Don't Get Kerreyed Away

Don't Get Kerreyed Away
When will Dan Rather hold communists to account?
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, May 3, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

Watching Bob Kerrey twist under the stern questions and damning frowns of Dan Rather, on "60 Minutes II" Tuesday, I did come away with one small hope. Presumably Mr. Kerrey's interviewers--in some cases, interrogators--aren't doing this just for sport, or politics, or even ratings. Presumably they are genuinely and humanely concerned about possible injustice and brutality in Asia.

Surely this Dan Rather standard of in-depth inquiry shouldn't stop with unearthing tales of Mr. Kerrey's Navy SEAL squad and the Vietnamese villagers they killed in a war zone 32 years ago. Step aside, Mr. Kerrey. In the course of its long struggle with communism, Asia has racked up a mighty list of folks in far greater need of an invitation to unburden themselves on prime-time television.

Granted, the continuing fallout of communism in Asia offers so many horrors that it's hard to know where to start. But here are a few suggestions.

Begin by going back to Vietnam. This time, land a few of those hard-hitting journalistic punches on the folks at the top. Mr. Rather, in his zeal for the Kerrey story, sent a film crew all the way to the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong, where Mr. Kerrey's 1969 attack took place. There the intrepid CBS crew interviewed some villagers. Somehow Mr. Rather forgot to mention (maybe he is saving this for a follow-up special?) that Vietnam is a communist police state in which no one, and certainly not a couple of villagers facing TV cameras, may speak freely--not if that might mean deviating from whatever would please the party.

Nor is that the only problem. Mr. Rather's film crew might want to hunker down in Hanoi long enough to offer the Communist Party leaders, past and present, a chance to discuss their very own guilt and anguish over continuing to impose a system of government that has kept Vietnam among the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world. Even apart from such tolls as a devastating war, the ensuing refugee exodus and the enduring political prison camps, the cost of Vietnamese communism, even today, includes a huge waste of human life--with people living worse and dying younger than would be remotely likely had Vietnam escaped communism.

Sure, Vietnam's rulers, not being subject to the democratic customs that clearly weigh with Mr. Kerrey, would probably decline the offer to be grilled by someone like Mr. Rather. Isn't that part of the story too?

Then, of course, there's North Korea. I worry a bit about bringing it up, lest Mr. Rather go ransacking the ranks of American veterans for new seams of guilt dating back to the early 1950s. But it was, after all, such stuff as the North Korean experience that fueled U.S. fears of the evils that might follow a communist takeover in Vietnam. And the story today, of North Korea's miseries, the famine, the obligatory communist prison camps, the dehumanizing conditions of those who live under one of the poorest and most repressive states on earth--well surely someone there deserves at least a reasonable portion of the kind of relentless coverage that has just gone in to sharing with us the guilt of Mr. Kerrey.

And then there's China. There, the decaying communist police state, even when it hasn't been receiving round-the-clock American TV coverage for holding a U.S. air crew, has racked up generations of brutality against its own people. Back in the days of Mr. Kerrey's SEAL forays in Vietnam, in 1969, China was deep into the Cultural Revolution, in which more than 20 million Chinese died--some beaten to death, some executed, many starved. That frenzy eased by the mid-1970s, but the communist government of Jiang Zemin continues to preside over a system in which people are jailed and sometimes killed for speaking the truth about politics or trying to worship as they choose.

The result, for all China's economic reforms of the past two decades, is a country that still ranks among the world's poorer and more backward. Contrast the squalor and fear still endured by the 1.2 billion folks of the People's Republic with the wealth and freedom of the 23 million people on Taiwan, for a taste of what China's more self-aware party members might just be trying occasionally to square with conscience.

I know, this is on one level a disingenuous set of suggestions. No one expects to switch on the news and see the leaders of Asia's decaying communist regimes confessing guilt and anguish to American reporters. But there can be no justification for dismissing this crew from scrutiny just because they aren't in mood to confess on camera. It is a large disservice to both Americans and Asians to apply civilized standards only to our own compatriots. Communism is a system that has poisoned every society where it has ever been tried. Just take a look at the misery and anger still welling up in the former Soviet Union.

The record of death, betrayal, corruption and anguish produced by Marxist revolutions of the 20th century goes far beyond anything Americans are usually offered a chance to watch on the evening news shows. Calling Bob Kerrey to account may play big in America. But it is a peculiar and dishonest endeavor when it's done without similar effort to present Vietnam's rulers themselves with the vastly larger reckoning for the sufferings of their own people.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."