I. ENDINGS: ONE KIND OR ANOTHER
9In her book on rape, Against Our Will (Simon & Schuster), Susan Brownmiller wrote that by 1971 “the feminist movement and the antiwar movement had gone their separate and distinct ways, each absorbed with its own issues to the exclusion of the other.” Miss Brownmiller wrote that when asked to bring out other women in the feminist movement to show solidarity with the peace movement, her response was that if the antiwar movement “cared to raise the issue of race and prostitution in Vietnam, I would certainly join in.” It is clear that she did not, however, although both rape and prostitution were often mentioned, as were the defoliation of the land, the use of napalm, the heavy bombings, the use of torture, the policy of creating refugees.
13N.W. Ayer, the advertising agency that does Army recruiting advertisement, began its “The Army wants to join you” campaign about the time of the trial of Lieutenant William Calley, Jr., according to Jerry J. Siano, director of creative services (The New York Times, July 7, 1975) In a story by Philip S. Dougherty, Theodore M. Regan, Jr., associate director at the agency, said the advertising worked, although, he said, “it was like running airline advertising after a crash.” The Army account had its difficult moments, Mr. Regan said, some suppliers wouldn’t handle the work and there was “some client or potential client resentment.” Things are better now, the article said.
No precise estimates exist of how many troops served a combat role in South Vietnam, and how many more performed service and logistic duties. In Vol. II, War Without Shadows by Robert B. Asprey (Doubleday), the author writes: “Such was the appetite of conventionally organized American units that a division (15,800 men) required a logistics ‘tail’ of over forty thousand troops. Put another way, of every hundred thousand troops committed in South Vietnam, perhaps twenty thousand would serve in a combat role, and of the twenty thousand, a significant percentage would be performing service and logistic duties.”
In Newsweek (July 5, 1971), Colonel David Hackworth, an Army officer with considerable experience in Vietnam with the infantry, said although American forces there had numbered 546,000 “. . . you never had more than 43,000 out in the boonies at one time.”
How to Talk with Practically Anybody on Practically Anything by Barbara Walters (Doubleday).
20“Celebrations of the war’s end, like the one in Central Park a few Sundays ago, had the wanness of a class reunion, its participants moist-eyed and nostalgic for the sixties’ gallant hopes, communal ardors and risks antic and real,” Susan Sontag wrote in The New York Review of Books, June 12, 1975. “The Vietnamese won politically; the antiwar movement lost . . . The Movement was never sufficiently political; its understanding was primarily moral; and it took considerable moral vanity to expect that one could defeat the Realpolitik mainly by appealing to considerations of ‘right’ and ‘justice’ (See Thucydides, Book V, the Melian Dialogue),” she wrote.
The question of unconditional, universal amnesty—not the same as a pardon, which implies guilt—which was mentioned often by speakers at The War Is Over Rally is not a new one in this country’s history.
From 1795 through 1952, fourteen presidents, as well as Congress, have issued a total of thirty-seven proclamations pardoning insurrectionists, deserters, political prisoners, and draft evaders. Amnesties specifically covering deserters and draft evaders were passed in the wake of the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. For a detailed summary of amnesties in American history, see Editorial Research Reports, Vol. II, No. 6, August 9, 1972, p. 611, “Amnesty Question” by Helen B. Shaffer. Editorial Research Reports is a publication by Congressional Quarterly.
28The prayer by Dr. Gordon Livingston originally appeared in an article by him in Saturday Review, September 20, 1969. It was seen by others in the Washington, D.C., newsletter put out by Concerned Officers Movement in July 1970, in which he wrote: “In my experience, Patton was neither the best nor the worst of the military there. He was simply the product of the misbegotten and misguided idea that single-minded dedication to destruction is to be highly rewarded.” After handing out his prayer at the ceremony, Dr. Livingston was relieved of duties. He was not court-martialed, but given a letter of reprimand; his request to complete his Vietnam tour at the 93d Evacuation Hospital was denied. On his return to the United States he resigned from the Army and was given a general discharge in July 1969. He was a member of Concerned Officers Movement, an antiwar group.
31The author was present at the Gainesville Eight trial in August 1973, where she observed the judge’s reactions. The account of the defendant’s request to observe sixty seconds of silence, and the judge’s denial and irritation, was an AP story, August 14, 1973.
35The “Bell Telephone Hour,” which Albert Lee Reynolds heard about in Saigon, was a form of torture used by American interrogators. It involved the use of field telephones with electrodes which were attached to the genitals or other sensitive parts of Vietnamese to cause acute pain and which left no marks.
40“The biggest white elephant of them all is the World Trade Center,” said an article in Fortune, February 1975. “Despite various tax breaks the complex is losing money—nearly $10 million annually, according to the center—and would still be in the red even if fully occupied.”
In an interview with Joe McGinniss, Harper’s, April 1975, General William Westmoreland said he missed flying helicopters. The general, who was then the chairman of the Governor’s Task Force in Economic Growth in South Carolina, also told Mr. McGinniss: “I guess basically I’m kind of a do-gooder. Kind of a crusader.”
Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger made his remarks about the outcome of losing part of Southeast Asia in a copyrighted article in the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin. Quotes by him were excerpted by the AP and appeared in the New York Post, March 24, 1975.
“A golden opportunity . . .” came from an article written by Howard Callaway, then Secretary of the Army, Op-Ed page, The New York Times, July 17, 1964.
“All wars are the glory and agony . . .” was in a speech by President Ford to the VFW convention August 19, 1975, on amnesty.
46UPI in Washington, D.C., on January 31, 1975, reported on the Census Bureau’s findings on the widening gap between America’s rich and poor in 1974. The Census Bureau reported that the 12 percent inflation rate of 1974—the worst since World War II—eroded wage and salary gains made in the previous four years but hurt the richest least.
UPI also reported on the findings of the Catholic Church’s antipoverty agency, which said there were forty million poor people in the United States. In an 80-page report, “Poverty Profile 1975,” the Catholic Church’s Campaign for Human Development said: “The government’s yardsticks for measuring the number of poor Americans is radically unfair, given any of the variables listed—real cost of living, provision of adequate diet and habitable housing, decent participation as a member of society.”
“The top 20 percent of our population receives 41 percent of all income,” Bill Moyers wrote on June 16, 1975, in his column for Newsweek.
47In his letter of February 18, 1975, President Brewster also wrote: “I happen to share your views about the Vietnam war, and of course, Mr. Bundy, among other Yale men, was in part responsible. However, there were others such as Mr. Harriman and Mr. Vance at the official level who tried to halt it. And there were still others, like Coffin and Spock, who sparked the opinion which finally turned the tide . . . Finally I have learned that the failures of a man in some of his life do not disqualify him for all time or all purposes; nor does a lapse in one area of judgment tarnish his other thoughts or accomplishments. McGeorge was a most accomplished, skillful and wise Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at ‘that other place.’ So his views on elderly educational institutions seem pertinent.”
49An English translation of the article by Nguyen Tu for the Chinh Luan newspaper in Saigon was carried by UPI on March 18, 1975.
52The letter of Maurice Braddell appeared in The New York Times, February 20, 1973. Mr. Braddell also wrote: “It [the United States] ought to go out of its way to make reparations, not to the brutal government of Hanoi, but to the wretched, charming people of Vietnam, whom it has so badly hurt.”
54The interviews with Mr. Berkowitz and Mr. Gollan for their reactions to the Vietnam cease-fire were in The New York Times, January 25, 1973, in an article by Israel Shenker.
57The description of the Yale Club of Saigon meeting came from Thomas C. Fox, who was a graduate student at Yale, and at the time, a journalist in Saigon. He took notes.
59The remarks about the precision of the American bombing of North Vietnam were made by Dennis Doolin before the House Armed Services Committee and appeared in The New York Times March 1, 1973.
The preliminary survey made by the North Vietnamese, and quoted by Hanoi Radio, on the damages and casualties of the American bombing, is from a dispatch in The New York Times, January 5, 1973.
The AP account of the Christmas tree mailed to Nixon was in The New York Times, December 25, 1973.
61Flora Lewis of The New York Times Paris bureau, January 28, 1975, in her account of the signing of the cease-fire agreements described “an eerie silence, without a word or gesture . . .”
The results of a Gallup Poll (The New York Times, January 30, 1973.) conducted by telephone among 577 persons, eighteen years of age and older, showed that 58 percent agreed with President Nixon’s claim that the United States had achieved “peace with honor” in Vietnam. In addition, the poll found that 57 percent believed the recent heavy bombing of North Vietnam had helped bring about the Paris Peace Agreement.
73Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony J. Russo, Jr., were charged with fifteen counts of espionage, theft and conspiracy in the Pentagon Papers case. The documents, which the men said they had copied, were a secret Pentagon study of American involvement in Vietnam from the early 1940s to March 1968. In his testimony Dr. Ellsberg said the documents contained 1,000 pages depicting American war crimes and illegal actions, not by troops but by high government officials. Both men said they wanted the American people to have full access to the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and that their 89-day trial served the purpose of “telling the truth, the very painful truth” to the American people. The case against them was dismissed in May 1973 by a U.S. District Court judge because of government misconduct.
Dr. Ellsberg was a strategic analyst at The Rand Corporation and a consultant to the Department of Defense, which he joined in 1964. In 1965 he went to Vietnam for the State Department as a member of the team of General Edward Lansdale. He worked on Secretary Robert McNamara’s study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam, called the Pentagon Papers.
76In an editorial, July 8, 1946, the Washington Post urged the government to show concern over the rights of 2,500-odd conscientious objectors who “remain conscripted in Civilian Public Service camps.” It said although church groups administered most Civilian Public Service camps, the entire conscientious-objector program remained under essentially military control and was subject to the whims of Selective Service. “High Selective Service officials throughout the war reflected the attitude that objectors were criminals,” the editorial said. “They took it upon themselves in a mandate never intended by Congress in openly regarding the Civilian Public Service program as punishment.”
82The Department of Defense supplied the statistics on injuries and deaths, hostile and non-hostile, and ages of the casualties.
83General Westmoreland’s remarks at the Associated Press Managing Editors Convention were from a story in the Richmond-Times Dispatch by Ron Sauder, October 10, 1975.
II. FAMILIES: TOGETHER AND NOT TOGETHER
90The interview with Michael “Cyclops” Garrod in Vietnam was written by Kevin Buckley of Newsweek in January 1970. It was never published in Newsweek. The author showed the story to Mr. Garrod, who said it was correct and that the remarks attributed to him were accurate.
115President Johnson’s criticism of the name MASHER is in the Pentagon Papers as published by The New York Times, Quadrangle Books.
118The fighting in Bong Son was described in an AP story, January 14, 1975.
The former medic with the 173d Airborne who wrote about the end of the war was John Hamill, in The Village Voice, April 7, 1975.
136In answer to my letter to the publishers Scott, Foresman and Company in Glenview, Illinois, asking how many schools were using Sidewalks, Gunboats and Ballyhoo as a textbook, the director of market research replied: “Sales history, by necessity, is confidential and cannot be released.” However, the series called Promise of America had been sold in all states in both the eleventh and eighth grade social studies markets. “The sales to date have been above our original expectations,” he said.
141The three men also wrote, in their critical analysis of textbook material on the Vietnam war:
There is a consistent use of prejudicial language to describe NLF-DRV actions and motives, while U.S. premises and tactics are presented either in benevolent or technical-military terminology. Thus the “Viet Cong” and the “Reds” used “terror” upon the people to gain their support (although it is admitted in liberal-dove texts that they had some support among the people because of the excesses of the Diem regime), while U.S. actions are framed in terms such as “massive firepower,” etc. It is not suggested that U.S. tactics, including defoliation, search and destroy missions, and civilian bombing raids were inherently terroristic and genocidal, clearly war crimes as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal . . . There is no real appreciation of the fact that the Vietnamese who fought against the U.S. were in fact principled and dedicated patriots, as opposed to the officially supported parade of businessmen, clergy, generals, landlords and pimps. There is simply no recognition of Carl Oglesby’s insight; that we might be “the enemies of men who are just, smart, honest, courageous and correct . . .” The existing framework avoids even a cursory examination of this possibility.
Twenty-eight textbooks examined the most profound and divisive conflict in recent American history without calling into question a single fundamental premise surrounding the event. The limited margin of debate and dissent was maintained, safe from “partisan” and “passionate” attacks upon the honor and integrity of our leaders or the nation itself. The textbook analysis is even secure from the impact of the Pentagon Papers. These documents, which revealed once and for all the utter bankruptcy of the liberal-dove position, are avoided.
142The Swedish poll was reported by UPI, Washington Star, August 23, 1975.
152Ngo Cong Duc was mentioned in a story from Bangkok by David Andelman, The New York Times, August 30, 1975, as “one of the former members of the so-called Third Force opposition in South Vietnam [that] have quietly begun appearing in the governing bodies being set up by the Communist government . . .” While most of the Vietnamese were “relatively unknown members of what was the non-Communist opposition to President Nguyen Van Thieu,” Mr. Duc was cited as as a National Assembly deputy and former newspaper publisher.
152The interview with Nguyen Khac Vien appeared in Jeune Afrique, No. 631, February 10, 1973, under the title of “Vietnam: Un Combattant Explique.” The interview and essays by Dr. Vien appear in “Tradition and Revolution in Vietnam,” printed by the Indochina Resource Center, Washington, D.C., which considers these essays “the first serious political analysis by a Vietnamese writer to a general English-language audience.”
155The remarks of James Ealy Johnson, January 24, 1973, in Johnson City, Texas, were in an interview by B. Drummond Ayres, Jr., The New York Times, January 25, 1973.
Jimmy Carter’s speech was quoted by Tom Wicker in The New York Times, April 25, 1976.
“An American Woman’s Bicentennial Prayer” by Marjorie Holmes appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1976.
“Bomb-bomb-bomb. Yatta-yatta-yatta . . .” is from an interview with Janis Ian, by Cliff Jahr, The Village Voice, December 15, 1975.
177Richard Perrin is one of the deserters interviewed in The New Exiles, Chapter V, by Roger Williams (Liveright), who was a draft evader himself and spent five years in Canada.
183The four members of President Ford’s Clemency Board, in a minority report submitted to the White House, complained that the chairman, Charles Goodell, and his staff appeared to have “misinterpreted, circumvented and violated at least the spirit” of the presidential order establishing an amnesty program. They were: Lewis W. Walt, a retired Marine Corps general; Ralph Adams, president of Troy State University in Alabama; James B. Dougnovito, instructor at Michigan Technical University; and Barry C. Riggs. The core of their complaints, according to an AP story, The New York Times, September 20, 1975, was that Senator Goodell had too lenient, or liberal, an outlook on who deserved amnesty.
The criticism of the amnesty program from the ACLU in New York was published March 31, 1975, by the Project on Amnesty, directed by Henry Schwarzchild, which issued a fact sheet #2. It also said:
Unconvicted draft violators, or alleged draft violators, fall under the clemency jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. The final list of those in jeopardy of draft prosecution now comprises about 4,400 names, to which must be added those who failed to register for the draft in the first instance. The 4,400 number is down about 1,500 from the October 1974 list because of dismissals by the Justice Department of indictments even the federal prosecutors did not think worth pressing. Only 13% of the 4,400 (or 550) have asked for clemency, even with 5 years in the penitentiary staring them in the face. The draft refusers knew a bad war when the government offered them one, and they know a bad clemency.
In addition, the ACLU said:
The Defense Department claims there were about 12,500 military deserters eligible for the Presidential Clemency Program. Independent specialists think the number of military absentees who are underground or in exile to be far greater. But taking the Defense Department’s figures, fewer than half (or about 5,300, i.e., less than 45%) have accepted clemency. Even at the low rate, it is the highest proportion of any part of the program, because the military clemency does not in fact require the performance of alternate service. (The alternate-service pledge for military clemency applicants is virtually unenforceable, as the Defense Department openly admits.)
185Deputy Attorney General Silberman was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, September 17, 1974.
The story of the ACLU making public a copy of the final report of the Presidential Clemency Board, and criticizing its contents, appeared in The New York Times, January 7, 1976.
Warren Hoover made this statement in a UPI story, Richmond News Leader, September 15, 1975. He also said: “Less than 20 percent of the people eligible applied and many of them have since dropped out.”
III: SMALL PLACES
192The legal case against sending a National Guard unit to Vietnam, which involved Specialist 4 Ronald E. Simpson—the only plaintiff among the casualties in Bardstown, Kentucky—was based on the contention that it was unconstitutional to send any National Guardsmen overseas. In The New York Times, July 5, 1969, Anthony Ripley wrote: “A key issue in the case is whether, as the plaintiffs contend, guardsmen cannot be sent overseas because Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution specifies only the militia can be called up to ‘execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.’”
200Colonel Hal Moore, of Bardstown, Kentucky, who was given a Vietnam Day party, is described in The Face of South Vietnam, text by Dean Brelis and photographs by Jill Krementz (Houghton Mifflin). Colonel Moore, who had been to the Armed Forces Staff College, the U.S. Naval War College, the Command General Staff College, was commander of elements of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, 1st Air Cavalry Division which made a combat assault into the Ia Drang valley. The Americans came under intensive fire after crossing the valley and reaching the foot of Chu Phong mountain. Colonel Moore called for air strikes and artillery as he ordered his men to hold their position. Mr. Brelis, who arrived at the end of a 72-hour period of fighting, wrote:
I marched over to where Colonel Hal Moore was hunched over his map. He was young-looking and he described some of the fighting, and his voice was choked and tears were in his eyes. “I don’t know what they’re saying in Berkeley or any other place back home, but I just want to tell you that these are the bravest men any country ever had . . . This was man-to-man fighting, a free-for-all like they can never describe in the textbooks. You know I had a platoon out there, B Company, and they were surrounded. They ran out of everything—dexedrine, morphine, bandages and they were running down to their last rounds of ammunition—and all the time they were talking to me, and they never once said anything about quitting . . .”
211“. . . it looks as if a stream of brilliant candy apples . . .” was said by Sergeant Robert Lessels, U.S. Air Force, and quoted in Air Force Magazine, November 1971. His remark also appeared in Air War, a handbook prenared by Project Air War and Indochina Resource Center, March 1972.
Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell’s statement appeared in an interview in The Hurricane, April 1970, a publication of II Field Force Vietnam, published monthly by the 16th Public Information Detachment and the Information Office. General Ewell also said: “I think the bulk of criticism in the last few years has not been so much of the Army per se, but of the Vietnamese war, and I think some of the more vocal and less thoughtful members of U.S. society would criticize motherhood if they thought they could attack the Vietnamese war by so doing.”
212General Tran Va Tra was quoted in The New York Times, March 16, 1972. He is believed to be the architect of the Communist offensive, Tet, 1968. The general also said of Saigon: “The trees are gone and the city has somehow lost its Vietnamese character.” He headed the Saigon military government, installed after the Communists won the south on April 30, 1975, until it was replaced in January 1976 by a civilian administration known as the People’s Revolutionary Committee.
222The statistics on unaccounted-for and missing Americans were given in The New York Times, September 7, 1976.
223In Jon Stallworthy’s biography of Wilfred Owen (Oxford University Press/Chatto and Windus, London), he writes that the English officer and poet took German lessons while recuperating in a military hospital for nervous disorders in Scotland: “There were three or four of these lessons, and after the last of them, talking in a café of the Germans and their language, Owen spoke as he rarely did of the horrors of the Front.” The tutor’s name was Frank Nicholson.
“He told Nicholson of photographs of the dead and mutilated that he carried in his wallet and his hand moved toward his breast pocket, only to stop short as he realized, with characteristic delicacy, that his friend had no need of that particular lesson in reality.”
The comment that Americans had only one happy war was made by Governor Roger Branigin in the Indianapolis Star, April 26, 1968, when he had entered the 1968 Indiana presidential primary race as a stand-in for President Lyndon B. Johnson. The governor also said: “. . . There is no such thing as instant happiness. There is no such thing as instant peace, nor are there instant answers.” A Democrat, considered one of Indiana’s most popular governors and a staunch supporter of President Johnson’s Vietnam war policy, Mr. Branigin died in November 1975.
224The Department of Defense cannot provide the number of men blinded in the Vietnam war. In the hearings before a Senate subcommittee on Veterans Affairs, on the oversight of medical care of veterans wounded in Vietnam, in December 1969, Irvin P. Schloss, a former national president of Blinded Veterans Association, told the committee: “As is the case with other types of severe disability, service-connected blindness during the Vietnam era is occurring at three times the rate in World War II. There are now about four hundred Vietnam blinded veterans; and based on the experiences of veterans of other wars, we can expect this number to triple over the years. It appears there is a higher incidence of severe additional disabilities such as amputations, than was the case among blinded veterans of World War II and Korea.”
SENATOR ALAN CRANSTON: “Could you explain what there is about the nature of the fighting in Vietnam that accounted for the threefold increase in blindness?”
MR. SCHLOSS: “I would suspect that it is the quick evacuation and medical treatment of head wounds in particular. I have no doubt that many of those during World War II and Korea who sustained similar wounds died.”
SENATOR CRANSTON: “Basically, it is a matter of survival due to the instant treatment?”
MR. SCHLOSS: “Yes, sir, I believe that is the reason. In fact, there is a much higher incidence among Vietnam-era blinded veterans of additional severe disabilities such as multiple amputations and severe brain damage than there was during World War II or Korea.”
235William L. Males, the deserter from Cheyenne, Oklahoma, was interviewed by Thomas Linden in Yale Alumni Magazine, February 1971. In January 1975 Mr. Males wrote from Sweden to the Elk City Daily News explaining why the “vast majority of dissenters” refused to have anything to do with President Ford’s amnesty program, which he termed “a thinly veiled punishment coupled with a presupposition that all we who resisted the war are traitors.”
The publisher of the paper, Larry R. Wade, wrote in an Editor’s Note: “Because we so much respect this young man’s father, we discussed with him this letter before publishing it. He would have preferred it not be written, but with the courage and fortitude for which he is known, could not ask us not to publish it.”
Mr. Males wrote: “I deserted because I thought the war was wrong. The U.S. government still doesn’t accept that the war was wrong. They want to put me on the spot. I want to put the war on trial.”
236“Look into that free-fire zone business . . .” Senator Russell said to Harry McPherson, Special Counsel to President Johnson, 1964 to 1969, Deputy Under Secretary of the Army for International Affairs in 1963. In his book A Political Education (Houghton Mifflin), Mr. McPherson describes an incident during his visit to Vietnam in the spring of 1967:
Coming back to Saigon one afternoon, we were followed by a rescue helicopter. Corpsmen lifted out a young soldier, about twenty-three, and with an almost womanly gentleness, carried him towards a waiting ambulance . . . Two big packs, soaked in red, lay on his belly . . . The soldier’s boots and britches were wet from the paddy where he had lain until they reached him. Driving to my quarters a wave of grief came over me. What if all we had tried to do was wrong. What if the stakes were not worth this suffering and waste, this effort to build a line of defense in a bog. God Almighty. I did not want to think about that.
On his return to Washington, D.C., he wrote to LBJ: “We are simply there, and we should be.”
254It was Ellen J. Hammer, in Vietnam: Yesterday and Today (Holt, Rinehart and Winston), who said that as of 1887 Vietnam had ceased to exist for all practical purposes.
255“I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held . . . possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh,” President Eisenhower wrote in The Mandate of Change, Vol. I of his memoirs The White House Years (Doubleday).
256The Phoenix Program was directed by William Colby, later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who said in an interview with Philip Nobile, columnist for Universal Press Syndicate, Richmond Times Dispatch, May 30, 1976:
The object of the Phoenix Program was to identify, capture or seek the defection of Communist terrorists. We recorded the fact that 20,000 in the Viet Cong apparatus were killed. Yet 85 to 95 percent died in military battles. Were some Vietnamese wrongly killed? Yes, but a very, very small number . . . The Phoenix Program, as opposed to the Communists, actually implied moral rules that substantially improved the behavior of the South Vietnamese. For example, I issued an American directive against assassination in the program and took steps to see that it was carried out.
IV. ODD THINGS NOT YET FORGOTTEN
263The Americans’ fear of the dark is described in Vol. II of War in the Shadows by Robert Asprey (Doubleday).
267“What Combat Does to Our Men” was a survey commissioned by the Reader’s Digest: the article on Mr. Gallup’s findings was written with Blake Clark in the June 1968 issue.
The study on college and noncollege youths appears in Daniel Yankelovich’s book The New Morality, A Profile of American Youth in the Seventies (McGraw-Hill).
The remarks of the Reverend Billy Graham, evangelist, were made in an interview with Edward Fiske, The New York Times, January 21, 1973.
The interview with former President Richard Nixon was held in May 1975 and was the first he granted since leaving office at noon, August 9, 1974; it was conducted by William M. Fine for his article “Sunday with Richard Nixon.”
268The death totals by home state of record do not include the period October 1 to December 31, 1975. During this three-month period fifty-one names were added. Deaths due to nonhostile causes in Thailand, where there were U.S. Air Force bases, were not included in the Department of Defense official totals of casualties in Indochina. But according to the Department’s information, given early 1976, there were 677 deaths in Thailand, January 1, 1961, through December 31, 1975.
280The Emma Goldman Brigade was named in honor of the Russian-born American anarchist, 1869–1940, who was co-publisher with Alexander Berkman of the paper Mother Earth. Imprisoned in 1916 for publicly advocating birth control, deported in 1919, she took an active role with the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War.
285The interview with Claire and Steve Cleghorn was in The Daily Rag, May 4–18, 1973.
286Ralph Blumenthal’s story on military chaplains appeared in The New York Times, June 22, 1971.
304The Associated Press carried the story on the findings of the coroner’s jury on the death of Sergeant Kavanaugh, The New York Times, September 12, 1973. A later AP story in the New York Post, June 27, 1974, said his widow had decided not to file a damage suit against the Pentagon for negligence or wrongful death. Mrs. Kavanaugh had become a Jehovah’s Witness. “I’m a whole new person and my views have changed on everything,” she said in the AP story. “We don’t look to the U.S. government as our government. It will be destroyed.”
333An account of the supplies sent to Vietnam from Pulaski County appeared in the Nashville Tennessean, November 15, 1956.
The Vietnamese poem was written by Hoang Son and was published in the 1974 poetry anthology Of Quiet Courage, compiled and edited by Jacqui Chagnon and Don Luce of the Indochina Mobile Education Project.
338Participants in the conference at the Naval War College, November 16 and 17, 1972, agreed to keep their remarks off the record. However, the Navy Public Affairs Monthly Direction, in the February 1973 issue, published an account of the proceedings which made such an agreement invalid.
351The statistics on draftees in Vietnam are from The Discarded Army: Veterans After Vietnam (Charterhouse Books). It was written by Paul Starr with James Henry and Raymond Bonner. During 1971 and 1972 Mr. Starr was project director of a task force on Vietnam, veterans and the Veterans Administration, at Ralph Nader’s Center for the Study of of Responsive Law in Washington, D.C.
364The March 15, 1971, issue of Newsweek carried the photographs by Denis Cameron, including the one of the dead pilot. In the same issue was an account of General Vogt’s briefing during which he produced the “vital enemy pipeline.”
V. EXPERTS
376The letters of Sergeant Guy de Chaumont Guitry are in Lettres d’Indochine (Editions Alsatia, Paris). The translations were done by Iver Peterson.
387In the interview with Dr. Gerald Hickey, mention is made of Edward Lansdale, who was a colonel in Saigon in 1956. He had been sent to Vietnam in June 1954 as a chief of a Saigon military mission, with orders to “beat the Geneva timetable of Communist take-over in the north,” according to the historian Frances FitzGerald in her book Fire in the Lake (Atlantic-Little, Brown). “By August, during the period of negotiated truce, Lansdale’s teams were scattered from Hanoi to the Camau peninsula conducting sabotage operations and what can only be called agitprop work in direct violation of the U.S. government’s promise at Geneva to ‘refrain from the threat or use of force,’” she wrote. In her assessment of Lansdale, Miss FitzGerald said: “With all his expertise in black propaganda and every other form of unconventional warfare, Lansdale had an artless sincerity. No theorist, he was rather an enthusiast, a man who believed that Communism in Asia would crumble before men of good will with concern for the ‘little guy’ and the proper counter-insurgency skills.”
The reputation of Lansdale in 1956 in Saigon was remarkable. He was a romantic figure to many young men and respected by most Americans for his role in the Philippines—where he was on special assignment to the Filipino government—during the rise of the Hukbalahaps, the local Communist insurgency movement. Lansdale’s star rose, dimmed and went out during various years of American ascendancy in South Vietnam. Sent out to Vietnam in 1965, once more at the behest of the CIA, Lansdale was not kindly regarded by the more orthodox, entrenched members of the U.S. Mission because he did not approve of the large-scale American presence.
Miss FitzGerald wrote: “. . . the bureaucrats narrowed his ‘area of responsibility’ to the point where they had effectively cut him off from the mission command and from all work except that of a symbolic nature.”
(See further references to Lansdale on pages 293 and 294.)
395The front-page article in The Wall Street Journal, November 18, 1971, on Gerald Hickey had a headline NEW MCCARTHYISM? Blackball of Scholars for Links to the War Stirs Heated Debate. It was by Everett Martin, a former Vietnam correspondent.
404In the Pentagon Papers, as published by The New York Times, Quadrangle Books, there are excerpts from a memorandum from Brigadier General Edward Lansdale to General Maxwell D. Taylor, President Kennedy’s military adviser, on “Resources for Unconventional Warfare, S.E. Asia,” undated but apparently from July 1961. The information General Lansdale noted was compiled by Defense and CIA. There is a reference to Operation Brotherhood, which by then no longer existed in South Vietnam but in Laos. The same memorandum said: “There is another private Filipino public-service organization, capable of considerable expansion in socio-economic-medical operations to support counter-guerilla action. It is now operating teams in Laos, under ICA auspices. It has a measure of CIA control.” The same can be assumed of OB when it operated in Vietnam.
413A.J. Liebling’s review of The Quiet American, from The New Yorker, April 7, 1956.
414The April 1966 article in Ramparts magazine, called “The University on the Make,” with an introduction by Stanley Sheinbaum, was by Warren Hinckle, the editor of the magazine, in conjunction with research editor Sol Stern and foreign editor Robert Scheer. Material on Michigan State University’s role in Vietnam originated in Mr. Scheer’s pamphlet “How the United States Got Involved.” The Ramparts article, which caused a furor, ended: “The essential query, which must be asked before the discussion of Michigan State’s behavior can be put in any rational perspective, is this: what the hell is a university doing buying guns, anyway?” Mr. Hinckle, editor of Ramparts from 1964 to 1969 until its bankruptcy, wrote in his autobiography If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (Putnam) of the types of MSU men who went to Vietnam: “Gary Wills called them the ‘Bogart Professors’—academics who, tiring of the humdrum of college routine, discovered the wonderful world of exciting government contracts.”
422The returned prisoner of war who greeted Dr. Fishel was Brigadier General David D. Winn of Edina, Minnesota, who held the rank of colonel during his four and a half years in prison in North Vietnam. In an AP story, Huron (S.D.) Daily Plainsman, April 1, 1973, the ex-POW said he was subjected to torture three times “but they didn’t have enough muscle to hurt me.” He was captured in August of 1969 when his F-105 fighter was shot down.
424The chronology of events, letter, documents, articles and speeches made against the existence of the Center for Vietnamese Studies at Carbondale, Illinois, was published in a special February 1971 issue of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. Articles on the Center were by C. Harvey Gardiner, Robert G. Layer, Douglas Allen, David Marr, Nina Adams, Ngo Vinh Long, Huynh Kim Khanh and Gabriel Kolko. Articles on AID by Ngo Vinh Long, Earl Martin and Al McCoy were included, as were articles on “The University” by Stanley Sheinbaum, Eqbal Ahmad, Arthur Waskow and Douglas Dowd.
425The sixth annual report for the fiscal year 1975 to the Agency for International Development in Washington, D.C., from Southern Illinois University—dated March 15, 1976, title: 211 (d) Grant, AID/ csd 2514: A Grant to Strengthen Southern Illinois University’s Competence in Vietnamese and Contiguous Area Studies—said:
A. Statistical Summary:
| Period of Grant: | 30 June 1969 to 29 June 1975 |
| Amount of Grant: | $1,000,000.00 |
| Expenditures for Report Year: | $53,506.62 |
| Accumulated Expenditures: | $1,000,000.00 |
| Anticipated for Next Year: | -0- |
*As amended by Grant Amendment #3 approved April 26, 1974.
I. GENERAL BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE GRANT:
From 1961–1970 Southern Illinois University acquired considerable experience on Vietnam while serving there as the contracting institution for three different technical assistance programs. These technical service contracts with USAID provided for the establishment of four Normal Schools and a Demonstration School for elementary school teachers, advisory assistance to the Phu Tho Polytechnical Institute, and program development for the Saigon National In-Service Elementary Teacher Training Center. During this period many SIU faculty and staff became intimately acquainted with the vital humanitarian needs of Vietnam and Indochina and through either their actions as advisors in the field or as researchers at home became both knowledgeable and concerned with Vietnam.
Through these combined efforts and interests, much expertise was developed at SIU. Many of these individuals became increasingly sought as consultants on the educational, social, and economic problems of Vietnam. Therefore in order to better organize these talents, to more effectively respond to these requests, and to fill a growing need for a center of academic research and training on Vietnam in the U.S., a Center for Vietnamese Studies and Programs was proposed by the University and adopted by the Illinois Board of Higher Education on June 3, 1969.
No other U.S. university was known at that time either to have or to be planning to establish a Center for Vietnamese Studies. The Center was designed to provide an intellectual climate and a physical location in which scholarly knowledge about Vietnam in particular, and Indochina in general, could be developed.
But permanent establishment of such a Center would require “seed monies” of such a quantity that no state institution could expect to have easily approved. While SIU was devoting what resources it could to institutionalize its interests and expertise, it was apparent that only through secure, long-term assistance sought externally could SIU ever hope to realize its desires for a Center for Vietnamese Studies.
A request therefore went out to the Agency for International Development for a 211 (d) assistance grant for the development of the Center. In response to this request, AID approved Grant number csd-2514 on June 29, 1969.
This Grant was to strengthen the existing competence of the Southern Illinois University Center for Vietnamese Studies in the four general areas: professional staff development, fellowship awards to students, library/research capacities, and travel as it related to the first three categories. It was anticipated that the Center for Vietnamese Studies would become a center of expertise and activity concerning Vietnam within the American academic community. The Grant was based on the University’s “commitment to the continued growth and development of the Center” with the first five years (1969–1974) being regarded as the basic development period.
USAID, for its part, was interested in awarding this Grant for the purpose of “strengthening within Southern Illinois University competency in Vietnamese studies and programs related to the economic and social development of Vietnam and its post-war reconstruction.” . . . It was only later when peace for Vietnam was less certain with the war in Indochina raging violently and the American people becoming more restless with the social and economic consequences of that conflict—that a much modified purpose for the Grant had to be postulated. Thus, on September 15, 1971, Amendment #2 to the Agreement altered the original purpose of the Grant to read, “to strengthen Southern Illinois University’s competency in Vietnamese and contiguous area studies.” It is only now, with the 211 (d) funds exhausted, that attention could again be focused on the post-war economic and social rehabilitation of Vietnam. For it is only now that anything resembling a post-war period is developing in Indochina.
The report also said:
. . . Reviewing these objectives it is readily perceived that some accomplishments have occurred in all the areas mentioned. While virtually all higher educational institutions in the U.S. are beginning to face serious budgetary restrictions and the necessity to adapt their curricula to the more pressing and very real needs of the contemporary world, SIU has maintained the Center for Vietnamese Studies (CVS) and the Asian Studies Program (ASP) in respectably good order. The overall objective still remains to free these two programs from all outside support. If prestige and the competence of these programs can be further established, then they will survive and prosper beyond these troubled times.
During the 1974–75 report period, the activities of the two campus programs were a continuation of the programs of previous grant years. While the Center for Vietnamese Studies (CVS) at Carbondale and the Asian Studies Program (ASP) at Edwardsville remained separate programs, the overall objectives and resultant activities continued to reflect a consensus of purpose. The CVS program focused on Indochina and Vietnam while the ASP concentrated on the international affairs and relations of those nations. Together these two programs, with the generous assistance of the 211 (d) Grant, have fostered further understanding and study of the problems and conditions of Vietnam and Asia.
427The documents that John Isaacs gave to a few correspondents in Saigon were usually classified on a low level. For example, the report quoted—written by an American Deputy District Senior Adviser, revealing how wretchedly things were going in his area despite the good reports going to CORDS in Saigon—was marked Confidential. It was stamped “Group 4. Downgraded at 3 year intervals; declassified after 12 years.” Since the circulated version of the American’s critical report contained none of the names of the Americans, contained no information useful to the “enemy,” or information they did not already have on the misbehavior of local Vietnamese officials, it hardly deserved to be marked Confidential except to save CORDS from any more embarrassment.
433Rights in Concord, The Response to The Counter-Inaugural Protest Activities in Washington, D.C., was a special staff report, not a report of the Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.
438In A Long Row of Candles, Memoirs and Diaries 1934–1954 (Macmillan), Cyrus Sulzberger told of his wife’s work in an Athens military hospital during World War II. Mr. Sulzberger, who was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times until October 1954, when he became the foreign affairs columnist, wrote of his years in the Balkans:
In my day I came to know their Kings and Communists, to argue with their priests and politicians, to love their princesses and dancing girls. I learned to speak three of their languages, badly but fluently, accompanied four of their armies, was expelled from two countries and fled two others before advancing Nazi hordes. In the Balkans, I was bombed, bullied, coddled, arrested and enticed . . . In the Balkans, I left part of my soul and found my wife.
456Information on the VVAW “incursion into the country called Congress” came from interviews with ten veterans who had participated and stories from the Washington Post and the Evening Star April 20, 21, 22, 23 and 24, plus material later provided by VVAW.
458The study on the veterans was done by Hamid Mowlana and Paul H. Geffert as an appendix to The New Soldier, by John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, edited by David Thorne and George Butler (Collier Books).
464A single-type discharge has long been a grievance raised for years, and is still unresolved. In a handbook called Facts on OTHER-THAN HONORABLE DISCHARGES And What Can Be Done About Them, researched, written and published by the American Veterans Committee, it says:
Discharge certificates are issued to servicemen separating from military service under the statutory authority of Title to U.S. Code 3811.
Following are the kinds of discharges issued by the military departments:
| TYPE OF DISCHARGE | CHARACTER OF DISCHARGE OR SEPARATION | GIVEN BY |
| Honorable | Honorable | Administrative action |
| General | Under honorable conditions | Administrative action |
| Undesirable | Under conditions other than honorable | Administrative action |
| Bad Conduct | Under conditions other than honorable | Sentence of special or general court-martial |
| Dishonorable | Dishonorable | Sentence of general court-martial |
Robert L. Hill, national director of the Veterans Education and Training Service (VETS), a project of the National League of Cities and United States Conference of Mayors, in an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times, March 3, 1975, wrote: “Some 350,000 Vietnam-era veterans left the service with less-than-honorable discharges. Of, this number, most have been black, brown, poor and undereducated. And less than honorable discharges and a veteran’s opportunity for employment are directly related. With a less-than-honorable discharge, a veteran’s chances for employment are minuscule.”
Of the five types of discharges issued by the Armed Forces, honorable, general, undesirable, bad-conduct and dishonorable, the last three are less-than-honorable and the last two are conferred by sentences of special and general courts-martial. “In many cases, the veteran with a less than honorable discharge will find as he re-enters civilian life that he is ineligible for the benefits of the GI Bill, such as educational assistance, medical care, Veterans Administration loans, employment assistance, unemployment benefit and civil service point preferences,” Mr. Hill wrote. He added that because of the lengthy and complicated procedures involved, as well as the expenses the veteran must pay, only one out of every five veterans who receives a bad discharge ever appeals, only about 3 percent have had their discharges upgraded.
The photograph of Vietnam veterans demonstrating against the war, showing the ex-Marine sniper Chuck James in their midst, the only man wearing a suit, is in The New Soldier (see note for page 458).
VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS
465The remark by Ambassador Martin, testifying before the House subcommittee, was quoted in the Washington Post, January 28, 1976. The article by Don Oberdorfer also quoted Christina Macy, a former associate of the Indochina Resource Center, as saying the Center had eight staff members and an annual budget of between $50,000 and $65,000 at the height of its activity in 1974–75. The reporter who described Ambassador Martin was Mary McGrory in her syndicated column in the New York Post, January 31, 1976. Henry Bradsher’s story’s in the Washington Star, January 28, 1976, also quoted Ambassador Martin as saying the overriding factor in the fall of South Vietnam was the reduction of aid to the Communists.
“Martin’s assertions met with some disbelief from the House International Relations Committee’s investigations subcommittee,” Bradsher wrote. “Surely there were reasons for the reversal other than the U.S. economic cuts,’ said Pierre S. duPont IV, R-Del.’” The ambassador declared that he could not “in good conscience say” that anything in the fabric of South Vietnam’s war effort was responsible for the defeat.
466Fred Branfman worked as a teacher of English in Laos, where he first learned what the air war was doing to the country and its inhabitants. He later compiled Voices from the Plain of Jars, Life under an Air War (Harper & Row), in which he said: “In September 1969, after a recorded history of seven hundred years, the Plain of Jars disappeared.” The book is a collection of essays by Laotian peasants who once lived in the area, with sketches done by them of the destruction and death that came from U.S. aircraft.
489In January 1976 the Report, a newsletter from Clergy and Laity Concerned, said in an article by Deborah Huntington:
A class action suit against the CIA, the National Security Agency and select corporations was filed in Washington by the ACLU on behalf of Don Luce, CALC, and seventeen other organizations and individuals. The plaintiffs in the suit represent a group of at least 7200 persons and 1000 organizations who were subjects of CIA surveillance under “Operation CHAOS.” Among the defendants listed in the ACLU brief are former directors of the CIA Richard Helms and William Colby, and James Schlesinger, former Secretary of Defense, and Director of the CIA from February through July, 1973 (as well as fourteen other individuals who served in an official capacity during the period of Operation CHAOS); Western Union Telegraph Company, RCA Global Communications, Inc., American Cable and Radio Corporation and ITT World Communications, Inc.
During and after August 1967, the CIA, with direction from Helms, Colby, Schlesinger and others, established within the CIA a Special Operations Group known as Operation CHAOS. CHAOS’ purpose was to collect, coordinate, evaluate, file and report information on “foreign contacts” of American citizens who were involved in expressing opposition to the war and other government policies. Information from other governmental organizations such as the FBI was assembled as well. As Congressional investigation recently noted, there were no significant connections between the antiwar groups and foreign political groups. However, Operation CHAOS continued until 1974.
CHAOS recruited approximately forty undercover agents to infiltrate the domestic organizations, and to disrupt or discredit such groups when desirable. “Personality” files on over 7000 individuals and “subject” files on over 1000 organizations were maintained concerning the associational and political activities of the plaintiffs, and this information was conveyed to the White House, the FBI, and other governmental agencies.
Sometime after September 1969, CHAOS supplied a “watchlist” of US citizens (including the plaintiffs) to another CIA unit, which resulted in the opening of these citizens’ first class mail without judicial warrant. Copies of their letters were put into CHAOS files. The CIA also supplied a “watchlist” to agents and employees of the National Security Agency which included the names of the plaintiffs.
For an unknown period of time the NSA monitored and intercepted international communications, including telephone and telegraph cables, with the assistance and cooperation of Western Union, RCA, American Cable and Radio Corporation, and ITT. In November 1974, NSA supplied CHAOS with approximately 1000 pages of summarized communications concerning activities and travels of the plaintiffs, which is presently in the CHAOS files, intact with the other CHAOS material.
The individuals of both the CIA, NSA and the corporations involved acted in full knowledge that their activities violated the constitutional rights of the plaintiffs in their freedom of speech, assembly, and association.
The demands of the plaintiffs are that such actions be declared illegal, that the court issue an injunction enjoining the defendants from such conduct, and ordering that the CIA deliver to the plaintiffs the complete contents of the CHAOS files. Also being demanded is the sum of $100 per day per defendant as liquidated damages, as well as $50,000 punitive damages and lawyers’ fees.
490The remarks by Ambassador Martin before the House subcommittee were from a transcript of his prepared statement, which he read for fifty minutes to open the hearing on January 27, 1976. It was his first appearance before the subcommittee, which had been, according to the Washington Post, “demanding testimony from Martin since last June.”
491The figures on civilian war casualties in South Vietnam were prepared by Le Anh Tu, National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complex (NARMIC), a project of the American Friends Service Committee. The figures on the disabled were based on estimates of the U.S. Senate Refugee Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, and used by NARMIC.
The ambassador’s remarks are from the transcript of his statement to the House subcommittee.
491Reports on the medical problems and needs in Vietnam, north and south, at a two-day “Aid to Vietnam” meeting in Manila of a World Health Organization committee were filed by the Los-Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service (Richmond News-Leader, March 30, 1976) and Associated Press (The New York Times, March 21, 1976).
512“When you send us to war . . .” was said by James W. Kelly, who was interviewed by Gary Robertson, Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 28, 1976.
515Napalm, which was dropped in thin containers, from a low altitude for accuracy, is gasoline jellied by mixing it with a special soap powder. In The Air War in Indochina, edited by Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, Air War Study Group, Cornell University (Beacon Press) it says: “A later type . . . consists of 50 percent polystyrene, 25 percent gasoline and 25 percent benzene, yielding a longer burning fire and greater stickiness . . . Napalm is sticky and cannot be readily removed from surfaces against which it has been splattered; attempts to brush it off result in further spreading.”
521Senator George McGovern is not alone in saying he regretted voting for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox was reportedly attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by patrol boats of North Vietnam. On August 4 both the Maddox and C. Turner Joy were said to have been attacked. President Lyndon Johnson authorized “reprisal” air strikes against the north. At the time of the attacks the President briefed leaders of Congress and had a resolution of support for his policy. On August 7, 1964, the resolution—which was used by the President as a mandate for war—passed with near-unanimity in both Houses. Later, LBJ complained that Senator William Fulbright’s attacks on his constitutional right to commit U.S. troops to Vietnam puzzled him because the Tonkin Gulf Resolution permitted him “to take all necessary steps to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”