In an analysis of the foreign policy approaches of both John McCain and Barack Obama, the New York Times says "both men have been forced into surprising detours." McCain's perspective is drawn from his experience as a prisoner of war in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. The question rarely ever broached is this: did he emerge from that ordeal as a gallant hero or a mere survivor? No doubt, his admirers and most Americans would come down on the side of heroism, but that stems from a romantic view of war perpetuated by movies, television dramas or countless books and magazine accounts. Our guys in wartime are always the good guys and the ones we're fighting are the bad ones.
But the fact is that McCain was a Navy pilot who on 24 missions over North Vietnam bombed industrial targets in Hanoi and its surrounding suburbs that were occupied by civilians who lived near the places where they worked. The incessant bombing day and night by U.S. Air Force and Navy pilots was a terrifying experience for the Vietnamese on the ground. So when McCain was pulled from West Lake in the center of Hanoi after parachuting from his plane that was hit by a Soviet missile, the rescuers were not in a particularly joyous mood. They did not give a damn about McCain's injuries, his broken arms and a leg. They were ready to tear him from limb to limb. Only Communist soldiers and police saved him from more bodily harm.
What happened to him inside the Hanoi Hilton, the POW camp where he and several hundred American pilots were imprisoned and mistreated is another matter. In a recent interview with New York Times correspondent Seth Mydans, McCain's captors denied that he was tortured. But whatever happened to him or any of the other POWs inside that prison, those years were defining ones in Senator McCain's life and not pleasant ones. Whether that and his experience as a senator in Washington qualifies him as a national security expert is quite another.
Obama, on the other hand, had a different and compelling perspective as a youngster when it comes to foreign affairs. According to the Times and to his own accounts in the books that he has written. "It took shape in the back streets of Jakarta," the Times reported, "where he lived as a young boy and saw the poverty, the human rights violations and the fear inspired by the American-backed Indonesian dictator Suharto." I remember it as well, having had lunch frequently with other foreign correspondents at the Columbia Café in Jakarta. Below us, we watched and ate just above Indonesia's poor who lived near the canal that wound through the capital, where they ate, washed their clothes and defecated all at once.
It left a lasting impression on me, one that still seems vivid 50 years later.
It was in that atmosphere that Obama remembered in his second autobiography "the jumble of warring impulses" that make up American foreign policy and received a street-level understanding of how foreigners react to "our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism" and to Washington's tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption and environmental degradation."
In 1965, I flew into Jakarta at the time of the Indonesian coup that overthrew Sukarno which most authorities believe paved the way for Suharto's rise to power. Traveling through the heart of Java, I witnessed the countless bodies of civilians who were slaughtered by Indonesian troops and anti-terror squads who were singled out as Communist sympathizers by the CIA for the coup plotters. But many of the alleged Communists happened to be members of Indonesia's labor unions that were in constant conflict with the government over the issue of higher wages. Many of the streams I saw throughout central Java where the killings occurred were turned blood red.
Later, it was believed to be a model for the controversial counter-terror program known as Phoenix that was mounted by the CIA during the Vietnam war which I also witnessed.