The notable exception was The New York Times, which blamed President Johnson for the "reckless spilling of American and Vietnamese blood." Its editorial also said, "No compelling national interest was served by waging war in Vietnam, and the men who directed the war, including Johnson and his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, knew it at the time."

The Washington Post, by contrast, rallied around the flag. Its editorial on April 30 said, "For the sake of the 58,000 Americans who lost their lives in Vietnam, it is important to recall the large and just cause for which they made their sacrifice." The Post also expressed relief that "the Gulf War cured the armed forces of the debilitating Vietnam syndrome."

To reinforce its position, the Post ran an op-ed the same day by Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, who received the Medal of Honor for service in Vietnam. Kerrey wrote, "We were fighting on the right side. . . . The cause was just and the sacrifice not in vain." The reason the United States lost, he said, was: "We succumbed to fatigue and self-doubt."

Next to Kerrey's commentary, the Post ran five accounts from Vietnamese Americans, every one of them bemoaning the U.S. departure. At least four of the five were South Vietnamese military officers or their relatives.

On the front page of the Post that day, the coverage was similarly biased. The article, entitled "Three Roads from Vietnam," profiled three Vietnamese who eventually immigrated to the United States. All three had been in the South Vietnam military.

Nowhere in The Washington Post was there a hint of another Vietnamese perspective, or another U.S. perspective, for that matter.

Newsweek, owned by the Washington Post Company, was equally lopsided in its coverage. The May 1 issue had two long articles on Vietnam. The first was by Evan Thomas entitled "The Last Days of Saigon." The piece was all but bereft of analysis except that Vietnam was "at once a noble cause and a tragic waste," and "a low moment in the American Century, a painful reminder of the limits of power."

The other article was by--I'm not kidding you here--Henry Kissinger! Akin to having Goering write about the blitzkrieg, Newsweek let Kissinger (he of the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia, he of the mining of Hanoi's harbors, he of the "madman" theory of diplomacy) retouch his own portrait even as he smeared the protesters once more.

Impervious to this day to the more than two million Vietnamese the U.S. military killed, Kissinger had the audacity to say: "One of the most important casualties of the Vietnam tragedy was the tradition of American 'exceptionalism.' The once near-universal faith in the uniqueness of our values-and their relevance around the world-gave way to intense divisions over the very validity of those values and the lengths we should go to promote and defend them."

Still aghast that critics began "challenging the worthiness of America itself, and of its conduct not only in Vietnam but around the world," Kissinger pleads for "a balanced judgment on Vietnam."

I wait for Newsweek and The Washington Post to give Howard Zinn or Philip Berrigan equal time.

Copyright © 2000 by The Progressive, Madison, WI

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