LETTERS
LETTERS Class wars Charles Peters ["Tilting at Windmills," October] says I "wrote in a recent issue of Newsweek that in the late sixties and early seventies the young antiwar protestors, simply...
...We knew that we were fighting to make a better world...
...It is true that the old P-40s couldn't match the performance of the ME-109 or the Zero, but the 51 was not rushed along to take its place, whoever's son was flying them...
...but, absent any requirement for personal responsibility, I doubt that we will ever get there...
...Nowhere have I read an explanation of why the Vincennes was situated precisely where it was...
...Read the ad you took money for, Mr...
...that on those same pages you have a radar detector advertisement designed for the same people who drive, drink, and smoke the same products you rightfully tilt at...
...Fun and games, maybe...
...This ad asks the reader to think about the problem of undeserved speeding tickets—no girls in swimsuits...
...Napoleon probably said it best—"In war, morale counts for three-quarters, the balance of manpower counts for only one quarter...
...Lewis comments: ". . . that comment blandly tells us the founding premise of the war was false...
...Earl Warren's early days as a prosecutor do not invite close scrutiny, but we forgive Earl Warren because he, unlike Mr...
...no snow-capped mountains...
...I don't mean the Persian Gulf, I mean directly under a heavily travelled civilian airway...
...Sheehan's "lie," his professional life was an open book...
...Vann into uncontrolled rages, it was not oppressive in the sense that North Korea, Albania, or Uganda are repressive...
...There was some contempt in the air, most clearly visible in the odious antiwar film Hearts and Minds...
...They also went forth with plans to build the P-47 and the P-38, both planes of some distinction, but neither as successful as the 51 would prove to be...
...I don't recall her doing anything wrong...
...October], I think you may be wrong...
...Make no mistake about it: John Vann and those who served under him knew what we were fighting for...
...It wasn't all that good either, but then it wasn't governing Switzerland...
...We all have these lusts for purity in our society...
...You may be right, but the evidence you offer doesn't support your argument...
...John Vann's soldierly courage and personal heroism were utterly inconsistent with cynicism...
...begin to think about building them for American use...
...I rejoice that Mr...
...DUANE LOCKARD Brewster, Massachusetts Napoleon's odds Author Scott Shuger, in his cogent presentation of the incompetence resulting from too heavy a reliance being placed on hardware, instead of human skills, that led to the Vincennes fiasco ["Why Did the Navy Shoot Down 290 Civilians...
...Vann's strategy had been accepted, we and the longterm forces of enlightenment would have won...
...The place we do draw the line is refusing to accept ads that glamorize such dangerous practices as smoking, drinking, and speeding...
...But if cigarette ads are an abomination, what about that ad you have for radar detectors...
...Surely being stationed ten miles or so to one side or the other of the centerline of the airway would not have seriously hampered its effectiveness in whatever it was that it was supposed to be doing...
...JOHN CARTER Earlysv We, Virginia I find it passing strange: That on the same pages where you castigated the Department of Transportation for allowing cars that travel in excess of 155 miles per hour ["Tilting at Windmills," September...
...That, by the way, is still true in the North...
...Thank you, and thank Taylor Branch, for his excellent essay on Neil Sheehan's new book...
...All leaders do a little unseemly self-promotion...
...Sheehan's book is being well received...
...One more small piece of evidence against your theory that the likes of the Kennedys did not get sent forth in unsafe planes is the stupid decision to send Joe Kennedy on that experimental run against the harbor facilities in France...
...In fact the 51s were designed for the British, and only when the RAF found the 51 compared favorably with the Spitfire did the U.S...
...One last thing...
...Of course the war would have ended sooner if either all the antiwar types had resisted the draft and gone to jail or if all had been drafted...
...Forty-eight thousand dead on the highways is not funny, it's tragic...
...And of course,protestors should have made more of an issue of the classbiased draft, although my impression is that many did try to raise it, especially the more Marxist types...
...My points in Newsweek were simply, and unoriginally, these: a) protesting the war was honorable and right, contrary to all the subsequent neoconservative revisionism, and b) despite the "flag-burning and similar Jerry Rubinesque gestures," the antiwar movement as a whole helped to end the war—even if other things might have ended it sooner...
...would say, "Grow up guys" W.L...
...The same applies to soldiers...
...In the end, however, we decided to keep the ad...
...I, for one, cannot figure out any legitimate purpose for such products...
...GORDON D. SAVAGE Belmont, California Morton Downey and Jessica Hahn I was rather disappointed to read the little blurb about Jessica Hahn in your recent issue of The Washington Monthly ["Tidbits and Outrages," October...
...LETTERS Class wars Charles Peters ["Tilting at Windmills," October] says I "wrote in a recent issue of Newsweek that in the late sixties and early seventies the young antiwar protestors, simply by opposing the war, had done the most effective thing they could do to save the poor blacks and whites who were doing the dying in Vietnam" I didn't write that and don't think it...
...Bombing with Bush In your discussion of a potential candidate for the directorship of the selective service program [`Assistant Secretary of What...
...The editor replies: As you know, we strongly object to advertising that glosses over the potential dangers of a product with a slick presentation...
...No amount of womanizing negates the fact that if Mr...
...All advertising is an attempt to sell something—to present a product in its best light—and we have to draw the line somewhere...
...We were not fighting for American prestige, American empire, or because we needed jobs...
...Either would have prompted our parents to raise hell, which is why LBJ made sure it was easy for us to avoid the draft...
...The current deprivation, tyranny, and slaughter in communist-held Southeast Asia should by now be overwhelming evidence that not everyone who believed in the war was either a dupe, opportunist, racist, or colonialist...
...You mention that in World War II the establishment was quick to supply less risky airplanes when the sons of the Bush and Kennedy families were flying dangerous planes...
...In the time I knew John Vann he displayed not one iota of cynicism, and contrary to Mr...
...BARBARA WYMAN North Sandwich, New Hampshire Our ad diction I can understand your distaste for cigarette ads and your desire to see them eliminated...
...Henry Kissinger has written, according to Anthony Lewis in a New York Times column, "We went into Vietnam on the assumption that Hanoi was 'the cutting edge of Sino-Soviet global strategy' " But, "in retrospect," he said, "we know that Hanoi was working for its own account ." Mr...
...There's a deeper charge buried in Peters's criticism, the idea that antiwar types, by not serving or going to jail or raising the class-bias issue, had contempt for the people who were "doing the dying...
...It is courageous of him to admit having been bamboozled by the Best and the Brightest in Washington as we slouched into Vietnam...
...We ought all to be thankful to Neil Sheehan...
...Perhaps then it wouldn't have been so dependent upon an unread Official Airlines Guide...
...Vann had the overwhelming respect of professional military officers as well as amateur reservists like me...
...The willingness to win posthumous medals hardly makes a person either a cynic or a self-seeker...
...But in 1951 the Korean government wasn't something to write home about and the country was a slum...
...Most important, however, John Vann was right from the start, and everyone else—from that stuffed prig William Westmoreland to the students at Kent State—was utterly wrong...
...This brings me to Taylor Branch's favorable review of Neil Sheehan's book about John Paul Vann ["A Soldier's Story," October...
...But the larger point, I think, is that those who protested the war were doing something to prevent the people doing the dying from having to do any more dying...
...that on the same pages where you excoriated rich tobacco companies and newspaper owners because they lure people into tobacco addiction...
...Vietnam's Vann guard When I was young, my grandfather was fond of pointing out that when a person is in big trouble, he needs a lawyer and not a golf player...
...that on the same pages where you champion an innocuous, but hopefully beneficial, label warning of the perils of alcohol...
...SCHUBERT Monsey, New York...
...In 1953 the South won in Korea, and today we see real democracy and a country prosperous enough to host the Olympics...
...Vann's staff in 1968-69...
...As Morton Downey Jr...
...Your letters were therefore the cause of much discussion here at the magazine...
...Peters, and explain what it is trying to do...
...was that trip necessary...
...Neil Sheehan will get rich savaging Mr...
...Vann, and that is regrettable, mostly because of what it tells us about the value today of honor, duty, and country...
...MICKEY KAUS New York, New York The editor replies: My friend Mickey Kaus did write in Newsweek, "We were antiwar protestors precisely to try to prevent the boys of Chelsea and West Virginia from dying" The word "precisely" was not used with his customary care...
...I was an artillery captain on Mr...
...RICHARD NEELY Charleston, West Virginia Richard Neely is a justice on the supreme court of appeals in West Virginia...
...MYRON SPONDER Washington, D.C...
...Or maybe you are looking to appear in "Tilting at Windmills...
...Nowadays manpower is replaced by machinery, which probably lengthens Napoleon's odds even more...
...The South Vietnamese government wasn't all that bad...
...I mean really...
...If the war colleges were to train "commanders" instead of mere "managers," all three services would benefit enormously...
...Vann, was on the correct side of history...
...The Thieu government was a typically corrupt, incompetent, Third World operation...
...October] merely reinforces the lessons of history that have been ignored by successive commanders in their ongoing infatuation with the latest military toy—be it a crossbow or a computer...
...They are designed solely to alert a speeder to the fact that police are in the offing...
...Its superiority wasn't immediately apparent to the air corps brass—the rival they thought would do the job was that universally agreed lemon, the P-39...
...Of course simply opposing the war wasn't the most effective thing to do...
...But it was not totalitarian and, except for the proclivity to be indifferent to the rural population that sent Mr...
Vol. 20 • December 1988 • No. 11
