From Civil Rights to Vietnam
While I was in Mississippi, a United States destroyer in North Vietnam's Tonkin Gulf had a run-in with three North Vietnamese patrol boats. Johnson was looking for an excuse to send more troops into South Vietnam and to start bombing the North. The day after the run-in, he gathered congressional leaders and accused North Vietnam of “open aggression on the high seas.” On August 11th, Congress authorized him to take “all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” Only two senators voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Wayne Morse (D-Ore.) and Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) were opposed.
On February 7th, 1965, Johnson began bombing North Vietnam on the discredited theory that you could bomb a nation into submission. World War II studies on the effect of its massive bombing campaigns showed that civilians become more dependent on their governments when they were being bombed. Massive bombing didn't stop the production of German war supplies. In fact, Germany was producing more tanks and machine guns in 1945 than at any time during the war. The bombing was effective in keeping Germans from getting their arms to battle fields, because German superhighways and railroads were susceptible to bombing attacks. North Vietnam was moving war supplies on bicycles and elephants on the Ho Chi Trail. Bombing elephant trails is like swatting mosquitos with sledgehammer.
In March, the first US combat troops went into Vietnam, 3, 500 marines. Students for a Democratic Society held their first teach-in against the war and later that spring the first march on Washington to oppose the war. With 25,000 people, most of them students, SDS called it the largest peace march in American history.
International observers, particularly the French, said the United States escalation was a terrible mistake. North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh was popular and South Vietnam leaders represented a tiny oligarchy and the Catholic Church. If elections had taken place in 1954 as mandated by the French/Vietnam peace agreement, no one doubted that Ho Chi Minh would have won the country.
The French had fought the Vietnamese for ten years before being soundly defeated in 1954. As colonial masters they knew the culture, had an administrative apparatus and local contacts. It didn’t do them any good. We were dubious the United States could do better. French journalists pointed out that Vietnam’s northern neighbor, China, had invaded repeatedly for a thousand years, but the Vietnamese had kicked them out every time.
The United State media told an entirely different story, based on the usual handouts from the State Department. According to them, Ho Chi Minh was not popular and North Vietnam was on the verge of economic collapse. Time Magazine announced that Ho Chi had ordered people to work only a l/2-days, because hunger was so pervasive.
I wanted to talk to the North Vietnamese, but they had no representatives in the Unites States. When WBAI was given a grant to cover a Women Strike For Peace’s delegation attending the 1965 World Peace Congress, I jumped at the chance.
The conference was held from July 10 through the 15th in Helsinki, Finland. Delegates representing every communist country and party in the world attended. There were bearded revolutionary from the mountain of Latin American and rain forests of Asia, artists, poets, writers, members of parliament from Western Europe. Of the 500 people from 98 different countries, the largest delegation was from the United States, almost 100 Quakers, Episcopalians, Methodists, members of Women Strike for Peace, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and a few union members.
It was a heady experience for the Americans who attended. The delegates I met seemed ordinary, middle class American housewives, leaving children at home. One of them whispered in exasperation after endless speeches denouncing US foreign policy, "If I hear 'aggressive American imperialism' in one more foreign language, I think I’ll scream!"
Members of the North Vietnamese delegation told me that tales of a country on the brink of collapse were nonsense. They were doing fine. I asked why, if things were so great, hadn't North Vietnam allowed Western reporters in to see for themselves. No American reporters had been to North Vietnam since the French were kicked out in 1954.
The head of the youth delegation asked me if I would like to visit. I said I would. Other members of the delegation told me this was no idle comment. They had been thinking of opening up and my request would be taken seriously. I should wait for word but not tell anyone of my plans. "Don't expect a decision quickly. We are taking the train hack to Hanoi. The head of the delegation hates airplanes." They would travel across Asia on the Trans-Siberian railway, and then down through China and across the mountains into Vietnam, a two week rail trip.
As the hot New York summer dragged on, I came to believe that no invitation would be forthcoming. Then, in mid-August, I received an unsigned international telegram. "Be at #6 Rue de Venuse at 5:00 pm on August 15th."
I called Victor Rabinowitz, a progressive attorney whose family ran a foundation that provided funding for progressive causes. I hinted that I had an invitation to "a communist county." Victor stopped me before I could say any more and asked me to meet him at his law offices on 42nd Street.
Victor knew of my interest in Southeast Asia. He appeared the moment the receptionist announced me and motioned me back to the elevator while holding a finger to his lips to keep me from speaking. We rode down three floors where Victor led me into the men's room. After we inspected the stalls, I explained the situation in front of the urinals. Victor already had figured it all out and he handed me $5,000 in cash and advised me to tell no one about the trip.
I told the staff at WBAI that I was burned out and needed a break. I was going to Paris for a couple of weeks, and I would take a tape recorder with me just in case. It was a difficult time at the station, and everyone was super pissed that I was leaving.
I flew to Paris on Saturday night, checked into a hotel Sunday morning, and slept until noon. With time on my hands until the five o’clock meeting, I savored the sense of coming adventure. I felt I was being given an opportunity like that given to Edgar Snow, who followed Mao Ts Tung on the Long March in China and returned to the United States to write about it, shifting opinions about the nature of the communist rebellion at that time. I was not fearful for my own safety. The possible consequences of violating the State Department’s explicit ban on travel to North Vietnam seemed trivial compared to the journalistic scoop I was about to get.
Travel to Hanoi
I rang the discreet doorbell at number 6 Rue de Venuse at 5:00 pm full of expectations.
The door was opened by a small Vietnamese man, dressed casually in slacks and a light brown shirt, cut square, and hanging over his pants. He smiled and ushered me into a meeting room where three other young men my age were waiting, sitting in padded easy chairs. The room, in various tones of brown, had the faded elegance of another age, with tea tables and dusty chandeliers.
Everyone looked slightly uncomfortable as we introduced ourselves. Harold Supriano was a young African American social worker from the Bay Area, Mike Meyerson was international secretary of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, and Richard Ward was a Canadian editor of a peace magazine. We all had been invited to Hanoi by the North Vietnam Youth Federation.
The invitation put me in an awkward position. I explained that as a journalist I couldn’t be part of any delegation. I thought it would affect the perception of my work when I returned to the United States. Journalistic independence was a difficult concept for the Vietnamese, but Mike, who emerged as the delegation leader and the most interesting of my companions, agreed with me. Mike was tall, good natured, and very smart. After additional conversation we agreed that I could accompany the youth delegation as a journalist.
We had tickets and visas to Moscow and reservations at a Moscow airport hotel. “You will receive further instructions there,” the Vietnamese told us. I wasn’t happy with all the security, but the North Vietnamese seemed to feel that we were at risk of being stopped along the way. The trip remained a complete secrete until we returned to the United States.
At the Moscow airport North Vietnamese representatives met the plane and escorted us to our hotel where we received tickets and visas to China. “As you leave tomorrow, tell our Soviet comrades you are going to Beijing,” the North Vietnamese advised. “Unfortunately, our Chinese comrades will have to know more about your ultimate destination than our Soviet comrades.”
Not being officially in China, the Chinese would not provide us with a translator or guide. A friendly employee of the Hsin Chiao Hotel where we were staying gave us a laundry list of Chinese characters. “Show it to anyone on the street and they will send us in the right direction,” he said. Everyone to whom we showed the list was extremely friendly.
In 1965, the Chinese on the streets were wearing blue Mao uniforms. At dawn, old people filled the parks, exercising as early mist drifted through the trees. Later the streets filled with bicycles, blue uniforms leaving for work. The only break in the color scheme were the children’s clothes. Every child under ten was dressed in bright, cheerful colors.
Three days later we headed to Hanoi. Our prop-driven plane stopped for lunch in Nanking. We left the plane and ate in a lovely garden. When I’d finished eating, I got up to look around and wandered down a long chain link fence beyond some hangars. I was at the end of road, where fifteen to twenty men, dressed in the clothing and conical hats of rice planters, waiting around a gate in the fence, bicycles parked nearby.
The gate led to an airport runway, where tiny MIG aircraft were taking off and landing. A man would take off his hat and run out to the plane, while the pilot got out of the plane, took off his helmet and left it on the wing. The man coming out put the helmet on, climbed into the jet and roared off while the former pilot walked back, grabbed and conical hat and his bicycle, and rode off.
I was about to approach the men when a security guard arrived and told me I was off limits. He politely led me back to airport lounge where I asked a spokesman what was going on. Was this part of China’s defense system? Not really, he explained. These men were local village peasants, part of a local defense force but they would be unlikely to fly in combat. However, flying a jt aircraft gave an uneducated peasant a whole new attitude toward technology. That was the point.
We made the last leg of the trip over the mountains from Nanking during a late August monsoon. The wild clouds cleared over the Vietnam foothills. Dark brown crags rose out of miles of lush green rice paddies. The Red River Delta stretched to the West in patterns of green and gray. The Vietnam that lay below held all the strange familiarity of a land pictured in childhood fairy tales.
The comfortable illusion of peaceful tranquility was shattered on the trip from the airport into Hanoi. Vietnam was a country at war. The road was filled with young people coming home armed with rifles. Trucks and cars were camouflaged with fresh foliage. The bridge across the Red River was heavily fortified with anti-aircraft guns. Slit trenches and fox holes lined the country roads and low, ugly bomb shelters squatted on city streets.
The Front Line
Hanoi was hot and crowded. Pedicabs, ox carts, bicycles and a few motor vehicles jammed the streets. The sidewalks and stores were full of shoppers. Fifty Thousand women and children had been evacuated from Hanoi, but the exodus didn’t seem to make a noticeable difference in population density and women and children made up their share of the crowds.
The men wore light cotton shirts and loose tan slacks. The women wore traditional baggy pants and tightly fitted dresses slit up the sides. Men and women sat at long tables in cafes under the glow of single, naked light bulbs drinking beer or tea and eating bowls of rice with fried meat and vegetables. Others rummaged about in the sparse merchandise or toiled in workshops over handicraft production. Our hosts told us that only half of North Vietnam's goods were produced by modern industry.
The old native section of Hanoi was a jumble of homes and shops in a dozen imitation French styles, carelessly mixed on twisting, narrow streets. The former French Quarter was still elegant with rows of 19th century French mansions sitting well back from shaded boulevards. They had become government offices or foreign embassies.
We stayed in the old Metropole Hotel, a meeting place for French colonialists until 1954. In 1965 the colorful uniforms of French officers, the elegant dresses of their wives, the priests and western journalists were gone. The Metropole, renamed the Unity, was full of Asians, a few Africans and some Eastern European technicians.
As I lay in bed before getting up at six, I could hear groups of young people singing as they returned from militia training in the countryside. Preparations for war went on all night and day. Groups of young people dismantled and reassembled rifles in parks. Others studied detailed models of U.S. aircraft and took aim at miniature, simulated American jets gliding down guide wires secured to rooftops.
North Vietnam, as her leaders were quick to point out, was poor. Her shops had essentials but few luxuries. As a youth leader told me in Hanoi's major department store looking at a pile of ugly suitcases, "consumer goods are neither of good quality nor fashionable." Then he continued more proudly, "but we make 90% of them ourselves and preserve our foreign exchange for heavy industry."
The division of Vietnam in 1954 confronted the North with a food shortage. Traditionally the South exported rice to the North and the North provided coal for the South. Without the South, North Vietnam had to develop its own agriculture. And it used agricultural surplus to fund industrialization. This required sacrifice. Party theoretician Le Duan gave some idea of how far this went when he said in 1962, "There will be no harm if we temporarily abstain from eating sweets made of groundnuts and export them instead to pay for machines."
Leaders claimed food production had increased by 50% in the last 11 years and that the share of industry in total production had risen from 17% to 50% since 1955. No one seemed to be starving in North Vietnam.
The destruction outside of Hanoi reminded me of the Germany I saw in 1955. In fact, before it was over we dropped more tonnage of bombs on Vietnam that we dropped during all of WW II over all the country we fought.
I spent two days in Thanh Hoa province. Many of the roads and towns were partially destroyed. There were always planes and flashes of bombs or ack-ack somewhere in the sky. The Vietnamese call these areas under attack "the front." There they apply their experience of more than twenty years of warfare against the French. Traffic moves at night without lights, cities are evacuated during the day. Hospitals and schools are dispersed throughout the countryside.
We left for Thanh Hoa late one afternoon with two translators, Quy Du and Trung Hieu, and several others in two heavily camouflaged Soviet jeeps. Most Vietnamese are remarkably engaging people, personally kind and gentle. I frequently marveled at the smiles they used while telling stories of torture and destruction as if to say, "Yes, such things do happen, but we will not let the brutality of others destroy our humanity, will we?"
The old French military road to the south, lined with young trees, was crowded all night with carts, bicycles and trucks filled with produce. Water buffalo, tended by small children riding their backs, grazed on the strip of grass next to the pavement. Farmers in conical hats worked in the paddies. Fishermen flung nets over the ponds against a late afternoon sun. Modern and ancient tools were used side by side. In one field two young women stood with a basket suspended between them on a long rope. They swung the basket into an irrigation ditch, over the dike and into the field, rhythmically filling the paddy with water, a basketful at a time, as their ancestors had done for centuries. In the next field an electric pump did the same job in minutes.
The towns along the highway were bustling and cheerful. The Vietnamese seemed to take the American air strikes in stride. Nguyen Cu, the young chairman of the Thanh Hoa Youth Federation told me later, "We still try to live as we used to. On moonlight nights we meet outside to sing and dance. When it rains we meet inside with lamps. And if Johnson comes we have a special leaf we carry to conceal the light." The Vietnamese call the bombing planes "Johnsons." Cu added, "we live at night now, but we still have the cinema and more artists and singers come from Hanoi than before. So you see it is the same."
But of course, it was not the same.
We drove through Nam Dinh, North Vietnam's third largest city and a new industrial center at dusk. From the jeep I saw a bombed pagoda, a partially destroyed hospital and a school yard full of craters. The famous Nam Dinh Textile Factory built by the French was a jumble of twisted, bombed out buildings. But I was most struck by the working class homes around the factory which had been leveled to a pile of charred bricks and bamboo for blocks in every direction.
There are many bridges between Hanoi and Thanh Hoa. Three of the four major ones had been destroyed. One of these was almost rebuilt. Another has been replaced by a pontoon bridge that was floated out at dusk and hidden under the trees at dawn. The third, the Ham Rong rail bridge, was still serviceable. Traffic moved slowly but steadily to the front. The railroad paralleling the highway was busy all night.
Thanh Hoa province had been heavily hit. At Hospital Number 71 which was destroyed in three raids on July 8th, I talked with its Vice Director Nguyen That. That said the thirty building complex had been a research and treatment center for tuberculosis. Now it was a skeleton against the morning sky. Forty doctors and patients were dead.
We visited the Dai Thang agricultural co-op. It was simply a cluster of buildings in the middle of rice paddies far from any possible military target. Pham Van Ky, the old peasant who was chairman of the Party committee, reminded me of agricultural workers of California or rural Mississippi Blacks. He had a natural dignity and warmth, but his eyes never left your face as he watched your reaction. "Illiteracy has been wiped out," he said, "the old people have a shirt on their back, and they know they will get their bowls of rice. One out of every ten families has mosquito netting." While we took notes, the other villagers looked on, shyly smiling in proud confirmation of what he said.
"There were four raids in 45 days. Twenty children between three months and ten years were killed. Fifteen elderly people were killed. One hundred twenty-nine houses were destroyed; 200 were damaged. Three cows, one buffalo, and one horse were killed and we lost one bicycle."
Every large building we saw in Thank Hao had been targeted in U.S. raids. In response, North Vietnam dispersed its hospitals and schools throughout small villages. In one such small hospital we talked with a ten-year-old boy who had lost his legs above the knees while he was playing in his school yard; a 27 year old woman, seven months pregnant, caught on the highway during a raid, her back was broken; a young man who was planting rice when his insides were torn out.
I had expected to find a great bitterness in the Vietnamese. There was surprisingly little, and it was directed against Taylor, McNamara, Rusk and Johnson. Johnson took the brunt of it. When the planes come the tiny children run through the streets shouting, “John ‘s coming!” As one Vietnamese said to me with great compassion, “It must be so difficult to live in your country.”
Leaving Vietnam
Before we left the front, we spent the afternoon in a pine forest in the hills of Thanh Hoa with a group of young people who asked us about the peace movement in the United States. They had a surprisingly detailed knowledge of it. Everyone knew of Alice Herz, the American who burned herself with gasoline, emulating the Buddhists, to protest the war in Vietnam. They vastly over estimated the strength of the peace movement.
That evening we sat under a crescent moon together. We talked about many things, barely mentioning the war. I asked one girl what she looked for in a man and she replied, "a fighting spirit." They took our hands later and sang us songs, mainly about love. "You see our girls are very militant," Hieu said, "but when it comes to music they prefer romantic songs."
We had our nearest aid raid that evening. They rushed us over to a shelter and we stood by the entrance watching the brilliant flares in the sky and the bursts of rockets and ack-ack. It made us realize that some of these young people would be dead before the war was over. We said goodbye in the middle of the night on the edge of the Song Chu River. The stars were bright and clear as they usually are only from the highest mountains. We could see rockets and flares in the distance.
Someone in Vietnam discovered that a rifle bullet can bring down a jet. Now the Vietnamese mass scores of people in trenches and fill the air with bullets when planes pass over. I have no idea how much military value these rifles have, but they have an enormous psychological effect. Everyone can now take part in the national defense. There is no question but that most do so willingly.
The only complaints I heard against the government were from young people who wanted to be released from school to join the Viet Cong. There is an intense nationalism in Vietnam today. The intellectuals go back into Vietnamese history and glorify the heroes of the resistance against the Chinese, the first a woman who defied the Chinese in 400 AD. The youngsters long to emulate the revolutionary exploits of their leaders.
The Vietnamese proudly wear a shirt made of their own, domestically produced cloth. When the textile factory that made the shirt was bombed it was a personal affront. The dams that are bombed were built by hundreds of people who worked for days with shovels and baskets to create an irrigation system. A dam is part of the community in a way that no power company dam built by bulldozers can ever be.
I asked many people how they thought the war would end. They were confident of ultimate victory. Victory, a university student told me, "means that we want to be left alone to settle our own affairs." The Vietnamese that I met were in no mood to negotiate. There was a story making the rounds in North Vietnam attributed to Ho Chi Minh. "Look, a bandit breaks into your house, steals half your belongings, kills part of your family, and then sits down and says, 'let's negotiate.' Well, do you talk to him or kick him out?"
We saw Ho twice, once at the 20th anniversary of independence where he sat on the stage with his jacket open and his sandals off in amazing though dignified informality. The second time we were at the opera, and Ho came in without causing any disturbance and sat in the last row of the first section of the orchestra. You see fewer pictures of Ho in Hanoi that you see of Johnson in Washington. While there seems to be no "cult" around him, there is deep affection.
We were unable to meet Ho, but we interviewed Premier Pham Van Dong for about an hour. Dong, who extended the President's apologies to us, is one of his closest and oldest associates. He was waiting at the bottom of the steps to the Presidential Palace when our car arrived, dressed like every Vietnamese in a cotton shirt, pants and sandals without a tie or jacket. We had tea in the grand reception room, but the Premier soon took us back outside where he answered our questions while we strolled through the gardens. He was very much the French intellectual, extremely urbane and witty. While he made no new statement to us, he spoke with conviction about the course of the war and insisted that the United States must accept the principles of Vietnamese unity, sovereignty, and independence before negotiations can take place.
As we drove to the airport early on the morning we left North Vietnam, Truc, the head of the Youth Federation, said, "you will tell the American people about Vietnam." I nodded. "You know," he added, "this war can only be ended by the people of both our countries."
Reception Back Home
On the way back from Hanoi we made a direct connection with no layover in Peking, but we spent a day in Moscow waiting for a flight to New York. I met several Soviet Asian specialists. I asked why the Soviets were not giving the Vietnamese more sophisticated weaponry, such a jet fighters to challenge American air supremacy. They replied that Vietnamese refused anything they couldn’t operate by themselves. They didn’t want Vietnam to find itself in the position of Cuba during the Missile crisis, with the Soviet Union doing all the negotiating.
On the flight from Moscow to New York City, I was offered a copy of the New York Times, my first Western newspaper in six weeks. I read the front page eagerly and then turned to the inside pages and experienced a cultural shock. For six weeks I had lived in a world without advertising, marketing or commercial hype. There before me, was a Lord and Taylor ad, a photograph of a sexy young woman in a matching bra and panties next to a detailed report about the bombing campaign against North Vietnam.
The juxtaposition of the bombing and the young girl dressed in her underwear at that moment seemed obscene. All the ads, in fact, spoke of a culture that was out of tune with most people in the world, a culture of promiscuous self-indulgence that could rain death down upon a tiny country in a far off land because we didn’t like its political ideology. The passport control officer told me as he stamped my passport, “Welcome back to the free world.”
We held a news conference shortly after our return. It was well attended by the national press, but did not generate many articles beyond two columns in the New York Times and a lengthy piece in St Louis Post Dispatch. The AP wire picked it up, but I’m not sure how much play it got. All four networks interviewed me, but not one frame of video ever aired. The interview for PBS was done by Bob Potts, who had been my news director at WBAI. I called Bob when the interview didn’t run. He told me a segment with my interview had been put into the show, but it was pulled at the last minute by “someone in Washington.”
Pacifica’s management claimed to be outraged that I hadn't warned them about the trip in advance. They'd been caught by surprise. As soon as I had left for my presumed vacation in Paris, Trevor Thomas had made one of the WBAI’s marginal staff members acting station manager. Chris Albertson was an Icelander who became a naturalized US citizen in 1963, primarily because of his love for American Jazz. Albertson had worked at a number of radio stations and was well known for his interview with Lester Young, one of only two extant interviews ever done with the tenor saxophonist.
Albertson had a long, angular Scandinavian face. He dressed in grays and blacks, colors from the jazz and beatnik age, but tailored with a European cut. He was stand-offish and self-conscious, like the character out of a Bergman movie. He must have been the only available person associated with WBAI who didn’t have a dog in the fight between Pacifica’s management and its staff.
In the polarized politics of Pacifica, that made Albertson the enemy. The board ordered him to review my Vietnam scripts. He decided I had 113 errors of fact or exaggeration. I tried to discuss the presumed errors, but probably did so in such an officious tone that Albertson collapsed across the desk in exasperation. He dug his heels in and insisted I make ridiculous changes. I asked to work with an area expert. Pacifica found two journalists. I don’t recall who they were. They went over my scripts and reduced the errors … or unproven facts … to three.
I'd won the battle of the scripts but lost the war. I no longer had the confidence of the board. If management didn’t have faith in my judgment, then I had no business being their program director. I resigned. As soon as I was gone, WBAIU ran my Vietnam series over and over without any changes.
Most of the staff with whom I had worked left with me. Angry listeners confronted the new station manager. Within six months subscriptions at WBAI dropped from a high of twelve thousand to only slightly more than seven thousand. It was the end of an era. My Pacifica generation already was on the way out. Mike Tigar had returned to the law. Fred Haines had gone off to Europe. John Leonard was at the New York Times. Dick Elman had quit over the loyalty oath. Jerry Shore was gone and Elsa was on the run.