Hindsight on War
Ragsdale, Wilmott
Hindsight on War THE WOUND WITHIN, by Alexander r Kendrick. Little, Brown. 432 pp. $12.95. reviewed by Wilmott Ragsdale In The Wound Within, newsman and foreign affairs analyst Alexander...
...His immediate concern is U.S...
...The final question Kendrick implicitly poses is whether our character has been changed by our experience or whether we just want to forget...
...Wilmott Ragsdale covered the White House for The Wall Street Journal and formerly was a correspondent in Europe for Time and in Southeast Asia for Newsweek...
...There would be no cause for congratulation," Kendrick observes, "if the nation returned to the complacency of its old habits, if punishment of subverters of the 'System' were to suffice for reform of the 'System' itself...
...reviewed by Wilmott Ragsdale In The Wound Within, newsman and foreign affairs analyst Alexander Kendrick deals with the enigma of war: since all agree that war is bad, why is it so prevalent...
...Kendrick writes with the hindsight of nearly forty years of journalistic experience, much of it with CBS...
...America's power and prestige were high...
...By character, function, and familiarity with the uses and limitations of power, they should have represented an island of rationality in a surrounding sea of emotionalism, aggressive instinct, undefined terms . . . To judge by the results, the rational could not be distinguished from the irrational...
...He concedes that American fears were not unprovoked: "Stalin's successor, Khrushchev . . . continued to build and rattle nuclear rockets and to proclaim . . . his support for 'wars of national liberation.' " And in Vietnam, "Each step in escalation was taken by men of presumed probity, perception, even enlightenment...
...It was rooted in history, habits, and hauteur...
...In his last section he reviews Watergate, where the lack of character was so damaging...
...If Vietnam was largely inevitable, it was also unnecessary...
...Hence our actions in the Cold War, in the arms race, and in Vietnam "were fueled by what General Douglas MacArthur called 'two great illusions': the Soviet fear that the United States was preparing an attack, and the American fear of Soviet attack...
...the creeping fear of surveillance...
...Yet they were transmitted to minds already committed to an American century and its assumed need to be saved from communism...
...Kendrick ends on a note of individual citizen responsibility and "Presidential integrity...
...At this moment, still in fear that America would be threatened by a communist Vietnam, the United States decided to support and finance a South Vietnamese republic in violation of the Geneva accord that had ended the French- Indochina war...
...The growing commitment to South Vietnam was what "George Kennan, the 1946 apostle of containment, called in 1972, 'the most disastrous of all America's undertakings over . . . 200 years of its history.' " Kendrick marshals thousands of facts and lets them show the enormity of the wounds both to Asians and to Americans: the increased violence...
...the alienation and loss of the sense that anybody in government or corporations cares, or is reliable or honest...
...Hindsight on War THE WOUND WITHIN, by Alexander r Kendrick...
...If these are the results of such involvement, what hope is there of avoiding such an involvement next time...
...Such a combination might not lose, but could hardly win...
...The hauteur was an arrogant confidence that our manifest destiny was to be "Number One...
...In 1954 Stalin was dead, Moscow's wards in Eastern Europe were showing anti-Soviet sentiments, the Chinese were at odds with Russia, the Third World was embracing neutralism, and Western Europe was prosperously noncommunist...
...These illusions, Kendrick believes, were so blindingly pervasive that the United States would have become involved in Vietnam regardless of which party was in power or who was President: "Vietnam was not a personal idiosyncrasy...
...involvement in the Vietnam revolution and civil war from the blundering beginnings with the French in 1945 through the exhausting and degrading middle to the disastrous and humiliating " e n d . " In his review Kendrick makes what we already knew into something new: events seen from 1974 may not look the same as they looked when they happened...
...The history was of mounting prestige as a world power...
...He teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin...
...In this, the United States made a fatal mistake in failing to recognize the "purpose, determination, and ability" of the North Vietnamese...
...The habits were political demagogy, ignorance of foreign cultures, moral righteousness, unwillingness to confess error...
...ripoffs as accepted behavior, and the evidences of not caring by the managers who largely run our system, from car production (with flaws and returns) to Presidential assistants (with dirty tricks and cover-ups...
...Kendrick writes throughout with more compassion than outrage and more understanding than bitterness...
...He views Vietnam as a series of escalating events that most Americans "invoked their sacred right Not to Know, extenuated by Presidential refusal to t e l l . " The events themselves were often seeable, sometimes pn television, often in print...
Vol. 38 • December 1974 • No. 12
