Among several interlocking purposes for this newsletter, I hope to create a robust open-source paper trail of research into Patrick Gunkel’s life and works, including commentary and contextualization.
One such paper trail relates to Gunkel’s letters to newspapers and other editorial-type writings as I described here (his first known editorial, published in the New York Times), here (a letter he published in the Cambridge Evening News in England), and here (editorials related to the Global War on Terror).
Today’s newsletter summarizes four editorials Gunkel wrote—three in the Boston Globe and one in the Chicago Tribune.
I recognize that straight summarization of material isn’t my normal newsletter fare.
If you’re interested enough to read to the end today, I’d say you’re either a Gunkel fanatic… or somehow I’m good enough as a writer that I can keep you interested.
Or maybe both?
“Blind Hatred”
A December 12, 1978, editorial in the Boston Globe places Gunkel back in Jamaica Plain, in the suburbs of Boston, where he was living in 1974 before going to New York to help Herman Kahn on his NASA contract.
In the editorial, Gunkel criticizes a Globe columnist over his savage treatment of former president Richard Nixon’s visits to France and England, which he undertook as part of a “rehabilitation tour,” and which generally received a warm reception.
Gunkel claims the columnist’s negative opinion of Nixon does not reflect the opinion of “many Americans” as well as Europeans: “that Nixon was done an injustice, that we in this country overreacted, misconceived events, and wrongly induced his departure from office.”
So Gunkel thought Americans “misconceived” the events of Watergate?
He wasn’t the only one, but it’s important to remember that many important oversight laws, such as those laws that created independent inspectors general, were passed by Congress in reaction to the Watergate scandal.
“Intolerable Individual”
Gunkel continued his editorial-writing spree in the Boston Globe on June 5, 1980, when he provided commentary on the description of a local antinuclear protestor named Victor Manfredi.
Gunkel noted that—despite the fact that Manfredi apparently said he was “opposed to nuclear energy” but “not fanatically so”—he nevertheless attempted to break into the Seabrook Nuclear Power plant by cutting down a fence.
“It was an interesting portrait of an intolerable individual,” Gunkel concluded.
The dateline on the editorial was Sommerville, Massachusetts, suggesting that by this point Gunkel had moved somewhat closer to the MIT campus in Cambridge.
“A Forum: The Rights of Parents and Children”
In an August 9, 1980, editorial in the Chicago Tribune, grouped with several others under the title “A Forum: The Rights of Parents and Children,” Gunkel weighed in on the case of Walter Polovchak, a 12-year-old Ukrainian boy who wanted to stay in America despite the fact that his parents were returning to Ukraine.
The debate naturally became a referendum on the U.S. versus Soviet systems, and Gunkel came down clearly on the side of the United States.
Gunkel invoked his authority as an expert in child prodigies and concluded: “On certain occasions a child is perfectly capable of making decisions that transcend childhood in their wisdom and prescience. In the present instance a boy, doubtless in part because he is young, has in a clear-eyed way recognized the advantages of a future in life in the United States contrasted to a future life in the hobbling, primitive, and grim Soviet Union.”
“The Real Lesson of Vietnam”
Yet another editorial—this one in the November 29, 1980, pages of the Boston Globe—has Gunkel responding to an article regarding a retrospective analysis of the Vietnam war that questioned whether the prevailing popular narrative ought to be rethought in light of the North Vietnamese takeover of the entire country.
“The Supreme Particular about the Vietnam War—not yet discovered in print—perhaps because of its awful simplicity,” Gunkel writes, “is that it was an asymmetric ground war. It was deliberately fought in south and not in North Vietnam.”
Gunkel concludes that because of this approach to the war, communists were able to maintain a tactical and strategic advantage that allowed them to “recuperate and maneuver” in perfect safety north of the demilitarized zone.
Gunkel concluded: “The real lesson of Vietnam is that, if we choose to protect the freedoms we cherish, we must be prepared—have the courage and resolve—to fight wars bloodily, sensibly, with both hands and sincerely.”
This may seem inconsistent with Gunkel’s position as a conscientious objector who fled to Canada to avoid being drafted after he dropped out of high school in the late 1960s, but on the other hand, perhaps he would have signed up to fight should he not have felt that he had “more important things to do for society,” as Jo Zarboulas recorded in her unpublished profile of Gunkel.
Perhaps, on the other hand, Herman Kahn and the influence of his colleagues at the right-leaning Hudson Institute had by then changed Gunkel’s tune.
At any rate, Gunkel was more or less right in his critique—and judging by everything that has happened since then, the United States, incredibly, still does not seem to have learned “the Vietnam lesson.”