For Three Transgressions... and for Four

(The following is an address by George Hunston Williams, Hollis Professor of Divinity, delivered in Appleton Chapel in the Memorial Church, Harvard University, during a service in observance of the Vietnam Moratorium, November 13, 1969.)

WE ARE not yet marching on Pennsylvania Avenue. We have withdrawn for a brief season of reflection, not exhortation, in a sanctuary.

On Veterans Day last Tuesday the flag of our nation, the hymns of our nation, the lights on our car, the lights on our porch were all claimed for the hitherto silent majority who supposedly with unanimity back the President in his prolongation of the agony abroad through intensified Vietnamization of our policy there. It is not necessary for us who oppose this policy to argue that we, the non-silent, are the majority, although we surely have many more sympathizers among the silent than successive administrations have granted. It is, in our case, sufficient to think of ourselves as a large, redemptive minority, the bearers, no less than the marchers on Veterans Day, of part, and we would surely say, a most precious part of the American tradition.

Although the Vietcong flag may be seen here and there in our marches and rallies, our most appropriate banner remains the flag of our Republic. If only by a drapery could we draw temporary attention away from the blue field of the fifty sparkling subdivisions of us as a now global superpower to spotlight the thirteen red and white stripes of the embattled and once only partially united original states in order to remind us and all that we ourselves about two centuries ago were shaped in a sneaky fencerow guerrilla warfare that enraged the minuetlike martial formations of the Redcoats. It is an irony of American history, as we approach the two hundredth anniversary of our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, that we should find ourselves as a nation half George III, half Edmund Burke, on the issue of a distant colonial people, who are not even our colonists or distant kinsmen.

The comparison, though of course by no means consistent throughout-the Vietnamese are French and not American colonials-does have extraordinary validity in the fact that the People's Republic of Vietnam has assigned an important place to our own Declaration of Independence and to the paradigmatic role of George Washington in its own formative rhetoric and constitutional documents. Hanoi's ever more frequent direct appeals to a portion of the American people over the heads of our highly elected officials is grounded partly, of course, in their Marxist reading and no doubt misreading of what they construe as the class basis of our protest movement but partly also in their residual admiration for part of America. This is an admiration, first of all, for that part of America which through President Wilson called for the acceptance of the XIV Points after World War I, especially with respect to national self-determination, which Ho Chi Minh hoped could be implemented for Indochina through him when as a young French socialist he sought admission at Versailles. It is a fleeting admiration, also, for that part of America in the midst of World War II (when the French were out of Indochina and when Ho Chi Minh's communist nationalists alone were able to give sustained resistance to the Japanese conquerors) which through President Roosevelt called for the permanent removal of France from Indochina, as of Britain from India, in the post-war reconstruction-only to be reversed by President Truman. And it is an admiration, finally, for that part of America which, in quite unexpected sectors (for Marxist analysis) have in fact become the American hearts of resistance to the war against their completion of the communist nationalization of Vietnam.

WHAT an anomaly this war! Not only is it:

the first war in which our enemies have claimed our own revolutionary and constitutional heritage as tributary to theirs;

the first war to be fought on television;

the first war in which we have had to fight female soldiers and have caused more casualties among civilians than among the military;

the first American war in which there have been publicized person-to-person American atrocities;

our first undeclared war of any proportion;

our first large war in which we were not first attacked;

the first war in which we have admitted to the use of very special services because of the civil, communal, and ideological character of the resistance to us;

almost the first war in which no claim has been made that overriding American interests of security are at stake;

the first large war in which we have had no major ally and to which our friends among the nations-including our now traditional allies such as Canada, England, and France-are articulately opposed;

but also the first war in which we have eschewed some of our most powerful weaponry and destructive tactics even while employing more weaponry of penultimate efficacy than in any other of our wars to chew up the land and the inhabitants, civilian and military, whom we profess to be helping toward self-determination;

the first war in any place or time in which a body of draft-age citizens, not only conscientious objectors to all wars (like many of the early Christians in the Roman Empire), have taken upon themselves a right (hitherto exercised only by emperors, kings, divines, and jurists) to make an individual determination as to what constitutes a just tear.

And yet be it remembered also that never before our America has any nation in history socially, religiously, and through its judicial organs ever tolerated such an extraordinary latitude of expression and action in time of war as in our days.

But it is not on these long familiar anomalies of the Vietnam War that I have asked you to reflect upon this noon in chapel before we face the yet more difficult events ahead. We know that the President's policy of withdrawal through Vietnamization has consolidated behind him and his frighteningly articulate Vice-President a large portion of that silent majority which is to be found in any nation, that silent majority which bears its full share and sometimes more in the great exertions of society in war and rapid social change, that silent majority which generated instinctively those symbols and slogans which bond society together.

In the tragic polarization of the American people which we now sense impending, let us not aggravate the situation by disparaging the civil loyalty and trusting rally-to-the-head-of-State on the part of all those fellow citizens whose instinctive patriotism and whose military and quasi-military formations became visible and audible on Tuesday last. It is our responsibility even more than theirs in the struggle between that kind of patriotism and what most of us would consider the higher patriotism of prophetic self-criticism that the flag of our American commonwealth be neither abandoned by us nor ripped apart in the imminent encounter, even when we insist that the remarks about the moratorium and the mobilization by the former governor of this state and by the Vice-President are, because of the eminence of these spokesmen of administration policy, a more serious aggravation of the frightening moral schism in our society than the introduction of Vietcong symbols by youthful extremists on our side.

Our self-control and our sorting out of licit and illicit actions and sanctions for our position are now much more difficult than in the civil rights movement, Phase I. When this Phase I came to an end with the assassination of Martin Luther King, it was especially meaningful to have the American flag fly alongside the UN flag and the Christian flag in the funeral procession in the streets of Montgomery because the States Rights banner of the Confederacy had been the overt or covert symbol of the opposition to integration then being enforced by the Attorney General, the U.S. marshals, and the Supreme Court. But now in the kindred movement of opposition to the war, enlisting many of the same people and in any case the same kind of people who participated in the civil rights movement, the sanction of the American flag and the plenitude of the Anglo-American tradition of loyal opposition has been purportedly withdrawn from us in sweeing gestures and sonorous rhetoric from spokesmen very high in the Federal government.

While dissent and appeal to America's principles of fair play is called defeatism and even treachery, getting out of the war through the expedient of Vietnamization just because the United States forces are now clearly not winning is generously called patriotism. We who are excluded from the presidential embrace as unpatriotic are going to find ourselves tested all the more perilously as the tragic dilemma of our nation unfolds.

Yet, despite the perhaps temporary inward withdrawal of allegiance to the flag of the Republic on the part of some black militants and other alienated groups, despite the Vietcong flags of some of our fellow resisters (who for their part of overtly anti-establishment and have lost hope for America except through revolution), despite the direct appeal to us and felicitation on our activities over the head of our government from Hanoi and the NLF, we will not waver in our conviction that we rightly march under those same three banners that preceded the mule-drawn cortege in Montgomery: under the UN flag, symbolizing international concern and universal justice, under the banner of the Church for us who are prophetically Christian, and under the flag of our Republic concerned with liberty and justice for all.

Before it became Veterans Day it was Armistice Day. Many of us here can remember the tonality of the original celebration of this day with traffic and all activity stopping at 11 a.m. for a universal moment of solemn silence in recollection of the prodigious sacrifice in resolution that war might forever cease as an instrument of national policy. Those who march on Washington November 15 will be hearing the mulled drums of that other and perhaps mote humane America which had fixed upon Armistice Day not only as an annual tribute to those who had died in the War against the Central Powers but also as an annual reminder of our solemn pledge to do everything possible as a nation to prevent recourse to war. Repentance and compassion are also part of the American tradition.

IN THE tradition of evangelistic Christianity, the confession of sin in repentance is the principal spiritual transaction during revival preaching and hence the principal mark of the ongoing Christian life, even as the Lord's Prayer invites us to daily repentance and forgiveness of sins. It is an irony of what can be called White House religion that the chief spiritual advisor of both President Johnson and President Nixon is precisely our foremost preacher of repentance. Repentance is a religious term which, when cast back into its original Greek sense in the New Testament, means change of mind.

Although Billy Graham has acknowledgedyouthful idealism and even courage in the resistance movement, he does not seem even to be groping for a sense of national or corporate repentance or change of mind and heart; and yet the idea of national or corporate repentance is almost uniquely ours as Christians and Jews because of the prophetic conception of religion woven into the basic fabric of scripture. Accordingly, there have been many religious leaders in our country in both the liberal and conservative tradition who have long cried aloud with Amos "that for three transgressions and for four" we may be doomed to ever more grievous turmoil within our nation and abroad.

The uniqueness of the present conflict in American society is that, despite the failings of many earnest evangelists of individual repentance and moral purity, the prophetic conception of the righteous remnant of a nation is sufficiently strong among religious and secular people alike to enable us to participate in the most significant reversal of national policy on moral grounds ever compassed in so relatively short a time, given the unprecedented magnitude of our goal. Never before has such a large proportion of the population of any nation become so actively involved in reversing the policy of its head of state as is now the case.

When France withdrew from Vietnam and again from Algeria, although there accumulated much popular support respectively behind Mendes-France and de Gaulle, these near parallels to our own proposed action are also quite different in that leadership in these painful disengagement's over there came from the head of government. And in the American Revolution, although there was indeed Edmund Burke, who could see English principles victorious in the rise of the Revolutionary Republic, it was the thirteen colonies themselves who wrought the victory.

As we perceive the uniqueness of the action in which we are now engaged, thwarted though we long seem to have been at the polls and in our pleas from the podium and in the papers, yet are we inexorably swerving the policy of our nation. And as we do this in the streets and at the polls, let us in the sanctuary not minimize or disparage the moral ground on which our government has taken its stand. It is hard to repent if your policy is based on the compassionate abandonment of the maxims of an isolationist fortress American. It is hard to repent if your policy is based on the scrutiny of historic experience and on the resolution not to permit the armed crossing of the Czechoslovakian or any other international frontier through acquiescence, umbrella in hand, in any Munich Pact, however disguised.

And yet that very fixity of high moral purpose under the slogan of no more Munichs has in fact, because of our preoccupation with civil war in Indochina, brought it to pass that ironically precisely the Czech frontiers were once again forcibly crossed at the very moment when there was such substantial hope that Czechoslovakia might prove to emerge for the good of all mankind as an irenic mediator between the Communist and the Western political and economic systems. One can scarely imagine a more damaging consequence of our government's alleged sole rationale for the Vietnam War in terms of respect for present frontiers and national self-determination than the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, alongside our own grotesquely massive penetration of Vietnam and our unilateral determination of its macerated body politic. In our savage defense of "democracy" or self-determination there, most of the natural cells of village communitarian consensual democracy have long since been sucked up into our refugee and relocation camps.

CHANGE in a policy that is seen to have been misconceived and to have proved unjust is not defeatism. In the Church it would be called collective repentance. As a secular nation, suffused however with some scriptural ideals as a kind of convenantal constitutional commonwealth, America is the greater for acknowledging through us, an articulate loyal opposition, that we have unwittingly done a great wrong and must be prepared even to make reparations for our mistake. And at the same time, without illusion, we must remain or become realistic about the totalitarian ferocity of the other side as it emerges exhausted but triumphant.

A national change of mind, an administration change of course, a national admission of an unwitting misapplication of our corporate resources will not with certainty lead to peace at home or abroad. The international enhancement of the prestige of France through the withdrawal from what Frenchmen for generations had regarded as an integral part of metropolitan France within the French Empire cannot serve us as a sure model, because de Gaulle's act was a fundamental change in policy with respect to a partly integrated region whose population used also the language of France.

What we are asking is not merely a change but a reversal of policy, because only by a reversal of policy and the acknowledgment of an unwitting national mistake can we and the Vietnamese be freed. Having eventually come as a nation to recognize that our intervention in Vietnam was not only unwise but also morally wrong because presumptuous, we should not be taken up as a nation with trying to prettify what we have unwittingly done, although we have indeed assumed responsibility over there that we cannot honorably evade. We cannot honorably evade our responsibility by trying to make the Saigon government do what we with them could not. Nor can we use that unpopular government of ex-French officers to cover our retreat and prolong the agony of their people. Nor can we honorably leave those military leaders and their civil servants exposed to reprisals.

But let not the concepts of Vietnamization and honorable peace confuse our nation into imagining that we can construe our intervention in Indochinese affairs since the end of World War II as somehow right, because we have expended so much material treasure and American life in hopefully our last venture in Manifest Destiny. This is not repentance.

In terms of practical politics, given the sinful human condition, would it not be more realistic and hence more wholesome-and, as it happens, also more moral-to train now our diplomacy on the decade ahead and work for as positive a role as possible in our eventual relations to an inevitably united, nationally communist Vietnam? As to what we can mean by honorable, we should be limited solely to our concern for the reduction or hopefully the suspension of reprisals against all of those South Vietnamese who in good faith or otherwise accepted our professions of concern for them. Here we have as a nation a continuing obligation.

And it is just possible, just as two boys in the block who have once fought it out often become the fastest of friends-and there are some very big comrades in the bloc with whom Vietnam would rather not get into a fight-that the united Vietnamese will somehow be able a decade hence to refurbish their picture of our George Washington and our other political forefathers and come again also to respect us, the present-day custodians of their political vision of the Age of Enlightenment. May they and the whole world see in us again, after our ordeals of racial and generational cleavage, as a truly viable, participatory democracy because of what we the articulate and anguished opponents of the war will have slowly accomplished, just as we for our part have developed admiration for the Vietnamese as resolute and resourceful soldiers and have become sympathetic with them all as an unusually attractive people even as we recoil both from the iron ideology of Hanoi and from the corruption and vice of Saigon.

But for this to come to pass, we must repent as a nation what we have inadvertently wrought at such a cost to them and to ourselves and to the U.N. and all that it could stand for. For this to come to pass, we can not speak henceforth of what may be honorable but rather of what may be just. For something positive to come out of this mutual agony; can we not restrain all speech about defeat or victory, except it be the victory of a people healed by its own stripes, by chastisement made whole.

The Lord said through Amos:

For three transgressions... and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they have rejected the law of the Lord, and have not kept his statutes, but their lies have led them astray. Amen.