Todd Gitlin

The current smears against the John Kerry of 1969 and 1971 are, of course, a massive distraction from the question of which American agenda is to prevail from January 2005 through January 2009. In another way, though, the smears are not an utterly irrelevant surrogate for everything that divides America now. Watch the players maneuver, watch carefully, and you will see who they are. Talk about character! Obscured by the obliviousness of “objective” journalists and talking-head blowhards, Bush avails himself of the smears he is too dishonest to condemn forthrightly. Once again, those who supported a dishonest war continue to do it dishonestly.

As everyone must know by now, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has run two commercials in the battleground states of Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin — and thanks to the TV channels that offer themselves for hijacking to the most scurrilous bidder, the majority of Americans are at least dimly aware of them. They may or may not be aware that the charges against John Kerry in wartime are (1) unsupported by contemporaneous military documents; (2) put forward by veterans who have in more than one case changed their stories since 1969; and (3) in the case of the battles that resulted in Kerry’s medals, rejected by the crewmen on Kerry’s boat.

Then this week, the same smear artists opened up with their bigger — as it were — guns. The second SBVFT commercial includes clips from Kerry’s April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads … randomly shot at civilians … cut off limbs, blown up bodies … razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan … crimes committed on a day-to-day basis … ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

What happens during those ellipses is SBVFT members talking about Kerry’s accusations in these terms: “Just devastating.” “It hurt me.” “John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and many of my comrades in the North Vietnamese prison camps took torture to avoid saying. It demoralized us.” “Betrayed us.” “Dishonored his country and more importantly the people he served with. He just sold them out.”

Note well: These bait-and-switch artists don’t dare say that Kerry’s statements were false. The anti-Kerry crusaders issue classic non-denial denials. The subtext of their outrage against Kerry is simple: They are still averse to facing the awfulness of the Vietnam War. What they are really saying with their slanders is that the truth hurts.

Take a close look at what Kerry said to the Senate committee. He was summarizing testimony given publicly at the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation of Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1971, presented by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in Detroit. One hundred five Vietnam veterans testified there. Seventy-one of them said they were eyewitnesses to war crimes of the sort Kerry later mentioned. Thirteen said that they themselves had committed war crimes.

These veterans testified to rape; to torture and the killing of prisoners; to the torching of Vietnamese homes and whole villages. In sickening detail they filled in the blanks — as the Pentagon was itself unwilling to do — to put to work this sentence from a U.S. Army field manual: “Every violation of the law of war is a war crime.”

It is to the Winter Soldier testimony specifically that Kerry was alluding. It was these chronicles of mayhem that he was summarizing. To judge the truth of Kerry’s Senate testimony, read some excerpts from the Detroit testimony.

SCOTT CAMILE: “My name is Scott Camile. I was a Sgt. attached to Charley 1/1. I was a forward observer in Vietnam. I went in right after high school and I’m a student now … The cutting off of heads — on Operation Stone — there was a Lt. Colonel there and two people had their heads cut off and put on stakes and stuck in the middle of the field. And we were notified that there was press covering the operation and that we couldn’t do that anymore. Before we went out on the operation we were told not to waste our heat tablets on food but to save them for the villages because we were going to destroy all the villages and we didn’t give the people any time to get out of the villages. We just went in and burned them and if people were in the villages yelling and screaming, we didn’t help them. We just burned the houses as we went.

“MODERATOR: Why did you use the heat tabs? Did you just light off the villages with matches or just throw the heat tabs in so it would keep burning?

“CAMILE: We’d throw the heat tabs in because it was quicker and they’d keep burning. They couldn’t put the heat tabs out. We’d throw them on top of the houses. People cut off ears and when they’d come back in off of an operation you’d make deals before you’d go out and like for every ear you cut off someone would buy you two beers, so people cut off ears. The torturing of prisoners was done with beatings and I saw one case where there were two prisoners. One prisoner was staked out on the ground and he was cut open while he was alive and part of his insides were cut out and they told the other prisoner if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to know they would kill him. And I don’t know what he said because he spoke in Vietnamese but then they killed him after that anyway.”

JAMES DUFFY: “I served as a machine gunner, on a CH-47, Chinook helicopter with Company A, 228th Aviation Battalion, 1st Air Cav. Division, from February ’67 to April ’68.

“I iced a contingent of Vietnamese peasants chopping wood and I decided, well, if the Vietnamese can fire a round into my ship, then I can fire as many rounds into the Vietnamese as I want to.

“So I swung my machine gun onto this group of peasants and opened fire. Fortunately, the gun jammed after one or two rounds, which was pretty lucky, because this group of peasants turned out to be a work party hired by the government to clear the area and there was GIs guarding them about 50 meters away. But my mind was so psyched out into killing gooks that I never even paid attention to look around and see where I was. I just saw gooks and I wanted to kill them. I was pretty scared after that happened because that sort of violated the unwritten code that you can do anything you want to as long as you don’t get caught. That’s, I guess that’s, what happened with the My Lai incident. Those guys just were following the same pattern that we’ve been doing there for 10 years, but they had the misfortune of getting caught at it.

“I looked out across the field and I spotted a Vietnamese woman peasant running away from the ship. I fired a burst of about six or seven rounds into her back before we fired, before we hit the ground. When I was being questioned as to what happened about two weeks later by a captain in my company, I told him what we did and what I did. We both had a good laugh about it. That was pretty much company policy. Also in Hue, during the Tet offensive in ’68, I observed American fighters and bombers (Phantoms) dropping bombs and napalm into very crowded streets full of civilians. I don’t know how many people were wiped out in that place. They blamed that on the NVA. Also, I was flying tail gun at the time on one mission into Hue, and just for kicks, the pilot told me to spray a house with my M-16. I don’t know if the house was occupied, but the area was occupied by civilians. This was common policy. Kill anything you want to kill, any time you want to kill it, just don’t get caught.”

MICHAEL HUNTER: “I served in Vietnam two tours, the first tour was from the 1st Air Cav. Bravo Company 5th/7th Air Cav. and the second tour was the 1st Infantry Division, I Company, 75th Rangers, Lurps (LRRP) about 40 miles west of Saigon.

“…kids 4 years old, ranging up to 16 years old, came around the fence to sell GIs cigarettes, or candy, or beg for food, they were CSed. And what I mean is they were gassed. This didn’t happen just once, it happened constantly, the whole time we were there and when we were in the base camp also. And when we didn’t use CS out of the grenade we used CS out of the canister round of the M-79, which, if you’re hit by it, you can be killed…

“Bravo Company, 5th of the 7th, when we were outside of Hue shortly after the Tet offensive, went into a village (and this happened repeatedly afterwards) and searched for enemy activity. We encountered a large amount of civilian population. The civilian population was brought out to one end of the village, and the women, who were guarded by a squad and a squad leader at that time, were separated. I might say the young women were separated from their children and the older women and the older men, the elderly men. They were told at gunpoint that if they did not submit to the sexual desires of any GI who was there guarding them, they would be shot for running away.

“MODERATOR: …every person that sat at this panel for the 1st Air Cav. has stated that they would swear, under oath, for everything that they have said.”

JAMIE HENRY: “Sgt. (E-5), H Co., 2nd Bn., 9th Marine Reg., 3rd Marine Div. (September 1967-August 1968)

“The captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel that morning. The order that came down from the colonel that morning was to kill anything that moves … As I was walking over to him, I turned, and I looked in the area. I looked toward where the supposed VCs were, and two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on so I assumed she had been raped, which was pretty SOP, and she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men, around the circle, opened up on full automatic with their M-16s.”

SAM SCHORR: “SP/4 (E-4), 86th Combat Engineers (September 1966 to September 1967)

“Regarding throwing people out of helicopters, I only saw one incident to this … There were five Vietnamese people. I do not know if they were civilians, Viet Cong or Viet Cong suspects. Three of them were wounded, had bandages on their bodies and their legs and their arms looked in bad shape. The other two were older men, somewhere around 50 years old. The lieutenant from the armored personnel carrier and the captain from the chopper helped place these people in the helicopter. He got in the helicopter and took off. He got a couple of hundred feet up and three bodies came out. The lieutenant who was on the ground radioed up to the ‘copter and he asked, “What happened to the prisoners?’ The reply was point blank, ‘They tried to escape.’

“…The destruction of crops was fairly widespread. I was in an engineering outfit. I operated a bulldozer and also an earth mover, which is a very large piece of equipment for removing 18 cubic yards of dirt at a time. When we had to build a base camp or we needed dirt for a road, we just drove off the side of a road into somebody’s rice paddy and just started scraping away and taking their dirt. It didn’t matter if the Vietnamese people there were using it at the time, or if they were going to use it at a future time. We just went in there and got it anyway ’cause we needed the dirt. Along almost all these rice paddies, they have graves on the dikes, at corners of the dikes, and these are the fathers, mothers, and grandfathers of the people who lived near that particular rice paddy. If there was a grave in the way, we just went right through it.”

THOMAS HEIDTMAN: “My first day with 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, I was informed that the nickname of the company was the ‘Burning Fifth Marines.’ Once, just before my first operation, we had a company formation, which means that the entire company who was going on the operation is fully equipped with everything they’re going to take with them, including ammunition. At the time, our company commander was a 1st lieutenant, who was hit on Hill 1100 in April, but he said that we’re going out in the morning and we’re going out on choppers. We’re going out into an area west of Tam Ky. Then he said, “We’re going to have a Zippo inspection right now.” And I would say approximately two-thirds of the entire company had Zippo lighters. We held them up, lit them, demonstrated that they were filled, would burn. Then put them away. He smiled and let it go at that. When we went out, I would say 50 percent at least of the villages we passed through would be burned to the ground. There was no difference between the ones we burned and the ones we didn’t burn. It was just that where we had time, we burned them.”

Consider the setting at the time of the Winter Soldier event and Kerry’s summary of it. The country was still reeling from the evidence presented at the trial of Army Lt. William Calley for murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai on March 16, 1968. The country had read Seymour Hersh’s epoch-making report on the massacre of more than 300 unarmed Vietnamese and had seen the photos in Life magazine. “We intend,” said William F. Crandell, a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in opening the event, “to demonstrate that My Lai was no unusual occurrence.”

Indeed. Decades later, reports of the horrors are still trickling out. The Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer Prize for its October 2003 series about killings committed by an elite U.S. Army “Tiger Force” unit in the course of a seven-month period in 1967. “Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed — their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings,” the Blade reported. “Investigators concluded that 18 soldiers committed war crimes ranging from murder and assault to dereliction of duty. But no one was charged.”

“The object of Winter Soldier,” Crandell wrote in 1994, “was to take the all-too-available atrocity stories coming out of Vietnam and show their direct relationship to American policies … In VVAW we knew as veterans that everyone who participates in war crimes suffers, and we needed to tell our country that these horrible acts were not simply aberrations or psychotic episodes, but the inevitable outcomes of the direction soldiers in Vietnam had been given.” In other words, the war itself, defending against guerrillas, was “a formula for war crime.”

And in a passage that reads like an anticipatory rebuttal to the accusations by the SBVFT, Crandell added: “What relief we found as misled warriors came from confession rather than blaming. We never denied our individual responsibility for the acts we took part in. We were an army that was profoundly troubled by guilt for indefensible acts, and we admitted as much. Then we went further … We invited America to come clean.”

I spoke to Crandell this week. A former infantry patrol leader, he had returned to the United States in October 1967 with a Purple Heart and had joined VVAW after the Tet offensive of January-February 1968. Crandell told me that, in 1971, after an attorney named Mark Lane had included unreliable evidence in an earlier compilation of war-crimes charges, he had been concerned about keeping the evidence to the straight and narrow. “We vetted the witnesses,” he said. “People had to produce identification. They cross-checked each other. That’s why we organized the testimony by military unit.”

And as for the charge that Kerry “betrayed” his comrades, Crandell insists: “The whole point we made was that the war crimes came from above.” Kerry said the same in Washington in 1971. He repeated it on “Meet the Press.”

And yet on Aug. 23, as if nothing at all had been learned from decades of scholarship and journalism, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked former presidential advisor David Gergen whether Kerry should apologize for what he said about the war. He didn’t ask whether Robert S. McNamara should apologize. He didn’t ask whether Henry Kissinger should apologize. He didn’t ask whether Dick Cheney and George W. Bush should apologize for their support of a wrong war. (As recently as his interview with Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” on April 18, Bush repeated the right-wing stab-in-the-back demagogy that what had been wrong with the Vietnam War was that the civilians had run it.) Responsibility has never been George W. Bush’s game. He represents the America that refuses to be sorry, and the unscrupulous John O’Neill does his dirty work as he did for that spiritual guide, Richard Nixon.

Some thought Kerry was overdoing his Vietnam credentials with his theatrics of “reporting for duty.” But Kerry was on to an essential truth about the America that emerged from Vietnam: That duty begins when you open your eyes in the dark face of reality. It is the same truth with which he closed his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 33 years ago:

“We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by this denial, is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more. And more. And so, when, 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say ‘Vietnam’ and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning. ”

“One last mission”: The turning is still in progress.

In the originalist spirit of Associate Justice of the U.S .Supreme Court Antonin Scalia, let’s go to the text. Undeniably the mayor had one thing right.  The First Amendment protects speech. It also prohibits “abridging … the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  There can be no doubt but that the occupants of Zuccotti Park were peaceably assembling and that their purpose was, in the broad sense, petitioning, though some of them don’t like dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on the de facto demands they are making on the authorities by the very act of congregating in their vicinity. As for incidents of violence and other illegal acts that took place in the square, the police were within their rights to interpose criminal justice, but not to sweep the square of tents, sleeping bags and other personal property.  Even one New York Times columnist who thinks that eviction was “to a point … defensible” calls the mayor and police chief Ray Kelly “imperial,” which is not a compliment, even in the Empire City.

But now that Mayor Bloomberg has joined the mayors of Oakland, Denver, Portland and Salt Lake City as agents of dispersal, the larger question preoccupying not only the occupiers but their larger concentric circles of supporters, as well as the chattering classes, is:  Now what?  What’s the relation between the turf and the movement?  Both known and unknown unknowns abound, but it cannot be taken for granted that the expulsion is bad for the movement.  To the contrary:  Odds are that the expulsion — from a place very far from Eden — will function as a pick-me-up, driving greater numbers to the Nov. 17 actions planned by MoveOn and other groups for lower Manhattan and 300 other sites nationwide.

Movements wither when they don’t evolve, and they evolve when they learn intelligently how to avail themselves of opportunities and adapt to changes in the environment — an ensemble of several moving parts (supporting groups, politicians, police). In fact, as many occupants and commentators have pointed out, Zuccotti was already having a hard time managing, and was looking more unruly with the passing days. Although the local community board overwhelmingly endorsed the occupation, not a few residents were annoyed by undisciplined drumming (reportedly by a few drummers who, even after the general assembly voted restrictions, insisted on their absolute right to drum whenever and wherever they liked — an unwitting echo of Michael Bloomberg’s la ville, c’est moi).

Since Sept. 17, there have been so many moving parts in the evolving ensemble known as Occupy, each rubbing against the others in a whole ecology of protest, that predictions are foolhardy. But there’s a good chance that the great sprawling hard-to-pin-down Occupy movement is well along in the learning process and that it can gain more than it loses by leaving the Zuccotti/Liberty campground.

The urban planner Peter Marcuse, a strong supporter of the movement, has cautioned against “fetishizing” Zuccotti Park.  He usefully distinguishes among seven functions of the movement:

1. A confrontation function:  “taking the struggle to the enemy’s territory, confronting, potentially disrupting, [its] operations.”  That means the Wall Street area, for which Zuccotti Park was and remains, obviously, a convenient launch-pad.
2. A symbolic function as a visible testimonial to a line of argument and a way of looking at the world.
3. An educational function, promoting debate and clarification, toward the end of clarifying what the 1 percent and the 99 percent mean, and how that infernal cleavage developed.
4. A glue function, “creating a community of trust and commitment to the pursuit of common goals.”
5. An umbrella function, “creating a space … in which quite disparate groups can work together in pursuit of ultimately consistent and mutually reinforcing goals — … a political umbrella, an organizing base for an on-going alliance, not just a temporary coalition, of the deprived and discontented.”
6. An activation function, “inspiring others to greater militancy and sharper focus on common goals and specific demands  … providing space for … cross discussions among supporting groups and interests, organizing … events in support of … reforms that point [toward] Occupy’s own ultimate goals of change.”
7. A model function, “showing, by its internal organization and methods of proceeding, that an alternative form of democracy is possible.”

Hey, whoever said that organizing movements is simple or mindless?

Marcuse goes on to say that only the confrontation function required Zuccotti Park as such, and even that is far from clear.  There do need to be meeting places, sites where people of different dispositions brush up against each other and stay in touch.  Zuccotti offered advantages — Wall Street proximity, for one — but at a cost:  very limited sunlight, leading one prominent supporter I know to publicly call it “hell’s half-acre.”  There are other public places, even ones with symbolic resonance. (By some accounts, after all, on Sept. 17, when the occupation began, Zuccotti Park wasn’t the first choice — it was Plan B.)  As Peter Marcuse writes, “the defense of the permanent and round-the-clock occupancy of a specific space can lead to a fetishization of space that make  the defense of that space the overwhelming goal of the movement, at the expense of actions furthering the broader goals that that space is occupied to advance.”

As for the model function, the utopian, communitarian spirit, it can thrive in many spaces. Now that the symbolism has been established in the public mind, some token encampment through the winter probably makes sense, but Liberty Square can be movable; Zuccotti has no patent on liberty.  Anyway, it would be foolhardy to think that the tent-city way of life Zuccotti has promoted is a way of life that the 99 percent cottons to.  It’s that 99 percent that needs, continually, to be assured that the movement speaks to and for them.

All the old questions remain. What of demands, programs, platforms? How will the movement relate to an election year? How can it contain violent outbursts?  How can it maintain itself over time? How can the leaders who have emerged through the occupations cultivate their skills and withstand all the pressures that realities place on leaders?  These are not problems that can be solved by turf.  They are the givens, the questions that coil at the heart of any movement; and they are, and remain, ours.

Then the marches stopped.

They stopped partly because the antiwar leadership was barely cobbled together, with some conspicuous quarters reluctant to speak harshly of the multi-murderous Saddam Hussein. The movement’s drawing power was limited from the start, and then, once the war was on in earnest, it felt — realistically — that it had run smack against the brick wall of George Bush’s manic pigheadedness. Demonstrators are unlikely to invest their energies in what look from the start like very lost causes. And the demonstrations also tailed off because the mainstream media didn’t pay attention — refused to pay attention. The story line they were promoting was: America kicks ass, new era begins!

Do not neglect the new wars’ insulation from the American population, either. A volunteer army, disproportionately staffed from rural areas, is an army insulated from the more vocal, influential sectors of the country. By the same token, drone wars in Yemen and Somalia take place behind thick curtains, with some effectiveness against hated jihadis, and the offstage moans are muffled. For the vast American majority, ordinary life goes on — business as usual. For that matter, too, it’s troubled business, with many people beleaguered by what feel like the more urgent cares of joblessness and eviction. Paradoxically, perhaps, a more prosperous country is better available to resist its own wars.

But also, in the new century, once war was on in earnest, the demonstrations dwindled because many former or potential demonstrators gravely doubted how nice the outcome would be if the expeditionary forces left — or at least, lacking a tragic sense, downplayed the human costs of withdrawal. This was true for Iraq as it had earlier been true for Afghanistan, where the pro-war momentum of October 2001 was fueled, at the start, by the direct connection of the Taliban with al-Qaida. But once al-Qaida was on the run (mostly over the border to Pakistan, as was predictable) it was hard to summon the will, the clarity, the intensity, the downright buoyancy of a street movement when one harbored a fear — sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not — that the victors in the case of an American defeat would be foul. In Afghanistan, they would be the burqa-enforcing Taliban committed to barring girls from school. As for “Iraqi Freedom,” Iraq with a zeroed-out American presence looked more like civil war between Shia fanatics and Baathist holdovers, garnished with torture.

During the Vietnam War, when the antiwar movement was challenged with the question — meant to be rhetorical — How can we leave? our common reply was, On ships. In the case of Vietnam, that was the right and sufficient answer. The aftermath of that hideous war was always going to be awful — and it was going to be the same kind of awfulness whether the United States accepted elections to unify the country in 1956, as the Geneva Accord required; or the U. S. had withdrawn in 1963, when Kennedy flirted with the idea; or not until 1975, as it came to pass. The Vietnamese Communists were always going to win, were going to reunify the country, were going to install a Communist government in the South, were going to set up so-called reeducation camps and the whole apparatus of dictatorship. They would have done so, given the chance, in 1956 or 1963, though if the war had ended then, some 3 million more Vietnamese would have stayed alive.

The domino theory that served to rationalize the Indochinese wars for years was always a fraud. The dominoes were the former French colonies of Indochina — and no more. As Vietnam went, so went Laos — and, horrendously (in no small part because America dragged Cambodia into the war), the Khmer Rouge genocide that was, in fact, opposed and finally halted by the Vietnamese army itself. The scare scenario in which all Southeast Asia would be dragged over the precipice — Thailand! Indonesia! Malaysia! Australia! — was always nothing more than a phantasmagorical nightmare in the fevered brains of Cold War fanatics.

By contrast, the case of Afghanistan, what was originally a just war of self-defense against al-Qaida — indeed, a “war of necessity” — devolved into an incoherent morass. Where was the necessity to shore up the corrupt, feckless government of Hamid Karzai facing a porous border and official Pakistani connivance? Was the Afghanistan intervention supposed to avert a 21st-century cascade of dominoes? We couldn’t leave, it was said, because leaving would empower jihadis. But on those grounds, should the United States have stayed in Lebanon in 1983? Ronald Reagan didn’t think so. And would a NATO pullout encourage violent jihadis in other Muslim countries any more than an American occupation of Afghanistan? Were millions of dollars and thousands of lives needed to crush a few hundred remnants of al-Qaida, obviously a stateless network already regathering in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen?

As for Libya, hardly any opponents of the NATO war are enamored of Col. Gadhafi, but the war is largely out of sight and the bodies don’t wear NATO uniforms. America’s air bombardment of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia came into the sights of an antiwar movement that had already reached critical mass while thousands of American soldiers were being killed. So far as NATO is concerned, this war is all bombardment, and the rebels have a very good press.

Anyway, “out” is not a plan — it is a goal, though not a utopian one. Pull out and there will still be avoidable suffering. As always in the actual world, there is that nettlesome problem of ends and means. Some ends justify some means. Just as the mindless apostles of purification claimed clean hands on the way in, there is sometimes a tendency to say that since we, the antiwarriors, aren’t the ones who got in, it’s not our responsibility to explain how to get out. Since we shouldn’t have been there in the first place, our hands are clean. But there are no clean hands — for anyone — on the way out. In a fine essay in a 2009 book edited by Michael Walzer and Nicolaus Mills, “Getting Out,” the Indian political scientist Rajiv Bhargava argues quite carefully that if the British had stayed in India one more year, and done the right things, the subcontinent could well have been spared the horrible war of partition that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

The military attacks now underway, in Libya and elsewhere, will mainly be fought by elite units — Special Forces, Navy SEALs, drone commanders — operating from far-flung American bases, without any civilian call-up. Any revulsion by well-informed citizens against what they do is counterbalanced by popular satisfaction at their successes, by their virtual invisibility, and the unpleasantness of their intended targets. These are not recipes for popular commotion — let alone opposition.

Todd Gitlin’s most recent books are “The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election” (with Liel Leibovitz), and a novel, “Undying.”

First the good ship Harriet Miers was torpedoed after movement conservatives rose up in righteous revolt (but for James Dobson, who was whispered who knows which sweet nothings to keep him in line). Then the cleanest of prosecutors galloped in, wearing the whitest of hats and astride the whitest of horses, as investigating judges have done in recent years to take down Italian corruption when political parties were on the take and journalists had more amusing fish to fry. Patrick Fitzgerald alleged numerous lies on the part of Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s “Cheney,” and couldn’t say whether Cheney himself was culpable in the White House campaign to smear Joseph Wilson, a conscientious objector to their war campaign. In the process, Fitzgerald grazed awfully close to the vice president and simultaneously decided to keep a Washington grand jury in business while he looks into a whole stud farm of Augean stables: Karl Rove’s, above all, but also the Italian secret services that in 2002 colluded with who knows whom to circulate forged Nigerien documents that helped Bush ease his way into the calamitous Iraq war. If it wasn’t bad enough for Bush that Libby was out, Fitzgerald let it be known that he was not necessarily done cleaning out bad guys. And to add insult to injury, along came Bush’s once-staunch ally, Silvio Berlusconi, his own reelection campaign looming nigh, to declare that in 2003 he tried to talk Bush out of going to war against Saddam Hussein. Berlusconi has been telling this story for at least a year. So much for the fervor of Bush’s “coalition of the willing.”

Meanwhile, Bush had to say farewell to the pliable Alan Greenspan, durable keeper of the Fed and sprinkler of holy water on Bush’s immense deficit pileup. The president then decided to go respectable with Ben Bernanke as the replacement rather than go wild on the supply side with somebody else. Bush’s dreams of dragging Social Security into the quagmire of privatization and consigning the inheritance tax to eternal hell are blasted.

Piling up in the background were a heap of other October surprises: Tom DeLay’s appointments with Dallas prosecutor Ronnie Earle, Bill Frist’s appointments with financial investigators, Jack Abramoff’s appointments with prosecutors hither and yon (and who knows which of his cronies are facing their own showdowns), and New Orleans’ many appointments with preventable misery and loss. Corruption and negligence have become the hallmarks of an administration that promised to install honor and efficiency where Democratic rascality and moral slovenliness governed before. Even senators of his own party have broken with Bush over the White House’s laissez-faire policy toward torture.

Non-surprises also served to dash the president’s aura of competence. There was that nasty little number: “American Deaths in Iraq Number 2,000.” There was Bush’s approval rating at least provisionally stuck on the wrong side of 40 percent. If Bush was still doing Bible study, he might have paid close attention to the Pharaonic plague chapters of Exodus.

No surprise, then, that George W. Bush’s administration looks, this week, to be held together more by spit than cement. The lame duck quacks like a lame duck and walks like a lame duck so what else could it be? Presidents’ second terms have a way of leaving a sick taste in their mouths, not to mention the mouths of many others, but it’s hard to recall another administration whose second term has unraveled so far so fast.

Yet Bush is not without resources. His nomination of Samuel Alito to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court may prove a stroke of intelligence in winning back offended movement conservatives, pundits and think-tankers who want a reliable judge. In any event, the nomination exhibits Bush striving to get back in charge — or look as though he’s already there. Stubborn as always, he resists with aplomb the calls, even from within Republican ranks, to clean up his inner circle. A man not devoid of cunning, even with Rove distracted, he prides himself on staying his course even when there is no obvious one. Bulldozer steadiness has worked for him before. (Perhaps it’s the only thing that’s worked for him before.) Blessed with a rock-hard faith in himself and whatever voices stay ringing within his ears as the likes of Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson bail out, Bush plunges on.

There is, however, some rational basis for his monumental self-confidence. He has long understood that politics is rarely a contest for ideological preeminence, lasting glory or a dare of the universe. Far more deeply and often it amounts to a crude contest between winners and losers. Politics is a zero-sum game. Schadenfreude may be fun, but it doesn’t translate into victory. And victory is the only prize that matters.

Bush must know, in other words, that whatever liberals may wish and however fervently they may wish it, the party in power will not fall of its own weight. Its seams can open up into gulfs — chiefly between the Christian right and those whose hearts beat loudest for deregulation and tax cuts — but still the imposing Republican Party machine rolls on, in proud possession of every branch of the national government and the midterm elections a long, long year away. Bush can squander his mandate, can fail to cash in on his claimed accountability moment, but his enemies, the Democrats, cannot win power back by default, or indictments, alone.

They can only win power back the hard way, the way the Republicans did over the last three decades — by merging the energies of movement and party, stitching together alliances, mobilizing ideas and running attractive candidates.

During the 2004 election campaign the Democrats demonstrated a (for them) unprecedented ability to move activists into practical politics, to raise money and discipline themselves. It was an impressive — and insufficient — effort. Still, the commitment they mobilized soon moved Howard Dean into the Democratic leadership on a platform of building up the party’s withered infrastructure. One measure of Dean’s success was that by the time the party made its choice, all his rivals were beating the drum for internal reform as well. No sooner was Dean in charge of the party than he began to deliver — to universal applause. Even Democrats who deplored what they consider his foot-in-mouth disease were thrilled that, at long last, the national party had started to put in place, state by state, a funded national staff. It shouldn’t have been a breakthrough to ensure that the party mustered permanent staff in transparently pivotal states like Ohio. Incredibly, it was.

At the moment, the Senate Democrats are off to a rollicking comeback, taking the Senate floor yesterday under Minority Leader Harry Reid to blast back at Republican tyranny over Congress by brandishing an obscure rule to insist that the Senate debate the prewar intelligence hanky-panky it somehow has failed to investigate. The Democrats may not know what to do about the war — a thorny conundrum indeed — but at least they are refusing to let GOP malfeasance off the hook.

But the next steps will be more challenging still. The Democrats have to offer a national face for next year’s midterm elections. House races in particular are local. Americans may deplore the party in power, but they also deplore the party out of power. “The mess in Washington” doesn’t look to them like a mess with a single author — it looks like a mess for which both parties are culpable. Democrats have to offer convincing reasons for tossing out the party in power. Lacking those reasons, enough of the electorate may simply decide to sit on their hands and keep the Republicans in charge of all the levers of power.

The Democrats’ most impressive sign of life is that, across the center-left political spectrum, they now recognize a need to put forth a national program — their own “Contract With America.” It’s far from sufficient to talk incessantly about the value of “reframing the debate,” as if the losing party suffers primarily from flimsy public relations. It won’t do any longer to thrash away against “the mess in Washington.” They have to look like a remedy for the mess. While American politics are stubbornly local — the views and tones that win elections in New York are not necessarily the ones that win in Nebraska — Democrats have to find their own heart of brightness.

One formidable barrier they face is their own inertia — the weird, self-reinforcing passivity that makes them look spineless and inauthentic, too calculating by half. They need more of the daring that Reid showed this week.

(The unanswerable and decisive argument put forth by the Republicans in 2004 was that even if you didn’t always agree with Bush, at least you knew where he stood. In countless ways this mood failed to correspond to the truth, but never mind — Bush played a decisive president on TV, and that was enough to make up a critical margin of minds.)

On Iraq, the Democrats cannot permit themselves to stay their own wobbly course. With the country torn up about the ongoing debacle in Iraq, the Democrats have to sound like a governing party for a change. They have to recover from their appalling collapse of 2002-03, the one that led the party’s senators to split down the middle on Bush’s war resolution. As November 2006 draws closer, semi-dissident Republicans will make gestures in favor of partial troop withdrawals. If Bush continues to languish in the polls, they will pretend not to be from his party.

Democrats have to face the fact that Bush’s recklessness has produced a situation in Iraq where there are no good options. Still, they should, at the least, renounce permanent bases and peg troop withdrawal to the achievement of substantive goals. The time is long past when the Democrats can delude themselves that they’ll ingratiate themselves with the country by intoning in chorus that they support the troops while ducking the debate about how to do precisely that.

On the economy, with all the Republican debts coming due, Democrats have to stick up for rolling back Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy.

On the court, Bush having nominated a more judicious version of Antonin Scalia, the Democrats have a rendezvous with filibuster. Friendly extremism in the pursuit of states’ rights is one hell of a vice.

The only way the Democrats can win back at least one house of Congress is to look and sound like fighters. And the only way to look like fighters and sound like fighters is to be fighters. Whining about the Republicans’ structural advantages — real as they are — will not do. Whining about media skew and inattention — real as they are — will not do. Bush is not only a lucky politician but the chief of an apparatus of rule. He has three more years in the White House and it will take more than the force of gravity to bring the whole corrupt, thoughtless, mendacious lot down.

Nader’s narcissism has metastasized to such proportions that he came forward to announce his candidacy without being able to brandish a single one of the celebrities who surrounded him in 2000 — not Michael Moore, not Tim Robbins or Susan Sarandon, not Patti Smith. In fact, more important, he cannot offer the Green Party, whose nomination he disdains to seek — so much for his claim that he is the principled champion of third parties and their indispensability in American history. To the struggle against “corporate-occupied territory,” Nader offers only himself. La troisième partie, c’est moi. He has gone way over into flying saucer territory. He occupies an Area 51 of his own. Will he make the headquarters of his campaign in Roswell, N. M.?

The third-party candidate of 2000 now runs as the one-man answer to “the two-party duopoly.” This year he adds a new wrinkle, a new enemy: “the liberal intelligentsia” (referring to them twice during his interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press”). Nader admits that this enemy has been striving to talk him out of his mad intent to run as an independent this year. Professing in his interview to believe in the fantasy that “we have no major enemy left in the world,” he substituted another menace: “corporate pornography directed toward children.” He seems to want to dip into the murky waters of the culture war. It’s a hell of a way to make sure that you’re an unforgettable figure in American history.

How grave Nader’s decision proves to be will, of course, depend on how the brutal face-off of 2004 shapes up. Florida, New Mexico and New Hampshire are only three of the states where even a weakened Nader might make a difference comparable to his decisive margin in 2000. Accordingly, John Kerry has shrewdly said that he wants to appeal to those who followed Nader in 2000.

Judging from proliferating anti-Nader Web sites, open letters from former supporters, a don’t-run editorial in the Nation, and other such appeals, Nader can scarcely take for granted the 2.74 percent of the voters he attracted in 2000. But there is a permanent margin that he can speak to — a magic one-digit number. His 2.74 percent is almost exactly what California’s Green Party candidate, Peter Camejo, drew in the strange California gubernatorial recall race of 2003. Even a third of that vote might conceivably tip a state or two.

Nader, of course, has grander designs than being a fraction of his previous fraction. Making his announcement, Nader referred to the “100 million nonvoters” he thinks he speaks to and for. It’s especially peculiar to think that nonvoters are counting on him at a time when turnout has risen, sometimes impressively, in almost every Democratic primary and caucus so far this year. But leaving that aside, if you take a hard look at the turnout argument, you see that the legions of nonvoters are the spectral cavalry of the marginals — the phantasmagorical saviors waiting in the canyons. Nader invoked them in 2000. Howard Dean invoked them this year. They are an argument of last resort in political fantasies.

But here’s the truth: There’s no evidence that nonvoters differ from voters in any radical ideological way. They are not bashful saints biding their time as they hold out for perfection. They are mainly low-income people who want practical results. Their cynicism about politics comes from the lack of precisely that, practical results. They don’t want prophecy or a new party. They have no more faith in Ralph Nader’s version of the “liberal intelligentsia” than in any other.

If those who suffer most from corporate domination were vulnerable to Nader’s appeal, why was his black vote in 2000 so puny — only 1 percent in Washington, D.C., for example, where Nader won 5 percent overall? A Green vote was a luxury of those who didn’t need politics to improve their material lives. In fact, Nader’s base is a sliver of upper-middle-class whites — a sliver of “the liberal intelligentsia,” you might say — disproportionately located in states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and New Hampshire, those with the smallest black populations. Here’s a headline you didn’t see in 2000 but remains evergreen in 2004: Nader Undermines Minorities.

A final point: The Green Party, say what you will, has a fundraising base and is on state ballots. But Nader is running as an independent, not as a Green, not as the candidate of any party. He needs thousands of signatures to get on 50 state ballots. Petitioning is an expensive business. Nader has no organization. He’s starting late. Who will pay? Who will pound the pavement and make calls for him? Who will sign his petitions? In 2000, there were Republicans who came to the aid of local Green candidacies. And this time? Will Karl Rove and his fundraising Rangers limit their splurge? Will they find a warm place in their hearts for Nader’s effort to undermine yet another Democratic candidate? Reporters in search of springtime stories, start your investigations.

So, when all is said and done, leave aside Nader’s wishful thinking — his hallucination of ideologically aroused masses, his prayer that the Electoral College system might vanish. What Nader’s decision amounts to is not logic but an exercise in monomania by a man who once accomplished great things and now believes that whatever he claims to accomplish is great by virtue of the fact that he claims it. Quixotic Nader, whose first run was tragedy, now tries farce. It’s not funny.

But then, Henry Kissinger has more lives than any Laotian peasant or Chilean socialist who happened to stand in the way of his designs during the years when he administered American foreign policy with B-52s and coup plans. Having sequestered his official papers at the Library of Congress for 50 — that’s 50 — years and published well-received memoirs that cannot easily be corrected precisely because that valuable evidence is locked away in a vault, he now steps forward with an unsurprisingly self-serving book, “Does America Need a Foreign Policy?” — one with the obviously intended answer: yes, and guess whose? Having supervised an apparently badly needed foreign policy for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger now capitalizes on his self-perpetuating repute to duck any question that might cast doubt upon the worthiness of the tough-guy realism he not only fancies but personifies.

Mainly he gets away with it. He got away with it in 1971 when refusing to say whether the Nixon administration had made any estimates of Indochinese casualties (an episode related in Tom Wells’ new biography of Daniel Ellsberg, “Wild Man”), and he still gets away with it. For more than 30 years now, when the American press comes around Henry Kissinger — that’s Dr. Kissinger to you — a giant sucking sound can be heard. While Robert S. McNamara was mauled (by this writer, among others) for his disingenuous and insufficient Vietnam apology, Kissinger is steadfastly unrepentant — he sneers at apologies, in fact — and weaves his way from talk show to talk show unscathed. He scorns Clinton for making post-Cold War apologies and congratulates Nixon for “negotiated extrication from Vietnam” while preserving a reputation for straightforward talk. He chides our Vietnam-era NATO allies for holding themselves “aloof” from America’s war, and no one ever tells him that this is hardly the right word for the strong opposition that came forth from, among others, Charles de Gaulle (the subject of some of McNamara’s most interesting pages).

From Kissinger, gravitas and a gravely voice are mistaken for wisdom. His clichis, when issued in suitably ex cathedra tones, strike journalists as profundities. The ostensible literary critic Norman Podhoretz once raved about Kissinger’s prose style, and now even the liberal columnist Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, calls him a good writer. But in the current book, barely a page passes without some inept, ungrammatical or fatuous formulation — a subliterary phenomenon unremarked upon by any reviewer I’ve read. I open four of Kissinger’s pages at random and find these contortions, confusions and clichis:

The Cold War strategies sought to manage the conflict of the nuclear superpowers by the policy of containment of the Soviet Union.

In fact, India’s conduct during the Cold War was not so different from that of the United States in its formative decades.

Or is the rush to Tehran an obstacle to a rapprochement which is in itself not in dispute?

The West’s relations with Russia have always been laced with ambivalence.

If Kissinger passes over a subject, most of his reviewers have no objection. About Angola, Kissinger’s single reference is as follows: “The civil war in Angola has lasted for thirty-eight years.” As if eight of those years were not on his watch, when the U.S. backed the anti-Russian side (which is still at war) strictly because it was anti-Russian. By contrast, Warren Cohen of the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, distinguishes himself from other reviewers by noting that Kissinger’s tendentious account of Chile in the years between 1970 and 1973 omits mention of the kidnap and murder of Chilean chief of staff Rene Schneider in 1970, a move that opened the way for Pinochet’s coup against Allende.

In his current, largely unreviewed book, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens is particularly convincing when he marshals evidence that Kissinger, who chaired the top covert action committee in Washington, was brain-deep in the planning of this grave offense to democratic government. He cites (as Kissinger does not) Kissinger’s declassified memorandum of his 1976 conversation with Pinochet, in which, by his own account, Kissinger said to the dictator: “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going Communist.”

In his own book, Kissinger takes time from his general theory of foreign policy to congratulate Pinochet for his economics and to commiserate with him on his long-delayed arrest for human rights abuses in Britain in 1998. In an inadvertently comic observation, Kissinger declares that he himself ought to know what human rights agreements are for, having himself been their virtual founding father when he worked up the Helsinki Accord of 1975. So he knows that human rights initiatives were intended as “primarily a diplomatic weapon to use against Soviet pressure on their own and captive peoples, not as a legal weapon against individual leaders before courts of countries not their own.” Beware the reckless gall, the soft-headedness of a Spanish judge or a tribunal in The Hague taking literally a treaty’s words about human rights — taking them at face value as a universal commitment!

Thus does Kissinger now oppose the trials of torturers and war criminals outside their homelands, insisting (in his book and in a Foreign Affairs article drawn from it) that “we must not allow legal principles to be used as weapons to settle political scores.” The globe-roaming Kissinger puffs himself up with a pose of high-mindedness in defense of national sovereignty. His own self-interest in stopping such trials fairly screams between the lines. On May 28, after all, he was issued a subpoena by a French judge interested in his testimony as to the disappearance of five French citizens in Chile under Pinochet — a subpoena on which he turned his back. As Barbara Crossette recently wrote in the New York Times, “The arm of the law is growing longer and the world smaller for national leaders and others accused of atrocities.” Indeed. Which is precisely Kissinger’s concern.

No surprise, Kissinger cavalierly identifies his own safety with that of the state. Yet Mead, who ought to know better, is so enamored of Kissinger’s exercise in self-exculpation that all he can say in objection to Kissinger’s coverup on Chile is that “the behavior of the Chilean military and U.S. complicity with it during Pinochet’s seizure of power marked one of the less edifying moments in the long Cold War.” Edifying! Other adjectives come to mind — defensible, honorable, decent and perhaps (as Hitchens suggests) legal.

Mead lauds this Kissinger quote, “A deliberate quest for hegemony is the surest way to destroy the values that made the United States great,” as “some of the most eloquent and important words ever to issue from his pen.” Possibly Mead means this as a backhanded compliment, though I doubt it. Political journalism is in desperate condition when a sentence like this rings the eloquence gong.

In the New York Times Book Review, Thomas Friedman a bit more judiciously credits Kissinger for, when considering intervention, “emphasiz[ing] the long causal chains, and what might happen at the end, rather than submit to any immediate emotions,” and chides him for underestimating the force of economic globalization. But with vague allusions to the criticisms of “others,” Friedman also lets Kissinger off the hook.

In a June 21 puff piece for the Boston Globe, a story in which Kissinger performs his avuncular act for 34 paragraphs, Mark Feeney finds room for four critical ones, but the criticisms consist of the usual banalities about the “dark side” of his career, his “role in the secret bombing of Cambodia, the overthrow of the Socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, and the wiretapping of journalists and subordinates.” On none of these “events was he then — or is he now — notably forthcoming,” Feeney writes.

Any of Feeney’s readers who is not familiar with that “role” will surely learn no more about it from this story. This is, after all, a gushing profile, like hundreds of others Kissinger has garnered in his career, lazily skimming the surface, alluding to “criticism” without citing or evaluating it, presupposing that the reader should not be troubled with messy fact. Even the Globe’s sidebar on Hitchens’ short book offers phrases but no particulars. If you want truth, damn it, reader, get thee to the library, but don’t expect to find facts in what is after all only a newspaper.

So it goes in the halls of journalism. Kissinger has the herd cowed.