A couple of readers have pointed out that I was unfair to Geoff Garin, Hillary’s top strategist, in my suggestion that he was milking the Rev. Wright controversy on MSNBC Monday. They’re right. Turns out Garin was actually saying it was time to move past the Wright business; it was Andrea Mitchell who was milking it. (I was making lunch, so the factchecking department was drinking wine…) Geoff Garin’s a kind person and on the left; he’s not the type to exacerbate racial divisions.
That said, I want to return to Garin’s writings from college. Yesterday I wrote about his call for violent revolution. To be fair, a temporary mood on Garin’s part, confined to 2 pieces at age 20. But a leftwing radical spirit characterized his work. That is the reason I as a young Jewish lefty looked up to him. He was clearthinking, he had figured out what he thought, he was never egotistical, and he had moral vision (at a time in my own life when I was immature and intellectually turbulent).
Garin often hit a theme I hit today: the need for accountability by our leaders and thinkers for a disastrous war policy–the Vietnam war in his case. And as I do he even blamed the meritocracy for producing the war:
Then there is the problem of meritocracy itself. Do we want, or does the rest of the world need, a Harvard that picks out an elite to do society’s work when society’s work means bombing Asian peasants… [emphasis mine]
Garin wanted war-crimes prosecutions. In 1975, at 22, he opposed the mood of let’s-move-on. When Vance Hartke, an Indiana senator famous for opposing the war, said there must not be fingerpointing over who got us into the war, because it had been started by "desperate men caught up in a process that had a momentum of its own and which they neither understood nor could control"–which is sort of Hillary’s line– Garin wasn’t buying. He wrote:
That way nobody
gets hurt, at least not until the next time around… A conspiracy
of silence will rob the United States of its Vietnam heritage: the
moral, legal and political questions that American involvement raised
but never quite settled.
Beautiful. Here’s another inspired passage:
Most American public officials have never exhibited much willingness to discuss the subject of war crimes in Vietnam, either while the war was going on or now that it is over. The shooting has stopped in Vietnam, but My Lai, free-fire zones, napalming citizen populations, massive bombing of non-military targets, torture, herbicidal warfare and "forced-draft urbanization"–in sum, the tactics used by the American war machine in Indochina–all raise moral and legal questions that did not go away with the victory of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. The war crimes issue lingers, despite the silence of liberal and conservative politicians, and the American future that Ford says he will now concentrate on cannot be so easily separated from the sins of so recent a past.
Garin also wielded a concept of institutional responsibility: "soul searching about its [Harvard’s] relationship to the seats of power." I share this idea–in Iraq’s case, soul-searching by the Jewish leadership and the liberal intellectual establishment that signed off on the debacle. Garin aimed his darts at intellectuals who served "the political and economic elite." He pinned blame on Harvard graduates:
If Harvard ever had a just pride in the role its alumni play in American politics, that pride can not be restored so quickly after the moral disgrace of Vietnam.
Just think how many Iraq hawks (or those who served them) went to Harvard or used Harvard as a platform. Daniel Pipes, Noah Feldman, Bill Kristol…
Garin granted no amnesty to heroic Democrats. Here he is condemning Kennedy for his role in Vietnam:
There is no forgiving Kennedy
the Bay of Pigs, the expansion of our imperialist involvement in
Indochina, his incredibly belligerent cold war rhetoric or his
brinksman handling of the Cuban missile crisis. Nor can Kennedy be
forgiven the domestic surveillance he allowed his brother to institute
or the wiretaps he permitted to be placed. There is no escaping the
fact that many of Johnson’s and Nixon’s most repressive policies have
their antecedent roots in the administration of John Kennedy.
I am of course playing Gotcha here, which is no kindness to a friend. But Garin was writing during a great spiritual crisis for this country, and we are in another one today. Iraq has destroyed my country’s promise in the eyes of the world and mutilated an Arab society, causing untold suffering. Now Hillary, pandering to Jewish voters, is talking about "obliterating" Iran. I wish Garin was working for Obama now, I wish he was using that subtle brain of his, and his evolved values, to help Obama reach out to blue-collar whites. Though maybe he will inject some of his Vietnam ideas into Hillary’s discussion of the Iraq war. She could begin by apologizing.
