Vietnam War – Don't Gel Too Soon

The Vietnam Moratorium, 40 Years Ago Today

It wasn’t that long ago – not really. Thousands of us singing “All we are saying, is give peace a chance” on the Mall in Washington. It all started when Sam Brown, David Hawk, David Mixner, Marge Sklenkar, John Gage and other peace luminaries, many of whom were veterans of the failed McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns, decided to call a “moratorium on the war in Vietnam” and ask everyone to come to Washington to support it. It was a great idea: a kind of strike against the war, but with manners.

And 250,000 came, followed by at least 500,000 exactly a month later, during the November Moratorium that followed. But on this day, a manageable and peaceful crew assembled. My memories of the day are scattered. I worked for CBS News by then and my job was to keep track of the march, marchers and plans for all the peace activity going on in the capital. There was plenty, in a wide spectrum of militancy and affect.

I wish I could describe for you some of the more radical “peace houses” I visited; collectives with tie died cloth covering the windows and mattresses on the floor – working for a much tougher way to oppose the war.

Organizers and participants in this march , though, slept in church basements and the homes of local people who made room for them. Everyone who lived in Washington didn’t have a spare bed or couch – or inch of space on the floor. You know this, but just to remind you, listen to what the BBC says about that time “in context:

American combat troops had been fighting the Communist Viet Cong in Vietnam since 1965.

Some 45,000 Americans had already been killed by the end of 1969. Almost half a million US men and women were deployed in the conflict, and opposition to the war was growing.

The Moratorium for the first time brought out America’s middle class and middle-aged voters, in large numbers. Other demonstrations followed in its wake.

I guess that song is what I remember most – that, and members of the Chicago 7, out on bail as they awaited trial, addressing the crowd and pulling off wigs to show how their jailers had cut off all their hair. For some reason, I can still see that – it felt to me like such a violation. A less than friendly observer asked me later “How did you like what they did to “your friends” huh? They weren’t my friends; I barely knew them, but the question was a punch in the gut. So many things stood for other things then. Long hair on men meant rebellion and outlier.

Anyway, it’s yet another 40 year anniversary and I didn’t feel that I could let it go un-noted.

If you have never heard the Lennon song “Give Peace a Chance” here are John and Yoko singing it with a crew of friends during a peace “bed in” in, I believe, Amsterdam. Happy Anniversary

Robert S. McNamara: Did His Atonement Suffice or Did He Just Outlive Our Anger?

It's hard to understand the role of Robert McNamara and feelings toward him, particularly during the Johnson Administration, but if you think "Dick Cheney during the Bush years" and multiply, you'll come closest. McNamara, who died today, was one of the great villains of my 20's and 30's. Secretary of Defense, a major architect of the Vietnam War and defender of the ideas behind it, he supported both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in their attempts to "save democracy" there. He entered the new Kennedy Administration in a blaze of glory just five weeks after being named, and then resigning as, president of the Ford Motor Company. A supremely successful and confident executive (who opposed production of the much-reviled Edsel), he seemed a creative and promising choice.

What he became was a symbol of all that seemed wrong with American foreign policy, especially in Vietnam,(including the "domino theory" claiming that if Vietnam "fell" other nations in the region would fall as well) and one of the subjects of the landmark book about this foreign policy team, David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. In addition to the vast, deep anger at the direction of the war and the philosophy that defined it, McNamara and all he represented reminded us daily of what we saw as both the arrogance of the US decision to enter and remain part of the war in Vietnam and our conviction that we were being manipulated, spied upon and lied to.

Paul Hendrickson's The Living and the Dead best described McNamara's impact by visiting the stories of five people affected by the war. Here's an excerpt from the first part of the book; it looks long, but you'll be glad you've read it:

In the Winter of 1955

His
wife wasn't drinking milk with her Scotch in the hope her stomach might
hurt a little less – not then. A man bearing a child hadn't set himself
on fire below his Pentagon window – not yet. A wigged-out woman hadn't
stolen up behind his seat in an outdoor cafe in the Kodak winter sun of
Aspen to begin shrieking there was blood on his hands. (He was applying
ketchup to his hamburger.) A Viet Cong agent – his name was Nguyen Van
Troi — hadn't been found stringing fuses beneath a Saigon bridge he
was due to pass over. Odd metaphors and strange turns of phrase weren't
seeping from him like moons of dark ink. His pressed white shirts
weren't hanging loose at his neck. He wasn't reading Homer late at
night in an effort to compose himself. His dyslexic and ulcerated son
hadn't been shown in a national newsmagazine with his ropes of long
hair and kindly face reading aloud a list of war dead at the San
Francisco airport. Reputed members of an organization called the
Symbionese Liberation Army didn't have stored in a Berkeley garage some
crudely drawn but surprisingly detailed descriptions of the interior
and exterior of his resort home in Snowmass, along with thumb-nail
sketches of members of his family. (WIFE: name unknown to me. She is
small, not outstanding in appearance & probably not aggressive. .
.") He hadn't stood in the Pentagon briefing room in front of his
graphs and bar-charts to say with perfect seriousness, "So it is
fifteen percent of ten percent of thirteen-thirtieths that have been in
dispute here. . ." He hadn't stood on the tarmac at Andrews, at the
rollaway steps of his blue-tailed C-135, before winging to a high-level
CINCPAC meeting in Honolulu, and told another tangle of lies into a
tangle of microphones, made more artfully disingenuous statements to
the press boys, this time about the kind of forces – which is to say,
combat forces – soon to be shipped to the secretly escalated war. ("No,
uh, principally logistical support — arms, munitions, training,
assistance.") He hadn't hunched forward in his field fatigues at a news
conference in Saigon and said, as though trying to hug himself, and
with only the slightest belying stammers, "The military operations have
progressed very satisfactorily during the past year. The rate of
progress has exceeded our expectations. The pressure on the Viet Cong,
measured in terms of the casualties they have suffered, the destruction
of their units, the measurable effect on their morale, have all been
greater than we anticipated" — when, in fact, the nations chrome-hard
secretary of defense had already given up believing, in private, a long
while ago, that the thing was winnable in any military sense. The
president of the United States hadn't called him up to yell, "How can I
hit them in the nuts, Bob? Tell me how I can hit them in the nuts!" —
the them being little men in black pajamas in a skinny curve of an
unfathomable country 10,000 miles distant. He hadn't yet gone to this
same president and told him he was afraid of breaking down. The
expressions "body count" and "kill ratio" and "pacification" and
"incursion" hadn't come into the language in the way snow — to use
Orwell's image — falls on an obscene landscape. The casualty figures
of U.S. dead and missing and wounded hadn't spumed, like crimson
geysers, past the once unthinkable 100,000 mark. Nor had this man risen
at a luncheon in Dean Rusk's private dining room at the state
department (it happened on February 27, 1968, forty-eight hours before
he left office) and, without warning, begun coming apart before Rusk
and dark Clifford and Bill Bundy and Walt Rostow and Joe Califano and
Harry McPherson, telling them between stifled sobs, between what
sounded like small asphyxiating noises, between the bitter rivers of
his cursing, that the goddamned Air Force, they're dropping tonnage on
Vietnam at a higher rate than we dropped on Germany in the last part of
World War II, we've practically leveled the place, and what's it done,
nothing, a goddamned nothing, and Christ here's Westmoreland asking for
another 205,000 troops, ifs madness, can't anybody see, this thing has
to be gotten hold of, it's out of control I tell you. . .

No.

None of this.

Not yet.

It all lay waiting in the decades up ahead.

Pretty amazing, huh? Those are just a few of the moments that informed McNamara's War years, and mine. And the engendered the rage, the hateful things yelled at marches, the weeping, the tear gas, the chaos and the fear. And McNamara knew it. He spent much of the rest of his life trying to atone for those years, first by leading the World Bank in its sunnier years and urging America and the world to help the starving and the lost. At least once, he broke down at a major appearance as he described the world misery the Bank sought to abate. Later, he collaborated on a book, Argument Without End, that struggled to understand and, some claim, apologize for, the war.

As many of the obits noted, especially that on TIME's website, ("Robert McNamara dies, no escape from Vietnam") for many, next to LBJ, McNamara was the war. And as Hendrickson's book noted, he haunted those directly affected by the war even more than the rest of us.

Somehow though, it's difficult to retain rage as ideas soften and history teaches us more about times we lived when we were young. I remember that when Nixon died a friend called to talk about it. I wasn't home, and she said to my son "What really makes me mad is that I think he outlived our anger." I'm still trying to figure out if that's how I – we – will feel about this death. McNamara certainly tried to both understand and to atone for Vietnam but the damage of that war, up until today, remains. As I've written before, since Vietnam, every national campaign including the last one, and, you can be sure, any one that Sarah Palin runs in the future, is informed by – colored by – sometimes defined by – what happened then. President Obama has certainly blunted the culture wars, generational change will absolutely change many issues, especially related to gender rights, but I wonder… When the right gets mad – gets desperate – they can easily reignite the culture wars that were the bi-product of the Vietnam era. And Robert McNamara is responsible for those, too.

I don't know. Really, I don't. But I'm ending with this Charlie Rose interview with McNamara from 1995. Take a look. There's more of the whole man here. The question is now much he deserves, after what the Defense Secretary in him did, to expect us to think about all the rest.

Farewell to Eden Lipson, A Great Mother, Editor and Friend

There were so many of us in 1968, joined to battle the Vietnam War by helping Eugene McCarthy run for president. We lost the Senator several years ago, and Eli Segal, one of the best, soon after. Today I learned of the loss of another of the dear ones, Eden Ross Lipson. She died this morning of pancreatic cancer. You can see from this photo that she was a woman who relished life and laughter. Her greatest joys: her husband and her kids.

Although we shared a history from the campaign, we also shared some great lunches and adventures in Manhattan, where she had dozens of friends who loved and respected her. Principled and kind, she was a joy and support to so many.

In her work as Children’s Book Editor of the New York Times Book Review, Eden produced what is still the classic work on children’s literature. I knew her as she wrote the first edition; it was a real labor of love. Her understanding of kids, of books and of writing and purpose made her an ideal guide for anxious parents and savvy librarians alike.

Her generosity went far beyond the love of children that made her such a great advocate for the joy they would find in their books. It was she who gave me my first review assignment and it led to an entire side career as a book reviewer that lasted for years. She was a tough and smart editor, too.

I remember my review of one of my favorites: Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic. A time-travel Holocaust story, it is a beautiful book. I submitted a very positive review. Soon after, Eden called. In a tone slipping between amused and professional, she reminded me that not all parents were as open as I was, and that I needed to add some kind of caution to parents who were more protective about at what age their kids were exposed to tough information. She was right, of course. I began an embarrassed apology. Her response: if people didn’t need editors she wouldn’t have a job! I fixed the piece and it ran. Later, it was Eden who connected me with the editor who published my first book. She did it, as she did all things, with no expectation of reciprocal benefit. These sorts of things are typical of the warmth and kindness she showed to everyone who knew her.

Life is strange. Eden was someone I knew, respected and cared about. I lost touch with her, as with so many others, when we moved to Los Angeles. My life then just didn’t allow for working to stay connected; there were hard things happening and they made it difficult to think outside the immediate circumstances of my life. And so I’m doubly sad as I struggle to write about a woman with such a mind, and a spirit, and a heart.

I’m comforted to know, though, that she had friends and family around her, supportive and caring, in her last days. That’s no surprise; it’s what she offered so many others.

THEY WILL CAMPAIGN AGAINST US UNTIL WE’RE ALL DEAD – AND MAYBE AFTER

From the day Richard Nixon was nominated in 1968 until Tuesday afternoon, forty years later, when John McCain began running this “Love” commercial, Republicans have been running against us. All of us who share a history of opposing the Vietnam war and working to elect an anti-war president. Against everything we ever were, believed, dreamed, voted for, marched against, volunteered to change, spoke about, created, sang, wrote, painted, sculpted or said to one another on the subway or the campus or anyplace else from preschool parent nights to Seders to the line at the supermarket.

How is it possible that what we tried to do is still the last best hope to elect a Republican? They used it against John Kerry. They used it against Max Cleland. They did it every time (well, almost) they were losing policy battles in the Clinton years. They called CSPAN and said unspeakable things. And now they are using the history of people my side of sixty to run against a man who was, if my math is right, seven years old during this notorious “summer of love” which – I might add, had nothing to do with those of us working to end the war. In fact, there were two strands of rebellion in those years. The Summer of Love/ Woodstock folks and the political, anti-war activists.

At the 1967 National Student Association Convention in Maryland, I saw a room full of students boo Timothy Leary off the stage, literally. We didn’t want to “turn on, tune in, drop out” we wanted to organize against the war. The anti-war movement was not a party. I know that’s not a bulletin but it is so hard to see all of us reduced to a single mistaken stereotype. Those who chose to find a personal solution weren’t nuts; communes and home-made bread were a lot more immediate gratification than march after march, teach-in after teach-in, speech after speech. “If you’re goin’ to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” Tempting, romantic – and not us.

Even more painful is the fact that the cultural and political divide is still so intense that research (I assume) told the McCain guys that this commercial would work. That our patriotic, committed efforts to change our country’s path, and the cultural alienation that drove others toward the streets of San Francisco, combine to become a stronger motivator than all the desperate issues we face today, this side of those 40 years. Perhaps even worse, these Bush years have dismantled so many of the successes we did have, so that in addition to facing, yet again, this smear against the activism of 1968 (and I repeat, that was forty years ago — longer than most of the bloggers I know have been alive) there’s the awareness of what we did that has been undone.

I need to say here that I grew up on the shores of the Monongehela River in Pittsburgh and my classmates were kids who mostly went into the steel mills or the Army after high school. I knew plenty of supporters of the war. I went to prom and hung out at the Dairy Queen with them. But it never occurred to me to demonize them, to hold against them their definition of patriotism.

I’m not writing off or looking down upon those who did support the war; I’m saying that this cynical, craven abuse of the devotion of people on both sides to the future of their country is reprehensible and precisely the kind of behavior that has broken the hearts of so many Americans, on those both sides of the political spectrum, who just want their candidates to lead us in hope for what our country can be, not defame others whose dreams aren’t quite the same as theirs.

FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

By the time Robert Kennedy decided to run for President, in March of 1968, just days after Eugene McCarthy’s great New Hampshire primary showing demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson’s weakness and the real unpopularity of the Vietnam war, I was already neck-deep in McCarthy’s campaign. I’d been involved since the summer before, in what, before McCarthy agreed to run, we called Dump Johnson. When Allard Lowenstein (himself assassinated in 2000), recruited us for it at the 1967 National Student Association (NSA) meeting, he’d say "You can’t beat somebody (LBJ) with nobody." So he had worked very hard to get Bobby to run, but he refused.

It was Gene McCarthy who agreed to stand for all of us against the Johnson administration and the war. After NSA I organized the Smith campus. We were among the first students to go each weekend to New Hampshire to work for McCarthy and against the war. So when Kennedy announced, just days after our great New Hampshire triumph, that he would also run, we were devastated, and angry.

Over the months of campaigning though, I came to have enormous respect for Senator Kennedy and his campaign. There was no way to watch him without feeling the power of his connection with all kinds of Americans and his compassion, poetry and sense of justice. This moment, just as an inner city Indianapolis neighborhood learned of the death of Martin Luther King, is typical of him at his best:

By June the campaign was tense; such an important issue and the two Senators were running against one another as well as (and sometimes, it seemed, instead of) the war. Kennedy won Indiana. McCarthy won Oregon. We moved south to Los Angeles(one of many places I saw for the first time from a campaign bus) criss-crossing the state from Chico to San Francisco and back to LA. Just before the midnight after the primary, as June 4, 1968, election day, became June 5, we knew we’d lost, so we went to Senator’s concession in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton and then back upstairs to mourn. We weren’t even watching the rest of coverage. Suddenly, running through the halls of the staff floor of the hotel, one of McCarthy’s closest advisors shouted "Turn on the TV! They’ve done it again!"

Continue reading FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

WHO WANTS HILLARY? WHO WANTS BARACK? WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE? WHAT’S AT STAKE?

You really need to read this guest post at Political Voices of Women, Catherine Morgan‘s remarkable combination of editorial and aggregator. There are links there to more than 400 women who blog about politics – and guest posts. And (full disclosure) yes, sometimes that includes to my work. But I digress.

On Wednesday, April 23, just after the Pennsylvania primary, Slim, whose blog is called No Fish, No Nuts, was Catherine’s guest blogger. Slim’s post, which first appeared on her blog, wrote a loving but sad analysis of the Clinton supporters at her county convention where local Democrats elected their delegates. Listen to this:

Obama’s voters are looking toward Obama as a standard
bearer, as a point man for the change they want to see in the country.
Hillary’s supporters, at least the older women among them, are voting for their
surrogate: because they want to see a woman in the Oval Office before they die,
and because they themselves were denied so many opportunities for advancement
in their own lives.

I do not doubt that they also desperately believe in
Hillary Clinton, but their investment in her goes much deeper than politics.
Hillary Clinton is proof that they had it in them all along, the fire, talent
and creativity, and they could have been leaders but for the glass ceiling that
seemed to rise only inches a decade.

Slim also wrote that she was reluctant to offer these observations but that given polls showing many Clinton supporters saying they will vote for McCain if Obama gets the nomination, and some the other way around, she felt that times were so desperate that she had to weigh in. In her view, "We cannot afford another 4 years of war, debt and economic stagnation,
the prescription of a McCain presidency. So we Dems cannot allow
Clinton voters (or for that matter, I add, Obama supporters if it goes the other way – though they report this feeling somewhat less frequently) to take their ball and go home come November."

To that I say "amen!" I was a member of the "Children’s Crusade" that was the 1968 anti-war presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy. We worked like demons through New Hampshire, did so well there that it was considered a win even though, technically, we lost, then saw Bobby Kennedy enter the race against us. We persisted, as did his supporters, until his assassination in June of 1968. After that, many of his supporters joined us, working still to try to elect a president who would stop the war. And then.

The riots in Chicago. The nomination of Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and for way too long a staunch supporter of the war. And then. Many, many of my colleagues and friends indeed picked up their footballs and went home. To stay. Not only did they not work for Humphrey – that would have been very hard after what had happened in Chicago. They didn’t even vote for him. Or vote at all. And that, my friends, is how we got Richard Nixon. Which is how we got Watergate. Which is how we got Jimmy Carter– who made such a mess that we got Ronald Reagan. Who took apart so much social safety net, environmental and regulatory and other federal function that we thought more was impossible. Until we got George Bush. Who decimated much of what was left, including much of our hope. Until now, when we have two candidates who stand for so much.

Of course that’s simplistic, but what really really upsets me is that every time we educated activists, in our righteousness, take a walk because things aren’t perfect, we aren’t the ones who get hurt the most. People who are poor, whose kids go to bad schools, whose unemployment insurance runs out too soon, who no longer can afford even in-state tuition or, for many, community college tuition, to say nothing of HEALTH INSURANCE (an issue which reaches up into the middle class) — and of course the war, where low-income people do most of the enlisting…these people are the ones who are hurt the most.

We let our singular perception of what’s perfect become the enemy of the good – or at least better than bad – that we could help to bring into being. It’s infantile. It’s sad. It’s shameful. And unless all of us in the blog universe who feel this way make a lot of noise and take lots of friends to lunch no matter WHO gets the nomination, it’s going to happen again.

Thanks to Slim for her great post that inspired this rant.

WAY BEFORE HER TIME- IN A HAT! REMEMBERING BELLA ABZUG

She was way before her time — way before. Loud, brash, confident, and always in a hat (even on the House floor), born in 1920 and elected to Congress in 1970, Bella Abzug was a force of nature who, early in her career, ignored serious threats on her life to defend Willie McGee, a Mississippi black man convicted of raping a white woman. Although very pregnant at the time, she went to Mississippi to argue his case and face the cruel segregation machine that was the Jim Crow South.

Later, she represented many of those attacked by Senator Joe McCarthy in the 50’s and became one of the leaders of the anti-Vietnam War movement – and an enduring symbol of the struggle to gain the kinds of rights women enjoy today. There was so much to her – and most of it was apparent in the force of her presence, and her impact on others.

Now two of her long-time colleagues, admirers, friends and founding editors at Ms. Magazine have compiled an exciting and inspiring oral history.

To many of those who read this blog Bella is a seeming anachronism. There’s no way to recall the desperation of those times not only because of the war but also because of the growing frustration of women trying to find an equal place in the world. Bella broke down barriers, put the fear of God into politicians (and her staff and many of her admirers) with her fierce commitment and energy, and was a funny, loving person between battles – and this book brings all that to life.

So take a look at this engrossing story. If you have a young woman friend who doesn’t know what came before there was an all-girl sweep of high school science awards (much less any girls competing at all), or women running the New York Times, or women so commonly in authority that their roles on TV are not “first” or “woman fill-in-the-blank” but simply jobs — chief residents like Miranda Bailey or hospital directors like Lisa Cuddy or even really bad bad guys like Angela Petrelli share it with her this holiday – or for her birthday – or when she graduates. And remind her of this:

When you get your meds from a woman pharmacist or get a ticket from a woman cop or have your plane waved to the gate by a woman airport worker — remember that they, and we, stand on the shoulders of this remarkable woman. Take a look at her story (the book is called – Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought
Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the
Rights of Women and Workers, … Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along
the Way— then decide what you’re going to do to take us to the next landmark.

ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! HOW WE TRIED TO STOP THE WAR

This morning I attended a briefing by NYT Political Reporter Matt Bai; he was speaking on his new book The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. It’s a thoughtful, exciting look at American politics – very original. Although if you’ve read his stuff you know that’s no surprise.

I was taking notes, so I headed the page with the date – and was stunned. It was a memorable day, at least for me.

Remember the Vietnam War? Or at least all the stories you’ve been told about it? Today, October 15th, is the 38th anniversary of one of the major demonstrations against that war — after the chaos of 1968 and the election of Richard Nixon: the Vietnam Moratorium.

Described as the largest demonstration in US history, it was quite a day. Astonishingly, Richard Nixon went to the Lincoln Memorial — in secret, in the middle of the night — to talk to the demonstrators camping out on the grounds there. Not astonishingly, hundreds were tear-gassed and rounded up — many on the way to class at George Washington University, and some, like my now-husband, on the way from his office to lunch.

This website from SMU quotes Steven Ambrose:

“Tens of thousands of protesters marched around the White House on October 15th; across the country, in every major city, tens of thousands attended antiwar rallies. It was, by far, the largest antiwar protest in US history. Altogether, millions were involved. There was little or no violence. Most disturbing to Nixon and his supporters, the Moratorium brought out the middle class and
the middle-aged in in very large numbers”.

Yeah the middle class was there – and people even older than I am now. It made a lot of noise and got a remarkable amount of attention. Jerry Rubin and
Abbie Hoffman showed up, on bail from the Chicago Seven trial, and pulled
off wigs to show that their hair had been shorn, like Sampson, by their Chicago jailers.

Of course the war didn’t end. Years later an alleged Soviet spy told an interviewer that the demonstrations had been a dead give-away to the Russians that the US could not sustain the effort. Who knows? It was just one more huge event in many efforts to make the war go away.

I have just read that one of the leaders of SDS and one of my favorite thinkers, Todd Gitlin, in his new book, has urged today’s activists to learn from what went wrong then. They’d better. For all we tried to do, we never got where we wanted to go and we left a legacy of polarization that still provides fodder for opponents in the culture wars. It was a noble effort and probably helped demonstrate anti-war sentiment but now, in these times, we need a new way to do that. It’s intriguing that two highly-regarded thinkers like Bai and Gitlin are both looking at the future of Progressives at the same time — just a year before the next presidential election.

What do you think? What should we have learned from the battles of the 60s — and of the early years of this century? What do we still have left to find out?