A Reply to James Reston’s Critique
June 1978
Exiled from his native Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered the commencement speech at Harvard University on June 8, 1978. Solzhenitsyn spoke of the decline of courage in Western societies generally and in the United States in particular, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. He argued that the security and contentment of Americans had made them morally soft; their freedom had decayed into self-indulgence. Meanwhile, Soviet tyranny had toughened Russians, and these two moral changes, taken together, put into question the survival of genuine freedom everywhere.
New York Times columnist James Reston issued an indignant reply to the speech. He was especially exercised by Solzhenitsyn’s charge that America’s “capitulation” in the face of the military advance of communist North Vietnamese forces against South Vietnam three years earlier had been “hasty.” “Hasty?” he exclaimed: “After a generation of slaughter?” Solzhenitsyn probably referred to the U. S. Congress’s refusal to grant additional military funding to South Vietnam after American troops had withdrawn, rather than the whole course of the war. But in my response to Reston I addressed another aspect of his critique.
Mr. Reston sees “a fundamental contradiction” in Solzhenitsyn’s address at Harvard, a contradiction between the assertion that “only moral criteria can help the West against Communism’s strategy” and the assertion that “only American military power and willpower” could have stopped the advance of Communism in Southeast Asia.
No contradiction: Solzhenitsyn sees that willpower and morality intersect, that there are some moralities that tend to soften human character and others that tend to toughen it. His argument that the nation, Russia, is spiritually stronger than ours doesn’t in any way endorse the Soviet government. The point is rather that the Russians have been forced to become morally tougher because their adversary, the government, is more overtly evil, whereas in the United States evil takes a more seductive, pleasing form and thus eases us into shallower lives.
In his high-flown praise of American’s “spiritual heritage” as the cause of our withdrawal from Vietnam, Mr. Reston overlooks the fear of our supposedly exemplary anti-war protesters–what Hobbes called the fear of violent death; “belief in the sanctity of individual human life,” indeed.
Solzhenitsyn would remind us that some things surpass individual human life in their sanctity. The fact that it is possible to hold up the individual life’s sanctity as the American summum bonum demonstrates Solzhenitsyn’s point about American moral shallowness more conclusively than anything Solzhenitsyn said.
As for military power, it is necessary on another level, the level of practice. Only moral toughness can bring a decent country to use military power, but moral toughness without power can find itself imprisoned by tyrants. Or, in a different way, by purveyors of intellectual fashion.
Unsurprisingly, the Times didn’t publish this. But James Reston replied in a letter to me dated June 20:
Dear Mr. Morrisey,
Thank you for your opinion on my Solzhenitsyn column.
There really is so much controversy on what he said that it would take more time than I have to go into all the details. On reflection, there is rather more in your interpretation of the effects of suffering than in mine.
Sincerely,
James Reston
The spirit of kind magnanimity in that note touches me even today, nearly forty years after receiving it.
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