-Caveat Lector-
Veritas and Vietnam
Gore president of Harvard? What will the antiwar protesters do?
BY SETH LIPSKY
Thursday, December 21
2000 12:01 a.m. EST
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.
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.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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