I must describe J. Patrick Dobel as a “fanatic.” I do not mean all the offensive overtones that word has in ordinary speech. By “fanatic” I mean only a person who is not open to any revision of former opinions he held, and held sincerely, and at that point held for what he believed were good reasons. It can then come to pass that such a person defensively protects the righteousness of his view by now allowing no forgiveness to anyone who at that earlier time judged and acted differently. In other words, to forgive—no longer to exclude Robert McNamara from our ongoing political community—would be to admit that the author in some measure was wrong, or might have been. Or it is to admit that he too contributed unknowingly to the tragic outcomes for which McNamara and others were also responsible.

Since the fall of Saigon in April, 1975, the United States has been attempting to define a new security role for itself in Southeast Asia. Our ejection from the Indochina peninsula terminated a quarter-century of confused and distorted perceptions of American priorities and interests in the region, so it is natural that it is followed by a period of reevaluation and adjustment. Nevertheless, there has been a clear lack of urgency in defining a new role for ourselves in the area, and the reasons for the delay are not hard to find

Mr. Dobel is right—as a society we act as if the war in Vietnam was just a nasty little mistake. This not only excuses those who, for a variety of good and evil reasons, unwarrantedly perpetuated that war; but, more important, it dishonors those who conscientiously served there and those who conscientiously refused to serve there. If there is any forgiving to be done, people in those two groups must lead the way; they alone know what such forgiveness might mean.

Mr. Dobel is also right in stating that Vietnam continues to lie uneasily on our national conscience. Our inability to explain why we were in Vietnam and why we stayed there indicates the moral limits of our political self-understanding. We simply lack the moral means to recognize and understand what we did there. But then it would be a mistake to single out Vietnam—have we recognized or understood any better what we did to the Indians or that we were a slave nation?

My task is to comment on the political, strategic, and moral implications of P.D. 59, the presidential directive on U.S. nuclear strategy and targeting policy revealed in the media in August. The commentary is of necessity preliminary and tentative, since no document or position paper has been made available to the public to spell out the contents of P.D. 59. The most authoritative text we have is a major speech by Secretary of Defense Harold Brown on August 20 explaining the rationale of the new directive.

Soviet relations with much of the world, and with the United States in particular, are clearly at a low ebb, a fact underlined at the beginning of my most recent trip to the Soviet Union in May. Soviet Customs, always suspicious of Americans, searched the luggage of our Citizens Exchange Corps-sponsored group much more thoroughly than that of the group I had led the previous year. Still, this was the only significant manifestation of Soviet ire we encountered during our stay in the USSR.

After two decades of relative political stability and unprecedented economic progress, South Korea is once again racked with political disorder, civil strife, and student unrest. The trouble began in Seoul in May with massive demonstrations by students demanding free elections for a new government and a quick end to martial law. What followed was a virtually total military takeover of the government and even more inclusive martial law. The initially peaceful demonstrations escalated into grave civil strife, bringing Kwangju, the country's fourth largest city, under the control of protesting youths.