It was an honor listening to you today at The New School. I’m a Latin American graduate student, not a fan of the US, but I think that you are one of the best people I’ve met. We live to learn lessons, nothing more. I’ll dare to say that you had an overwhelming lesson to learn, learned it and did so gracefully and determinately. That in and of itself is enough to inspire anyone who wants to listen.

I saw the film and heard you speak in San Francisco last week, but didn’t get a chance to ask my question. I enjoyed the film, and appreciate the courage and integrity you showed during that period. I was also moved by the Vietnamese journalist, who was so emotional he had a difficult time articulating his question, but who basically said “It’s all very well for you to act heroically, but look at the mess you left for us.” You basically responded “We were never there to make things better for you, and the left is not responsible for the lousy government you were left with.” That sounds more callow than I’d hope for from you, and I’d like to push a little harder on the point.

Ironically, by the time you leaked the secret history of the war, the actual war had changed significantly. The Viet Cong might have been an indigenous Southern independence movement earlier, but after Tet, it was a hollowed-out instrument for Hanoi, a “cat’s paw” as the Soviets used to call it (read, for example, Truong Nhu Tang’s book, Vietcong Memoir). Also by that time, Ho’s balancing act between the Russians and Chinese had collapsed; Hanoi was as close to Moscow as “lips and teeth,” and the Soviets were conducting a front of the Cold War through a satellite country, pretty much like we were. Because of those changes, there’s a plausible argument that Vietnamization would have worked. With U.S. air support, ARVN repelled the ‘72 spring offensive. If the U.S. had been politically able to keep funding South Vietnam and providing air support and training, we might have ended up with a real peace deal and a South Vietnam that conceivably developed the way South Korea eventually did, without the gulags and the boat people and the repression and the corruption. Sure, it could easily have failed too — the quick collapse of ARVN in 74-75 shows how much work would have to have been done, but, that’s a plausible “what if.”

So honestly, where do you think the morality lies in all this? Did the U.S. conduct the war immorally? Sure. But if our government had told the truth to our citizens, and if our military had operated under proper rules of engagement, would that have satisfied the anti-war movement? Was it immoral to conduct the cold war through proxies? I guess, though conducting it directly through nuclear bombs would have been worse. (And don’t forget, the Marshall Plan also comes under the heading “conducting the cold war by proxy” – it wasn’t all bad conduct.)

Like they say, honesty and integrity are the first victims of war. You kept yours intact. You also, like Nixon says in the film, gave comfort and support to the enemy.

That sound bite you’re famous for “We weren’t on the wrong side; we were the wrong side” seems disrespectful to all the Catholics who fled repression in the North, all the petit bourgeois who were robbed and journalists who were silenced and Buddhists who couldn’t practice their religion and peasants who were starved and boat people who fled for their lives. Were they the “wrong side” too? Like you said, we weren’t in Vietnam to protect them. But we WERE in Vietnam because we saw a common cause between our desire to stop Soviet expansion and their desire to stop North Vietnamese expansion. We made promises to those people, and we failed to keep them, and one of the reasons for that failure was your leak of the pentagon papers.

At the end of your talk after the showing, you asked people to come to your blog and suggest ideas about where the film should be shown and how it could make a positive impact. My suggestion is that you go to Arlington and Irvine and other Vietnamese areas, and you show the film and talk through those issues with people like that journalist. It wouldn’t be very easy, and you wouldn’t get the kind of adulation that you got here in San Francisco, but you might bring about some actual peace and reconciliation.

Sincerely,

Matt Chanoff

You’re featured prominently. Thank you so much for your work.
Rafael and the gang at NYTW

Domestic policy seems to have grown worse, in both of our coutries, since your gesture. And I left feeling, partially, that people don’t want to appreciate what is done in their name; that it’s too much, and too hopeless.

Easier, at some level; to let someone else make those choices, those decisions; to blame them later as needed.

And, as in a game of chess, even when presented with equal intelligence and prospects, we move towards a point of asymmetrical information, by our actions and inactions.

This desire for “unequalness” has lead to disastrous consequences; for example, a friend of mine who served in the medical corps in Afganistan pointed out to me the number of troops we keep alive, sometimes people who will no longer be able to serve society, or themselves, due to immensely traumatic injuries. And sometimes at the expense of the native population.

Yet even the hippocratic oath has a built in desire for truth to be valued only by those valued:

“All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.”

But I am inspired by your conviction, your rationality, and your bravery.

Although I am not religous, you have helped restore my faith in the idea of the, “lone voice, crying in the wilderness”: that all should be valued, all have a voice, and be heard.

And that, though a thorny credo, is ideal that resores hope.

(and good luck at the oscars!)

Thank you for your courage

……………….stay dangerous