Volume 12, Number 5 · March 13, 1969
A Nice Place to Visit
By Frances FitzGerald
Hanoi
by Mary McCarthy
Harcourt, Brace and World, 134 pp., $2.45
Trip to Hanoi
by Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 91 pp., $1.45
What are the North Vietnamese like? A difficult question, perhaps, but it is curious that in all the reams of newsprint, all the miles of television tape devoted to the war there appeared not so much as a caricature. Until Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag went to Hanoi, no American journalist had attempted the subject. During the angry months of the domestic debate over the war even those Americans most concerned seemed to regard the Democratic Republic of Vietnam uniquely as an object of American power. For the Johnson Administration it was a collection (seemingly inexhaustible) of military 'installations,' bridges and harbors; for those who opposed the war, it was, on the other hand, a place which had lost not only 'installations' but whole cities and thousands of civilian lives. In limiting themselves to the 'hard news' of the bombing damage and the peace proposals, Americans who went to the DRVN, from Tom Hayden to Harrison Salisbury, only contributed to this important but nonetheless totally reflexive debate. Like a patient in psychoanalysis, the United States seemed preoccupied with the significance of its own actions.
Review, 3061 words
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