President Carter's Indochina Record
Tuesday, January 7, 11 a.m. ET
Register by clicking here or with this link https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1fNo0VktTzijf6WauEE2bg
A webinar to review and reflect on policies and actions by President Carter affecting Viet Nam and Cambodia and those who opposed the war.
With Viet Nam and Cambodia
* Nayan Chanda, journalist and author
* Elizabeth Becker, journalist and author
With veterans, exiles and draft resistors
* Barry Lynn, religious and legal activist
Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning American journalist and author, most recently of You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War which won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. Foreign Affairs named it the military book of the year.
An expert on Cambodia, she interviewed Pol Pot while he was in power and later was an expert witness at the international war crimes tribunal of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge is now a classic and won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award. She is the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.
Her 2013 book “OVERBOOKED: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism” was an Amazon book of the year and was hailed by Arthur Former as "required reading" about the future of global tourism. In 2019 Conde Nast Traveler named Becker one of the people who has changed how the world travels.
Becker covered international affairs for over four decades, beginning as a war correspondent in Cambodia for the Washington Post, as Senior Foreign Editor at National Public Radio and as a New York Times correspondent. She was part of the Times’ team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of 9/11. She won two DuPont Columbia awards for NPR coverage of the Rwanda genocide and South Africa’s first democratic election. She has reported from around the world including foreign postings in Phnom Penh and Paris.
She was a fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, holds a degree from the University of Washington and studied language at the Kendriya Hindi Sansthaan in Agra, India. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the board of the Oxfam America Advocacy Fund.
www.elizabethbecker.com
Nayan Chanda, is Associate Professor of International Relations at Ashoka University.
He began his career as a lecturer in History at North Bengal University and later conducted research on contemporary Indochina in Jadavpur University and University of Paris. His deepening interest in contemporary history led him to wartime Saigon as the bureau chief of the Hong Kong-based magazine the Far Eastern Economic Review and report on the fall of Saigon in 1975. After two decades as its correspondent based in Hong Kong and Washington DC he was appointed editor of the magazine - the only Asian editor in its half century.
Prior to his editorship of the magazine Chanda was a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC and also served as editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly. In 2001 Chanda was appointed Director of Publications at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization at Yale University. In 2002 he founded YaleGlobal Online and edited the online journal until 2015.
Chanda is the author of Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization (Yale ,2007) and Brother Enemy: the War After the War (Harcourt, 1986). Bound Together has been translated in eight languages. Chanda has co-edited and contributed chapters to over a dozen books including Encyclopedia of Global Studies (2012). His most recent co-authored publication is The Future of East Asia (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2018). Recently Chanda has published his first children's book Around the World With a Chilli, (Pratham Books, 2016).
He has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Diplomat and other international newspapers. He writes regular columns for Times of India, and Global Asia. He is a founding member of the editorial board of Global Asia and New Global Studies journal and of the Sage Encyclopedia of Global Studies. He has served as a member of the Abe Fellowship Committee and Shorenstein award committee.
Chanda did his BA (Hons in History) from Presidency College, Kolkata and obtained a First Class Master's degree in History from Jadavpur University, winning the University Gold Medal. Nayan Chanda is the winner of the 2005 Shorenstein Award for Journalism presented for lifetime achievement.
Barry W. Lynn is a minister in the United Church of Christ and an attorney with
membership in the Supreme Court bar. During the traumatic end of the war in
Vietnam and employed by the UCC, he became a Board member and key legislative
contact for the National Coalition For Universal Unconditional Amnesty. He
went on to work for a major change in the military discharge system for
veterans with other than honorable discharges with Senators Ed Brooke and James
Abourezk, a group ignored by President Carter during his "pardon" actions. Following his work on amnesty he fought reinstatement of registration for the
draft which resulted in a narrow defeat in Congress but the prosecution of only
18 men who refused to register notwithstanding threats of massive prosecutions.
He worked for the ACLU on censorship matters including destroying the Reagan era
Meese Commission on Pornography and battling efforts to close the Palestine
Information Office. He then worked for 25 years as Executive Director of
Americans United For Separation of Church and State opposing homophobic and
bigoted Christian Nationalists.
Lynn is the author of 3 books: Piety and Politics. God and
Government, and a trilogy memoir Paid To Piss People Off which
Ron Kovic, author of Born On The Fourth of July, calls "an
unforgettable portrait of a generation in turmoil...told with wit, honesty and
grace".
Resources
"Safe Return: Inside the Amnesty Movement for Vietnam War Deserters"
"Seeking to heal the country, Jimmy Carter pardoned men who evaded the Vietnam War draft"
The American Veterans Committee praised the pardon but said it should have also included deserters and those who were given less-than-honorable discharges, categories that were disproportionately represented by "minority and less advantaged groups in our society."
By Joe Hernandez January 4, 2025 NPR
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/04/1158874141/jimmy-carter-vietnam-draft-evaders-pardon
"Vietnam War Resisters in Canada"
A Guide to Web Sites
February 4, 2019
https://www.vietnamfulldisclosure.org/vietnam-war-resisters-in-candada/
Vietnam War Antiwar Movement History Not Air Brushed in Canada
By Jack Colhoun July 12, 2015
https://www.vietnamfulldisclosure.org/vietnam-war-antiwar-movement-history-not-air-brushed-in-canada-by-jack-colhoun/
