Posted on 02/17/2004 6:04:09 PM PST by Gritty
It is now thirty years since the end of the Vietnam War, but the 2004 Presidential campaign is fighting it all over again. That long after the Civil War, the bloody shirt had been put away, and politicians were arguing about other things, such as free silver.
In 1896, the Democrats actually nominated a presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, who had been only four years old at the time of Appomattox, and whose activities during the war were not (as far as can be determined) subjected to the scrutiny of the other side's opposition researchers.
Learning the lesson of Vietnam has been a watchword of American politics throughout all those thirty years, and a great many people have done so. The only problem is they all learned different lessons.
That being the case, the story of Ryszard Kuklinski is worth noting. A new biography of Kuklinski, entitled A Secret Life, has just been published by Benjamin Weiser, and it is not only an exciting read, but also a thought provoking examination of the front lines of the Cold War, one which contains many intellectual challenges for both left and right.
Kuklinski was a Colonel in the Polish Army who, during the 1970's and early 1980's, provided the CIA with "highly classified Soviet documentary intelligence at a prodigious rate," becoming "the best-placed source now available…in the Soviet bloc…."
He was a spy – but never, in his mind, against his own country. Kuklinski saw himself as a patriot, working to free Poland from occupation by the USSR, an occupation which grew more and more oppressive during the period of his service.
Kuklinski had seen the horror of the Nazi occupation during the war. From his apartment building, the young Kuklinski could literally look down at the barbed-wire- topped wall that marked the ghetto. "One day, he witnessed the mass execution of dozens of Poles…outside the ghetto wall." The Nazi storm troopers spared two on that occasion, and forced them "to load the bodies on a flatbed truck and to sprinkle sand on the bloodstained sidewalk."
The Kuklinskis were not Jewish; nonetheless, Ryszard's father was one day carted off to a concentration camp and never seen again.
When the Soviets drove away the Nazis, Kuklinski rejoiced, and in 1947, at the age of seventeen, he enlisted in the Polish Army. But as time passed, he came to realize that his country had merely traded one oppressor for another.
So did many other Polish officers, but they did not risk their lives to contact the Americans, and then continue to take the same risks day after nerve-wracking day, year after year. What was it that made Kuklinski believe he could trust the very country he and all his comrades had been taught to think of as the enemy?
Why the lesson of Vietnam, of course.
Kuklinski was sent to Saigon in 1967 as a member of the Polish delegation to the ICC, the international group that monitored compliance with the Geneva Convention. He found himself in close proximity to American soldiers and came to admire them. Weiser also writes that Kuklinski "worried that antiwar sentiment in the United States might cause it to reassess its commitment to fighting the Soviets around the world, or worse yet, to withdraw its troops from Europe."
Much later, Kuklinski would write in praise of the "authentic and unselfish" commitment to freedom of the people of the United States. "Perhaps the Vietnam War was, for you Americans, a nightmare, and it is difficult for you to believe that precisely the experience of that war decided my present road in life."
A few months later, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, and the contrast became sealed in Kuklinski's mind. The U.S. fought to defend freedom; the Soviets fought to destroy its first inklings.
In August of 1972, Kuklinski, as a result of deliberate planning was in West Germany, and made contact with the U.S. embassy in Bonn. Until the daring and dramatic "exfiltration" (a CIA word; the opposite of "infiltration") of him and his family on the eve of the Soviet crackdown against Solidarity in 1981, he provided service to the CIA that earned him the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, presented in absentia and in secret. Weiser's book presents an effective and caring CIA, deeply concerned with the welfare of the people who worked for it. Included among its best agents are some highly partisan Democrats, reminding us that there was indeed a time when something higher than partisanship motivated our international goals.
Which brings us to 2004 and Senator John Kerry. Based on his subsequent antiwar activities and the calumnies of his 1971 "Winter Soldier" testimony before Congress, what John Kerry learned in Vietnam was to hate American soldiers.
Kerry and his fellow activists did indeed try to weaken America's Cold War mission, just as Ryzsard Kuklinski feared. In the end, the good guys won, and Kuklinski helped a very great deal. His Vietnam lesson, learned against a background of a life spent among Nazis and Bolsheviks, was that America is good, that it is willing to shed blood and tears, and pour out its treasure, to promote the freedom of people around the world.
That's a lesson we all could brush up on.
Kerry and his fellow activists did indeed try to weaken America's Cold War mission, just as Ryzsard Kuklinski feared. In the end, the good guys won, and Kuklinski helped a very great deal. His Vietnam lesson, learned against a background of a life spent among Nazis and Bolsheviks, was that America is good, that it is willing to shed blood and tears, and pour out its treasure, to promote the freedom of people around the world.
Foreign friends and Domestic enemies. Ping
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