(The following is an address by George Hunston Williams, Hollis Professor of Divinity, delivered in Appleton Chapel in the Memorial Church, Harvard University, during a service in observance of the Vietnam Moratorium, November 13, 1969.)

WE ARE not yet marching on Pennsylvania Avenue. We have withdrawn for a brief season of reflection, not exhortation, in a sanctuary.

On Veterans Day last Tuesday the flag of our nation, the hymns of our nation, the lights on our car, the lights on our porch were all claimed for the hitherto silent majority who supposedly with unanimity back the President in his prolongation of the agony abroad through intensified Vietnamization of our policy there. It is not necessary for us who oppose this policy to argue that we, the non-silent, are the majority, although we surely have many more sympathizers among the silent than successive administrations have granted. It is, in our case, sufficient to think of ourselves as a large, redemptive minority, the bearers, no less than the marchers on Veterans Day, of part, and we would surely say, a most precious part of the American tradition.

Although the Vietcong flag may be seen here and there in our marches and rallies, our most appropriate banner remains the flag of our Republic. If only by a drapery could we draw temporary attention away from the blue field of the fifty sparkling subdivisions of us as a now global superpower to spotlight the thirteen red and white stripes of the embattled and once only partially united original states in order to remind us and all that we ourselves about two centuries ago were shaped in a sneaky fencerow guerrilla warfare that enraged the minuetlike martial formations of the Redcoats. It is an irony of American history, as we approach the two hundredth anniversary of our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, that we should find ourselves as a nation half George III, half Edmund Burke, on the issue of a distant colonial people, who are not even our colonists or distant kinsmen.

The comparison, though of course by no means consistent throughout-the Vietnamese are French and not American colonials-does have extraordinary validity in the fact that the People's Republic of Vietnam has assigned an important place to our own Declaration of Independence and to the paradigmatic role of George Washington in its own formative rhetoric and constitutional documents. Hanoi's ever more frequent direct appeals to a portion of the American people over the heads of our highly elected officials is grounded partly, of course, in their Marxist reading and no doubt misreading of what they construe as the class basis of our protest movement but partly also in their residual admiration for part of America. This is an admiration, first of all, for that part of America which through President Wilson called for the acceptance of the XIV Points after World War I, especially with respect to national self-determination, which Ho Chi Minh hoped could be implemented for Indochina through him when as a young French socialist he sought admission at Versailles. It is a fleeting admiration, also, for that part of America in the midst of World War II (when the French were out of Indochina and when Ho Chi Minh's communist nationalists alone were able to give sustained resistance to the Japanese conquerors) which through President Roosevelt called for the permanent removal of France from Indochina, as of Britain from India, in the post-war reconstruction-only to be reversed by President Truman. And it is an admiration, finally, for that part of America which, in quite unexpected sectors (for Marxist analysis) have in fact become the American hearts of resistance to the war against their completion of the communist nationalization of Vietnam.

WHAT an anomaly this war! Not only is it:

the first war in which our enemies have claimed our own revolutionary and constitutional heritage as tributary to theirs;

the first war to be fought on television;

the first war in which we have had to fight female soldiers and have caused more casualties among civilians than among the military;

the first American war in which there have been publicized person-to-person American atrocities;

our first undeclared war of any proportion;

our first large war in which we were not first attacked;

the first war in which we have admitted to the use of very special services because of the civil, communal, and ideological character of the resistance to us;

almost the first war in which no claim has been made that overriding American interests of security are at stake;

the first large war in which we have had no major ally and to which our friends among the nations-including our now traditional allies such as Canada, England, and France-are articulately opposed;