Echoing a critical essay that Society member Yoav Fromer wrote, Con Chapman explores the circumstances surrounding Updike’s hawkish Vietnam War stance in “John Updike, Accidental Conservative,” posted April 12, 2016 on Easy Street: a magazine of books and culture. He also provides additional context.

“The Times, in a particularly dishonest bit of sleight-of-hand, said that Updike was the lone American writer in the collection [Authors Take Sides on Vietnam] who was ‘unequivocally for’ the United States intervention in Vietnam. This was untrue; novelist James Michener, who had spent much time in Asia, was more forthright in his defense of the American presence there than Updike….”

Ironically, as Chapman notes of Updike, “Had he not been summering on Martha’s Vineyard he would have been busy, he recalled later, and probably wouldn’t have answered the query, which was designed to elicit responses that could be assembled into a book of the sort that had been put together three decades earlier from writers’ reactions to the Spanish Civil War.

“Instead, he composed a thoughtful response that considered both sides of the question; he was, he wrote, uncomfortable about what he called America’s ‘military adventure’ in South Vietnam, but he doubted that the Viet Cong, who used force to rule the peasants of the country, had a ‘moral edge’ over the United States. He said the country needed free elections, and if they chose Communism the U.S. should leave, but until that time he did ‘not see that we can abdicate our burdensome position.'”

Chapman concludes, “In the long run, the controversy didn’t hurt Updike, who was unceasingly productive to the end of his life, but in the short run it cost him. Within a few months his tenure as a writer of unsigned ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces for The New Yorker ended when his editor objected to the tone of a piece that suggested, when Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election in 1968, that the President ‘might have been right after all.’ Updike acquiesced in a suggested revision, then decided to leave the column ‘to other, more leftish hands.’

“History has, of course, proven Updike right…,” Chapman concludes.