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Paris, she traveled to Vietnam . She went like the European journalist who had
already taken sides. McCarthy felt that the rage and commitment could only
be expressed from the concrete situation . She manifested the lapsed Cath–
olic 's doubt about extrinsic principles of right and wrong. For her, situations
of" rightness" and "wrongness" had to be experienced: Then her rage could
be justified. McCarthy's insights are most powerful when she talks about a
situation in its totality and then describes its consequences. I was less struck
with her description of the people in the situation since she suffers a bit from
cosmopolitan unkindness which assumes that those hooked by the roles and
deceptions of the everyday world are yahoos and fools . Yet when she moves
beyond description and judgmentalism, she brings great acuity
to
the subject
matter and the situation. She understood the moral weakness of Lieutenant
Calley and, by reference, the military's absurd view of conscience. Calley,had
said at his trial that his remorse was "for losing my men in the mine field,
remorse that those men ever had to go to Vietnam, remorse for being in that
sort of situation where you are completely helpless ." As McCarthy says, Calley
" felt regret for things that were not his fault." During the period of the war
theJohnson administration would accost the antiwar movement with political
demands that it criticize the Vietnamese and the NLF for their atrocities if it
continued to criticize the American military policies. Johnson's advisors were
saying that the American antiwar protesters had as little control over the
American government as they had over the NLF. As it turned out, they were
wrong. In part they were wrong because the quality of cynicism, which is so
infectious among Americans who expect immediate payofffrom any exertion,
was held
to
a minimum.
It
is true that there was much pessimism . What
difference do the marches make, or the leaflets, or draft resistance, or filling
the jails? But they make a difference . McCarthy points out that if the cynic is
right 99 percent of the time, it does not matter when it comes to political
action. She recounts the experience of Ron Ridenhour, who refused
to
let the
My Lai massacre pass into the ocean of blood which the war created.
Ridenhour was "naive enough
to
send thirty letters, nine registered,
to
President Nixon, senators and congressmen ." And in his naivete he obtained
the investigation of the massacre. McCarthy inveighs, correctly, against
cynical wisdom, a knowledge of pessimism and immobilization . And while
she is taken with the late Chip Bohlen, a pompous, cold warrior, in ways that
Halberstam was taken with the Bundys and McNamaras (' 'The best qualities
of old-fashioned American representatives abroad were being exhibited in
'Chip' Bohlen's gay and efficient helpfulness"), she was not overwhelmed by
the ruling elites .
Part of McCarthy's new understanding came from her trip to Hanoi
where the Westerner is taught the limits of his own culture and technology.
McCarthy learned rwo lessons that provoked her into a reconsideration of her
life . Perhaps borrowing from her early Catholicism she saw the importance of
