PERSPECTIVE ON THE DRAFT : Forget Uncle Ray--Ask About Uncle Ho : The mainly pro-Clinton media ignore the real question: Does he feel now that he was wrong about Vietnam?

In the crush of stories about Bill Clinton and the draft, the national media, fixated for reasons of their own generational ontology on the imperative of electing him President, are overlooking the critical issue.

It doesn’t particularly matter about ol’ Uncle Ray-Bob over to Hot Springs trying to get him into the Naval Reserve, and nobody seems to care much about Clinton’s inconsistent accounts of his most successful foreign-policy strategy to date, which was how to avoid visiting Vietnam. Indeed he is no less credible on this issue than President Bush has been on Clinton’s alleged 128 tax increases in Arkansas.

The real question is whether Clinton, while young Americans were dying in the jungles of Vietnam, stood in the streets of London, where he had gone to avoid being at their side, and raised his voice in support of those who were killing them. If he did, or if he contributed in some other way to the efforts of the communist aggressors in Vietnam, how can he now summon the moral authority to be President--unless he is willing to say he was wrong?

The Vietnam-era anti-war movement was not America’s first, but it was the first in which millions of leaders and followers embraced not only the notion that the United States should not be at war but that its enemies should win because their cause was more just.

Does Clinton still think Hanoi’s cause was more just? Would somebody please ask him, just once? In his famous letter to Col. Eugene Holmes, the Arkansas ROTC recruiter, Clinton thoughtfully gave the dates of the two rallies he helped organize in London in the fall of 1969. All an enterprising reporter has to do is find out what the assorted Trotskyites, Maoists and other wackos on the card those two days actually said about “Amerika” and the glorious Vietnamese people’s revolution, and then ask Clinton: “I know you were against the draft, which is fine, but in view of what the communists did in Vietnam and Cambodia, do you regret giving these people that platform?”

This painful issue comes up in virtually none of the lengthy newspaper pieces about the draft issue. Sometimes, Pravda-like, the media ignore it when it does rear its head. On Sunday, when Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) spoke at a Bush rally in Anaheim, he said that Clinton had spent his time in London “in a pub in London, drinking ale, throwing darts . . . organizing demonstrations in London where they shouted ‘Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong is gonna win.’ ”

In Monday’s paper, the New York Times’s account of the rally omitted the reference to the Viet Cong, although it was reported in the Los Angeles Times. If the speech had been about a conservative candidate from the South who had, say, spent the years of the civil-rights movement playing horseshoes, drinking mint juleps and riding with the Ku Klux Klan, would reporters have left out the operational element in the series?

It is vitally important for voters to understand that Clinton did not just avoid service in Vietnam, but also participated--not only in London but in Washington at the headquarters of the October Moratorium in the fall of 1969--in activities that gave aid and comfort to forces against which the United States was engaged on the battlefield.

It is said ad infinitum that millions of principled young Americans opposed the war in Vietnam; for that reason even Sen. Bob Dole (R-Okla.), in his floor speech two weeks ago, implicitly excused Clinton and others who had opposed the war as a matter of conscience. But the difficulty is that the exercise of that generation’s conscience has left it up to its chins in the cold blood of the millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians slaughtered in the aftermath of the communist victories in 1975.

For years I’ve been listening to people saying that if President Richard M. Nixon “had just said he was wrong” during Watergate, all would have been forgiven. Let us offer the same chalice of redemption to Gov. Clinton. Just to put my money where my mouth is, if he joins Norman Podhoretz’s small band of self-revisionists and says that he now believes he was wrong about Vietnam, I’ll vote for him. But, President Bush, I think you’re safe on this one, because Clinton’s lofty opposition to the war is a fundamental element of his defense against the draft-dodging charge.

I winced when George Bush said in his Inaugural Address that it was time to salve the wound of Vietnam, because I always knew that the verities of the ‘60s left, including those about the war in Indochina, would have to be tested at the polls as soon as the generation of young leaders of that era came to the point of inheriting real political, economic and cultural authority. Indeed, millions of them are now looking to this ostensible referendum on Bush’s handling of the economy to vindicate the choices they made in their own young lives, at a time of the vastest divide separating Americans from one another since the Civil War.

This is why the coverage of this race seems more slanted to the Democrats than any since 1972. Many political writers and editors seem to have decided that we have just got to elect this roly-poly, eager-to-please, ideologically diffuse guy--elect him not in spite of what he did during Vietnam, but in large part, I would wager, because of it.

It is true that people are sometimes judged irredeemably and harshly because of the decisions they make while young. One example is Dan Quayle, whose approval ratings sag in part because of the firestorm he went through in 1988 over his own choices about Vietnam.

Quayle’s problem is that his actions and principles in 1969 were inconsistent. He supported but avoided the war. Clinton’s draft-dodging and war-hating are consistent, but a press corps that largely shares his opposition to the war has let him avoid facing the question of whether either was right. It’s an important question because it’s still a dangerous world.

So reporters and Republicans should stop asking Clinton about Uncle Ray and start asking about Uncle Ho. If Clinton, as President, saw a Ho Chi Minh again on the world scene, would he recognize him as a good guy or a bad guy?