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New voices of reconsideration are heard. Jean Lacouture, the French journalist and biographer of Ho Chi Minh and long an expert on Viet Nam, has now called for "trials" of Communist crimes in Indochina since 1975, when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army. Guenter Lewy, a University of Massachusetts political scientist, fired what may be the opening shot of a revisionist view of the war in his 1978 book, America in Viet Nam. Lewy examines the process of U.S. involvement and concludes that though the performance was unsuccessful, it was legal and not immoral. Leslie Gelb, now the State Department's director of politico-military affairs, makes a persuasive and subtle case in his new book, The Irony of Viet Nam: The System Worked. Despite his inflammatory (to war critics) title, Gelb's thesis is limited and, as he says, ironic: "American leaders were convinced that they had to prevent the loss of Viet Nam to Communism, and until May 1975 they succeeded in doing just that. It can be persuasively argued that the United States fought the war inefficiently with needless costs in lives and resources. As with all wars, this was to be expected. It can be persuasively argued that the war was an out-and-out mistake and that the commitment should not have been made. But the commitment was made and kept for 25 years."
In a sense, the formal foreign policy lessons that the U.S. learned from Viet Nam have been easier to absorb than the deeper psychological and personal meanings, which will be years in unfolding. Says Columbia University Historian Henry Graff: "America has learned for the first time that not everything it attempts comes off successfully. What we regarded as decency, honor and pride were not implemented in the world satisfactorily to make others see us as we thought we ought to be seen. That this could have happened to us is what The Deer Hunter is really all about."
After Viet Nam, John Kennedy's "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship ..." formula rings like the penny-bright, dangerous rhetoric that it was. The old policy of containment is, of course, long dead, as is the corollary view of a Sino-Soviet Communist monolith probing ever outward. It was precisely the containment-monolith-domino view of geopolitics that led the U.S. into Viet Nam. Says Henry Kissinger: "We've learned two somewhat contradictory things. One, that our resources are limited in relation to the total number of problems that exist in the world. We have to be thoughtful in choosing our involvements. Secondly, if we get involved, we must prevail. There are no awards for losers." Anthony Lake, director of the State Department's policy planning staff, uses more cautious phrasing: "What Viet Nam should have taught us is to be very clear-eyed about our interests and the situations we are getting into when we use our military power. It should not have taught us that we should never use our power. We should be very careful about doctrinaire answers or lessons-either that we should have intervened anywhere, any time orin response to our Viet Nam experience-that we should not intervene anywhere any time."