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}}.
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Ma.gnolia
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StumbleUponDear Jacob,
What an odd pair we make. You're inclined to think Kerrey is not telling the truth about whether he participated in a deliberate massacre of unarmed civilians in Thanh Phong in February 1969. Yet you think charitably of the man. I'm now inclined to think Kerrey is telling the truth (partly because the other SEALs now back him up, and partly because New York Times Magazine writer Gregory Vistica's key Vietnamese eyewitness is now allowing as how she didn't actually see the guns go off). Yet I'm still feeling somewhat uncharitable toward him. Chalk that up in part to lingering doubts (at the moment, I'd put the odds at 53 percent that Kerrey is telling the truth to 47 percent that he isn't), and in part because his apparent manipulations have made it harder rather than easier to get to the bottom of what happened in Thanh Phong. Which, as far as I'm concerned, is what we should all stay focused on.
You chide me for being cynical when I said that Kerrey was either "pulling a McCain" (making an overwrought apology in order to garner sympathy) or "disrespecting the Bing" (avoiding responsibility for a large offense by pleading guilty to a lesser one). You say I'm missing the fact that Kerrey and McCain are admirably candid people. I don't quarrel with that judgment, though my opinion of Kerrey is necessarily second-hand, since I've never met him. Nonetheless, they are both capable of being quite manipulative. Name me a politician—indeed, name me a person—who isn't, especially when the heat is on. Since my operating hypothesis is now that Kerrey did not participate in the deliberate slaughter of roughly a dozen unarmed women and children, I have to wonder why Kerrey has been lacerating himself in public as though he had. I think it's because he wants the rest of us to take note of his admirably tortured conscience. If all Kerrey really did was accidentally to kill some unarmed people, then the self-dramatizing language he's been employing ("To describe it as an atrocity, I would say, is pretty close to being right, because that's how it felt and that's why I feel guilt and shame for it") seems wildly inappropriate. Far better would be for him to say, "I feel terrible about what happened, but innocent people often die in war because good men make honest mistakes. Do not confuse a tragic error committed in self-defense with an atrocity."
You cite a New York Times {{op-ed#2:http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/opinion/28WOLF.html?searchpv=site02}} by Tobias Wolff to argue that Kerrey's memory about all these events may be clouded by trauma. I don't buy it in this instance, because Kerrey and Vistica were engaged in detailed discussions about these events over a period of several years before the Times story appeared. Whatever memories Kerrey may have suppressed had ample time to float to the surface. Indeed, Wolff's own description of his struggle to remember his Vietnam experience accurately when he wrote a war memoir actually undermines your point. Wolff writes:
Again and again I found my old version of things overtaken by memories that made me wince in shame. Now and then I recalled good things I'd forgotten, notably the kindnesses of a sergeant who nursed me, a blundering young officer, through that dispiriting time. But the most forceful memories made me ashamed, and something more—they rendered me unrecognizable to myself. Maybe that's why I had forgotten them; they didn't fit my idea of myself.
Wolff isn't saying here that his Vietnam memoir is full of hooey because he didn't remember the experience honestly. He's saying that it was a struggle to write about Vietnam honestly because he had to overcome false notions in his head about what had really happened. The experience of writing about Vietnam made Wolff capable of remembering it in a way that was closer to the truth. Wouldn't Kerrey's experience of helping Vistica write about his Vietnam experiences have had a similar effect? And wouldn't Gerhard Klann's many discussions with Vistica have helped untangle any confusion he may have had about what happened that night?
Probably you disagree with much of what I'm writing here. But I'd like to try to draw you into a pact: Let's not spend any more time assessing Kerrey's goodness or theorizing about the larger meaning of Vietnam. I'll set aside my journalistic cynicism, and you'll set aside your paraphrasing of {{Heart of Darkness#2:http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~benjamin/316kfall/316ktexts/heart.html}}. Instead, let's roll up our sleeves and examine the evidence about what actually happened in Thanh Phong. I certainly feel as though I could use some help in weighing the conflicting accounts. A chalkboard would be handy to keep track of the various versions, but perhaps we can devise some sort of Internet equivalent. How about a chart that we take turns revising? Our raw materials, as best I can make out, are the {{Vistica story#2:http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/25/magazine/25KERREY.html}}, {{Kerrey's press conference#2:http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/msnbc/ms042601-6v.htm}} last week, the April 29 {{Washington Post story#2:http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17752-2001Apr28.html}} about the SEALs meeting with Kerrey last Friday and hammering out a {{joint statement#2:http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18097-2001Apr28.html}}, the April 29 {{Los Angeles Times story#2:http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20010429/t000036211.html}} about an additional Thanh Phong villager who claims to have witnessed a deliberate massacre, and the {{Time piece#2:http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101010507-107929,00.html}} in which Pham Tri Lanh, Vistica's Thanh Phong eyewitness, says that she didn't actually see the massacre. After tonight, we'll also have the 60 Minutes II broadcast to pick over. It will be interesting to see how (or whether) CBS deals with the new evidence that's trickled out during that last few days—an opportunity the Times Magazine never had, since it went to press before the conflicting accounts appeared.
Oh, and two more data points. The first is an {{op-ed#2:http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95000402}} by James Webb, the Vietnam-vet novelist and former Navy secretary, in the Wall Street Journal. If you read past Webb's predictable how-dare-you-draft-dodging-scum-sit-in-judgment commentary—and, incidentally, this might be a convenient moment to point out to our readers that you and I were both shy of our 18th birthday when Saigon fell—Webb engages in some interesting parsing of the evidence concerning the possible presence of Viet Cong on the night in question:
According to the Times Magazine story, archive records of Army radio transmissions indicate that two days after the incident, "an old man from Thanh Phong presented himself to the district chief's headquarters with claims for retribution for alleged atrocities committed the night of 25 and 26 February 69. Thus far it appears 24 people were killed. 13 were women and children and one old man. 11 were unidentified and assumed to be VC. …" [This] would appear to confirm the position of Mr. Kerrey and the five others on the patrol that they took fire and returned it, with the loss of civilian lives an unfortunate consequence. This piece of evidence is perhaps the most objective account available of the results of the Kerrey patrol, coming as it does from a time near the incident, from a man who was asking for retribution and thus was hardly trying to cover things up. It also coincides with Mr. Kerrey's recollection of 13 or 14 dead civilians in the village before the team left the scene, as any Viet Cong soldiers would most likely have been on the other side of the villagers who were killed, perhaps even using them as a screen while attempting to escape. … [I]f a seven-man patrol operating independently at night far inside enemy territory killed 11 Viet Cong soldiers after coming under fire, it would seem they hit their assigned target.
We'll need to plug this into our chart.
The other data point is an e-mail I received yesterday from our mutual friend and sometime colleague, Gregg Easterbrook. Gregg, who says up front that he likes Kerrey a lot, raises a couple of interpretive questions about Kerrey's account that I'll bypass here in order to focus on an interesting factual question Gregg poses about Klann's version of events:
If you wanted to kill civilians so they wouldn't give you away, why would you spend a full minute firing six assault weapons, which is what Klann claims they did? That would make a racket that could be heard for a mile or more under rural circumstances. (You can't believe how much noise an M16 makes until you hear it; plus, they had an even louder 30 cal squad gun.)
Maybe you would think you had to kill the witnesses because you were in such a state of confusion and panic that you couldn't think straight. But the circumstances don't sound like ones so horrible they would keep soldiers from thinking straight. Maybe they did it because they were zombies who were trained to get a body count on every outing and only later thought, My God, what have I done. But even Klann doesn't say that. He says they wanted to cover the retreat, and this basically makes no sense.
Also, the unit is said to have fired off 1,200 rounds on this mission. Unless that number was faked that's 200 rounds per man. That means each man changed magazines five times with screaming victims directly in front of him. That's not just twisted, it's monstrous. Could they really have gone from rational to monstrous in a couple minutes? And 1,200 rounds to kill 15 people means 80 bullets per victim at close range. Doesn't make sense.
Anything else we'll need?
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
The "you can't judge if you weren't there" is a copout, or an invitation to one. Nobody says that about battlefield heroism, though it may be just as true. And it's suspicious when that line comes in reference to someone the press loves. Weisberg has it exactly right on this: you shouldn't be overquick to judge someone's actions in very difficult situations. But you shouldn't use the difficulty to argue that nothing matters. Or--if you're really willing to argue that--you should apply it even to people you hate, like Serb death squads, sleazy Argentine "dirty war" types, and French secret police in Algeria forty years ago. But nobody seems to want to do that.
They're right not to do that, but if you're going to judge some, you have to judge everybody according to the same standard. At least, you have to if you claim to care about justice.
--A.G.Android
(To reply, click here.)
I have spent years reading police reports, listening to and watching tapes of police interrogations. Kerrey's statements and conduct bear an uncanny resemblance to a confused, frightened criminal suspect who has the feeling something terrible happened but isn't quite clear what it was. This doesn't prove his guilt, of course, but it also doesn't prove the tenderness of his conscience. In my experience, guilty suspects exhibit this confusion at least as frequently as innocent ones, perhaps more often.
--Yukon
(To reply, click here.)
If a majority or large plurality believe that a full scale investigation of those events 30+ years ago are warranted, I don't supppose that their desire is in any way illegitimate, but we shouldn't fool ourselves as to the possibility of ever determining, to any large degree of certainty, what actually occurred, unless a tremendous amount of yet-undiscovered circumstantial evidence becomes available. The nature of conflicting, or even unconflicting, eyewitness accounts in circumstances such as these are no basis for forming judgments.
--Will Allen
(To reply, click here.)
In an otherwise remarkably thoughtful and incisive essay on Bob Kerrey and his conduct in Vietnam, Jacob Weisberg makes one crucial misstep. He writes that
"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 error here is perhaps best illustrated by considering a kind of diametric opposite of the Kerrey case: the story of Oskar Schindler. Schindler's numerous "character flaws" have long been documented, and while he was known to be very charming, few would have described him as possessing a saintly personality; yet he saved a thousand lives at great personal risk. Would we therefore say that Schindler was not a good man, just because Jacob Weisberg, if given the chance to interview him, might well have failed to feel the enormous warmth and sympathy he feels towards Bob Kerrey? Does the heroism of such an imperfect person shake our view of morality itself, or tell us that selfishness is less of a choice than the lack of sufficient reason to act altruistically?
On the contrary, it teaches us an ageless lesson: that we are all ultimately judged by what we do, not by what others perceive us to be. We don't yet know, and may never know, what Bob Kerrey did or did not do in Vietnam, but we surely know one thing: that Kerrey's choice was, like Schindler's, his to make, and that the moral state of his soul will finally be determined by his choices--not vice versa.
--Dan Simon
(To reply, click here.)
(5/2)
Reader Comment From The Fray:
I did not read the Hagel-Kerry Op-Ed to reserve exclusively the role of judge for Vietnam War combat veterans. Rather, I thought the article suggested whom we should call as witnesses in the "trial." No procedure for judging actions can rationally require that the judge have been identically situated with the judged. Accepted procedures do, however, recognize the value of witnesses to inform our judgments. In evaluating, post hoc, the actions of combatants, the testimony of other combat veterans, then similarly situated, is certainly some of the most relevant evidence available. Most combatants in Vietnam did not commit war crimes. Far from stacking the deck with biased sympathizers, considering the perspectives of combat veterans may permit a more complete and informed evaluation of his actions.
--Sean Watts
(To reply, click here.)
(5/9)