Pentagon Still Hasn't Cleaned Up Time-line on Commemorative Web Site

Making America’s Wars Great Again 

The Pentagon Whitewashes a Troubling Past 
By Arnold R. Isaacs

Here’s a paradox of the last few decades: as American military power has been less and less effective in achieving Washington’s goals, the rhetoric surrounding that power has grown more and more boastful.

The cliché that our armed forces are the best and mightiest in the world -- even if the U.S. military hasn’t won any of its significant wars in the last 50 years -- resonates in President Trump's promise to make America great again. Many Americans, clearly including him, associate that slogan with military power. And we don't just want to be greater again in the future; we also want to have been greater in the past than we really were. To that end, we regularly forget some facts and invent others that will make our history more comfortable to remember.

The Vietnam War was obviously one of the most disastrous of this country’s past mistakes -- and the Pentagon's "50th Vietnam War commemoration" is a near-perfect example of how both national and military leaders and a willing public have avoided facing important truths about Vietnam and American wars ever since. That’s not just a matter of inaccurate storytelling. It’s dangerous because refusing to recognize past mistakes makes it easier to commit future ones. For that reason, the selective history the Pentagon has been putting out on Vietnam for more than six years, and what that story tells us about the military leadership's institutional memory, is worth a critical look.

The commemoration website's historical material -- principally a set of fact sheets and an extensive "interactive timeline" -- is laced with factual mistakes, errors of both omission and commission. Its history drastically minimizes or more often completely ignores facts that reveal America's policy and moral failures, its missteps on the ground, and its complicity (along with the enemy's) in massive civilian suffering not just in Vietnam but in Laos and Cambodia, too. Opposition to the war at home is largely scrubbed out of the record as well.

Perhaps more telling than the misstatements has been the prolonged failure to correct faulty entries that have remained unchanged for years even though the site's administrators were well aware of them.

Back in 2014, following a critical TomDispatch article by Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, and pressure from other critics, officials did revise a few items. Those included the My Lai massacre (though the site still does not use the word “massacre” for the murder by U.S. troops of more than 500 civilians, including women and children) and the naval clashes in the Tonkin Gulf that led to the first U.S. air strikes on North Vietnam. But no more corrections followed, leaving a startling range of wrong or misleading statements untouched.

In its most noticeable distortion, the site virtually ignores the domestic debate on the war and the divisions it caused in American society. As of this writing, the 30-year (1945-1975) timeline still includes only terse one-line entries for each of the massive national antiwar protests of October and November 1969. The wave of demonstrations in May 1970 following the U.S. "incursion" in Cambodia gets a somewhat more detailed entry, mentioning the deaths of protesters killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio and by police gunfire at Jackson State College in Mississippi.

Aside from those, though, most other important moments in the peace movement are missing from the timeline altogether. The massive 1965 and 1967 protest marches outside the Pentagon are nowhere mentioned. Nor are the chaotic protests the following year outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Although the Vietnam veterans' experience is billed as the central theme of the commemoration, veterans who came to oppose the war were also blanked out of its story until just days ago, when officials at the commemoration’s History and Legacy branch learned that I was working on the present article. Only then did the site managers insert a new entry on the dramatic week-long protest in April 1971, when hundreds of disillusioned vets threw away their decorations in front of the U.S. Capitol -- an event previously not mentioned in the timeline at all.

The new entry, along with briefly describing the veterans' protests, refers to future secretary of state and presidential candidate John Kerry's televised testimony that week before a Senate committee. However, it does not mention the moment that most historians would describe as the most memorable in that hearing, when Kerry, wearing Navy fatigues with his Vietnam ribbons pinned above his shirt pocket, asked the committee members, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Even if the veterans' demonstration and some other notable gaps have been belatedly corrected, they are still worth noting because they illustrate the nature of the message the site has been putting out for the last five or six years, and the underlying attitude that has let acknowledged mistakes go uncorrected for half or more of that time.

Errors of Commission...

Along with misleading omissions, the commemoration site also contains direct misstatements of historical fact that have not been corrected even though site officials have been aware of them for at least a year, or possibly longer.

Examples include a pair of falsehoods that, with symbolic symmetry, distort historical reality at opposite ends of America's Vietnam involvement. One falsifies a key issue at an early turn on the U.S. path toward involvement in that war, while the other misrepresents an important turning point in its very last stage.

The first false statement is in the U.S. Army fact sheet -- there is one for each military service -- which says in its opening paragraph, "The Geneva Accords of July 1954 divided Vietnam into a Communist state in the North and an anti-Communist state in the South."

That is wrong. On the contrary, rather than creating two states, the Geneva agreements, which ended hostilities in France's failed effort to maintain colonial rule in Indochina, definitively recognized Vietnam as a single nation. The line it established between South and North was defined as a "provisional military demarcation line" temporarily separating the opposing French and Viet Minh armed forces, pending national elections for a unified government. The Geneva Conference's final declaration explicitly stated that the ceasefire line "should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary."

That is not a minor technicality. It misleads on a fundamental question: What was the war about? Was it illegal foreign aggression by North Vietnam against the South, as the United States and the South Vietnamese government in Saigon -- neither of which signed the Geneva treaty -- insisted? Or was it a war to reunify an illegally divided country, as the Communist side proclaimed? There are arguments to be made on both sides of that question, but the Geneva accords did not support Washington's legal and political justification for intervening -- and wrongly indicating that it did gives the U.S. claim an uncontested legitimacy it simply did not have.

The second example comes from a passage in the Air Force fact sheet on the December 1972 U.S. air offensive commonly remembered as the "Christmas bombing."

Using its codename, Linebacker, the fact sheet describes events this way: "As [peace] talks dragged on, President Nixon ordered a second Linebacker operation and in late December 1972, B-52s struck Hanoi and Haiphong at night and A-7s and F-4s struck during the day... The North Vietnamese, now defenseless, returned to negotiations and quickly concluded a settlement. American airpower therefore played a decisive role in ending the long conflict."

Like the Army's statement on Geneva, that is false. The December bombing brought no significant new concessions from North Vietnam. The peace agreement signed by Hanoi's representatives in January 1973 was, in every meaningful respect, identical to the draft treaty they had already accepted in October 1972, months before the bombing.

That earlier text, which differed from the January agreement only on a few minor procedural points, was not a negotiating proposal or a loose agreement in principle. It was a definitive final draft approved down to the last detail by both sides and was not carried out only because the United States withdrew its commitment after South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu, whose government had not participated in the negotiations, rejected its terms. Under strong U.S. pressure, Thieu accepted essentially the same agreement in January. So it was Saigon, not Hanoi, that changed its position after the bombing.

That's a meaningful mistake, too. It mischaracterizes a critical event in the negotiations that ended the U.S. war, and then cites that erroneous history to falsely claim that air power played a decisive role.

...and of Omission

Until the most recent changes spurred by my inquiry, some crucial historical events were missing from the timeline. Although a few of those blank spots have now been nominally filled, several of the revised entries still lack meaningful details.

One notable omission was the March 1970 coup in Cambodia that overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk, toppled Cambodia into full-scale war, and set the stage for U.S. troops to enter the country just six weeks later. Another was South Vietnam’s only authentic national election in September 1967, when General Nguyen Van Thieu became president with slightly more than one-third of the votes. An entry on that election was inserted in one of those late amendments to the timeline, but it still says nothing about the surprise second-place candidate, Truong Dinh Dzu, who ran on a peace platform, was arrested soon after the election and imprisoned for the next five years -- tarnishing claims that the United States was supporting a legitimate democracy in South Vietnam.

Another gap only partially filled after all these years by the newly amended timeline has to do with the intensive and highly controversial U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1973, conducted for nearly six months after the Paris peace agreement ended U.S. combat in Vietnam.

Replacing a single oblique reference in the earlier entry, which had merely noted that the U.S. Congress ended funding in August 1973 for "air action in Cambodia and Laos" but said nothing else about that campaign, the timeline now specifies where and when the bombing took place. However, it still gives no details about the scale and severity of those air strikes. (Two hundred and fifty thousand tons of U.S. bombs fell on Cambodia in 1973, more than were dropped on Japan in all of World War II.)  Nor does it offer any hint that the bombing did not end Cambodia's agony. The timeline mentions Cambodia just once more, in a one-sentence entry on its final page saying only, "On April 16 and 17 [1975], Phnom Penh falls to the communist forces, the Khmer Rouge."

Omissions extend even to the dates that were chosen for the 50th "anniversary" (if that word can be used to designate a span of more than 13 years). Rather than marking any events in the actual Vietnam War, the commemoration officially runs between two U.S. holidays -- from Memorial Day in 2012 until Veterans Day in 2025.

A beginning date for the Vietnam War is indeed hard to pin down, but there were perfectly clear choices for its end: January 27, 1973, when U.S. combat ended under the Paris peace agreement; March 29, 1973, when the last American war prisoners were released and the last U.S. combat troops departed; or April 30, 1975, when Saigon surrendered to the Communists. By not choosing any of those, the Pentagon spared veterans and the rest of us from the possible discomfort of noticing the real dates and remembering the great national failure they represent.

Changes Promised, But Unmade

Pentagon commemoration officials have long acknowledged serious shortcomings in the timeline. As far back as March 2015, administrators informed a group of the site's critics that sooner or later they planned to replace it with a brand-new timeline giving a more accurate and balanced version of events in Vietnam.

The following January, retired Army Colonel Mark Franklin, chief of the commemoration's History and Legacy Branch, told historians at the American Historical Association's annual meeting that the updated timeline would be posted "soon." He even showed slides from what was to be the new version. But nothing on the site had changed in the fall of 2017, many months later, when I contacted his office before writing an earlier article on the commemoration. I was told then that a completely revised website, including a brand-new timeline, was expected to be posted by the end of that year. If that didn't happen, the plan was to go ahead with corrections in the existing timeline.

Almost exactly a year later, the site has still not been replaced and the revised timeline, prepared several years ago, remains in limbo. The official explanation for the delay is that unresolved contracting issues have kept work on the new site from starting. Franklin has emphatically denied that there has been a deliberate attempt to cling to faulty history or any intent to "portray one particular narrative about the war." But keeping drastically whitewashed history on the site for so many years after promising to change it does not exactly suggest a strong commitment to provide "historically accuratematerials," as promised on the History and Legacy section's home page, to help Americans understand their country's experience in Vietnam.

Mythologizing Our Wars and Ourselves

The commemoration not only tells us something about the Pentagon's custodians of our Vietnam War memories, it also reveals something much broader and deeper in American political and popular culture: a powerful need to think of ourselves as a righteous, just, and successful country that fights only righteous, just, and successful wars.

This is, of course, hardly a new phenomenon. As far back as 1899, in a speech defending the military campaign that would make the Philippines a U.S. colony, President William McKinley assured his audience that it was not a war for treasure or conquest because such wars were foreign to the American character. "No imperial designs lurk in the American mind," McKinley declared. "They are alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose." The "sole purpose" of sending U.S. troops to the Philippines, he went on, was "the welfare and happiness and the rights of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands." As chronicled in Stephen Kinzer's fascinating 2017 book, The True Flag, that same note was struck in many orations at the time -- speeches that perfectly expressed what more than a century later would be called "American exceptionalism."

Along with nurturing a broad national assumption of moral superiority, for a generation American political leaders have shored up U.S. military ventures with rhetoric that conflates "support the troops" with "support the policy." A variant of that formula that has been retroactively applied to Vietnam equates "honor the veterans" with "honor the war," the clear implication being that criticizing the war is indeed disrespecting those veterans. It's false logic, but looking at the Pentagon commemoration site, it's impossible not to see its influence there.

The commemoration's most recent corrections are a welcome but small step toward greater accuracy. But the site is still far from showing the true nature of what this country really did to itself and to many millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians in the tragic mistake we call the Vietnam War. For that, far greater changes will be needed than have been made so far.

Arnold R. Isaacs, a TomDispatch regular, covered the Vietnam War for the Baltimore Sun between June 1972 and the final defeat in April 1975 and is the author of Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia. He also wrote Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy and an online report, From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani and Afghan Americans in post-9/11 America. His website is www.arnoldisaacs.net

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Storyand Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands.

Copyright 2018 Arnold R. Isaacs

Posted by Arnold Isaacs at 7:44am, November 8, 2018.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176493/

A Personal View of the Anti-war Movement

A Personal View of the Movement to End the Viet Nam War

Revised from presentation at a colloquy on "1968" sponsored by Temas, Havana, Cuba
November 8, 2018

by John McAuliff

It is an honor to participate in this colloquy with such an illustrious group of presenters.  My thanks to the sponsors for this rare opportunity:  La Acadamia de la Historia de Cuba, La Universidad de Nanterre, y La Revista Temas.

I am approaching this topic from the perspective of a participant, as an artifact from a movement half a century in the past, not as an academic.   I can attest to the authenticity of my views, but not to their objectivity or universality.   I am going to use my time to provide an overview of this historic movement that for the first and only time in US history helped to stop a war.

Before I graduated from university in 1964, I wrote a paper about the little noted conflict in Viet Nam.  At the time, there were 23,300 US military advisers in country.  Then I went off to work in the Mississippi Summer Project of the civil rights movement to register voters and three months later to the Peace Corps in Peru.

On February 13, 1965 while I was working with campesinos in Cuzco, the US began bombing northern Viet Nam.  Traditional peace groups and student activists organized protests in perhaps two dozen locations with at most a few hundred participants. The first teach-in was held six weeks later at the University of Michigan on March 24, 1965.  That spring thousands of students and professors heard lectures and argued about the war and what should be done about it at over 100 campuses.  The US government initially sent representatives to advocate for the war, but stopped when they saw that their presence was generating more opposition.  The first large national peace demonstration was organized by the new left SDS, Students for a Democratic Society on April 14, 1965 and brought 20,000 people to Washington.  Seven months later, 30,000 protested in Washington under the banner of SANE, an older liberal peace organization that was formed to advocate for a sane nuclear policy.  SDS supported that demonstration reluctantly, and made from the speakers’ stand a much appreciated more direct and radical critique of the cold war liberals carrying out the war in the Johnson Administration.  Nevertheless a Gallup poll in October showed 64% of Americans supported the war.

When I returned to the US in 1966, US troop levels in Viet Nam had mushroomed to 385,300 plus 60,000 sailors offshore.  More than 6,000 U.S. soldiers died that year and an estimated ten times that many National Liberation Front combatants, a.k.a. Viet Cong.  The war had emerged as a major national issue. This led to more discontent in the US.  48% of Americans still supported the war in May, but opposition was spreading and had grown to 35%.

The party line of the Democrats began to crack when critical nationally televised hearings were held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee led by J. William Fulbright, his acknowledged response to the previous year's protests.  Anti-war activism was focused on campuses and in communities.   Silent vigils and counseling for young men who were eligible for the draft were common.  There were smaller national demonstrations but sectarian political differences and rivalries, most notably between the Old Left of the Communist Party and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party,  frustrated the emergence of a national antiwar -movement.  

In 1967 the war grew larger and the peace movement finally got organized.  485,600 troops were on the ground and deaths rose to 9,377.  At great political cost, Martin Luther King brought together the defining issues of the decade, civil rights and peace, in a prophetic April 4th speech at Riverside Church in New York.  Days later he was at the head of a march of 300,000 in New York.  Vietnam Summer, my own first job as an anti-war activist, took the movement off campus all over the US, laying the ground for peace candidates in Congressional and Presidential campaigns.   Veterans and former Peace Corps Volunteers, lawyers and business people, clergy and lay activists came together through newspaper ads and new organizations.  (I came to be the head of one of them, the Committee of Returned Volunteers.  More on that later.) 

Burning draft cards

An essential vehicle for carrying out the war, Selective Service (the draft) became a major focus for opposition.  Beginning in October, a movement arose of young men who burned or returned their draft cards.  This symbolic action was illegal and decisions not to cooperate with the draft could lead to imprisonment.  Over the course of the war, 200,000 young men were cited for draft violations, 25,000 sent to trial, and 4,000 imprisoned for an average of two years.  More militant confrontations with local authorities were seen at the Oakland Stop the Draft Week and in protests at the University of Wisconsin against Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm and, learned only later, Agent Orange, the defoliant that is still wreaking havoc in Vietnam with birth defects.   (The way I dealt with the draft was to seek and ultimately receive status as a conscientious objector, although I was not really qualified because my opposition was specifically to the Vietnam war.)

Arrests on the steps of the Pentagon

The movement publicly redefined its goal as From Protest to Resistance on October 21st.  100,000 rallied at the Lincoln Memorial, and half marched on to the Pentagon.   More than 600 were arrested, most peacefully sitting on the Pentagon steps, myself among them.   Catholic activists led by the Berrigan brothers a week later began symbolic but real attacks on local draft boards, pouring blood on files or burning them.   The year ended with more anti-draft demonstrations and card turn-ins as well as the announcement by Senator Eugene McCarthy that he would run as a candidate for President in opposition to Lyndon Johnson and the war.

Self exile to Canada and Europe grew among those facing the draft as well as among discontented military.  Reminiscent of the anti-slavery campaign, an underground railway of middle class activists assisted draft resistors and deserters to escape authorities.  One source reports about 100,000 Americans fled abroad to avoid being called up with some 90 percent going to Canada. Thousands of others went into hiding within the country, sometimes changing their identities. In addition about 1,000 military deserters entered Canada

1968, the focus of this colloquium, witnessed the height (or the depth) of the war and the anti-war movement.  US troop numbers peaked at 536,100 with 14,589 deaths.  Public opinion began the year with a plurality of 46 % feeling the war was a mistake.  By seven months later 54% felt that way.  The Tet Offensive shattered US illusions that the war was being won and cost tens of thousands of Vietnamese lives on both sides of the conflict.   Surprisingly strong vote totals for Eugene McCarthy brought Bobby Kennedy into the race and led Lyndon Johnson to withdraw as a candidate for reelection.  The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy provoked urban riots and political despair.

Police riot against protestors on Michigan Avenue in Chicago

Inside the Democratic Convention

The focal point of struggle was the national convention in Chicago of the Democratic Party.  Different tendencies within the peace movement did their own thing, ranging from counter cultural Yippies (organized hippies) and a confront-the-police faction of SDS to anti-war activists such as our group of former Peace Corps volunteers seeking to support similar sentiment among delegates.  A large non-violent march that we were asked to lead was viciously attacked by the Chicago police just as it joined up with the symbolic mule train from Dr. King’s Poor Peoples Campaign, the opening act of what was officially described as a police riot.  The Mayor of Chicago undertook his own form of verbal riot on the convention floor.  The post-assassination post-Chicago alienation of activists led to votes for protest candidates instead of the Democrat’s nominee (including my own for Dr. Benjamin Spock)--even after Hubert Humphrey broke with Johnson on the war.  (During 1968 I turned in my draft cards and refused to perform civilian alternative service during a demonstration at the Justice Department protesting the arrest of Dr. Spock and four others for counseling draft resistance.)

October 1969 Moratorium

As a result Richard Nixon became President and the war lasted five years longer.   Another 15,000 Americans would die.  While reducing the number of troops on the ground as part of Vietnamizing the war, Nixon increased bombing in the north and broadened the conflict to Cambodia with the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk,  “secret” bombing and the “incursion” of US forces, creating conditions for the post-war horror of Khmer Rouge rule.  Anti-war protest also broadened with nationwide and national Moratorium protests in October and November 1969, despite the real but partial reduction in US troop numbers and casualties.  (475,200 and 9,414 respectively)  (During this year, I discovered I was under indictment for refusing to carry out alternative service--and so could not be part of a delegation I had organized from the Committee of Returned Volunteers to visit Cuba.  Subsequently I agreed to do alternative service in Indianapolis, Indiana, where I spent much of my personal time doing anti-war organizing and working on the "underground" newspaper.)

November 1969 Mobilization in Washington

The deadly shooting of students at Kent and Jackson State Universities in May 1970 in protest of the Cambodia incursion expanded already widespread student strikes to hundreds of universities.  National demonstrations continued in Washington, with the most dramatic occurring in April 1971 when Vietnam veterans threw their medals of war at the Capitol building.  Days later hundreds of thousands marched in peaceful protest.     Later in the month  May Day brought several days of a more militant response.  Some 10,000 were arrested for civil disobedience, for trying to shut down normal business in the Capital.   (I was among them.) Anti-war energy was not diminished by the fact that US troops were down to 200,000 and the year’s death total had fallen to 1,381.  

Anti-war violence had also become more common.  Dozens of ROTC military training buildings on campuses, a research facility and several Bank of America branches were destroyed.   SDS fractured into self-described Maoist and Marxist-Leninist factions, some immersing themselves in factory jobs.  Most notorious was the Weathermen faction underground campaign of bombings that did nothing to end the war but permanently damaged the reputation of the movement. 

Nixon announced the end of the draft in 1972, a year when troop levels were down to 24,200 and US deaths totaled 300. After the Paris Peace Agreement in 1973, the last US combat forces were withdrawn.  As US troop levels and casualties fell, opposition to the war grew to 60%, but activism declined.  After the last American soldier had left Viet Nam, residual anti-war sentiment focused on a sophisticated campaign of grass roots lobbying for legislation to stop US bombing and restrict US military aid led by the Indochina Peace Campaign and my office in the Peace Education Division of the American Friends Service Committee .  US intentions to maintain a client state in the south failed when the South Vietnamese government collapsed in 1975 because of loss of morale, diminishing military supplies and inability to fight on its own.

Reflections:

The main factor driving the anti-war movement was the war itself, which is to say the unwillingness of the Vietnamese to surrender their "independence and freedom" -- in Ho Chi Minh’s famous words,.  The daily carnage reported freely by the US media violated the values and sense of rightness of many Americans.  Initial objection came from traditional pacifists and progressive political activists for whom any war or any exercise of cold war adventurism was unacceptable.   The movement broadened as the oft-proclaimed assumption of self-defensive anti-communism was overcome by knowledge of the history of US intervention and of Vietnam itself.  At root the case could not be made under serious scrutiny that this was a Just War or in US national interest.

The draft and US deaths made a war that lacked legitimacy an existential issue for young men, their families and friends.  To the normal human aversion to being killed in war was added the feeling that the loss would not be for a worthy reason.  That sentiment spread through the Vietnam generation, most quickly on campuses where young adults were structurally exposed to open debate and critical histories, interacted constantly in classrooms and dormitories and could feel their collective strength--as well as endangerment.   Doubt spread generationally upwards and outwards, family argument by family argument.  The questioning of the war on campuses and in the media and its delegitimization by prominent cultural icons promoted disquiet in ever growing circles.  At times it caused anger at disloyal protesters but also at the unfairness of being forced into danger by a discriminatory draft or economic pressures.

Finally I want to touch on the factor of solidarity in the anti-war movement.  It took two forms, symbolic and personal.  On the symbolic side activists expressed their growing radicalization by carrying the blue and red National Liberation Front flag in demonstrations and chanting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win”.  This distressed some protest organizers who feared public alignment with an enemy that was killing Americans would narrow the appeal of the message for peace. 

A different kind of solidarity was expressed by activists who had worked with South Vietnamese civilians under sponsorship of Quakers, Mennonites and the secular International Voluntary Service.  Most returned to the US deeply opposed to the cost the war was exacting on South Vietnamese civilians.  A few made it their full time work for several years to carry this message of common humanity to the grass roots.

My colleagues in the Committee of Returned Volunteers had a less direct but expansive version.  They identified the rural peasant victims of the war with the people they had worked with around the world.  It also motivated their interest to expose flaws and contradictions of US policy in the countries where they had served, an experientially grounded and non-rhetorical anti-imperialism.

In addition, a relatively few political activists met the North Vietnamese and NLF representatives in third countries like Hungary, Canada, France, Sweden and Cuba.  About 200 traveled to the north and liberated areas of the south.  The meetings were motivational because the story told by Vietnamese participants about their own lives was extraordinary—as were they.  The American activists often wrote about the meetings and incorporated them into speeches.  The encounters also benefited Vietnamese morale, boosting the political theme that their struggle was winnable because the enemy was the US government not the American people.  At times the Americans carried away an over-romanticized impression that was vulnerable to disenchantment in the first harsh years after the war ended. 

Five years ago I co-led a visit to Vietnam by activists who had shown great courage by visiting the enemy country of North Vietnam in war time.   For many of them it was not easy to absorb the imperfect equity of a very successful market economy for which the US had become the largest export market, a major investor, a primary source of tourists and a prized ally in fending off new yet very old threats to sovereignty and territorial integrity from China.  For others it was disturbing to see that long after the war had ended in a context of phenomenal economic development Vietnam was still a one party state imprisoning internal critics who stepped over the line, less restictive than twenty years ago but a line.  Heartening was to discover a process of self generated national reconciliation through which many tens of thousands of Vietnamese exiles or their children had returned to live, work and invest in the country.

Our group produced a book about each person’s experience during the war and impressions upon returning, as well as what they had done in the intervening half century, “The People Make the Peace”.  As well as being an organizer, I was entitled to be part of the group because my first arrival in Hanoi was on the same day the US war totally collapsed in Saigon, April 30, 1975.  If I have not overrun my time, I will end by sharing a few slides from those days.

April 30, 1975 Ha Noi reads about the end of the war

Orchestra from the Music Conservatory joins the crowd walking
 around the Lake of the Redeemed Sword in Ha Noi, April 30 1975 

Cuban construction team joins the celebratioin

Proposal for November Mobilization 50th Anniversary Programs

From Terry Provance
Washington staff, VPCC

We have been discussing possible scenarios/projects for October and November 2019.  Here is a suggestion

Nov 15, 2019 is on a Friday.  I suggest that on Saturday, Nov 16, we organize a walk/march that would make stops at:  Vietnam Memorial Wall, Martin Luther King Memorial, Treasury Office near the White House and in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House.  We would have speakers at each, etc.

The order could be discussed.  Either start at the Mall and finish at the White House.  Or the other way around.  We would make statements about no war/intervention/restore nuclear agreement with Iran, no arms race/nuclear threats with Korea, reduce military spending, and oppose Trump's policies at the White House.  If possible and if Congress is in session on Monday, Nov 18, or Friday, Nov 15, we could have people lobby congress on perhaps a comprehensive legislative agenda/bill or these individual demands.

It's a suggestion meant for discussion.  See what you think, Terry

Memories of the Moratorium, October 15, 1969

(please add your own by utilizing the comments box below or sending a word attachment by e-mail to director@ffrd.org)




Howie Lisnoff

Author, "Against The Wall: Memoir Of A Vietnam-Era War Resister":

October 15, 1969 was one of the most momentous days in my life. It was the last day I would be teaching junior high school in the small town in Rhode Island where I grew up. That night I would head up to Providence to meet the person at Brown University with whom I was in a relationship, and we would march with hundreds of others down from the college green at Brown to the Rhode Island state house where we would join thousands of others protesting the Vietnam War. The next morning I would board a plane at Green Airport in Warwick, Rhode Island and fly off to the reception station at Forth Jackson, South Carolina and then onto basic training at Fort Gordon, Georgia. I was a member of the Rhode Island National Guard.

At Brown (I had graduated from Providence College across town the previous June), the hundreds who were gathered listened to speeches, the most memorable was by Allard Lowenstein, the peace and civil rights activist (and House member from Long Island), who would be murdered several years later by one of his civil rights proteges, Dennis Sweeney. Lowenstein's message was so powerful that it is almost as if I am listening to him nearly 50 years later. He said that if the Nixon administration didn't listen to the voices of peace from that night, then more radical voices would dominate the peace movement. Here was a leader who could predict what would happen with great accuracy.

Many in the procession down College Hill to the state house about a mile away held candles in the march. Arriving at the state house, I was amazed at the masses of people gathered on the lawn below the building. The most prominent voice of the speeches that would follow was delivered by Mitchell Goodman, who had been charged along with Dr. Benjamin Spock, for counseling young men to refuse the military draft.

The woman, with whom I had attended the march, and I headed back up to College Hill where we said our goodbyes. Within a few, short hours after returning home, I would board a jet that would carry me to basic training in Georgia. 

The November Moratorium march is only something that was described to me by way of a telephone conversation and letters, as I was in the middle of basic training when it took place. I also followed the march on the news to the extent that that was possible in the military.

<howielisnoff@yahoo.com>  Howie lives in western Massachusetts in the southern Berkshires

Cambodia's Elections, Vietnam Observations, Senator John McCain

Personal views of John McAuliff

(Please check back tomorrow to see this page. I am still working on it.)



The Context of John McCain's Imprisonment

John McCain carried out more than a score of combat missions over Vietnam for a wrongful war before being shot down. Innocent civilians were surely among the Vietnamese victims, even if not intended. He was rescued from drowning and protected from an angry crowd, a story known widely in Vietnam but not acknowledged in US media recounting that acts as though his presence was innocent. Vietnam's treatment of prisoners, especially in the early years, was harsh and linked to their legal interpretation of implications that the US had never declared war.  Post-capture beatings and illegal killings of their combatants in the south may also have shaped Vietnamese treatment of their captives.  McCain described what took place as maltreatment and torture and commendably used it as a reason to oppose "enhanced interrogation" by the CIA.

McCain's refusal to accept early release was honorable and courageous within parameters of military discipline.  Other POWs who opposed the war did accept release and risked opprobrium for continuing to speak for peace after return to the U.S. 

His principled behavior in the face of the authoritarianism and dishonesty of President Trump deserves deep appreciation.

It also should be noted the Senator McCain was a supporter with Senator Leahy of US government funding that addresses legacies of the war such as land mines, UXO and Agent Orange.

Vietnam News recalled McCain in this favorable way
https://vietnamnews.vn/politics-laws/464563/us-senator-mccain-who-helps-lay-foundation-for-vn-us-relations-passes-away.html#7PVM2O30JTrjC2If.97

Journalist Arnold Isaacs has written an insightful article about McCain's visit to Saigon six months before the end of the war  https://warontherocks.com/2018/08/john-mccain-in-1974-back-in-vietnam/

Pasted below is a Vietnamese perspective.



Cambodia elected a new parliament on July 29th. 

For the first time in its post Khmer Rouge history only one party will be represented in Cambodia's National Assembly.  Ironically this is reminiscent of the Sihanouk era before he was overthrown by the US backed coup of Lon Nol.

The primary opposition party was outlawed, the Khmer National Rescue Party (KNRP), once known as the Sam Rainsy Party.  Rainsy who lives in exile acts and speaks as though he still is its leader.

Nineteen other parties freely competed, accumulating 23% of the vote.  None of them received enough support to win a seat in parliament.  In fact, as I said at the post-election press conference of election observers, the second largest party was the 9 % "spoiled ballots" (594,659).  The next largest vote (374,510) went to FUNCINPEC, the Royalist party.

FUNCINPEC's ability to campaign was greatly weakened by a crash during a campaign caravan that killed Prince Ranaridh's wife and seriously hospitalized him in Bangkok.

The KNRP's call for an election boycott fell flat.  Voter turnout was 83%, slightly above the previous parliamentary election.

Supporters of the KNRP charge it was outlawed because it came close to defeating the CPP in the last election.  The CPP points to Rainsy's disloyal guarantee in North Carolina of autonomy to Montagnard provinces (as seen on Youtube  https://youtu.be/GZHKJTr79AU) and the also videotaped boast by Kem Sokha, his successor, that the US had promised to support him in a color revolution.

Because the primary opposition party was outlawed and allied publications were closed, the US and the European Union refused for the first time to send election observers and have disputed the legitimacy of the election.  Their absence lent no support to the parties composed by former KNRP members and those calling for the release of imprisoned opponents of the government.

This was the fourth time I served as an official election observer.  My impression in the Phnom Penh area is that election day procedures were once again very well organized and completely transparent.  We observed the vote and count in districts that had been very pro-opposition at the previous election.  Not surprisingly, the spoiled ballots in the counts we viewed were a higher percentage than the national average, one-third or more.

This was the same area that had seen post-election violence after the previous vote, but this time all was peaceful.

The success of the CPP is probably a mix of soft intimidation of opponents and its own well grounded organizing skills plus the benefits of incumbency.  After the scare of the last election, Hun Sen regularly undertook events at garment factories and participated in university graduations.  Commune leaders who had not maintained support were replaced.

The CPP's total electoral victory creates real problems for future governance.  Hun Sen convened a meeting recently to have dialogue with parties that opposed him but the two with the most independent following did not show up.  He has also suggested that opposition figures could be incorporated into ministries, a well-practiced strategy of cooptation.   There are also hints he will ask the King to pardon imprisoned opponents, coupled with threats that they will need to behave properly once released.

In the context of its region, Cambodia is somewhere in the middle of the democracy scale.  The US and the European Union tolerate the military coup government in Thailand and its prolonged highly controlled process to restore the appearance of democracy, while assuring that Taksin supporters are kept out. Singapore's version of effectively one party social democracy has also received minimal criticism.  Vietnam and Laos show no signs of abandoning single party rule.  Myanmar and the Philippines do not have much to boast about at the moment and Brunei's royal rule is undisturbed. 

Neither the US nor Vietnam are happy with the growing Chinese influence in both Cambodia and Laos, but neither seems able to provide an alternative to the massive investment that is benefiting both populations.  The new US ambassador should return to the more productive relationship of the initial years after the Paris Agreement.

At the end of the day, the people and system responsible for Cambodia's near miraculous renewal after the Khmer Rouge devastation have preserved the stability of their rule.  However, as with other societies the overlong preservation of leadership based on a single dominant personality carries its own risks.

Election results are here.

https://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/final-poll-results-confirm-first-single-party-assembly-0?utm_source=Phnompenh+Post+Main+List&utm_campaign=a53d8d6a1a-


Still to come.  My observations from Vietnam in August



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A Vietnamese Perspective on John McCain

Mr. Nguyen Quang Dy is retired from Viet Nam's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He studied in Australia and in the U.S., at Harvard, where he was a Nieman Fellow.  His writings and commentary are read and respected among the expat community and Vietnamese contemporaries, and young Vietnamese as well.

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How John McCain is remembered  

Nguyen Quang Dy

John McCain (like John Kerry) is a congressional leader (and “a titan in the Senate”). Both are successful politicians who have run unsuccessfully for president. Both men are Vietnam War veterans who (as a Republican and a Democrat) have done so much to support the painful process of normalization of relations between the two bitter enemies.

John McCain (as a naval pilot) was shot down over a Hanoi lake during an air strike and jailed for over five years in the “Hanoi Hilton”, while John Kerry (as a gunboat officer) was wounded during battles in the Mekong delta during the Vietnam War. Both Johns are known much more for their peace-making efforts with Vietnam than for their war records.

John McCain (unlike John Kerry) suffered so much in captivity, yet he worked so hard over the years (like John Kerry) to assist Vietnam’s post-war reconstruction and reconciliation. The last major action John McCain and John Kerry did for Vietnam was to lobby and support President Obama’s timely decision to lift the arms ban on Vietnam (May 23, 2016).

John McCain fought for what he believed was right until the very end. In one of his last public acts, McCain blasted Trump's summit with Putin (July 16, 2018) as “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory”. Then he went on “The damage inflicted by Trump's naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake”.

As John McCain died on August 25, 2018 (the full-moon thanksgiving day in Vietnam), he has left not only deep sorrow in the heart of his family and friends, but also a huge gap in the dynamics of US-Vietnam Relationship, at this critical juncture of history.  

There are few men who could really come to terms with their former enemy. And much fewer men are missed and loved by both friends and foes alike when they die. John McCain is such a man, as he stands larger than size with his uncommon values and valor.

When John McCain was diagnosed with brain cancer (glioblastoma) a year ago, he told CNN “every life has to end one way or another”. He said: “I've lived very well and I've been deprived of all comforts. I've been as lonely as a person can be and I've enjoyed the company of heroes. I've suffered the deepest despair and experienced the highest exultation”.

As John McCain died (at 81), Vice President Joe Biden said: “John McCain will cast a long shadow. His impact on America hasn’t ended. Not even close. It will go on for many years to come… America will miss John McCain. The world will miss John McCain. And I will miss him dearly”.  John McCain died from glioblastoma on August 25, 2018, while Senator Edward Kennedy (his good friend and foe) also died from the same form of brain cancer on August 25 2009, exactly nine years earlier to the day (as a strange coincidence).

If “statesmen are judged not for what they did but for the consequences of their actions” (as people say), John McCain is such a statesman. He would live much longer than life in the heart and mind of people he cares for. His family and friends should be proud of this uncommon man who will be missed and remembered as a decent man, and a good guy.     

There are no better words for this man than the speech that Ambassador Pete Peterson delivered in Boston (September 10, 2001) during an Award Dinner Honoring Senator John McCain and Senator John Kerry. Let me quote (in part) to make the points:  

Tonight, we gather to honor two more brave men - the architects of American's reconciliation with Vietnam: Senators John McCain and John Kerry. Through the administrations of four American presidents (Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and, now, another Bush), I have seen how these two colleagues of mine in Congress -  and fellow veterans of Vietnam - first planned, designed, and then patiently guided this reconciliation to completion…

Having seen first-hand the recent evolution of Vietnam, I can tell you that with the aid of John McCain and John Kerry, the people of Vietnam now have a chance at a better future...like what our country eventually enjoyed after the reconciliation of our own civil war…They are just as heroic in waging peace...as they are in waging war…

It took 50 years after the last shot was fired in the American civil war for the survivors reconcile their differences on the field at Gettysburg…Without John McCain and John Kerry, it would have taken far longer. Maybe 50 years…when those of us who went to Vietnam the first time would be in the 8^th and 9^th decades of our lives. May be even longer…

But because of these two visionaries, these two leaders, it happened sooner in our lifetimes…

The American people and the people of Vietnam are forever in your debt.

The future relations of these countries is in your debt…

Now that John McCain is gone, John Kerry seems even lonelier. 

May John McCain’s soul live in peace without ordeal. 

Amen!

NQD, August 28, 2018.