Fair Game

...Her response was, I think, revealing of a set of mind...

...And while she is troubled by the catechisms in America's parochial schools, whose children are open to all manner of secular influences as well, she seems to find the single-minded, all-pervasive adulation of Mao and other Chinese government figures inspiring...

...But the Left is supposed to be more conscientious about such matters...

...In a lengthy rebuttal to my article published in the Sunday Times, Miss MacLaine took me to task for intimating that if this country required universal military training for very young children or raised its national leaders to the status of man-gods-things she uncritically recorded in China-she would be among the first to protest...

...Then Miss MacLaine's memoir of China, like the Vietnam travelogue of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, will take its place alongside the Dean of Canterbury's jolly dispatches from Stalinist Russia...

...Bob Hope got upset...

...When, on a TV talk show recently, I asked Schneider whether he felt any discomfort in accepting and conveying a message from a political body inclined to a totalitarian ideology, he replied only that he did not "perceive" the PRG that way...

...It dealt with three movies: The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir, directed by Shirley MacLaine and Claudia Weill...

...is a member of the John Birch Society...

...Being a radical in America is a frustrating line of work...

...Some of the criticisms could be smiled or sighed away, like the one that classed me with Himmler, or the suggestion that to call Hearts and Minds propaganda was a form of McCarthyism, or the charge on a radio show that to object to a movie made by women was a sign of homosexuality, or the letter from an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer asking whether I was in the pay of the government...

...My article was accompanied by a headline asking, "Why do our radicals celebrate foreign police states...

...One of the inserters, Lawrence P. McDonald (D.-Ga...

...Although I took pains to distinguish the last film from the other two as a piece of superior movie-making, I found them all to be examples of special pleading, political propaganda from a section of the antiwar Left in the guise of reportage...

...In Miss MacLaine's view, I am forced to conclude, an institution such as the Boy Scouts-which no one is obliged to join, which the great majority of children do not join and which, in any case, can hardly be called military-is not only equivalent to China's state-enforced early training of tots for future service in the People's Liberation Army...

...Many people deduced from my piece that I must be a ferocious hawk...

...Once before, a part of the Left found itself celebrating totalitarian regimes, with the explanation that eggs must be broken to make an omelet...

...Perhaps the film did have defects as a work of art, they conceded, but it had powerful impact as an antiwar message, one that was much needed in getting across to Americans the enormity of our crimes in Southeast Asia...

...She questioned whether I had ever heard of the Boy Scouts, ever seen the games American children play in summer camps or the "absolutely frightening" array of weapons sold here as Christmas toys...

...Schneider Perceives Bert Schneider caused a fuss at the Academy Awards when he read a greeting from an official of South Vietnam's Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG...

...MacLaine Rebuts Just as I was laboring with these misgivings, who should come along to restore my peace of mind but Shirley MacLaine and Bert Schneider...

...This last point was sharpened when my article was placed in the Congressional Record twice-at least once too much, surely, even of this good thing-by gentlemen I cannot remember ever sharing any position with...

...The opportunity exists, I believe...

...If anything I wrote brought pleasure to them, or to those correspondents who complimented me on joining in the adoration of Chiang Kai-shek, that was lamentable...

...or by the diversity of publications and views it makes available to the populace...

...It did no injustice to his producer...

...it was simply a case of the enemy of their enemies being, for the moment, their friend...

...For that audience, nothing will do but to begin any discussion of Vietnam with an oath that the writer is not now and never has been in favor of bombing small children...

...I had written that actions Miss MacLaine would condemn in her own country she counts as achievements when done to the Chinese-and she put on a nice display of this talent in her rejoinder...

...Whereas she considers Christmas toys "absolutely frightening," she is not frightened by the indoctrination being inflicted on Chinese boys and girls for holy war against the "imperialists...

...or by the leeway it allows dissenting politicians...

...To complain about its heavy-handedness was to give too much credit to the discrimination of the mass movie audience...

...In the coming months and years, increasing numbers of American observers-sympathetic, suspicious, occasionally dispassionate-will be traveling to China and Vietnam, the regimes permitting, and returning with reports on the societies being created there...

...Now that's what I call an amiable approach...

...It angered Peter Davis, and may have done him an injustice...

...One does not measure a dictatorship by the number and quality of the elections it permits...

...This nation refuses either to succumb to the radical spirit or, except at nervous moments, mount much resistance to it...

...it is even more deserving of criticism...

...I'm still not sure of the answers, though I am persuaded from her rebuttal, and from her many appearances and interviews to promote the film and the book which grew out of her three-week China visit, that she is as suspect a guide to America as she is to China...

...Yet it is an opportunity that calls for a degree of seriousness, something not much found among those who choose to perceive China and Vietnam as founts of liberation and America as a tomb of repression...

...But getting back to my misgivings over having my criticisms of the Good Guys become grist for the Bad Guys, these have for the moment been laid to rest...

...Guilt by association, Mr...

...The reaction to my article was large, and largely unfavorable...

...Now, I understood there was nothing personal in this tribute...

...I had asked: "Can this be anthropological relativism, or the latest thing in radical racism...

...As to the worship of Mao, she asked whether I had ever visited a parochial school where children are taught about Jesus Christ...

...there are, after all, differences between dictatorships, and Ho Chi Minh was unquestionably a more estimable figure than the Thieus, Kys and Nhus to whom this country committed itself over so many bloody years...

...and, in particular, Hearts and Minds, a documentary about America's role in the Vietnam war, directed by Peter Davis and produced by Bert Schneider...

...It is a tendency the show-biz contingent is especially prone to, their notions of reality having already been addled by all that Hollywood sun and fun...

...Schneider is associated with the element of the antiwar movement that has always found the dictatorship of North Vietnam preferable to the one in the South...

...The other, John M. Ashbrook (R.-Ohio) ran briefly for President the last time round on a platform that out-Goldwatered Goldwater...

...Is Miss MacLaine mischievous or only simple...

...I do not doubt that observers could be rounded up on the Right who perceive South Africa as a land of enlightenment and Chile as a model republic...

...Will they amount to "radical" changes...

...A number of friendly acquaintances, who knew I had favored the candidacies of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972 and with whom I had been associated in other virtuous causes, chided me for being unduly fastidious in my approach to Hearts and Minds...

...There was, however, one group of responses that I found myself taking to heart (and mind...

...It takes a very tough stomach to digest such omelets...

...One perceives what one finds it congenial to perceive...

...Yet may one altogether slide over the fact that a strenuous dictatorship does exist in North Vietnam and still hope to be taken seriously on the subject...

...Radicals tend to be whistled away...

...The material promises to be fascinating, possibly even heartening...

...Further, I was reminded, to play up the flaws in well-meant works supporting peace was to play into the hands of its opponents...

...Wulf...

...Introduction to the Enemy, a visit to North Vietnam with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, photographed by Haskell Wexler...

...Nonetheless, their recognition made me uneasy...

...It's an arguable case...

...With no realistic hope of either commissarship or martyrdom, they are driven to dramatics-about America, about China, about themselves...

...There is a chance that out of our deserved defeat in Vietnam and out of our apparent inability to deal with the ongoing economic disarray may come important changes in the shape and direction of American society...