VIETNAM
655
thinking'all these years. And what ... ?-No results? Nothing? Except this
statement? Then what does it mean to issue a public invitation for "some
new thinking?" Wouldn't it have been more gracious to wait until their
thinking has produced something new before issuing statements about the
inadequacy of other people's thinking?
Susan Sontag
As someone who has signed many of the petitions and ads
from which the "Statement on Vietnam and the Dominican Republic"
in the last PR wishes to distinguish itself, I found that statement quite
mysterious. What were you trying to say? Whom were you trying to
appease? Is it people like McGeorge Bundy and Chancellor Erhardt, who
have complained lately about the impertinence and irresponsibility of
intellectuals and writers shooting their mouths off in public about politics
and disturbing the national consensus? I doubt
if
the carefulness of the
statement in PR will reassure them.
The criticisms of American foreign policy voiced in the second and
longer part of the statement in PR merely sum up, in a tone of mild finn–
ness, what is being said about that policy by a great deal of infonned
opinion around the world. One can read the same, and more-I have
been spending the summer in England and France-in the
Sunday
Observer,
the
Guardian,
the
Economist
and the
New Statesman,
in
Le
Monde
and
Le Nou vel Observateur.
That the American presence in
Vietnam and the Dominican Republic is, in most respects, both immoral
and impractical, I take to be a highly plausible, and
responsible,
posi–
tion. . .. But it is the first part of the statement in PR that
is
interesting.
Those who signed it are apparently troubled that many other Amer–
ican critics of U.S. policy do not sufficiently dissociate themselves from
the criticisms made in Hanoi, Peking, Moscow, and Havana. The state–
ment in PR suggests that many who signed the earlier statements are being
naive about the extent to which the Vietnamese war is an international
struggle and not just a civil war, are bestowing at least tacit approval on
the Vietcong, and are indifferent
to
the likelihood of a "Communist
take-over" in Southeast Asia. Even assuming all these things are bad (and
I think the facts lead to a more complex judgment than that which the
statement in PR suggests is the right one), I am convinced that a degree
of political innocence and fellow-traveling that requires the answer made
by the first part of the statement in PR is
not
to be found in the earlier
statements. In short, I believe that the statement in PR embodies a pre–
sumptuous
readin~
of the language of the earlier statements. Undoubtedly,
