Essay: THE MORALITY OF WAR

"MORALISTS are unhappy people," wrote Jacques Maritain. A great many Americans are turning into unhappy moralists about the war in Viet Nam. It is a new sensation. Americans are accustomed to feeling right about the fights they get into. The majority probably still feels right—but troubled. The President summed up the uneasy moral choice in his State of the Union Address. "It is the melancholy law of human societies," he said, quoting Thomas Jefferson, "to be compelled sometimes to choose a great evil in order to ward off a greater evil." On the...

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