Vanity Fair has a tremendous account of Bobby Kennedy’s doomed presidential campaign of 1968 that’s just fascinating in a lot of respects, but I’m most struck by how he was able to articulate so persuasive a moral case against the Vietnam war - words that, but for 40 years, might be repeated today, with the very same resonance.
The first was his November 26 appearance on Face the Nation, during which he characterized the argument that Americans were fighting in Vietnam to prevent Communism from threatening the mainland as “immoral,” saying, “Do we have the right here in the United States to say that we’re going to kill tens of thousands, make millions of people, as we have, refugees, kill women and children, as we have? … I very seriously question whether we have that right.” Then, continuing to frame the issue in moral terms, he said, “When we use napalm, when a village is destroyed and civilians are killed … this is a moral obligation and a moral responsibility for us here in the United States.”
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Kennedy opened his attack on President Johnson’s Vietnam policy with a confession and an apology. “Let me begin this discussion with a note both personal and public,” he said. “I was involved in many of the early decisions on Vietnam, decisions which helped set us on our present path.”
He acknowledged that the effort may have been “doomed from the start” and admitted that the South Vietnamese governments, which his brother’s administration had supported, had been “riddled with corruption, inefficiency, and greed,” adding, “If that is the case, as it may well be, then I am willing to bear my share of the responsibility, before history and before my fellow citizens. But past error is no excuse for its own perpetration. Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom. Now, as ever, we do ourselves best justice when we measure ourselves against ancient texts, as in Sophocles [from Antigone]: ‘All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and he repairs the evil.’ The only sin, he said, is pride.”
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He urged his audience to consider “the young men that we have sent there; not just the killed, but those who have to kill; not just the maimed, but all those who must look upon the results of what they are forced and have to do,” and to consider “the price we pay in our own innermost lives, and in the spirit of this country.” This was why, he said, “war is not an enterprise lightly to be undertaken, nor prolonged one moment past its absolute necessity.”
Amen. Now watch this drive.
