As the war ground on in 1966—more search-and-destroy missions, defoliation, use of napalm, bombing of the South and North, and fresh American troops, more doubts about ultimate success and about willingness to negotiate—Commonweal grew increasingly impatient with the opacities of American policy, the silence of American bishops, and the disparagement of dissenting views. Where once the editors had found fault with an antiwar ad for declaring “In the name of God, STOP IT!” now the editors themselves did not hesitate to put the title “Stop the Killing” on an open letter from eleven Vietnamese priests. An article by Gordon Zahn—author of German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars and In Solitary Witness, a biography of the anti-Nazi martyr Franz Jägerstätter—raised parallels between Catholic support for the war and failures of the German Church to oppose Nazism. In September, a whole issue of articles on the war included critical comments from Catholic intellectuals in Asia, Germany, France, and Great Britain. Apologizing for expressing himself “so brutally,” the eminent philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote, “It can no longer seriously be maintained that the Americans are there as the protectors of the Vietnamese people and their liberties.”
The final break came with the 1966 Christmas issue. The cover featured a large-type, all-caps headline: “PEACE?” The lead editorial, “Getting Out,” was the one quoted at the beginning of this essay:
The United States should get out of Vietnam: it should seek whatever safety it can for our allies; it should arrange whatever international face-saving is possible; and, even at the cost of a Communist victory, the United States should withdraw. The war in Vietnam is an unjust one…a crime and a sin.
Once again, the editors insisted that this conclusion was not based on pacifism. “The moral problem of warfare is bound up with the moral problem of the existence of evil. And the almost incredible apparitions of evil mankind has witnessed within the last half-century…convince us there are moments when force must be met with force.”
Nor did they deny the seriousness of the stakes in Vietnam. A Communist victory would likely mean a “rigorous dictatorship” and “bloody liquidation of dissenters,” while a Saigon victory might bring a looser authoritarianism and suppression rather than liquidation of dissenters. An American withdrawal could lead a newly nuclear and assertive China to “tragically miscalculate” American determination, though it was also true that American success could lead the United States to tragically miscalculate Chinese determination. “To measure these stakes against one another, and against the horror of the war, is a miserable and difficult task.” It “involves surveying a host of often contradictory political and military reports; it involves numerous subjective judgments; but it remains the only way we know for men to make moral decisions in an ambiguous world.”
So, yes, the outcome could possibly make a difference, but not the decisive difference needed to justify the appalling destruction of life and treasure—and here the editors catalogued all the lethal force the United States had already unleashed and was prepared to do for years to come—and even then without the assurance of any positive result.