New York, June 26—A gentleman of the press writes me, not without glee, to remark what he clearly conceives as an irony, to wit that on the very same day, the press published a paragraph by me and a paragraph (from a memorandum written in 1965) by the Assistant Secretary of Defense making my own paragraph look positively sick in its misjudgment.
I had written, after analyzing the arguments of John Kerry [NR, June 29], “Myself, I will listen patiently, decades hence, to the those who argue that our commitment in Vietnam, and our attempt to redeem it, were tragically misconceived. I shall not listen, ever, to those who say that it was less than the highest tribute to national motivation, to collective idealism, and to international rectitude.”
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