Party an
KIMBALL, ROGER
Party An by Roger Kimball In the great competition for making the most morally fatuous remark of the 20th century, the novelist E. M. Forster must be considered a leading contender. His famous...
...Forster had been blinded by the pieties of Bloomsbury to the most elementary moral and political realities...
...There was great consternation, though, after a member of the audience asked each panelist to give his "personal ethical assessment" of An's activities as a spy...
...An, now a retired general in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), was in the news because he was denied an exit visa to participate in a public forum about the legacy of the Vietnam War and the future of U.S.-Vietnamese relations held at the Asia Society in New York on April 28...
...Who can say what effect this information had on our prosecution of the war...
...Roger Kimball is executive editor of the New Criterion...
...Without doubt the saddest performance was by Bobby Muller, himself a disabled vet, whose quest for "reconciliation" with his former enemies seems to have led him to demonize the United States...
...He didn't really have one...
...What was remarkable about the Times's story was not the fact that the North Vietnamese had a spy working for a major American news magazine...
...Sports also dilated on the idea of reconciliation...
...Let's be clear about what it was that An actually did in pursuit of his patriotic duty during the Vietnam War...
...The Times did quote Burton Yale Pines, a correspondent for Time in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970, who was justly outraged at the revelation of An's espionage...
...Someone wondered aloud how a catharsis could be "vicarious" and still cathartic, but a truculent man who nodded excitedly every time anyone uttered the word "Internet" insisted loudly that Aristotle would have agreed...
...The Vietnamese ambassador was repeatedly taxed for an explanation of why his government had refused to let An come and reminisce with his old buddies...
...Personal what assessment...
...The rest might have taken their motto from Christopher Marlowe: "That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead...
...If these distinguished gentlemen of the Fourth Estate were irked by anything, it was Vietnam's refusal to grant their old pal a visa to join their reunion party at the Asia Society...
...A young man got up and lectured us about the environmental depredations of the war...
...They wanted all the political stuff, the same as you guys wanted...
...How many corrupt or corruptible commanders were got to—and with what results...
...The Exceptional Athlete Matters") Sports, had planned for the disabled as well as the able-bodied in January 1998...
...During the question period, several representatives from T.E.A.M...
...Forster's remark came to mind last week when the New York Times ran a story about Pham Xuan An, an American-educated Vietnamese who, during the Vietnam War, was simultaneously a correspondent for Time and a colonel in the army of North Vietnam—in other words, an enemy spy...
...About An's activities as a spy, they were all forgiveness...
...Of course, the article in the Times was great publicity for the forum at the Asia Society, and the event played to a nearly full house...
...What ethical...
...Perhaps the receipt of a Pulitzer prize relieves one of such mundane claims on one's attention...
...He felt he was doing his patriotic duty by being an agent, but we were his friends . . ." And what about Karnow's "loyalty . . . to his nation...
...What about his "patriotic duty...
...Karnow began by describing An as the absent "star" of the evening...
...The journalists whom the Times talked to about An's activities were nothing if not distinguished: Frank McCulloch from Time, Morley Safer from 60 Minutes, and David Halberstam and Stanley Karnow, both Pulitzer-prize-winning scribes...
...There was the usual browbeating that one discovers whenever a critical mass of liberal piety meets the subject of the Vietnam War...
...Anyone with a taste for dada would have enjoyed the proceedings...
...How many U.S...
...But then the distinguished journalists on the panel didn't have any explanations either...
...It was the reaction of An's former colleagues in the American press corps to the revelation of his espionage that was stunning...
...His loyalty to Vietnam was to his nation...
...But about the issue that probably brought most people to the forum in the first place—the response of American journalists to the revelation that they had worked alongside and befriended a man who turned out to be an enemy agent—hardly a word was spoken...
...Indeed, given the nature of the American press coverage of the war, one would almost have suspected it...
...They just didn't get it...
...One eager young woman asked whether their biking event might not provide a much-needed "vicarious catharsis...
...Forster never seems to have twigged that by betraying his country he would have been betraying his friends in the most categorical manner...
...But the major themes were "reconciliation," Vietnam's nasty regime, and the 1,200-mile biking event from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City that the forum's co-sponsor, World T.E.A.M...
...They wanted estimates of the capabilities of commanders—who was corrupt and who was corruptible...
...My superiors wanted to know the strengths of various units...
...But what gives his remark that special extra fillip of obnoxiousness is Forster's presumption of superior virtue, deposited like an unpleasant smell before the reader...
...The panel, moderated by Karnow, consisted of Safer, Halberstam, Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, and Ngo Quang Xuan, the Vietnamese U.N...
...His famous declaration, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country," perfectly epitomizes a certain species of preening self-infatuation that is at once naive and pernicious...
...Personal ethical what...
...I had access to all the Vietnamese bases and their commanders," the Times quotes him as saying...
...ambassador, who had been invited at the last moment to take An's place...
...Karnow, for example, explained in Forster-like syllables that An's "loyalty in the case of America was to his colleagues...
...But his was a lone voice...
...The ostensible subject of the evening's discussion was "Vietnam: Then, Now, and Future...
...soldiers were killed or wounded because the enemy went into battle with a foreknowledge of our troop strength...
...Or maybe it was the rancid politics of the 1960s, which ruined so many of the best and the brightest, blinding them with presumption of superior virtue, as E.M...
...A woman informed the audience that, now that there were no anti-war demonstrations to attend, she regularly made pilgrimages to Vietnam to try to help expiate the guilt of the United States for ever being in the war...
...Where does that come into the picture...
...Aristotle would have agreed, at any rate, that "Vietnam: Then, Now, and Future" roused the emotion of pity if not fear—unless it be fear for the moral fiber of this country's opinionmakers...
...Maybe it was the word "ethical...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 34
