Why We Were in Vietnam By Norman PodhoretzSimon & Schuster, 223 pp., $13.50 Norman Podhoretz’s Why We Were in Vietnam is a sharp disquisition in political pathology. Given my own reactions at the time—as long ago as 1954 I was convinced of the futility of getting into war over the future of a distant and recalcitrant land against close-by forces bent on possession, but once we had entered the conflict I was loath to be seen siding with people who assailed the U.S. for criminality rather than mere bumbling—I am favorably disposed toward Podhoretz’s negative answers to these questions: “. . . did that defeat truly mean what the antiwar movement seems to have persuaded everyone it meant? . . . Does the United States deserve the moral contumely that Vietnam has brought upon it in the eyes of so many people both at home and abroad?”
Still, his conclusions—epitomized in a final paragraph affirming Ronald Reagan’s description of our involvement as “a noble cause” and disparaging Jimmy Carter’s allusion to “ ‘the intellectual and moral poverty’ of the policy that had led us into Vietnam and had kept us there so long”—leave me unsatisfied. Reagan’s approbatory adjective echoes Hoover’s endorsement of Prohibition—“an experiment noble in purpose.” Conceptual righteousness and operative morality are not the same. Like automobiles or watches, policies have to work to be any good. They must give plausible promise of working to be acceptable. The noble experiment in Vietnam was a colossal fizzle.
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