Waldheim/Waldheim-The Missing Years:

...What Waldheim still defends as "per-formance of duty" was participation in an unjust war waged by an immoral re-gime...

...In doing so, he does not ignore the weaknesses of the evidence and possibly self-serving char-acter of the charges Cohen and Rosenz-weig seem to regard as beyond rational challenge...

...Professor Herzstein's study is altogether different...

...but until more documented proof can be produced to the satisfaction of some im-partial authority, there is no justification for treating the president of Austria as a convicted war criminal...

...Here too, however, our condemnations should perhaps be tempered by an examination of con-science...

...In my judgment the evidence all three authors provide to support their stern indictment is not as convincing as they obviously think...

...He treats the same documentary evidence and charges, but he manages to present virtually the same case and conclusion in a manner that allows the reader to make his own reasoned judgment...

...Whether he committed the acts of which he is ac-cused or not is really beside the point...

...It is to the authors' credit that they admit he is "no Eichmann," but that is the only positive thing they can say in his behalf...

...by seeking and attaining higher rank, that share grew larger...

...others, on his place in the regimental "flow chart" (it was part of his job description, so he must have done it...

...Their indignation spills over to include as virtual co-conspirators Austria itself, "a country whose redemp-tion in the eyes of the world is based on a lie," and Catholicism as a wellspring of anti-Semitic and pan-German nationalist sympathies...

...By simply be-coming a member of Hitler's armed forces, he necessarily assumed a share of the guilt for what those forces did...

...Thus, while I am in agree-ment with both books that Waldheim, the man, has shown himself to be a consum-mate opportunist and prevaricator, I am not quite ready to conclude, as both seem to do, that he (and Austria as long as he remains president) deserve to be reduced to pariah status...

...As the one who first brought the Waldheim "war crimes" charges to public attention, he deals with the later developments from a perspec-tive (not completely achieved) of dispas-sionate detachment and scholarship...

...Strangely enough, it is Cohen and Rosenzweig who touch upon this "obedience" dimension of the Wald-heim case, but they are too intent upon the hunt to give it the attention it merits...

...The objective is to "demolish" Kurt Waldheim as a completely characterless and incompetent nonentity who some-how managed to mastermind some of the more heinous episodes of World War II war crimes...

...His two terms of service in that distinguished post probably were more productive-in pre-serving at least the semblance of dignity for that contentious body-than Herz-stein credits and certainly nothing like the fiasco of incompetence the other two authors maintain...

...He gives due weight to the fact that the eyewitness testimony of the alleged victims is not all that conclusive either, and makes it very clear that the postwar charges brought against him by former Jugoslav partisans must be questioned as the product of the often uncritical passion for vengeance that prevailed at the time-and, even more, by the changing interests of the Tito regime vis-a-vis its Austrian neigh-bor and its erstwhile patron, the Soviet Union...

...The over-arching moral crime, and it is not his alone, is the failure to recognize and respect the limits to obedience...

...While no one can deny ele-ments of truth in all three conclusions, these deserve a more balanced historical interpretation than one finds here...

...Seldom has this reviewer encountered a work of such unrelieved and vituperative polemic in what purports to be a factual contribution to an ongoing controversy...

...Other Aus-trians-heroes like Franz Jaegerstaetter, Michael Lerpscher, Josef Ruf, and some not yet discovered-refused and paid for that refusal with their lives...

...Our own recent history, unfortunately, provides ample evidence that the combination of manipulative opportunism and a disregard for truth does not automatically disqualify one as a candidate for a nation's highest office...

...Could not the deportations and reprisals he is accused of implementing or even order-ing in his "performance of duty" find disturbing parallels in Israeli reprisal bombings of refugee camps harboring the "partisans" of the PLO and the severity of the suppression of the resis-tance in the Israeli-occupied areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...

...Whether his election to the post of General Secretary of the U-nited Nations was as much the "accidental compromise" that Cohen and Rosenzweig make it or the somewhat more calculated program Herzstein de-scribes is probably immaterial...

...Until this has been done it is grossly insulting to de-scribe, as Cohen and Rosenzweig do, the action of John Paul II in ceremonially receiving President Waldheim of Austria as a "slap in the face" delivered to "Jews all over the world...

...The memory of fifty-square-mile blankets of napalm unleashed in Vietnam, of villages systematically "torched," or of other military strategies incorporating commands to "shoot any-thing that moves"-all of these should give us pause before we cast the first stone at Waldheim or anyone else...

...This is not to say the charges are false...

...Indeed, at one point, it is not too much to say, the "re-discovery" of the Waldheim documentation was tied to what could be described as diplomatic blackmail...

...Nor is this all...

...In the Christian perspective Kurt Waldheim's crime was wearing the Nazi uniform in the first place...

...Faced with this charge of guilt through simple compliance, he insists he had no choice...

...Some rest upon Waldheim's presumed presence on the scene (he was there, ergo he must have known...

...Altogether too much of the "Waldheim case" consists of a loose tissue of logical inference...

...may have acted un-justly in putting Waldheim on the ' 'Watch List'' and issuing the order ex-cluding him from this country...

...After the war the same talent for knowing the right paths, mak-ing the right contacts, and pulling the right strings led him up the ladder to positions of international as well as national prestige...

...The same might apply to the major Jewish organizations which have put so much effort into developing and Rromot-ing the case against Waldheim...

...The same is true for the international" cover-up"-with Israel a participant!-which, as Cohen and Rosenzweig see it, has prevented the ugly truth from coming to light until now...

...Even if he did not, one can safely assume that, like most loyal and ambitious (not to mention opportunistic) junior officers, he would have done them under orders...

...Kurt Waldheim's military career seems to have been that of an ambitious junior officer toadying to the wishes of his seniors, a pattern of behavior likely to apply to the overwhelming majority of junior officers regardless of what uniform they wear...

...I hold no brief for Waldheim, but the malice in Cohen and Rosenzweig's approach could tempt me to rise to the unfortunate man's defense were it not for my own objections to him and his war-time record...

...The issue, of course, is precisely what is being covered...

...WALDHEDf: THE MISSING YEARS Robert Edwin Herzstein Arbor House/William Morrow, $18.95, 303 pp...

...Given the pride we take in our nation's hallowed "presumption of innocence" principle, it might be argued that Attor-ney General Meese (himself no stranger to the lure of political opportunism or the disregard of truth...

...To have probed these more general im-plications would have given them less personal satisfaction, perhaps, but it could have brought them and their read-ers closer to the deeper, but still unrecog-nized, evil with which humankind must deal if it is to be spared the even greater horrors and crimes of World War III...

...Here, too, Herzstein's is by far the better and fairer book...

...But he did...

...There is more than a touch of self-righteous hypocrisy in a law which requires such exclusion on the basis of unproven suspi-cion when the record is so clear that our nation actively assisted in the escape of truly major war criminals (Klaus Barbie, to mention only one) when World War II came to its end...

...Gordon C. Zahn The Cohen-Rosenzweig effort is one of those unfor-tunate cases where, what-ever its authors may have intended, a book self-destructs for reason of style and tone...

...Herzstein, too, is critical of that diplomatic cour-tesy, but less denunciatory...

...Even deportations...

...There can be no justification for Wald-heim's clumsy attempts to cover his military past with a heavy fog of denials, distortions, excuses, and re-interpretations...