One side effect of the mobilization of the Nazi-Fascist regimes for their war against Western civilization was the coup de grace it gave to American intellectual isolation. The “intellectual migration” of the pre-war years brought to our shores a host of men and women who have transformed the American academic, scientific and aesthetic landscapes. Nowhere has this effect been more evident than in the field of political philosophy. Men and women such as, to name but a few, Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich, Arnold Brecht, Leo Strauss and Waldemar Gurian brought new historical and metaphysical depth to what had largely become a genteel, bland and decaying field of study. Among these figures Hans Morgenthau stands out because of the breadth of his interests, because of the extent of his impact on thinking outside the narrowly academic milieu, and because of his recent improbable role as intellectual fellow-traveler of the young, the disaffected and the idealistic in their struggle against the war in Vietnam. The latter role has brought him both public notoriety and journalistic excoriation and is regarded by many as being in direct conflict with the basic positions he has espoused throughout the rest of his intellectual life.

In that short sentence Hans Morgenthau describes one role of the intellectual who relates himself to the political world. It is clear, from the way he states it, that he admires this vocation. It is also clear, from his own career, that he has often exercised that vocation.

Morgenthau's eminence is such that he needs no praise from me. As an analyst of international affairs he is a brilliant scholar, a shrewd observer of the actions behind the headlines, a puncturer of pomposities, and an irritant to sluggish minds. These qualities are sufficiently well known that I shall not elaborate them.

In their attempts to discourage dissenting members of the public from attempting (in the Jeffersonian tradition) to influence our policy in Vietnam, apologists for our government's policy frequently state that the situation in Vietnam and its background are too complicated for the general public to understand and comment on. This is not the case. If one disregards the many misrepresentations of the situation widely disseminated by our own government since 1965 and sticks to the plain facts, the degree of blame which we must shoulder becomes quite clear, as those who have followed the course of events with close attention are aware. They need not be rehearsed here.

I think there are certain situations and events in human life that are so horrendous and evil that a sensitive human being is left speechless and painfilled to the point of numbness. Such were the actions at Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Dachau, Dresden, Bataan, Sharpeville; now we may add another name in the long list of human brutality of the twentieth century —My Lai.

It is easy to condemn the particular men who perpetrated this crime against God and man, just as it was easy for the Germans after World War II to stand apart from what their government had done, to insist that it was not they who released the gas jets; so too Americans today are horrified and condemn some few men as scapegoats since it is clear that it was not they who gave such orders or who pulled the triggers of the M-16's and the 50-calibers. In both cases, this facile rationale is an escape by a whole people from the responsibility for crimes committed in an atmosphere which, by their tacit or vocal consent, made it more likely that such crimes could be committed.