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Seeds of McCain's war views found in '74 thesis
Willingness to forgive
But Mr. Schweitzer, who died in a car crash soon after the war, became an example of what Mr. McCain later called "the necessity to forgive." Confronted by a senior officer, Mr. Schweitzer renounced his participation in the propaganda and resumed his place in the American ranks.
"It is neither American nor Christian to nag a repentant sinner to his grave," the senior Americans taught.
"John McCain has lived by that his whole life," Mr. Swindle said. Others have observed the pattern as Mr. McCain has embraced former adversaries from antiwar activists and North Vietnamese prison commanders to the critics who charged him with corruption in the Keating Five scandal.
Mr. McCain was one of about a half-dozen former prisoners of war who spent the year after their release at the National War College, an elite academy for future admirals or generals.
Some officers fresh from Vietnam questioned the premise of the war. "The vast majority of generals who had experience in Vietnam will tell you we should never have gone past the advisory level," said John H. Johns, a retired Army general and a student at the college that year. But in Mr. McCain’s paper, he instead focused on the failure to sustain public support for the fight. The paper was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and provided to The New York Times by Matt Welch, an author of a book about Mr. McCain.
He cast a cold eye on the public sympathy for prisoners like himself. "Two and a half million American fighting men served in the Vietnam conflict, and more importantly 46,000 sacrificed their lives," Mr. McCain wrote. "Yet in the latter stages of that war millions of people were more actively concerned about the plight of 565 P.O.W.’s in Hanoi than in any bigger issue of the war."
Myopic focus on prisoners?
American elected officials, he argued, had fostered a myopic focus on the prisoners by forsaking the goal of unconditional surrender in favor of a negotiated peace, enabling the North Vietnamese to turn their hostages into a bargaining chip. "Many Congressional resolutions, favorable to the enemy, were based solely on the guaranteed return of Americans from North Vietnam," he wrote.
With prisoners returned, he argued, ambivalence about the war was protecting the minority of American prisoners "who did not keep faith with their country or their fellow prisoners."
Court-martial charges were filed against two officers and seven enlisted men, he noted. "Probably more would have been charged if the Vietnam War had been like other wars in which this country has engaged," Mr. McCain wrote. (Top military leaders quickly quashed charges against those nine.)
Mr. McCain reserved his fiercest criticism for what he called "the evils of parole and amnesty," returning repeatedly to the importance of teaching recruits to reject such offers as he did. The prospect of early release had tempted and demoralized the other captives while providing the North Vietnamese "a maximum of favorable publicity and propaganda value from these ‘humane acts,’ " he wrote.
"Probably the greatest shock to great numbers of the P.O.W.’s was to find, on returning to the U.S., that P.O.W.’s who were released early had not been court-martialed but in fact had received choice assignments and early promotions," he added, calling their warm welcome "inexcusable."
On teaching foreign policy
Mr. McCain’s proposal that the military teach U.S. foreign policy to its recruits may be his most notable recommendation. "Too many men in the armed forces of the United States do not understand what this nation’s foreign policy is," Mr. McCain wrote, adding he did not propose a Soviet-style "indoctrination," but "a simple, straightforward explanation of the foreign policy of the United States."
In his e-mail message, Mr. McCain stood by the idea. "It is important, not just for P.O.W.’s, but all Americans serving in combat to understand the purpose and reason for the sacrifices they are asked to make for our country," he said.
Such instruction, though, sounds close to heretical to some military officers because it risks instructing the troops in the foreign policy of either one president or another, a prospect that particularly troubles Mr. McCain’s contemporaries who came to opposite conclusions about the Vietnam War.
"It gets to be partisan political positioning and regime support," said Merrill McPeak, a retired Air Force general and another War College classmate of Mr. McCain. (Both Mr. Johns and Mr. McPeak are supporting the Democratic presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama .)
But Prof. Richard H. Kohn, a historian of civil-military relations at the University of North Carolina who has taught at the War College, suggested that Mr. McCain’s recommendation was more of a "time warp" back to the 1950s, when he came of age at the Naval Academy. It was an era of staunchly anti-communist foreign policy consensus that was shattered by the debates over the Vietnam War while Mr. McCain was in prison, Professor Kohn said.
Mr. McCain’s public statements when he returned from the war suggested that he saw a similar consensus emerging again. "I see more of an appreciation of our way of life," he wrote in a 1973 article for U.S. News & World Report. "There is more patriotism. The flag is all over the place."
"Some of my fellow prisoners sang a different tune, but they were a very small minority," he added. "I ask myself if they should be prosecuted, and I don’t find that easy to answer. It might destroy the very fine image the great majority of us have brought back from that hellhole."
This story, In '74 Thesis, the Seeds of McCain's War Views, originally appeared in The New York Times.
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