Duty and Responsibility

Behind the tortuous unraveling of the American role in Viet Nam, as well as the national debate over the court-martial and conviction of Lieut. William Galley, there lies a haunting problem: well-intentioned men faithfully executing their duty as they see it can find themselves responsible for horrible events. By coincidence, in the week that the Pentagon papers emerged, Yale Law Professor Charles Reich (The Greening of America) addressed the problem in The New Yorker. Reich wrote: "Evil now comes about not necessarily when people violate what they understand to be their duty but, more and more often, when they are conscientiously doing what is expected of them."

The problem of My Lai, to be sure, is not the same as the dilemma that confronts men at every level in bureaucracies public and private. "The ultimate evil is the result of carefully segmented acts; the structure itself guarantees an evasion by everyone of responsibility for the full moral act," Reich argued. His solution is to create a new sense of accountability within bureaucracies that would "restore the awareness, the responsibility and the law that are the moral essence of free men." Reich surely has a point about the diffusion of responsibility in big, modern organizations. But in the case of Viet Nam, where men up and down the chain--from President Johnson through Daniel Ellsberg--have agonized over their share in making and carrying out policy, there has never been any doubt about where ultimate responsibility lay. Lyndon Johnson anguished over his decisions to bomb North Viet Nam and to commit U.S. combat troops, and he could not escape the consequences.

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