Carrol
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [sixties-l] Fwd: Veritas and Vietnam Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 14:11:59 -0800 From: radman <resist at best.com> Reply-To: sixties-l at lists.village.virginia.edu
Veritas and Vietnam
Gore president of Harvard? What will the antiwar protesters do?
BY SETH LIPSKY, Wall Street Journal Thursday, December 21, 2000
A rare uncomfortable moment in my long love affair with Harvard occurred at the 25th reunion of my class.
A "teach-in" had been assembled to talk about Vietnam from the perspective of a generation. A veteran of the war, I'd been invited to speak but had demurred.
Five classmates spoke of their experiences during the war and the struggle against it. One, Peter Francis Hagerty, told how he found himself on a destroyer headed for the Gulf of Tonkin and refused an order to declare his vessel combat-ready. He was threatened with court-martial, but the Navy "backed down," as he also put it in a written entry in the class report, "when faced with the prospect of an Ivy League Officer rotting in their jail."
Less than a year later, he told us, the ship blew up her forward gun mount, killing or blinding many of the crew.
After the Navy, he went to Vietnam to help a left-wing legal defense team for GIs. While visiting a pagoda in the Mekong Delta, he encountered a Viet Cong patrol. He said he spent hours talking to them about baseball and girlfriends. Later, he founded a company called Soviet American Woollens, to trade with the Russians. Now, he told the reunion with what I took to be a tone of irony, he was forming a company to trade with that other enemy of America, the Palestinian Arabs.
When this was greeted with an ovation, I walked out. I left the building and stepped into the sunshine. My wife and son were frolicking there. I said I'd decided to go home, though the reunion had just begun. We held hands as we walked through Harvard Yard to the Freshman Union, where we got a refund. And then we drove back to New York.
[The rest isn't very interesting so I haven't edited out the >s]
My reminiscence is prompted by reports that Al Gore has been
nominated to be Harvard's next president. It's a long shot, to
>be sure. There are already 500 nominees. Mr. Gore is a
>distinguished graduate and a former Harvard Overseer. But the
>Boston Globe quotes a senior fellow of the Harvard Corp., which
>makes the decision, who says that while Mr. Gore will get serious
>consideration, he lacks academic credentials.
>
>Mr. Gore's friend Martin Peretz, a member of the faculty and
>editor-in-chief of The New Republic, tells me that there's
>nothing serious to the news reports. "The president of Harvard
>is the emperor of Japan," he said, meaning that it is an
>honorific post. "The only thing you can do," he added, "is
>mischief." To which I found myself thinking that one could say
>that about the U.S. vice presidency too--witness the Kyoto
>Treaty.
>
>Despite the temptation to crack wise, however, I find myself
>thinking that there would be a certain logic to bringing Mr.
>Gore in to even a ceremonial position at Harvard. And it gets
>back to my sentiments at that reunion. I've found myself
>thinking during this campaign that there is a fact about Mr. Gore
>that I admire--his decision to throw off the perks of privilege
>and enlist for Vietnam.
>
>He and I were two of but a handful of Harvard guys from that
>generation who made it a point to serve in Vietnam. I've never
>met Mr. Gore. He was class of '69, I of '68. But we both went,
>and were both Army journalists there, he for an Army engineering
>command newspaper and I for the Pacific Stars and Stripes.
>
>On election eve, he told the New York Times how Vietnam was much
>more complicated than the antiwar movement made it out to be. I
>had hoped that he'd explain this in the campaign. He could have
>helped unravel the knot that has since bedeviled our foreign
>policy. It was but one of the opportunities he missed in the
>election, but I can't help thinking how nice it would be if
>someone in high office at Harvard could explain it to the
>students there.
>
>How fitting it would be if one of the handful who did go from
>Harvard to Vietnam ended up as head there. If, in the course of
>things, Mr. Gore were able to get it together for another run
>for the White House, more power to him. And if not, he'd still
>be able to enter a room and have people call him president.
>----
>Mr. Lipsky is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal.
>His column appears Wednesdays.