Almost everybody who weighs in on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be the next secretary of defense, pro or con, begins by genuflecting to his experience in Vietnam, as if it goes without saying that this is a compelling asset for the civilian who oversees the Pentagon. I'm going to be an exception.
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Bill Keller
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Hagel's wartime service, which earned him awards for valor and two purple hearts, was unquestionably honorable. No doubt he has a deeper awareness than most people that wars are messy, which is not without value. His tour as an infantry squad leader, even more than his Republican Party card, provides useful political cover for a president who favors a less interventionist foreign policy and a smaller defense budget. But the notion that experience of war imparts a special wisdom is one of our enduring fallacies.
Just to be clear, I think the president is entitled to pick a defense secretary who is compatible with his views and has his trust. Besides, as Hillary Clinton and Bob Gates can testify, under this president foreign and defense matters are run from the White House. The new secretaries of state and defense will probably be, as their predecessors have been, more executors than authors of policy.
And most of the arguments for voting against Hagel's confirmation are flimsy at best. He once described Israel's friends in Washington as "the Jewish lobby?" So does the Israeli press. He's in favor of talking to Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah? Great. As another defense minister, Moshe Dayan, once observed: "If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies." Hagel's attitudes toward gay rights and women's freedom are — or were, back when he was a senator from a red state — unenlightened? I would bet that, like most of us, he has evolved, but in any case those are issues the president decides. The most small-minded reasons for opposing Hagel's confirmation are the unspoken, partisan ones: the hope of embarrassing the president, or the urge to pay Hagel back for his support of the Democrat Bob Kerrey, a fellow Vietnam vet, in last year's Nebraska Senate race.
There is no end of bad reasons to vote no. But among the reasons to vote yes, the fact that Hagel has tasted combat should be regarded with skepticism. You hope that he brings to the job a non-bullying management style, strategic judgment, political dexterity and an open mind, but none of those are qualities likely to have been perfected in the jungles of Vietnam. It's even worth considering whether his military service could be a handicap.
The last time I wrestled with this issue was about 10 years ago when John Kerry was contemplating a run for the presidency and calculating how heavily to exploit his wartime command of a riverboat in Vietnam. (In the end, I'd say he overplayed it — remember "reporting for duty"? — and the emphasis left him more vulnerable to the infamous swift-boat smear.)
Whether or not Senator Kerry's Vietnam experience brought him wisdom, I decided at the time, was better judged by examining his wisdom than his experience. A decade later that observation is relevant again as Kerry awaits his own hearings on his nomination to be secretary of state. If you had only his voting record on recent American wars to go by, you'd be hard pressed to detect any coherent wisdom of the battlefield. His service in Vietnam did not keep Kerry from casting two big, politically expedient — and, in hindsight, misguided — votes on Iraq: in 1991 against the first President Bush's justified war to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, and in 2002 in favor of authorizing the second President Bush's Iraq folly. Fortunately for Kerry (and for us), his work as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his role as President Obama's informal emissary on missions to Afghanistan and Pakistan have been more impressive.
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