The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990
Polner, Murray
interpretation of Christ's passage from being "rich" to being "poor." Finally, the bibliog- raphy has some surprising omissions: for example, G. Schneider on the Acts of the Apostles, H. Schlier on...
...Does this square with his views of professionalism in church music...
...and Young reminds us of their flawed advice...
...Nor for that matter did Watergate, Teheran, the Iran-contra scandal, and Beirut...
...The pattern was repeated in the Philippines where General Douglas MacArthur had installed as head of state Manuel Roxas, "a collaborator closely associated with the most exploitative Japanese occupation policies," writes the author...
...The archbishop wants yet more statistical studies...
...Topping the list is a great favorite, Alexander Peloquin...
...With little or no understanding of the consequences, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy (harshly criticized by Young) and their successors plunged into a region they barely understood, determined, as they repeated endlessly, to stop communism and resist aggression...
...GERALD O'COLLINS, S.J., is dean of the the- ology faculty at The Gregorian University in Rome...
...REV...
...In Phnom Penh, as in Hanoi and Beijing, there were bitter rivalries older than the entire history of the United States...
...the media had lost the war...
...REVIEWERS DAVID TOOLAN, S.J., is an associate editor of America magazine and director of the Catholic Book Club...
...Without suggesting any parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, she offers a "new, harsher and unwanted conclusion"--"that war continues to be a primary instrument of American foreign policy and the call to arms a first response to international disputes...
...To the Editors: Archbishop Weakland's surprising and virulent attack on Thomas Day's book Why Catholics Can't Sing avoids focusing on the problem...
...But, notes Young, there were exceptions like Paul Kattenberg, then the State Department coordinator of an interdepartmental group on Vietnam...
...troop ships were ordered to ferry thirteen thousand French soldiers to Saigon to fght the Vietnamese seeking independence, the same Vietnamese who had cooperated with the Allies in resisting the Japanese occu- pation...
...Professor Young reveals little that is new, relying too much on secondary sources and tending to omit or slight many works that differ from her views, such as Peter Braestrup's provocative book on the Tet offensive...
...Hanoi was portrayed as a Moscow-Beijing puppet and Ho as an easy- to-hate tyrant...
...Waltham, Mass...
...LEIGH D. JORDAHL Puzzling misquote New York, N.Y...
...If this is his final, major work, I cannot think of a more impressive achievement to crown the learning of a lifetime...
...r. President," HEW Sec-retary Wilbur Cohen asked Lyndon B. Johnson at a cabinet meeting in early 1968, "why are we in Vietnam...
...she asks in her preface...
...Years later Kattenberg described the meeting: I listened for about an hour or an hour and a half....There was not a single person there that knew what he was talking about...
...First, that is a reply, of sorts...
...But, all in all, these are minor blemishes EVERY FIFTEEN YEARS in a book that puts us in Grayston's debt...
...As her book went to press Iraq invaded Kuwait...
...the result is an embarrassing review...
...They all just disregarded it or said it was not backed by anything...
...204: Commonweal...
...Then, as now, a few experts were allowed in to confirm their wis- dom...
...And every pres- ident, from Truman to Eisenhower and Kennedy to LBJ and Nixon, set in motion the events that led to the deaths of fifty- eight thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians...
...The musical expression of our Christian faith ridicules us and our belief...
...Yet until 1968 the overwhelming major- ity of Americans stood behind the war in Vietnam...
...How would you answer it...
...Finally, he spoke up, questioning their judgment...
...Then, as now, ordinary Americans embraced the emotional patriotic appeals while the elites--in Washington, in cor- porations and unions, and in the media--backed the war with few questions or challenges...
...Indeed, a good case can be made, as William Pfaffhas argued, that the Persian Gulf war is in part an effort to show that the defeat in Southeast Asia "didn't count...
...And then as now, the rationale for the war kept changing--from the Soviet and Chinese threat, to the "domino theory," to America's burden in defending freedom, a burden (then, as now) never shared by our war party's children and grandchildren, let alone themselves...
...Henceforth, the history of the region would be made by the countries occupying it...
...And per- haps, too, Day's tract for the times may be just what is needed to jar things up...
...Soon their postwar rationalizations emerged: the military wasn't allowed to go all-out...
...The archbishop constantly asks Day for proof of this or that statement...
...E3 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 178) do as well as their Methodist, Episcopalian, or Lutheran brothers and sisters...
...Peloquin writes music that is extraordinarily simple and then adds "wrong" notes to make it sound "modern...
...MURRAY POLNER wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran (Holt, Rinehart & Winston) and edited When Can I Come Home...
...Listening to the music that surrounds us in our churches today provokes many of us...
...he asked LBJ...
...Even so, The Vietnam Wars is a graphic recapitulation of how and why the United States became embroiled in a war with so vague and unattainable ends at a price far greater than the public was ultimately willing to pay...
...Whether the full sentence merits the interpretation Day gives it can certainly be discussed...
...Our ears tell it all...
...Her book opens by noting that, two months after the surrender of Japan, twelve U.S...
...America's youth---on the bat- tlefield and as dissenters at home--had contributed to the debacle...
...It was appalling to watch....They didn't know Vietnam...
...Doubleday Anchor...
...Where foreign policy was concerned, an uncritical generation of Americans pas- sively accepted increasing military inter- vention in Southeast Asia...
...ROBERT P. IMBELLI Too angry to listen...
...Finally, the bibliog- raphy has some surprising omissions: for example, G. Schneider on the Acts of the Apostles, H. Schlier on Galatians, and C.ED...
...Then, as now, Undersecretary of State George Ball was alone in trying to talk sense but was overwhelmed by those like the New York 7~mes' s influential military correspondent, Hanson Baldwin, who wrote that, while "Vietnam is a nasty place to fight...there are no neat and tidy battlefields in the struggle for freedom [my italics...
...Nor does she express much sym- pathy for the Vietnamese boat people and their extraordinary efforts to escape post- war Vietnam...
...Postwar, anti- military-intervention America was said to be suffering from the Vietnam Syndrome, and had become a "pitiful, helpless giant" paralyzed by an all-powerful Soviet bloc...
...The more this meeting went on, the more I sat there and thought, "God, we're walking into a major disaster...
...Professor Young judi- ciously concludes that the American defeat "released new configurations of power in Southeast Asia, not readily acceptable to control from the outside...
...The absurdity of applying this sweeping formula to Southeast Asia escaped most people in Washington...
...Only two senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, voted against the Tonkin Gulf resolution...
...In August 1963 Kattenberg returned from an official visit to Saigon and sat in on a National Security Council session attended by Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Maxwell Taylor, Roger Hilsman, Bobby Kennedy, and LBJ...
...Cohen had prefaced his question by say- ing that his fourteen-year-old son and friends had posed the very same question of him...
...Still, a nation born of revolution had now become the world's leading counterrevolutionary force, opposing virtually every regime it chose to define as Communist...
...It was a gen- eration deeply affected by Munich and ter- rified-with some reason---of Stalin's Soviet Union and Communists...
...But to omit that part of his own sentence that most clearly grounds Day's critique smacks of...well, ideological dishonesty...
...And for what...
...A careful exegesis leads to the conclu- sion that the critique's author has never thought carefully about the difference between "sacred" and "secular" music...
...His scholarship is rich and his judgment repeatedly sure as he brings to life, in a new way, passage after passage of the New Testament...
...The old dictum, that what was good for General Motors was good for America, was stood on its head...
...While our moral stances can never be evaluated by opinion polls, he feels music should be ruled by popular demand...
...Second, the archbishop quotes selectively...
...They didn't know the past...
...They had forgotten history...
...They were all great men...
...But when the human toll began to mount, LBJ himself became a vic- tim, as Gabriel Kolko has written, "not sim- ply of his own political errors but also of the failure of an entire class in pursuing the war and the hegemonic goals of American foreign policy...
...In his comments, Day calls particular attention to the words "communal sensi- tivity" as the archbishop's characterization of the liturgical experience...
...Marilyn Young, an Asian history scholar at New York University, painstakingly dis- closes the mistakes and lies of those years in her illuminating and riveting synthesis...
...the principles and practices of the liberal capitalist system that governed America was good for America and good for the world...
...When the war ended so ignominiously in 1975, pundits and ideologues were forced to explain why a small, semirural nation had been able to defeat the world's greatest military power...
...No proof is necessary...
...To the Editors: In his long and ultra-critical review of Thomas Day's Why Catholics Can't Sing, Archbishop Rembert Weakland inserts a puzzling parenthesis: "(When Professor Day implies that the following phrase of mine, 'that our song is our common twentieth-century response to God's word here and now,' is totally lacking in any sense of the transcendent in liturgy but favors a 'horizontalism,' his criticism strikes me as simply ideological dishonesty and not worthy of reply...
...Years later Cohen described Johnson's explanation: "The president took half an hour to answer, and the answer didn't make any sense whatsoever....If he had given that answer publicly, he would have been laughed out of court...
...Then, as now, Washington policy makers drew a tight circle about themselves and rendered life and death decisions without benefit of naysayers...
...Framed in terms of"the struggle for free- dom," a generation of trusting Americans could hardly be expected to envision any alternatives to so massive a military interTHE VIETNAM WARS, 1945-1990 Marilyn B. Young HarperCollins, $25, 386 pp...
...Murray Polaes...
...Pointing out deficits in the book, the review provides a listing of generally mediocre contemporary church composers...
...Young points out that we had once again assumed a responsibility grounded on the conven- tional premise that, "a world ordered by 202: Commonweal vention...
...Why are we in ~e Middle East...
...The full sentence quoted by Day from an article by Archbishop Weakland, as transcribed on page 92 of Why Catholics Can't Sing, reads thus: "If, on the other hand, the liturgical expe- rience is to be primarily the communal sen- sitivity that I am one with my brother next to me and that our song is our common twentieth-century response to God's word here and now and coming to us in our twen- tieth-century situation, it [music] will be something quite different...
...Please save us from this bleak music...
...Moule on being "in Christ...
...If this is so, and I believe it is, then future generations of American young men and women will have to go to war every ten or fifteen years or so--even in the New World Order...
...There is no question that Thomas Day is angry...
...What angers the archbishop is that Day harpoons him with a direct hit...
Vol. 118 • March 1991 • No. 6
