Wrong again - quit while you are behind.
The Shawcross Apology
By Stephen S. Rosenfeld
Friday, May 21, 1999; Page A31
I am four years late in coming to the end of this particular story, but it seems sufficiently topical to merit a catch-up. By the story I mean the political and moral accounting that came due for one writer, the British journalist William Shawcross, in the treatment of a sad and salient part of the ending of the Indochina wars, the fall of Cambodia to Communist forces in 1975.
Years later, an era later, not many people have an appetite for refighting the war over the war. Still, there is something of enduring value for us journalists in the way Shawcross treated a chapter of the war that has now been relegated pretty much to the footnotes of history.
My attention was piqued by a particular footnote in Gabriel Schoenfeld's Commentary review of the third and latest volume of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, "Years of Renewal." That citation pointed to a second Kissinger footnote in which, with scholarly restraint marked by a faint archness, the former secretary of state addressed "my gadfly in many treatises," Shawcross.
In the 1970s, Shawcross was a powerful critic of Kissinger's policies, not least as they bore on Cambodia. Hence Kissinger's laconically expressed but obviously pleased observation that Shawcross "seems to have had second thoughts." He was referring to an article of 1994 in which Shawcross wrote:
"[T]hose of us who opposed the American war in Indochina should be extremely humble in the face of the appalling aftermath: a form of genocide in Cambodia and horrific tyranny in both Vietnam and Laos. Looking back on my own coverage for The [London] Sunday Times of the South Vietnamese war effort of 1970-75, I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and their American allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the Communists would provide a better future. But after the Communist victory came the refugees to Thailand and the floods of boat people desperately seeking to escape the Cambodian killing fields and the Vietnamese gulags. Their eloquent testimony should have put paid to all illusions."
"A form of genocide in Cambodia" -- Shawcross's words. Kissinger offers a summary of what it entailed: "All former government employees and their families were executed. . . . The 2 million citizens of Phnom Penh were ordered to evacuate the city for the countryside ravaged by war and incapable of supporting urban dwellers unused to fending for themselves. Between 1 and 2 million Khmer were murdered by the Khmer Rouge until Hanoi occupied the country at the end of 1978, after which a civil war raged for another decade."
Shawcross's apology is generous and unconditional and no doubt marks a personal ordeal and stamps him as an honest writer. But it poses some difficulties not just for him but for our journalistic breed. For he was but one of many journalists who collectively nourished a view of the war that put much of public opinion at odds with the foreign policy of several administrations. Some of them have followed Shawcross's example of keeping their minds open for review of events and newspaper articles past. Some have not. Regardless, an openness to personal review, however commendable, does not alter the political fact that what Shawcross and others wrote at the time had its impact on events at the time. Words can be taken back. Facts have consequences.
In the theory and practice of journalism in a democracy, there is not much of a place for looking back. There is a tyranny of today. We journalists are quick to brandish the freedoms we enjoy. We correct errors on the factoid level easily. But we also cultivate a notion of journalism as history's first rough draft -- a concept that implicitly suggests that later drafts will be more accurate and meanwhile we should be indulged for trying to do our best.
And yet I realize that to take this critique to its logical extreme is to undo the people's right and need to know -- to paralyze journalism and all discourse. You want us to hold our silence until we're sure we're telling the truth? You're crazy. But there are other ways. Keep our minds open. Keep our judgments recognized, explicit and conditional. Make sure our interior channels of choice and bureaucratic scrutiny remain open. Share our pages with our critics. Respect the truth tellers among us, especially those who come by their knowledge by hard experience like William Shawcross.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
postscript: Too late for Hong Kong, and they were royal subjects anyway. But Taiwan is a democracy dude, and worth protecting. Yes, I would volunteer to fight the Chinese if they attacked Taiwan, because it is a threat to freedom everywhere.
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