McCain and Rolling Thunder
War
Hero or War Criminal?
By ROBERT RICHTER
As
character assassination attacks on Sen. Barack Obama have now taken over Sen.
John McCain's
campaign, and
because McCain cites his military experience as of prime importance, now is the
time to focus closer attention on a facet of the Arizona Senator's own
character. This is related to his 23 combat missions for Operation Rolling
Thunder - the Pentagon's name for U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.
I will never
forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at
the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the
idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals - and
that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution.
An ardent
opponent of the Vietnam conflict, Taylor spoke with me in the fall of 1966 when
I was looking into producing a documentary on this controversy for CBS News,
where I was their National Political Editor. While he did not mention any
pilot's name, then U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain who was captured a
year later, would have been among the group Taylor wanted to
prosecute.
Why would anyone
have wanted to prosecute McCain and the other captured pilots? Taylor's argument
was that their actions were in violation of the Geneva conventions that
specifically forbid indiscriminate bombing that could cause incidental loss of
civilian life or damage to civilian objects. Adding to the Geneva code, he
noted, was the decision at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two: military
personnel cannot defend themselves against such a charge with a claim that they
were simply following orders.
There were
questions raised about whether the Geneva conventions applied to the pilots,
since there had been no formal declaration of war by the U.S. against the Hanoi
regime - and the Geneva rules presumably are only in force in a declared
war.
Anti-war critics
at the time claimed that despite the Pentagon's assertion that only military
targets were bombed, U.S. pilots also had bombed hospitals and other civilian
targets, a charge that turned out to be correct and was confirmed by the New
York Times' chief foreign correspondent, Harrison Salisbury.
In late 1966
Salisbury described the widespread devastation of civilian neighborhoods around
Hanoi by American bombs: "Bomb damage...extends over an area of probably a mile
or so on both sides of the highway...small villages and hamlets along the route
[were] almost obliterated.<WBR>" U.S.
Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara conceded some years later that more than a million
deaths and injuries occurred in northern Vietnam each year from 1965 to 1968, as
a result of the 800 tons of bombs a day dropped by our pilots.
In one of his
autobiographies McCain wrote that he was going to bomb a power station in a
heavily populated part of Hanoi when he was shot down.
If Gen. Taylor
tried McCain, would he have defended himself as just following orders despite
the Geneva conventions barring that kind of bombing and the Nuremberg principles
negating just following orders?
The targets
McCain and his fellow pilots actually bombed in Vietnam and his justification
then or now for the actions that led to his capture, are no longer simply old
news. They are part of what must be taken into account today, as voters weigh
support for him or Obama to be the next President of the United States.
This is not
about the hugely unpopular war in Vietnam. It is about the character of a man
who seeks to be U.S. President, who perhaps was not simply a brave warrior, but
a warrior who by his own admission, bombed and was ready to bomb targets in
violation of the Geneva conventions and Nuremberg principles.
_____
When I
passed along Gen. Taylor's comments to my network superiors the program was
scrapped: too hot to handle. Instead Air War Over the North was telecast, about
precision bombing North Vietnam military targets by U.S. pilots. A few years
after that broadcast, a Pentagon public information executive gleefully told
Roger Mudd in The Selling of the Pentagon that he, the Pentagon official, not
only had persuaded CBS to produce Air War Over the North, he even chose those to
be interviewed and coached them about what they should say. This unethical
collaboration and intercession by the Pentagon in the news media is sadly all
too familiar a tactic repeated in the Bush-Cheney years.
Robert
Richter was political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968.
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