CHANGE in a policy that is seen to have been misconceived and to have proved unjust is not defeatism. In the Church it would be called collective repentance. As a secular nation, suffused however with some scriptural ideals as a kind of convenantal constitutional commonwealth, America is the greater for acknowledging through us, an articulate loyal opposition, that we have unwittingly done a great wrong and must be prepared even to make reparations for our mistake. And at the same time, without illusion, we must remain or become realistic about the totalitarian ferocity of the other side as it emerges exhausted but triumphant.

A national change of mind, an administration change of course, a national admission of an unwitting misapplication of our corporate resources will not with certainty lead to peace at home or abroad. The international enhancement of the prestige of France through the withdrawal from what Frenchmen for generations had regarded as an integral part of metropolitan France within the French Empire cannot serve us as a sure model, because de Gaulle's act was a fundamental change in policy with respect to a partly integrated region whose population used also the language of France.

What we are asking is not merely a change but a reversal of policy, because only by a reversal of policy and the acknowledgment of an unwitting national mistake can we and the Vietnamese be freed. Having eventually come as a nation to recognize that our intervention in Vietnam was not only unwise but also morally wrong because presumptuous, we should not be taken up as a nation with trying to prettify what we have unwittingly done, although we have indeed assumed responsibility over there that we cannot honorably evade. We cannot honorably evade our responsibility by trying to make the Saigon government do what we with them could not. Nor can we use that unpopular government of ex-French officers to cover our retreat and prolong the agony of their people. Nor can we honorably leave those military leaders and their civil servants exposed to reprisals.

But let not the concepts of Vietnamization and honorable peace confuse our nation into imagining that we can construe our intervention in Indochinese affairs since the end of World War II as somehow right, because we have expended so much material treasure and American life in hopefully our last venture in Manifest Destiny. This is not repentance.

In terms of practical politics, given the sinful human condition, would it not be more realistic and hence more wholesome-and, as it happens, also more moral-to train now our diplomacy on the decade ahead and work for as positive a role as possible in our eventual relations to an inevitably united, nationally communist Vietnam? As to what we can mean by honorable, we should be limited solely to our concern for the reduction or hopefully the suspension of reprisals against all of those South Vietnamese who in good faith or otherwise accepted our professions of concern for them. Here we have as a nation a continuing obligation.

And it is just possible, just as two boys in the block who have once fought it out often become the fastest of friends-and there are some very big comrades in the bloc with whom Vietnam would rather not get into a fight-that the united Vietnamese will somehow be able a decade hence to refurbish their picture of our George Washington and our other political forefathers and come again also to respect us, the present-day custodians of their political vision of the Age of Enlightenment. May they and the whole world see in us again, after our ordeals of racial and generational cleavage, as a truly viable, participatory democracy because of what we the articulate and anguished opponents of the war will have slowly accomplished, just as we for our part have developed admiration for the Vietnamese as resolute and resourceful soldiers and have become sympathetic with them all as an unusually attractive people even as we recoil both from the iron ideology of Hanoi and from the corruption and vice of Saigon.

But for this to come to pass, we must repent as a nation what we have inadvertently wrought at such a cost to them and to ourselves and to the U.N. and all that it could stand for. For this to come to pass, we can not speak henceforth of what may be honorable but rather of what may be just. For something positive to come out of this mutual agony; can we not restrain all speech about defeat or victory, except it be the victory of a people healed by its own stripes, by chastisement made whole.

The Lord said through Amos:

For three transgressions... and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they have rejected the law of the Lord, and have not kept his statutes, but their lies have led them astray. Amen.