Timothy Noah writes Slate’s “Chatterbox” column. Jacob Weisberg writes Slate’s “Ballot Box” column. This week they discuss the factual and ethical disputes surrounding former Sen. Bob Kerrey’s raid on a civilian town during the Vietnam War. To read Noah’s columns on this topic, click {{here#2606:Show=4/29/2001&idMessage=7595}}, {{here#2606:Show=4/28/2001&idMessage=7591}}, and {{here#2606:Show=4/26/2001&idMessage=7584}}.
Dear Tim,
In your first “{{Chatterbox#2606:Show=4/26/2001&idMessage=7584}}” item on the subject last week, you asked whether Bob Kerrey was “pulling a McCain”—i.e., overapologizing for an understandable mistake to provoke sympathy—or “disrespecting the Bing”—dodging responsibility by pleading guilty to a less serious offense. I reject your choice of alternatives. In fact, if you’ll forgive me, I think framing the matter that way is a fine example of journalistic cynicism run amok, in regard to both McCain and Kerrey. Both of these guys always get a lot of attention from the press for their candor and willingness to criticize themselves. But that doesn’t mean they’re poseurs or diabolically effective spin artists. Even the paranoid have enemies. Even press favorites sometimes deserve friends.
My view, which is based more on personal impressions than anything else, is that McCain and Kerrey really are unusually frank politicians, probably for reasons relating to what they experienced in the Vietnam War. Watching Kerrey deal with charges that he was responsible for killing civilians only reinforced my view that he tends to be entirely, excruciatingly genuine. You point out that Kerrey has been inconsistent and self-contradictory in his answers. I would argue that those very contradictions are testament to the sincerity of his anguish.
When the story broke last week, my first reaction was a “eureka” about Kerrey himself. I’ve always liked Kerrey a great deal at a personal level, while finding him to be something of an enigma. If you spend any time around him, you become aware of a haunted, almost ghostly quality about the man. He is one of those people who seems to have an eerie existence outside of the moment, as if he’s watching himself from afar.
I first got this sense of Kerrey in 1989, when he was a freshman senator and I was assigned to write a {{profile#2:http://www.thenewrepublic.com/archive/1989/weisberg121889.html}} about him for the New Republic. I remember sitting in his office and asking him questions about his life. “Don’t you find this awkward?” he asked me. He didn’t mean discussing his experiences in Vietnam, though that may have been part of it. He meant the artificiality of our transaction. I was asking personal questions of someone I’d never met before. He was supposed to give honest answers to someone who was going to try to convey him in print. I had been in that position often enough that I no longer found it especially awkward. But then, no other politician I interviewed had ever pointed it out. Afraid that my allotted time would vanish into a metadiscussion, I tried to steer him back to the matters at hand.
When my largely favorable piece came out, Kerrey called me to say he hadn’t read it. Why not? I asked. Because it “didn’t feel right” to read that kind of thing about himself, he said. At the time, I took this for conventional false modesty. I now think Kerrey was being truthful. He didn’t want to read descriptions of wartime heroics that he knew were not the whole truth. Self-examination was deeply painful for him because of the gap between the way others tended to describe him and the way he thought about himself, based on something he knew and they did not. Kerrey did, though, object that the gauzy illustration on the magazine’s cover depicted him wearing his Congressional Medal of Honor. He said he never wore his medals.
If Kerrey really didn’t read my story, I assumed that it was because it was too painful for him to read about himself getting maimed—one of the details was a fellow SEAL crawling around the jungle looking for his severed leg. But such an aversion never quite explained Kerrey’s spookiness, his streak of deep ambivalence about almost everything. On a whim, Kerrey decided not to run for re-election as governor of Nebraska, despite his overwhelming popularity. On another whim, he ran for the Senate, then for president. But on a daily basis, he seemed like a guy who couldn’t decide whether he should be serving or running for anything. Senators aren’t supposed to sit at their desks cutting pictures out of the newspaper for collages, as Kerrey did. People who run for president are supposed to want to be president. Nothing I knew about Kerrey explained the oddity of his attitude.
Now we have the missing piece of the puzzle. Kerrey’s ghostliness doesn’t come from the fact that he was nearly killed. It stems from the knowledge that he killed other, innocent people—with what degree of intentionality no one can yet be sure. Having the deaths of 13, or 15, or 21 women and children on your conscience could make you ambivalent about ever getting out of bed again, not to mention running for president. And it could certainly leave you with mixed feelings about seeking positions where people would laud you for a heroism you knew to be illusory. The strain of this conflict between public image and self-image is hard to imagine.
Of course, to say that Kerrey has been sincere in his reaction doesn’t mean that he is correct about what happened on that night in 1969. My guess is that he is not. While presenting both sides of the story, the author of the New York Times Magazine {{piece#2:http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/25/magazine/25KERREY.html}}, Gregory L. Vistica, clearly believes the version of Gerhard Klann, who told him that Kerrey and his men participated in the atrocity of wittingly killing noncombatants, including children and a baby. The fact that the dead bodies were all gathered together inside the hut, which is how even Kerrey remembers the scene he found, tends to support this version.
That doesn’t mean that Kerrey is “lying” about what happened. As an excellent {{op-ed#2:http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/opinion/28WOLF.html?searchpv=site02}} piece by Tobias Wolff in the Times argued, memory reacts to trauma in all sorts of odd ways. Kerrey and his fellow squad members may be remembering that which makes it possible for them to continue with their lives. It is also entirely possible that Klann’s memory is playing a trick by recalling something that did not occur. This episode is as good an illustration of the “Rashomon” principle as, well, Rashomon.
But it seems to me that whichever version is closer to the truth, we know with a high degree of probability that Kerrey did something both awful and avoidable. He could have ordered a retreat when he encountered civilians in the first hut. Instead, he ordered and participated in what was, at the very least, indiscriminate killing in a village that he knew was filled with noncombatants. That the U.S. military unofficially sanctioned this kind of murder in a “free-fire zone”; that self-protection may have necessitated it; that the perpetrators were young, scared, malleable, and ignorant about the rules of war; and that Kerrey went on to do other good, both in the war and in civilian life, are all mitigating factors. But they don’t excuse what he seems to have done.
That is what has disturbed me so deeply about the Times story. If you know anything about the Vietnam War, you know that this kind of thing went on. But heretofore, it has always been easy to dismiss the perpetrators of war crimes, the Calleys and Karadics, as moral monsters, people nothing like us. Here we have someone I know as a candid, kind, and charming person who turns out to be, quite possibly, a war criminal. What that says to me is that perhaps it would be no great trick to reduce any of us to the level of animals. Put us in a concentration camp or a free-fire zone, and you might make savages out of the best of us pretty quickly.
Put another way, the veneer of civilization is pretty thin. I’d like to think I could never do what Bob Kerrey did in Thanh Phong. But I’m sure Bob Kerrey thought of himself as someone who could never do such things either. To me, that makes this story a tragedy, in the true Greek sense. There’s no way out of this one. Bob Kerrey is a good person who evidently did something awful, and possibly something profoundly evil, on a single day of his life. Such a contradiction doesn’t just challenge our view of an individual. It shakes our view of morality itself. If Bob Kerrey could do that, good and evil aren’t fixed within a person for a lifetime. Decency is less of a choice than the lack of sufficient reason to do evil.
The reaction of most of the commentary has been that we’ll never know what really happened, and we can’t judge in any case, because we weren’t there. I disagree on both counts. Though we may never know what happened that night, the evidence may eventually point in a clearer direction. I hope that the press, which is completely terrified of this story, pursues it aggressively. As for the notion that we shouldn’t judge Kerrey because we weren’t in his shoes, we should of course be reluctant to criticize someone who came under pressures few of us can even imagine, especially based on insufficient information. But to reject the possibility of any kind of moral verdict seems to me an abdication of responsibility. We can’t retreat into relativism just because the truth is horrible to contemplate or because we happen to like and admire, as I do, the man in the dock.
