A Sense of Dishonor?
The case of Bob Kerrey.

From the May 28, 2001, issue of National Review

hat is most unnerving about former senator Bob Kerrey's defense against the charge that he is a war criminal is his apparent lack of indignation. An innocent man charged with rounding up and shooting unarmed civilians — including women, children, and a baby — and leaving behind a pile of corpses, would usually express outrage at being foully traduced. He would certainly denounce the motives of his accusers and perhaps demand some sort of recompense for the slur on his honor. He might threaten a libel action to regain his good name — even if a public figure has almost no chance of winning substantial monetary damages in today's legal climate.

Yet the senator has done nothing of the sort. He has retreated instead into a kind of neurotic confessional mode in which he denies the actual charges made by the article in The New York Times Magazine, but then pleads guilty to nothing in particular of the most haunting kind. Thus, in the senator's own words: "I went out on a mission and, after it was over, I was so ashamed I wanted to die." He has spoken of feeling a fraud for accepting a medal for his leadership on that night. And Kerrey's distinguished defenders in both parties have taken similar lines in anguished psychobabble — suggesting, for instance, that he has a right "to keep this memory private."

A war crime cannot, of course, be treated as a private matter. And if Kerrey is innocent of such a crime, he should wish to establish clearly not only his own innocence but also that of his Navy SEAL colleagues. What explains his reluctance or inability to do so in a straightforward way?

The simplest explanation is that Kerrey is lying; that he did take a leading part in deliberately killing innocent civilians and that he is now orchestrating a cover-up to protect his hide and his future career. Evidence to support such a dark conclusion, alas, is not lacking. As Thomas H. Lipscomb pointed out in a UPI commentary, Kerrey's account of what happened — his unit fired round after round into the village, and, when they entered it, discovered the Vietnamese civilians all dead and neatly stacked up in the middle of the village — is inherently implausible.

After years of war, the villagers would have developed some survival skills and known better than to collect in the village square during a firefight. Even if they had presented such an easy target, Kerrey's men would have had to have been extraordinary marksmen to hit them all by firing with light weapons on a dark night through heavy jungle foliage — and still more uncannily accurate to kill (not just wound) all of them.

Admittedly, the Vietcong might either have retrieved the wounded or, quite possibly, themselves shot the villagers, leaving them for the Americans to find. As Lipscomb points out, however, the Vietcong did not usually retrieve wounded civilians. And if they had murdered the unarmed villagers, surely Kerrey and his men would have reported such an atrocious enemy war crime on their return. But they didn't.

Taken together with Sen. Kerrey's half-ashamed demeanor since the allegations were made, these implausibilities count heavily against him. Occam's razor — the philosophical principle that the simplest explanation of any event is generally to be preferred to other accounts — would suggest that he is guilty as charged by the New York Times. Of course, Occam's razor is a general guide rather than an infallible test. So what is the alternative explanation?

It comes down to three linked possibilities:

1. Sen. Kerrey is not guilty as charged, but is guilty of something. During the assault on Thanh Phong, he did something of which he is ashamed and has no wish to defend before the world. Suppose, for instance, that Gerhard Klann (the Navy SEAL who is the source for the Times story) is telling the truth when he alleges that Kerrey helped him kill an old man whom they thought to be a Vietcong lookout. That would be a grisly deed, and if they later concluded that he was not an enemy agent, his death would be a tragic mistake. It would not, however, be a war crime. Civilians are sometimes mistaken for soldiers, especially in guerrilla warfare when soldiers disguise themselves as civilians. And since an old man can as easily shout a warning as a young man, age is properly no guarantee against attack. It would be very understandable if Kerrey returned to base that night with a heavy heart and cursing the war. He might still find that particular incident — essentially a fatal military mistake — too painful to discuss. And he might salve his feelings by confessing to…nothing in particular and everything in general.

2. The discrepancies and implausibilities in the account of the Thanh Phong assault given by all of the Navy SEALs except Klann are exactly what we should expect in honest accounts of a frightening and confusing event that happened a long time ago. Even contemporary eyewitness accounts are generally mistaken on some points. And when we have massaged painful memories over a long period, we have generally embroidered them as well. As Sir Robert Morton, the cross-examining lawyer in Terence Rattigan's play The Winslow Boy, observes of an honest witness whom he breaks down: A simple liar would have put together a far more plausible story.

3. Finally, Kerrey, like almost all Democrats and the media, has internalized the Left's version of the Vietnam War. After 30 years of amendments to suit the political purposes of liberalism, that version is now quite complicated. To oversimplify, however, it goes something like this: The Vietnam War itself was the essential war crime because it compelled ordinary soldiers to commit war crimes in order to survive; but the Vietnam vets who fought the war were heroes — especially if they were Democratic candidates who could rid their party of what by 1980 was the stigma of being anti-defense. So when Kerrey steps forward and explains his actions at Thanh Phong, not only does he give a suspiciously confused version of events, he also defends himself by blaming the war. In an elliptical way, of course, so that he ends up declaring:"The Vietnam War made me do — something."

Whereupon Sens. McCain, Cleland, Hagel, and John Kerry all step forward to declare him an authentic war hero who deserves to be left alone to solve his own anguish. The effect of this, of course, is to entrench the Left's view of the Vietnam War as the authorized version binding on all. We are served notice that if we wish to protect an apparently decent moderate Democrat like Bob Kerrey, the price of his absolution is an endorsement of the Vietnam-as-war-crime doctrine. Kerrey, Lt. William Calley, or anyone else who might have committed crimes while fighting is thereby acquitted. Whereupon it follows, as night follows day, that Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon and (of course) Secretary of State Kissinger must take their places in the dock.

In neither legal nor historical terms, however, can the guilt or innocence of Lt. Kerrey at Thanh Phong be determined by whether Lyndon Johnson acted rightly in pushing through the Tonkin Gulf resolution. Nor can we take refuge in a Good Ol' Boy verdict of "there but for the grace of God go I" — since that is a guilty verdict expressed in a euphemism. Unfortunately, it is very hard to see exactly how Kerrey's guilt or innocence can now be established.

The preponderance of evidence, as outlined above and tested against Occam's razor, seems to be against Kerrey. But the weight of it falls somewhat short of the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard that is required for a conviction. Nor does it seem likely that either new evidence or contemporary witnesses can change this stalemate. Kerrey's comrades (however innocent) have an interest in supporting his denials, and the Vietnamese witnesses cannot speak freely since they are living under a totalitarian regime. A congressional or U.S. Navy inquiry might bring some new information to light. But neither is likely to settle the matter.

That puts the ball firmly in Kerrey's court. Either he should step forward, firmly declare his innocence of any war crime, and take legal steps to recover his good name, or he should equally frankly admit that he committed actions of which he is so deeply ashamed that he cannot in good conscience continue in public life. What he cannot do is confess vaguely to dark deeds, leaving open the possibility of a war crime, and then give the keynote address to a conference of New Democrats.

One final point. It seems unlikely to me that a "benefit of (military) clergy" defense would be allowed to protect, say, Newt Gingrich from allegations of war criminality. It strikes me as still more unlikely that Newsweek would have sat on a similar story about, say, Pat Buchanan just because he seemed unlikely to be elected president. And I cannot help reflecting that Republicans like Dan Quayle and George W. Bush have suffered worse abuse from the media for not serving in Vietnam than Kerrey has sustained for the not wholly implausible accusation of mass murder. But doubtless I am biased.

This originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.