The Unending War

THE VIETNAM WAR WAS AMERICA'S LONGEST ON THE battlefield and probably as damaging to the national psyche as the Civil War. In some important ways it is not over yet. Just a few days of Senate hearings were enough to revive the country's faded memories of bloodshed, the accusations of official duplicity and the anger of the 1970s. Names and faces out of the past returned to Capitol Hill to wrangle and dispute, 20 years later, the fate of American servicemen who did not come home from Indochina.

When the U.S. pulled out its forces in 1973, Hanoi handed back 591 prisoners of war. Unaccounted for were hundreds of men the U.S. believed had been captured alive, most from bombing attacks and covert operations in Laos, who were neither returned nor included on Vietnamese lists of the dead. Washington repeatedly demanded more information, but Hanoi refused to respond.

The number of those "discrepancies" has been reduced to 135, but that was not the issue last week. At hearings of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, its chairman, Democratic Senator John Kerry, wanted to know whether the Nixon Administration had pulled out in full knowledge that U.S. servicemen were still being held prisoner. Melvin Laird and James Schlesinger, who both served as Secretary of Defense during 1973, said they thought so.

Kerry told Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State who negotiated the peace agreement with Hanoi, that "the question is whether we got the full accounting, and if we didn't, why." Kissinger was outraged. If Laird and Schlesinger had held such views in 1973, he said, they had never told him. It was true that more prisoners were expected than were returned, Kissinger told the committee, and both he and Richard Nixon had said so. But there had been no certainty they were alive, for "no confirmed report of living American prisoners ever crossed my desk." To suggest that he and Nixon knew that men were being left alive in captivity, he insisted, was a lie. Possibly, but after Vietnam and Watergate, many Americans are ready to believe the Nixon White House capable of any deception. (See related story beginning on page 57.)