The New York Times has now been reduced to printing the articles that don't meet Newsweek's standards. The case at hand is an article accusing a genuine war hero, Senator Bob Kerrey, of, as a New York Times editorial puts it this morning, "the purposeful shooting of noncombatants" in the village of Thanh Phong.
The Times news coverage this morning dwells on the background of Senator Kerrey, but it tells very little about the background of the writer for the Times magazine. That writer has accused the U.S. Navy of embellishing the Soviet naval threat and of culpability in the downing of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes.
The Times editorial says the Thanh Phong incident is a "horrible lesson of the physical and psychological damage to people on both sides when a great power undertakes a war without a rationale." The war in Vietnam, the Times editorial says, "seemed to lack any rationale except the wrecking of as many lives as possible on both sides."
Well, the South Vietnamese who fled by the thousands in rickety boats to avoid communist rule understood that there was a "rationale" to the war. But even if the Times claims there was no rationale, the truth is, an event like Thanh Phong can happen in any war, with or without a "rationale." The way Senator Kerrey tells the story to the Times magazine, he only discovered the dead women and children after a nighttime exchange of fire. The American who claims the women and children were killed in cold blood, we are told by the Times magazine, "immigrated from Germany as a child" and "comes from a long line of German military men." Unexplained, this information raises more questions than it answers. Why is the account of the German more credible than that of Senator Kerrey? And if Senator Kerrey's account is correct, what it amounts to is essentially an accident -- a tragic accident, but not a war crime, and surely not worthy of the razzle-dazzle treatment the Times gives it today, with a lead editorial, a front-page news article, and a splashy animated display on its web site.