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PARTISAN REVIEW
the young . "Ho, Ho , Ho Chi Minh . The NFL 's gonna win. " Embarrassed
middle-class protesters had no such certitude. We felt a greater sense of
futility about our actions . But even in our futility we kept hoping our quixotic
actions might " click, " might start an avalanche which would end the war , or
imperialism, or at least the next day's bombings. I do not think that anyone in
the resistance and protest movements felt that the movement would fail.
I remember walking home one evening with Arthur Waskow in 1967.
It
seemed time to move from middle-class protest to resistance and we did. Six
months later I was on trial. My family stayed at the home of the Roman
Jakobsens, through their kindness and the kindness of Noam Chomsky. Six
years before that , in 1962 , I was in the White House , but so far from it . Sandy
Jencks was then an editor of
The New Republic ,
who with Gar Alperovitz
talked with me about capturing
The New Republic
for a special issue on
Vietnam which would tell the Crazies to get out. Jencks put out that issue.
Thirteen years later, $160 billion in treasure and millions in lives, the Crazies
were forced out by the American people, by the impassioned intellectuals like
McCarthy, and by the soldiers who gave up fighting rather than be used as
pawns for imperialism. (The Crazies could not leave without signing their
name in blood with the Mayaguez incident and other postwar bombings.
Their predecessors in imperialism had also left their signature in Hanoi in
1950 and in China in 1949 . The Americans bombed and blew up bridges,
buildings, and airfields.)
Like many intellectuals during the Indo-China war, McCarthy lived in
one world and felt in another. She lived in the elite world that believed
American leadership had taken leave of its senses in Vietnam. Elites pride
themselves on prudence : prudence is a major ingredient for anyone who
aspires to success as an imperialist. McCarthy's passions led her to understand
that the Indo-China war was more than a question of prudence. Her moral
sensibility also led her
to
Vietnam where she experienced the anguish of
societies in war. She was not there as an adventurer or as a journalist. She was
there as a committed person who happened
to
write . Her visit to Vietnam led
her to believe that the American system itself was decaying. Most people in
McCarthy's world did not deeply question the values of the political and
economic system. One reason was that the intellectuals rode a crest of success
in the sixties and they saw the United States as having reached great heights of
consumer-goods prosperity .
Mary McCarthy, so far as I know, was not a victim of twentieth century
American imperialism. Indeed, it could be argued that her personal success
was related to the success of American imperialism.
It
gave her the freedom
and the access
to
come and go as she pleased . She was welcome, as she points
out, atthe best tables. But this fact makes it all the more interesting that she ,
and others like her , drew on their moral outrage, beyond class ,
to
seek the
war's end. Because McCarthy was not content with the drawing rooms of
