When I joined its staff in the summer of 1964, Commonweal supported the war in Vietnam. Just two and a half years later, in December 1966, the magazine condemned it in the bluntest, most explicitly theological terms; “The war in Vietnam is an unjust one. We mean that in the most profound sense: what is being done there, despite the almost certain good intentions of those doing it, is a crime and a sin.” That was more than six years before the agreement to end the war and withdraw American forces, eight years before the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese troops. How did that change come about? How did it happen so quickly—or, in some eyes, so slowly?
In the decades after World War II, Commonweal, then a weekly, could fairly be called a Cold War liberal magazine. To its credit, I hastily add—given a caricature in some left circles of “Cold War liberal.” From its inter-war beginnings, Commonweal stood out among journals of opinion for consistently opposing the twin totalitarianisms of both left and right, and it did not alter that opposition after the defeat of Nazism left Soviet Communism standing. The stakes for freedom and human dignity were too high to disregard the threat of Stalinist expansion into Western Europe and Communist infiltration elsewhere. The magazine supported NATO and military preparedness while rejecting confrontational visions of “rollback” or nuclear “brinksmanship” to reverse Soviet power or liberate its victims. The persecution of the Catholics in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe and Communist China only strengthened this posture. In May of 1954, for instance, Commonweal published “Catholics at War” by Graham Greene, a portrait of embattled Catholic villagers led by bishops and anti-Communist Vietnamese officers struggling to resist the Communist-dominated Viet Minh. Hundreds of thousands later fled Communist control.
That very month diplomats gathered in Geneva to consider Indochina’s future after the defeat of French forces there. Commonweal viewed the Geneva conference’s outcome as a disaster. Vietnam would be divided, and the South would be “neutralized at best, and may quite possibly slip under the bamboo curtain.” Communist China’s sway over all Asia was rendered a real likelihood. The only bright spot was that the new government in the South of Ngô Đình Diệm might “redeem non-Communist nationalism.”
In May 1963, Commonweal still clung to that hope. But, beginning that month, it began to fade. The brutal repression of Buddhist protests by President Diệm and his brother Ngô Đình Nhu had led to self-immolation by monks, rattling Washington and public opinion. Nhu’s wife mocked the immolations as “barbecue,” and in an October 1963 visit to the United States, she denounced as insufficiently anti-Communist anyone challenging her family’s autocratic rule. Plodding up the stairs in Morningside Park to the Columbia University campus where I was beginning my graduate work in European history, I would step on a message scrawled in indelible magic marker: “Madame Nhu, go home!”
By that time, Commonweal’s reservoir of admiration for Diệm’s steadfastness in fighting both colonialism and Communism had run dry. In September, after Diệm’s declaration of martial law and government raids on Buddhist pagodas, the editors wrote, “The question now is not so much ‘If not Diem, who?’ but rather, ‘Instead of Diem, who?’… The issue of the moment is how to ease Diem out.”
The answer came with the American-backed November coup and the cold-blooded killing of Diệm and Nhu, followed by a Saigon carousel of coups and attempted coups, with rival generals rising and sinking while the Viet Cong increased its control over the countryside. “The war in Vietnam must be won,” Commonweal wrote, “but it remains to be seen whether that goal can be achieved in a way which is just, humane and sensitive to human rights.”
In that summer of 1964, Vietnam was hardly the only thing on the magazine’s radar. In the first presidential election since Kennedy’s assassination the previous November—three weeks after Diệm’s—Lyndon Johnson would be pitted against Barry Goldwater. The Catholic Church was paused between sessions of the Second Vatican Council, but intense debates about the Council’s work were not. In Vietnam, American infusions of financial and military aid, of advisors and intelligence personnel, were but a fraction of what was to come.
A pivotal event occurred that August. Washington seized upon a clash between a U.S. destroyer and North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin to launch a bombing raid on North Vietnam and to obtain a congressional resolution granting the president sweeping powers to use armed force in Southeast Asia. Given the questions then and later about exactly what had happened in the Gulf and about the use of that resolution as a veritable declaration of war, Commonweal’s view of the administration’s actions as “carefully calculated and restrained” was remarkably deferential, perhaps protecting Johnson’s flank against more aggressive reactions from the Goldwater camp.
Not at all deferential was “Vietnam: the Roots of the Crisis,” a lengthy article that Commonweal published at the beginning of November. Its author was William Pfaff, later a distinguished analyst of international affairs who wrote an influential syndicated column and essays for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He was also a former Commonweal editor, almost certainly the youngest in the magazine’s history. In 1949, only twenty years old and freshly graduated from Notre Dame, Pfaff passed up taking the State Department’s foreign-service exam to accept an invitation from Edward Skillin to come to Commonweal.
In some respects, Pfaff was a model Cold War liberal. During a leave from Commonweal, he served in the Special Forces. He later worked for the CIA-funded Free Europe Committee and then for many years at the Hudson Institute, the think tank founded by the nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, whose books On Thermonuclear War (1960) and Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962) were often portrayed (or caricatured) as the ultimate in Cold War madness. In fact, Pfaff and Edmund Stillman, his coauthor of three books, constituted a kind of humanist loyal opposition at the Institute. Where Kahn brought the detached logic of a physicist to analyzing the moves and countermoves of nuclear strategy, Pfaff and Stillman drew on history, philosophy, literature, and theology in their critiques of America’s messianic and Manichaean foreign-policy hubris.
That was apparent in Pfaff’s analysis of the Vietnam crisis. It recounted the history of Vietnam in extraordinary detail: the country’s often violent ethnic and religious divisions; its susceptibility or resistance to outside forces, whether Indian, Chinese, French, Japanese, or now American; Hồ Chí Minh’s nondogmatic Communism; Ngô Đình Diệm’s incorruptibility and intransigence alongside an oligarchic authoritarianism that was “mandarin, northern, and Catholic.” Pfaff praised Diệm’s critics for insisting on his failures. But he also called them “victims of the illusion that just beyond the Diem government there was a liberal and democratic solution to the turmoil of Vietnam, an elusive ‘third force’ that would rally Vietnamese yearning for liberal government against the Viet Cong.” But there was no evidence, Pfaff warned, that “the Vietnamese people wanted anything more complicated than to be left alone.” It was a reproach applicable to more than one recent Commonweal editorial.
Pfaff did not deny that the United States had an interest in inhibiting China’s expansion and influence, but he questioned whether that could be achieved by either the current policy or an “overt intervention with major United States forces,” about which Pfaff said many prescient things. The best option would be a negotiated “neutralization of Southeast Asia” that would neither extinguish China’s ambitions nor heal Vietnam’s wounds but at least “buy time and halt the killing.”
I have no recollection of the editors discussing Pfaff’s article, either before or after publication. My hours in the office varied with my Columbia class schedule. But an editorial two issues after Pfaff’s article had a distinctly new tone.
LBJ had just been reelected. The November 20 issue opened with an editorial reflection of more than three thousand words on the notion of a “great society” and the challenges facing the new president. The editorial’s first five enumerated topics—disarmament, coexistence, assistance to poor and non-aligned nations, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia—all had to do with international affairs, no doubt a reflection of the Goldwater campaign’s nuclear saber-rattling and assertive nationalism. The opening of the section on Southeast Asia was unequivocal: “A military solution to the chaos in South Vietnam is no longer foreseeable.… A stalemate is the best we can hope for, while the worst—total collapse of the South Vietnamese regime—looms as a much more probable alternative.” There was, alas, a complication. “With the way the war is going, however, we suspect that only a massive military build-up by the United States, and perhaps a token raid or two on North Vietnam, will be able to bring the Communists to the negotiating table.”
About twelve weeks later, that massive build-up began. On February 12, 1965, the United States bombed North Vietnam in retaliation for two Viet Cong raids that killed and wounded American troops. Commonweal’s editors were considerably less generous than they had been the previous August. Referring to emerging doubts about what actually had happened at the Gulf of Tonkin, the editors now suggested that Washington’s latest justification for bombing be viewed with “healthy skepticism.”
From this point on, negotiations became the center of the editors’ deliberations. Negotiations with whom? About what? And at what point in the fluctuating military circumstances? Hanoi, the National Liberation Front (a.k.a. Viet Cong), and maybe China and the Soviet Union, were apparently clinging to hope for decisive victory. So was Washington. The challenge of getting adversaries to the bargaining table was intimately tied to the military balance at any moment. Among the editors, intense and painful discussions focused on whether this or that military initiative could provide the leverage to bring negotiations closer—or was the talk of negotiations just a disguise for a greater and more destructive expansion of the war?
Week by week, Commonweal scrutinized every military development and diplomatic gambit, every new round of bombing or “peace offensive” pause in bombing. We scoured the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other papers with overseas reporting, the newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek, other opinion journals like the New Republic, the Nation, and the National Review, maverick publications like I.F. Stone’s Weekly. There was a wall of shelves for these publications, and Daniel Callahan, John Leo, and I would constantly step out of our adjacent cubicles to trade highlights of what we had most recently read. James O’Gara and Ed Skillin would join the conversations during daily lunches. Toward the end of the week, we would all meet and sketch the editorials for the issue already in page proofs. We would draft the chosen editorials over the weekends or even on Monday morning, circulate and revise them, and send them to the printer.
In April 1965, amid ongoing bombing of the North and new troop deployments in the South, Lyndon Johnson included a call for “unconditional discussions” (though not, as it turned out, “negotiations”) in a speech at Johns Hopkins. Commonweal was cautiously approving. Two months later, an editorial (“Willing to Negotiate?”) questioned the administration’s truthfulness. “The number of half-truths and untruths in which the Johnson Administration has been caught is extraordinary.” In a column bleakly headed “Defeat in Vietnam,” Pfaff again inventoried whatever elements in Vietnamese society might oppose the Viet Cong. At the heart of U.S. policy, he concluded, was “ideological intoxication.… We incorrigibly believe that because our intentions are pure, the blighted peasantry of Vietnam look upon us as liberators…. Yet the situation in Vietnam has deteriorated with every expansion of the American intervention.”
The ultimate outcome of the war as well as the Pentagon Papers’ detailed revelations in 1971 of Washington’s many delusions and duplicities may tempt one to ask why all the editors’ finely wrought arguments were necessary. But that’s only in hindsight. In the mid-1960s, the editors believed U.S. positions deserved detailed, even if increasingly skeptical, examination. They had resonance, after all, with an instinctively patriotic public and a significant contingent of influential commentators.
William V. Shannon, Commonweal’s national-affairs columnist, was among the latter. A Washington correspondent for the then-liberal New York Post and later an editorial-page editor for the New York Times, Shannon was the author of outstanding books on the Irish American experience and served as ambassador to Ireland under Jimmy Carter. In a column, “A Word to My Critics,” Shannon described his position of straightforward opposition to Communism and his support of America’s efforts to defeat it as “distinctly unfashionable”—at odds, he said, with writers he admired but found unconvincing, including “William Pfaff, my friend and fellow contributor to these pages.” If a genuinely free election could be held, Shannon was confident that “the majority in the South would not vote to live under Ho Chi Minh’s government.”
The magazine’s arguments would have been equally unnecessary if Commonweal had been a pacifist publication. It wasn’t—to the dismay of some readers. In fact, two of its most influential editors in the 1950s and afterwards, John Cogley and James O’Gara, had emerged from Dorothy Day’s pacifist Catholic Worker movement, founding a “house of hospitality” in Depression-era Chicago but choosing to serve in World War II. When O’Gara, in a March 19, 1965, column headlined “Men of Peace,” saluted Daniel and Philip Berrigan as the first priests to publicly disavow the war in Vietnam, he also indicated his own non-pacifist convictions. That disagreement, he added, was not the central point, which was “to insist on the relevancy of morality to the question of national policy and war.” A frightening number of people, he wrote, had come to believe that there were no limits to what could be done in warfare. The Christian tradition has taught otherwise, and “the moral leadership of people like the Father Berrigans will help to recapture that tradition.” (In a later column, O’Gara noted that while he had received nice letters from the Berrigans, most of the mail came from pacifists and was “rather warlike in tone.”)
Just-war teaching was in the DNA of the editors. They urged the bishops to affirm it for the benefit of “selective” Catholic conscientious objectors to the war. Also in Commonweal’s DNA, however, was a wariness of fervent moral appeals moving too swiftly from general moral principles to particular judgments. The journal’s characteristic manner of editorial reasoning was heavily laden with historical, political, cultural, and geopolitical particulars, dwelling on military options, international diplomacy, Vietnamese and American perspectives. Its premise was the urgent need to halt the violence and Vietnamese suffering. (Attention to the suffering and death—and moral degradation—of American troops would come only as their numbers grew.) It did not highlight overtly moralistic or religious appeals. When Commonweal published an ad from a group of antiwar clergy that blared “In the Name of God, STOP IT!” its own editorial decrying escalation also tweaked the clergymen for moralism: “It is terribly tidy to impute immorality to the Administration and to call, ‘in the name of God,’ for it to desist…but there have been no reports that God has revealed to anyone His plan for a Vietnamese solution.”
A good picture of the style and state of the editors’ reasoning can be found in a lengthy editorial responding to a public burning of draft cards by five young men:
Seldom does there occur a liturgical ceremony more impressive than the draft-card burning which took place in Manhattan’s Union Square November 6…. Here was…not another manifesto, but a commitment backed by the willingness to risk five years of personal freedom.
The editorial noted the seriousness and reverence of the “congregants,” even in the presence of hecklers chanting “Drop dead, Red!” and carrying signs that read “Burn Yourself Instead of Your Cards.” (Some of these hecklers later marched around neighboring streets shouting “Give us joy, bomb Hanoi” and assaulted two people recognized from the Union Square event.) The editorial continued:
We have expressed our doubts about the necessity of illegal protests against the war in Vietnam, and presumably burning draft cards falls into that category, though hardly in the same way as draft-dodging or interfering with troop trains. Yet has an illegal act ever been so close to legality—scheduled and performed before an orderly and respectful audience in a public park, with municipal permission and protected by hundreds of policemen?
Unable to overlook the irony that “those hundreds of policemen…were a grim reminder that the day of nonviolence preached from the platform is not yet,” the editors examined the two key statements made by the five card burners:
First, the war in Vietnam is immoral. Second, no individual can surrender his moral judgment to any government, no matter how imposing or even dear to him that government may be. On the first of these points, we cannot associate ourselves with the witness of these protesters. What does their brave act say about the moral aspect of the war in Vietnam?… Since they disapprove of all wars, what particular light does their disapproval of this one shed?
“Our own pronouncements on Vietnam,” the editorial acknowledged, “have been uneasy and hesitant. Of this we are not ashamed; the situation provides little alternative. If intervention and the employment of force were a moral question while non-intervention and withdrawal” were not, “the issue would be considerably simpler. But one can sin by omission as well as commission; the option of not employing force is also a moral question.” The editorial continued:
Nor are any of the issues raised by the Vietnamese conflict—from the protection of those who have fled to the South to the containment of Red Chinese expansion—without their moral overtones. In every case, the horrible ambiguities must be faced and balanced, working all the while in the nearly paralyzing knowledge that at stake are lives, of men, of women, of small children, whose value is incalculable. In every case, the U.S. could possibly be culpable by not acting as well as by acting. Those who have, a priori, decided we can sin only by acting must be respected; but their decision does not help us much.
On the other hand, “where the witness of the five men does help is in their insistence upon moral judgment.”
Nothing, absolutely nothing…can release the individual from making a conscientious judgment on the particular events occurring in Vietnam.… The fact that this moral judgment may be complex and qualified does not mean that it should not be made at all.… The entirely illegitimate alternative is to let it all pass by, to deny any responsibility, to surrender one’s conscience.
As the war ground on in 1966—more search-and-destroy missions, defoliation, use of napalm, bombing of the South and North, and fresh American troops, more doubts about ultimate success and about willingness to negotiate—Commonweal grew increasingly impatient with the opacities of American policy, the silence of American bishops, and the disparagement of dissenting views. Where once the editors had found fault with an antiwar ad for declaring “In the name of God, STOP IT!” now the editors themselves did not hesitate to put the title “Stop the Killing” on an open letter from eleven Vietnamese priests. An article by Gordon Zahn—author of German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars and In Solitary Witness, a biography of the anti-Nazi martyr Franz Jägerstätter—raised parallels between Catholic support for the war and failures of the German Church to oppose Nazism. In September, a whole issue of articles on the war included critical comments from Catholic intellectuals in Asia, Germany, France, and Great Britain. Apologizing for expressing himself “so brutally,” the eminent philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote, “It can no longer seriously be maintained that the Americans are there as the protectors of the Vietnamese people and their liberties.”
The final break came with the 1966 Christmas issue. The cover featured a large-type, all-caps headline: “PEACE?” The lead editorial, “Getting Out,” was the one quoted at the beginning of this essay:
The United States should get out of Vietnam: it should seek whatever safety it can for our allies; it should arrange whatever international face-saving is possible; and, even at the cost of a Communist victory, the United States should withdraw. The war in Vietnam is an unjust one…a crime and a sin.
Once again, the editors insisted that this conclusion was not based on pacifism. “The moral problem of warfare is bound up with the moral problem of the existence of evil. And the almost incredible apparitions of evil mankind has witnessed within the last half-century…convince us there are moments when force must be met with force.”
Nor did they deny the seriousness of the stakes in Vietnam. A Communist victory would likely mean a “rigorous dictatorship” and “bloody liquidation of dissenters,” while a Saigon victory might bring a looser authoritarianism and suppression rather than liquidation of dissenters. An American withdrawal could lead a newly nuclear and assertive China to “tragically miscalculate” American determination, though it was also true that American success could lead the United States to tragically miscalculate Chinese determination. “To measure these stakes against one another, and against the horror of the war, is a miserable and difficult task.” It “involves surveying a host of often contradictory political and military reports; it involves numerous subjective judgments; but it remains the only way we know for men to make moral decisions in an ambiguous world.”
So, yes, the outcome could possibly make a difference, but not the decisive difference needed to justify the appalling destruction of life and treasure—and here the editors catalogued all the lethal force the United States had already unleashed and was prepared to do for years to come—and even then without the assurance of any positive result.
The editorial invoked the just-war criterion of proportionality:
The disproportion between ends and means has grown so extreme, the consequent deformation of American foreign and domestic policy so radical, that the Christian cannot consider the Vietnam war merely a mistaken government measure to be amended eventually but tolerated meanwhile. The evil outweighs the good. This is an unjust war.
What about holding out for the elusive negotiated compromise that might assure the South some degree of independence and protection and “supporting the war only in the meantime and only to this end”? That “makes sense if a negotiated settlement is truly in sight,” but Commonweal no longer believed that to be the case. The problem was that “the ‘meantime’ stretches out into five, eight, ten years. One’s moral and political judgment is rendered hostage to the fanaticism of Washington and Hanoi.”
That hardly ended Commonweal’s efforts. Believing the war unjust only reinforced the importance of ending it. The magazine’s attention turned more to the home front, reporting and rallying antiwar activities, deploring pro-war enthusiasm, and challenging public complacency, but also addressing the slide of radical activists into violence and revolutionary fantasies. Commonweal now defended overt religious appeals and dramatic but nonviolent acts by the Berrigans and others, such as pouring blood on draft records or burning them with homemade napalm. The magazine followed the court cases of these activists and published their views, though not without occasionally distinguishing them from the editors’ own.
It is a melancholy exercise to fast forward and skim through editorials written in the wake of the 1973 agreement to end the war, full of hopes for reconciliation and reconstruction, healing and amnesty, or in the wake of the 1975 fall of Saigon to the conquering troops of the North, with hopes for introspection rather than recriminations and for finding leaders who could learn from the past. A few of those hopes have been fulfilled; many have not.
