Discussion of Moratorium/Mobilization 50th Anniversary

A useful review of what happened during the October 15th moratorium is here https://www.alternet.org/story/84683/nixon%27s_savage_attack_on_the_greatest_anti-war_movement_in_u.s._history

From John Ketwig
(veteran, author of and a hard rain fell)


I want to share a couple of thoughts.

First, 34 years after the publication of my Vietnam War memoir …and a hard rain fell, (which is still in print after 27 printings) I have a new book being published about March of next year.   Vietnam Reconsidered: The War, the Times, and Why They Matter is intended to be the complete antithesis, and hopefully somewhat of an antidote, to both the Ken Burns PBS TV series, and the Pentagon’s 50^th anniversary “Commemoration” and recruiting extravaganza.   Although it is arriving a little late, the new book will offer a very decidedly anti-war alternative look at the history of our generation as well as the war, and an analysis of various aspects of the war from the standpoint of showing the war as a tragedy and a travesty.   I have attempted to show the damage the war did to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and the U.S., with emphasis on the failed policies and strategies that have been carried over to today’s wars in the Middle East.   After many years of speaking to high school and college students, the book was originally targeted to them but I found that many baby boomers and members of our generation were also very interested.   In the years after the war we have all been focused upon family and career pursuits, and now as we retire we have time to look back and reflect upon what made us so passionate back then.    (Please see www.johnketwig.com)

I believe there must be some effort to reach out to the young students.   They consistently tell me that they understand that the overall topic of “Vietnam” is important, but they don’t know why.   “What was all the fuss about?”  Over the past few years I have asked a number of authors and historians what five books they would recommend to young people trying to understand, and very few can name five.   There is no clear source for understanding the emotions of that time.   Our present political environment in this country makes it all but impossible to impress middle aged voters, but the young seem to be leaning toward progressive attitudes and political activism, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Octavio-Cortez.   Our activities need to be fertilizer to the seeds that those young folks are feeling.   We must resist the current pro-militarism attitudes or our country faces both moral and financial bankruptcy.   The Pentagon’s 50^th anniversary Commemoration has delivered print materials, colorful buttons and an assortment of “trinkets and trash” to every high school in America, followed by the recruiters in force.   I strongly urge the committee to develop some sort of brochures or pamphlets or similar materials that will be thought-provoking and contrary to the militarism, and then find a way to distribute them to schools, colleges, and even churches across the land.  

I hope you will contact me concerning opportunities to take part in some of your activities. 

Thanks for this opportunity to register an opinion.

 John Ketwig



From John McAuliff

The draft of a proposed nationwide activity for the Moratorium/Mobilization 50th anniversaries prompted three thoughtful replies from friends whose experience then and involvement now are at least as relevant as my own.  We hope to generate widespread discussion, either through the comment box on either page, or via longer interventions that we will post on this page.  (They can be sent, preferably in a word doc, to director@ffrd.org .)

A Simpler Local Commemoration or a National Event? 


Dear John,

I am not optimistic about your plan.  It feels very much like our attempt to commemorate the Pentagon March, which, despite all the work you and others put in, lacked the impact we all hoped it would have.

Bridging the gap between young activists today and old veterans of the antiwar movement has been difficult.  Perhaps I am unaware of places where it has occurred, but I see little success, and occasional resentment.  “What do we have to learn from a bunch of 80-year-old white guys?”

So, while I applaud your intent, and agree it would great to achieve the goals you outline, I don’t see a practical plan for doing that.

You might have a better chance by simply pitching a local commemoration of the Fall 1969 events.  At least a simple commemoration gives a lot of people, those who participated, a reason to come.  If there is an anticipation that such an audience will be large, younger people might then become interested and venues for dialogue could be established.

At the same time, you might find a major university in DC or NY willing to sponsor a day-long symposium on the impact of the 1969 events.  That could give you a national platform, and perhaps a little press interest, especially if leading figures were invited to participate.  A symposium like that could be followed up by something in the evening geared to a bigger audience, a concert perhaps with the music and a few of the artists from back in the day Country Joe, Joni Mitchell, CSN&Y?  TV rights?  A doc film?

I think if your activities are pitched as a celebration of activism by looking back at a time when it worked, rather than pitching them as an attempt to “teach lessons” or “bridge gaps” you would draw more interest.  Having done so, the lessons and the bridging would occur in a more organic way.

My two cents,

Bill Zimmerman

***********************

Thanks for sharing. Bill makes some good points. 

The possibility of organizing local events focused on the 1969 Moratorium may be overambitious. The reason the Moratorium worked at the local level was because there were already established grassroots and campus groups working against the war in most communities, often for some years. We don’t have that base now to build local events around, nor the cause of the war.  To find and mobilize people who were involved then and are interested now in organizing local events may take considerable effort, if it works at all, and would likely need considerable funding and staff to seed and support such efforts.  

A national conference that focused not just on what happened in Fall 1969, but on credibly documenting the impact of the momentous events on Nixon’s war plans could help inform and inspire movements today - and possibly encourage local events afterwards. Featuring academics and organizers, it could also be livestreamed with people around the country from various causes invited to tune in.

One of the biggest benefits from last October's conference was several major national media retrospectives on the Pentagon March, which were likely a result of work on that event and Chris Kelly’s PR promoting it: http://www.vietnampeace.org/press-coverage

One other possibility is to focus over the next year on developing a compendium of written or filmed memories of the Moratorium/Mobilization by its national and local organizers, which would include lessons and impact. These could be published and promoted, and perhaps help generate more national media in Fall 2019. There could be a question on the survey asking people if they’d like write up their experiences, etc.

Best,

Steve Ladd

My basic reply to both thoughtful comments is, "let's try ... and maybe do both".  We'll send out this mailing to our list of about 2,000 people and see how many of you want to think about and explore with friends and colleagues doing something in your own community.  If nothing else, our experience taught us how to take an idea, a passion, and organize it into reality.

My bottom line is that history is rooted in diverse local realities at least as much as in national events.  Right now we are seeing our history disappear.  Not surprisingly, opposition to the war in the military and among veterans is completely invisible in the Pentagon's 50th anniversary commemoration project.

Even the Burns and Novick epoch documentary for PBS gave relatively short shrift and misleading interpretation to the anti-war movement, although it portrays powerfully the wrongness of the war and its impact on those who fought.

The people on our list, as well as many others, embody in their lives a different and more valid version of history.  And only they have the ability to insure that it is recognized and expressed in specific personal ways and connected to how that experience affected our own lives -- and how it might be relevant to the profound challenges now facing our country.  

At a minimum while it is still possible, this needs to be recorded beyond the memoirs written by the few who have the ability to do so and become lodged in institutional records of libraries and universities.  

I don't mean to close on a morbid note, but we have recently lost Julian Bond, Tom Hayden, Paul Booth and Ron Young--and hundreds of others less publicly recognized from one of the most transformative generations of US history.  If not us, who will get it right?

  --John McAuliff



Earlier Response from Moratorium leaders

We think it would be very valuable to place the events of October/November in an historic context with some serious and scholarly attention to the impact they had on the course of the war.  We know, of course, that Dan Ellsberg argues that they were pivotal in preventing greater escalation. Before we, the Moratorium, responded to Nixon’s November 3 speech, we met with Dan and with George McT. Kahin to make sure we were on solid ground.  But we knew little then compared to what we know now. 

We’d be interested in a serious panel on the Oct/Nov 69 events and the course of the war with scholars such as Fred Logevall, whose two books are the best recent writing on the Vietnam war, Hang Nguyen whose book, Hanoi’s War, was a revelation, Ken Hughes, the Nixon tapes expert, who has written two books that should be read (Chasing Shadows and Fatal Politics), Jeff Kimball (Nixon’s War and Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: the Secret Alert of ’69, Madman Diplomacy and the Vietnam War) and perhaps others. 

   There is also the parallel scholarly debate now, about whether RMN and Kissinger were really out to win the war or just seeking a “decent interval” before the collapse, namely after the 72 election.  And there is now a lot of info on how the Oct 69 outpouring forced RMN and K to postpone for three years the Duck Hook/Pruning Knife escalation they wanted to force Hanoi’s hand in Paris – what became Linebacker and the Xmas bombing -- for 3 years.  Dan had info on this at the time.  But now that the archives opened there is much more.

We also think there is value it looking at events in Vietnam subsequent to the end of the war in Vietnam and Indo-China.  That is not a happy story and we need to acknowledge that fact.  It is sobering and enlightening to see the unintended consequences.  

This goal may be too ambitious, but an achievable goal might be to focus on the views of the still-surviving activists from that period and what they thought, intended and did at the time.  To the best of my knowledge this inside understanding of the dynamics of the movement around October/November ’69 have never been collected and this could be a serious contribution to what went right and wrong and what lessons might be learned.  That's a separate exercise from assessing its impact on the "official" history.  It’s important to gather those memories, especially about the crucial transition of October/November '69, not because those views are definitive for the war as a whole but because citizens' involvement in war decisions remains marginalized and subject to caricature.

So we hope we can gather as much firsthand witness as possible.  If a transcribed symposium could be framed as an exercise in exploration and preservation on the topic of citizen/youth movements, it might attract both institutional funding and interest from the youth movements stirring now.

In general we think there is value in memorializing the value of disbursed and community-based work, in this case on the war, but in a larger sense helping understand how citizen action can truly impact on policy.  We believe, the model of self-generated, locally-based efforts conveying a single, central theme and focused specifically on changing the hearts and minds of the public and politicians remains an important lesson all these years later. 

In this context, perhaps we could engage some of the younger organizers, both of protest movements and of progressive political campaigns.  We would certainly learn something, and so might they.  

Sam met recently, just before the big Never Again march where the Executive Director or some such title was Kate Gage, the daughter of a Moratorium person, John Gage.  She was totally interested to talk about the problems we faced then and they face now — ranging from pure logistics (toilets, sound, stages, marshals, etc.) to how to keep the energy alive after a cathartic march.  The more mundane parts of that discussion were easy but, they, like us, face the larger problems of burn out, leadership disagreements and more complicated long-term problems.   Sam has discussed this with some current, younger activists and has found a surprising degree of interest.  We should explore whether that interest is adequate to bring a strong group of younger organizers to meet with us.  We are, after all, not yet dead.  And many of us remain active.  There is no reason we should not want to learn and, perhaps impart some learning.  

Response survey to become part of this program  

tinyurl.com/Moratoriumsurvey