even adolescents, are far too busy with growing up to have a genuine interest in past glories and foreign cultures...

...The evidence is ambiguous...

...Vietnam: A History and its television counterpart, then, have moved us decisively from the theological perspective to the psychiatric...

...It became a best-seller 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984...

...On the screen he is a rotund, awkward man facing immensely complicated social and historical forces and handicapped by a rigid personality and impossibly antiquated conception of government...

...Packaged tours lure the retired from everywhere to everywhere while insulating them from any inconvenience and from contact with anything unaccustomed...

...I can't run...

...Truong Nhu Tang is not here either, though he was a founding member of the NLF and minister of justice in the Provisional Revolutionary Government before becoming a boat refugee...

...and it is cheap and getting cheaper every year...

...Former Director William Colby tells of the operation's effectiveness in exposing and turning Vietcong cadres, but denies that torture or indiscriminate killing were part of it...

...But what of the other Ho...

...Karnow never succumbs to the temptation, regularly idling in small details as well as large...

...Over eight million people each week have watched the television series...

...Pike, whose classic study of the Vietcong angered doves in 1966, judges it "a first rate popular contribution to understanding the war...

...Taken to soak up European culture they resist every which way they can...

...You would think such a multifaceted individual would excite PBS's penchant for illuminating ambiguity...

...For Hook brings to mind some of the great Victorian essayists--Mill, Bagehot, Morley, and Macaulay--who never strayed too far from the central issues of their time...

...ideas enter through the sieve of pre-established notions and prejudices (some held strongly, some weakly...

...Germans traveled for adventure, often cheaply, forming a tourist underclass...

...But epic poetry is not history...

...We hear and see the hardliners and softliners of those years: Rusk, Rostow, and McGeorge Bundy...

...Whole families spend their vacations abroad...

...There is a detailed interview with one of the surgeons, and a lengthy close-up examination of wounded children, all of which puts the bombings f'h-mly in the domain of emotion rather than assessment...

...But students, out for adventure, often go it alone...

...On the other hand, because the narrator seldom offers any commentary of his own, the general viewer regards Giap's and Bui Tin's reflections in much the same light as Clark Clifford's or Dean Rusk's...

...As a man, a nationalist, an ideologue, Ho Chi Mirth had as many sides as he had pseudonyms...

...Italians often were immigrants but not tourists...

...But it also largely neglects the looming fact that this particular nationalistic upsurge was Communist, not traditionalist, that the culture it brought with it was essentially alien to Vietnamese life...

...If a Marine tries to explain American shooting of villagers, a guerrilla exults in the peasant collaboration that shielded his unit...

...But a society without faction cannot be a democratic society...

...They haven't been given the background for either...

...the problem is not atheism, but that too many people are not sufficiently committed to political freedom...

...Such men might have offered startling insights on the conduct and conscience of the Vietnamese Communists...

...Even professional students of culture do not always manage to look at foreign cultures with pristine eyes...

...As he put it to Bill Moyers, " I feel like a hitchhiker caught in a lightning storm on the edge of a Texas highway...

...Interviews with Pham Van Dong, Vo 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 Nguyen Giap, PAVN officers, and Southern guerrillas reveal little that is not inspirational...

...Cambodia and Laos" (Episode Nine), for example, highfights American bombings, covert action, and deception...

...The beach at St...

...Traces of personal bias slip through, more often in the book than in the series...

...The upper class still tours but constitutes only a small (though economically important) segment of the tourist mass...

...I have not found traveled people less opinionated or prejudiced about the countries they visited than people who have never been there...

...As if aware that the project would be at the center of a national act of introspection, both Karnow and Ellison undertook their tasks with requisite gravity...

...French, Italian, or Dutch nationals rarely saw good reasons for leaving their native haunts...

...Or as Hook said in "Communism and the American Intellectuals," written in 1981: "Today, by and large, the mainstream of American intellectuals is either indifferent to the challenges of the Communist world or hostile to the very conception of such a challenge as a manifestation of cold war sentiment...

...Ho was a "moderate," "a nationalist more than a Communist," part of the seamless web of Vietnam's patriotic fight for independence...

...Their approach is like that of two psychiatrists who want to walk the patient back through his trauma and have him see it in a clearer light, free of violent emotions and crippling blockages...

...This is true, of course, as it is that he looked everywhere for support, even to the United States...

...Not of course from Pham Van Dong, who made a career out of managing American opinion, or from Bui Tin, who hs assistant editor of the Army Daily News is one of Vietnam's most competent propagandists...

...But on the screen, no COSVN officials debate the fine points of Cambodian neutrality...

...While they talk we watch the once happy Khmer devoured by savagery...

...Henry Kissinger muses over whether we should have gone in...

...His comments on Hanoi's manipulation of the Southern nationalists would have corrected a number of American misconceptions...

...Ball, Mansfield, and crusty Wayne Morse...

...Speaking for most of the TV critics, John Corry of the New York Times applauded the "delicate balance" of a series that "tries hard not to reach conclusions...

...No insiders candidly recount Hanoi's intentions for postwar Indochina...

...What enters depends on the width of the holes in the sieve, on their location, on how easily they are enlarged, and so on...

...Early on he tells how he discovered in 1981 that two of his best Vietnamese contacts during the war had actually been Vietcong agents...

...Most tragic of all is Lyndon Johnson...

...Marx doesn't acknowledge, as Hook puts it, that human beings "have purposes that are often at cross purposes with each other...

...In all good faith, we tried to do a responsible job that will enlighten, not obfuscate...

...The enduring image is of LBJ hunched over a microphone speaking longingly of his social ideals, even while the necessities of office seem to demand a deepening commitment to the war...

...As a dedicated promoter of a foreign policy based on antiCommunism, Hook has no rival...

...By that time it will not be worth writing...

...Such knowledgeable critics as Douglas Pike and Colonel Harry Summers think that by and large they succeeded...

...I can't hide, and I can't stop it...

...His political career began as it ended, with deliberate duplicity . . . . "Still, as C.V...

...His book, Vietnam: A History,* and its companion PBS television series,"Vietnam: A Television History," of which he is chief correspondent, mark a major stage in America's recovery from our Vietnam trauma...

...Tourists want change...

...And in the distance is "Old Ho," who should have been willing to cut a deal, but wouldn't...

...In the fhst place, Karnow and Ellison do not always maintain an air of detached sympathy...

...To understand the war we need to know that our antagonists in Vietnam were riven by anxiety and prone to catastrophic judgments and mistakes...

...American tourists used to travel to soak up European culture...

...Not only was Ho a great Machiavellian, he was also an archetypal revolutionary organizer, a Leninist who knew all about gathering allies and when to strike...

...Consequently, it is American decisions and American faces that we see juxtaposed with scenes from the Cambodian charnel house...

...One predictable result of this imbalance is the suggestion that the U.S...

...The anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote a perennial best-seller, Coming of Age in Samoa, describing Samoan adolescence and general culture...

...In his description he notes too that there were some mistakes: One stray bomb fell on a hospital situated near an airfield, killing 18 patients...

...These people have no doubts, no remorse, no ambivalence...

...I think he is...

...If an American infantryman agonizes over killing an old woman, Premier Dong proudly recites the martyrology of elderly fighters...

...Through Vietnam's contentious history one uprising after another was spurred by patriotism, xenophobia, and an almost reflex refusal to abide foreign domination...

...The theme of superhuman courage and endurance predominates...

...Packaged tours further reduce the cost...

...and less time...

...What is needed is a Portable Hook, a volume that preserves Hook's best work...

...They want the familiar...

...many of his essays hold up well and serve as an excellent guide to the major controversies of the postwar era...

...But PBS fails to provide it...

...Whether intended or not, the message of American culpability is unmistakable...

...Among other events, it describes the shift of populations from North to South after the signing of the 1954 Geneva agreement...

...We can be grateful that Karnow and Ellison have risen above the exorcist tone that characterized many earlier attempts to account for Vietnam...

...Recently, however, the National Endowment for the Humanities has seen fit to honor him by asking Hook to deliver the 1984 Jefferson Lecture on the Humanities...

...Thanks to Hersh's prodigious belch of malice toward Kissinger, it's a notion that one suspects has run its course...

...Such numbers suggest that a decade after the war there is a distinct need to look back not in anger, but in search of understanding...

...He is especially good in analyzing the jumble of foolish ideas held by many luminaries--John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Heilbroner, Herbert Marcuse, Lillian Hellman...

...Another unfortunate feature of "Vietnam: A Television History" is its adherence to the wartime legend of imperturbable Vietnamese heroism...

...David Chanoff teaches at Harvard and is a free-lance writer...

...On the screen the same incident commands major attention...

...As he puts it in the introduction, "The role of the historian is to depict the motives and debates that go into the formation of policies...

...It is one of the triumphs of these works that we are made to feel something of the pressures and conflicts that assaulted the man...

...But the virtues of both the print and screen versions should not obscure their defects...

...From his *Viking Press, $20.00...

...Still, one wishes Karnow had taken it upon himself to illuminate both sides of the story...

...That Hook, who has defended freedom forcefully and eloquently for fifty years, has never received the Presidential Medal of Freedom is disturbing, even scandalous...

...The word all this brings to mind is compassion...

...In his Texas way, Johnson personalized the war...

...Doan Van Toai, a student leader at Saigon University under the Thieu regime, is currently director o f the Institute for Southeast Asian Policy Analysis...

...It is astonishing that we hear nothing from Hoang Van Hoan...

...Say it to his credit, Stanley Karnow is no Sy Hersh...

...Tropez is more popular than Chartres or Versailles...

...He had a special talent for eliminating or neutralizing rival nationalist leaders...

...In watching the series, there is no way to know that Vietnamese officials required interview questions to be submitted beforehand, or that, as EUison told one critic, many of their answers seemed virtually memorized...

...What might he have told us about the Politburo's conception of Vietnam's geopolitical role...

...Karnow's view of Nixon is even less "detached": "Nixon seemed destined for disrepute...

...The problem is that this history focuses on America's role in the war, and thus shows only half the picture, notwithstanding the absorbing historical footage of the first two episodes and the unusual interviews with Pham Van Dong, General Giap, and other Vietnamese...

...This was most likely not the case, as Lansdale himself states in a part of the interview excluded from the televised sequence...

...English tourists to get out of England...

...Throughout the book Karnow capably records the background information that puts the images in context, refusing to substitute drama for objectivity...

...Their attempt, as Karnow put it, was to be "impartial," "to show all sides in an evenhanded way...

...For one thing, unlike Ellison's attempt to achieve an "objective" documentary tone, Karnow is not ashamed to let his personal voice control the book's narrative...

...Time and again, PBS's lack of attention to Communist motives means that American decisions are associated with the screen's images of carnage and despair...

...Karnow's companion volume suffers from the same lack of candid Vietnamese reflection, though in all fairness the omission does not impair the book as it does the series...

...It's available from Vietcong and Northerners who today live outside Vietnam but were not interviewed...

...I watched guys laying there and crying for their mothers all night long, dying, slowly dying 'cause they can't take it...You get an angry eighteen-year-old kid behind a gun and he's just seen his buddy get killed, he's going to have no remorse about who's on the receiving end...

...For all its efforts to achieve impartiality, the television series is at best a one-eyed account...

...Karnow and EUison acknowledge that we were often mistaken (God knows), ignorant, and insensitive--but not evil...

...But of course some of Hook's essays have not stood the test of time as well...

...One need not be a champion of atheism to recognize that societies in which religious belief flourished have not always been societies that honored human dignity and freedom...

...They create excruciating bottlenecks, obstruct the views they came to see, disturb the peace they came to enjoy, and overwhelm the natives they came to observe...

...More serious than the book's occasional personal a~mus is the structural bias of the television series, which undercuts Ellison's painstaking search for balance...

...Their articles on lndochina have appeared in Encounter, the New Republic, the New York Review, National Review, as well as The American Spectator...

...Karnow doesn't much like Kissinger, who was driven, he says, "by inexhaustible, almost primeval ambition...

...Thought to be harmless and even beneficial, tourism is encouraged by all governments...

...Nguyen Cong Hoan, deputy of the Unified National Assembly does not speak, nor does Vietcong Major Nguyen Tuong Lai, nor Le Dinh, captain in the People's Army Intelligence Bureau...

...They have time and money enough to travel seeking novelty and pleasure...

...Thus, EUison provides an unusual insight on American activities without any equivalent attempt to probe North Vietnamese conduct...

...Germans are the same with their Wiirstchen mit Sauerkraut, and Italians with pasta...

...As for Ho himself, despite a brief run-through of his days in the Comintern, we learn little more than that "he personified the nationalist struggle...

...Nor is it clear that the numerous Americans who talked with reporters could afford a plain-spoken honesty simply not available to the Vietnamese participants...

...In the past tourists--people traveling for the sake of pleasure--were few...

...As Hook himself has pointed out, Marx has no room in his political blueprint for faction...

...We learn that the police chief whose summary execution of a Vietcong prisoner was immortalized by Eddie Adams's camera had lost several men that morning to assassination teams, including one gunned down with wife and children...

...At all levels we glimpse only (Communist) Vietnamese defiance and valor...

...More important, there are no interviews with any of the refugees, many of whom now live in the United States and could shed light on Vietminh actions that caused them to flee their homes, farms, and ancestral graves...

...Marx did praise democracy, but he also dreamed of a future society in which democratic politics would be superfluous--a society of total concord...

...And it is all too easy to mistake self-analysis for understanding...

...They want hamburgers, not French cuisine...

...What a comment that would have made next to Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson's description of the domino theory...

...Consider the following...

...Her report reflected all the notions she brought there...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 23 For another, Karnow accurately reports, for example, that the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong were carried out against military targets with extraordinary precision, keeping civilian casualties to a minimum...

...And Karnow the historian--as opposed to Karnow the television correspondent--evinces a critical wariness of his material and enough strength to acknowledge his own fallibility...

...bears the prime, if not sole, responsibility for the war's more horrifying tragedies...

...Even a Marine involved in a village massacre elicits understanding...

...Like other voices from the past, Kaiser blamed the war on aberrant THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 21 psychopaths whose sins have not yet been expiated...

...We need a map of their mental landscape as well as our own...

...Tourism has become attractive and affordable to all classes...

...Instead, the producers adopted the easy course...

...They want to escape the familiar--but not altogether: Venetian restaurants, for example, advertise German dishes in German...

...Why American parents think that children, or even teenagers, would appreciate French cuisine or culture is beyond me...

...Nearly a million refugees flooded out of Ho Chi Minh's new republic, and PBS has come up with some remarkable films of their flight...

...This pattern pervades the series...

...he says that "the entire twentieth century is sucked into the vortex of atheism and selfdestruction...

...What doctrine Le Duan and Le Duc Tho might have been following, one can only guess...

...Old ladies travel around the world having nothing better to do...

...No Northern Politburo members reflect on the decision to arm Pol Pot...

...But all national and class monopolies have been broken now...

...According to publisher's projections, the book will sell in the area of 300,000 hardcover copies its first year...

...When a veteran describes his nightmares over shooting an old peasant woman, we see not just the act, but the desperate circumstances imposed on soldiers in Vietnam...

...In this sense, the Vietminh and Vietcong represented a fundamental break with the past, but of this the viewer has scarcely a hint...

...Also shown is part of an interview with Edward Lansdale, the influential American intelligence operative who was running a propaganda campaign in the North at the time of the exodus...

...Travel by bus, car, train, or plane is easy and takes less Ernest van den Haag is the John M. Olin Professor o f Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham University...

...chair at the Army War College, Summers called the book "objective," "exceptionally well-researched...

...In this respect American children are paradigmatic...

...We tried hard not to load it in any particular direction," said Ellison...

...The impression conveyed is that the United States through Lansdale was deeply implicated in panicking the refugees...

...Yet for all its detail, his book comes no closer to describing the inner workings of the Communist mind than does the series...

...The familiar is not yet familiar enough for them to be interested in the non-familiar (except in escapist fantasies...

...The mind is largely a sifting device...

...CIA men, ambassadors, generals, and secretaries testify...

...In Episode Eight, "Vietnamizing the War," the CIA's controversial Phoenix program is described through the use of PBS's striking multiinterview technique...

...Perhaps because Hook is intent on rescuing Marx from the clutches of Lenin, Hook tends to give Marx the benefit of the doubt on the question of freedom...

...Today great masses are on the move every summer...

...One of Ho's oldest associates and a long-term Politburo member, Hoan in 1978 defected to China where he has since spoken with a number of Western journalists...

...While all feel obligated to have wine, they are also found sneaking Coca Cola...

...Does travel broaden the mind...

...Other accounts by an American field officer and a civilian nurse differ graphically from Colby's...

...The fool that far is sent some wisdom to acquire Returns an idiot, as he went...

...Solzhenitsyn regards Marx as a pernicious secular intellectual whose contempt for religious belief is at one with his contempt for freedom...

...It extends even to Ngo Dinh Diem, who emerges as a threedimensional human being of some integrity...

...In one respect, then, Solzhenitsyn is profoundly wrong...

...Author Karnow and producer Richard Ellison have fashioned the most important of quite a few recent studies of the war which employ analysis rather than demonology as their historical method of choice...

...Cambodia," declares Nixon, "is the Nixon doctrine in its purest form...

...The shame of it is that the information is available...

...Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, assigns too much explanatory power to atheism--whether Marxist-inspired or otherwise...

...More disturbing still is PBS's disregard for the politics of Ho Chi Minh's revolution...

...In portraying the Vietnam war as a continuation of this two-thousand-year struggle, the series provides a valuable historical perspective...

...Travel often seems to reinforce the pre-established notions the tourist brought along, with only marginal modifications...

...For Vietnam's true history is only to be found in the interaction between ourselves and our antagonists...

...they have the musty odor of old quarrels, of issues no longer of interest...