To the Editors:
Noam Chomsky’s treatment of No More Vietnams? The War and the Future of American Foreign Policy in his article “The Menace of Liberal Scholarship” (NYR, January 2) is almost exclusively as a foil for his broader argument.
Perhaps Professor Chomsky never intended to “review” the book. But if that were the case, he should have said so. Or perhaps Professor Chomsky felt that his ironic advance comment on the book, to the effect that No More Vietnams? is “an important historical document,” one that “gives a remarkable insight into the mentality of those close to the formation of policy,” freed him from the obligations normally incumbent on a reviewer. But, whatever Chomsky’s intentions, no other review of the book will appear in the NYR, his article was laid out as if it were at least in part a review of the book (the name of the book appears under the title of the article), and many readers reasonably will take it as such.
It is in this context that I must reply. For Professor Chomsky will be taken to have effectively damned this book in the process of “illustrating” what, to my mind, is an otherwise generally valid, broadgauged attack on the dominant strain in American social science. As a review, despite a few passing remarks that “the points of view expressed at the conference were diverse” and that “more searching critical analysis was expressed,” the sections of Chomsky’s article that deal with No More Vietnams? can only be characterized as intellectually irresponsible.
To an incredible extent, Chomsky deals with the book through an attack on two of its twenty-six participants, suggesting to the average reader that the views of the chosen two, Professors Pool and Huntington, are substantially representative. To support this biased interpretation, Chomsky quotes selectively from other participants, such as Stanley Hoffmann and Daniel Ellsberg, in a manner indicating that their expressed views generally were consonant with Pool and Huntington, whereas the fact of the matter is that Hoffmann and Pool, and Huntington and Ellsberg were for the most part in diametrical disagreement about the morality, usefulness, and degree of failure of our Vietnam policy. In order to make his points most effectively, Professor Chomsky glosses over the fact that in a significant sense the book is an intense argument in dialogue form about how and why the US perpetrated Vietnam upon the world and what it means for the future. One would never know from reading Chomsky, for example, that:
(1) Professor Pool played a minor, and, to my mind, essentially negative role at the conference: qualitatively, he helped to define a loose consensus on US foreign policy, from which he was excluded; quantitatively, his contributions to the book comprise approximately 50 percent of those, for example, of Richard Barnet (and if it is true, as I argued at the conference, that few took Barnet seriously, that need not be true for readers of the book);
(2) the relevant sections of Professor Huntington’s paper were greeted nearly as negatively (although much more respectfully) as Barnet’s paper;
(3) Eqbal Ahmad’s critique of Huntington’s argument in favor of stability and order in developing countries began with the words “Professor Huntington’s presentations are a mixed bag of welfare imperialism and relentless optimism,” and continued on that level of acidity and analysis;
(4) Stanley Hoffmann, whatever Chomsky may think of his Foreign Affairs style of framing issues, has been one of the earliest, most consistent, and most intelligent critics of the wisdom and morality of US Vietnam policy;
(5) of the twenty-six contributors to the book, at least six to my knowledge have been contributors to The New York Review (Richard J. Barnet, John McDermott, Theodore Draper, Stanley Hoffmann, Hans Morgenthau, and John King Fairbank)—each reader must draw his own conclusions from that fact;
(6) the book is structured (reflecting, I believe, the growing consensus of the conference participants) to suggest serious defects in the American national character and in the processes and organizations relevant to political and bureaucratic decision making, defects that at least in part illuminate our Vietnam policy and may portend more Vietnams;
(7) relatedly, Stanley Hoffmann and, to use Chomsky’s word, “something of a majority” of the participants generally agreed that if we learn from Vietnam only that we have failed, then Vietnam may signify even greater tragedy for the future than it already has.
Before responding to what I take to be Professor Chomsky’s major (almost only), explicit criticism of the book as a whole, please allow me to respond briefly and in kind to his quote-mongering, if only to indicate that the book has a very different flavor from what Chomsky seems to suggest:
1) Daniel Ellsberg: “The lesson which can be drawn here is one that the rest of the world, I am sure, has drawn more quickly than Americans have: that, to paraphrase H. Rap Brown, bombing is as American as cherry pie. If you invite us in to do your hard fighting for you, then you get bombing along with our troops.”
2) Stanley Hoffmann: “The ethics of foreign policy must be an ethics of self-restraint: our moral duty coincides with our political interest…. The saddest aspect of the Vietnam tragedy is that it combines moral aberration and intellectual scandal….”
3) James C. Thomson, Jr.: “And why…is it ‘a bitter truth,’ as Professor Huntington puts it, to discover that probably the most stable government in South-east Asia today is the government of North Vietnam and, beyond that, that it is not only stable but responsive to the needs of its people?…. perhaps North Vietnam might be a more appropriate model for modernization, political development, institution building, nation building, and so forth, than others, and, in fact, might be given an opportunity to be such a model, at least among the Vietnamese people.”
Let me close by responding to one of the few significant, substantive points Professor Chomsky makes about the book, that “an acceptance of the legitimacy in principle of forceful intervention—when it can succeed—”(my italics) was a characteristic feature “of much of the discussion.” Precisely because this is an accurate and potentially important characterization, it is unfortunate that Chomsky makes this point almost in passing. Sad to say, at the least because of its usual consequences in application, the legitimacy in principle of forceful intervention appears to be upheld by almost every major group in our population, by every major power in the world, and, I would hazard to say, perhaps even by a majority of readers of The New York Review. Raise the case of American intervention against Nazi Germany—even as we observe the crimes committed in the process of our intervention in Vietnam—and see how many people reject forceful intervention in principle. The participants at this conference, in so far as they accept this principle, are not perpetrating a kind of evil unique to American social science. Rather, they are reflecting the views of many governments and peoples around the world who too frequently see their interests in narrow nationalistic terms. Pacifists, by definition, may be the only people who reject the principle.
The issue, then, is not the legitimacy of the principle of forceful intervention, but the historical pattern of American intervention. Had Professor Chomsky dealt with the problem at that level, he might well have been able to score effectively against a substantial number of the participants. But then he would have had to face the problems associated with applying general principles.
To argue the case at the level of principle is to obscure the issue for most of us: for those of us who are not pacifists, the “bitter truth” is that the US must learn to be more moral, intelligent, restrained, and responsible in deciding in particular situations when the use of force seems clearly justified. And that decision should be conditioned by the realization that generally the course of history rarely has been “improved” through such use.
Professor Chomsky did not take No More Vietnams? seriously, except at the level of irony. He has allowed both his understandable, if in this context unfortunate, obsession with the likes of Ithiel de Sola Pool and his justifiable antagonism to much of American social science (and the jargon it employs) to color—if not to preclude—considered responses to the substance of the book.
Even more serious, perhaps, Noam Chomsky has raised, by his example, the menace of radical scholarship. I am deeply sorry for that. No group, it seems, has a monopoly on menaces, though I agree that some are more richly endowed, and some certainly have more power than others.
Richard M. Pfeffer
Editor of No More Vietnams
Adlai Stevenson Institute
of International Affairs
Chicago
To the Editors:
It does not occur to Noam Chomsky that one can differ from his criticisms of public policy by dint of intellect. If an intellectual supports the government’s views it must be, so he seems to assume, by some process of corrupting seduction. Clearly, Chomsky, the terror of all establishments, is not corrupted by that particular mechanism. That leaves as an unresolved mystery what mechanism of corruption it might be that makes so excellent a scholar in his own field of expertise incapable of accurately representing the views of those he criticizes. Most of his attacks, says a review of his work in linguistics (American Anthropologist, 1967, p. 414) are “directed against misrepresentation of actual views.” This habit carries into his political tracts, too.
In “The Menace of Liberal Scholarship,” he cites me 11 times, in 6 1/2 of these presenting as my views nearly the reverse of what I happen to believe. Perhaps I may be permitted a reply to a few of the more exasperating misinterpretations.
(1) Chomsky quotes me (correctly and so this point counts as the 1/2 distortion) as describing how the values of political participation and political order are sometimes in conflict. He then asserts that those on my side give “transcendent importance to order”—implying by guilt by association that that is my view. My real view is that only an idiot would pick either side of that issue. Like any dilemma, it is a dilemma. There are times and places for concern with stability and others for concern with participation. For example, as a believer in freedom, I admire Czechoslovak demonstrators against their oppressors. That does not force me to favor cargo cults or Vietnam resisters.
(2) Chomsky says that I am no doubt aware that there were no regular North Vietnamese units in the South in 1964. On the contrary I am aware that there were, any quotes to the contrary notwithstanding.
(3) He says I might agree with my friend Daniel Ellsberg that “we have demolished the society of Vietnam.” I don’t. The only sense in which that is true is the sense in which every modernizing country abandons reactionary traditionalism. Despite the horrifying consequences of the war, South Vietnam is a stronger, more prosperous, more self-conscious country than it has ever been before. It even shows the first small glimmer of a participant political system.
