Vietnam - Kouroo Contexture

Transcription

GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE
“IS IT POSSIBLE WE WERE WRONG FROM THE START IN VIETNAM?”1
1. Nixon to Kissinger. The Quaker President is also on record as opinioning:
“I’d rather use the nuclear bomb.... The nuclear bomb.
Does that bother you? I just want you to think big,
Henry, for Christ’s sake.... You’re so goddamned
concerned about the civilians, and I don’t give a damn.”
— President Richard Milhous Nixon, on tape, 1972
VIETNAM
ATOM BOMB
“Fiddle-dee-dee, war, war, war,
I get so bored I could scream!”
—Scarlet O’Hara
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After an air-raid on North Vietnam, LBJ chortled that
he hadn’t merely “fucked Ho,” he had “cut his pecker off
and had it in his pocket.” Of course, our President
actually had not only not used his “Johnson” to subject
Ho Chi Minh to homosexual rape, but also, he had not
sexually mutilated his counterpart with a knife.
Actually there was no severed body member damaging the
lining of his suitpocket. Our President had merely been
an American homosocial and done that of which he spoke
in fantasy, cleanly, and in the American way — by proxy
and by machinery.
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111 BCE
The Chinese conquered what is now northern Vietnam.
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
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“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project
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939 CE
China ended its rule over the Vietnamese and an independent state was established.
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
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1553
In DES MERVEILLES DU MONDE, Guillaume Postel declared the Oriental understanding to be “the best in the
world.”
CHINA
JAPAN
KOREA
INDIA
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DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
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1802
Nguyen Anh came up with the name Vietnam. From this year into 1820, the Emperor Gia-Long would be
uniting that nation.
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION,
THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
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1806
One of the earliest English illustrated books on Vietnam, John Barrow’s A VOYAGE TO COCHINCHINA, IN THE
1792 AND 1793: CONTAINING A GENERAL VIEWS OF THE VALUABLE PRODUCTIONS AND THE POLITICAL
IMPORTANCE OF THIS FLOURISHING KINGDOM; TO WHICH IS ANNEXED AN ACCOUNT OF A JOURNEY, MADE IN
THE YEARS 1801 AND 1802, TO THE RESIDENCE OF THE CHIEF OF THE BOOSHUANA NATION, BEING THE
REMOTEST POINT IN THE INTERIOR OF SOUTHERN AFRICA ... (London: Strahan and Preston, for T. Cadell and
W. Davies in the Strand) with 19 color-printed aquatint plates with additional hand-coloring by T. Medland
after Samuel Daniell and W. Alexander and two folding engraved maps, the first a hand-colored plan of the
harbor and town of Rio de Janeiro, the second a “Chart of the Southern Extremity of Africa.”
YEARS
The volume is dedicated to fellow traveler and chronicler Baronet Staunton, and describes the outward voyage
of the expedition as it stopped at Madeira, the Canary Islands, Rio de Janeiro, and Tristan da Cunha on its way
around the Cape and then at Batavia on the island of Java before arriving in Cochinchina, otherwise known as
Vietnam. The volume’s historical overview of Vietnam was based on a manuscript by Captain Barissy, a
French naval officer. John Barrow noted along the way that Captain Cook’s Resolution had been transformed
into a smuggling whaler, operating under the French flag. The volume’s description of an expedition into
Bechuanaland in the interior of South Africa from Cape Town was based on a manuscript by Pieter Jan Truter.
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This 1806 publication would be checked out by Henry Thoreau from the Harvard Library on September 30th,
1834.
SIR JOHN BARROW
THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE
INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN
SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD.
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1818
John White, sailing from Salem, was reaching a port named “Saigon” on the southern coast of Asia and
attempting to negotiate there a trade agreement for sugar. He would fail due to the Emperor Minh Mang’s
isolation policy: foreigners equal trouble. He would bring back home with him some Vietnamese spears
that one may now view at the Peabody Museum in Salem.
“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR
POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW
FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF
HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE
ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF.
THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.
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1820
February 14, Monday: In Vietnam, from this point until 1841, the emperor Minh Mang would be reversing
the policies of Gia-Long, and expelling the Christians.2
2. This policy was, of course, a mistake, since as we all know, in this world there is nothing quite so nice –or quite so rare– as a
Christian.
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NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE FEBRUARY 14TH, 1820 AT ALL
ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY,
TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY
AT BEST). WHAT WAS GOING TO BE HAPPENING AS OF 1841, AND
WHAT WAS GOING TO BE HAPPENING UNTIL THEN, WAS AS OF
FEBRUARY 14TH, 1820 STILL ENTIRELY INDETERMINATE.
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1824
Following the defeats of the Emperor Napoléon, France began to recover its colonial empire. Between 1824
and 1914 it would be adding close to 3.5 million square miles and some 50 million people. It would begin to
take over what became French North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) starting in this year, by means of
an expedition against the Algerian pirates. The French would later take over what would become French IndoChina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam).
In Vietnam, Minh Mang outlawed any instruction in the nature of Christianity.
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?
— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.
LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
The Emperor Napoléon
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1845
During this year the USS Constitution was away from its Charlestown home dock, as it was conducting its one
and only circumnavigation of the globe. (Artifacts, including log books and journals written during this
diplomatic mission, period weaponry, original watercolors by one of the ship’s officers, etc., may for $4.00 now
be perused daily from 10AM to 4PM at the Navy Yard, children under 6 free. Call 426-1812.) While it was
visiting the port of Da Nang, Vietnam it persuaded the people under its guns to promise to release a French
missionary who was in prison there. Then, on its way out to sea, its guns shelled the Vietnamese harbor
anyway, on general principle or for target practice.3
NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE
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3.When it was suggested to President Polk that we should capture this port of Da Nang, Vietnam and make it into the US window
on Asia, he replied that to establish American sovereignty on Asian soil would be “incompatible with our system of government.”
(The administration of President Polk would receive notice in WALDEN but not in reference to excellence in government.)
WALDEN: Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have
long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they
say that Huber is the only modern author who appears to have
witnessed them. “Æneas Sylvius,” say they, “after giving a very
circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by
a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree,” adds
that “‘This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the
Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent
lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the
greatest fidelity.’ A similar engagement between great and small
ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being
victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own
soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the
birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant
Christiern the Second from Sweden.” The battle which I witnessed
took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the
passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill.
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
POLK
WEBSTER
KIRBY AND SPENCE
WILLIAM KIRBY
WILLIAM SPENCE
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1848
France occupied Cambodia and parts of Vietnam.
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
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1858
From this year until 1883, the French would control Vietnam.
THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT
CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE
HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE,
A PRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A
MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH
WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL
CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT.
THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO MOMENT HAS EVER
EXISTED.
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1862
April 13, Sunday: The treaty of Saigon, between France and the kingdom of Annam, was transacted in a region of the
world known to the West as “Indochina,” known under that name simply because the West knew about India
and thought India to be important, and knew about China and thought China to be important, but did not
consider that anything in between India and China could from a Western perspective be of equivalent
importance.
FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT
THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES
DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE
TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST
CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS
THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.
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1890
May 19, MondayHo Chi Minh was born.
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WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND
YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
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1940
Italy, Germany, and Japan signed a tripartite pact as the “axis powers.” The Japanese military occupied French
Indochina (Vietnam) with approval by France (which is to say, with the approval of the Vichy government of
collaborators) and announced that its intention was the creation of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
US troops were sent to guard air and naval bases obtained in Newfoundland, Bermuda, St. Lucia, the Bahamas,
Jamaica, Antigua, Trinidad, and British Guiana by negotiation with Great Britain (these would sometimes be
referred to as “lend-lease” bases).
US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS
Founding in 1815 in Boston by William Tudor and the journalist Nathan Hale, the North American Review, the
oldest American literary magazine, had come to be owned by a hack writer named Joseph Hilton Smyth. In
this year this owner was unmasked as having received $125,000 from Manhattan’s Vice Consul Shintaro
Fukushima in payment for publishing pro-Japanese sentiments, and so the magazine discontinued
publication).
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The Japanese tradition of the Cherry Blossom Pageant was introduced in Washington DC.
The Japanese military dropped bombs on the city of Ningbo in China containing fleas which they had carefully
infected with the bubonic plague.
The Japanese military introduced typhoid fever and cholera into China by way of Chekiang Province.
WORLD WAR II
GERM WARFARE
The Cuban Constitution of 1940 was established by a national assembly that included Blas Roca, a young
shoemaker who had helped organize the Revolution of 1933. The document struck a balance between the rich
and the working class, protected individual and social rights, supported full employment and a minimum wage,
extended social security, called for equal pay for equal work, and outlawed the huge plantations known as
latifundias. What could go wrong?
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THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
September 22, Sunday: The Hanoi Convention was concluded. Japan agreed to respect French interests in the Far East
in return for the Japanese military being allowed use of French facilities in Indochina, such as for instance
airfields. Within hours, Japan would introduce troops into the area. From this point until 1945, the Japanese
would be in control of Vietnam.
WORLD WAR II
READ THE FULL TEXT
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1941
Communist activist Ho Chi Minh secretly returned to Vietnam after 30 years in exile to organize a nationalist
organization known as the Viet Minh (Vietnam Independence League). After the Japanese had occupied
Vietnam during World War II, the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) would ally with Ho and his guerrillas
to harass Japanese troops in the jungles and to help rescue downed American pilots.4
The Irish potato catastrophe of the 1840s was re-enacted on a smaller scale in Kenya when, to obtain more
potatoes to feed the Allied troops of World War II, seed potatoes were sent into East Africa from the United
Kingdom (previously, the small area devoted to growing potatoes in Kenya had been P. infestans-free).
January 31, Friday: An armistice was signed between France and Thailand aboard a Japanese warship in Saigon,
ending their border dispute of 4 months.
WORLD WAR II
In Newton, New Jersey, 9 leaders of the German-American Bund were sentenced to prison terms of 12-14
months for violation of that state’s race hatred law.
Evocations for piano by Carl Ruggles was performed publicly for the initial time, at the Detroit Institute of the
Arts (the concert inaugurated an exhibition of 20 of Ruggles’ paintings).
March 10, Monday: The last transport of Jews from Bydogszcz arrived at the Warsaw Ghetto.
WORLD WAR II
Japan mediated the undeclared war between France and Indochina; France ceded territory to Thailand and
gave Japan a monopoly over the Indochinese rice crop and the right to the airport at Saigon.
Olivier Messiaen wrote from Neussargues, Cantal that he was no longer a prisoner of war, and was now with
his wife and son.
Sinfonietta for orchestra by Walter Piston was performed for the initial time, in Jordan Hall, Boston.
4. The enemy of my enemy is my friend (or at least, I read that somewhere).
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November 23, Sunday: Pursuant to an agreement with the Netherlands government, the USA occupied Surinam in
Dutch Guiana to protect its bauxite mines.
The USA intercepted and decoded a Japanese Navy communication: “The first air attack has been set for 0330
hours on X-day” (that would be Tokyo time, equivalent to 8AM Honolulu time).
Sonata for english horn and piano by Paul Hindemith was performed for the initial time, in New York.
A bomb exploded at the United States consulate in Saigon causing considerable damage but no injuries.
German forces took Istra, west of Moscow.
German and Italians troops attacked British and South Africans at Sidi Rezegh. Losses were so high on both
sides that the German soldiers would dub this day Totensonntag.
At Gambut, New Zealand troops captured a German headquarters with much valuable communication
equipment.
WORLD WAR II
BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS,
AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER,
THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT
ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT
MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE
IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST
MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS
HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL
THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A
MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.
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December 10, Wednesday: Cuba declared war upon Japan.
WORLD WAR II
The Japanese landed on Camiguin Island and at Gonzaga and Aparri on the island of Luzon in the Philippine
Islands. They captured the British-controlled islands of Abemama, Makin (Butaritari) and Tarawa in the
Gilbert Islands (Kiribati). The US Marine garrison on Guam surrendered to a Japanese landing force.
Führer Adolf Hitler commented that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words on the previous day had
amounted to a de facto declaration of war.
German and Italian forces began a full retreat to the west from Tobruk (Tubruq).
S.S. Commander Heinrich Himmler ordered that the ill, mentally ill and those otherwise unfit for work be
removed from concentration camp populations and gassed to death.
Brazil froze all the German, Italian, and Japanese assets it could get its hands on. Argentina froze all Japanese
assets.
The British warships HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales were sunk off Kuantan, Malaya. The ships had
been spotted by submarine I-58 just before dawn and a flight of nine “Betty” torpedo-carrying planes of the
Japanese 22nd Naval Air Flotilla led by Lieutenant Haruki Iki had scrambled from the Japanese base at Saigon.
The battleship Prince of Wales was hit by 4 torpedoes and sank at 12:33PM. 327 died. The cruiser Repulse was
hit by 14 torpedoes and sank at 1:20PM. 513 died. The Far Eastern Fleet commander, Admiral Sir Tom
Phillips, went down with his ship. The Japanese lost 4 planes. A total of 2,081 would be plucked from the water
by escort destroyers HMS Electra, Vampire, and Express and would be dropped off at Singapore.
Cavite Navy Yard, Philippine Islands was heavily damaged by enemy air attack. United States naval vessels
damaged at Cavite, Philippine Islands:
•
•
•
•
Destroyer Peary (DD-226), by horizontal bomber
Submarine Seadragon (SS-194), by horizontal bomber
Submarine Sealion (SS-195), by horizontal bomber
Minesweeper Bittern (AM-36), by horizontal bomber
Japanese naval vessels sunk:
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Submarine I-170, by carrier-based aircraft, Hawaiian Islands area, 23 degrees 45 minutes North,
155 degrees 35 minutes West
•
Minesweeper No. 10, by Army aircraft, Philippine Islands area, 17 degrees 32 minutes North,
120 degrees 22 minutes East
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Minesweeper No. 19, damaged by Army aircraft and grounded by own forces (total loss),
Philippine Islands area, 18 degrees 22 degrees North, 121 degrees 38 minutes EastAt the home of
Helen Clarke Grimes, in Spragueville near Smithfield northwest of Providence, Rhode Island, as in
many homes in America, the radio was being kept constantly on, not for the soap operas that filled
the daytime airwaves, but for the sporadic news flashes about the war situation. Helen made notes
for her diary:
Dec. 10 — From London comes news that the ill-fated and shortlived Prince of Wales has been sunk by Japanese aircraft. In the
year of its service it saw action with the Bismark from which
it emerged badly crippled, and later served as the meeting place
of Churchill and Roosevelt in the mid-Atlantic.
The Repulse has been lost, too.
Keeping the radio tuned-in all day means listening to an endless
series of “soap operas,” the daytime serials for moronic women.
The sensible thing is to listen to regular news broadcasts at
stated intervals, but I find myself compelled to listen almost
continuously for every stray bulletin, which is downright
idiotic of me.
There is a report that American bombers have sunk one Japanese
transport and hit five others, three by direct hits.
Noon 12:00 — The Japanese attempt to land troops on Luzon has
been beaten back by our forces.
The British report a heavy battle going on in Hong Kong.
No news from Germany.
the last of the trans-Atlantic steamship service has been
discontinued. Only planes now link us to Europe.
Some idiot in Washington has chopped down four of the Japanese
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cherry trees along the Potomac, and pinned messages to the
hacked trunks.
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1943
J.L. Coolidge’s “Three Hundred Years of Mathematics at Harvard” appeared in The American Mathematical
Monthly, Volume 50, Issue #6.
MATHEMATICS AT HARVARD
From this year until 1946, J.C.R. Licklider would be a Research Fellow in the Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory
at Harvard, advancing theories of pitch perception and the intelligibility of speech. He would become involved
in efforts to improve communication at high altitudes, particularly in ways to compress or clip speech to
increase the carrying power of radio.
A form of jelled gasoline that would be termed “napalm” was developed at Harvard by a team led by chemistry
professor Louis F. Fieser (who is prouder of his synthesis of the hormone cortisone) to provide a stickier fuel
for flamethrowers, more effective because it would tend not to drip off its target as it burned. Here is a Barbi
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doll dipped in homemade napalm:
Professor Fieser made a gel out of gasoline with a powdered aluminum soap of naphthalene with palmitate,
also known as napthenic and palmitic acids. The term “NA-PALM” thus originated an initialism standing for
“NApthenic/PALMitic.” Greatly improved versions of napalm, known as “NP2” (a mixture of 21% benzene,
33% gasoline, and 46% polystyrene) and as the “MK-77 firebomb,” now make no use either of napthenic or
of palmitic acid and thus the US military has been able to deny on appropriate occasions that it any longer
makes any use whatever of “napalm.” The US Air Force has at one point, for instance, posted a
“disinformation alert” on the internet asserting that the US in 2001 destroyed its entire stock of napalm bombs
— and what it meant by that was merely that the US military had been moving along with more effective forms
of incendiary gels. Disinformation indeed!
Nearly 400,000 tons of napalm would be dropped on targets in Vietnam, giving rise to an Army cadence chant
wit the platoon response line, “Napalm sticks to kids!”
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1944
January 15, Saturday: US submarine Crevalle (SS-291) laid mines east of Saigon in French Indochina.
WORLD WAR II
Soviet forces broke the German encirclement of Leningrad, seizing Pushkin and Gatchina just south of the city,
Mga to the east, and Slutsk, south of Minsk.
In Italy, American forces captured Monte Trocchio and reached the River Liri.
The Germans began a new offensive against Yugoslav partisans. Tito needed to relocate his headquarters from
Jajce to Drvar.
On the previous day at a concert in Boston, Igor Stravinsky had presented his rearrangement of the good old
“Star Spangled Banner” tune. A Massachusetts police official came to his dressing room to advise that he was
in violation of a Massachusetts ordinance that forbade “tampering with national property.” Policemen
confiscated the offending sheets from the orchestra’s music stands.
Anne Frank to her diary: “The war goes on just the same, whether or not we choose to quarrel, or long for
freedom and fresh air, and so we should try to make the best of our stay here. Now I’m preaching, but I also
believe that if I stay here for very long I shall grow into a dried-up old beanstalk. And I did so want to grow
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into a real young woman!”
February 22, Tuesday: Two Songs op.18 for voice and piano by Samuel Barber were performed for the initial time, in
New York: The Queen’s Face on a Summery Coin, to words of Horan, and Monks and Raisins, to words of
Villa.
Soviet forces captured Dno, east of Pskov.
At Dachau, 31 Soviet POWs were executed.
After torpedoing the tanker British Chivalry, Japanese submarine I-37 machine-gunned its lifeboats, killing
20. Chivalry, what’s that?
Completing United States control of Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, under cover of naval
bombardment and carrier-aircraft bombing US Marines landed on Perry Island.
Destroyers bombarded the Japanese airstrips, pier area, and anchorages at Kavieng on New Ireland.
US submarine Ray (SS-271), laid mines at the entrance to the port of Saigon in French Indochina.
United States naval vessel sunk:
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•
PT-200, by collision with unknown object, off Long Island, New York, 41 degrees 23 minutes
North, 71 degrees 1 minute West
Japanese naval vessels sunk:
•
•
•
Minelayer Natsushima, by destroyers, off New Ireland, 2 degrees 40 minutes South, 149 degrees
40 minutes East
Tug Nagaura, by destroyers, off New Ireland, 6 degrees 54 minutes South, 148 degrees 38 minutes
East
River gunboat Francis Garnier, by mine, South China Sea, 10 degrees 30 minutes North,
108 degrees 0 minutes East
WORLD WAR II
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1945
February 4, Sunday-11, Sunday: The Yalta Conference of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Prime Minister
Winston Churchill, and General Secretary Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili (“Stalin”) at Potsdam would
between the 4th and the 11th settle the postwar fate of Eastern Europe.
READ THE FULL TEXT
The racial legislation of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany was annulled (two down, one to go).
Nazi concentration camps were inspected and the extent of holocaust became known to the general public.
The refugee situation in Europe was of course entirely chaotic.
The United Nations was founded. At an early point, there was some speculation that it might be appropriate to
situate this organization in Concord, Massachusetts (whether this consideration was ever fantasized by anyone
outside Concord, or was entirely contained within that local group of citizens, is unknown).
Ho Chi Minh used our Declaration of Independence as a model for his speech in which he declared Vietnam
to be free of French colonial rule. Refer to HO CHI MINH: A LIFE by William J. Duiker (NY: Hyperion, 2000).
Symphony in G by Lukas Foss was performed for the initial time, in Pittsburgh, the composer himself
conducting.
Friend Agnes Carol Zens Kellam wrote from Washington DC to her husband, Friend John R. Kellam, who was
being held in a federal penitentiary for having refused to participate in the killing:
February 6, 1945
Hi Dearest:
... I’m writing this at work (my second day) as it’s early (8:10)
and I have no work to do as yet. I was sort of tired yesterday
when 5 p.m. came (quitting time) although the work is very easy.
I’m doing stenographic work with the Bureau of National Affairs,
a publishing company headed by David Lawrence and affiliated
with the United States News....
Oh, I work from 8:15 a.m. to 5 p.m. five days a week — no Saturday
work. Lunch is from 11:45 to 12:30 and I eat with Nelda [a close
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friend] and some other girls at a canteen in a church nearby —
where whites and Negroes eat together!! I believe the
denomination is Southern Presbyterian — it’s called Church of
the Pilgrims....
My girl friend, Ree, is going to have a baby in September — we
think our baby will come earlier, however. She asked me how I
felt and I told her fine except once in a while. She said she
felt fine once in a while.... I haven’t been to a doctor yet.
I’ll write first to the University of Chicago to see if they can
recommend a doctor here who believes in the principles of
natural childbirth....
One of the girls in the office here just now showed me a picture
of a boy friend of hers who is a conscientious objector working
in a mental hospital in Marion, Virginia. She says he is a swell
fellow, and she sticks up for him through the criticism she has
received for going out with him. People here have all been very
nice — no raised eyebrows. And I can work as long as I want
to....
I am wearing thy watch and think about thee every time I look
at it. I hope thee can find work to do there, cause thee’ll be
happier, but that’s up to thee and the authorities.
All my love, Thy Cary
Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were destroyed in allied bomb raids using conventional and
unconventional technologies.5
WORLD WAR II
The Blood-Guilt6
So long having foreseen these convulsions, forecast the hemorrhagic
Fevers of civilization past prime striving to die, and having through verse, image and fable
For more than twenty years tried to condition the mind to this bloody climate:
— do you like it,
Justified prophet?
I would rather have died twenty years ago.
“Sad sons of the stormy fall,”
You said, “no escape; you have to inflict and endure ... and the world is like a flight of swans.”
I said, “No escape.”
You knew also that your own country,
though ocean-guarded, nothing to gain, by its destined fools
Would be lugged in.
I said, “No escape.”
If you had not been beaten beforehand,
hopelessly fatalist,
You might have spoken louder and perhaps been heard, and prevented something.
I? Have you never heard
5. The firestorming of Tokyo would produce 83,793 deaths. That’s considerably more civilians than would perish at Nagasaki under
the atomic weapon — General Curtis LeMay would later aver that the citizens of Tokyo had been “scorched and boiled and baked
to death,” and speculate that if the USA had lost the war, he and Robert Strange McNamara would have been put on trial as war
criminals on account of the fire-bombing of Tokyo.)
6. This poem was entirely suppressed by the publisher, Random House, even after the war was over.
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That who’d lead must not see?
you share the blood-guilt.
You saw it, you despaired of preventing it,
Yes.
— Robinson Jeffers
(During this year this poet, who was considered by his publisher Random House to be writing poems not
considered fit for publication, was being inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters. :- )
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION,
THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
Vietnam
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THE FINAL SOLUTION OF WWII
I recently received an email which asserted:
> The Japanese would have surrendered anyway but maybe not totally unconditionally.
> Secret talks between the OSS and Japanese were ongoing in Switzerland.
> If the Emperor’s safety had been guaranteed, a surrender was only a few months away.
I responded to this email by asserting that if we in the United States of America had not had the atomic bomb
available to us, for whatever reason, in the manner in which we did, to employ as the final solution to World
War II in the Pacific Theater, then we would most definitely have dropped germ bombs onto the Japanese home
islands. There is a straightforward reason why this was so. We had at the time a realpolitik need to establish
that it was the USA rather than the USSR which had defeated Japan. This was a realpolitik objective which
we needed to accomplish, of course, before Japan seized an opportunity to surrender unconditionally. We did
have quantities of such anthrax devices available, we now know, for we had been planning to drop them on
Germany before it managed to surrender unconditionally. We had failed in our plan to drop these devices upon
a select group of target cities in Germany, with our intent being to make large blotches of the German landscape
entirely unavailable for human habitation for the next 50 to 100 years. We had failed for two reasons, reasons
having nothing to do with human decency and having to do only with issues of timing: 1st, the Overlord
invasion of Europe had gone unexpectedly quickly, and, 2d, there had been extensive production delays in our
anthrax manufacturing facility in Vigo — due to what I will generously characterize as the general
incompetence of that facility’s Indiana Ku Klux Klan management.
The above calls for some background explanation. These germ bombs were being manufactured near
Terre Haute. Some of my relatives –relatives on the pure white side of my family, I might point out by way of
emphasis– actually worked in this rural war plant. The manufacturing facility was being run by the Indiana
Klan on defense contract with the US government. The idea of doing this had been suggested by an early
advocate of germ warfare named Winston Churchill. The whole affair has, for your amusement, been
adequately explored in back issues of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (q.v.).
Over and above that, there is no reason why the effective use of nuclear materials has required that they be
explodable in an atomic reaction. Due to their intense radioactivity, such materials can be rendered quite
adequately deadly in an exceedingly low-tech manner, that is, they can simply be pulverized and distributed
by means of some sort of conventional fire or explosion. Thus, even if our tower test of an atomic device at
Los Alamos had proved it to be a dud –even if our calculations had been entirely inaccurate and nuclear chainreaction practically an impossibility– we would still have gotten ourselves a new weapon of mass death,
available for use on the Japanese home islands, arising merely out of our mining and concentration of such
poisonously radioactive materials.
It is said, it may be in humor, that in every war they kill you a new way. Why did we chose to scorch and blow
apart Japanese noncombatants, civilian women and children, with this high-tech chancy new atomic device,
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rather than exterminate them low-tech with these available radioactive poisons? The answer is, we had
precedent for scorching them and blowing them apart, as that was a mere magnification of the action of the
smaller-scale conventional incendiary and explosive devices we had already been dropping. An A-bomb could
be construed as amounting simply to an intensification of our existing, conventional techniques for doing
harm by means of the blast effect. Blast is conventional. By way of contrast, to have exterminated these same
noncombatants, civilian women and children, through the small-blast release of dirty radioactive aerosol
poisons, would have needed to be construed as an excursion into a new and unprecedented territory of death,
and might therefore have been more constructible by world opinion as a indefensibly novel new aggression.
In sum, we’re such nice people that we took pity on these Japanese civilians and killed them merely in what
could be made to seem to be the more conventional manner!
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March 10/11: American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had declared that the bombing of civilians was “inhuman
barbarism.” Just after midnight (it was March 9/10 west of the International Date Line), a firestorming of
Tokyo by wave after wave of American B20 Superfortress bombers, 334 bombers in all,
dropping conventional weapons, that is, dropping napalm7 incendiary devices, destroyed sixteen square miles
of homes, the homes of a million and a half people, and produced 83,793 deaths.8 It should be taken into
account, by opponents of new technology such as the atomic bomb, that as has been pointed out in David
Irving’s THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN, the 135,000 people who had died in Dresden on February 13, 1944,
had died as the result of such an attack with conventional weapons.9
WORLD WAR II
Amid rumors of a possible American invasion, the Japanese ousted the French colonial government which had
been operating independently, and seized control of Vietnam, installing Bao Dai as their puppet.
Over the following months, the American Superfortresses with their napalm incendiary devices would be
similarly attempting to create similar firestorms in more than sixty other densely populated areas in Japan, such
as Kobe and Yokohama.
Summer: Severe famine struck Hanoi and surrounding areas, eventually resulting in 2,000,000 deaths from starvation
(out of a population of 10,000,000, this would amount to one of every five persons). The famine would
generate political unrest and peasant revolts against the Japanese and the remnants of French colonial society.
Ho Chi Minh would capitalize on the turmoil in the spreading of his Viet Minh movement.
WORLD WAR II
7. Napalm had been invented at Harvard in 1943, a fuel made into a gel by co-precipitated aluminum salts of napthenic acid and
palmitic acid (“napalm” stands for NApthenic/PALMitic). Such thickening helps the material work better in flamethrowers, plus,
gobs of it stick to the target while they burn. It had already been dropped in bomb form during the invasion of Normandy. It is a
rather humane weapon since the vast majority of the people it kills die not in the agony of the primary scorching that occurs when
contact is made with the body, but, untouched by this flame, instead by very peacefully drifting off by smothering in the 20%
atmosphere of carbon monoxide that is left behind by the flames — this atmosphere induces merely a sleeplike trance leading to
asphyxiation, as the red blood cells quickly all become no longer capable of transporting any oxygen from the lungs to the brain.
(And, I’ll bet, you never expected to hear death by napalm described as benign!)
8. That’s considerably more civilians than would perish at Nagasaki under the atomic weapon — General Curtis LeMay would later
aver that the citizens of Tokyo had been “scorched and boiled and baked to death,” and speculate that if the USA had lost the war,
he and Robert Strange McNamara would have been put on trial as war criminals on account of the fire-bombing of Tokyo.)
9. By way of contrast, the high-tech explosion at Hiroshima at 8:16AM on August 6th would produce only 71,379 deaths.
–So much for our Luddite obsession with bringing an end to the horror of war by outlawing the use of special weaponry.
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July:
Edward F. Carnahan committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Dropping or spraying the herbicide “LN-8” from the air onto enemy croplands was determined by our
government to be the most effective distribution method. In a test using an SPD Mark 2 bomb, one originally
crafted to distribute biological weapons such as anthrax or ricin, the shell burst at a prearranged height and sent
down a rain of this chemical agent of death.
SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS
Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, World War II Allies including the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union
would hold the Potsdam Conference in Germany to plan the post-war world. Vietnam was considered a minor
item on the agenda. In order to disarm the Japanese in Vietnam, the Allies divided the country in half at the
16th parallel. Chinese Nationalists would move in and disarm the Japanese north of the parallel while the
British would move in and do the same for the south. During the conference, representatives from France
requested the return of all French pre-war colonies in Southeast Asia (Indochina). This request was honored,
and in the postwar world, following the removal of the Japanese, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia would once
again become French colonies.
President Harry S Truman, our naïf, would sail home from the conference exclaiming “I like old Joe! He is a
decent fellow.”
FOR HE’S A DECENT FELLOW, FOR HE’S ...
August 14, Tuesday: The family of Hirotami Yamada, who is now secretary general of the Nagasaki chapter of the
Hidankyo or Japanese A-bomb survivors, had collected themselves together at their destroyed home and taken
stock of their various injuries, such as from flying glass, and had counted themselves relatively fortunate. His
baby brother had happened to be wrapped in a futon at the time, a futon that had served as a cushion, and had
suffered no apparent injuries — and then on the third day afterward the infant had simply stopped breathing
(they knew, of course, nothing of radiation).
In our final strategic bombing raid on Japan, American planes hit Kumagaya and other targets on Honshu. On
this day Japan accepted the provisions of the Potsdam Declaration and agreed to surrender. General of the
Army General Douglas MacArthur, was named Supreme Allied Commander to receive the Japanese
capitulation and conduct the occupation of Japan.
Emperor Hirohito recorded a message to the Japanese people explaining that his government has accepted
Allied terms of unconditional surrender. In the evening, over 1,000 Japanese soldiers attacked the palace in an
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attempt to destroy the recording or prevent its transmission. They kill the commander of the palace guards, but
were repulsed by loyal troops. Minister of War, General Anami, kills himself in order to be spared listening to
the imperial proclamation.
France ratifies the Charter of the United Nations.
Vietnam’s puppet emperor, Bao Dai, abdicated. Ho Chi Minh’s guerrillas occupied Hanoi and proclaimed a
provisional government.
In the Andaman Islands, as food shortage had become acute during the last month of the war, the Japanese had
decided to rid themselves of any of the natives who were no longer useful to them. Deprived of all personal
possessions and household goods, one batch was loaded aboard three boats and taken to a point a couple of
kilometers from the shore of Havelock Island and told to swim for it. Most of this batch of natives, about 100,
of course drowned on the way and anyway, those who made it to the shore of the uninhabited island would
starve there. There was another batch of 800 Indian civilians who were boated by the Japanese to another
uninhabited island, Tarmugli. On this island it took just over an hour for a detachment of 19 Japanese to
bayonet or shoot all but a couple of the natives, who had managed to hide.
Japanese naval vessels sunk, Sea of Japan:
•
•
Coast defense vessel #13, by submarine Torsk (SS-423), 35 degrees 42 minutes North, 134 degrees
35 minutes East
Coast defense vessel #47, by submarine Torsk (SS-423), 35 degrees 42 minutes North, 134 degrees
36 minutes East
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Finally, having tested both the Plutonium239 version and the Uranium238 version of our new atomic weapon
on the civilians of their cities, having found out at the cost of the lives of Japanese civilians what we needed
to find out in order to decide which of these two civilian-killing devices we desired to continue to manufacture,
we were able to allow the Japanese government to agree to an unconditional surrender.
WORLD WAR II
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August 19, Sunday: A Japanese delegation in Manila was informed of the terms of their surrender as dictated by
General Douglas MacArthur.
Near Hankow in northeast China, a civilian group of Chinese managed to capture 26 Japanese soldiers.
They beheaded the initial 4, then tied 4 to posts and shot them in the back of the head, then broke and crudely
amputated the arms and legs of the next 4, and cut off the hands and feet of 4 and stuffed their genitals into
their mouths.
Then with the remaining 10, they gouged their eyes and used them for bayonet practice. (Were these dudes
trying to prove that Chinese can be as inventive as Japanese?)
HEADCHOPPING
The war being over, the American newspapers revealed that there had been in January 1945, while John R.
Kellam was in the Toledo jail awaiting his big day in court, a possibility that Japan might surrender before the
A-bomb, a possibility upon which then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had simply refused to follow up.
The following appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington DC Times Herald, on page 1:
WORLD WAR II
BARE PEACE BID
U.S. REBUFFED
7 MONTHS AGO
------------------------------------------------BY WALTER TROHAN
Chicago Tribune Press Service
Washington, D.C. Aug. 19 - [1945]
Release of censorship restrictions in the United States makes
it possible to announce that Japan’s first peace bid was relayed
to the White House seven months ago.
Two days before the late President Roosevelt left for the Yalta
conference with Prime Minister Churchill and Dictator Stalin,
he received a Japanese offer identical with the terms
subsequently concluded by his successor, President Truman.
The Jap offer, based on five separate peace overtures was
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relayed to the White House by Gen. MacArthur in a 40-page
communication. The American commander, who had just returned
triumphantly to Bataan, urged negotiations on the basis of the
Jap overtures.
All Acting for the Emperor
Two of the five Jap overtures were made thru American channels
and three thru British channels. All came from responsible
Japanese, acting for Emperor Hirohito.
President Roosevelt dismissed the general’s communication,
which was studded with solemn references to Deity, after a
casual reading with the remark, “MacArthur is our greatest
general and our poorest politician.”
The MacArthur report was not taken to Yalta. It was preserved
in the files of the high command, however, and subsequently
became the basis of the Truman-Attlee Potsdam declaration
calling for surrender of Japan.
News Kept Secret
This Jap peace bid was known to THE TRIBUNE soon after the
MacArthur communication reached here. It was not published,
however, because of THE TRIBUNE’S established policy of complete
cooperation with the voluntary censorship code.
Now that peace has been concluded on the basis of the terms
MacArthur reported, high administration officials prepared to
meet expected congressional demands for explanation of the
delay. It was considered certain that charges would be hurled
from various quarters of congress that the delay cost thousands
of American lives and casualties, particularly in such costly
offensives as Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
It was explained in high official circles that the bid relayed
by MacArthur did not constitute an official offer in the same
sense as the final offer, which was presented thru Japanese
diplomatic channels in Bern and Stockholm for relay to the four
major allied powers.
War Lords Feared
No negotiations were begun on the basis of this bid, it was said,
because it was feared that if any were undertaken the Jap war
lords, who were presumed to be ignorant of the feelers, would
visit swift punishment on those making the offer.
It was held possible that the war lords might assassinate the
emperor. Officials said Mr. Roosevelt felt that the Japs were
not ripe for peace, except for a small group, who were powerless
to cope with the war lords, and that peace could not come until
the Japs had suffered more.
The offer, as relayed by MacArthur, contemplated surrender of
everything but the person of the emperor. Japanese quarters
making the offer suggested that the emperor become a puppet in
the hands of American forces.
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Full Surrender Offered
Jap proposals in the MacArthur communication contemplated:
1. Full surrender of Jap forces on sea, in the air, at home, on
island possessions, and in occupied countries.
2. Surrender of all arms and munitions.
3. Occupation of the Jap homeland and island possessions by
allied troops under American direction.
4. Jap relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea and Formosa, as well
as all territory seized during the war.
5. Regulation of Jap industry to halt present and future
production of implements of war.
6. Turning over of Japanese the United States might designate
war criminals.
7. Release of all prisoners of war and internees in Japan proper
and in areas under Japanese control.
In fact the idea that the Japanese would never surrender had been little more than an American wartime myth,
and rather than being a piece of useful realism had constituted the primary obstacle to negotiation toward a
Japanese surrender. How do we know this? Well, we can trust the attitude of the Sinologist George Edward
Taylor of the University of Washington on this one, because he was a cold warrior on the inside and anything
but a bleeding-heart liberal — he would become a Nixonian reactionary and support the Vietnam War on the
campus of the University of Washington. Questioning the wisdom of using atomic weapons against Japanese
civilians to end the war in the Pacific, it appears, had not been a position reserved for the softhearted: before
the dropping of the atom bombs there had been embedded conservative members of the military-intelligence
community, international men of intrigue, hawks, who had viewed this as an unnecessary atrocity. During
WWII Taylor worked with Rand Corporation, with the Department of State, and with other articulations of the
revolving door of American intelligence institutions private and public. As the Deputy Director for the Far East
of the Office of War Information, he supervised a small army of anthropologists who were, basically,
weaponizing anthropology against the Japanese. It was Taylor’s team that crafted the leaflets dropped from
airplanes on Japanese soldiers and civilians. His team of government anthropologists had access to 5,000
diaries seized from captured and killed Japanese soldiers and studied such documents carefully for clues as to
Japanese behavior tendencies. At the beginning of the war Taylor had viewed his psychological warfare
programs as a means of ending the war by helping the Japanese overcome all the cultural obstacles preventing
their surrender, but as the war progressed and it became abundantly clear that the American side would triumph
he began to see his job as being one that needed to be done at home: he needed to convince US civilian and
military leaders that they did not in order to end the war need to engage in any acts of genocidal annihilation.
He came to perceive the War Department and the White House as in the grip of racist stereotypes of maniacal
Japanese soldiers and citizens fighting to the death, and he and his staff began to struggle against this domestic
attitude as a prime obstacle to peace. In the typescript of a speech that he probably delivered in 1944, we find
him arguing that “If we accept, as we must, the view that Japanese soldiers, in spite of their indoctrination, are
as human as other troops, we shall be the less surprised at the mounting evidence of their very human reactions
to defeat. We are taking more and more prisoners. Two years ago it would have been very unusual for 60 men
to allow themselves to be picked up out of the water when their transport had been sunk. In New Guinea and
Burma stragglers are coming in out of the jungles to surrender without a struggle. We have known for a long
time that many Japanese officers have been evacuated from indefensible positions and that their reaction on
places such as Attu, where escape was impossible, was not to fight to the last man.” Such thinking would be
ignored by the War Department and White House. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt insisted on including
the demise of the Japanese Emperor as part of America’s demand for unconditional surrender, and it was not
until after this man had collapsed and died that the government was able to communicate a more relaxed
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position on this point to the Japanese. A May 11, 1945 communication intercept being studied inside the US
government had supported the attitude of Taylor and others at the Office of War Information that the Japanese
military were ripe for surrender: “Report of peace sentiment in Japanese armed forces: On 5 May the German
Naval Attaché in Tokyo dispatched the following message to Admiral Doenitz: ‘An influential member of the
Admiralty Staff has given me to understand that, since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless, large
sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation
even if the terms were hard, provided they were halfway honorable.’” To this communication intercept,
someone in US military intelligence had appended the following: “Previously noted diplomatic reports have
commented on signs of war weariness in official Japanese Navy circles, but have not mentioned such an
attitude in Army quarters.” A July 20, 1945 communication intercept had revealed that Japanese Ambassador
Sato was advocating a Japanese surrender providing that the United States would assure the Japanese that the
“Imperial House” would remain in existence. Like many others, regardless of how hawkish they were, Taylor
would come to consider that what President Harry S Truman’s decision to use of nuclear weapons probably
had to do with was “scaring the hell out of the Soviet Union,” and that the idea of saving American lives during
an invasion of the Japanese homeland islands was a mere cover story that of course the American public would
readily buy into in order to avoid the thought that we had committed a war atrocity.
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
September 2, Sunday: There had been no actual fighting for a number of days (very few warriors are eager to be the
very last warrior to die in a given war). On this day Japanese officials came aboard the battleship USS Missouri
(BB-63) at anchor in Tokyo Bay to sign formal articles of unconditional surrender. General of the Army
Douglas MacArthur signed for the Allied Powers, and Fleet Admiral C.W. Nimitz signed for the United States.
Representatives of China, Great Britain, the USSR, Australia, Canada, France, Netherlands, and New Zealand
added their signatures to the celebration. It is estimated that roughly 50,000,000 human beings died in the
course of World War II including 20,000,000 Soviets, 7,000,000 Germans, 6,000,000 Chinese, 6,000,000
Poles, 6,000,000 Jews, 3,000,000 Japanese, 1,500,000 Yugoslavs, 511,000 from the British Commonwealth
nations, 420,000 Greeks, 363,000 Americans, 240,000 Dutch, 36,000 Indians, 27,000 Finns, and untold
thousands from other cultures. At the end of the ceremony, General MacArthur announced, “These
proceedings are closed.” Army forces were disembarked at Yokohama from a naval task force under the
command of Rear Admiral J.L. Hall.
In related ceremonies, Japanese troops on Truk in the Caroline Islands, on Pagan and Rota Islands in the
Marianas Islands, and in the Palau Islands were meanwhile surrendering to other United States Naval and
Marine officers on board other naval vessels at various locations.
On this same day, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independence of Vietnam to a crowd of 500,000 in Hanoi by
quoting from the text of the American Declaration of Independence, which had been supplied to him by our
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OSS — “We hold the truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This immortal statement is extracted
from the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. These are undeniable truths.”
Ho declared himself president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and would pursue American
recognition but would repeatedly be ignored by President Harry S Truman.
During the WWII period 1941 to 1945, a total of some 2,700 or more Liberty Ships had been constructed in
18 shipyards, as general cargo carriers. One of these had been designated the SS Henry D. Thoreau. The last
datapoint that we presently possess is a radio news announcement during this month: that cargo vessel was in
the Caribbean, it was caught in a storm, and its highly explosive deck cargo had broken loose.
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The warlords of America would not release their prisoners of conscience right away, but as it seems, under the
circumstances Friend John R. Kellam of the good behavior would probably not need to serve out his total fiveyear “legal maximum” prison sentence:
After the war ended, I spent the last fifteen months of my
sentence, which was originally five years, at Lewisburg.
The only library books I saw at Lewisburg were ones a former sea
captain had brought me, THE AMERICAN EPHEMERIS AND NAUTICAL ALMANAC
because he had discovered —he was an orderly in the hospital
ward, and he found out— that I was doing some exercises in math
so he brought me these books full of tables, astronomical
tables, which delighted me and I spent a lot of time — I even
figured out all of the elements of the orbit for a fictitious
planet, which I called Imp, for Impossible. I think I put it
somewhere between Venus and Earth in order to have its own orbit.
I wasn’t particularly concerned about perturbations of the
orbits of either Venus or Earth but just to see how it would
rotate around, or revolve around the Sun, what its own year would
be and how large it was likely to be and how much gravitation
it probably would have in that position and so forth. I made a
lot of assumptions which were not factually based but anyway it
was an instructive sort of fiddling around.
There was a man who had lost his power to walk because of feeling
very oppressed and violated. This was an Indian, an American
Indian, another inmate at Lewisburg, who had resisted routine
inoculation for whatever disease, inoculations that were given
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to any inmate whose history wasn’t firm that he had had such an
inoculation recently enough. He resisted on the basis that his
Indian religious faith was very strong against taking anything
into his body that was not generated inside his body from normal
food. Anything injected would be a poison and would have dire
side-effects. It was not to be permitted, but the prison
authorities had insisted and against his most strenuous physical
resistance they had injected some kind of vaccine into one of
his buttocks where it would be absorbed in a way that medical
science says is proper. He was so violated in opposition to his
conscience and his religious spirituality that he lost all power
in that leg on that side and he simply could not walk. He had
no strength left. The doctors dismissed this as so much hysteria
and of course every prisoner is supposed to conform to whatever
demands are made by the authorities over all the inmates. We
should not presume to question their judgment because they were
in control and virtually owned us for the duration of our
sentences. Now this man was in a private room at the time and
he soon was thrown out into the ward. He was bedridden so his
food was brought to him on a tray and put on his little side
table. There didn’t seem to be any other disability but he was
absolutely convinced that he could not walk. To me this
indicated the complete insensitivity of the prison officials to
any matters of religious conscience. They were completely
indifferent to him as they were to me. It all fit.
While I was at Lewisburg, there was a fellow from Tunbridge,
Vermont who came to visit me. He was a medium large fellow with
a bushy beard and a very deep voice. He had a whole air of self
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confidence and he was happy to be himself. He had refused
military service. I don’t recall that he was a member of any
church, or at least any of the peace churches, but he looked
like a fellow who always knew precisely where he stood and didn’t
have to think very much about how to react to situations. He
seemed to have been born wise. I liked him as soon as he
introduced himself and we sat and talked together. He seemed to
be finding out how firm and settled I was. I don’t know if he
had any early struggles at all. He just looked like someone who
never had.10
ESSENCE IS BLUR. SPECIFICITY,
THE OPPOSITE OF ESSENCE,
IS OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH.
September 12: In the Council Chamber at Singapore, Lord Mountbatten received the surrender of all Japanese forces
in Southeast Asia.
Chinese troops took control of Shanghai.
Rationing of cheese ends in the United States.
10. Probably about five or six years ago I was going through Tunbridge, Vermont and I remembered that this fellow had said that
he had spent all of his childhood there. I wondered if he was still alive, so I tried to look him up. When I found a librarian there, she
told me who would likely know his name — the sheriff. So I found the sheriff in town and told him that I had met the man in
Lewisburg Penitentiary as another conscientious objector to the war. He knew right away who I was talking about and so I found
that he had lived a good life and that his latter years were spent down in Nicaragua on some kind of a service mission to a community.
Then he had returned to Tunbridge and eventually died somewhere in his seventies. I always wished that I had looked him up earlier.
I would like to have met him again.
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September 13: Indian, Gurkha and Free French troops arrived in Saigon and free the Vichy French garrison (who had
been imprisoned by the Japanese). All three forces, British and Free French, Vichy French and Japanese join
to drive the Viet Minh out of Saigon.
The Soviet Union establishes a German government in their occupation zone. Three of eleven directors were
communists.
September 13, Thursday: The Japanese surrendered in Burma.
British forces arrived in Saigon. 150,000 Chinese Nationalist soldiers, consisting mainly of poor peasants,
would arrive in Hanoi, after looting Vietnamese villages during their entire march down from China. They
would then proceed to loot Hanoi as well.
WORLD WAR II
September 22, Saturday: In South Vietnam, 1,400 French soldiers released by the British from former Japanese
internment camps entered Saigon and went on a deadly rampage, attacking Viet Minh and killing innocent
civilians including children — aided in this by French civilians who joined eagerly in the rampage (an
estimated 20,000 French civilians were living in Saigon).
Mike Colalillo of Duluth, Minnesota received a Congressional Medal of Honor from President Harry S
Truman. Mike had done something that Give-’em-Hell-Harry could recognize as honorable. He had been
extraordinary in the offing of enemies.
WORLD WAR II
September 24, Monday: Karl Amadeus Hartmann signed a contract with the Bavarian State Theater in München
naming him Dramaturge until August 31, 1946. This would be approved by the American military government
on September 26th. The position required him to report to the theater management on developments in opera
and music theater, and oversee musical productions of recent works. He would hold this position until his
death.
Bachianas Brasileiras no.6 for flute and bassoon by Heitor Villa-Lobos was performed for the initial time, at
the Escola Nacional de Música, Rio de Janeiro.
In Saigon, the Viet Minh successfully organized a general strike shutting down all commerce along with
electricity and water supplies. In a suburb of Saigon, members of Binh Xuyen, a Vietnamese criminal
organization, massacred 150 French and Eurasian civilians, including children.
WORLD WAR II
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September 25, Tuesday: Edward Albert Beurman committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Allied authorities ordered the immediate abolition of all German armed forces, SS, SA, Gestapo and the Nazi
Party. All German foreign affairs would be handled by the Allies. Germans were ordered to turn over all gold,
silver and platinum coin and bullion. All items looted from conquered countries were ordered returned.
WORLD WAR II
September 26, Wednesday: Just before noon, Béla Bartók died of leukemia at West Side Hospital in New York City at
the age of 64 years, six months, and one day. The remains would be placed in Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale,
New York.
The Argentine government imposed a state of siege and arrested hundreds, including of course newspaper
editors.
The first American death in Vietnam occurred, during the unrest in Saigon: this was OSS Lieutenant-Colonel
A. Peter Dewey, who was offed by Viet Minh guerrillas who mistook him for a French officer. Prior to his
death Dewey had filed a report on the deepening crisis in Vietnam, offering the commonsensical opinion that
the US “ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.”
WORLD WAR II
October: 35,000 French soldiers under the command of World War II General Jacques Philippe Leclerc arrived in
South Vietnam to restore French rule. The Viet Minh immediately began a guerrilla campaign against them.
The French would succeed in expelling the Viet Minh from Saigon.
50,000 US Marines were sent to North China to assist Chinese Nationalist authorities in disarming and
repatriating the Japanese in China and in controlling ports, railroads, and airfields. This was in addition to
approximately 60,000 US forces remaining in China at the end of World War II.
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1946
The beginning of war in Vietnam, as France struggled to retain its colony. The Truman Doctrine was
announced, to stop the expansion of communism. An iron curtain (Churchill did not originate this phrase;
it had originated as a German brag about how the continent of Europe had been isolated by the metal hulls of
their U-boats) separated Eastern and Western Europe, as a “Cold War” intensified.
What Odd Expedients11
God, whether by unconscious instinct, or waking, or in a dream, I do not know
how conscious is God,
Uses strange means for great purposes. His problem with the human race is
to play its capacities
To their extreme limits, but limit its power. For how dull were the little planet,
how mean and splendorless,
If all one garden; and man locally omnipotent rested the energies that only need, only
Bitter need creates.
The solution of course is war, which both goads and frustrates;
and to promote war
What odd expedients! The crackpot dreams of Jeanne d’Arc and Hitler; the cripple’s-vanity
of Roosevelt; the bombast
Of Mussolini; the tinsel star of Napoleon; the pitiful idiot submissiveness
Of peoples to leaders and men to death: — what low means toward high aims!
— The next chapter of the world
Hangs between the foreheads of two strong bulls ranging one field.
Hi, Red! Hi, Whitey!
— Robinson Jeffers
February: The Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek agreed, in exchange for French concessions in Shanghai and other
Chinese ports, to withdraw from North Vietnam so that the French might return.
March: In exchange for French recognition of his Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh agreed to permit
French troops temporarily to return to Hanoi (replacing the Chinese occupying forces).
11. The publisher Random House entirely suppressed this poem even after the war was over.
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May-September 1946: Ho Chi Minh, who had lived in France before and spoke French very well, spent these four
months in France attempting to negotiate full independence and unity for Vietnam. He would fail to secure any
guarantees.
November: After a series of violent clashes with the Viet Minh, French forces bombarded Haiphong harbor and
occupied Hanoi, causing Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh to melt away into the surrounding countryside.
June:
In a major affront to Ho Chi Minh, who was at the time in France, the French high commissioner for Indochina
proclaimed a separatist French-controlled government for South Vietnam (Republic of Cochinchina).
December 19, Thursday: In Hanoi, 30,000 Viet Minh launched their first large-scale attack against the French. Thus
begins an 8-year struggle that is now referred to as the 1st Indochina War. “The resistance will be long and
arduous, but our cause is just and we will surely triumph,” commented Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen
Giap. However, he wasn’t going to find it all that easy to push and shove these gallant white men around:
“If these [people] want a fight, they’ll get it,” French General Etrienne Valluy averred.
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1947
October 7, Tuesday-December 22: The French conducted Operation Lea, a series of attacks on Viet Minh guerrilla
positions in North Vietnam near the Chinese border. Although the Viet Minh would suffer over 9,000
causalities, most of the 40,000-strong Viet Minh force would be able to slip away through gaps in the French
lines.
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1949
March 8, Tuesday: In the face of moves by the legislature to investigate corruption, Prime Minister Sun Fo of China
resigns with all his government. He was replaced by General Ho Ying-chin, an advocate of peace with the
Communists.
Four Protestant ministers were sentenced to life in prison by a Sofia court for treason, espionage and black
marketeering. Eleven others receive prison sentences ranging from one year to 15 years.
In accepting the resignation of Carlos Chávez as director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, the managing
council announced the dissolution of the orchestra. “The Symphony Orchestra of Mexico was, in reality, the
personal work of Carlos Chávez who founded it in 1928 and directed it uninterruptedly for 21 seasons.” The
Red Pony, a film with music by Aaron Copland, was shown for the initial time, in the Mayfair Theater, New
York.
In South Vietnam, the French reinstalled Bao Dai as their puppet head of state.
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July:
The French established the (South) Vietnamese National Army.
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1950
January: The People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union recognized Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of
Vietnam. China would be sending military advisors and modern weapons to the Viet Minh including automatic
weapons, mortars, howitzers, and trucks. Much of this equipment would have been made in America and had
pertained to the Chinese Nationalists prior to their defeat by Mao. With the influx of new equipment and
Chinese advisors, General Vo Nguyen Giap would be transforming his guerrilla fighters into conventional
army units, including five light infantry divisions and one heavy division.
February: The United States and Britain recognized Bao Dai’s French-controlled South Vietnam government.
The Viet Minh began an offensive against French outposts in North Vietnam near the Chinese border.
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July 26, Wednesday: United States military involvement in Vietnam began as President Harry S Truman authorized
$15,000,000 in military aid to these gallant white men.
American military advisors would accompany this flow of US tanks, planes, artillery, and other supplies.
Over the following four years, the US would expend not mere millions but all of $3,000,000,000 on the French
war, and by 1954 would be providing 80% of the war supplies being used by the French.
September 16: General Vo Nguyen Giap began his main attack against French outposts near the Chinese border. As
the outposts would fall, the gallant white men would lose 6,000 men and large stores of American military
equipment to the Viet Minh.
VIETNAM
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September 27, Wednesday: General Douglas MacArthur gained permission to cross the 38th Parallel into North
Korea.
Why on earth would they have called him “Dugout Doug”?
KOREAN WAR
To aid the desperate French Army in Indochina, the US established a Military Assistance Advisory Group
(MAAG) in Saigon.
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1951
January 13, Saturday: 20,000 Viet Minh under General Vo Nguyen Giap began a series of attacks on fortified French
positions in the Red River Delta (extending from Hanoi to the Gulf of Tonkin). The open areas of the Delta,
in contrast to the jungle, allowed French troops under the new command of General Jean de Lattre to strike
back from the “De Lattre Line” which encircled the region with devastating results. 6,000 Viet Minh would
perish while assaulting the town of Vinh Yen near Hanoi in the first attack, and Giap would be forced to
withdraw.
March 23-28: In a second attack, General Vo Nguyen Giap targeted the Mao Khe outpost near Haiphong. Giap would
again withdraw, after being pounded by French naval gunfire and by air strikes, with the loss of another 3,000
Viet Minh.
VIETNAM
May 29, Tuesday-June 18: General Vo Nguyen Giap made yet another attempt to break through the De Lattre Line,
this time in the Day River area southeast of Hanoi. French reinforcements, combined with air strikes and armed
boat attacks, resulted in another defeat for Giap with 10,000 killed and wounded. Among the French
causalities, however, would be Bernard de Lattre, the only son of General De Lattre.
“A victory described in detail is indistinguishable
from a defeat.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
June 9, Saturday: General Vo Nguyen Giap began a general withdrawal of Viet Minh troops from the Red River Delta.
VIETNAM
September: Seeking more aid from the Pentagon, French General De Lattre traveled to Washington DC.
VIETNAM
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September 23, Sunday: United Nations forces captured Heartbreak Ridge north of Yanggu, Korea (they would lose it
on the following day).
KOREAN WAR
Doctors performed an operation on King George VI at Buckingham Palace, removing part of a lung.
General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the French High Commissioner for Indochina, completed a week of
meetings in Washington. He had been promised the 2d highest amount of US military aid to East Asia, 2d only
to Korea.
President Harry S Truman released 3 secret reports made by then Vice-President Henry Wallace to President
Roosevelt after his 1944 mission to China. Wallace had urged Roosevelt to support Chiang Kai-shek. Truman
was releasing the documents in order to counter charges before a Senate committee that Wallace had been
under the influence of Communists in the State Department.
October 3, Wednesday: With peace negotiations on hold, UN forces open a new offensive in central Korea.
KOREAN WAR
French troops evacuated Binhlu, Indochina, near the border with China, after it was attacked by Viet Minh.
VIETNAM
Arthur Honegger conducted for the final time, in a recording session of Le Roi David.
US Ambassador-at-large Philip Jessup testified before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee that the
accusations being made against him by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy amounted to “barefaced falsehoods,
distortions and misrepresentations.”
November 14, Wednesday: French forces captured Hoabinh, southwest of Hanoi.
The United States and Yugoslavia signed a military assistance agreement.
200,000 demonstrators in Cairo peacefully protested the presence of Great Britain in Egypt.
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November 16, Friday: French forces linked up at Hoa Binh, southwest of Hanoi, as General De Lattre attempted to
lure General Vo Nguyen Giap into a decisive battle.
What
goes
around
keeps
coming
around
and
around
and
around...
November 20, Tuesday: Stricken by cancer, General De Lattre was replaced in Vietnam by General Raoul Salan.
Returning home, De Lattre would die two months later in Paris, after being elevated to the rank of Marshal.
The UN command in Korea confirmed discovery of 365 bodies of US servicemen killed by the other side while
prisoners of war.
KOREAN WAR
In Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito signed the Japanese ratifications of the San Francisco Peace Treaty and Security
Treaty.
WORLD WAR II
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December 9, Sunday: General Vo Nguyen Giap began a careful counter-offensive by attacking the French outpost at
Tu Vu on the Black River. He had learned to avoid conventional warfare and instead would wage hit and run
attacks followed by retreat into the jungles. His goal would be to cut the French supply lines. By year’s end,
French causalities in Vietnam would surpass 90,000.
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1952
January 12, Saturday: Gunfire began, between British troops and Egyptian snipers in the Suez Canal Zone (in five days
of hostility 25 people would be killed).
Concerto for cello and orchestra no.1 by Bohuslav Martinu was performed for the initial time, in The Hague.
French supply lines to Hoa Binh, Vietnam along the Black River were severed.
Travel along road “Route Coloniale 6” was also impossible.
Bomber 44-86292, the Enola Gay, was flown to Pyote Air Force Base, Texas for temporary storage.
February 22-26: The French, with the assistance of a 30,000-round artillery barrage, withdrew from Hoa Binh back to
the De Lattre Line. Casualties for each side surpassed 5,000 during these Black River skirmishes.
VIETNAM
June 18, Wednesday: Japan recognized the Taiwan government as the sovereign government of that island and its
dependencies.
The British government proposed to create a unified Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
An agreement was reached in Washington DC between the United States and France wherein the US would
substantially increase its aid to Vietnam. This would be mostly military aid to the French-backed antiCommunist forces.
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October 11, Saturday: General Vo Nguyen Giap attempted to draw the French out from the De Lattre Line by attacking
along the Fan Si Pan mountain range between the Red and Black Rivers.
VIETNAM
October 13, Monday: Tunisian nationalists began a wave of bombing attacks.
By a vote of 8-1 the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Their death
sentence would continue in effect.
Over the following 3 days, 12 US employees of the United Nations would decline to reveal to a Senate
subcommittee whether they had ever been communists. A 13th would acknowledge that she had been a
communist in about 1935 but would decline to name anyone else.
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October 29: The French countered General Vo Nguyen Giap’s move by launching Operation Lorraine, targeting major
Viet Minh supply bases in the Viet Bac region. Giap would not fall for this and would maintain his position
along the Black River.
VIETNAM
What
goes
around
keeps
coming
around
and
around
and
around...
November 14, Friday-17, Monday: The French forces canceled their Operation Loraine and managed to withdraw
back toward the De Lattre Line after fighting off a Viet Minh ambush at Chan Muong.
VIETNAM
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1953
April 27, Monday: General Mark Clark, supreme UN commander in Korea, offered $100,000 to the first North
Korean, Chinese, or Soviet pilot to land his MIG-15 at a UN airport.
KOREAN WAR
The Viet Minh proclaimed a rival government for Laos.
Negotiators from Egypt and Great Britain began talks in Cairo on the withdrawal of British troops from the
Suez Canal Zone.
The British House of Commons voted to denationalize long-distance road transport.
Argentina nationalized the $200,000,000 Bemberg industrial concern.
January 20, Tuesday: The initial modern translation of the Bible into Korean was published in Tokyo.
1,300 East Germans fled to West Berlin by elevated train just before the East German government closed the
line.
Todor Stoyanov Christov was sentenced to death in Sofia for espionage. Nine other defendants received prison
terms of from six months to twenty years.
Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, former 5-star Army general and Allied commander in Europe during World
War II, replaced Harry S Truman as 34th President of the United States. Tradition had it that the two Presidents
would visit inside the White House and then ride together to the inauguration ceremony, but Eisenhower
remained for a long time in his limousine in the driveway of the White House, fuming, reluctant to come inside
and greet Truman and unsure that he could force himself to ride next to him in the official open Lincoln
limousine, while Harry and Bess were waiting for Dwight and Mamie to join them in the Red Room for coffee.
After the inauguration ceremony former President Truman and his family departed by train for Independence,
Missouri.
During his term, to prevent a Communist victory, the new President would greatly increase US military aid to
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the French in Vietnam. US military advisors would continue to accompany American supplies sent to Vietnam.
To justify America’s financial commitment, Eisenhower would cite a “Domino Theory” in which a
Communist victory in Vietnam would result in surrounding countries going down “like a falling row of
dominoes.” To the best of my knowledge, no experiments would be conducted to determine what similarities
a line of dominoes standing on edge on a planar surface has or does not have with a series of nations
geographically arranged around a global surface, but this Domino Theory will be used by a succession of
Presidents and their advisors to justify our ever-deepening involvement in the Vietnam quagmire.
At some point during this year, in a press conference, President Eisenhower would indicate that although he
was in favor of military aid to prevent a Communist victory in Vietnam, he was opposed to having a war to
prevent that Communist victory:
“All of us have heard this term ‘preventive war’ since
the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the
first time I heard it. In this day and time ... I don’t
believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn’t
even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked
about such a thing.”
— President Dwight David Eisenhower, 1953,
upon being presented with plans to wage
a preventive war against the USSR
ADOLF HITLER
From this year into 1955, Former President Harry S Truman would be working on his memoirs, the 1st volume
of which, YEAR OF DECISIONS, would be published during November 1955 (the 2d volume, YEARS OF TRIAL
AND HOPE, would appear during the following year).
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April 24, Friday, 1953 Viet Minh forces captured the French stronghold of Muongngoi, Laos.
Women were allowed to vote for the first time in Pakistan in municipal elections in Karachi. Extra police were
ordered out to protect women voters from male hecklers.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill was knighted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle, and
invested with the Order of the Garter.
British security forces rounded up 6,000 Kenyans from the village of Kariobangi near Nairobi, on suspicion
of complicity with the Mau Maus. Their village was destroyed.
Symphony no.6 by Karl Amadeus Hartmann was performed for the initial time, in München.
July 27, day: A cease-fire was signed by Lieutenant General Nam Il and Lieutenant General William K. Harrison at
10:00AM at Panmunjom, dividing the country at the 38th parallel into Communist North and Democratic
South — about 12 hours later the fighting actually ended. A sum total of 688 soldiers from Minnesota had died
in this fighting.12 The armistice in Korea would be seen by many in the international community as a potential
model for resolving the ongoing conflict in Vietnam.13
KOREAN WAR
November 20, Friday: The French under their new commander General Henri Navarre began Operation Castor, the
construction of a series of entrenched outposts protecting a small air base in the isolated jungle valley at Dien
Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam. General Vo Nguyen Giap, sensing the potential for a decisive blow against the
French, would immediately begin massing Viet Minh troops and artillery in the area. Giap’s troops would
manually drag several hundred heavy howitzers up rugged mountain sides, with which to pound the French air
base. The French, aware of Giap’s intentions, would of course mass their own troops and artillery, preparing
for a showdown, but would grossly underestimate Giap’s strength and determination.
12. The gold standard, in Minnesota, is of course to articulate that “these boys gave their lives for their country.” In fact, no lesser
utterance is even tolerated.
13. The total number of Americans who had been killed in the course of our Korean War would, until April 1969, remain greater
than the total number of Americans to be killed in our Vietnam War.
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1954
As the result of a conference at Geneva Vietnam was divided, and Laos and Cambodia become independent
of one another.
France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu would signal the end of a bitter struggle and the beginning of a divided
Vietnam. Soon US military aid would begin to trickle into Saigon and a “secret war in Laos” would be
beginning. Eventually some 58,000 Americans would be killed without any official declaration of war by the
US federal Congress.
January 26, Tuesday: Viet Minh forces took Phalane, 90 km east of Seno in central Laos.
The US Senate ratified a mutual defense treaty with South Korea.
It was revealed that the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Norwalk, Connecticut had formed a committee to
turn over to the FBI the names of Norwalk residents it deemed to be “communistic.” When informed of this,
President Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower made no objection.
US Representative Robert Condon would testify before the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee for
the following three days. He indicated that neither he nor his wife had ever been communists. He had not been
allowed to attend an atomic weapons test by the Defense Department due to “reports” linking him and his wife
to communists. The sources for these reports would not be made public.
ATOM BOMB
February 1, Monday: Viet Minh forces captured Muongkhoua, Laos.
The US Atomic Energy Commission reported that Element 99 had been created by adding particles to
Uranium. It was radioactive and only lasted a few minutes before turning into Element 97.
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February 18, Thursday: Foreign Ministers of France, Great Britain, the USSR, and the United States ended their
meetings in Berlin after 25 days. No agreement had been reached on Germany or Austria. They did agree on
a meeting in Geneva about the future of Korea and Indochina, to which China was to be invited.
The British government informed the Parliament that “atomic weapons are in production in this country and
delivery to the forces has begun.”
ATOM BOMB
Televised hearings by a Senate committee including Joseph R. McCarthy into communist infiltration of the
US Army began in New York. McCarthy questioned a dentist, Major Irving Peress, whom he asserted to be
the key to the infiltration. After Peress refused to answer 33 questions, McCarthy termed him a “Fifth
Amendment Communist.” In the afternoon closed session, McCarthy questioned Major Peress’s commanding
officer, General Ralph Zwicker, who had promoted Peress. Zwicker, a decorated veteran of the Normandy
Invasion, was informed by Senator McCarthy that he was “not fit to wear that uniform.” McCarthy commented
to Zwicker that he did not have “the brains of a five-year-old child.” He ordered John G. Adams, legal counsel
for the Army, to produce the names of all those involved in the promotion and honorable discharge of Peress
within 24 hours. McCarthy then threw Zwicker and Adams out of the hearing.
Incidental music to Giraudoux’s play Ondine by Virgil Thomson was performed for the initial time, in the 46th
Street Theater, New York.
February 23, Tuesday: Charles Ephraim Burchfield woke up at 2:30AM “overwhelmed at once with the enormity of
my ever-recurrent sins and hideous thoughts,” feeling desperately alone and vulnerable under the “accusing
finger” of God.
Viet Minh forces withdrew from forward positions near Luang Prabang and Muongsai, Laos.
Dr. Jonas Salk began to vaccinate children against polio in Pittsburgh. Concurrent tests began in 44 states.
US Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens advised the Senate Investigations Subcommittee, chaired by Senator
Joseph R. McCarthy, that he would provide the names of all personnel who had been involved in the promotion
and discharge of Irving Peress, and that all those listed would indeed testify.
Olivier Messiaen’s piano work Cantéyodjayâ was performed for the initial time, in Paris.
Variations for piano and orchestra by Wallingford Riegger was performed for the initial time, in Louisville.
March 8, Monday: Mohammed Neguib replaced Gamal Abdel Nasser as prime minister of Egypt.
Peace talks began in Paris between France and the Viet Minh.
Two days of voting for the Finnish Parliament left the parties virtually unchanged.
Three Songs from William Shakespeare for mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet and viola by Igor Stravinsky was
performed for the initial time, in Los Angeles.
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March 9, Tuesday: Three days of voting began today for the Majlis in Iran. The balloting featured gangs of thugs who
patrolled the voting places beating hundreds of citizens perceived to be anti-government. Police assisted in the
beatings.
The French National Assembly voted to attempt a peace settlement for Indochina at the upcoming Geneva
conference on the Far East.
Republican Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont attacked Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy on the floor
of the Senate, saying he was “doing his best to shatter” the Republican Party (this would be the very definition
of a partisan attack, would it not? :-).
On the CBS television program “See it Now” commentator Edward R. Murrow launched an attack on Senator
McCarthy, by straightforwardly condemning him out of his own mouth by repetition of his own filmed words
(what a low blow that must have seemed — to repeat to the voters what he actually said! -).
March 13, Saturday: Outnumbering the French nearly five-to-one, 50,000 Viet Minh under General Vo Nguyen Giap
began their assault against the fortified hills protecting the Dien Bien Phu air base. Giap’s artillery pounded
the French and shut down the only runway, thus forcing the French to rely on risky parachute drops for resupply. Giap’s troops then took out their shovels and began construction of a maze of tunnels and trenches,
slowly inching their way toward the main French position and surrounding it.
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March 29, Monday: Israeli troops attacked the Jordanian village of Nahhalin southwest of Jerusalem in retaliation for
a Jordanian attack on Kisalon on March 26th, killing 9.
The Revolutionary Council of Egypt intercepted an effort by President Mohammed Neguib to allow elections
in July.
In an address in New York, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles claimed that a victory for the Viet Minh
would mean Communist domination of all southeast Asia. “It’s like a line of dominos, you see,” he pointed
out wisely.
West Germany ratified the European Defense Community Treaty.
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March 30, Tuesday-May 1, Saturday: The siege at Dien Bien Phu occurred as nearly 10,000 French soldiers were
trapped by 45,000 Viet Minh. French troops soon ran out of fresh water and medical supplies. The French
urgently appealed to Washington for help. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff began to consider three possible
military options: sending American combat troops to the rescue; a massive conventional air strike by B-29
bombers; and the use of tactical nukes. After getting a strong negative response to such actions from America’s
chief ally, Britain, President Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower would dismiss both the conventional air raid and
the nuclear option. The President also would decide against sending US ground troops to rescue the French,
citing the likelihood of high casualty rates in the jungles around Dien Bien Phu, and in fact no action would
taken.
VIETNAM
April 12, Monday: The colonial government of Vietnam ordered the mobilization of all men 21-25 years of age.
700 Mau-Mau were arrested in Kenya (they were extremist members of the Kikuyu tribe working to oust the
British from Kenya).
It was revealed that Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, had been suspended by the
Atomic Energy Commission as a security risk. He was charged with associating with and hiring Communists
and ex-Communists, aiding Communist causes, and actively opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Oppenheimer said he had associated with Communists, contributed to specific Communist causes, and was
sympathetic to some Communist goals. He denied that he had ever been a Communist Party member and
reported that he had become disillusioned with Communism. He also asserted that he supported the
development of that thermonuclear device and had worked actively for it.
May 4, Tuesday: Viet Minh forces reached to within 500 meters of the French command headquarters at Dien Bien
Phu.
In the Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy produced a 1951 letter from FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover to the head of Army Intelligence naming 35 employees at Fort Monmouth as subversives. The
witness, Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, had never seen that communication.
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May 7, Friday: On Lubang Island in the Philippines, the war came to an end for Corporal Shimada as he was shot dead
by a search party sent in to find these Japanese holdouts.
LAST TO SURRENDER
WORLD WAR II
At 5:30PM, the 10,000 French soldiers remaining alive at Dien Bien Phu were ordered by their commander to
cease fire. By that point, 55 days in, an estimated 8,000 Viet Minh and 1,500 French had perished. These
French prisoners would be marched for up to 60 days to camps some 500 hundred miles away. Nearly half
would perish during this march, or during their captivity. France would proceed to withdraw completely from
Vietnam, ending a bitter 8-year struggle against the Viet Minh in which 400,000 soldiers and civilians from all
sides would have perished.
May 8, Saturday: The Geneva Conference on Indochina began, attended by the US, Britain, China, the Soviet Union,
France, Vietnam (Viet Minh and representatives of Bao Dai), Cambodia, and Laos — all meeting to negotiate
a solution for Southeast Asia.
June 1, Tuesday: The Viet Minh celebrated their victory over the French by blowing up an ammo dump at Tan Son
Nhut air base, Saigon.
Lawyers for J. Robert Oppenheimer disclosed that a special Atomic Energy Commission board had decided
he was loyal but had recommended to the full AEC against his reinstatement as a consultant.
David, an opera by Darius Milhaud to words of Lunel, commissioned to celebrate the 3,000 years since the
establishment of Jerusalem as the capital of Judea, was performed for the initial time, in a concert setting in
Jerusalem.
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June 29, Tuesday: The French High Command announced its intention to abandon Namdinh Province in the delta of
the Red River, Vietnam.
A three-man junta that had seized power in Guatemala two days earlier was overthrown by a CIA-directed
coup led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who placed himself at the head of a new junta.
The US Atomic Energy Commission voted 4-1 not to reinstate the security clearance of Dr. J. Robert
Oppenheimer.
July 20, Friday: Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities in Vietnam.
READ THE FULL TEXT
Mehmet Shehu replaced Enver Hoxha as prime minister of Albania.
Under pressure from the 3 Democrats on the US Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, Roy Marcus Cohn,
protégé of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, resigned as counsel.
July 21, Saturday: The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam in half at the 17th parallel, with Ho Chi Minh’s Communists
ceded the North, and Bao Dai’s regime granted the South. These accords also provided for elections to be held
in all of Vietnam within two years to reunify the country. The US, fearing a likely victory by Ho Chi Minh,
opposed the idea of the holding of unifying elections in the nation.
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October: Following the French departure from Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh would come out of the jungle after eight years in
hiding and formally take control of North Vietnam. In the South, Bao Dai installed Ngo Dinh Diem as his
prime minister. The US began to pin its hopes for a democratic South Vietnam on this known anti-Communist.
It would be Diem, however, who would predict that “another more deadly war” might erupt over the future of
Vietnam. Diem, a Roman Catholic in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, would encourage the Vietnamese
Catholics living in Communist North Vietnam to flee south. Nearly one million would head south. At the same
time, some 90,000 Communists in the south would head north — although nearly 10,000 Viet Minh fighters
would be instructed by Hanoi to quietly remain behind.
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1955
January: The initial direct shipment of US military aid arrived in Saigon. Hot cargo! The US offered to train the
fledgling South Vietnamese Army.
Our Atomic Energy Commission began a program of funding for nuclear power plants (lobbyists for our utility
corporations would demand that their clients be protected from “excess liability” in the event of an “accident,”
and our politicians, eager to obtain “campaign donations,” would race to introduce various pieces of
“legislation” providing ridiculously low “liability caps”; everybody would have their hands maximally in
everybody else’s pockets).14
May:
Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem waged a violent crackdown against the Binh Xuyen crime group which was
in control of Saigon’s casinos, brothels, and opium dens.
July:
Ho Chi Minh visited Moscow and agreed to accept Soviet aid.
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14. A subsidy is always essentially a subsidy, even when it is termed something else such as a “liability cap.” Nuclear power
generation has never been even remotely a lower cost alternative to other forms of electric generation, and therefore our utility
corporations have always needed to be induced to cooperate through nice incentives such as protection from liability.
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Our national birthday, the 4th of July, day: Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam claimed complete
victory over the Hoa Hao rebels.
General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin, and several other top Soviet officials
visited an Independence Day celebration at the US ambassador’s residence in Moscow. This was the 1st time
senior Soviet officials had visited the residence or attended such an event and was taken as a desire to improve
relations.
The Argentine government rescinded its expulsion order on two Vatican officials thrown out of the country on
June 15th.
In congressional elections in Mexico, women voted for the first time.
October 23, Sunday: In South Vietnam, Bao Dai was ousted from power after having been defeated by Prime Minister
Ngo Dinh Diem in a US-backed plebiscite which had been seriously rigged. Diem would be advised on
consolidating power by US Air Force Colonel Edward G. Lansdale, an attaché of our Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA).
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October 26, Wednesday: The Republic of South Vietnam was proclaimed with Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem as its
provisional president. President Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower pledged his support for the new government
and offered military aid. Diem would assign most high level government positions to close friends and family
members, including his younger brother Ngo Dinh Nhu as chief advisor. Diem’s style of leadership, aloof and
autocratic, would create future political problems for him — despite the best efforts of his American advisors
to popularize him via American-style political rallies and tours of the countryside.
Egyptian forces entered Israel and attacked a police station near El Auja. One Israeli was killed, three
wounded, and two captured.
The film Rebel Without a Cause was released four weeks after the death of its star, James Dean.
December: In North Vietnam’s radical land reforms, landowners faced “people’s tribunals.” Thousands of them would
be executed or forced into labor camps. In South Vietnam, President Ngo Dinh Diem rewarded his Catholic
supporters by giving them land he had seized from Buddhist peasants, arousing anger and eroding his support
in the countryside. Diem also allowed the big landowners to retain their holdings, thus disappointing the
peasants who had been hoping for land reform.
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1956
January: President Ngo Dinh Diem launched a brutal crackdown against Viet Minh suspects in the countryside. Those
arrested were denied counsel and were dragged before “security committees,” with many suspects tortured, or
executed under the guise of being “shot while attempting to escape.” It wasn’t a nice scene.
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April 28, Saturday: The last French soldier departed South Vietnam. The French High Command for Indochina
dissolved itself. It was the end of an oppressive era and the beginning of an oppressive era.
July:
In South Vietnam, the deadline passed for the unifying elections set by the Geneva Conference. President Ngo
Dinh Diem, with the backing of the US, had refused to participate.
November: Peasant unrest in North Vietnam resulting from oppressive land reforms was put down by the Communist
government by force, with more than 6,000 killed or deported. It wasn’t a nice scene.
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1957
January: Cuban Defense Minister Santiago Rey visited Washington DC as an official guest of the United States
government.
The Soviet Union proposed a permanent division of Vietnam into North and South, with the two nations to be
admitted separately to the United Nations. The US, unwilling to recognize Communist North Vietnam,
rejected this proposal.
May 8, Wednesday-18, Saturday: President Ngo Dinh Diem paid a state visit to Washington DC, where President
Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower labeled him the “miracle man” of Asia and reaffirmed the US commitment
to his regime. Eisenhower averred that “The cost of defending freedom, of defending America, must be paid
in many forms and in many places ... military as well as economic help is currently needed in Vietnam.”
(It wasn’t quite clear whose freedom he was talking about.) Diem’s government, however, with its main focus
on “security,” was spending little on schools, medical care, or badly needed social services in the countryside.
Meanwhile, Communist guerrillas and propagandists outside the capital city were making hay while the sun
shown, simply by offering the prospect of land reform and a higher standard of living.
October: Viet Minh guerrillas began a widespread campaign of bombings and assassinations in South Vietnam. By
year’s end they would have offed more than 400 South Vietnamese officials.
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1958
The Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment at Porton Down, Britain, developed the binary nerve agent
VX. This agent was more stable in storage than Sarin and Soman and would soon become the mainstay of
North American and Western European chemical warfare stockpiles. The patents for the agent would be
published in 1974. The Soviets, meanwhile, would continue to prefer using thickened forms of the older
German agents until the early 1990s, when they would begin replacing their aging Sarin stocks with the vastly
more stable (and lethal) Novichok (“Newcomer”) series of binary biotoxins. To date, none of these military
agents have proven to be as lethal or persistent as the 4,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange we dumped on
Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
GAS WARFARE
The federal Congress brought a “GRAS” rule into effect with a Food Additives Amendment to the Federal
Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Henceforward the food industry would not be obligated under sections 201(s)
and 409 to spend any money on any safety testing whatever, on a substance “generally recognized, among
qualified experts, as having been adequately shown to be safe under the conditions of its intended use.”
Under FDA regulations 21 CFR 170.3 and 21 CFR 170.30, all that was needed was to certify that the substance
had already as of 1958 commonly been consumed by a significant number of customers — the way ersatz
saturated fats had, for instance, been being consumed for very many years by very many people as a perfectly
safe but affordable source of necessary nutrition. “Testing for healthfulness? –Let’s not, and say we did.”
June:
A coordinated command structure was created by the Communists of the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam and
37 armed companies began to organize themselves there.
With wife Bess and the Samuel Rosenmans, Former President Harry S Truman made his 2d trip to Europe in
this postpresidential period.
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1959
A specialized North Vietnamese Army unit, Group 559, was formed to create a supply route from North
Vietnam to Vietcong forces in South Vietnam. With the approval of Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, Group 559
would develop a primitive route along the Vietnamese/Cambodian border, with offshoots into Vietnam along
its entire length. This would eventually become famous as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The United States Army adopted a new riot control agent, o-chlorobenzylidene malonotrile. Commonly
known as CS, this was both easier to disperse and more effective than CN. Unfortunately, CS-based irritants
were ineffective on about 10% of the population. Further, they could be fatal if used in enclosed spaces. While
this wasn’t a problem during military situations –the Americans would disperse 1,000,000 pounds of the
chemical in Vietnam during 1969– it would present a problem during police operations. Accordingly, British
researchers would in 1974 introduce a new agent called dibenz-(b,f)-1,4-oxazepine, or CR. CR would be about
5 times more effective than CS while being much less toxic. Working separately, United States researchers
would in 1978 introduce an equally powerful irritant called oleoresin capsicum, or OC. While CR has never
been publicly used, OC would be widely heralded as a breakthrough in non-lethal weapons technology when
United Nations forces would use it during 1993 peacekeeping operations in Somalia (actually, this material
was simply a traditional Mesoamerican pepper powder known as “ghost pepper,” put into an aerosol spray or
mixed with soapsuds).
Our Perennial Quest to Do Harm So Good Will Come
Extermination of the Pequot Tribe
“King Phillip’s” Race War
The War of 1812
The Revolution of the Texians
War on Mejico
Race War in the Wild West
The War for the Union
War to End War
Stopping Hitler
The Korean Police Action
Helping South Vietnam be Free
Cuban Missile Crisis
yada
yada yada
yada yada yada
1634-1637
1675-1676
1812-1815
1835-1836
1846-1848
1862-1863
1862-1865
1916-1919
1940-1945
1950-1953
1959-1975
1962
xxxx
xxxx
xxxx
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“To be active, well, happy, implies rare courage.
To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies
desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.”
— Henry Thoreau
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March: The armed revolution began as Ho Chi Minh declared a People’s War to unite all of Vietnam under his
leadership. His Politburo directed a changeover from the previous tactics to an all-out military struggle. Thus
began what is now known as the 2nd Indochina War.
May:
The North Vietnamese established their Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN) to oversee the coming war
to recover the southern half of the nation. Construction began on the Ho Chi Minh trail. This trail would
eventually expand into a 1,500-mile-long network of jungle and mountain passages beginning at North
Vietnam’s coast and extending along Vietnam’s western border through Laos and parts of Cambodia, and
would funnel a steady trickle of soldiers and supplies into the highlands of South Vietnam. In this year six
months were required to make such a journey, but by 1968 due to road improvements by North Vietnamese
laborers (many of them women) the journey would be requiring only six weeks. During the 1970s a fuel
pipeline would be added to this in parallel.
July:
George Santayana’s aphorism “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” was used by
William L. Shirer as the epigraph for his RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH.
July 8, Wednesday: Two US military advisors at Bien Hoa, South Vietnam, Major Dale Buis and Sergeant Chester
Ovnand, had the misfortune to be the first Americans killed in the 2nd Indochina War.
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1960
April: Universal military conscription was imposed in North Vietnam. The tour of duty was indefinite.15
MILITARY CONSCRIPTION
Eighteen distinguished nationalists in South Vietnam sent a petition to President Ngo Dinh Diem advocating
that he reform his rigid, family-run, and increasingly corrupt government. Diem would ignore such cautions
and instead shut down several opposition newspapers, arresting journalists and intellectuals.
November: A failed coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem by disgruntled South Vietnamese Army officers brought
a harsh crackdown against all perceived “enemies of the state.” Over 50,000 such identified individuals were
arrested by police units under the control of Diem’s brother Nhu, and many innocent civilians would be
tortured and then executed. This would result in further erosion of popular support for Diem. Thousands who
feared arrest would be fleeing to North Vietnam and later on, Ho Chi Minh would be sending many of these
persons back as infiltrators on behalf of his People’s Liberation Armed Forces. Termed the Viet Cong by
President Ngo Dinh Diem, the meaning of this phrase being “Communist Vietnamese,” Ho’s guerrillas,
indistinguishable from South Vietnamese, would be able to blend into the countryside while working to
undermine the southern government.
15. What if they gave a war and nobody came?
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November 10, Thursday: Five battalions of paratroopers began a coup against the government of Ngo Dinh Diem of
South Vietnam.
When a summit of communist party leaders from 81 countries convened in Beijing, Chairman Mao Tsetung
did not attend.
At a segregated lunch counter in Nashville, Black civil disobedience sit-in demonstrators were sprayed with
water, powder, and insecticide.
A federal judge prohibited implementation of school segregation laws in Louisiana. The New Orleans School
Board approved a plan to admit 5 black children to white schools.
Former President Harry S Truman hosted former President Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower on the latter’s
initial visit to the Truman Library. (Presumably they had an opportunity to discuss what had happened on
January 20, 1953, when tradition had it that the two Presidents were to visit inside the White House and then
ride together to the inauguration ceremony, but Eisenhower had remained for a long time in his limousine in
the driveway of the White House, fuming, reluctant to come inside and greet Truman and unsure that he could
force himself to ride next to him in the official open Lincoln limousine, while Harry and Bess were waiting
for Dwight and Mamie to join them in the Red Room for coffee.)
December 20, Tuesday: A “National Liberation Front” was established by Hanoi as its Communist political
organization for the Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam.
Although the United Nations General Assembly voted 63-8-27 to recognize the right of the Algerian people
to self-determination and independence, there was no agreement after 4 days of debate on the Congo crisis.
Songs of War and Peace, a cantata by Alfred Schnittke to words of Leontyev and Pokrovsky, was performed
for the initial time, in the Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory.
Incidental music to Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Thea Musgrave was performed for
initial first time, at the Old Vic Theatre, London.
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1961
January 20, Saturday: The Chinese government announced that the “Great Leap Forward” in industrial output needed
for the time being to be put aside in favor of greater agricultural production. Food shortages and famine were
to be anticipated.
The Museu Villa-Lobos opened in Rio de Janeiro.
Gloria for soprano, chorus and orchestra by Francis Poulenc was performed for the initial time, in Boston.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy replaced Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower as President of the United States of
America and declared that “...we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend,
oppose any foe, to insure the survival and the success of liberty.” Privately, outgoing President Eisenhower
told him he thought “you’re going to have to send troops” to Southeast Asia. This new Kennedy administration
was youthfully inexperienced in matters relating to the long-drawn-out conflict of Southeast Asia. When,
during this month, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev pledged his support for “wars of national liberation”
throughout the world, this statement encouraged the followers of Ho Chi Minh to escalate their struggle to
unify their nation.
With wife Bess and daughter Margaret, Former President Harry S Truman was a guest in the White House on
inauguration day — their 1st visit there in 8 years.
Over the next several years Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, 44-year-old Robert Strange McNamara from the
world of commerce, along with his civilian planners recruited largely from the academic community, a bunch
of whiz kids still wet behind the ears and marked by their complete infatuation with themselves, would play a
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crucial role in determining the White House strategy for managing the conflict in Vietnam. Under their
leadership the United States would be waging a limited war with the intention of forcing a political settlement,
but unfortunately the US would have as its adversary an enemy with no interest whatever in any partial
settlement of the issues at hand, as stated by Ho Chi Minh, “...whatever the sacrifices, however long the
struggle...until Vietnam is fully independent and reunified.”
Meanwhile, back home in the land of the free and the home of the brave, this would be the year of the Young
Freedom riders, lead by the World War II pacifist James Farmer who had been one of the founders of CORE.
After a bus would be burned in Alabama, and after riders would be attacked in Birmingham and would spend
40-60 days in jail in Jackson, Mississippi, our Interstate Commerce Commission would ban racial segregation
on buses and trains.
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May:
Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson visited President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and hailed the
embattled leader as the “Winston Churchill of Asia.”
This Winston Churchill of Asia asked the United States of America to provide aerial herbicide spraying in his
nation. There no problems around there that a little poison could not cure, selectively applied.
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy sent 400 American Green Beret “special advisors” to South Vietnam to
train South Vietnamese soldiers in methods of “counter-insurgency.” For awhile the war was going to consist
not of soldiers killing soldiers but of US advisers killing Soviet specialists and Soviet specialists killing US
advisers — or at least, that was the joke of the time. The role of these Green Berets “special advisers” would
soon expand to include the establishment of Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG) made up of mountain
tribesmen known as Montagnards. To thwart infiltration by the North Vietnamese, these groups would
establish a series of fortified camps strung out along the mountains.
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Fall:
The conflict in Vietnam was widening as 26,000 Viet Cong launched several successful attacks on South
Vietnamese troops, and President Ngo Dinh Diem urgently appealed for more military aid from the Kennedy
administration.
With US help, the South Vietnamese Air Force initiated herbicide operations. President Ngo Dinh Diem’s
request for this sort of “help” initiated a policy debate in the White House and the State and Defense
Departments, a policy debate during which we learned that such poisons were not unprecedented as weapons
of war: the British had already employed such herbicides and defoliants during the Malayan Emergency of the
1950s. Gosh, so actually, we may be doing something evil — but we are not doing anything that has not been
done before. How utterly reassuring!
My petition for Conscientious Objector status was denied on the basis that it was a federal crime of Selective
Service fraud, punishable by years in prison, to attempt to transit from a 2S Student Deferred status to a CO
status. I (Austin Meredith) was classified as ready for my obligatory military service. Despite my twisted
spine, which had been categorized by the Selective Service physician as “pes planus, asymptomatic,” I was
ordered to report for induction processing as an Army private — so I started moving from town to town one
jump ahead of the sheriff.
Each time they caught up with me, I would simply get on a bus and go to some different town. Meanwhile
I sought out a Marine recruiter and inquired as to whether I would be acceptable as a Marine Officer, on the
basis of my college education and test scores. It is so simple to explain why I needed to do this! During the
course of my 24 years, from birth in 1937 to 1961, I had been bashed a number of times by other males my
own age or slightly older. I had been beaten once in 1st grade at Brown Military Academy north of San Diego,
with sticks made to resemble rifles for training and marching purposes, and my left forearm was cracked and
my upper jaw crushed and one of my front baby teeth knocked out. Then during my Junior High years the other
boys purchased #1 hard-lead pencils, sharpened them to needle points, and made a practice of jabbing these
pencils into my thighs and buttocks in the halls of the school (I still bear inside my muscle tissue the marks of
pencil lead from pencils that had their sharp points snapped off against the long bones of my legs). Then during
High School years I was bashed during a gym class and my nose was utterly crushed, filling my nasal passages
with bone fragments and making me an obligate mouth-breather. –I had gone into public education deformed
and physically very ill due to my bout with bovine tuberculosis, and had come out of public education no
longer physically ill, but not only deformed any longer, having become as well disfigured. All these attacks
had occurred because of my personal appearance, which others found disgusting, the other students calling me
“Commie Queer” since I looked something like a centaur. (My upper torso and my lower torso, during my
adolescence, appeared to be from two different bodies that had somehow gotten pasted together at the beltline,
with the bottom half hugely muscular but the top half puny.)
This being my appearance and my consequent history, I expected that were I put into a prison, or into an army
barracks as a private, I would again find himself being physically abused on the basis of my bodily appearance,
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and might even possibly be called “Commie Queer” again as I had been in public school, and be ganged up on
again and stomped again. So my attitude at the time was that this application for Marine Officer Candidate
School, using my higher education to my advantage, might be what it would take to preserve my life and health
if in fact I were to be inducted into the Armed Forces of the United States of America.
I scored very highly on the Marine Officer written test. The recruiting sergeant at Navy Yard in Boston told
me that I had scored quite a bit higher than the highest that this recruiter had personally ever previously seen,
in his 14 years experience. So he sent me over to the doctors at the Navy Yard, and I had the first real rigorous
physical examination that I had in his 24 years of my life ever received. They classified my Potts Disease
physical defects, due to my past bovine tuberculosis, again as “asymptomatic,” the same way they had
originally been classified when I turned 18 years of age — as it was clear to them not only that I was no longer
infectious but also that I could readily accomplish any physical requirements that military service places upon
its young recruits. That is, it was easy for me to pass and even to excel, at the standard military “Physical
Readiness Test,” since this merely required a certain number of push-ups, a run of a certain distance (two or
three miles in a quite generous period of time under a rather light load, as I recall), etc.
Nevertheless the Marines then rejected me as physically unfit. The ruling was in effect that although I was
physically fit to be a private in the US Army –that being a position of appropriately low status– I was not
physically fit to be a 2d Lieutenant in the USMC — that being a position of a status incompatible with such a
personal bodily configuration. I couldn’t look good in the uniform. So I appealed this ruling, alleging that it
was not actually a medical response to my physical condition but was, rather, a prejudiced rejection on grounds
of personal appearance alone. I cited various remarks they had made to me about the importance that a Marine
Officer look like a Marine Officer, that the standard uniform fit properly, etc. I pointed out that I had scored
very highly on his written examination, and pointed out that despite my twisted spine I had easily been able to
accomplish each and every task required in the standard military Physical Readiness Test. I pointed out that I
had been working on a Texas road surveying crew as a sledgehammer-man, and that for sure no “disabled”
person would have been able to work all day on caliche roads in that hot sun swinging a sledgehammer. I
pointed out that as a youth I had made myself a set of weights out of cement poured over scrap metal in buckets,
and had developed a series of exercises which I had rigidly followed daily in order to strengthen myself to cope
with my nonstandard physical configuration. I pointed out that I could raise my left shoulder, at least in
appearance if that was what counted, simply by using extra padding in the uniform blouse for that shoulder.
Etc.
Did I exactly want to become a Marine Officer, was that what I had decided to do with my life? –Well, no, but
the alternative seemed to be for me to be made an Army Private and get myself stomped by other enlisted men
in an abusive barracks setting. I was simply struggling to limit my risks.
My medical dossier went on appeal and made its way up through the offices, while I was moving from town
to town evading the sheriff and ignoring letters and telegrams demanding that I report for induction into the
US Army as a private.
Every once in awhile I would fire off a letter asking the status of my appeal. Finally I received a response
directly from the Surgeon General of the Navy. The Surgeon General concurred that to reject such a
candidate on appearance grounds alone would be to reject him prejudicially. The Surgeon General required
that the USMC send me to their Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia, to determine there, by actual
candidacy, whether I would be physically and mentally qualified to be a Marine Officer.
My appearance at the Marine Officer Candidate School and subsequently at the Marine Officer Training
Course, in Quantico during Fall 1961, was obviously distressing to the officers in charge there. One of the very
first things that happened was that they discovered that I was embarrassed to be seen in the nude, or in my
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“skivvies” — and had brought pajamas with me to the enlisted Marine barracks used by these Officer
Candidates. In the barracks I was quickly and forcibly stripped of these nighttime modesty garments so that
my platoon mates could get the full impact of my physical deformity. (They even put a tape measure to me,
and to themselves, marveling at how much more huge the muscles in my legs were than their own muscles.)
The officers there quickly professed to have discovered my political attitudes and to have found these attitudes
treasonous, and threatened to award me a general court martial. They put a great deal of time and attention into
the fact that in college I had been a student of philosophy, and my “DI,” an Apache Indian named Sergeant
Wolf Mule, posed questions such as “How could we possibly trust you? How would we know what you were
thinking?”
Her is how this “treason” gambit was developed. At an Effective Presentation class, DI Mule assigned to me
the topic “Better Red Than Dead — Bertrand Russell.” He gave me precisely the standard 3 minutes to prepare,
and then had me deliver a standard standup 3-minute speech on this topic before the other officer candidates
of the class. At the conclusion of this speech I was marched to the office of the Company Commander and
processing began for a General Courts Martial for treason, in that allegedly by virtue of this classroom
effective presentation (whatever it was I had blurted out on the occasion) I had been attempting to convert other
military personnel, having the temporary status of enlisted men, to Professor Bertrand Russell’s pacifism.
My response, delivered to the Commanding Officer – Marine Officer Candidate School in the presence of the
base attorney, was that I hoped they would provide me the opportunity of being guilty of such a crime, a crime
of having obeyed an order to deliver the speech –that I would be eager to plead guilty– since this would be to
establish, as a principle of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Nürnberg Principle which the US military
had always up to that point evaded — that to obey an order to commit a crime could constitute a punishable
offense. I mentioned something that I had had no chance to mention during the 3 minutes of my Effective
Presentation, that the slogan “Better Red Than Dead” was not something that had been originated by
philosopher Bertie but was merely a repudiation of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s slogan
“Lieber tot als rot” — and therefore it would be possible for the popular media to construe the Commanding
Officer’s disagreement with Bertie as being in sympathy with the Nazis. I told the two that I would be ready
and willing to devote myself to prison, in order finally to be able to introduce “said Nürnberg Principle” into
American military law. The Commanding Officer, and the base attorney, then purported to feel relieved, when
they discovered through further questioning that actually I did not agree with Russell, that actually I considered
Bertie’s “better Red than dead” polemic to have been a stupid self-defeating one, and that I had delivered my
3-minute Effective Presentation as being in favor of such a posture only because in standard debate mode one
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is supposed to adopt the “pro” or the “con” position that one has been assigned to represent, and that I had
considered that it had been intended that I was to deliver the difficult “pro” argument rather than the easy “con”
argument. The two of them expressed themselves as so relieved, that actually I didn’t believe any of that
“better Red than dead” stuff! This had all been the most dreadful mistake! Of course, after that point nothing
more would be heard of the matter and I was allowed to graduate and mount my bright goldplate 2d-Lieutenant
bar on my uniform shoulder-strap.
(I am omitting here a description of the mandatory cosmetic surgery to which I would be subjected at the Naval
Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, since that is covered in a section of this database dated early in 1962.)
During the entire period of my military obligation, three and a half years, the Office of Naval Intelligence and
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the FBI would be conducting a full-scale Background Investigation on my entire life, from the point of birth
on September 17, 1937 onward, attempting to discover any factoid on the basis of which they could demand
that I resign this officer’s commission.
I would be interrogated with regularity, in rooms with one-way mirrors and a lie-detector machine, on Navy
Pier in San Diego. They would manage to get a few things on me, basically various fringe political attitudes
that I had taken, plus the fact that during my college education the Communist Manifesto had been assigned
reading in one of my classes, plus the fact that my mother would tell the nice men who came to visit her on the
farm, in suits, that when I had been a teenager I had masturbated. They would manage to establish that I had
an unsatisfactory attitude, one proof of that being that on a security form I had been required to fill out, stating
my exact address at every point since January 1, 1937, my first entry on the form had been:
January 1, 1937 — September 17, 1937: in utero
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This they would evaluate as my “trying to make a joke out of the national security of the United States of
America,” thus placing our national security at risk.
However, they never would get enough on me that I felt I had to accept their demands that I resign my
commission. To the best of the information I have available to me at this point, I was the first deformed person
to serve as an officer in the USMC, and seem in addition to be the sole such person — even to this day. I would
manage despite them all to complete his period of military obligation, and without being sent to prison. –And
then starting in 1965, my “military obligation” completed, I would be freed to dispose of my uniforms and
struggle to get on with my life.
ASSLEY
October 24, Tuesday: General Maxwell D. Taylor and Walt Rostow, top Presidential aides, were in Vietnam checking
out the situation on the ground, and communicating back to the administration in Washington DC personal
opinions they could not possibly have observed, such as that “If Vietnam goes, it will be exceedingly difficult
to hold Southeast Asia.” General Taylor advised President John Fitzgerald Kennedy both to expand the number
of US military advisors and to send some 8,000 combat soldiers.
Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended instead that there
be a massive show of force, by sending six divisions (200,000 servicemen) to Vietnam. However, the President
would decide at this time against sending any combat troops. On the sixth anniversary of the Republic of South
Vietnam, our President sent a pledge to President Ngo Dinh Diem that “the United States is determined to help
Vietnam preserve its independence.” He would send additional military advisors, up to a total of more than
16,000, along with American helicopter units that could transport South Vietnamese troops to their battlefields,
thus for the first time involving Americans directly in combat operations. He would justify the expanding US
military role as a means “to prevent a Communist takeover of Vietnam” and would point out that this was
“in accordance with a policy our government has followed since 1954.”16
“History is the how of now.”
— Austin Meredith
16. In 1954 the US had opposed the idea of holding popular elections to determine the nature of government in Vietnam,
on the grounds that the Communists were so popular that they would probably win any honest election there. So, I guess, our
President was reasonably accurate in stating that our government had been opposing a Communist “takeover of Vietnam”
“since 1954” — parsing this word “takeover” to mean “obtaining the most votes in a fair election.”
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November: President John F. Kennedy authorized Operation Ranch Hand, the US Air Force’s herbicide program in
Vietnam. The motto of this project would be “Only you can prevent a forest.”
J.C.R. Licklider was commissioned by the Council on Library Resources to explore what computers might be
able to do for the library, as of the year 2000. (The result of this would be his LIBRARIES OF THE FUTURE, to
be published in 1965.)
A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: There was a demonstration of
the CTSS Compatible Time Sharing System, on four terminals. MIT began to use “time-sharing” computers
which would enable several users to access the same machine simultaneously. Initially, this would be a costsharing and availability technology, but it was also a necessary step toward a brave new world in which
different members of a project, sitting at different terminals, could collaborate on their common project,
accessing the same databases and employing the same software tools.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
you must first invent the universe.”
— Carl Sagan
November 14, Tuesday: The number of US advisors in Vietnam increased from 1,000 to 16,000.
Stalinstad, East Germany became Eisenhuettenstadt. The statue of Stalin in East Berlin was carted away.
In Kindu, Antoine Gizenga declared his opposition to the central Congolese government and called for all
supporters of Patrice Lumumba to join him in a new movement.
A UN investigation commission reported that Patrice Lumumba and two associates had probably been
murdered at the order of the Katanga government.
The first two movements of Kaze no Uma/Wind Horse for chorus and women’s chorus by Toru Takemitsu to
words of Akiyama, were performed for the initial time, in Tokyo.
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December: Although the cost to the US of maintaining South Vietnam’s dispirited 200,000-man military and managing
the overall conflict was in the range of $1,000,000 per day, Viet Cong guerrillas living on handfuls of rice had
managed to control much of the countryside and frequently were able to ambush these regular troops when
they ventured out of their safe havens.
Therefore late in this year President John Fitzgerald Kennedy would order more help for the South Vietnamese
government in its struggle against the guerrillas. This major-power backing would include new equipment and
more than 3,000 military advisors and support personnel. The Soviets and the Communist Chinese would send
technicians and, for awhile, the proxy struggle would involve our advisers shooting at their technicians while
their technicians were shooting at our advisers.
December 11, Monday: American helicopters arrived at docks in South Vietnam along with 400 US personnel who
would be flying and maintaining these aircraft.
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1962
January 9, Tuesday: An initial shipment of herbicides arrived at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in South Vietnam (over the
course of Operation Ranch Hand there would be at least 6,542 spraying missions).
The published goal of this “Ranch Hand” would be to clear vegetation alongside highways, thus making it
somewhat more difficult for the Vietcong to conceal themselves for ambushes. As the war would continue and
continue, the mission of Ranch Hand would creepingly increase. Vast tracts of forest would be sprayed with
“Agent Orange,” an herbicide inadvertently, because of the cheap manner in which it was being manufactured
by a higher-temperature process, containing as a contaminant the supremely deadly chemical TCDD dioxin.
Guerrilla trails and base areas would be exposed, plus, as a fringe benefit, crops that might feed Vietcong units
would be destroyed (all a ranch hand does, you know, is lend a helping hand).
January 11, Thursday: During his State of the Union address, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy averred that
“Few generations in all of history have been granted the role of being the great defender of freedom in its
maximum hour of danger.” He went on to characterize this as “our good fortune.”17
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The US Marines issued a 20-page pamphlet in praise of themselves for having in 1859 stopped the raid by
Captain John Brown on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry:
THE UNITED STATES MARINES
AT
HARPER’S FERRY, 1859
Historical Branch, G-3 Division
Headquarters, U. S. Marine Corps
17. The special Washington terminology that describes such head-up-your-own-ass assertions is “spin.”
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Washington, D. C.
DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY
HEADQUARTERS UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS
WASHINGTON 25, D. C.
REVIEWED AND APPROVED 11 JAN 1962
H. W. BUSE, JR.
Brigadier General, U. S. Marine Corps
Assistant Chief of Staff, G-318
Brevet Colonel the detachment of Marines Robert E. Lee, from his
report to the Adjutant General of the suppression of John
Brown’s Raid.
James Ewell Brown Stuart, First Lieutenant, U.S. Cavalry, was
enjoying six months’ leave from his frontier post at Fort Riley,
Kansas Territory. Yet, the joys of coming home to Virginia had
not made him forget that he was a cavalryman by profession. On
the rainy morning of 17 October 1859 he had ridden over the muddy
streets of Washington to the office of the War Department, and
now he sat waiting to speak with Secretary of War John B. Floyd.
Jeb Stuart had an idea for a new type strap to fasten a
cavalryman’s sabre to his belt. While the young lieutenant was
rehearsing in his mind for the coming interview, the Secretary
himself was face to face with the spectre of a slave
insurrection.
John B. Floyd was a poor administrator, a failing which almost
resulted in his removal from office; but on this day there was
no need for paper shuffling. Word had come by way of Baltimore
that an insurrection had broken out at Harper’s Ferry. A band
of armed men had captured the United States arsenal there and
was fomenting a slave rebellion. A native of Virginia, the
Secretary must have heard the oft-told tales of the Haitians
revolt against their French masters with all its barbarism. Nor
had any son of the Old Dominion forgotten Nat Turner’s
Rebellion, a slave uprising which occurred a generation before
18. This 20-page booklet is a reprint of “At All Times Ready...” by Bernard C. Nalty, describing how in 1859 the USMC squashed
the takeover of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia by the forces of Captain John Brown.
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and claimed the lives of 55 whites in a single bloody night.
Swinging at once into action, Floyd fired off a telegram to Fort
Monroe; and by noon Captain Edward O.C. Ord with 150 coast
artillerymen was on his way toward Baltimore on the first leg
of the journey to Harper’s Ferry. There was no question as to
who would command operations against the insurgents. Floyd
called for his chief clerk and set him to writing orders
summoning to the War Department Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee,
then on leave at his estate, Arlington, just across the Potomac
from the Capital.
Message in hand, the harassed aide came dashing out of the
office, only to halt when he spied the forgotten cavalry
officer. Stuart, by now thoroughly bored, was easily persuaded
to deliver the sealed envelope. Even as this message was
speeding toward its destination, President James Buchanan called
upon Secretary Floyd to move even faster a demand which was to
bring the Marine Corps into the picture.
Since there were no troops nearer the scene of the uprising than
those en route from Fort Monroe, Floyd was powerless to comply;
but Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey quickly offered a
solution to his dilemma. About noon Charles W. Welsh, chief
clerk of the Navy Department, came riding through the main gate
of the Washington Navy Yard. He sought out First Lieutenant
Israel Greene, temporarily in command of Marine Barracks,
Washington, and asked how many Leathernecks were available for
duty. Greene estimated that he could round up some 90 men from
both his barracks and the small Navy Yard detachment. He then
asked Welsh what was wrong. The civilian told him all he knew—
that the armory at Harper’s Ferry had been seized by a group of
abolitionists and that state and federal troops already were on
the march....
Learning that the militiamen, whatever their faults, had at
least forced the insurgents to barricade themselves in a single
small building on the armory grounds—the Engine House—Lee
decided to attack as quickly as possible. Because of the danger
to the hostages, a night assault was out of the question, so the
colonel, his aide, and the Marines crossed the river to await
the dawn.
About 2300 on the night of 17 October, Greene led his men across
the covered bridge and into the armory yard...
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January 12, Friday: The Indonesian army publicly admitted that it had begun operations against the Dutch in West
Irian.
Nationalist terrorists killed 21 in Algeria. A French “conservative terrorist” paramilitary organization alerted
all French families in Algeria to stockpile 2 months of food.
In Operation Chopper, helicopters flown by US Army pilots ferried 1,000 South Vietnamese soldiers to sweep
an enemy stronghold near Saigon. This was America’s initial combat mission against the Viet Cong.
January 15, Monday: Dutch warships sank an Indonesian torpedo boat in their territorial waters off Etna Bay,
Netherlands New Guinea. 70 survivors were rescued by the Dutch. This was 1 of 3 boats carrying 100 troops
to land near Kaimana.
American tanks stationed near the Berlin Wall were withdrawn.
The Congolese Parliament sacked Antoine Gizenga as deputy Prime Minister.
Portuguese representatives walked out of the UN General Assembly during a debate on Angola.
During a press conference, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was asked point-blank if any Americans in
Vietnam were engaged in the fighting. “No,” he lied.
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January 18, Thursday: Edward Lansdale outlined a scheme under OPERATION MONGOOSE aimed at the
overthrow of the Fidel Castro government of Cuba. 32 planning tasks, ranging from sabotage actions to
intelligence activities, were assigned to the federal government agencies that would be entangled in such a
buccaneering scheme. The program was designed to develop a “strongly motivated political action movement”
within Cuba capable of generating a revolt eventually leading to the downfall of the Castro government.
Lansdale imagined that in the final stages of an uprising the support of the United States of America would
become overt, including, if necessary, the use of direct military force.
The United States military began using herbicides such as “Agent Orange” on the jungles of Vietnam.
We weren’t much concerned, at the time, with the known fact that the manufacturing process contaminated the
chemical product with TCDD dioxin, one of the very most highly toxic and persistent environmental organic
pollutants.
Over the next week, 35 bombs set by conservative extremists would be going off in and around Paris (these
folks were opposing President de Gaulle’s insufficiently hard-line policies in Algeria).
A group of air force officers overthrew the junta that had taken power 2 days earlier in Dominica, restoring the
Council of State led by Rafael Filiberto Bonnelly.
February 6, Tuesday: The US Military Assistance Command for Vietnam, MACV, was formed, replacing the
“MAAG-Vietnam” Military Assistance Advisory Group for Vietnam which had been established in 1950.
Having arrived at an agreement with local black citizens, 29 stores and 10 other businesses in Memphis
peacefully desegregated their dining facilities.
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February 7, Wednesday: Ten bombs set by conservative terrorists exploded in Paris. One, intended for the Boulognesur-Seine home of Minister of Culture André Malreaux (Malreaux was not home), blinded one eye of a 4-yearold girl.
Morocco lifted the bans on emigration by Jews that had been imposed on December 19th.
Intervals for bass-baritone, trombone, percussion and cello by Morton Feldman to his own words was
performed for the initial time, in Kaufmann Concert Hall of the 92nd Street Y, New York.
February 27, Tuesday: A couple of renegade South Vietnamese pilots in American World War II-era fighter planes
bombed the presidential palace in Saigon. President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu, escaping unharmed,
attributed this not to bad aim or obsolete equipment but to “divine protection.”
One of the planes was shot down and its pilot captured in South Vietnam. The other plane crash landed in
Cambodia and its pilot was arrested.
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March: “Operation Sunrise” began the Strategic Hamlet resettlement program in accordance with which the scattered
villages of South Vietnam were to be resettled into fortified villages that could be defended by the local
militias, while being separated from their ancestral farmlands. However, more than fifty of these strategic
hamlets were soon infiltrated and taken over by Viet Cong who killed or intimidated the village leaders.
President Ngo Dinh Diem was ordering bombing raids against strategic hamlets suspected of being under the
control of the Viet Cong. These air strikes were by the South Vietnamese Air Force, but they were being
supported by US pilots, who also were themselves perpetrating some of the bombings. The civilian causalities
were resulting in peasant hostility toward America, which was being largely blamed for the unpopular
resettlement program as well as for the indiscriminate bombings, and were eroding even further Diem’s
popular support.
The Atomic Energy Commission launched its “Atoms for Peace” nuclear-powered luxury liner NS Savannah.
It could be able to cruise around the planet without refueling. It offered 30 air-conditioned luxury staterooms
and a swimming pool. It would never prove economically viable but it looked damned nice.
Marine Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn, Jr., orbited the earth in the first manned American space capsule.
May:
In central Vietnam the Viet Cong had begun to organize themselves into units of battalion size. Nevertheless,
Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara, visiting, reported to those back home that “we are winning
the war.” Strange.
Deliberations regarding the possible installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba continued in Moscow. Early in the
month Nikita Khrushchev informed the newly designated ambassador to Cuba, Aleksandr Alekseyev, of his
plan. Although Alekseyev expressed concern over the idea (as would Gromyko and Mikoyan at different
times), it was decided to send Alekseyev and Marshal Biryuzov secretly to Cuba to explore the question with
Fidel Castro himself.
Following further discussions in this month and the following one, Khrushchev would authorize Soviet
military officials to decide independently on the exact composition of nuclear forces to be deployed in Cuba.
The military would propose a force of 24 medium-range ballistic missile launchers and 16 intermediate-range
ballistic missile launchers; each of these launchers was to be equipped with 2 missiles (one as a spare) and a
single nuclear warhead. Soviet officials also decided that a large contingent of Soviet combat forces should be
dispatched to Cuba. The proposed Soviet force would include 4 elite combat regiments, 24 advanced SA-2
surface-to-air missile batteries, 42 Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 interceptors, 42 IL-28 bombers, 12 Komarclass missile boats, and coastal defense cruise missiles.
A multi-service US military exercise code-named WHIPLASH, designed to test contingency planning for
Cuba, would be completed at about the middle of the month.
July 23: A Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos, signed in Geneva by the US and 13 other nations, prohibited US
molestation of the portions of the Ho Chi Minh trail that were inside eastern Laos.
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August 1, Wednesday: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy signed a Foreign Assistance Act providing for
“military assistance to countries which are on the rim of the Communist world and under direct attack.”to
monitor the North Vietnamese Army infiltration down the Ho Chi Minh trail, US Special Forces camp would
be set up at Khe Sanh.
Six Renaissance Lyrics for tenor and seven instruments by Gunther Schuller was performed for the initial time,
at Tanglewood, near Lenox, Massachusetts.
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1963
President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara discussed withdrawing 1,000
troops from Vietnam and ending US involvement by 1965.
The US backed a coup against South Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, who would be murdered on November
2.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Lyndon Johnson took office and Republicans in Congress would soon be
wondering whether Brown & Root’s new government contacts weren’t connected to its political contributions
to our new president. The company eventually would become part of a consortium which would win a $380
million contract to build bases, hospitals and airports for the US Navy in South Vietnam (during America’s
War on Terror, this Halliburton subsidiary would have similar good luck in regard to opportunities in
Afghanistan and Iraq).
As part of a post-graduate project at Oxford University, a retired US Marine Corps general, Samuel Griffith,
published a heavily annotated translation of Sun Tzu’s THE ART OF WAR. Griffith’s reasons for doing the
translation included his belief that the United States could no more win a war against the Chinese without
understanding Sun Tzu’s 13 chapters than it could win a war against the Nazis without understanding MEIN
KAMPF. Other Western generals would insufficiently appreciate Sun Tzu until the United States’s forced
withdrawal from Vietnam in 1972.
Sun Tzu had also authored a treatise on mathematics which has never been translated into English. Obviously
such an author hadn’t written anything on the art of mathematics that would be of interest to us.
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G.I. Joe was born in Rhode Island. (His inventor, of the Hasbro corporation, coined the term “action figure” to
cope with the cultural given that little boys weren’t supposed to play with dolls. Dogtags were provided, but
Dad needed to purchase his weapons and other equipment separately.)
A.J. Muste began to function as a central coordinator for the movement to end American involvement in
Vietnam.
The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed after six years of demonstrations and public pressure.
The March on Washington was the largest demonstration to date, bringing more than 250,000 people to the
Lincoln Memorial. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I have a Dream” speech.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Reconstructing what was going on in my (Austin Meredith’s) head during this period, I can remember that
I had become aware through Marine scuttlebutt of how many of our junior officers were getting “fragged”
by their own men in the Nam, and I can remember being very well aware that I was precisely the sort of junior
officer who would be most likely to have a hand-grenade dropped in his lap by one of his own men. There was
no question but that, even stateside, certain of them found the experience of being led by a man they could not
respect due to his physical deformity, to be distinctly unsettling. Already, I was so fearful of my own troops
and fellow officers that I was never coming onto base without tucking my little .32-caliber automatic into my
girdle, in the hollow of my back under my belt, for use in protecting myself should the occasion arise perhaps
on a live-fire exercise in the hills — and there in Camp Pendleton barracks they were not supposed to have
routine access to the live ammo! I could well understand that if they were able to get me to Vietnam, it was
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exceedingly unlikely that I in particular would be able to get back home alive. I can remember thinking
“Why should I kill people for these American people, on cue? –America’s never done anything for me, really,
but abuse me and take advantage of my condition.” So my thinking was at the time, primarily, focused on what
I needed to do to avoid being sent to a place like Vietnam. Could I shoot myself in the foot? Could I develop
some sort of specialty that was of a sort that would not get sent into a shooting war, such as the Motor Pool?
I don’t remember that I ever mused on what I might do, if I wound up in the Nam and had to try to escape and
make my way through Southeast Asia. It was just, like, too impossible a thing to think about. There were too
many unknowns.
So I don’t know how I would have tried to handle the situation had it arisen. Bear in mind, my wife was the
only woman who had ever accepted me in my condition, so I wasn’t particularly interested in trying to
disappear and begin a new life with some other woman in the way regular men sometimes do when they are
in difficulties.
ASSLEY
January 2, Wednesday: At the hamlet of Ap Bac, the Vietcong 514th Battalion and local guerrilla forces ambushed the
South Vietnamese Army’s 7th division. For the 1st time, the Vietcong stood their ground against American
machinery and South Vietnamese soldiers. Almost 400 South Vietnamese were killed or wounded. 3 of our
American “advisors,” manning one of our helicopters, were also slain.
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January 3, Thursday: A Viet Cong victory at Ap Bac, South Vietnam made headlines in America because a mere 350
Cong had defeated a larger force of American-equipped South Vietnamese troops who had been sent out into
the countryside to seize a radio transmitter, and 3 American helicopter crewmen had gotten killed. (The South
Vietnamese Army was run by an officer corps personally chosen by President Ngo Dinh Diem on the basis of
loyalty to him, military competence and initiative being secondary considerations. Diem has issued explicit
instructions that his military was to avoid causalities in fighting the Cong — because its primary mission was
not the fighting of guerrillas in the countryside but the protection of his government from any coups which
might occur inside Saigon, the capital city.)
UN units made up of Indian soldiers captured Jadotville in Katanga.
Due to the presence of 15,000 Egyptian troops in Yemen backing republican forces against the royalist regime,
Saudi Arabia mobilized its armed forces against Egypt.
May:
On St. Helena, the 1st ever registration of electors.
In South Vietnam, after being told they would not be allowed to display any of their religious flags in
celebration of Buddha’s birthday, Buddhists rioted. In Hue, the police and soldiers shot at Buddhist
demonstrators, killing a woman and eight children. A leading Buddhist accused US officials in Saigon of being
“responsible for the present trouble — because you back Diem and his government of ignoramuses.” Political
pressure on the Kennedy administration would be mounting, to disassociate itself from President Ngo Dinh
Diem’s repressive, family-run puppet government.
June-August: In South Vietnam, over a period of some three months several Buddhist monks would be publicly
immolating themselves. In an American TV interview, Madame Nhu, their first lady, referred to the selfimmolations of the monks as a “barbecue,” but such immolations, captured on film in full by news
photographers, would prove disturbing to the American public. The response of President Ngo Dinh Diem,
a guy with one behavior mode, would be to impose martial law. South Vietnamese special forces, originally
trained by the US but under the control of Diem’s younger brother Nhu, would raid Buddhist sanctuaries in
Saigon, Hue, and other cities, and such antics would spark further widespread anti-Diem demonstrations.
A fool could perceive what the ruling family could not, that the situation was spiraling out of all control.
Our national birthday, Thursday the 4th of July: At Monticello, Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies of Australia
delivered an oration.
The annual “Let Freedom Ring” tradition began as houses of worship across our nation simultaneously rang
their bells 13 times. Meanwhile, a Buddhist South Vietnamese General, Tran Van Don, perceiving that what
the United States of America needed in order to make freedom go ding-ding-ding for the Vietnamese was a
more efficient local puppet satrap, contacted our Central Intelligence Agency personnel in Saigon about the
possibility of his staging a coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been growing more and more
bothersome to us.
CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
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August 16, Friday: A 71-year-old Buddhist monk burned himself to death in Hue to protest the anti-Buddhist policies
of the South Vietnamese government.
Duke Ellington’s My People was performed for the initial time, in the McCormick Place center in Chicago.
August 18, Sunday: 15,000 people assembled at the Xa Loi Pagoda in Saigon for a day of prayers and speeches
denouncing the corrupt, anti-Buddhist government of South Vietnam of the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem.
At a concert of sacred music in the Cathedral of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Igor Stravinsky was invested with the
insignia of the Order of St. Sylvester (during the previous October, Pope John XXIII had conferred on him the
honor of Knight Commander of St. Sylvester with star).
James Meredith (no relation, I don’t think) graduated from the University of Mississippi.
Folk Suite for Band by William Grant Still was performed for the 1st time, in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles.
August 22, Thursday: The new US ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, arrived in South Vietnam.
August 24, Saturday: A US State Department message directed to new Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was
interpreted by him to mean that he should encourage the military coup being planned against President Ngo
Dinh Diem.
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August 26, Monday: Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge met with President Ngo Dinh Diem for the first time.
Under instructions from President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, our ambassador instructed the President of South
Vietnam to reform his government, starting with the firing of his brother Nhu.
Receiving such an order, our puppet President Diem unfortunately got on his high horse — this was,
supposedly, an internal Vietnam matter that wasn’t, supposedly, any of our fucking business. President John
Fitzgerald Kennedy began three days of heated discussions with his top aides over whether to support the
planned military coup against Diem.
August 29, Thursday: Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge wrote from Saigon to Washington that “there is no possibility,
in my view, that the war can be won under a Ngo Dinh Diem administration.” President John Fitzgerald
Kennedy then awarded his ambassador a free hand to manage the unfolding events in the capital city.
However, due to mistrust and suspicion within the ranks of the military conspirators, the awaited coup against
Diem would fizzle.
When a black couple, Horace and Sara Baker, attempted to take possession of their home in a housing
development outside Philadelphia, they were met by a mob of 500 whites, mostly adolescents. The whites
hurled insults, smashed windows in the house and car and refused to let them in. At night, a bomb started a
fire at the house, which was doused by firemen.
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September 2, Monday: During a TV news interview with Walter Cronkite, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
characterized President Ngo Dinh Diem of our client state of South Vietnam as “out of touch with the people”
but commented that the government might obtain popular support “with changes in policy and perhaps in
personnel.” Kennedy, deep thinker that he was, produced the typical Domino account that “If we withdrew
from Vietnam, the Communists would control Vietnam. Pretty soon, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya,
would go,” yada yada yada.
September 7, Saturday: A march by Saigon high school students to an anti-government rally was stopped by special
forces units, who surrounded the schools and arrested 800 students.
In Lucerne, Little Music for strings op.16 by Alexander Goehr was performed for the initial time.
Fred Vine and Drum Matthews of the University of Cambridge’s “Magnetic Anomalies Over Oceanic Ridges”
appeared in Nature — hard evidence supporting Wegener’s theory of continental drift.
PALEONTOLOGY
October: The US military began targeting Vietnamese croplands, primarily using Agent Blue (the American public
would not become aware of such Operation Ranch Hand crop destruction programs until 1965 and then they
would be led to believe that the program had begun that spring).
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
“The Month That We Lived Most Dangerously”
Interview with Cuban leader Jorge Risquet on 1962 “missile” crisis
from the Militant, vol.62/no.37 October 19, 1998
Below we reprint an interview with Jorge Risquet, member of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, on the October
1962 “missile” crisis. At that time, the U.S. administration of
President John Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear
war and threatened the annihilation of the entire Cuban people
over the issue of Soviet missiles that were installed in Cuba
in an act of sovereign self-defense. Kennedy intended to mount
an invasion of Cuba, as he had been planning to do for more than
a year. His hand was stayed when the Pentagon informed him that,
in face of an armed and ready Cuban population, he could expect
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an estimated 18,000 U.S. troop casualties during the first 10
days of an invasion.
The interview, headlined, “The month that we lived most
dangerously,” appeared originally in issue no. 308 in 1997 of
the magazine Cuba Internacional, published in Havana. The
translation from Spanish is by the Militant.
Reprinted by permission.
BY MOISE’S SAAB
Thirty-five years ago, in October 1962, the world was on the
brink of nuclear holocaust because of the so-called Missile
Crisis.
So close, in fact, that former U.S. defense secretary Robert
McNamara does not even want to think about the subject because,
to this day, it makes him shudder.
Jorge Risquet is a member of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Cuba and a specialist on the causes and
effects of that wild spiraling of tensions between Cuba and the
two great superpowers of the time, the Soviet Union and the
United States, over the placement on the island of intermediaterange ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Three and
a half decades later, he remembers that episode and its
consequences, which could have ended in an unprecedented tragedy
for humanity.
How was defense organized for the very likely possibility of
direct U.S. military intervention in Cuba?
In the capital, Fidel [Castro], working directly with the
General Staff, was responsible for the provinces of Havana and
Matanzas; Che [Ernesto “Che” Guevara] was in Pinar del Ri’o with
a command post in Cueva de los Portales; in Las Villas and
Camaguey, that is, the center of the country, the command was
entrusted to Commander of the Revolution Juan Almeida; while
Rau’l [Castro] was on the eastern front.
Looking back 35 years later, would you say that this was the
month that we lived most dangerously?
Well, we were within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war.
What or who avoided this confrontation?
One would have to be crazy to want nuclear war, because although
the response capability of the Soviet Union was inferior to that
of the United States - we didn’t know it at the time, but we
later found out that the United States held a 17-to-1 edge over
the USSR - and Nikita Khrushchev [the former first secretary of
the Communist Party of the USSR] bluffed a lot with the missiles.
The millions of human lives, the devastation, and the
radioactive consequences for everyone involved would have been
unimaginable, irrecoverable.
Did the October, or Missile, Crisis simply break out or had it
been prepared?
First we must look at the reasons why nuclear weapons were
installed in Cuba, and then at the development of events. In the
first place, we were convinced - and secret documents released
later proved us right - that the United States was preparing a
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direct military attack on Cuba.
Later, when it was declassified, we would learn about the
“Mongoose” plan, which in fact was to culminate in October, when,
after creating a civil war situation in Cuba - according to the
fevered imagination of the CIA officials in charge of the plan
- U.S. troops would intervene.
We saw this coming, although we didn’t know about the entire
plan, which was controlled personally by Robert Kennedy.
So we asked the Soviets to accelerate the schedule for the
delivery of armaments.
On May 29, 1962, they sent us a high-level delegation, led by
Rachidov, alternate member of the Political Bureau of the
Communist Party of the USSR and first secretary of one of the
Asian republics; Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, chief of Soviet
missile forces; and Aleksandr Alexeev, who had recently been
named Soviet ambassador to Cuba, a tremendous man. He had
excellent relations with Cuba; he was here as a journalist
during the first days of the revolutionary triumph, and he
thought like a Cuban. He thought we were right throughout the
crisis.
This commission explained that the Soviet leadership had
analyzed our point of view and had come to the same conclusion
as we had with respect to the probable direct military attack,
and that the only thing that could deter this attack was the
installation of a number of nuclear warheads on medium- and
intermediate-range missiles.
The Cuban leadership studied the issue and approached it in this
way: if it were solely for the defense of Cuba, we would have
preferred another solution over this one - for example, a
military pact between the USSR and Cuba and a public statement
that an attack on Cuba would be considered an attack on the USSR.
Such a formulation would also have been a deterrent and,
furthermore, would have been backed up by the shipment of more
conventional arms and the corresponding advisers. But we told
them we accepted the option of the nuclear missiles, considering
that this would improve the East-West relationship of forces in
favor of the socialist camp, to which we belonged, and
subsequently would strengthen our defense against the plans
being developed by the Pentagon to invade us.
We had no idea of the nuclear imbalance between the United States
and the USSR. Fidel [Castro] would say years later that if he
had known that the imbalance at the time was so great, he would
have recommended to the Soviet leadership that they be more
cautious and reject the idea of installing the missiles here,
because we could not be so imprudent when the gap was so great.
The Cuban leadership thought we should not approach the question
solely from the point of view of defending Cuba. Since we
belonged to the socialist camp and were asking it to make
sacrifices for us, then it was also incumbent upon us to assume
responsibilities involving risks and danger.
From the standpoint of international law, Cuba is a sovereign
country, as was the USSR, and we adopted an agreement covered
by Article 51 of the UN Charter.
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It was for all these reasons that the Cuban leadership agreed
to respond positively to the Soviet proposal. The Soviets sent
a draft accord that was a sloppy, tactless document. The
agreement was rewritten in Cuba, in Commander-in-Chief Fidel
Castro’s own handwriting, and was taken to Moscow by Rau’l
[Castro, Cuban armed forces minister] to be translated and
studied. The translation turned out to be very difficult,
because the discussions were with then-Defense Minister Marshal
Rodion Malinovsky, with no one else present besides Ambassador
Alexeev. We didn’t speak Russian and they didn’t speak Spanish,
and our knowledge of diplomatic language was weak, so we often
had to resort to dictionaries to get the right terms.
Nikita Khrushchev’s autobiography gives an account of the events
according to which the Cuban authorities did not agree, for
example, on the question of the secret or public character of
the military treaty. How did it really happen?
Cuba was not in favor of nondisclosure of the accord, given the
missile question. We were convinced that not making the CubaUSSR military accord public would lend a dubious character to a
legal and sovereign act, which the United States would use in
its favor. And we let the Soviets know this very frankly.
Khrushchev did not want to make it public in the middle of the
U.S. congressional election campaign, because he did not want
to harm Kennedy’s chances of winning. He proposed making the
announcement in November, during a visit he was planning to
Cuba, after the U.S. elections. This is the historical reality.
Then the question arose: What would the USSR do if, in the middle
of the operation, the United States discovered it? How would the
two superpowers react? The delegation that came in late May had
no answer to this. When Rau’l was in Moscow in July, he asked
the Soviet prime minister the same question, on Fidel’s behalf.
And?
And Nikita’s answer was, “We will send the Baltic Fleet.”
We were pleased with the promised action, as it meant the
Soviets had decided not to retreat in case the crisis eventually
broke out.
In late August, another Cuban delegation, headed by Che
[Guevara], went to the USSR. He asked Khrushchev the same
question, this time less hypothetically, as the United States
was creating an atmosphere of hysteria over the arrival of a
large quantity of armaments in Cuba. Nikita, who was a short man
with short limbs, raised his right arm and reiterated, “We will
send the Baltic Fleet.” Che proposed signing the military accord
on behalf of Cuba and making it public immediately. The Soviet
leadership did not agree to announce it at that time, but rather
in November, after the U.S. elections; also, Nikita and Fidel
were to sign it in Havana.
Later, when the crisis broke out over the installation of
missiles with nuclear warheads, how do you evaluate the course
of events?
My impression is that Nikita arrived at a time when he was
flustered by the crisis. And also that the senior Soviet
leadership made several errors, including the discussion on the
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offensive or defensive character of those weapons. The correct
thing would have been to proclaim the sovereign right of Cuba
to acquire the arms it considered necessary for its defense.
All Cuban statements were based on this right and we never fell
into the trap of labeling the type of weapons. It was a long and
pointless discussion, but for the U.S. government, a weapon
capable of reaching its territory was considered “offensive.”
Another error was not announcing the accord. If, as soon as the
pact was adopted, it was announced that Cuba had the weapons
necessary to confront any foreign attack, it would have
accomplished its political and military objective.
On the other hand, however, it must be said that, in general,
the Soviet operation of transferring weapons as well as
personnel, and their deployment, was flawless, considering the
magnitude and distance.
As is known, this situation was settled between Moscow and
Washington, without taking into account the Cuban position. Did
this bilateral resolution damage relations between Cuba and the
USSR?
Of course it damaged them. But rather than pour vinegar and salt
in the wound, we used balm, and we worked to put that episode
behind us, which we did.
Given the fact that the Cubans were excluded from the
negotiations to resolve this problem, the outlook for relations
between Havana and Washington was tense. Would the situation
have been different if Cuba had participated in the discussions?
The discussion of the problem should always have been between
the three of us - the USSR, the United States, and Cuba. The
crisis was handled the wrong way; Cuba should have been heard.
There was no justification for keeping us out of the
negotiations.
We believe our participation in the discussions could have
extracted guarantees to halt the preparations for an attack, the
spy flights, the economic and financial blockade - which had
been decreed in early 1962 - the acts of sabotage, and the return
of the land holding the U.S. naval base on Cuban territory, which
is important to the United States for purely political reasons
since, militarily speaking, it is obsolete and constitutes a
death trap.
The Soviets, nevertheless, achieved the dismantling of the U.S.
missile bases in Turkey.... For the United States, these bases
had become a liability more than an advantage. We now know that
they had raised withdrawing them with the Turks a year earlier.
They feared that in a confrontation with the USSR, Soviet troops
would occupy them. But the Turkish government was opposed, since
it considered them important for its defense, and the United
States did not insist. If you think about it, they were more
considerate of their Turkish allies than the Soviets were with
us.
What impact did this situation, its development and outcome,
have in Cuba?
Since then we have known for certain that, in the event of an
attack, we can count only on ourselves. Che described it very
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well when he called them “the brilliant, but sad days of the
October Crisis.”
Brilliant, because the people knew that they were risking the
very existence of the country and confronted the situation with
dedication and courage. There was not a hint of panic either in
the country’s leadership or among the people. More than 400,000
people mobilized and formed the regular forces, the reserves,
and the militia units. The United States, as McNamara confessed
to me at the first “Tripartite Meeting on the Crisis” in Moscow,
did not know about this enormous deployment capacity of Cuba.
Sad, because Cuba continued to be subjected to the danger of an
attack. There are those who say that we succeeded in winning the
pledge that a military attack would not be launched, but this
is a fallacy. If the United States didn’t attack, it was due to
their growing involvement in the Vietnam War and the steady
strengthening of Cuban military power.
Experience showed that they could not fight two wars at the same
time.
Does this mean that the situation has radically changed?
During all those years Cuba grew stronger, and we have more
weapons and are better armed. The doctrine of war of all the
people was conceived and put into practice, by which millions
of people have weapons and a means of combat, are organized, and
know what their post is in the event of war.
The great hero, the protagonist of that crisis, is the same as
today: the people. They are resisting, not a short-term tense
situation, but rather daily challenges of every kind.
And, among the people, the heroes are the women, who every day
face the problems of feeding the family, caring for the kids basically everything necessary to survive.
And together with the people, we have a leadership capable of
finding solutions to these everyday problems, of resisting the
special period and the blockade, which has been intensified to
inconceivable lengths by the Helms-Burton law, of defending the
country’s independence, and leading the gradual recovery of the
economy.
ASSLEY
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October 2, Wednesday: The United States government sent out cables to all Latin American governments and NATO
nations outlining new measures to tighten its economic embargo of Cuba.
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy sent Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge a mixed message, that “no initiative
should now be taken to give any encouragement to a coup” in South Vietnam while he was seeking to “identify
and build contacts with possible leadership as and when it appears.”
October 5, Saturday: Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge informed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy that the coup
being plotted against President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam appeared to be on again. The rebel generals
led by Duong Van “Big” Minh were asking for assurances that the US would not attempt to interfere with their
coup and that our aid would be uninterrupted. President Kennedy gave these pledges, communicating with the
plotters by way of CIA agents.
October 25, Friday: The White House, terrified about the public-relations consequences if the military coup in Saigon
should fail, was calmed by reassurances from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.
October 28, Monday: Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge reported that the military coup in Saigon was “imminent.”
October 29, Tuesday: Instructed by the White House to delay the military coup in Saigon, Ambassador Henry Cabot
Lodge responded that at this point it could only be stopped by our betraying the conspirators to President Ngo
Dinh Diem.
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November 1, Friday: On this day at the presidential palace in Saigon, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge took his usual
meeting with President Ngo Dinh Diem at 10AM and departed at noon. At 1:30PM as scheduled, during
Vietnam’s traditional siesta time, the mutineers roared into town and surrounded the presidential palace. They
also seized the headquarters of the police. Diem and his brother Nhu, trapped at the palace, refused appeals for
their surrender. Diem phoned the rebel generals and tried to talk them out of their coup. He then phoned Lodge
to inquire “what is the attitude of the United States?” Lodge responded that since it was 4:30AM in Washington
DC, “the US government cannot possibly have a view.” He expressed concern for Diem’s safety, to which
Diem responded “I am trying to restore order.” At 8PM, Diem and Nhu slipped out of the presidential palace
unnoticed and made their way to a safe house in the suburbs that belonged to a wealthy Chinese merchant.
November 2, Saturday, 3AM: An aide to President Ngo Dinh Diem betrayed the whereabouts of his leader to the
mutineers. At 6AM, Diem and Nhu phoned the generals from a Catholic church and offered to surrender.
They were secured inside an armored personnel carrier and then shot to death. At the White House, a meeting
was interrupted by news of the President’s death. Saigon was celebrating. Witnesses report that President
John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s face turned white as he left the room. The President would jot in his private diary
that “I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it.” This coup would produce a power vacuum
in which a series of military and civilian governments would in turn seize control of the US’s client kingdom
of South Vietnam. The Viet Cong would meanwhile be profiting from the unstable political situation in the
cities to increase their hold over the rural population to nearly 40%.
China shot down a Nationalist U-2 spy plane.
The new South Vietnamese government freed about 150 political prisoners including all the Buddhist leaders
seized in the recent unrest.
Overture on Russian and Kyrgyz Themes for orchestra by Dmitri Shostakovich was performed for the initial
time, in Frunze.
November 22, Friday: A memorial window to John Ireland was unveiled in the Musicians’ Chapel of the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre, London.
C.S. Lewis died in Oxford at the age of 64. Aldous Huxley died of cancer in Los Angeles at the age of 69.
Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was
scheduled to be screened on this evening but the screening would be indefinitely postponed in consequence of
another event of this day.
In Dallas, Texas, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot twice from a 6th-floor warehouse window as he
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rode in an open car and was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital.19 In the restaurant of the House of
Representatives in Washington DC, having lunch, Speaker of the House John W. McCormack was approached
by reporters who advised him that the President had just been shot. A minute later he was advised inaccurately
that Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson had also been shot. A minute after that he was advised that Secret
Service agents were on their way to protect him — if both the President and the Vice-President were dead, he
was next in line as President of the United States of America. It was 2:18PM. Rising unsteadily from his chair,
the Speaker of the House experienced an attack of vertigo and sank back down again. Soon, however, another
Congressman called over to his table to inform him that there had been some misinformation, that actually
Johnson was unharmed.
On the plane heading back to Washington, Vice President Johnson put his hand on a Bible and was sworn in
as President. He would be the 4th US president to attempt to cope with the situation in Vietnam and would
oversee a massive escalation of the war while continuing to heed the advice of many of the same hawk
apparatchiks who had been serving the Kennedy administration.
At that time the FBI had no statutory authority to investigate presidential assassinations. President Lyndon
Baines Johnson, however, ordered the Bureau to investigate. The conclusion that would be arrived at would
be that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. They would have arrived at that conclusion regardless of the facts
that they developed — but I happen to believe that conclusion to have been not only the politically mandatory
conclusion, but (quite coincidentally) also what had actually gone down there on Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
Aldous Leonard Huxley died. Here is some of his legacy:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving — by paying attention and doing
what one thereby discovers has to be done.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that is your own self.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at
the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice that “Try to be a little kinder.”
19. It is said that everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when they received the news of this death.
Driving a Volkswagen bus carrying Merce Cunningham and his dance company on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, John Cage pulled
into a gas station to inquire why American flags were at half-mast. I, Austin Meredith, was in Marine uniform in downtown San
Diego, with a detail that was picking up a prisoner named Spain to take back up to Camp Pendleton for incarceration when a taxi
driver rushed by shouting “Hey, that son of a bitch Kennedy has got shot!”
ASSLEY
The nuclear doomsday black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was in the
final stages of preparation. The voice of Slim Pickins, reviewing his B-52’s “survival kit” which included a condom, $100 in gold
coins, and a pair of nylon stockings, was altered so that instead of saying “Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas
with all that stuff,” he seemed to say “Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”
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•
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is
oneself.
(I’m not sure what Jack Kennedy’s legacy was. Perhaps it was that during his era the President of the United
States of America got to fuck whoever he wanted wherever he wanted — a legacy that would not remain the
case as standards of media reticence changed, and would be entirely gone by the florut of President Bill
Clinton.)
Martin H Manser’s THE FACTS ON FILE DICTIONARY OF ALLUSIONS (Facts On File, Incorporated, 2008) offers
the following:
shot heard round the world The shooting of a bullet or some other
event that proves to have momentous international significance.
The phrase has been applied to more than one such shot in
history, but is particularly associated with the first shot of
the American Revolution. It was fired on the morning of April
19, 1775, when a force of farmers and minutemen confronted
British troops across a bridge at Concord, Massachusetts. An
unidentified man fired the first shot without any order being
given, and the first of many battles was joined. The phrase was
later incorporated by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) in his
“Concord Hymn” (1836): “By the rude bridge that arched the
flood, / Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, / Here once the
embattled farmers stood, / And fired the shot heard ’round the
world.” In 1914 another “shot heard round the world” was fired
by Gavrilo Princip at Sarajevo, triggering World War I. In 1963
Lee Harvey Oswald fired a shot that was heard round the world.
November 24, Sunday: In the course of a meeting with Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Washington DC, President
Lyndon Baines Johnson declared he was not going to “lose Vietnam.” (Of course you aren’t, big boy — you
aren’t ever going to let anyone cut off your Johnson and put it in their pocket!)
Hey, hey, LBJ!
Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused murderer of President John Kennedy, was gunned down by Jack Ruby, a
restaurant owner, in Dallas. The prisoner was being transferred from the city jail to county jail when Ruby
burst from a group of reporters and fired point blank into Oswald’s side. Oswald died later in surgery at
Parkland Hospital. Leonard Bernstein conducted a memorial concert for President Kennedy with the New
York Philharmonic over the airwaves of CBS television. The music was the Symphony no.2 “Resurrection”
of Gustav Mahler.
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December: South Vietnam had in the course of this year received $500,000,000 worth of US aid. There were 16,300
American military advisors in country.
The Vallecitos light-water uranium reactor (VBWR), that had been the initial privately owned and operated
nuclear power plant to deliver significant quantities of electricity to a public utility grid, had by this point
delivered something like 40,000 megawatt-hours of clean, affordable, peaceful electrical electricity to its local
utility customers. This facility would become GE’s test reactor (GETR).
The USA bought back 1,113 of the Cuban exiles captured by Fidel Castro in the “Bay of Pigs” fiasco in
exchange for $53,000,000 payable in medicines and baby food. (Other of these POWs would be held at the
Isle of Pines prison of Cuba until 1986.)
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
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1964
The United States sent four transport planes to provide airlift for Congolese troops during a rebellion and to
transport Belgian paratroopers to rescue foreigners.
At this point, US military advisers had been in South Vietnam already for a decade and their numbers had been
increasing as the military prospects of the Saigon government had worsened. After the attacks on US
destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf, President Lyndon Baines Johnson asked for a resolution expressing US
determination to support freedom and protect peace in Southeast Asia. Congress responded with the Tonkin
Gulf Resolution, expressing support for “all necessary measures” the President might take to repel armed
attacks against US forces and prevent further aggression. Following this resolution, and following a
Communist attack on a US installation in central Vietnam, the United States would escalate its participation in
the war to a peak of 543 000 during April 1969.
Over the next two years, South Korea would be sending 40,000 heavily armed soldiers to Binh Dinh, Phu Yen,
Khanh Hoa, and Ninh Thuan provinces. The soldiers were trained in taekwondo but this did not demonstrate
its effectiveness in combat. Major General Charles P. Brown, Commander of I Field Force, Vietnam, would
report that the Korean military frequently failed to show initiative when conducting military operations or
sympathy when dealing with civilians. General Brown’s predecessor had been less kind, saying that the two
Korean divisions were less use than one US brigade, a unit ten times smaller. General Creighton Abrahms told
Vice-President Spiro Agnew that the Korean forces were militarily no better than the South Vietnamese, for
whom Abrahms had only contempt. As for Taekwondo’s reported effect on character-building, the cases that
come to mind of its use outside the training yard involved the beheadings of a woman and her eight children
following a sniper attack, and a beating delivered to a US Army major who had complained about a Korean
Marine colonel’s involvement in black market profiteering.
January 27, Monday: France and the Peoples Republic of China institute diplomatic relations.
Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara tells a Senate committee that the government intends to
withdraw most of its 15,000 troops from South Vietnam by the end of next year.
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January 30, Thursday: General Duong Van “Big” Minh was ousted by means of a bloodless coup led by General
Nguyen Khanh, who would become the new leader of South Vietnam.
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March: In the magazine Pacific Islands Monthly (Volume 35, page 115), under the rubric “Pleasant Legends,” it was
written that “Captain Cook is credited with having brought the tortoise Jonathan to St. Helena [in 1775 aboard
the Resolution], but in three years residence here, I have never heard of any connection between the two.”
The US was supporting bombing raids against the Ho Chi Minh trail inside Laos, but this was being done by
mercenaries flying old American fighter planes, with the US backing for this held as some sort of deep dark
secret that only we and the enemy were supposed to know about.
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What
goes
around
keeps
coming
around
and
around
and
around...
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March 6, Friday: On a visit to South Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara pledged that “We’ll
stay for as long as it takes. We shall provide whatever help is required to win the battle against the Communist
insurgents.” He averred, in particular, that General Nguyen Khanh had “our admiration, our respect and our
complete support.” Following this visit, the Defense Secretary would urge President Lyndon Baines Johnson
to shore up the sagging South Vietnamese army with increased military assistance. The cost to the USA of
maintaining its global reputation by propping up South Vietnam’s army and managing the overall conflict in
SouthEast Asian theater would rise to $2,000,000 per day. McNamara and other Johnson policy makers,
considering that the credibility of the US was at stake globally, would become focused on the need to prevent
a Communist triumph in South Vietnam, and would transform the war in Vietnam from something we
allegedly were doing for the benefit of the Vietnamese people into a straightforward test of US resolve in
fighting Communism, with America’s prestige and the last inch of the President’s Johnson at stake. President
Johnson would lack the inner resources to resist this personalization of the situation, and would be clueless as
to the manner in which the conflict was being transformed from one with limited and attainable objectives into
one with limitless and unobtainable objectives.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
March 17, Tuesday: The National Security Council recommended the bombing of North Vietnam. President Lyndon
Baines Johnson approved only that the Pentagon initiate the planning for this.
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May:
During this period American air power in Southeast Asia was being massively reinforced and, prompted by a
North Vietnamese offensive in Laos, a couple of our aircraft carriers were arriving off the Vietnamese coast.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s aides began work on a Congressional resolution in support of the
administration’s war effort in Vietnam. Due to lack of support in the Senate the resolution would be shelved
temporarily, but later on this text would get recycled as the “Gulf of Tonkin” resolution. What a marvelous
thing is a provocation!
Hey, hey, LBJ!
TONKIN GULF “INCIDENT”
Summer: With 56,000 Viet Cong spreading guerrilla terror throughout South Vietnam, they began to be reinforced via
the Ho Chi Minh trail by North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars. Informed of the presence of regular army
troops in the countryside, President Lyndon Baines Johnson approved a covert CIA-run venture that would
assault radar sites along the coastline of North Vietnam by sending out speedboats of South Vietnamese
commandos. The raids were to be supported by warships of the US Navy operating in the Gulf of Tonkin,
including the destroyer USS Maddox which was to us its electronic surveillance to pinpoint the radar locations
which were to be attacked. This was labeled Operation Plan 34A.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
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July 1, Wednesday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed General Maxwell D. Taylor, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, as his new ambassador to South Vietnam. (During a 1-year tenure, Taylor would need to be
dealing with 5 successive South Vietnamese puppet governments!)
The President appointed Lieutenant General William C. Westmoreland to be the new US military commander
in Vietnam.
July 16, Thursday-17, Friday: Senator Barry Goldwater was selected by the Republican Party at its national
convention in San Francisco as their party’s nominee for President. During his acceptance speech Goldwater
declared famously that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Although what he meant by this
campaign rhetoric is unknown, Goldwater was a virulent Cold Warrior and the morsels of inflammatory
persuasiveness coming out of this man’s mouth would in fact be driving many of the White House’s decisions
concerning Vietnam. The campaign aides to President Lyndon Baines Johnson were well aware that although
they should not put the President in the position of being portrayed by the left as a “war monger” concerning
Vietnam, what they could not afford was to have anyone derogate their candidate as the one that was “soft on
Communism.”One disadvantage that Senator Goldwater had, in addition to a name that sounded almost
Hey, hey, LBJ!
Jewish, was that he lacked credentials as a segregationist. How were Southern Republicans going to be able
to trust him?
July 30/31, Thursday/Friday: In the Gulf of Tonkin, as part of Operation Plan 34A, South Vietnamese commandos in
unmarked speed boats raided a couple of North Vietnamese military bases that were located on islands just off
the coast. The destroyer USS Maddox, an electronic spy ship, was in the vicinity with orders to electronically
simulate an air attack in order to draw North Vietnamese boats away from these commandos.
Well, you know how these things go. The fog of war and all that....
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August 2, Sunday: 10 miles off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin, 3 North Vietnamese patrol boats
roared toward the American surveillance vessel USS Maddox. Although they fired 3 torpedoes, the Maddox
was struck by only a single machine-gun round. There were of course no casualties. US Navy fighters off the
carrier Ticonderoga, led by Commander James Stockdale, attacked these insolent patrol boats, sinking 1 and
damaging the others. At the White House, 12 hours behind Vietnam time, it was a Sunday morning. President
Lyndon Baines Johnson fired off a diplomatic warning to Hanoi of the “grave consequences” that might follow
from any more such “unprovoked” attacks. He then ordered the USS Maddox to continue operations in the
Gulf of Tonkin in the same vicinity in which this attack had occurred, while his Joints Chiefs of Staff were
selecting targets in North Vietnam for a retaliatory bombing raid and readying US combat troops.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
August 3, Monday: The Mexican government announced that it would maintain its diplomatic relations with Cuba in
spite of the Organization of American States vote of July 26th.
String Sextet op.408 by Darius Milhaud was performed for the initial time, at the Library of Congress,
Washington DC.
The intelligence vessel USS Maddox, with a 2d destroyer USS C. Turner Joy, began to zigzag provocatively
in the Gulf of Tonkin, coming within 8 miles of North Vietnam’s coast, masking the activities of South
Vietnamese commandos who in speedboats were harassing North Vietnamese along the coastline. At nightfall
there were thunderstorms which affected the accuracy of electronic instruments on these US destroyers, and
nervous or overeager crew members, staring at their instruments, were able to persuade themselves that they
have been brought under torpedo attack again by North Vietnamese patrol boats. Oh lookie on my scope,
there’s another one! It must have been a pretty spectacle from the shore, for although there were no actual
sightings of any actual attackers, indeed both destroyers did open fire, boom ba boom boom, and were able to
obliterate numerous apparent targets.
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August 4, Tuesday: The bodies of James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were uncovered by
FBI agents nine kilometers west of Philadelphia, Mississippi (these three young civil rights workers had gone
missing on the night of June 21st after being released by the local police).
The skipper of the surveillance vessel USS Maddox had reported that it had been fired on in “international
waters,” and that an attack from North Vietnam was imminent in “international waters.” Then later he had
reported that, actually, no, there had not been any such attack, never mind about the “international waters.”
Well but, the wheels of the Johnson administration in Washington DC were already grinding this stuff into the
finest grist. 6 hours after that initial report the President ordered retaliation. We’ll teach you not to do what you
didn’t do! Oil facilities and naval targets were attacked by 64 fighter bombers of the US Navy, 2 of which got
shot down. In a midnight TV appearance an hour after the attack began, President Lyndon Baines Johnson
assured the American people that “Our response for the present will be limited and fitting.” Because what he
was seeking was a spreading of the conflict, a wider war, he went “We Americans know, although others
appear to forget, the risk of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.” The Vietnamese took their initial
American airman prisoner of war, Lieutenant Everett Alvarez of San Jose, California, they took him to an
internment center in Hanoi later to be dubbed the “Hanoi Hilton” by the nearly 600 American airmen who
would become long-term residents there. The American press jumped on the reports that had become available
and, although no actual journalists had been on board either of the destroyers, began to embellish a 2d “attack”
off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin, offering spectacular eyewitness accounts. Although
immediately in the government there were doubts concerning the validity of at least a 2d attack on our
destroyers in “international waters,” at least among the levelheaded, nothing could have stopped the Joint
Chiefs of Staff from strongly recommending that the US conduct a retaliatory bombing raid against North
Vietnam, that’s what they do is be useful to our nation, and our President, being after all merely yet another
cowboy from Texas, was of course assenting to all this because it enabled him to seize for his administration
a power to declare war that had been reserved, in the United States Constitution, exclusively to the federal
legislative branch of government.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
The USS Constellation, visiting Hong Kong on a regularly scheduled R&R port visit, scrambled to “sail”
immediately and began launching strikes against North Vietnamese vessels and bases. For the following 8
years, the Connie would be returning to the South China Sea for a total of 7 combat cruises, conducting air
strikes against heavily fortified North Vietnamese positions, engaging naval targets, and shooting down enemy
aircraft. The 1st American aces of the war, Lieutenant Randall Cunningham and Lieutenant Junior Grade
Willie Driscoll of Fighter Attack Squadron 96, would fly off the Constellation’s decks. Their success would
come during the ship’s 7th WESTPAC, its 6th combat cruise. For its actions in Southeast Asia the Connie
would be awarded a Presidential Unit Citation — like the flea and the fly they flew up a flaw in the flue.
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August 5, Wednesday: Numerous newspaper editorials supported the bombing of North Vietnam. Opinion polls
indicated that 85% of Americans supported President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s action. The President’s aides,
including Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara, began to lobby the Congress to pass a White House
resolution that was short of a declaration of war but would give the President the freedom to operate as he
chose as Commander-in-Chief without any oversight.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
August 6, Thursday: During a meeting in the Senate, Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara was confronted
by Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. The Senator had apparently been tipped off by some disloyal person in
the Pentagon that the USS Maddox, although posturing as a “victim of unprovoked attack,” had actually been
operating at the time in conjunction with commando raids being staged against North Vietnam. The Defense
Secretary lied in the Senator’s face, averring that the US Navy had “played absolutely no part in, was not
associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions — if there were any.”20
August 7, Friday: The careerist politicians who make up our US federal Congress stepped out of the Constitutional line
of fire by enacting a “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,” awarding President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his minion
Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara the power to take whatever actions they considered necessary
to defend the freedom and liberty of southeast Asia. Go kill some folks and improve the hell out of that
situation!
20. At some point President Johnson commented to Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara that he had been well aware that
there perhaps had been no attack of any sort: “When we got through with all the firing, we concluded maybe they hadn’t fired at all.”
In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg would leak the “Pentagon Papers” to the press, proving that the pretext for this escalation was based upon
distortions. Before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Ellsberg would ask government officials who knew that the Bush
administration was deceiving the public to come clean, and in 2004 he would reiterate this plea: “Do what I wish I had done in 1964:
go to the press, to Congress, and document your claims,” he would advise. Senator Robert Byrd, in opposition to the resolution
authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq, would compare that current crisis with the one lawmakers had faced in 1964.
“This is the Tonkin Gulf resolution all over again,” he would insist during October 2002. “Let us not give this president or any
president unchecked power. Remember the Constitution.”
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August 19, Wednesday: Having reached the age of 18, William Jefferson Clinton registered for the draft at Hot
Springs, Arkansas. Just another red-blooded American boy ready to give his life for his nation!21
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I will not lie to you...
August 21, Friday: In Saigon, students and Buddhist militants began a series of escalating protests against the regime
of General Nguyen Khanh. Khanh would decide to share power with General Duong Van “Big” Minh and
General Khiem, but amid the gross instability of the puppet government the streets of Saigon would
disintegrate into chaos and mob violence.
Students and Buddhists marched in Hué against the South Vietnamese government.
After 2 days of fierce fighting, Congolese government troops regained control of Bukavu from rebels. The
Congolese government rounded up and expelled citizens of the Congo Republic, Burundi, and Mali on the
grounds that these nations were supporting the rebels.
Bolivia broke diplomatic relations with Cuba.
August 26, Wednesday: At the Democratic National Convention, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was renominated.
During his campaign he would declare that “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand
miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves!”
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Hey, hey, LBJ!
21. Not.
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August 26, Wednesday: At the Democratic National Convention, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was renominated.
During his campaign he would declare that “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand
miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves!”
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Hey, hey, LBJ!
September 4, Friday: Prime Minister Nguyen Khanh of South Vietnam announced the resignation of all army officers
from ministerial positions.
More riots between ethnic Chinese and Malays erupted in Singapore. 8 people were killed on the 1st day and
a 2PM curfew imposed. The rioting would continue for a week.
September 7, Monday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson assembled top aides at the White House to ponder our future
course of action in Vietnam.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
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September 13, Sunday: A coup was staged in Saigon by a couple of unusually disgruntled South Vietnamese generals,
unsuccessfully.
October 16, Friday: The People’s Republic of China, North Vietnam’s neighbor and ally, exploded its initial nuclear
device, near Lop Noor, Sinkiang. This produced a 20-kiloton detonation.Well, but we knew how to defend
ourselves. Doesn’t this look all cozy and family-value?
By this time, responding to US escalation of the conflict in the SouthEast Asian theater, China had of course
positioned masses of troops along its border with Vietnam.
James Harold Wilson of the Labour Party replaced Conservative Sir Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister
of the United Kingdom.
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November 1, Sunday: A couple of days before the US presidential election the 1st attack by the Viet Cong directly
against the American presence came, at our Bien Hoa air base a dozen miles north of Saigon. This pre-dawn
mortar assault killed 5 Americans and 2 South Vietnamese, while wounding some 76 others. 5 of our B-57s
were destroyed and 15 damaged. Were the Viet Cong trying to ensure that LBJ would win the Oval Office?
November 17, Tuesday: William Jefferson Clinton was classified by his draft board as 2-S (student deferment).
(Bill would come to oppose this Vietnam war in which he might get shot at, oppose it on deep principal, its
being such a poorly advised war — although he would never become a pacifist and oppose also the wars in
which the only people being shot at were other people. In this way he would make himself fit to be our
President.)
In Moscow, a major reorganization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was announced by the Central
Committee.
NBC-TV showed the documentary film “The Louvre,” with music by Norman Dello Joio, for the first time.
November 25, Wednesday: Rioting by Buddhists against the South Vietnamese government took place throughout
Saigon.
An all-white jury in Jacksonville, Florida acquitted four Ku Klux Klan of dynamiting the home of Donald
Godfrey, a 6-year-old who had been admitted to a previously all-white school.
December: Ernesto “Che” Guevara began a world tour (he would visit 8 African countries and China).
Some 10,000 soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army arrived unannounced in the Central Highlands of South
Vietnam via their Ho Chi Minh trail, carrying sophisticated weaponry from China and from the Soviet Union.
They would be able to shore up Viet Cong battalions with the weapons and ammo, and were able to provide
leaders experienced in larger-scale military operations.
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December 1, Tuesday: At the White House, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge
Bundy, and Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara, a bunch of guys with good haircuts without a
single clue, recommended to President Lyndon Baines Johnson precisely the opposite of what any sane or
decent adviser might have recommended: a policy of gradual escalation of US military involvement in
Vietnam.
Sic ‘em, boy!
Viet Cong fighters overran the district headquarters at Thiengiao east of Saigon. After killing the district chief
and carrying of a large weapons cache, they retired before government reinforcements could arrive.
West Germany acceded to the Common Market agricultural plan, paving the way for the integration of the
agricultures of the six member countries.
Gustavo Díaz Ordaz Bolaños replaced Adolfo López Mateos as president of Mexico.
Malawi, Malta, and the Republic of Zambia were admitted to the United Nations.
“Three Against Christmas,” a comic opera by Andrew Imbrie to words of Wincor, was performed for the initial
time in Berkeley, California.
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December 20, day: In Saigon, there was yet another military coup as General Nguyen Khanh and young officers, led
by Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, ousted older generals including General Duong Van “Big” Minh.
December 21, day: Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor summoned the young officers who had seized control of South
Vietnam to the US embassy and, affecting anger, scolded them like schoolboys. He had already warned them,
he said, that the Americans had gotten “tired of coups.” General Nguyen Khanh would comment to the press
that America was reverting to “colonialism.”
December 24, day: At at 5:45PM at the Brinks Hotel, a residence for American officers in downtown Saigon, the Viet
Cong set off a car bomb. The bomb had been timed to explode during the “happy hour” in the hotel bar, and
two Americans were killed and 58 wounded. By year’s end, the number of American advisors in South
Vietnam would total 23,000 and there would be an estimated 170,000 Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Army
fighters in the “People’s Revolutionary Army.”
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1965
The US federal government designated Eastern State Penitentiary a National Historic Landmark (yes, that
does sound desperate).
George Evelyn Hutchinson’s THE ECOLOGICAL THEATER AND THE EVOLUTIONARY PLAY.
In Britain, the 2d Brain Committee recommended increased control over opiates, including a system of addict
notification, the establishment of special treatment centers which would seek to rehabilitate and not just
maintain drug users, and the restriction of heroin supplies to these centers. These recommendations would be
put into effect with the Dangerous Drug Act of 1968.
Prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia were subjected to dioxin, a highly toxic chemical
component found in the Agent Orange used in Vietnam. The prisoners would later be checked to see if they
had gotten cancer as a result of these secret medical experiments — which would seem to indicate that we have
been suspecting all along, that Agent Orange might well prove to be carcinogenic.
Anyway, 42% of all this “herbicide” being spread across the countryside by Operation Ranch Hand would be
dedicated to croplands and intended to produce famine, so if it’s famine we’re after, why should we draw the
line at a few cancers?
When a military analyst for the New York Times, Hanson Baldwin, dared to opinion that in order to achieve
the needed military results we might need to place up to 1,000,000 US troops in South Vietnam, his newspaper
denounced, in an editorial, its own analyst’s stance (the highest troop levels would come in 1968, when we
would have 536,100 American soldiers there, along with 50,000 South Korean soldiers, along with 7,660
Australian soldiers, along with 6,000 Thai soldiers, along with 1,580 Philippine soldiers, along with 520 New
Zealand soldiers, for a grand sum total of 601,860 Allied soldiers, not counting of course 820,000 South
Vietnamese soldiers).
January 1, Friday: Across South Vietnam, Vietcong forces began a series of attacks (until February 7th). They would
briefly seize control of Binh Gia, a village only a day trip from Saigon. Near Binh Gia they would kill some
200 South Vietnamese troops, along with 5 American advisors.
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January 20, Wednesday: In Saigon, 5 Buddhist monks called for the resignation of Prime Minister Tran Van Huong,
beginning a hunger strike.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Alan Freed died in Palm Springs, California at the age of 43.
Taking the constitutional oath as President, Lyndon Baines Johnson orated against isolationism: “We can never
again stand aside, prideful in isolation.”
Hey, hey, LBJ!
This was the month in which the anti-isolationist US Navy was beginning its river patrols of South Vietnam’s
3000 nautical miles of inland waterways. Gunboats to the rescue!
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January 23: 200 Buddhists in Nhatrang began a hunger strike to protest the government of South Vietnamese Prime
Minister Tran Van Huong.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
About 5,000 Buddhists marched on the US Consulate in Hue (a few dozen of them would break in and set fire
to the building).
A federal court prohibited the January 19th actions of Dallas County officials and forbade them to harass
anyone attempting to register, or anyone helping them.
January 25, Monday: 15,000 Buddhists marched through Hue, South Vietnam, demanding the resignation of Prime
Minister Tran van Hong and the recall of US ambassador Maxwell Taylor. The military declared martial law
in Hue due to continuing anti-government violence.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Three days of violent demonstrations took place in Madras state, India to protest the replacement of English
by Hindi as the official language of the country (which was due to go down on the following day).
January 27, Wednesday: 24 people were arrested for attempting to stand in line to register to vote in Selma, Alabama,
or for urging others to persist in that course of conduct.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Lieutenant-General Nguyen Khanh seized full control of South Vietnam’s government from Prime Minister
Tran Van Huong. Nguyen Xuan Oanh was named acting prime minister. Their objective temporarily achieved,
five Buddhist monks ended their hunger strike begun on January 20th.
National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara sent a
memo to President Lyndon Baines Johnson stating that the US had reached a “fork in the road” because
America’s limited military involvement in Vietnam was not succeeding. We needed to either escalate or
withdraw, and whichever option we chose, we needed to begin this soon.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
Norman Dello Joio was elected to the council of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
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Six Simple Songs for voice and piano by Bohuslav Martinu was performed for the initial time, in Prague, 48
years after it was composed.
Brass Quintet by Ralph Shapey was performed for the initial time, in Kaufmann Concert Hall, New York.
Also premiered was Numbers for flute, horn, trombone, tuba, percussion, piano, violin, cello and double bass
by Morton Feldman.
Three works by Steve Reich were performed for the initial time at the San Francisco Tape Music Center:
It’s Gonna Rain for tape, Music for Two or More Pianos or Piano and Tape, and Livelihood for tape.
February 4, Thursday: National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy visited South Vietnam for the first time while
Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin was arriving in Hanoi.
Loyal Laotian troops gained control of Vientiane, crushing a conservative coup.
A federal judge in Mobile found that the barring of blacks from the voting process in Selma, Alabama was
systematic, and attempted to correct that by ordering the Dallas County Board of Registrars to process at least
100 applicants every day it was in session.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
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February 5, Friday: 500 black citizens marching on the county courthouse in Selma, Alabama were arrested.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Cradle Song, a song by Charles Ives to words of A.L. Ives, was performed for the initial time, in the Alma
Gluck Concert Hall, New York.
Chamber Piece no.1 for 14 players by Stefan Wolpe was performed for the initial time, in Coolidge Auditorium
of the Library of Congress, Washington.
February 6, Saturday: At Pleiku in the central highlands of South Vietnam, the Viet Cong killed 8 Americans, wounded
126, and destroyed 10 aircraft.
February 7, Sunday: A US helicopter base and advisory compound in the central highlands of South Vietnam was
attacked by Viet Cong commandos, who killed 9Americans and wounded more than 70 (President Lyndon
Baines Johnson would immediately authorize US Navy fighter-bombers to attack military targets just inside
North Vietnam).
February 8, Monday: “I’ve had enough of this,” President Lyndon Baines Johnson commented to his national security
advisors. Clearly he had not had enough of this, for he was ordering US Navy fighter-bombers from the carrier
USS Ranger to bomb a North Vietnamese army camp near Dong Hoi. Although the President made no
speeches or public statements in regard to this Operation Flaming Dart, the opinion polls showed a 70%
approval rating for the President and an 80% approval of US military involvement in South-East Asia — so
our popular President began the policy of sustained bombing of North Vietnam. In Hanoi, Soviet Prime
Minister Kosygin was being pressed by the North Vietnamese to help them counter American “aggression,”
and new sophisticated Soviet surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) would be arriving in theater within weeks.
Texas isn’t big enough yet
Stand by, Hanoi Hilton, you are about to receive some guests. They are going to drop from the sky!
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February 10, Wednesday: A Viet Cong bomb went off under a 4-story hotel being used as a barracks for US troops at
Qui Nhơn, killing 23 Americans.
At least 21 people were killed in language riots in Madras State, India.
Fluktuationen for orchestra by Isang Yun was performed for the initial time, in Berlin.
Sheriff’s deputies with electric cattle prods herded civil rights marchers out of Selma, Alabama.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
February 13, Saturday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson authorized “Operation Rolling Thunder,” a limited but
long-enduring standoff carpet-bombing offensive the intent of which would be to oblige North Vietnam to
discontinue support for Vietcong guerrillas in the South.
February 15, Monday: A People’s Daily editorial warned that if United States troops in Vietnam were to cross the 17th
parallel, they would automatically place themselves at war with China.
Several hundred Bulgarian and foreign students protested at the United States embassy in Sofia against the
American invasion of Vietnam.
Queen Elizabeth II proclaimed a new flag for Canada. This banner was raised in ceremonies outside the
Parliament buildings in Ottawa.
Die Soldaten, an opera by Bernd Alois Zimmermann to his own words after Lenz, was performed for the initial
time, in the Städtische Bühnen Cologne.
February 18, Thursday: Another military coup in Saigon resulted in General Nguyen Khanh finally being ousted and
a new military/civilian regime, led by Dr. Phan Huy Quat, installed.
For the first time, US warplanes attacked Viet Cong positions without participation by the South Vietnamese
Air Force.
Gambia, under Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Dawda Kairaba Jawara, was declared independent of
Great Britain.
400 black demonstrators were attacked and chased by state troopers in Marion, Alabama (one of them was
killed).
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Alberto Ginastera’s Harp Concerto was performed for the first time, in Philadelphia.
February 20, Saturday: Representatives of Japan and South Korea signed a draft treaty in Seoul calling for
establishment of diplomatic relations.
Troops loyal to Nguyen Khanh entered Saigon and put down the coup begun on the previous day.
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February 22, Monday: General William C. Westmoreland requested two battalions of US Marines as protection for the
American air base at Da Nang, Vietnam, because 6,000 Viet Cong had massed in the vicinity. Over the “grave
reservations” of Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor, the request would be approved.
March: Former President Harry S Truman received award as “The Outstanding Television Personality of the Year”
from the American Cinema Editors Association.
Former President Truman was not a person known for changing his mind about much of anything, and there
is no reason to suspect that he no longer harbored the sympathy that all draft dodgers belonged in prison as
criminals all the time. However, during this year the US law of military conscription was being amplified in
the cases “US v. Seeger 380 US 163” and “380 US 163.” US v. Seeger had been heard in October 1964 and
during this month the decision was announced — before the Vietnam War was expanded and the draft became
a source of strain and division.
In this Seeger case, the central question was whether the claims of a conscientious objector could be
recognized even if said Difficult Person didn’t believe in a Higher Being as required by law, as for instance in
the case of an agnostic member of the Religious Society of Friends who was an adherent of the Quaker Peace
Testimony.
OHNE MICH!
THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
The administration suggested that such people simply could not be recognized but Seeger was arguing that
theology was irrelevant and his claim for objector status should not be denied so long as his religious beliefs
led him sincerely to object to participation in all wars — and the Supremes, taking notice of the fact that
eminent theologians of the day were unsure what role a Supreme Being played in religious belief and doctrine,
agreed with him. It would be enough, the justices would hold in this case, “that the beliefs which prompted
[Seeger’s] objection occupy the same place in his life as the belief in a traditional deity holds in the lives of
his friends, the Quakers.”
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March 2, Tuesday: Operation Rolling Thunder began, with more than 100 American fighter-bombers attacking the Ho
Chi Minh trail and North Vietnam. Scheduled to last 8 weeks, this carpet-bombing from high altitude would
be so ineffective that it would need to go on for 3 years before being abandoned. A total of 500 American
planes would be lost in these largely ineffective attacks on the Ho Chi Minh trail and its female construction
crews. To get out from underneath this about 3,000,000 local civilians would need to become refugees.
Some 3,000,000 sorties would be flown and nearly 8,000,000 tons of explosives (4 times the tonnage we had
dropped from the skies during all of World War II) would be expended, largely to splash mud around in a
jungle. You’d have thought we had better things to do.
March 8, Monday: The first US combat troops arrived in Vietnam as the 3,500 Marines of the 9th Marine
Expeditionary Brigade landed at China Beach to defend the American air base at Da Nang. They joined the
23,000 American military advisors already in Vietnam. (I could well have been with this group, but had sat on
the papers I had been given to sign back in 1963, extending my tour of duty so that I could stay with my
battalion during its “lock on” training at Camp Pendleton, California. Again and again they had asked me for
these papers, and I had kept telling them “Oh, I left them at home, I’ll bring them in tomorrow,” and finally
they had given up on this and simply transferred me as “a short-timer” to another Marine battalion, a local
training command that was not scheduled to go on overseas tour.)
ASSLEY
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March 9, Tuesday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson authorized the use of napalm, a jelled gasoline gobs of which
stick to the skin while burning, in Vietnam.
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.... It smells like ... victory.”
Three white Unitarian reverends who participated in the march of March 7th were savagely beaten on a street
corner in Selma, Alabama. Four white men would be arrested. Marches in sympathy with the Selma civil rights
demonstrators took place in major cities throughout the United States.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
American Tryptich: Three Studies in Texture for orchestra by Gunther Schuller was performed for the initial
time, in New Orleans, and was conducted by the composer himself.
March 11, Thursday: Operation Market Time, a joint effort between the US Navy and the South Vietnamese Navy,
began to intercept coastal routes by which North Vietnam might be resupplying the South, to force the use of
the more difficult land route of the Ho Chi Minh trail.
ARIEL by Sylvia Plath was published by Faber in Great Britain.
The Unitarian minister Reverend James Reeb of Boston died in a Montgomery hospital of wounds suffered
during his streetcorner beating in Selma, Alabama on March 9th.
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April 1, Thursday: Ernesto “Che” Guevara resigned his Cuban citizenship and departed to wage armed struggle in
Latin America.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson authorized sending 2 more Marine battalions and up to 20,000 logistical
personnel to Vietnam. The President also authorized American combat troops to go on the offensive go out on
patrol to root out the Viet Cong. Although immediately this of course would come to be no secret at all in the
countryside, for two months the American press and public would be kept in the dark.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
April 2, Friday: Rodney King was born in Sacramento, California.
April 3, Saturday: An American campaign against North Vietnam’s transport system was initiated. In a month-long
offensive Navy and Air Force planes would strike at bridges, road and rail junctions, truck parks, and supply
depots.
We put into orbit SNAP-10A, the initial nuclear reactor out there (it’ll whiz around this planet for some 4
millennia, or until something goes wrong).
The human population of this planet was at about 3.2 billion, by way of contrast with the present more than
doubling to greater than 7.2 billion mouths.A tenth of the world’s 1965 population would have been 320
million, which is the present population level of the United States of America. W.H. Auden inquired, in “As it
Seemed to Us” in The New Yorker (pages 159-194), “How can we contemplate the not so distant future with
anything but alarm when no method both morally tolerable and practically effective has yet been discovered
for reducing the population of the world to a tenth of its present size and keeping it there?”
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April 7, Wednesday: At Johns Hopkins University, President Lyndon Baines Johnson proposed to stop the fighting and
provide truly massive economic assistance in the modernization of Vietnam. All the warmongers of Hanoi
would need to do would be to sit back and watch the moola roll in! Nobody turns down free moola, you know.
“Old Ho can’t turn that down,” Johnson supposed to aides (a couple of weeks later the President would be
obliged to raise America’s combat strength in Vietnam to more than 60,000, and add Allied forces from Korea
and Australia as a pretense of international support).
Parliamentary elections in Ireland gave the ruling Fianna Fáil Party two more seats and an overall majority.
Der junge Lord, a comic opera by Hans Werner Henze to words of Bachmann, after Hauff, was performed for
the initial time, at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin.
April 15, Thursday: During the course of this day 1,000 tons of bombs were dropped by US and South Vietnamese
fighter-bombers on the Viet Cong.
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April 20, Tuesday: Meeting in Honolulu, Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara, General William C.
Westmoreland, General Earle Wheeler, William Bundy, and Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor agreed to
recommend to President Lyndon Baines Johnson that we send another 40,000 combat soldiers to Vietnam.
Elections were held, and the Cook Islands were no longer a colony of New Zealand. (Elizabeth II, in her
Hey, hey, LBJ!
capacity as Queen of New Zealand, remains, however, at least nominally in charge.)
Leonard P. Ullmann and Leonard Krasner’s CASE STUDIES IN BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION offered the 1st use of
the term “behavior modification” in the title of a book. By 1980, Ullman and Krasner’s treatise would have
been cited in more than 480 other publications and it had thus become a “citation classic” in the journal Current
Contents.22
PSYCHOLOGY
April 24, Saturday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced that the Americans in Vietnam were eligible for
combat pay.
May 3, Monday: The initial US Army combat troops, 3,500 men of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, arrived in Vietnam.
22. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological
Association, 1994
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May 11, Tuesday: The Viet Cong overran South Vietnamese troops in Phuoc Long Province, north of Saigon, and also
attacked in central South Vietnam (after a couple of days they would withdraw).
May 13, Thursday: In hope that Hanoi could be brought to negotiate, a bombing pause was announced by the US.
There will be 6 more such pauses during the Rolling Thunder carpet-bombing, and all would fail in this
objective. Each time the North Vietnamese would merely take advantage of the pause to repair their air
defenses, and send some more troops and supplies down the muddy, crater-marked Ho Chi Minh trail.
The Viet Cong attacked a US special forces camp in Phuoc Long. 2d Lieutenant Charles Williams, despite 4
wounds, knocked out a Viet Cong machine-gun and then guided rescue helicopters (he would be recognized
with a Congressional Medal of Honor).
May 19, Wednesday: US bombing of North Vietnam resumed.
June 10, Thursday: At Dong Xai, a South Vietnamese Army district headquarters and American Special Forces camp
was overrun by a full Vietcong regiment. US air attacks eventually drove the Vietcong away.
June 18, Friday: The 10th government of South Vietnam in 20 months: General Nguyen Cao Ky as prime minister and
General Nguyen Van Thieu as official chief of state.
June 27, Sunday: General William Westmoreland launched the 1st purely offensive operation by American ground
forces in Vietnam, sweeping into Viet Cong territory just northwest of Saigon.
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July 1, Thursday: The Viet Cong attacked the air base at Da Nang with mortars, destroying three aircraft.
VIETNAM
What
goes
around
keeps
coming
around
and
around
and
around...
July 8, Thursday: Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was reappointed as US ambassador to South Vietnam.
Former President Harry S Truman’s brother Vivian died.
July 21-28: President Lyndon Baines Johnson met with his aides to determine a future course of US action in Vietnam.
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July 28, Wednesday: During a noontime press conference, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced that he
intended to send 44 combat battalions to Vietnam, increasing the US military presence to 125,000 men. “I have
asked the commanding general, General William C. Westmoreland, what more he needs to meet this mounting
aggression. He has told me. And we will meet his needs. We cannot be defeated by force of arms. We will stand
in Vietnam.” The monthly draft calls were to be doubled, to 35,000. “I do not find it easy to send the flower
of our youth, our finest young men, into battle. I have spoken to you today of the divisions and the forces and
the battalions and the units, but I know them all, every one. I have seen them in a thousand streets, of a hundred
towns, in every state in this union — working and laughing and building, and filled with hope and life. I think
I know, too, how their mothers weep and how their families sorrow.”
Hey, hey, LBJ!
August:The plan was that “Combined Action Platoons” made up of US Marines operating in conjunction with units
of the South Vietnamese militia were to defend the new fortified village enclaves and patrol the surrounding
countryside.
August 3, Tuesday: Following a mortar attack against the air base at Da Nang, Vietnam, 7 US Marines had been killed
while patrolling for Viet Cong. A rifle company of Marines went out to destroy nearby villages suspected of
Viet Cong sympathy, and this was videotaped and appeared on American TV on the CBS channel (it didn’t
make pleasant viewing).
Differences between the Senate version and the House of Representatives version of the Voting Rights Act of
1965 having been resolved in conference, the House of Representatives accepted the Conference Report.
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August 4, Wednesday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson asked the US Congress for an additional $1,700,000,000 to
prosecute the war in Vietnam.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
Differences between the Senate version and the House of Representatives version of the Voting Rights Act of
1965 having been resolved in conference, and the House of Representatives having on the previous day
accepted the Conference Report, the Senate also accepted the Conference Report.
August 5, Thursday: The Viet Cong managed to destroy 2,000,000 gallons of aviation fuel stored near Da Nang,
Vietnam.
Pakistani soldiers crossed the Line of Control into India dressed as locals, covertly initiating the Indo/Pakistani
War of 1965.
August 8, Sunday: The US conducted major air strikes against the Viet Cong in South Vietnam.
August 11, Wednesday: The beginning of the Watts race riot in Los Angeles. There would be 35 killed and about 1,000
wounded.
August 17, Tuesday: After a deserter from the 1st Vietcong regiment revealed that an attack was imminent against the
US Marine base at Chu Lai, the American army launched Operation Starlite. In this, the 1st major battle of the
Vietnam War, the United States achieved a resounding victory. Ground forces, artillery from Chu Lai, ship
bombardments, and air support combined to kill nearly 700 Viet Cong. US forces sustained 45 dead and more
than 200 wounded.
August 18-24: Operation Starlite, the first major US ground operation in Vietnam, began with US Marines making a
preemptive strike against 1,500 Viet Cong who had been planning to assault the American airfield at Chu Lai.
The Marines arrived by helicopter and by sea following heavy artillery and air bombardment of Viet Cong
positions. 45 Marines were killed and 120 wounded, while 614 Viet Cong were being killed and 9 being taken
prisoner.
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October: More than 3,000 Cubans left in a boatlift from Camarioca to the USA.
In this timeframe, after the North Vietnamese Army had attacked a Special Forces camp at Plei Mei, the US
1st Air Cavalry deployed against enemy regiments that had been identified in the vicinity of the camp. The
result was the battle of the Ia Drang: for 35 days the division pursued and fought the 32d, 33d, and 66th North
Vietnamese Regiments — until the enemy, suffering heavy casualties, would fall back to their bases in
Cambodia.
October 16, Saturday: There were anti-Vietnam-war rallies in 40 cities across American, plus in centers such as
London and Rome.
from a defeat.”
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October 19, Tuesday: As a prelude to the battle of Ia Drang Valley in South Vietnam’s central highlands, the North
Vietnamese Army assaulted a US Special Forces camp at Plei Me.
What
goes
around
keeps
coming
around
and
around
and
around...
October 27, Wednesday: Viet Cong raids wrecked US Marine aircraft at Marble Mountain and Chu Lai in South
Vietnam.
October 30, Saturday: In Washington DC, following after 5 recipients of the Medal of Honor at the head of the column,
25,000 marched in support of the US’s involvement in Vietnam. We ever so badly needed for some more of
our boys to die in vain, so it could be made abundantly clear that our boys were not dying in vain!23
23. Like they say, it ain’t over ’till the fat lady sings.
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November 2, Tuesday: Outside the Pentagon in Washington DC, making a personal protest against the war in
Vietnam, Friend Norman Morrison handed off his 1-year-old daughter Emily, or put her down, and then
immolated himself.24
Senator Barry Goldwater suggested that the Vietnam war could be brought to a speedy conclusion by bombing
industrial areas of Hanoi.
The Witch of Endor, a ballet by William Schuman to a scenario by Graham, was performed for the initial time,
in the 54th Street Theater, New York. Critics were not impressed.
November 14, Sunday-16, Tuesday: In the Ia Drang Valley, the first major battle between US infantry and regulars of
the North Vietnamese Army. The 1st Cavalry Division, Airmobile, used helicopters to move to the battle zone
and there, supported not only by heavy artillery but also by B-52 pattern bombing, they engaged in two days
of firefights until the NVA melted into the jungle. 79 Americans were killed and 121 wounded, while NVA
losses were guesstistimated to have been 2,000.
According to the TIME Magazine issue for November 19, 1965, “One week to the day after Quaker Norman
Morrison burned himself to death outside the Pentagon, Roman Catholic Roger LaPorte, 22, a student at
Manhattan’s Hunter College, doused his clothes with gasoline and set himself aflame on a street corner outside
United Nations headquarters.”
24. This Baltimore Quaker was the husband of Anne Corpening Welsh, a member of the Durham, North Carolina monthly meeting
of Friends (their wedding had been the 1st to be performed in the new meetinghouse, on September 7, 1957). Friend Norman’s selfannihilation would apparently spawn other such gestures. For instance, a couple of weeks later a non-Quaker would immolate
himself in front of the United Nations in New York City as a protest against the war in Vietnam, and in 2006 a peace activist would
immolate himself at the Millennium Flame sculpture on the Kennedy Expressway near downtown Chicago as a protest against wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan.Perhaps, therefore, it is time for us to take a look at the origins of Quaker self-martyrdom, something which
goes way, way back, all the way back at least to Boston — for when Friend Mary Dyer traveled there from the safety of her
Aquidneck Island home in the Narragansett Bay to preach yet again, after once already having been excused and warned by the
Puritans only at the foot of the hanging tree on Boston Common, she had well known what fate she was choosing for herself.
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November 17, Wednesday: Elements of the 66th North Vietnamese Regiment moving east toward Plei Mei
encountered and ambushed a 400-man battalion of the US 7th Cavalry that had been sent out on foot to occupy
nearby Landing Zone “Albany.” Neither reinforcements nor effective firepower could be brought in. When
fighting ended that night 60% of the Americans were casualties, and almost 1 of every 3 soldiers of that
battalion had been killed — 155 Americans killed, and 124 wounded.
What
goes
around
keeps
coming
around
and
around
and
around...
November 27, Saturday: In Washington DC, 35,000 protesters against the Vietnam War circled the White House
before proceeding to a peace rally at the Washington Monument.
November 30, Tuesday: Returning from Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara commented
privately that he was anticipating an American casualty rates of up to 1,000 deaths per month.25
25. Over and above being jetlagged, how could he have been getting any sleep while having to think about this?
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December 4, Saturday: A blast at a hotel used by US military personnel in Saigon killed 8 and wounded 137.
December 7, Tuesday: Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara briefed President Lyndon Baines Johnson that
the North Vietnamese apparently had accepted “that the war will be a long one, that time is their ally, and that
their staying power is superior to ours.”
December 9, Thursday: The New York Times revealed to the American people that the US, despite all the
bombardments, had been quite unable to intercept the continuous flow of North Vietnamese soldiers and
supplies into South Vietnam.
December 18, Saturday-20, Monday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson met with his top aides to determine a future
course of action in Vietnam.
December 25, Saturday: There was a 2d interruption in the bombing of North Vietnam. This one would last for 37 days
while the US was attempting to pressure the North Vietnamese into a negotiated peace. However, this bombing
halt would be denounced as “a trick” and the Viet Cong activities in the South would continue. By year’s end
US troop levels in country would reach 184,300. An estimated total of 90,000 South Vietnamese soldiers
deserted during the year, while an estimated 35,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were infiltrating via the Ho Chi
Minh trail. During the year up to 50% of the countryside in South Vietnam had fallen under some degree of
Viet Cong control. As ever given to paradox, Time Magazine would choose General William C. Westmoreland
as 1965’s “Man of the Year.”
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1966
A.J. Muste led a group of pacifists to Saigon where, for trying to demonstrate for peace, they were arrested
and deported. Then, later in the year, he flew with a small team of religious leaders to Hanoi and met with Ho
Chi Minh.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
January 8, Saturday: Operation Crimp, set in motion on this day, would deploy nearly 8,000 troops and would amount
to the largest American operation of the Vietnam war. Its goal was to capture the Vietcong’s headquarters for
the Saigon area, which they believed to be located in the district of Chu Chi. Though that district of Chu Chi
would be razed and then repeatedly patrolled, we would be unable to discover any such significant base.
Hoping for head-on clashes with the enemy, US forces would launch 4 search and destroy missions during the
month of February. Although there would be a couple of minor clashes with Vietcong regiments, however,
these would not generate any major clashes.
Just as Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski was scheduled to leave Warsaw for Rome to celebrate 1,000 years of
Christianity in Poland, his passport was revoked by the government.
Hyperion for flute, piccolo and orchestra by Bruno Maderna, consisting of the already performed Dimensioni
III and Aria, was performed for the first time, in Rome.
January 10, Monday: Thousands of Indonesians demonstrated before the Chinese embassy in Jakarta.
An agreement was signed in Tashkent between Pakistani President Mohammed Ayub Khan and Indian Prime
Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, withdrawing of all troops to pre-war borders. It had been a lamentable mistake.
William Walton was operated on at the London Clinic, on the likelihood of lung cancer.
The House of Representatives of the State of Georgia voted to refuse to seat duly-elected member Julian Bond
because he opposed United States federal policy in Vietnam and counseled young men to avoid the draft.
Did this Julian Bond have no sense of decency? –Of patriotism? –Of loyalty? –Of respect?
Fire bombs were thrown into the home of Vernon Dahmer, a civil rights leader of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
He, his wife, and their daughter were hospitalized with burns. He would die. Three others in the house escaped
injury.
String Trio by Ralph Shapey was performed for the initial time, at the Textile Museum in Washington DC.
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January 12, Wednesday: During his State of the Union address before Congress, President Lyndon Baines Johnson
attempted to wax philosophic by commenting that –although of course the war in Vietnam was unlike
America’s previous wars– “Yet, finally, war is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their
promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate ... therefore, to know war is
to know that there is still madness in this world.”
In other words, all wars are the same in that they are all pieces of human craziness that we shouldn’t engage
in — except that we can notice that this one that we’re presently engaged in, although of course it is also a
piece of human craziness, we can notice, somehow is slightly different from those previous ones that we
shouldn’t have engaged in. Also, there shouldn’t be such craziness in the world, but there is, and so, what are
you going to do, as long as there is craziness we all have to get crazy like this.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
In other words, we had ourselves a President who, although somehow he was canny enough to be able to
put himself in charge of us, was also so stupid that he simply wasn’t able to put thoughts together in his head.
And, we were so stupid that we were able to listen to him drivel on in this incoherent manner — and get all
impressed.
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January 28, Friday-March 6: “Operation Masher” marked the beginning of large-scale US “search-and-destroy”
operations against the Viet Cong and encampments of troops of the North Vietnamese Army. President Lyndon
Baines Johnson ordered the name of the operation to be changed to “White Wing,” out of fear of US public
reaction to the hostility of a name such as “Masher.”
Hey, hey, LBJ!
During the 42-day operation near the coast on the Bon Son Plain, troopers of the US 1st Cavalry Division
(Airmobile) once again used their helicopters to take themselves directly into the battle zones. 228 Americans
were killed and 788 wounded, while the enemy body count was said to be 1,342. The term “search-anddestroy” would come to be used by the US media to describe everything from these large scale Airmobile troop
movements to the small patrols that rooted out Viet Cong in tiny hamlets. The term eventually would come to
be associated with scary images of American soldiers torching straw huts.
January 31, Monday: Citing the fact that Hanoi had refused to respond to peace overtures during his 37-day selfimposed bombing pause, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced that he would resume the bombing of
North Vietnam.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
President Johnson was infuriated by a comment made by Senator Robert F. Kennedy about his decision to
resume the bombing of North Vietnam, that we might be “on a road from which there is no turning back, a
road that leads to catastrophe for all mankind.”
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February: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator J. William Fulbright, held televised hearings
examining America’s policy in Vietnam. Appearing before the committee, Secretary of Defense Robert
Strange McNamara stated that the US objective was not “to destroy or overthrow the Communist government
of North Vietnam.” Instead, the US objective was “the destruction of the insurrection and aggression directed
by North Vietnamese against the political institutions of South Vietnam.” Secretary McNamara was such a
clear-thinking whiz kid that when he wanted to, he could make your head explode. Even Secretary
McNamara’s haircut could make our heads spin around like a gyroscope. Clearly, we were in good hands and
were being well defended.
February 3, Thursday: Influential newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann came out in opposition to President Lyndon
Baines Johnson’s strategy in Vietnam: “Gestures, propaganda, public relations, and bombing and more
bombing will not work.” Lippmann predicted that as our combat causalities mounted, the struggle in Vietnam
would divide America.
February 6-9: President Lyndon Baines Johnson and South Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky met in
Honolulu.
March 1, Tuesday: An attempt by Senator Wayne Morse to cause the repeal the Gulf of Tonkin resolution allowing
the US President to wage war in Vietnam was repudiated in the US Senate by a vote of 92 over 5.
March 5, Saturday: The 272nd Regiment of the Vietcong 9th Division attacked a battalion of the American 3rd
Brigade at Lo Ke, but bombing by US air support forced the attackers to disengage. (A couple of days later,
the American 1st Brigade and a battalion of the 173rd Airborne would be attacked by a Vietcong regiment that
under artillery fire would similarly disengage.)
March 7, Monday: The American 1st Brigade and a battalion of the 173rd Airborne were attacked by a Vietcong
regiment, that under artillery fire would disengage.
March 8, Tuesday: Prime Minister Holt announced that Australia would increase its contingent in Vietnam from 1,500
to 4,500 men.
An explosion brought down the top 20 meters of the 31-meter high Nelson Column in Dublin, including the
statue of Lord Nelson. Police blamed the Irish Republican Army (the Irish considered the column as a symbol
of British domination of their island).
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March 9, Wednesday: The US Department of State acknowledged that in South Vietnam some 20,000 acres of food
crops had been destroyed, in villages suspected of Viet Cong sympathies. The American academic community
would respond with harsh criticism.
Indonesian students attacked the offices of the New China News Agency in Jakarta, destroying the building.
Mobs also attacked the Chinese consulate, injuring 25. They were angry about something.
The French government announced it was withdrawing all it forces from NATO without leaving the alliance.
March 10, Thursday: Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky dismissed a top general who was Buddhist, and South
Vietnamese Buddhists began a violent campaign to oust this Prime Minister. The political squabbling would
result in unrest in several cities including Saigon, Da Nang, and Hue, which would spill out into the streets and
impede US military operations.
March 16, Wednesday: 10,000 Buddhists rallied in Saigon against the removal of Nguyen Chanh Thi from the
government.
A rally took place in Sydney, Australia to protest involvement in Vietnam. Twelve draft cards got burned.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Gemini 8 was launched from Cape Kennedy to carry out the initial docking in space. Pilot Neil Armstrong
maneuvered the spacecraft to join with an Agena target vehicle.
La Divina, a comic opera by Thomas Pasatieri to his own words, was performed for the initial time, at the
Juilliard School, New York.
March 26, Saturday: Anti-Vietnam-war protests were staged in New York, Washington, Chicago, Philadelphia,
Boston, and San Francisco.
April/May: In Operation Birmingham, more than 5,000 US troops, backed by huge numbers of helicopters and
armored vehicles, sweep the area to the north of Saigon. There were small scale actions between both armies,
but over a 3-week period they would be able to discover and kill merely around 100 Vietcong. Most of these
actions were dictated by the Vietcong, who were entirely elusive.
April 12, Tuesday: Bombs dropped from B-52s for the first time in North Vietnam. Each such bomber on each sortie
dropped some 100 bombs from some six miles up, onto power facilities, war support facilities, transportation
lines, military complexes, fuel stores, and air defense installations that had been carefully selected in the White
House.
April 13, Wednesday: The Viet Cong attacked Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon causing 140 casualties while destroying
12 US helicopters and 9 other aircraft.
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May 2, Monday: Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara privately reported that the North Vietnamese were
infiltrating 4,500 soldiers per month into the South.
The Chicago Civic Center was dedicated.
May 14, Saturday: The political unrest in Vietnam intensified, as South Vietnamese troops loyal to Prime Minister Ky
overran South Vietnamese Buddhist troops in Da Nang and then moved toward Hue to oust similar renegades
there. Ky’s assaults would result in a new series of immolations by Buddhist monks and nuns in protest against
his Saigon regime and against its American backers. The Buddhist leader Tri Quang would place the blame
for this upon President Lyndon Baines Johnson personally.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
The American President would respond by speaking of such self-immolations as “tragic and unnecessary.”
This wasn’t about us, it was about them — they needed to stop doing this to themselves.
May 25, Wednesday: About 2,000 anti-government protesters in Saigon, Vietnam were dispersed by troops with tear
gas.
The New York Times reported that Li Chi, propaganda chief for the Peking branch of the Communist Party,
had been purged from the Chinese government.
Rhapsodic Ballad for cello by Arnold Bax was performed for the initial time, at the Cork Municipal School of
Music.
Incidental music to Lunel’s play Jerusalem à Carpentras by Darius Milhaud was performed for the initial time,
in Théâtre Carpentras, Paris.
During late May the North Vietnamese 324B Division was crossing the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and
encountered a Marine battalion. 324B Division held its ground and the largest battle of the war to date broke
out near Dong Ha. Most of the 3rd Marine Division (some 5,000 men in 5 battalions) headed north.
In Operation Hastings, US Marines, backed by South Vietnamese Army troops, the heavy guns of US
warships, and their own artillery and air power, would over a period of 3 weeks drive 324B Division back
inside North Vietnam.
June 4, Saturday: A 3-page anti-Vietnam-war advertisement signed by 6,400 American teachers and professors
appeared in the New York Times.
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June 17, Friday: South China writer Chin Mu was attacked by workers in Canton for “anti-party, antisocialist crimes.”
More US paratroopers were sent to Hue, Vietnam to impose marital law. A Buddhist woman burned herself to
death in Saigon to protest against the US-backed government.
At the end of a constitutional conference in London, the British government announced that Basutoland would
gain its independence on October 4th under the name “Lesotho.”
June 25, Saturday: Political unrest in South Vietnam had abated following the arrest of Buddhist leader Tri Quang and
a crackdown on Buddhist dissidents by Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky. The Prime Minister appealed for calm.
June 29, Wednesday: The US had been being very cautious about targeting the city of Hanoi in order to forestall
reactions from North Vietnam’s military allies, China and the Soviet Union. On this date the we ventured to
begin to cautiously bomb oil depots around Hanoi and Haiphong.
June 30, Thurssday: On Route 13, which linked Vietnam to the Cambodian border, American forces were so
effectively assaulted by the Vietcong that only American air and artillery support would prevent a complete
disaster.
July:
In very heavy fighting near Con Thien, nearly 1,300 North Vietnamese troops were killed.
July 6, Wednesday: Hanoi Radio described how captured American pilots had been paraded through jeering crowds
in the capital city of North Vietnam.
July 11, Monday: The US intensified its bombing raids against portions of the Ho Chi Minh trail winding through
Laos.
VIETNAM
July 15, Friday: Operation Hastings was launched against some 10,000 soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army in
Quang Tri Province. “What is it about ‘demilitarized zone’ that you fail to understand?” This effort by US
Marines and South Vietnamese troops amounted to the largest combined military operation to date in the war.
July 30, Saturday: For the first time the US bombed soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army within the supposedly
Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Vietnam.
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August 6, Saturday: On the 21st anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb, demonstrations took place in major US cities
against the war in Vietnam.
The Bassarids, an opera seria by Hans Werner Henze to words of Auden and Kallman, after Euripedes, was
performed for the initial time, in Salzburg. Included was the first performance of Henze’s intermezzo The
Judgement of Calliope to words of Auden and Kallman.
August 9, Tuesday: By mistake US jets attacked a couple of South Vietnamese villages of civilians, killing 63 and
wounding more than 100.
August 14, Sunday: After meeting with US commander in Vietnam General William Westmoreland, US President
Lyndon Johnson announced at his Texas ranch that “a Communist military takeover in South Vietnam is no
longer just improbable…it is impossible.”
August 30: Hanoi announced that the Chinese had pledged to provide them with economic and technical assistance.
September 1, Thursday: September 1, 1966 Speaking in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, President Charles de Gaulle of
France called on the US to restore peace by withdrawing from Vietnam.
There would be two nights of black rioting in Dayton, Ohio. The National Guard would be called out.
September 9, Friday: Jusuf Muda Dalam, former Minister for Central Banking of Indonesia, was convicted of
corruption and subversion in a Jakarta court, and sentenced to death.
A bomb, presumably planted by Tyrolean terrorists, blew up an Italian customs barracks at Malga Sasso
(2 killed, 4 injured).
Privates James Johnson and David Samas were convicted of disobeying orders and sentenced to 5 years hard
labor in a court martial in Fort Dix, New Jersey. They had objected to being forced to fight in an illegal and
immoral war, in Vietnam.
September 14, Wednesday-November 24, Saturday: Operation Attleboro occurred, the US 196th Brigade and 22,000
South Vietnamese troops setting off in a 5-week search-and-destroy mission near the Cambodian border 50
miles north of Saigon. Almost immediately, huge caches of weapons and ammo of the NLF 9th Division were
discovered in a jungle base camp, most of it of our own manufacture, but again, there was an absence of manoa-mano conflict. In all, 155 Americans would be killed and 494 wounded. The official body count of North
Vietnamese would add up to 1,106 (all you need to do is take on faith those body count numbers, in which a
single body can be counted by any number of observers, and in which just another dead civilian man or woman
in black pajamas is entirely indistinguishable from just another dead Viet Cong soldier in black pajamas).
October: The Vietcong’s 9th Division, its losses in fighters and equipment having been restored by reinforcements and
supplies sent down the Ho Chi Minh trail from North Vietnam, was ready for a new attack.
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November 3, Thursday: When US and Saigon government forces encountered large numbers of Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese troops in Tayninh Province north of Saigon, a major battle ensued, the largest of the war to date.
Egypt and Syria agreed to resume diplomatic relations.
Floods ravaged northern and central Italy producing 113 deaths. The Arno River flooded in Florence, causing
damage to thousands of the city’s art works.
Untitled Composition for Orchestra no.1 by R. Murray Schafer was performed for the 1st time, in Toronto.
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September 12, Monday: The heaviest air raid in Vietnam to date: 500 US aircraft attacked supply lines and coastal
targets. Almost like, but not exactly like, the following illustration:
A Japanese newspaper reported that the Chinese army was called out in Kweilin to control a crowd of 100,000
protesting Red Guards.
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Gemini 11 achieves the first docking of one spacecraft with another when it completes the maneuver with an
Agena-D target vehicle sent aloft for that purpose.
200-400 whites riot against school integration for two days in Grenada, Mississippi. They attack reporters and
blacks with ax handles, chains and pipes while police watch.
September 14, Wednesday-November 24, Saturday: Operation Attleboro occurred, the US 196th Brigade and 22,000
South Vietnamese troops setting off in a 5-week search-and-destroy mission near the Cambodian border 50
miles north of Saigon. Almost immediately, huge caches of weapons and ammo of the NLF 9th Division were
discovered in a jungle base camp, most of it of our own manufacture, but again, there was an absence of manoa-mano conflict. In all, 155 Americans would be killed and 494 wounded. The official body count of North
Vietnamese would add up to 1,106 (all you need to do is take on faith those body count numbers, in which a
single body can be counted by any number of observers, and in which just another dead civilian man or woman
in black pajamas is entirely indistinguishable from just another dead Viet Cong soldier in black pajamas).
September 23, Friday: It was revealed that jungles near the Demilitarized Zone of Vietnam were being defoliated
through the aerial spraying of herbicides.
October 2-24: The 1st Air Cavalry Division attempted to clear the North Vietnamese Army out of some mountains
near Qui Nhon: Operation Irving.
October 3, Monday: The USSR announced that it was beginning to provide military and economic assistance to North
Vietnam.
Tunisia broke diplomatic relations with Egypt.
Festive Ode for orchestra by Robert Ward was performed for the initial time, in Pabst Theater, Milwaukee.
Ode to the Temple of Sound by Alan Hovhaness was performed for the initial time, at the dedication concert
of the new Jesse H. Jones Hall for the Performing Arts in Houston.
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October 25, Tuesday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson took a conference in Manila with the other nations that had
troops in South Vietnam: Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, New Zealand, South Korea, and South Vietnam.
The Allies pledged themselves to withdrawal of their troops from South Vietnam within six months of the
completion of a North Vietnamese withdrawal.
October 26, Wednesday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson visited the US base at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam.
November 7, Monday: During a visit to Harvard University, Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara was
confronted by student protesters who seemed strangely unimpressed by the neatness of his haircut.
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November 12, Saturday: The New York Times reported that all of 40% of the US economic aid being sent to Saigon
was being stolen or was in some manner winding up on their black market. And wasn’t that a shame and we
ought to do something about it.
December 5, Monday: Four Chinese gunboats anchored off Macao as 10,000 Chinese troops gathered on the border.
Anti-Government riots took place on the West Bank in Nablus and Hebron.
The US Supreme Court ruled that the actions of the Georgia legislature in denying a seat to Julian Bond were
unconstitutional. Bond had not been seated because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam.
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December 8/9: North Vietnam rejected a proposal by President Lyndon Baines Johnson for discussions concerning
treatment of POWs, and a possible prisoner exchange. These were seen as mere side issues, and as having the
function of distractions from what we really needed to be talking about.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
December 13/14: The village of Caudat, near Hanoi, was leveled by US bombers. This would produce harsh criticism
from an international community that simply fails to understand this sort of conduct.
December 26, Monday: Attempting to deal with the increased scrutiny from journalists over mounting civilian
causalities in North Vietnam, the US Defense Department began to acknowledge that civilians might have
been underneath the bombs — but this was of course mere collateral damage, and unintended. Why would we
want to waste expensive bombs on civilians we had no interest in killing? Certainly we were a decent and costeffective people who wanted no such thing! We were of course being as accurate in our bombing of others as
we could possibly be, so that we could be as effective and as powerful as we could possibly be, so where’s the
problem? If innocent civilians get killed, it may be a problem they need to solve but it’s not a problem we need
to solve, they know what to do to solve their problem, yada yada yada.
December 27, Tuesday: The US mounted a large-scale air assault against suspected Viet Cong positions in the Mekong
Delta region, employing super-napalm (the new improved type) as well as the usual hundreds of tons of
explosives. By year’s end, US troop levels in theater would reach 389,000. In addition, American Allies
fighting in Vietnam included 45,000 soldiers from South Korea, and 7,000 Australians. An estimated 89,000
more North Vietnamese soldiers had come down the Ho Chi Minh trail. We had 5,008 combat deaths for the
year, and 30,093 wounded. More than half of these American causalities had been inflicted during Viet Cong
ambushes, employing the handmade booby traps and mines they had been planting everywhere in the
countryside as well as small-arms fire from snipers. It was estimated at this point that we faced more than
280,000 determined Vietcong fighters any one of whom could do what no American could do, fight with a
single bullet while living off a sock-full of grains of rice.
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1967
Tiger Force, a group of 45 American paratroopers led by Army Lieutenant James Hawkins, operated for seven
months in the highlands of Vietnam, torturing and mutilating, and slaughtering entire unarmed farm families.
Sergeant William Doyle decorated his rifle with a scalp he took from the corpse of a young nurse. When one
of the paratroopers, Gerald Bruner, threatened to open fire on his comrades if they began to slaughter a group
of civilians, his commanding officer told him to see a psychiatrist. There would be a 4-year investigation —
resulting in no one being charged.
THE MARKET FOR HUMAN BODY PARTS
After the General Accounting Office faulted the war contractor “Brown & Root” for accounting lapses,
protesters targeted this segment of the “military-industrial complex.” In a series of “Stay the Course” speeches,
President Lyndon Baines Johnson was insisting that victory must come before any other consideration,
because all of America’s security and therefore all of America’s freedoms depended on the US being
victorious. He identified the Vietnamese struggle with the one that had faced colonial Americans and assured
American mothers that though their sons were dying, they were dying for a noble cause. Meanwhile he was
establishing a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders assisted by an Army task force, and laying
down the groundwork for responding to domestic disturbances by the use of military force. (It would be by no
mere low-level misjudgment that on May 4, 1970 four unarmed and unprotected students would be gunned
down on the lawn at Kent State University.)
January 2, Monday: American pilots had been prohibited by Washington DC from targeting MiG interceptors on the
ground in North Vietnam. However, on this date 28 US Air Force F-4 Phantom jets managed to lure some
MiG-21s into the air and had themselves a dogfight over Hanoi in which they were able to shoot down 7. This
left only 9 North Vietnamese MiG-21s operational.
January 8, Sunday-26, Thursday: In an offensive involving 16,000 American and 14,000 South Vietnamese soldiers
the Viet Cong of the “Iron Triangle” 25 miles northwest of Saigon were targeted. The Viet Cong melted into
the jungle and numerous concealed tunnel entrances were discovered. Our “tunnel rats,” specially trained
volunteers, explored the maze of underground installations. After we went back to our bases, of course, the
Viet Cong would rebuild their sanctuary. This pattern would be repeated throughout the war as Americans
arrived in their helicopters, messed around, and then fled in their helicopters.
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January 10, Tuesday: In his State of the Union message to Congress, President Lyndon Baines Johnson once again
declared “We will stand firm in Vietnam.” UN Secretary-General U Thant expressed a personal doubt that
Vietnam was essential to the security of the West.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
In West Seneca, New York, Charles Ephraim Burchfield died of a heart attack.
January 23, Monday: Chinese Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung mobilized the Peoples Liberation Army “in defense of
the Cultural Revolution.”
The US Supreme Court ruled that loyalty oaths were unconstitutional.
Lieder von einer Insel for chamber chorus, trombone, two cellos, bass, organ and percussion by Hans Werner
Henze to words of Bachmann, was performed for the initial time, in Selb.
By this point Senator J. William Fulbright and President Lyndon Baines Johnson were no longer on speaking
terms. The Senator published a book critical of our war policy, titled THE ARROGANCE OF POWER, among other
things suggesting that the South Vietnamese government engage in direct peace talks with the Viet Cong. The
President used the news media to deride Senator Fulbright, as well as Robert F. Kennedy and a growing
number of critics in Congress, as “nervous Nellies” and “sunshine patriots.”
Hey, hey, LBJ!
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February 2, Thursday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson allowed that there were no “serious indications that the other
side is ready to stop the war.”
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Hey, hey, LBJ!
February 8-10: American religious groups staged a nationwide “Fast for Peace.”
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February 8-12: During Tet, the traditional Vietnamese holiday of the lunar New Year, there was a truce.
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February 13, Monday: Following the failure of diplomatic efforts, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced that
the US would resume full-scale bombing of North Vietnam.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
The daily demonstrations outside the Soviet embassy in Beijing, going on since January 26th, were brought to
an end.
700 lost pages from the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci were announced as found in the National Library
in Madrid. The finding was made by Jules Piccus and Ladislao Reti.
The National Student Association, a group of student government members on 300 US campuses, admitted to
having been receiving money from the CIA (it would soon be disclosed that 30 different education, labor,
religious, and other organizations had likewise received such funds).
February 22, Wednesday-May 14: 22 US battalions and 4 South Vietnamese battalions attacked a North Vietnamese
Army headquarters. During the fighting at Ap Gu, US 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry was commanded by
Lieutenant General Alexander M. Haig, later to be an influential White House aide. The body count of enemy
dead was put at 2,728 and in addition 34 of the enemy had been captured (the number of men captured can be
presumed to have been accurate). American losses were 282 killed and 1,576 wounded. The offensive included
a parachute assault by US troops. The North Vietnamese simply relocated this headquarters inside Cambodia.
February 28, Tuesday: PFC James Anderson, Jr. became the initial black US Marine to be awarded the Medal of Honor
(he was of course dead).
USMC
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March 8, Wednesday: Congress authorized $4,500,000,000 for the Vietnam war. Vietnam was obviously worth it.
March 19, Sunday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson met in Guam with South Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Cao
Ky and for 3 days would be pressuring him to hold national elections.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party announced that it had instructed the army to take
control of all industry and mining.
Residents of French Somaliland voted to remain under French rule, but with “increased autonomy.”
Five Etudes for orchestra by Gunther Schuller was performed for the initial time, in Woolsey Hall, Yale
University, the composer conducting.
Suite for two pianos and tape by Lejaren Hiller was performed for the initial time, at the University of Illinois,
Urbana.
April 6, Thursday: Quang Tri City was assaulted by 2,500 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army personnel.
April 14, Friday: While visiting Saigon, Richard Milhous Nixon opinioned that the civil-disobedience people back in
the US were “prolonging the war.” (Guess what, anybody who didn’t agree with our president must be a
traitor.)
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“[President Richard Milhous Nixon] will, with time, be
a landmark in the history of quiet, determined
desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
April 15, Saturday: There were demonstrations involving nearly 200,000 citizens, in New York and San Francisco.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society
social reform programs were being undermined by the widening Vietnam war, which was causing everything
else to be put on the back burner, narrowing “the promised dimensions of the domestic welfare programs,
making the poor white and Negro bear the heaviest burdens both at the front and at home.”
Hey, hey, LBJ!
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April 20, Thursday: For the first time, US bombers targeted Haiphong harbor in North Vietnam.
April 24, Monday-May 11: Near Khe Sanh, an isolated air base in the mountains near the border of Laos less than 10
miles from North Vietnam, fighting between the US 3rd Marines and the North Vietnamese Army resulting in
a reported body count of 940 enemy dead. The American losses were announced to be 155 killed and 425
wounded (our reports of our own combat dead and wounded during this war were generally not
misrepresentations).
April 24, Monday: General William C. Westmoreland pointed out that the American anti-war demonstrators were
giving aid and comfort to the enemy by providing the North Vietnamese soldier with a “hope that he can win
politically that which he cannot accomplish militarily.” Maybe they should all be lined up and shot as traitors.
(Privately, this general has already warned President Lyndon Baines Johnson that the war in Vietnam “could
go on indefinitely.”)
China and Indonesia expelled each other’s charges d’affaires. Indonesia claimed that China was fomenting
rebellion among the ethnic Chinese in the country.
Soviet Cosmonaut Vladimir Mikhailovich Komarov was killed when the parachute on his Soyuz 1 spacecraft
failed to deploy properly.
The new conservative military dictatorship in Greece banned long hair on men and the wearing of miniskirts
by women.
Bo Widerberg’s film Elvira Madigan was released in Sweden.
Cantata from Job op.413 for baritone, chorus and organ by Darius Milhaud was performed for the initial time,
in Beth Zion Temple, Buffalo.
April 25, Tuesday: Shortly after becoming world champion Cassius Marcellus Clay had announced that he had
become a Black Muslim and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. He had then defended his title eight times
in twenty months. At this point he refused induction into the Army. His license to box professionally would
be revoked by the New York State Boxing Commission, his world championship title would be stripped from
him by the WBA and WBC, and he would be fined and sentenced to five years in prison.
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CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION
April 28, Friday: The Greek popular composer Mikis Theodorakis, in disguise, was transported by car through Good
Friday crowds in Athens to a meeting of the leadership of his Lambrakis Democratic Youth.
The WBA and WBC stripped Cassius Marcellus Clay (Muhammad Ali) of his heavyweight title.
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April 29, Saturday: The New York Times headline was “Clay Refuses Army Oath; Stripped of Boxing Crown”:
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By ROBERT LIPSYTE
Houston, April 28—Cassius Clay refused today, as expected, to
take the one step forward that would have constituted induction
into the armed forces. There was no immediate Government action.
Although Government authorities here foresaw several months of
preliminary moves before Clay would be arrested and charged with
a felony, boxing organizations instantly stripped the 25-yearold fighter of his world heavyweight championship.
“It will take at least 30 days for Clay to be indicted and it
probably will be another year and a half before he could be sent
to prison since there undoubtedly will be appeals through the
courts,” United States Attorney Morton Susman said.
Statement Is Issued
Clay, in a statement distributed a few minutes after the
announcement of his refusal, said: “I have searched my
conscience and I find I cannot be true to my belief in my
religion by accepting such a call.” He has maintained throughout
recent unsuccessful civil litigation that he is entitled to
draft exemption as an appointed minister of the Lost-Found
Nation of Islam, the so- called Black Muslin sect. Clay, who
prefers his Muslin name of Muhammad Ali, anticipated the moves
against his title in his statement, calling them a “continuation
of the same artificially induced prejudice and discrimination”
that had led to the defeat of his various suits and appeals in
Federal courts, including the Supreme Court.
Hayden C. Covington of New York, Clay’s lawyer, said that
further civil action to stay criminal proceedings would be
initiated. If convicted of refusal to submit to induction, Clay
is subject to a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment and
a $10,000 fine.
Mr. Covington, who has defended many Jehovah’s Witnesses in
similar cases, has repeatedly told Clay during the last few
days, “You’ll be unhappy in the fiery furnace of criminal
proceedings but you’ll come out unsinged.” As a plaintiff in
civil action, the Negro fighter has touched on such politically
and socially explosive areas as alleged racial imbalance on
local Texas draft boards, alleged discriminatory action by the
Government in response to public pressure, and the rights of a
minority religion to appoint clergymen.
Full-Time Occupation
As a prospective defendant in criminal proceedings, Clay is
expected to attempt to establish that “preaching and teaching”
the tenets of the Muslims is a full-time occupation and that
boxing is the “avocation” that financially supports his unpaid
ministerial duties.
Today, Clay reported to the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance
Station on the third floor of the Federally drab United States
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Custom House a few minutes before 8 A.M., the ordered time. San
Jacinto Street, in downtown Houston, was already crowded with
television crews and newsmen when Clay stepped out of a taxi cab
with Covington, Quinnan Hodges, the local associate counsel, and
Chauncey Eskridge of Chicago, a lawyer for the Rev. Martin
Luther King, as well as for Clay and others.
Half a dozen Negro men, apparently en route to work, applauded
Clay and shouted: “He gets more publicity than Johnson.” Clay
was quickly taken upstairs and disappeared into the maw of the
induction procedure for more than five hours. Two information
officers supplied a stream of printed and oral releases
throughout the procedure, including a detailed schedule of
examinations and records processing, as well as instant
confirmation of Clay’s acceptable blood test and the fact that
he had obeyed Muslim dietary strictures by passing up the ham
sandwich included in the inductees’ box lunches. Such
information, however, did not forestall the instigation, by
television crews, of a small demonstration outside the Custom
House. During the morning, five white youngsters from the
Friends World Institute, a nonaccredited school in Westbury,
L.I., who had driven all night from a study project in Oklahoma,
and half a dozen local Negro youths, several wearing Black Power
buttons, had appeared on the street.
Groups Use Signs
Continuous and sometimes insulting interviewers eventually
provoked both groups, separately, to appear with signs. The
white group merely asked for the end of the Vietnam war and
greater efforts for civil rights. The Negro eventually swelled
into a group of about two dozen circling pickets carrying
hastily scrawled, “Burn, Baby, Burn” signs and singing, “Nothing
kills a nigger like too much love.” A few of the pickets wore
discarded bedsheets and table linen wound into African-type
garments, but most were young women dragged into the little
demonstration on their lunch hours.
There was a touch of sadness and gross exaggeration throughout
the most widely observed noninduction in history. At breakfast
this morning in the Hotel America, Clay had stared out a window
into a dingy, cold morning and said: “Every time I fight it gets
cold and rainy. Then dingy and cool, no sun in sight nowhere.”
He had shrugged when Mr. Hodges had showed him an anonymously
sent newspaper clipping in which a photograph of the local
associate counsel had been marked “Houston’s great nigger
lawyer.” Sadly, too, 22-year-old John McCullough, a graduate of
Sam Houston State College, said: “It’s his prerogative if he’s
sincere in his religion, but it’s his duty as a citizen to go
in. I’m a coward, too.”
46 Called to Report
Then Mr. McCullough, who is white, went up the steps to be
inducted. He was one of the 46 young men, including Clay, who
were called to report on this day. For Clay, the day ended at
1:10 P.M. Houston time, when Lieut. Col. J. Edwin McKee,
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commander of the station, announced that “Mr. Muhammad Ali has
just refused to be inducted.”
In a prepared statement, Colonel McKee said that notification
of the refusal would be forwarded to the United States Attorney
General’s office, and the national and local Selective Service
boards. This is the first administrative step toward possible
arrest, and an injunction to stop it had been denied to Clay
yesterday in the United States District Court here. Clay was
initially registered for the draft in Louisville, where he was
born. He obtained a transfer to a Houston board because his
ministerial duties had made this city his new official
residence. He had spent most of his time until last summer in
Chicago, where the Muslin headquarters are situated, in Miami,
where he trained, or in the cities in which he was fighting.
After Colonel McKee’s brief statement, Clay was brought into a
pressroom and led into range of 13 television cameras and
several dozen microphones. He refused to speak as he handed out
Xeroxed copies of his statement to selected newsmen, including
representatives of the major networks, wire services and The New
York Times.
The statement thanked those instrumental in his boxing career
as well as those who have offered support and guidance,
including Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Muslims; Mohammed
Oweida, Secretary General of the High Council for Islamic
Affairs, and Floyd McKissick, president of the Congress of
Racial Equality.
The statement, in part, declared:
“It is in the light of my consciousness as a Muslim minister and
my own personal convictions that I take my stand in rejecting
the call to be inducted in the armed services. I do so with the
full realization of its implications and possible consequences.
I have searched my conscience and I find I cannot be true to my
belief in my religion by accepting such a call. “My decision is
a private and individual one and I realize that this is a most
crucial decision. In taking it I am dependent solely upon Allah
as the final judge of these actions brought about by my own
conscience. “I strongly object to the fact that so many
newspapers have given the American public and the world the
impression that I have only two alternatives in taking this
stand: either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another
alternative and that alternative is justice. If justice
prevails, if my Constitutional rights are upheld, I will be
forced to go neither to the Army nor jail. In the end I am
confident that justice will come my way for the truth must
eventually prevail.
“I am looking forward to immediately continuing my profession.
“As to the threat voiced by certain elements to ‘strip’ me of
my title, this is merely a continuation of the same artificially
induced prejudice and discrimination.
“Regardless of the difference in my outlook, I insist upon my
right to pursue my livelihood in accordance with the same rights
granted to other men and women who have disagreed with the
policies of whatever Administration was in power at the time.
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“I have the world heavyweight title not because it was ‘given’
to me, not because of my race or religion, but because I won it
in the ring through my own boxing ability.
“Those who want to ‘take’ it and hold a series of auction-type
bouts not only do me a disservice but actually disgrace
themselves. I am certain that the sports fans and fair-minded
people throughout America would never accept such a ‘titleholder.’”
Clay returned to his hotel and went to sleep after the day’s
activities. He is expected to leave the city, possibly for
Washington, in the morning.
May 1, Monday: Ellsworth Bunker replaced Henry Cabot Lodge as the US ambassador to South Vietnam.
May 9, Tuesday: Nearly 60% of the villages in South Vietnam had by this point gone over to the Viet Cong. President
Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed a former CIA analyst, Robert W. Komer, to form a new agency called Civil
Operations and Revolutionary Development Support that would work to win the “hearts and minds” of the
rural population. He was to distribute $850,000,000 in food, medical supplies, machinery, and numerous other
household items through this CORDS. The people would get a taste for capitalism, and meanwhile the
organization would be training and equipping local militias that could protect their villages from the
Communist enemy.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
May 13, Saturday: In New York City, a captain of firefighters led 70,000 citizens in a loyalty march in support of the
Vietnam war. We will put out the fire in Southeast Asia.
May 14, Sunday: The armies of Egypt and Syria were placed on alert and began to mass at the borders of Israel. It was
enough to cause you to piss down your leg.
May 18, Thursday-26: For the first time US and South Vietnamese troops engaged in firefights within the
Demilitarized Zone. There were heavy losses on both sides.
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May 18, Thursday: US and Saigon government troops launched an offensive into the Demilitarized Zone.
Mika Spiljak replaced Petar Stambolic as President of the Federal Executive Council of Yugoslavia.
The Israeli government announced it was taking “appropriate measures” to deal with the massive buildup of
arms at its borders with Egypt and Syria.
The State of Tennessee repealed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. (From this point forward public
school teachers would be allowed to suggest it as an alternative to Creationism?)
Varied Air and Variations for piano by Charles Ives was performed for the initial time, in Sprague Memorial
Hall, Yale University.
May 19, Friday: American planes bombed a power plant near downtown Hanoi.
At the request of Egypt, the United Nations Emergency Force that had been standing as a buffer between Egypt
and Israel for a decade was withdrawn. Their positions were occupied by Egyptian troops in the Sinai, and
PLO terrorists in Gaza.
Bomarzo, an opera by Alberto Ginastera to words of Mujica Láinez was performed for the initial time,
in Washington DC.
May 20, Saturday: President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping.
May 21, Sunday: Egypt mobilized its reserve army of 100,000.
Prozession no.23 for tam-tam, viola, electronium, piano, microphones, filters, and potentiometers by
Karlheinz Stockhausen was performed for the initial time, over the airwaves of Radio Helsinki.
Stücke for oboe and piano by Ernst Krenek was performed for the initial time, in Zagreb.
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May 22, Monday: Hong Kong police fired into a crowd that was hurling Molotov cocktails. 150 were arrested. A
dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed.
President Nasser of Egypt threatened to stop all Israeli shipping in the Gulf of Aqaba.
322 people died in a fire at the L’Innovation department store in Brussels (this was the highest loss of life in a
European fire since the Vienna Ring Theater fire of December 8, 1881).
Langston Hughes died in New York City at the age of 65.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson had recourse to the American media to publicly urge North Vietnam to agree
to some sort of peace compromise.
May 24, Wednesday: The semi-official newspaper Al Ahram reported that Egypt had mined the Strait of Tiran at the
entrance of the Gulf of Aqaba (this report was false). 20,000 Saudi Arabian soldiers entered Jordan and took
up positions near Aqaba.
George Crumb, Donald Martino, and Charles Wuorinen each received $2,500 grants from the National
Institute of Arts and Letters. Robert Ward, William Bergsma, and Gunther Schuller were inducted into the
Institute.
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May 30, Tuesday: The Cosmo Sport, the initial commercially available car with a Wankel rotary engine, was
introduced by Mazda.
The Republic of Biafra declared its independence from Nigeria. The new government, headed by General
Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, was recognized by Tanzania, Zambia, Gabon, and the Ivory Coast.
King Hussein of Jordan agrees to a military pact with Egypt, effectively placing his army under Egyptian
command.
Officials from St. Kitts and Nevis were evicted from Anguilla at the beginning of a secession movement.
Antechrist for piccolo, bass clarinet, percussion, violin, and cello by Peter Maxwell Davies was performed for
the initial time, in Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, with the composer himself conducting. Also premiered was
Harrison Birtwistle’s Monodrama for soprano, speaker, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and percussion, with the
composer himself conducting.
May 18, Thursday: US and Saigon government troops launched an offensive into the Demilitarized Zone.
Mika Spiljak replaced Petar Stambolic as President of the Federal Executive Council of Yugoslavia.
The Israeli government announced it was taking “appropriate measures” to deal with the massive buildup of
arms at its borders with Egypt and Syria.
The State of Tennessee repealed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. (From this point forward public
school teachers would be allowed to suggest it as an alternative to Creationism?)
Varied Air and Variations for piano by Charles Ives was performed for the initial time, in Sprague Memorial
Hall, Yale University.
May 19, Friday: American planes bombed a power plant near downtown Hanoi.
At the request of Egypt, the United Nations Emergency Force that had been standing as a buffer between Egypt
and Israel for a decade was withdrawn. Their positions were occupied by Egyptian troops in the Sinai, and
PLO terrorists in Gaza.
Bomarzo, an opera by Alberto Ginastera to words of Mujica Láinez was performed for the initial time,
in Washington DC.
May 20, Saturday: President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping.
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May 21, Sunday: Egypt mobilized its reserve army of 100,000.
Prozession no.23 for tam-tam, viola, electronium, piano, microphones, filters, and potentiometers by
Karlheinz Stockhausen was performed for the initial time, over the airwaves of Radio Helsinki.
Stücke for oboe and piano by Ernst Krenek was performed for the initial time, in Zagreb.
May 22, Monday: Hong Kong police fired into a pro-Communist mob that was hurling Molotov cocktails. 150 were
arrested. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed.
President Nasser of Egypt threatened to stop all Israeli shipping in the Gulf of Aqaba.
322 people died in a fire at the L’Innovation department store in Brussels (this was the highest loss of life in a
European fire since the Vienna Ring Theater fire of December 8, 1881).
Langston Hughes died in New York City at the age of 65.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson had recourse to the American media to publicly urge North Vietnam to agree
to some sort of peace compromise.
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June:
In Vietnam, the Mobile Riverine Force began to use US Navy “Swift” boats, with Army troop support, to
intercept Viet Cong usage of the Mekong Delta’s inland waterways.
June 4, Sunday: At a meeting of the Negro Industrial and Economic Union, Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Kareem Abdul
Jabar (formerly Lew Alcindor), Carl Stokes, Walter Beach, Bobby Mitchell, Sid Williams, Curtis McClinton,
Willie Davis, Jim Shorter, and John Wooten heard Muhammad Ali’s explanation for refusing the Vietnam war
draft.
June 5, Monday: Israeli planes virtually destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground while Israeli ground forces
advanced into Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and also moved to encircle the old city of Jerusalem presently
occupied by Jordan. Jordanian artillery attacked Tel Aviv and the New City of Jerusalem.
In a Paris court, 8 defendants were convicted and 5 acquitted of complicity in the abduction of Moroccan
opposition leader Mahdi Ben Barka in 1965.
A letter from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the 4th Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union was published in the
New York Times. He was demanding an end to official censorship in his country.
Kommentar+Extempore, a Selbstgesprache mit Gesten by Mauricio Kagel, was performed for the initial time,
in Frankfurt. Also premiered was this composer’s Variaktionen.
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June 20, Tuesday: Cassius Marcellus Clay (Muhammad Ali) was convicted of draft evasion, fined $10,000,
and sentenced to five years in prison. This would be appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, but
meanwhile Ali would be inactive for more than two years, and early in 1970 would announce his retirement.
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Summer: To open the Woodstock festival, Richie Havens, an artist on the rhythm guitar, sang his and the actor Lou
Gossett’s “Handsome Johnny” and then a variation on “Motherless Child” that he called “Freedom.”
Hey, look yonder, tell me what’s that you see
Marching to the fields of Concord?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with a musket in his hand,
Marching to the Concord war, hey marching to the Concord war.
Hey, look yonder, tell me what you see
Marching to the fields of Gettysburg?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with a flintlock in his hand,
Marching to the Gettysburg war, hey marching to the Gettysburg war.
Hey, look yonder, tell me what’s that you see
Marching to the fields of Dunkirk?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with a carbine in his hand,
Marching to the Dunkirk war, hey marching to the Dunkirk war.
Marching to the fields of Korea?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with an M1 in his hand,
Marching to the Korean war, hey marching to the Korean war.
Marching to the fields of Vietnam?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with an M15,
Marching to the Vietnam war, hey marching to the Vietnam war.
Marching to the fields of Birmingham?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with his hand rolled in a fist,
Marching to the Birmingham war, hey marching to the Birmingham war.
Hey, it’s a long hard road, it’s a long hard road,
It’s a long hard road, before we’ll be free.
Hey, what’s the use of singing this song, some of you are not even listening.
Tell me what it is we’ve got to do: wait for our fields to start glistening,
Wait for the bullets to start whistling.
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Here comes a hydrogen bomb, here comes a guided missile,
Here comes a hydrogen bomb: I can almost hear its whistle.
Joni Mitchell sang one version of the “Woodstock” song she wrote while CSN&Y recorded another version.
Here it is as sung by Joni Mitchell:
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm
I’m going to join in a rock ’n’ roll band
I’m going to camp out on the land
I’m going to try an’ get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man
I don’t know who I am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
Back to the garden
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
back to the garden (Copyright © Siquomb Publishing Company)
And here it is as sung by CSN&Y:
Well I came across a child of God, he was walking along the road
and I asked him tell where are you going, this he told me:
Well, I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm, going to join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land, set my soul free.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
Well, then can I walk beside you? I have come to lose the smog.
And I feel like I’m a cog in something turning.
And maybe it’s the time of year, yes, and maybe it’s the time of man.
And I don’t know who I am but life is for learning.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
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By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,
and everywhere there was song and celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bombers jet planes riding shotgun in the sky,
turning into butterflies above our nation.
We are stardust, we are golden, we caught in the devil’s bargain,
July:
Although General William C. Westmoreland requested an additional 200,000 soldiers as reinforcements over
and above the 475,000 soldiers already scheduled to be sent to the Vietnam theater, President Lyndon Baines
Johnson would stingily give him only 45,000 more American boys.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
July 7, Friday: North Vietnam’s Politburo decided that at long last they were ready to launch a widespread offensive
against South Vietnam. This they conceived as consisting of three phases, the 1st of which would involve
attacks against remote border areas that might have the effect of luring American troops away from the cities
which were to be the focus of the 2nd phase of the assault. The 2nd phase (this would be known to us as the
“Tet Offensive”) was to involve an assault upon these cities, to incite a “general uprising” that would throw
the region into paralysis. The 3rd phase would consist of their army formations attacking down across the
Demilitarized Zone.
July 10, Monday: Over the following week 5 people would be killed and 15 injured, and 700 would be arrested, during
the ongoing pro-Communist rioting in Hong Kong.
US and Saigon government forces repelled an attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong east of Anloc, which
is to the north of Saigon.
The Supreme Court of the State of Oklahoma determined that the state’s ban on interracial marriages was
unconstitutional.
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July 15, Saturday: Viet Cong forces launched a devastating rocket attack on the American air base at Danang, killing
12 and injuring 145. 11 fixed-wing airplanes and 23 helicopters were destroyed.
Israeli aircraft shot down six Egyptian planes while losing one.
Nigerian federal troops captured Nsukka in Biafra.
Canon ad Honorem Igor Stravinsky for chorus by Peter Maxwell Davies to words from the Book of Ezekiel
was performed for the initial time, in Cheltenham Town Hall. This had been composed to celebrate the 85th
birthday of Igor Stravinsky.
Four days of rioting by blacks in Jersey City, New Jersey began with snipers, firebombs, and rocks. One person
would be killed and 50 arrested.
Elatio for orchestra by Carlos Chávez, composed to celebrate the centennial of the restoration of the Mexican
republic, was performed for the initial time, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City.
July 29, Saturday: Italy announced that it would block an application by Austria to join the Common Market until
Austria could prove that no terrorists were being trained or harbored on its territory.
Aboard the USS Forestall in the Gulf of Tonkin, in the worst naval accident since World War II, a fire resulting
from an accidentally punctured fuel tank killed 134 US crewmen.
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December 13, Wednesday: After leading an attempt to overthrow the military dictatorship of Greece and replace it
with his own, King Konstantinos II was forced into exile in Italy. Georgios Zoitakis was named regent.
Georgios Papadapoulos replaced Konstantinos Kollios as Prime Minister of Greece. Accompanying the king
into exile were his wife and six members of his family, Prime Minister Konstantinos Kollios, Mayor Georgios
Plytas of Athens, and about 20 officials of the court.
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August 9, Wednesday: The Senate Armed Services Committee began closed-door hearings concerning the influence
of civilian advisors on military planning. During the hearings, Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara
testified that the extensive and costly US bombing campaign in Vietnam was failing to impact North Vietnam’s
war making ability in South Vietnam and that nothing short of “the virtual annihilation of North Vietnam and
its people” through bombing would ever succeed.
When a band of Red Guards threw a portrait of Mao into a car of the Mongolian embassy, the driver refused
to accept it. They dragged him from the car, setting it afire, and turned him over to the police. The Red Guards
then forced their way into the Mongolian embassy, injuring five of its personnel.
Biafran troops captured Benin, capital of the Mid-Western Region of Nigeria.
White mercenaries and Katangan rebels took Bukavu, capital of Kivu Province, Congo.
Soli no.4 for trumpet, horn and trombone by Carlos Chávez was performed for the initial time, at Dartmouth
College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Concert Piece for synket and orchestra by John C. Eaton was performed for the initial time, at Tanglewood
near Lenox, Massachusetts (this synket was an electronic instrument invented by Paul Ketoff).
August 18, Friday: California Governor Ronald Reagan called for the US to get out of Vietnam because “too many
qualified targets have been put off limits to bombing.”
August 21, Monday: The Chinese shot down a couple of US fighter-bombers that had strayed across their border
during the air raids against North Vietnam. No, don’t do that. Large crowds demonstrate outside the British
mission in Peking.
Mikis Theodorakis is arrested in Khaïdari, a suburb of Athens, and brought to Sercurity Police headquarters
on Bouboulinas Street in Athens.
August 22, Tuesday: Red Guards attacked the British mission in Beijing, burning down the main chancery building
and damaging the residence of the charges d’affaires. 60 people inside were beaten by Red Guards. Four were
seriously injured, including Charges d’Affaires Donald Hopson. Although Great Britain retaliated by placing
severe restrictions on Chinese diplomats in London, they didn’t beat any of them up.
President Gregoire Kayibanda refused entry of Katangan rebels and white mercenaries into Rwanda from
Congo.
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August 25, Friday: Hanoi officials announced the evacuation of all non-essential personnel from the city in the face
of increased US air attacks.
Egyptian authorities arrested 50 high ranking military officials, accusing them of plotting a coup d’état.
At the International Radio Exhibition in West Berlin, West German Foreign Minister Willy Brandt pressed a
symbolic red button and began regular color television service in Germany (over both ARD and ZDF).
George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, was shot to death in Arlington, Virginia.
The government of Argentina enacted a law providing for penalties of up to 8 years in prison for anyone found
guilty of “Communist activities.”
September 1, Friday: North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong made a surprise announcement: North
Vietnam was going to “continue to fight.”
September 3, Sunday: National elections were held in South Vietnam. With 80% of eligible voters participating,
Nguyen Van Thieu for president and Nguyen Cao Ky for vice-president received only 35% of the vote, but
won.
The Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior Board of Directors under chairperson A. Charles
Catania, at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC, authorized a Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.
Montrose M. Wolf would be the editor.
September 11, Monday: At Con Thien located two miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, US Marines were under
siege by the North Vietnamese Army. A massive long-range artillery duel erupted with the NVA firing 42,000
rounds and the US responding with 281,000 rounds — not to mention continuous carpet-bombing with
enormous bombs by B-52s at such an altitude that they could be neither seen nor heard from the ground.
Enemy losses were estimated at over 2,000. This would be continuing until October 31st.
India and China started shooting at each other’s positions across the border at Natu La (between Tibet and
Sikkim), and this target practice and expenditure of ammo would be going on for four days.
September 19, Tuesday: The embassy of the Republic of China in Saigon was heavily damaged by a bomb, with 1
killed and 27 injured.
49 employees of International Voluntary Services, a private relief group partially funded by the US
government, submitted a letter to the US ambassador in Saigon urging President Lyndon Baines Johnson to
end the bombing of the north and enter into negotiations with the Viet Cong.
A general strike called by Arabs in the West Bank was fully effective only in Nablus.
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October 5, Thursday: Hanoi accused the US of hitting a school with anti-personnel bombs (if we did this, of course,
it was a mistake and unintentional, so there is no way in hell that we should get faulted). During this month,
a public opinion poll showed that most Americans agreed that the US should “win or get out.” Some 46% of
us had come to believe our military involvement in Vietnam to be a “mistake.” Also, LIFE Magazine during
this month renounced its earlier support of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s war policies — obviously, since
the US is a representative democracy, this thing in Southeast Asia was going to be over in short order!
October 20, Friday: The Egyptian government admitted that its charges that US and UK planes had taken part in the
Six Day War for Israel had been inventions.
A petition in support of Isang Yun, signed by 160 composers, musicians, and scholars, appeared in Die Zeit.
Among the signers were Igor Stravinsky and Elliott Carter.
Over 80% of the 10,000 students at Brooklyn College boycotted classes to protest the use of police against
students on the previous day.
A federal jury in Meridian, Mississippi convicted 7 of conspiracy in the deaths of 3 civil rights workers in 1964
(8 were acquitted and mistrials were declared in the cases of 3 others).
Musiquette 3 op.25 for at least three violas by Henryk Górecki was performed for the initial time, in Katowice,
and was conducted by the composer himself.
October 21, Saturday: Egyptian sea-based missiles sank the Israeli destroyer Elath off the north coast of the Sinai
Peninsula, killing 47. 155 floaters would be rescued.
Thousands of protestors against the war in Vietnam descended on Washington DC. In two days hundreds
would be arrested outside the Pentagon. Concurrent protests were taking place in major European and
Japanese cities.
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October 21, Saturday-23, Monday: In London, protesters attempted to storm the US embassy. A civil-disobedience
“March on the Pentagon” drew 55,000 protesters. Inside the Pentagon, during this year, an effort had begun to
compile a secret “History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy,” something that eventually
would surface as the “Pentagon Papers” after Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department analyst, would take the
personal risk of making a personal copy on an office copier and take the risk of leaking it to the free press.
Publication of such government secrets would infuriate President Richard Milhous Nixon and would be one
of the principal motivations that would lead him into the Watergate entanglement.
Hero of Civil Disobedience
October 24, Tuesday: In a 3-hour artillery exchange across the Suez Canal, the oil refining facilities of Suez were
largely destroyed.
Royal assent was given to a British bill legalizing abortion under certain circumstances.
Lewis Hershey, director of conscription in the US, ordered that all men who involved themselves in the civildisobedience protests against the Vietnam War by destroying their draft cards were to lose their deferments.
“OK, you want to play rough? –No more Mr. Nice Guy.”
Funeral-Triumphal Prelude in Memory of the Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad op.130 for orchestra and band
by Dmitri Shostakovich was performed for the initial time, in Moscow.
Psalm 25 for chorus by Charles Ives was performed for the initial time, in the Arts and Industries Building of
the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, 66 years after it had been composed.
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October 29, Sunday: Viet Cong forces attacked the town and US base at Locninh north of Saigon.
The first of the Five Fantasies for organ by Ross Lee Finney was performed for the initial time, in the First
Unitarian Church, San Francisco.
The Mexican government distributed over 1,000,000 hectares of land to 9,600 families in the State of
Chihuahua.
Symphony no.8 op.106 by Vincent Persichetti was performed for the initial time, in Berea, Ohio.
The gates to Expo 67 in Montréal closed after more than 50,000,000 visitors.
October 31, Tuesday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson reaffirmed his commitment to South Vietnam — he just
wasn’t going to be the sort of guy who would abandon his friends.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
(Or, once he had your dick in his pocket, you weren’t ever going to get it back.)
Nguyen Van Thieu was inaugurated in Saigon as President of the Second Republic of South Vietnam. Nguyen
Cao Ky was sworn in as Vice President. The President appointed Nguyen Van Loc as Prime Minister. These
were all, of course, local decisions, ones that had been made by Vietnamese among Vietnamese.
Indonesian diplomats flew out of China after being detained for three weeks.
Per Bastiana Tai-Yang Cheng (L’oriente è rosso) for three instrumental groups and tape by Luigi Nono was
performed for the initial time, in Massey Hall, Toronto.
November 3, Friday-December 1, Friday: In the mountains along the border of Cambodia and Laos the US 4th
Infantry Division headed off a North Vietnamese Army attack against the Special Forces camp located at Dak
To. Not another Dien Bien Phu! After massive air strikes, combined with US and South Vietnamese ground
attacks, the NVA withdrew into Laos and Cambodia. The enemy body count was put at 1,644 while 289
Americans were killed. General William C. Westmoreland stated that “our tremendously successful air logistic
operation” had been the key to the victory, along of course with “the gallantry and tenacity of our soldiers.”
The 4th Battalion, 503rd Airborne Infantry would receive a Presidential Unit Citation for bravery.
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November 11, Saturday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson made another peace overture for Vietnam, and it was
promptly rejected by the warmongers of Hanoi.
November 17, Thursday: A tremendous storm of tens of thousands of Leonid meteors fell for a short interval timed
by skywatchers in the central and western United States. This display probably rivaled the historic meteor
storms of 1799 and 1833. Within just a couple of hours, observed rates increased from about 40 per hour to as
many as 40 per second: “We saw a rain of meteors turn into a hail of meteors too numerous to count,” reported
Charles Capen from the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California. “The meteors were so intense that we
were guessing how many could be seen in a one-second sweep of the observers head... A rate of about 150,000
per hour was seen for about 20 minutes,” reported Dennis Milon from Kitt Peak in Southern Arizona.
ASTRONOMY
November 29, Wednesday: Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara threw in the towel and used a press
conference to emotionally announce his resignation: “Mr. President ... I cannot find words to express what lies
in my heart today....” President Lyndon Baines Johnson had become angry with him, because he had found out
that privately his Defense Secretary had been questioning his war strategy. (It is surpassingly strange, but
McNamara had evidently never realized that he had no personal power base whatever in Washington DC
or elsewhere, and had apparently never realized that he was being utilized at the pleasure of a supremely
vindictive man who would tolerate no such subversion. Heaven knows what game he thought he had been
playing!) Over the period of the war not only McNamara but a number of top aides would be resigning in
despair, including press secretary Bill Moyers, McGeorge Bundy, and George Ball.
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1916 born in San Francisco
1937 graduated from the University of California at Berkeley
1939 graduated from Harvard University Graduate School of Business
1940-1943 taught at Harvard
1943 captain’s commission in the U.S. Army Air Corps
(His boss, General Curtis LeMay, had conjectured
after World War II that if the USA
had lost, he and McNamara would have been put on trial
as war criminals on account of the events of March 1945.)
1946 released from active duty as a lieutenant colonel
1946 joined the Ford Motor Company as part of a team of statistical control experts
1960 president of the company
1961-1968 secretary of defense
1959-1975 supported U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War
1964 encouraged escalation
After 1964 later sought to open peace negotiations
1968 The Essence of Security: Reflections in Office
1968 president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, known as the World Bank
1981 retirement
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1989 Out of the Cold: New Thinking for American Foreign and Defense Policy in the 21st Century
1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, he wrote that U.S. military involvement
in the war was “terribly wrong.” He attributed the failure of the war to eleven major causes, including poor
organization, lack of understanding of the enemy and its culture, and a decision made in the President’s office
to withhold information from the Congress of the United States and the American public. He blamed both
himself and other government officials, including President Johnson, for not engaging in more detailed debate
that might have illuminated the problems surrounding the war. The book generated controversy, with many
people questioning why McNamara waited three decades to speak out against the war.
November 30, Thursday: Eugene McCarthy announced that he would be opposing the re-election of Lyndon Baines
Johnson as President, averring that there was “a very deep crisis of leadership, a crisis of direction and a crisis
of national purpose” and going on to make the declaration that “The entire history of this war in Vietnam, no
matter what we call it, has been one of continued error and misjudgment.” He would offer himself as an
alternative Democratic candidate. Save us from ourselves, Eugene!
Hey, hey, LBJ!
December 4, Monday: Four days of anti-Vietnam war protests began in New York City. Among the 585 citizens
arrested would be the well-regarded “baby doctor,” Dr. Benjamin Spock.
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December 6, Wednesday: The US government alleged that at the hamlet of Dak Son, Vietnam, the Viet Cong had
murdered 252 civilians.
December 16, Saturday: Agnes Carol Zens Kellam died of cancer.
As Captain Howard John Hill was piloting his F4D Phantom II in an early morning mission over North
Vietnam, a Mig-21 missile flew up his tailpipe. He would be spending some five years in the infamous “Hanoi
Hilton,” and would sustain his spirits by the writing of the sort of war poetry that reminds one of what had been
written during World War II by General Patton:
Beloved heritage is ours
To fondly cherish evermore.
By God’s own hand sweet Freedom’s flower
Was planted at our nation’s door.
Warm blood of men enriched the soil
In hope it blossom-filled would thrive.
Though tyrants sent fierce weeds to foil
And hamper growth, it still survived.
The blooms will wither not nor die;
Some men will crave the fragrant air.
Unyielding Resolve reigns on high
With Duty calling those who care.
Much-needed care cannot be sloughed;
A few must bear the load for all.
From sun-soaked shores to windswept bluffs
We few will answer Duty’s call.
December 23, Saturday: With the length of service in theater for draftees being one year, at this point more than
1,000,000 Americans had rotated through Southeast Asia, although most of these Americans actually had
served in support units rather than as combat troops. US troop levels were reaching 463,000 and there had been
some 16,000 American combat deaths to date. Upon arrival at Cam Ranh Bay, President Lyndon Baines
Johnson declared that although the Viet Cong had not been defeated, “he has met his master in the field.”
Master of the Meat
An estimated 90,000 fresh soldiers from North Vietnam had come down the Ho Chi Minh trail during the year
and overall Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Army troop strength throughout the region was estimated as up to
300,000 men.
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1968
At the Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League the League Peace Award was presented to The
Resistance.
“Killing to end war, that’s like fucking
to restore virginity.”
— Vietnam-era protest poster
In Vietnam, United States military lawyers boasted of winning 200 convictions for a practice which the GIs
were referring to as “fragging,” that they characterized for court purposes as “assault with explosives.”
Explained one unidentified officer to a reporter, “Given beer, whisky or drugs, mixed in with a crowd of blacks
and whites, and you can have trouble. But you never know which came first — the booze, the drugs, or racial
disagreements.” The problem had not begun in Vietnam, for during World War II, Dr. Joseph W. Owen, the
head of a psychiatric section in the Solomon Islands, had described a case in which a Marine captain had been
routinely ridiculing a lieutenant in front of the enlisted men. That lieutenant had sneaked a mine into his
commanding officer’s tent and hidden in some nearby bushes to detonate it.
For crippling two American M-48 tanks and leading two successful attacks against a South Vietnamese
military base near Saigon, the North Vietnamese Army awarded a 17-year-old named Vo Thi Mo its Victory
Medal Third Class. “The first time I killed an American,” she would tell an interviewer twenty years later,
“I felt enthusiasm and more hatred.” After a while, she reported, her enthusiasm for this sort of thing had
waned, in part because after watching American soldiers look at pictures and cry, she had come to the
realization that most of these Americans, rather than being the faceless baby-burners that filled her nightmares,
were simply scared young men one hell of a long way from home.
January 5, Friday: The US began an effort to map the positions of the North Vietnamese Army gathering ominously
in the vicinity of the isolated Marine air base at Khe Sanh.
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January 21, Sunday: The 5,000 Marines in the isolated air base at Khe Sanh had been encircled by 20,000 North
Vietnamese Army troops under the leadership of General Vo Nguyen Giap, and a 77-day siege began.
This siege would be attracting enormous media attention back in America, because so many comparisons
could be made with the disastrous 1954 loss of Dien Bien Phu by the French — not to mention the Alamo.
“I don’t want any damn Dinbinfoo,” President Lyndon Baines Johnson instructed Joint Chiefs Chairman Earle
Wheeler anxiously, to which General Wheeler might well have responded “You don’t suppose, do you, that
this Giap gives a hot shit what you do or do not want?” Johnson, personally seeing off some Marine
reinforcements to the Vietnam theater, would comment that “the eyes of the nation and the eyes of the entire
world, the eyes of all of history itself, are on that little brave band of defenders who hold the pass at Khe
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Sanh.”26 He went so far as to issue a Presidential Order to the Marines, that they must hold.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
He demanded a guarantee “signed in blood,” to use his own words, from his Joint Chiefs of Staff that they
would successfully hold that fort. Operation “Niagara II” began with heavy B-52 carpet bombing of suspected
North Vietnamese positions while there was a massive aerial resupply of the besieged Marines. At the peak of
this confrontation, the North Vietnamese soldiers were being pounded every 90 minutes around the clock by
groups of three B-52s which in the course of the confrontation would be dropping over 110,000 tons of bombs.
This patch of jungle hillside was going to be absorbing absolutely the heaviest bombardment per unit area we
have ever witnessed in the entire history of human warfare.
26. He might as well have been humming along with “The Eyes of Texas are Upon You.” This is the American president who once
confounded some newsmen by unzipping his pants, pulling out his Johnson, and going “Here’s why we’re in Vietnam!”
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January 30, Tuesday: For the 18th time in the history of our nuclear program, this time at the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, some fissile material unexpectedly went beyond criticality into prompt-criticality, the final stage
before an atomic explosion.
Not to worry, however, for in the more than half century of our nuclear era there have been only a couple of
dozen such incidents that we know of. We are told that a full A-bomb nuclear-weapon-like blast is a real
engineering success story and very difficult to create, and therefore it is really really unlikely that any such
prompt-criticality incident will ever produce a full A-bomb nuclear weapon-like blast without our really
having intended for that to happen (even at Chernobyl the molten “corium” stuff in the “Elephant’s Foot”
formation in the basement failed to go off like a bomb). Just about the worst thing that might happen in a
prompt-criticality situation is that the nuclear material in question goes off like what one might term a big
“dirty” bomb –which is not at all in the same ballpark in terms of blast-effect although it is in the same
ballpark in terms of contamination-effect– except that we must bear in mind that at the Fukushima Daiichi site,
unfortunately, there are some 2,000 tons of such materials available within a few thousands of yards, in the six
reactor cores and seven cooling pools.
WALDEN: If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by
accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one
steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad,
or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,
–we never need read of another. One is enough.
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces began a major offensive against Saigon and 30 other cities. Taking
place on the Chinese New Year, this would forever be known as the Tet Offensive. The heaviest fighting took
place in Saigon and Hué.
Polish authorities closed down a production of the play Dziady by Poland’s greatest romantic poet Adam
Mickiewicz, due to an anti-Russian tone they were able to detect.
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January 31, Tet: The turning point of the Vietnam war occurred on this day, as 84,000 Viet Cong aided by North
Vietnamese troops launched a Tet Offensive, simultaneously attacking 100 cities and towns throughout South
Vietnam. The surprise offensive would be closely monitored by American TV news crews in Vietnam, which
would for instance be filming as the US embassy in Saigon was being assaulted by 17 Viet Cong commandos.
After more than 100 Marines had been killed at Hue, we would watch as a Marine under fire opinioned that
“The whole thing stinks, really.”
January 31, Tet-March 2: In the ancient capital of Hue during the Tet holiday, which had been only lightly defended,
12,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops begin systematic executions of over 3,000 “enemies of the
people,” including South Vietnamese government officials, captured South Vietnamese military officers, and
Catholic priests. South Vietnamese troops and three US Marine battalions counterattacked and retook the old
imperial city house by house and street by street, aided by American air and artillery strikes. On February 24th,
US Marines took possession of the Imperial Palace in the heart of the citadel, and soon afterward the city was
re-secured. The enemy body count was reported at over 5,000. American losses had been 142 Marines killed
and 857 wounded, 74 US Army killed and 507 wounded. The South Vietnamese military losses had been 384
killed and 1,830 wounded.
March 7, Thursday: Within the present capital city of Saigon, Lieutenant General Fred C. Weyand, a veteran of World
War II in the Pacific, had on a hunch positioned 50 battalions of American and Allied troops. In the battle for
possession of that vital center during Tet, they were able to turn back an assault by 35 North Vietnamese and
Viet Cong battalions, and on February 1st they launched a decisive counterattack against the Viet Cong at Tan
Son Nhut airport, to protect nearby MACV and South Vietnamese military headquarters from capture. Weyand
would come to be regarded as the “Savior of Saigon.”
In New York City, Ricercare for orchestra by Walter Piston was performed for the initial time, and was
conducted by its “dedicatee,” Leonard Bernstein.
Officials in Cairo informed UN peace envoy Gunnar Jarring that they were not going to be willing to meet with
any Israeli officials “in the present and the future.” –“You want us to get Jew cooties?”
ANTISEMITISM
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February 1, Thursday: In Saigon during Tet, in full view of an NBC news cameraman and an Associated Press still
photographer, a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla was shot in the side of the head point blank by South Vietnam’s
police chief General Nguyen Ngoc Loan.27 The haunting AP photo taken by Eddie Adams would appear the
next morning on the front page of most American newspapers. We observed the filmed execution on NBC TV.
The images were available not only in black and white but also in color, not only as stills but as a moving
picture. We could watch as the spray of blood and brains jetted out of the far side of the man’s head.
At about the same time we would be reading of an incautious remark made by an American military officer,
“We had to destroy it, in order to save it” (he was referring to a small city near Saigon that had been quite
leveled by American bombs).
February 2, Friday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson characterized the Tet Offensive as “a complete failure,” not only
in a military but also in a political sense. The “general uprising” the enemy had expected to provoke among
the South Vietnamese peasants had simply not materialized. The Viet Cong had come out of hiding to do most
of the actual fighting and had suffered devastating losses, and they could never regain their former strength.
They had given it there best shot — and they had only this one shot. In the future, most of the actual fighting
will have to be done by the North Vietnamese regulars, fighting a conventional war. Tet’s only success,
unexpectedly, had been in America rather than in Vietnam, where it had eroded the grassroots support among
Americans and in Congress for our continuing in this struggle.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
27. General Loan would never be faulted for having thus killed someone in cold blood. He is our friend. In 1975, when the
communists would capture Saigon, of course he would become an instant US citizen. He would have a restaurant near Washington
DC and would die of cancer at his home there in 1998.
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February 8, Thursday: At Khe Sanh, 21 US Marines were killed by North Vietnamese soldiers.
February 16, Friday: Unexpectedly, due to the needs of the Vietnam conflict, the Johnson administration had to abolish
2S deferments for graduate students.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
February 27, Tuesday: Influential CBS TV news anchorman Walter Cronkite, just returned from Saigon, remarked
during his CBS Evening News broadcast that he was certain that “the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end
in a stalemate.”
February 28, Wednesday: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Earle Wheeler, forwarding a request made by
General William C. Westmoreland, asked President Lyndon Baines Johnson for an additional 206,000 soldiers
and for the mobilization of reserve units in the USA.
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Hey, hey, LBJ!
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March 1, Friday: The British Parliament enacted a measure severely restricting Asian immigration into the country.
Rector Pietro Agostino d’Avack closed Rome University due to student unrest. When students attempted to
occupy one building they were met by police. In the fighting, over 200 students were injured and 225 arrested.
Similar events were going down at the Universities of Turin and Padua.
Kären, a song by Charles Ives to words of Ploug (translated by Kappey), was performed for the first time, in
the Great Hall of Jonathan Edwards College, Yale University.
Haiku of Basho for soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, double bass, percussion, piano and tape by Richard Wernick
was performed for the first time, at the University of Chicago.
Clark Clifford, an old friend of the President who had won renown as a Washington lawyer, was made the new
US Secretary of Defense. For the next few days Clifford would be conducting his own intensive study of the
entire situation in Vietnam, and discovering to his alarm that there was simply no concept or overall plan,
anywhere in Washington, for the achievement of a victory in Vietnam. He would reporting to his new boss,
President Lyndon Baines Johnson, that there should be no further escalation of the war. We were in a hole and
only digging ourselves deeper and deeper. “The time has come to decide where we go from here.”
March 2, Saturday: In an ambush at Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon, 48 US soldiers were killed.
March 4, Monday: Posters went up Peking announcing the “overthrow” of Cheng Chin, member of the revolutionary
committee of the Peking School of Art.
Viet Cong artillery fire for the 1st time reached the US supply base at Cam Ranh Bay.
A rally for presidential candidate George Wallace in Omaha produced 3 days of racial violence in which 1 was
killed, 16 were injured, and 18 were arrested.
March 7, Thursday: Within the present capital city of Saigon, Lieutenant General Fred C. Weyand, a veteran of World
War II in the Pacific, had on a hunch positioned 50 battalions of American and Allied troops. In the battle for
possession of that vital center during Tet, they were able to turn back an assault by 35 North Vietnamese and
Viet Cong battalions, and on February 1st they launched a decisive counterattack against the Viet Cong at Tan
Son Nhut airport, to protect nearby MACV and South Vietnamese military headquarters from capture. Weyand
would come to be regarded as the “Savior of Saigon.”
In New York City, Ricercare for orchestra by Walter Piston was performed for the initial time, and was
conducted by its “dedicatee,” Leonard Bernstein.
Officials in Cairo informed UN peace envoy Gunnar Jarring that they were not going to be willing to meet with
any Israeli officials “in the present and the future.” –“You want us to get Jew cooties?”
ANTISEMITISM
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March 10, Sunday: When the New York Times broke the news that General William C. Westmoreland had asked for
206,000 more servicemen, the White House attempted to deny that this was so. Secretary of State Dean Rusk
was called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and found himself being grilled for two days on
live TV, not only about the reality of that troop request but also about the overall effectiveness of President
Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Vietnam strategy.
March 11, Monday: Operation Quyet Thang began a 28 day offensive by 33 US and South Vietnamese battalions in
the area around Saigon.
March 12, Tuesday: In the New Hampshire Democratic primary, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was able to defeat
the anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, by only a very slim margin, just 300 votes. Public support for
Johnson had been seriously eroding. Public opinion polls taken after the Tet Offensive revealed that Johnson’s
overall approval rating has slipped to 36%, while approval of his Vietnam policy had slipped to 26%.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
Mauritius, under Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, was proclaimed
independent of Great Britain.
As Rome University was reopened for the first time since March 1st, 4,000 students staged a civil disobedience
sit-in forcing the rescheduling of examinations.
Oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
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March 14, Thursday: Senator Robert F. Kennedy made a confidential proposal to President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
He will stay out of the presidential race if Johnson would forsake his strategy for Vietnam and let a committee,
that would include Kennedy, plot a new course.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
March 15, Friday: In Vietnam, Captain Ernest L. Medina gathered his troops for a badly needed pep talk.
March 16, Saturday: Leftist and Rightist students battled at Rome University causing over 200 injuries. Police moved
in to quell the violence. The university would be closed for three days.
Night and Morning for unaccompanied chorus by György Ligeti to words of Weöres, were performed for the
first time, in Stockholm.
Polls indicated that Senator Robert F. Kennedy had come to be more popular than the sitting President. Since
President Lyndon Baines Johnson had spurned his confidential offer of March 14th, the Senator announced
that he was a candidate for the presidency. During his campaign, Kennedy would bypass the issue of his having
participated in forming President John F. Kennedy’s early Vietnam policy with a modest rejoinder that “past
error is no excuse for its own perpetuation.”
The troops of Captain Medina participated in an airborne assault against a suspected Viet Cong presence the
village of Son My in Quang Ngai province. At a tiny nearby settlement known as My Lai, members of Charlie
Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, US Army, under the command of Lieutenant William Calley, finding
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no Viet Cong, rounded up more than 300 of the civilians and gunned them down. Hugh Thompson, witnessing
this from the air as it was going on, landed his helicopter and began to evacuate as many of the people as he
could. The initial report by participants at this My Lai massacre would allege that 69 Viet Cong had been
killed, making no mention of any civilian causalities. The incident would be successfully concealed until a
series of letters from veteran Ronald Ridenhour would, a year later, necessitate an Army investigation. Charlie
Company’s Commanding Officer, Captain Ernest L. Medina, its 1st Platoon Commander, Lieutenant William
Calley, and 14 others would be brought to trial by General Courts-Martial. We have all now seen the
unforgettable news photos: tearful people who are obviously pleading for their lives, and a cluster of dead
children, women, and old men on a path — some of the more enduring of the images of our adventure in that
nation.
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March 20, Wednesday: As he neared graduation from Georgetown University, William Jefferson Clinton, age 21, had
finally been induced to submit to his physical examination and was reclassified from 2-S (student deferment)
to 1-A (eligible, shudder, to get killed with the other American boys in Vietnam, who were dying in combat at
the rate of about 350 per week).
He was the only youth of his prime draft age to be classified 1-A by that draft board in 1968 whose preinduction physical examination would be put off for a full ten and a half months, a delay more than twice as
long as anyone else’s and more than five times as long as that received by most Arkansas youths of comparable
eligibility.
Ben Barnes, a former Speaker in the Texan state legislature, has now acknowledged in a written statement
presented under oath in a courtroom in Austin, Texas, that on a spring day during this year, at the prompting
of a Bush family friend, Sid Adger, he had asked General James Rose of the Texan Air National Guard to get
21-year-old party animal George W. Bush, about to lose his 2S student deferment by graduating from Yale
University, excused him from the draft by positioning him in a National Guard pilot-training program.
Joining this organization was a popular way for Texans with money or political connections to avoid getting
shot at in Vietnam, without any need to flee to another country or risk doing hard time in prison. The Bush
boy’s service record reveals that he obtained his pilot slot in the Texas Air National Guard ahead of thousands
of other applicants in spite of the fact that he actually scored only 25% in his aptitude test. Immediately after
achieving this 25% score, Dubya was invited to take one step forward and be sworn in. Barnes was unable to
assert that the candidate’s father, then-Congressman George Bush, Senior, Republican from Houston, knew
that this request was being made by the family friend. Both father and son have deniability, and both father
and son have denied. However, Lawrence Littwin, former director of the Texas lottery, has revealed that under
Governor George W. Bush, the contract for operating this lottery was obtained by the Gtech Corporation,
for which family friend Ben Barnes was chief lobbyist, in return for a pledge that he’d keep his mouth shut
about the preferential treatment that had saved Dubya’s ass in the middle of the Vietnam War.
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March 23, Saturday: During a secret meeting in the Philippines, General Earle Wheeler informed General William C.
Westmoreland that President Lyndon Baines Johnson would be willing to send only 13,500 additional soldiers
— not the 206,000 that he had requested. His superior instructed Westmoreland to urge the locals to make this
Vietnam war their own.
March 25, Monday: Clark Clifford convened a dinner meeting of a dozen distinguished elder statesmen and soldiers
including former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and World War II General Omar Bradley, at the Department
of State. These “Wise Men,” so called, were given a blunt assessment of the situation in Vietnam, not excluding
the fact of rampant corruption within the Saigon government and not excluding the unlikelihood of any
satisfactory military outcome “under the present circumstances.”
March 26, Tuesday: The dozen so-called “Wise Men” who had met for the dinner briefing at the Department of State
on the previous evening gathered at the White House for lunch with President Lyndon Baines Johnson. 8 of
the 12 advised that we needed to withdraw from Vietnam.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
March 31, Sunday: Worn to tatters by civil disobedience, President Lyndon Baines Johnson stunned the world by
announcing a surprise decision that he was not going to seek reelection. He also announced a partial bombing
halt in Vietnam (a bombing halt that affected only targets such as Hanoi north of the 20th parallel) and urged
the Northern government to cooperate in peace talks. “We are prepared to move immediately toward peace
through negotiations.”
Hey, hey, LBJ!
How many lives did you save today?
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April 1, Monday: In Vietnam, the US 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) began Operation Pegasus to reopen Route 9,
the relief route to the besieged Marines at the Khe Sanh air base.
April 8, Monday: As a result of intensive American bombing and the reopening of Route 9, the siege of the Khe Sanh
air base was lifted with the withdrawal of the North Vietnamese troops in the area. Enemy losses during the
siege were estimated at up to 15,000. The US Marines had lost 199 killed and 830 wounded. The 1st Cavalry
had lost 92 killed and 629 wounded while reopening Route 9. The US command would secretly shut down
Khe Sanh and withdraws the Marines. Although President Lyndon Baines Johnson would state that the troops
that had defended Khe Sanh had “vividly demonstrated to the enemy the utter futility of his attempts to win a
military victory in the South,” a North Vietnamese official would label the closing of this remote air base as
America’s “gravest defeat” to that point in the war.
Hey, hey, LBJ!
April 11, Thursday: Defense Secretary Clifford announced that General William C. Westmoreland’s request for
206,000 more soldiers for Vietnam was a request which was not going to be granted.
April 23, Tuesday: Anti-Vietnam activists at Columbia University seized five of the college’s buildings.
April 27, Saturday: In New York City, in protest of the Vietnam war, 200,000 students refuse to attend classes.
April 30, Tuesday-May 3, Friday: The North Vietnamese sought to open an invasion corridor through the
Demilitarized Zone but were halted at Dai Do by Lieutenant Colonel William Weise’s battalion of US Marines,
the “Magnificent Bastards,” and by heavy artillery and air strikes. The enemy body count was said to be 1,568.
81 Marines were killed and 297 wounded. 29 US soldiers were killed while supporting these Marines, and 130
wounded. For the time being, this defeat had ended North Vietnam’s prospect of successfully invading straight
down the coast. They would need to wait four more years, until 1972, before trying this again after most of the
Americans had fled. It would actually require seven years, until 1975, for them to succeed in this movement
down the coast.
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May 5, Sunday: The Viet Cong launched their “Mini Tet,” consisting of a series of rocket and mortar attacks against
Saigon and 119 other cities and military installations throughout South Vietnam. The US of course responded
with air strikes employing super-napalm (of the new improved type) and high explosives.
May 10, Friday: At Kham Duc along the border of Laos, a battalion of the North Vietnamese Army attacked the US
Special Forces camp. This isolated camp had been established in 1963 to monitor North Vietnamese
infiltration. Since the camp had been encircled by the North Vietnamese, the decision was made to evacuate
the camp via C-130 transports. At the conclusion of this successful airlift, however, it was discovered that three
US Air Force controllers had been left behind. Although the camp was at that point already overrun and two
of the C-130s had been shot down, Lieutenant Colonel Joe M. Jackson brought a C-123 Provider down onto
the air strip under intense fire, gathered the three men who had been left behind, and got them the hell out. For
this, Jackson would receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Meanwhile, peace talks were beginning in
Paris but soon would stall as the US insisted that the North Vietnamese troops be withdrawn from the South,
while the North Vietnamese insisted that the Viet Cong be allowed to participate in a coalition government in
South Vietnam. This would mark the beginning of five years of unnerving on-again, off-again talks in Paris
between US negotiators and North Vietnamese negotiators.
May 18, Saturday:One of our rockets, carrying a SNAP-19B2 reactor, had to be aborted at launch — but fortunately,
its radioactive materials would be retrieved still intact.
Prime Minister Nguyen Van Loc of the Saigon government and his cabinet resigned. President Thieu
appointed Tran Van Huong to replace him.
In Prague, Soviet prime minister Aleksei Kosygin promised that the USSR accepted the democratization of
Czechoslovakia.
President de Gaulle returned to France to deal with the widespread strikes and protests. Subway and bus
service ended in Paris, taxis were greatly reduced. Workers occupied the shipyards at St.-Nazaire. Police took
over the international telephone and telegraph exchange.
Moralities, scenic cantatas by Hans Werner Henze to words of Auden after Aesop was performed for the first
time, in Cincinnati.
Seven Japanese Love Poems for voice and piano by Shulamit Ran to traditional words, was performed for the
first time, in Judson Hall, New York.
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May 27, Monday: Yale University student George W. Bush was 12 days away from losing his valuable 2S student
deferment from the draft and Americans were dying in combat in Vietnam at the rate of 350 per week.
He interviewed with Texas Air National Guard Commander Colonel Walter B. “Buck” Staudt and despite the
fact that he had scored only 25% on a pilot aptitude test, was instantly recommended, over a long long waiting
list of eager young college men, for a direct commission to 2d Lieutenant to undergo pilot training. (Some
people, unduly cynical, attribute this preferment to the fact that his daddy was a congressman.) On this day he
took one step forward and enlisted in the Air National Guard at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston, Texas.
Wearing the uniform of this elite stateside national guard unit flying obsolete aircraft was a practical guarantee
that he would never be sent against his will into harm’s way.
Immediately the enlistment ceremony needed to be repeated for the benefit of photographers, so that Texas Air
National Guard Commander Colonel Walter B. “Buck” Staudt could be seen to personally hand this important
young man his documents.
“When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
The Devil and the Good Lord
(1951), act 1
THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE
INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN
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SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF
GOD.
June 5, Wednesday: Just after winning the California Democratic presidential primary election, Senator Robert F.
Kennedy was shot three times by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian nationalist, after an event at an auditorium in
Los Angeles. Sirhan was arrested at the scene. Five others struck by bullets would survive.
Arabs demonstrated and battled with police in Jerusalem to mark the first anniversary of their defeat in the SixDay War. Similar events would continue over the following two days.
With the withdrawal of one of his coalition members, Prime Minister Aldo Moro of Italy resigned.
Cross Talk—for Painter Sam Francis for two bandoneons and tape by Toru Takemitsu was performed for the
first time, in Tokyo. Also premiered was PING for flute, percussion, piano, electronic sound generators, fourtrack tape and slide and film projections by Roger Reynolds after Beckett.
Cardenitas 68 for soprano, recorder, bassoon, trombone, double bass, percussion and tape by Robert Erickson
to his own words was performed for the first time, at the University of California, San Diego.
Vietnam
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Summer: It is suspected that during this period political and family influence were what was keeping William
Jefferson Clinton from being drafted into the US military and seeing service in Vietnam, where our boys were
getting killed at the rate of 350 each week. Would that all our lads could enjoy the benefit of such support
systems!
Beneficiary
Robert Corrado, the last surviving Hot Springs draft board member from that period, alleged that there had
been “some form of preferential treatment” and described how the chairman of the three-man draft panel there
had held back Clinton’s file saying “we’ve got to give him time to go to Oxford.” Corrado said he had been
telephoned by an aide to J. William Fulbright (then a Democratic Senator from Arkansas) asking them to “give
every consideration” to not drafting Clinton, so that he could attend Oxford University.
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July:
To defray the ballooning costs of the Vietnam war, the US Congress mandated an immediate 10% income tax
surcharge.
Worth Every Penny
July 1, Monday: The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty worked out in Geneva by the Disarmament Committee of the
United Nations was opened for additional signatures in London, Moscow, and Washington DC. 62 nations
signed.
A new penal code went into effect in East Germany that broadened their use of the death penalty, especially
in the case of political offenses.
General Creighton W. Abrams replaced General William C. Westmoreland as the top US commander in
Vietnam. To crush a Viet Cong infrastructure estimated at up to 70,000 Communist guerrillas, Robert W.
Komer of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program began his Phoenix program.
By virtue of this program, South Vietnamese would receive paramilitary training from the US and then be
turned loose on the countryside to assassinate any other South Vietnamese whom they suspected of being Viet
Cong operatives. Testifying in 1971 before the US Congress, Komer’s successor William E. Colby would
declare that although 20,587 individuals had indeed been terminated by operatives trained in this program,
it had not been “a program of assassination.” If it had not been a program of assassination, what indeed had it
been? Colby averred to the US Congress that it had merely been “a part of the overall pacification program.”
July 3, Wednesday: Three American prisoners of war were released by Hanoi.
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Our national birthday, Thursday the 4th of July: Vice President Hubert Humphrey attempted to deliver a piece
of 4th-of-July oratory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania while Governor George Wallace attempted to deliver a
piece of 4th-of-July oratory in Minneapolis, Minnesota. These weren’t the same piece of oratory, but antiVietnam-war protests made it equivalently hard for the speakers to make their thoughts heard in each location.
July 5, Friday: The Americans abandoned their Khe Sanh base in South Vietnam.
July 19, Friday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson and South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu met in Hawaii.
August 8, Thursday: Richard Milhous Nixon was chosen as the Republican presidential candidate and was promising
us “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.” In his acceptance speech, he had the following to say:
“Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth — to
see it as it is, and tell it like it is — to find the
truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.”
— Republican Presidential nominee
Richard Milhous Nixon, 1968
(a birthright Quaker)
Southern Republicans understood very well that Senator Nixon might be willing to put up with the colored
people as part of his “Southern Strategy,” but he obviously didn’t like colored people and was obviously
uncomfortable around them — and this of course was supremely reassuring.
After his presidency, Nixon would have the following to offer:
“Always remember others may hate you but those who hate
you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy
yourself.”
— President Richard Milhous Nixon
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August 28, Wednesday: Thus far in the year, there have been 221 student protests against the US presence in Vietnam,
at 101 colleges and universities. During the Democratic national convention in Chicago, 10,000 antiwar
protesters were confronted on downtown streets by 26,000 police and national guardsmen, who on this day
began to riot. The brutal crackdown had full live coverage on network TV and we all watched the batons rise
and fall as 800 defenseless demonstrators were being whacked at. in this riot the police and national guardsmen
injured 100 citizens and arrested 175. The United States of America was experiencing a level of social unrest
unseen since its Civil War era a hundred years before.
The Czechoslovak National Assembly declared the invasion of the country illegal and demanded the
withdrawal of troops.
In Guatemala City, the pro-Communist Rebel Armed Forces of Guatemala attempted to kidnap
US ambassador John Mein. Mein broke loose and ran and was shot dead by his kidnappers.
Police battled student demonstrators in front of the National Palace in Mexico City.
September 16, Monday: After a 5-day battle, US and Saigon government forces remained in control of Tayninh.
China pointed out that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had violated its airspace 119 times over the
previous year (which would amount to about every 3d day, and make it seem almost as if they were doing this
on purpose).
Nigerian federal troops captured the Biafran city of Owerri.
Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, leader of the fascist government since 1932, suffered
a debilitating stroke.
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September 30, Monday: The 900th US aircraft was shot down over North Vietnam. (Curiously, not one of these shotdown aircraft were of the only type that our lucky George would be being trained to fly. This is one of those
coincidences that make our historical trajectory so fascinating. It is almost as if this American boy were being
reserved for some higher purpose.)
For the 20th time in the history of the nuclear agenda and the 3d time this year, this time at the Aberdeen
Proving Ground, some fissile material unexpectedly went beyond criticality into prompt-criticality, the final
stage before an atomic explosion.
ESSENCE IS BLUR. SPECIFICITY,
THE OPPOSITE OF ESSENCE,
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IS OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH.
Fall:
Because the Hot Springs draft board continued unaccountably to postpone his preliminary interview and preinduction physical, William Jefferson Clinton was able to enroll at Oxford University.
Oxford
Vietnam
During this year, resistance to the Vietnam draft was becoming quite popular. For instance, here is a poster
featuring singer Joan Baez (left) and her sisters, encouraging young men to engage in draft resistance in what
might be described as a most forthright manner:28
28. “Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No,” National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
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October: Operation Sealord, the largest combined naval operation of the entire war in Southeast Asia, began with more
than 1,200 gunboats and warships of the US Navy and the South Vietnamese Navy targeting the supply lines
of the North Vietnamese Army extending from Cambodia into the Mekong Delta. Enemy supply camps in the
Delta and along other waterways would also be successfully disrupted during this operation, which would last
two years.
The St. Helena General Workers Union protested against Solomon’s shares being sold to foreigners.
October 21, Monday: The US released 14 North Vietnamese POWs.
October 26, Saturday: North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces assaulted the US base at Tayninh, 95 north of Saigon,
but were repulsed.
Israeli and Egyptian forces exchanged artillery barrages across the Suez Canal. Egyptian ground forces
attacked Israeli positions at Qantara and Port Taufiq.
When the Rassemblement pour l’Indépendence Nationale voted to join with the new Part Québecois,
the Quebec separatist movement was at last united.
October 27, Sunday: In London, 50,000 protested the war in Vietnam.
The Games of the Nineteenth Olympiad of the Modern Era closed in Mexico City. In 16 days of competition,
5,516 athletes from 112 countries had participated. Two black American athletes on the winners’ podium
raised fists in black gloves during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner.
String Trio by Charles Wuorinen was performed for the initial time, in the National Gallery, Washington DC.
October 31, Thursday: The US Navy announced that the remains of its nuclear submarine USS Scorpion had been
found 650 kilometers southwest of the Azores at a depth of 3,000 meters (they’d been wondering since late
May).
The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party announced that Chief of State Liu Shao-chi was
stripped of “all posts both inside and outside the party once and for all.” The new president was Dong Biwu.
Israeli commandos struck at an electric transformer station in Egypt, and two bridges over the Nile.
The Association of the Pastors of the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren, meeting in Pardubice,
demanded “complete withdrawal” of Soviet forces from Czechoslovakia.
L’Apocalypse de Jean by Pierre Henry was performed for the initial time in the Théatre de la Musique, Paris.
Paradigm for percussionist, conductor, electric guitar or electric sitar, three instruments (high, middle and low)
and electronics by Lukas Foss was performed for the initial time, at Hunter College, New York.
Operation Rolling Thunder was brought to an end after 2,380 B-52 sorties and more than 300,000 fighter-
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bombers sorties (Soviet-supplied air defense systems had shot down 922 of the US planes), and President
Lyndon Baines Johnson asked that the peace talks be resumed. During 3½ years of saturation bombing the US
had added 1,000,000 tons of conventional high explosives (my calculator puts that at 800 tons a day) to the
jungles beneath them without noticeable effect in slowing the flow of soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam
or diminishing their zeal. Many towns south of Hanoi had been leveled and we guesstimated that about 52,000
civilians, more or less, had given up the ghost — but the ones who were still alive were still patriotically rallied
around their Commie leaders.
The Chinese Communist Party Central Committee announces that Chief of State Liu Shao-chi has been
stripped of “all posts both inside and outside the party once and for all.” He was replaced as president by Dong
Biwu.
November: In Vietnam, William E. Colby replaced Robert Komer as head of CORDS.
November 5, Tuesday: In the US presidential election, after perpetrating a series of dirty tricks on his opponent such
as anonymous allegations of homosexuality, Republican Richard Milhous Nixon narrowly defeated Democrat
Hubert H. Humphrey and his running mate Wallace, and was elected to be the 37th President of the United
States of America. His margin, of 73,000,000 votes cast, was 510,000 votes.29
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29. I will seize the opportunity to again tell you my all-time favorite political joke:
A guy had an accident and was in a coma for years, waking up
finally in 1969. Of course he needed to know what had happened
while he had been out, and so the attending physician commented
that at the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington DC, Dwight
David Eisenhower had just died. “Oh, no!” the guy exclaimed,
“Oh, no!”
“Well,” the attending physician reassured him, “you’ve been
unconscious for many years — Eisenhower had a good long
retirement and died at an advanced age.”
“What a relief!” the patient exclaimed. “I thought for a moment
you were trying to tell me that son of a bitch Nixon had become
President of the United States of America.”
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November 25, Monday: New anti-government demonstrations broke out in 19 Pakistani cities.
In an agreement signed in Moscow, the USSR pledged military assistance, food, and agricultural materials to
North Vietnam.
Czechoslovakia again restricted travel into the West.
On a final day of student unrest 11 people were killed in Alexandria. Students vacated the university buildings
they had occupied.
Upton Sinclair died in Bound Brook, New Jersey at the age of 90.
Projekt 1-Version1 for ensemble by Gottfried Michael Koenig was performed for the initial time, in Utrecht.
Treffpunkt and Es from Aus dem sieben Tagen no.26 by Karlheinz Stockhausen were performed for the initial
time, in London.
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December: The Durham, North Carolina Friends monthly meeting united with other unprogrammed meetings in the
region to deal with the continued war in Vietnam (this would come to be known as the Piedmont Friends
Fellowship).
Clerks of Meeting
1943-1947 Edward K. Kraybill
1947-1948 William Van Hoy, Jr.
1949-1949 John de J. Pemberton, Jr.
1950-1951 Harry R. Stevens
1951-1952 John A. Barlow
1952-1957 Susan Gower Smith
1957-1960 Frances C. Jeffers
1960-1961 Cyrus M. Johnson
1961-1965 Peter H. Klopfer
1965-1967 Rebecca W. Fillmore
1967-1968 David Tillerson Smith
1968-1970 Ernest Albert Hartley
1970-1971 John Hunter
1971-1972 John Gamble
1972-1974 Lyle B. Snider (2 terms)
1974-1975 Helen Gardella
1976-1978 Cheryl F. Junk
1978-1980 Alice S. Keighton
1980-1982 John B. Hunter
1982-1984 Edward M. Arnett
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1984-1986 Calhoun D. Geiger
1986-1988 John P. Stratton
1988-1990 J. Robert Passmore
1990-1992 Karen Cole Stewart
1992-1995 Kathleen Davidson March
1995-1998 Nikki Vangsnes
1998-2000 Co-clerks J. Robert Passmore
& Karen Cole Stewart
2000-2002 Amy Brannock
2002-2002 Jamie Hysjulien (Acting)
2002-2005 William Thomas O’Connor
2005-2007 Terry Graedon
2007-2009 Anne Akwari
2009-2012 Joe Graedon
2012-2013 Marguerite Dingman
2013-
Co-clerks Cathy Bridge &
David Bridge
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December: George W. Bush began serving as a trainee with the 111th Squadron.
(1951), act 1
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During the year, we had been taking more than 1,000 of our boys home in body bags per month. By the end
of this year, US troop levels in Vietnam would have reached 495,000 and our total fatalities would have added
up to 30,000. Although in late 1968 the US was conducting 200 air strikes each day against the traffic on the
Ho Chi Minh trail, this just wasn’t fazing them, as still at any given moment there were up to 10,000 supply
trucks of the North Vietnamese Army en route. During the year an estimated additional 150,000 soldiers
infiltrated from North Vietnam.
However, by careful design, Wubya would be seeing none of this, because the aircraft on which he was training
would be a make and model of aircraft not capable of competing in actual air combats with any actual enemies,
that would therefore be banned by the Pentagon from ever taking part in any fighting anywhere. Our rich boy
might as well have been taking flight training on an Alfa-Romeo sports car.
ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL;
ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS
SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED
TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).
Vietnam
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1969
In downtown Boston, a tablet marking the site of our old Quaker meetinghouse (1709-1808) was stolen. There
was a march protesting the new Southwest Expressway — “People Before Highways!”
Friend Milton Mayer’s ON LIBERTY: MAN V. THE STATE.
Active in draft counseling during the Vietnam war, the Durham, North Carolina Friends monthly meeting was
involved in the establishment of Quaker House in Fayetteville, which would include a military counseling
service and an unprogrammed meeting. The 1st resident directors there would be from the Durham group
(other families in the meeting would also be serving as resident directors).
In other news relating to this monthly meeting in Durham, a decision was reached at the Carolina Friends
School associated with the meeting, that the school had grown to the point at which it needed to hire its initial
full-time principal. The school board interviewed one candidate who was a Quaker but had no educational
experience, and was not satisfied, and then interviewed another candidate who did have educational
experience but was not a Quaker, and was not satisfied, but then someone suggested Harold Jernigan as a
candidate, since he not only was a Quaker, but also had educational experience. He was selected and would
serve for seven years before moving along to be principal of another Quaker school elsewhere.
During this year and the following one Professor Kenneth L. Carroll would served as the T. Wistar Brown
Fellow at Haverford College.
January 1, Wednesday: Henry Cabot Lodge, our former American ambassador to South Vietnam, was nominated by
President-elect Richard Milhous Nixon as the senior US negotiator at the Paris peace talks.
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January 20, Monday: Richard Milhouse Nixon was inaugurated as the 37th US President and declared that “the
greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” This would be the 5th US President in series to
attempt to cope with the conflict in Vietnam. His campaign which had succeeded had been a campaign based
on a pledge that he was going to bring us “peace with honor.” (Trust me.)
yourself.”
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January 22, Wednesday: In the Da Krong valley, the beginning of Operation Dewey Canyon — the last major US
Marine operation in Vietnam.
January 25, Saturday: The Paris peace talks began, with official representatives of the US, South Vietnam, North
Vietnam, and the Viet Cong in attendance.
February 2, Sunday: While at Oxford, William Jefferson Clinton took, and passed, a military physical examination.
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February 3, Monday: With William Jefferson Clinton already at Oxford University, and already on the previous day
having taken and passed a military physical examination in England, his draft board in Hot Springs, Arkansas
got around to summoning him to appear for his local preliminary interview and pre-induction physical. At this
point the young man’s uncle, Raymond Clinton began to personally lobby J. William Fulbright, the
Democratic Senator from Arkansas, William S. Armstrong, the chairman of the 3-man Hot Springs draft board,
and Lieutenant Commander Trice Ellis, Jr., commanding officer of the local Navy reserve unit, to obtain for
his nephew a slot in the US Naval Reserve.
Although the local reserve unit had no open positions, Clinton was granted a slot, and the slot he was granted
was not of the usual sort since this would have required him to begin within 12 months to serve two years on
active duty, but instead was a slot which had been created especially for him and which involved no such
obligation.
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February 23, Sunday: The Viet Cong attacked 110 targets throughout South Vietnam, including Saigon.
February 25, Tuesday: In a raid by the North Vietnamese upon a base camp near the Demilitarized Zone, 36 US
Marines were killed.
March 4, Tuesday: Because of the series of Viet Cong offenses in the South, President Richard Milhous Nixon
threatened to resume our bombing of North Vietnam.
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desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
March 15, Saturday: Ruth Pickering Schmoe, who had had heart problems for some time, died.
For the 1st time since 1968, in Vietnam US troops went on the offensive inside the Demilitarized Zone.
March 17, Monday: President Richard Milhous Nixon authorized his secret Operation Menu, which everyone of
course was to know about except the American electorate — B-52 bombing of the North Vietnamese supply
depots located along the border of Vietnam inside Cambodia.
March 29, Saturday: A series of letters from Ronald Ridenhour finally resulted in an official US Army investigation
into his allegations in regard to a supposed massacre in which allegedly he had been involved, in a hamlet he
was calling “My Lai,” a year earlier, on March 16, 1968 — an allegation which was simply denied by all
existing army records. There was simply no indication whatever (other than this persistent series of letters from
this obviously disturbed and possibly deranged Vietnam vet) that anything of any sort untoward had occurred.
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April: William Jefferson Clinton received in the mail an induction notice from his Hot Springs, Arkansas draft board.
(He would later allege implausibly that the draft board had assured him that he could simply ignore their
mailed notice — since it had been delivered by the postal service after his deadline for induction!)
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April 9, Wednesday: At Harvard University, 300 anti-Vietnam students seized the administration building, throwing
out eight deans and then locking themselves in. They would be forcibly ejected.
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April 23, Wednesday: The Army Inspector General began a full inquiry into the reputed events at My Lai.
Fighting between Lebanese police and Palestinian terrorists broke out in Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, Tripoli, Baalbek,
and Nabatiah. Twelve people were killed. The government instituted a state of emergency and placed curfews
on the impacted cities.
The Egyptian government announced that it considered the cease-fire agreement of 1967 to no longer be in
effect.
A Los Angeles jury voted to impose the death penalty on Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.
Ramifications for string orchestra by György Ligeti was performed for the initial time, in Berlin.
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April 30, Wednesday: At 543,400, US troop levels in the Vietnam theater of war peaked. To date 33,641 Americans
had been killed — a total that finally had been brought to exceed the total of Americans who had been killed
in our Korean War.
Egyptian and Israeli forces began heavy artillery exchanges across the Suez Canal along a 100-kilometer front
from Qantara to Port Taufiq.
Lebanese troops relieved an army post between Merj Ayun and Hasbeya that had been under siege by
Palestinian terrorists.
Terence O’Neill resigned as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and head of the Unionist Party because his
party refused to support efforts to redress the grievances of the province’s Catholics.
Rioting broke out in Amsterdam when the Socialist Youth were prevented from broadcasting their take on
Queen Juliana’s 60th birthday. Police battled 2,000 demonstrators.
From Here on Farther for clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, and piano by Stefan Wolpe was performed for the initial
time, at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, New York.
May:
The New York Times revealed that there had been secret bombing in Cambodia — secret in the sense that
everyone in the world knew all about it except our general public, the members of the American electorate who
might have had something to say about this. To determine the source of this news leak and punish appropriately
the leaker, despite the fact that no court order had been obtained for such action, President Richard Milhous
Nixon ordered the FBI to place wiretaps on the telephones of 4 journalists and 13 government officials. No
more Mr. Nice Guy.
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desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
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May 10, Saturday: A federal jury in Meridian, Mississippi acquitted 3 members of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1966
murder of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer (in regard to 7 others they were unable to reach a verdict).
In a “search-and-destroy” assault on North Vietnamese positions atop “Hamburger Hill” in the A Shau Valley
near Hue, 46 soldiers of the 101st Airborne would be killed in the course of a fierce 10-day battle beginning
on this day, and 400 others wounded. After this hill was secured the soldiers would be ordered by their
commander to simply walk away from it. The hill itself meant nothing whatever to us and the North
Vietnamese Army was allowed to promptly move right back in and re-establish their positions atop the hill
unopposed. At home this would not be understood: did this mean that American lives were being wasted?
One of our senators labeled such a conflict “senseless and irresponsible.” Orders went out from Washington
DC to the MACV Commander, General Creighton Abrams, that in the future he was to avoid any such
incidents. “Hamburger Hill” would thus be the last major such search and destroy mission by large units of US
troops during the war. A long period of decline in morale and discipline would begin among the American
draftees serving involuntarily. Nearly 50% of our soldiers would be playing their war games with the
marijuana, opium, heroin and whatever that were so cheaply available in theater. US military hospitals would
be deluged with chemical-related cases rather than with the more usual causalities of war.
May 14, Wednesday: In his first TV speech on Vietnam, President Richard Milhouse Nixon presented a peace plan
according to which over the following year the US and North Vietnam would simultaneously pull out of the
South. This would of course be unacceptable to the warmongers in Hanoi.
June 8, Sunday: At Midway Island, President Richard Milhous Nixon met with South Vietnam’s President Nguyen
Van Thieu and informed him that US troop levels would be sharply reduced. The two leaders than held a press
briefing in which Nixon announced a “Vietnamization” of the war, and a US troop withdrawal of 25,000 men.
June 13, Friday: Hugh Thompson fingered Lieutenant William Calley as the officer who had been present at My Lai.
June 27, Friday: Life Magazine displayed smiling “before” portrait photos of all 242 of the American soldiers who
had lost their lives in Vietnam during the previous week, including the 46 who had been killed during the
taking of “Hamburger Hill.” There was no need to display “after” photos — these smiling, posed studio
portraits of dead men had the desired effect, of stunning the nation.
Here’s a photo of one young American who was not among the soldiers who had lost their lives.
Somehow he had evaded the bullets, all the bullets:
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June-July: In about this timeframe Ted Kaczynski, at loose ends, came to live at his parents’ small residence in
Lombard, Illinois.
Having received a 2d induction notice in the mail in England, something that would have meant his getting
shot at along with the other American boys in Vietnam –an induction notice with a July 28th induction date–
William Jefferson Clinton had no alternative but to come home to America.
Didn’t Inhale
Summer: Charles Lindbergh began building a dream home on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands.
Ted Kaczynski and his younger brother David Kaczynski drove to Canada to look for a plot of remote land on
which they might settle, where they might begin to lead a life that was remote and self-sufficient. They filed a
request with the Canadian government, to lease such a plot of ground.
HERMITS
William Jefferson Clinton went to see Colonel Willard A. Hawkins, who according to the Los Angeles Times
happened to be “the only person in Arkansas with authority to rescind a draft notice.”
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[I] never received any unusual or favorable treatment.
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Gosh, he’s a young man of such promise. It would be a shame to waste him.
I did not have sex with that woman
July:
— Monica Lewinsky.
President Richard Milhous Nixon, through a French emissary, sent a secret letter to Ho Chi Minh urging him
to settle the war and threatening to resume bombing if the peace talks around the round table in Paris remained
stalled as of November 1st. (In August, Hanoi would respond by simply repeating their earlier demands for
Viet Cong participation in a coalition government in South Vietnam.)
July 8, Wednesday: The very first US troop withdrawal occurred as 800 men from the 9th Infantry Division were sent
home. The troop withdrawal was planned to occur in 14 phases, from July 1969 through November 1972.
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July 11, Saturday: A friend of William Jefferson Clinton at Oxford, Cliff Jackson, wrote about how “Clinton is
feverishly trying to find a way to avoid entering the Army as a drafted private. I have had several of my friends
in influential positions trying to pull strings on Bill’s behalf.”
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July 17, Friday: Secretary of State William Rogers (a gentleman who, we hope, would never hear of the US torture of
prisoners at Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, and other legitimate practices of the
Bush administration in its never-ending total war against terror) accused Hanoi of “lacking humanity” in the
treatment of American POWs.
There would be black riots for 6 consecutive nights in York, Pennsylvania.
The National Guard was ordered into Youngstown, Ohio to control racial violence.
July 25, Saturday: The “Nixon Doctrine” was made public. While it advocated US military and economic assistance
to the nations around the world that were struggling against Communism, there were to be no more American
soldiers committed to Vietnam-style foreign ground wars. The emphasis was to be placed on local military
self-sufficiency backed by US air power and by technical assistance to assure security.30
RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON
July 28, Tuesday: This was the latest date on which the draft board in Hot Springs, Missouri had been meaning to
induct William Jefferson Clinton, so he could go to Vietnam and take his chances on getting killed along with
the rest of us. Well, they thought ... but you know how such things are.
Hell no I won’t go
July 30, Thursday: President Richard Milhouse Nixon visited US troops in Vietnam.
30. The Nixon Doctrine would work out really well in Iraq and Afghanistan, not.
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August 4, Monday: National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger took his first secret meeting in Paris with
representatives from Hanoi.
General William Westmoreland ordered the Army Inspector General to turn over the investigation of the
incident at the village of My Lai in Vietnam to the Army Criminal Investigation Division.
August 7, Thursday: After William Jefferson Clinton arranged to enroll in law school at the University of Arkansas
and enter the ROTC program there, the Hot Springs, Arkansas draft board reclassified him to 1-D.
1-D
Clinton would never enroll in that law school and thus become eligible to enter that ROTC program — this
was merely an evasive tactic — good on-the-job training for a budding lawyer and politician — how to lie with
a straight face.
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August 12, Tuesday: The Viet Cong kicked off a new offensive, attacking 150 targets throughout South Vietnam.
August 17, Sunday: 10 days of fierce fighting began south of Danang, Vietnam.
The New York Times reported that most Japanese companies were refusing to do business with Israel for fear
of Arab reprisals.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe died in Chicago at the age of 83.
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Late August: Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard graduate who had served as a lieutenant in charge of a company in the US
Marine Corps and then returned to Harvard to obtain a PhD in economics, had in 1959 joined the RAND
corporation’s Economics Department as an analyst, and in 1964 during the Johnson Administration had served
in the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara, and then had done a 2-year stint in
Vietnam for the State Department, and then had returned to RAND. He was the first Rand researcher to work
directly for the president’s assistant for national security. He had just been reading Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on civil disobedience when he met Randall Keeler,
discovering to his amazement that this conscientious objector was actually ready to accept a prison sentence
in order to attempt to raise a moral issue to his countrymen. Randy was about to be tried for draft resistance
and expected to go to prison (he would in fact serve two years). He changed Daniel Ellsberg’s life by his
example. Ellsberg for the first time found himself asking himself what he could do to help end the Vietnam
affair if he were willing to go to prison. He would try to arrange to testify before Congress, and in preparation
for such testimony, would begin to make himself a personal copy of the Pentagon Papers with which he was
working, all 7,000 pages of them. When Ellsberg had been a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam, he had thought of
himself as serving the president -- because the Marines tend to think of themselves as a fast reaction force that
is at the Commander-in-Chief’s disposal. Reading through these papers as he copied them burned out of him
all desire to work for the executive branch, for in these 7,000 pages he saw how five presidents in a row had
been operating in an utterly stubborn, selfish, foolish, immoral, and illegal manner year after year for 24 years.
He found himself no longer wanting to function as the president’s man.
And the point was that what Randy Keeler revealed to me was that
there were other ways of being conscientious than serving the
president. There are other kinds of courage. And I had to ask
myself, well, if I was willing to be blown up in Vietnam or
captured, as friends of mine were, when I accepted the cause or
supported it, should I not be willing to go to prison or risk
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my freedom? And when I faced that question, it was quickly
answered.
September 2, Tuesday: At the age of 79, Ho Chi Minh had a fatal heart attack. He was succeeded by Le Duan, who
publicly read his last will urging that North Vietnam fight “until the last Yankee has gone.”
September 5, Friday: The US Army found occasion to bring belated murder charges against Lieutenant William
Calley, concerning an alleged massacre of some Vietnamese civilians that supposedly had somehow taken
place at My Lai in the Quang Ngai province of Vietnam during March 1968.
September 12, Friday: Allegedly –according to what he would later aver to Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Holmes– 23year-old William Jefferson Clinton “stayed up all night writing a letter to the chairman of my draft board.”
Eventually he would be force to acknowledge that if he had thus stayed up all night composing such a letter
— then that letter had not ever actually been posted.
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If I tell you I was up all night...
September 14, Sunday: The Arkansas Gazette, published in Little Rock, headlined that the President of the United
States was considering a restriction of the military draft to permit conscription only of 19-year-olds. In
addition, according to this article, “the Army would send to Vietnam only enlistees, professional soldiers, and
those draftees who volunteered to go.” (It may be presumed that 23-year-old William Jefferson Clinton became
aware of this news story, for he would in fact return to Oxford that fall as he had hoped, for his 2d year.)
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September 16, Tuesday: President Richard Milhous Nixon ordered the withdrawal of 35,000 US soldiers from
Vietnam, and a reduction in future draft calls.
September 19, Friday: President Richard Milhous Nixon, dealing with the agitation of the college campuses,
instructed that the October draft call for Vietnam service be spread out over a 3-month period and suspended
the draft calls that had been scheduled for November and December.
October: An opinion poll indicated that 71% of the American public approved of President Richard Milhous Nixon’s
Vietnam policy. Please choose the flavor you prefer:
a.) We were being led by a desperate and exceedingly cunning man.
b.) We were utter idiots.
c.) We were utter idiots who were being led by a desperate and exceedingly cunning man.
desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
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October 1, Wednesday: President Richard Milhous Nixon announced that anyone already in graduate school could
complete the full year without fear of the draft. This had the effect of rendering William Jefferson Clinton safe
from the draft through June 1970.
During this month President Nixon would also suspend the call-up of additional draftees until a draft lottery
could be held, in December.
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October 7, Tuesday: China and the USSR agreed to negotiate their border dispute.
The military junta that had ruled Brazil since President Artur da Costa e Silva had suffered a stroke on August
31st, chose Emilio Garatuzú Medici as his replacement as president of Brazil.
Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted 255-81-150 to urge a “prompt, rapid and complete
withdrawal of United States forces” from Vietnam.
October 10, Friday: As the last US forces were removed from Saigon, the defense of the city came to be entirely in
the hands of Saigon government forces.
The recommendation of a 3-man commission chaired by Lord Hunt was that the Royal Ulster Constabulary
be disarmed and relieved of its military duties, that the parttime B Special Force be disbanded, and that more
Roman Catholics be recruited into the police force in order better to reflect the population of Northern Ireland.
Ramifications by György Ligeti is performed for the initial time, in the setting for twelve solo strings, in
Saarbrücken.
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October 15, Wednesday: A “Moratorium” peace demonstration was held in Washington and several US cities.
Demonstration organizers had received praises from North Vietnam’s Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, who
sent his good wishes in a letter to them “may your fall offensive succeed splendidly” — the first occasion on
which Hanoi had seen fit publicly to acknowledge the American anti-war movement. This would of course
infuriate American conservatives, including Vice President Spiro Agnew, who lambasted the protesters as only
he could, not only as “dupes” of the Communist but also as “an effete corps of impudent snobs who
characterize themselves as intellectuals.”31
In London, William Jefferson Clinton organized and led an anti-war demonstration. It wasn’t that he was
against war, of course, it was merely that he was opposed to this particular war in which he happened to be
asked to serve. He wasn’t opposed out of self-interest, of course, as he was a young man of principle.
October 30, Thursday: William Jefferson Clinton was reclassified 1-A, eligible for induction. (Clinton would allege
that he had instigated this reclassification, but produced no evidence whatever that he had done so — and in
all likelihood the reclassification had occurred simply because he had not honored the promise he had made
to the Hot Springs draft board, to enroll in the law school of the University of Arkansas and enter the ROTC
program there.)
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I got myself reclassified 1-A and...
31. Our vice president was, of course, not effete, not a snob, not impudent, not a dupe of any Communists, and certainly no
intellectual. What he was, he was a regular American crooked politician of an annoyingly ordinary stripe. If my memory serves me
right — he would never serve a day in prison for his crimes. Do I misremember?
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Christie’s of London auctioned off to the highest bidder what remained of Napoleon Bonaparte’s penis. As it
turns out, not very surprisingly, it isn’t worth as much to anyone else as it had been to him. Eventually the
object, which is said to resemble a worm, would wind up in the display cabinet of an American urologist.
DIGGING UP THE DEAD
So that you won’t be too terribly disappointed, that I don’t have a photo of the object, here is the preserved
organ of Grigori Rasputin, still in a museum in Russia,
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and here is a photograph of Napoleon’s sword and pistols, at the West Point Military Academy:
November 3, Monday: In a major TV address, President Richard Milhous Nixon asked for support from “the great
silent majority of my fellow Americans” for his new Vietnam strategy. He needed for us to be behind him
100% because “the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris.” Making a
gesture toward his personal fate that would only later become clear to us, he declared that others could not
defeat or humiliate the United States: “Only Americans can do that.” –Well, well.
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desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
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November 13, Thursday: First publication of the story of My Lai. Was that what the President had been talking about
ten days before, when he had commented that only Americans could defeat or humiliate the United States?
(For certain sure, the guy hadn’t been talking about himself.)
Speaking in Des Moines, Iowa, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew accused network television news departments
of bias and distortion, and urged viewers to lodge complaints against them. Never you mind that Unamerican
stuff about “My Lai.”
November 14, Friday: A 2d account of the action at My Lai was published. This one provided eyewitness accounts.
The Haeberle photos were published. The US Army announced that Staff Sergeant David Mitchell had on
October 28th been charged in connection with the murders of civilians there.
Apollo 12 blasted off from Cape Kennedy heading for the moon. Aboard were Charles Conrad, Richard
Gordon, and Alan Bean.
The Lobster Quadrille no.2 of An Alice Symphony for amplified soprano, folk group and orchestra by David
Del Tredici was performed for the initial time, in Royal Festival Hall, London.
November 15, Saturday: A “Mobilization” peace demonstration drew an estimated 250,000 to Washington DC —
this was the largest anti-war protest in US history.
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November 16, Sunday: Le Monde reported that Archbishop Felicio Cesar da Cunha Vasconcelos excommunicated the
chief of police in Sao Paulo for the arrest and torture of Sister Maurina Borges da Silveira and other atrocities
against clergy.
Seven Stars’ Symphony op.132 for orchestra by Charles Koechlin was performed completely for the initial
time, over the airwaves of BBC radio 3 and Radio France-Musique, 36 years after it had been composed. The
seven movements were 1. Douglas Fairbanks (du “Voleur de Bagdad”); 2. Lilian Harvey; 3. Greta Garbo; 4.
Clara Bow et la joyeuse Californie; 5. Marlene Dietrich; 6. Emil Jannings (de “L’ange bleu”); 7. Charlie
Chaplin (d’après “La ruée vers l’or”, “Circus” etc.).
A group of survivors of the My Lai massacre were allowed to tell of the murder of 567 civilians in 1968 at
their village in South Vietnam, in the presence of US Army officers.
William Jefferson Clinton organized and led an anti-war demonstration in London.
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December 1, Monday: The first draft lottery since World War II was held in New York City. Each day of the year was
assigned a number. Those with birthdays on days with low numbers would likely be drafted to serve in
Vietnam and would need to serve out their time either in the Army or in prison, while those with birthdays on
days with high numbers would likely not be drafted to serve in Vietnam. Are you feeling lucky?
In this first draft lottery, William Jefferson Clinton drew a high number, 311, which virtually assured that he
would never be forced to serve in the US military (in any role more lowly or more likely to be shot at than
Commander-in-Chief).
December 3, Wednesday: With his lucky number in hand, the callow youth William Jefferson Clinton finally kept a
promise he had made and wrote from England to Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Holmes, commander of the
University of Arkansas ROTC Program. He informed him that the US draft system was illegitimate,
and averred that he would accept being drafted only to maintain his viability as a future candidate for public
office. Here is this interesting “Merry Christmas” letter in full:
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Dear Col. Holmes,
I am sorry to be so long in writing. I know I promised to
let you hear from me at least once a month, and from now
on you will, but I have to have some time to think about
this first letter. Almost daily since my return to England
I have thought about writing about what I want to and ought
to say.
First, I want to thank you, not only for saving me from
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the draft, but for being so kind to me last summer, when
I was as low as I have ever been. One thing that made the
bond we struck in good faith somewhat palatable to me was
my high regard for you personally. In retrospect, it seems
that the admiration might not have been mutual had you
known a little more about me, about my political beliefs
and activities. At least you might have thought me more
fit for the draft than for ROTC.
Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked in a very
minor position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I did it for the experience and the salary but also for
the opportunity, however small, of working every day
against a war I opposed and despised with a depth of
feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before
Vietnam. I did not take the matter lightly but studied it
carefully, and there was a time when not many people had
more information about Vietnam at hand than I did.
I have written and spoken and marched against the war.
One of the national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium
is a close friend of mine. After I left Arkansas last
summer, I went to Washington to work in the national
headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to
organize the Americans here for demonstrations October 15
and November 16.
Interlocked with the war is the draft issue, which I did
not begin to consider separately until early 1968. For a
law seminar at Georgetown I wrote a paper on the legal
arguments for and against allowing, within the Selective
Service System, the classification of selective
conscientious objection, for those opposed to
participation in a particular war, not simply to
“participation in war in any form.”
From my work, I came to believe that the draft system
itself is illegitimate. No government really rooted in
limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to
make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may
oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong, a war,
which in any case, does not involve immediately the peace
and freedom of the nation. The draft was justified in World
War II because the life of the people collectively was at
stake.
Individuals had to fight, if the nation was to survive,
for the lives of their country and their way of life.
Vietnam is no such case. Nor was Korea an example where,
in my opinion, certain military action was justified but
the draft was not, for the reasons stated above.
Because of my opposition to the draft and the war, I am in
great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight,
kill, and maybe die for their country (i.e. the particular
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policy of a particular government) right or wrong. Two of
my friends at Oxford are conscientious objectors. I wrote
a letter of recommendation for one of them to his
Mississippi draft board, a letter I am more proud of than
anything else I wrote at Oxford last year. One of my
roommates is a draft resister who is possibly under
indictment and may never be able to go home again. He is
one of the bravest, best men I know. His country needs men
like him more than they know. That he is considered a
criminal is an obscenity.
The decision not to be a resister and the related
subsequent decisions were the most difficult of my life.
I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for
one reason only, to maintain my political viability within
the system. For years I have worked to prepare myself for
a political life characterized by both practical political
ability and concern for rapid social progress. It is a life
I still feel compelled to try to lead. I do not think our
system of government is by definition corrupt, however
dangerous and inadequate it has been in recent years.
(The society may be corrupt, but that is not the same
thing, and if that is true we are all finished anyway.)
When the draft came, despite political convictions, I was
having a hard time facing the prospect of fighting a war
I had been fighting against, and that is why I contacted
you. ROTC was the one way in which I could possibly, but
not positively, avoid both Vietnam and the resistance.
Going on with my education, even coming back to England,
played no part in my decision to join ROTC. I am back here,
and would have been at Arkansas Law School because there
is nothing else I can do. I would like to have been able
to take a year out perhaps to teach in a small college or
work on some community action project and in the process
to decide whether to attend law school or graduate school
and how to begin putting what I have learned to use.
But the particulars of my personal life are not near as
important to me as the principles involved. After I signed
the ROTC letter of intent I began to wonder whether the
compromise I had made with myself was not more
objectionable than the draft would have been, because I
had no interest in the ROTC program itself and all I seem
to have done was to protect myself from physical harm.
Also, I had begun to think that I had deceived you, not by
lies —there were none— but by failing to tell you all of
the things I'm telling you now. I doubt I had the mental
coherence to articulate them then.
At that time, after we had made our agreement and you had
sent my 1D deferment to my draft board, the anguish and
loss of my self regard and self confidence really set in.
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I hardly slept for weeks and kept going by eating
compulsively and reading until exhaustion brought sleep.
Finally, on September 12 I stayed up all night writing a
letter to the chairman of my draft board, saying basically
what is in the preceding paragraph, thanking him for trying
to help in a case where he really couldn’t, and stating
that I couldn’t do the ROTC after all and would he please
draft me as soon as possible.
I never mailed the letter, but I did carry it with me every
day until I got on the plane to return to England. I didn’t
mail the letter because I didn’t see, in the end, how my
going in the army and maybe going to Vietnam would achieve
anything except a feeling that I had punished myself and
gotten what I deserved. So I came back to England to try
to make something of the second year of my Rhodes
scholarship.
And that is where I am now, writing to you because you have
been good to me and have a right to know what I think and
feel. I am writing too in the hope that my telling this
one story will help you understand more clearly how so many
fine people have come to find themselves loving their
country but loathing the military, to which you and other
good men have devoted years, lifetimes and the best service
you could give. To many of us, it is no longer clear what
is service and what is dis-service, or if it is clear, the
conclusion is likely to be illegal.
Forgive the length of this letter. There was much to say.
There is still a lot to be said, but it can wait. Please
say hello to Colonel Jones for me.
Merry Christmas.
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton
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December 12, Friday: The 1,350-person non-combatant contingent from the Philippines began to withdraw from
Vietnam.
After receiving testimony from hundreds of tortured victims of the fascist regime, the Council of Europe was
set to expel Greece from its membership. Before the vote could be taken Greece withdrew from the council.
A bomb at the National Bank of Agriculture in Milan killed 14 and injuring 90.
In Rome 3 bombs injured 17.
Variations for violin and piano by Carlos Chávez was performed for the first time, in Alice Tully Hall, New
York.
On or about this date, William Jefferson Clinton was in Norway with Father McSorley, meeting with various
peace organizations.
December 13, Saturday: The Secretary of Defense commented that everyone involved in the killings at My Lai would
be prosecuted (yes, believe me, he actually did say that).
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December 15, Monday: President Richard Milhous Nixon ordered an additional 50,000 US soldiers out of Vietnam.
December 20, Saturday: A frustrated Henry Cabot Lodge quit his post as chief US negotiator at the Paris peace talks.
By the end of this year, America’s fighting strength in Vietnam would have been reduced by 115,000 men. At
this point, 40,024 Americans had been killed in Vietnam. Over the following few years, in accordance with
our new “Vietnamization” policy in which we weren’t going to die any longer for them but they were going to
have to die for themselves, the number of soldiers in the South Vietnamese Army would be being boosted to
over 500,000 men.
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1970
In Vietnam, the US Army fielded low-energy ruby laser rangefinders. Our artillerymen soon found this pointof-aim-equals-point-of-impact accuracy so fascinating that officers and enlisted men alike began setting out in
lawn chairs with cold brewskis to better view the action. (International television audiences would join these
fascinated American soldiers during the Gulf War of 1991, when Coalition forces would fire off 12,000 laser
guided munitions at the Iraqi targets.)
US troops were ordered into Cambodia to destroy Communist staging bases from which Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese were attacking the US and South Vietnamese forces. The stated object of this attack, which would
last from April 30 to June 30, was to ensure the continuing safe withdrawal of American forces from South
Vietnam and to assist the program of Vietnamization.
After a coup backed by the Central Intelligence Agency brought Lon Nol to power, the formerly neutral
Cambodia would be dragged into the war in Vietnam, support for the Khmer Rouge, which had been marginal
before President Nixon widened the war, would grow, and thus the Khmer Rouge would be able to seize power
in 1975 — leading to Cambodia’s infamous killing fields. “Few Americans realize that close to two million
people died ... and that the United States helped bring about the crisis that lead to the Khmer Rouge takeover,”
CBS would report. Thirty-five years later in an article “Cambodia All Over Again?” Conn Hallinan would
suggest that the US was setting the stage to extend the war with Iraq into Syria — a country with which we
were already “unofficially at war.”
January: George W. Bush was assigned flight duty as an F-102 fighter pilot with the 111th Squadron.
If the North Vietnamese attacked Texas, he would be among those ready to defend the countryside.
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(1951), act 1
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?
— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.
LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
February 2, Monday: Bertrand Russell died in Wales.
In retaliation for an increasing number of Viet Cong raids throughout South Vietnam, our B-52 bombers
carpet-bombed along the Ho Chi Minh trail.
February 19, Thursday: A combat patrol of the 7th US Marines was accused of having caused the deaths of eleven
civilians at Son Thang, South Vietnam.
USMC
February 21, Saturday: Although the official peace talks remain deadlocked around the round table in Paris, behind
the scenes National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was beginning a series of secret talks which would be
going on for two years, with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho.
March 10, Tuesday: Captain Ernest L. Medina was charged with having perpetrated the mass murder of Vietnamese
civilians at My Lai.
The Georges River Canal System was placed on the National Register of Historic Sites.
Vietnam
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March 14, Saturday: The Peers Report on the mass murder of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai was delivered to General
William Westmoreland.
March 17, Tuesday: Fourteen US officers were charged with offenses related to the mass murder of Vietnamese
civilians at My Lai.
March 18, Wednesday: Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia was deposed by General Lon Nol. The prince, who had been out
of the country at the time of this coup, then aligned with the Cambodian Communists, known as the “Khmer
Rouge,” in an effort to oust that general’s regime. The Khmer Rouge were being led by an unknown but
charismatic figure named Pol Pot who was receiving the support of the Chinese, who would eagerly capitalize
on the enormous prestige and popularity of Prince Sihanouk to increase local support for his movement. (Pol
Pot would later violently oust Lon Nol and begin a radical experiment in the creation of agrarian utopia through
radical social simplification, resulting in the slaughter of a full quarter of the country’s population, some
2,000,000 persons, in a course of starvation, overwork, and systematic execution. Everyone with eyeglasses,
for instance, would be automatically executed for fear that the eyeglasses signified that they knew how to read,
and everyone suspected of being a former cab-driver would be automatically executed because they possessed
dangerous knowledge of how to drive a motor vehicle.)
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March 20, Friday: Cambodian troops under General Lon Nol attacked Khmer Rouge guerillas and North Vietnamese
troops stationed inside Cambodia. At the White House, President Richard Milhous Nixon and top aides
discussed plans to assist this general’s pro-American regime.
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March 27, Friday: Saigon government troops conduct a major 2-day sweep into Kandal Province, Cambodia,
supported by US helicopter gunships.
The trial of 34 people on charges of sedition opened in a military court in Athens. Some of the defendants
testified that they have been tortured to extract confessions.
March 31, Tuesday: The US Army presented its murder charges against Captain Ernest L. Medina concerning the
massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in March 1968.
April 20, Monday: President Richard Milhous Nixon announced that another 150,000 American soldiers would be
withdrawn from Vietnam within the following year. –And, not in body bags!
April 24, Friday: The Peoples Republic of China launched a satellite into Earth orbit, that beamed back to Earth “The
East is Red,” a popular Chinese song.
A Vietnamese communist drive reached the middle of Angtassom, south of Phnom Penh.
Pursuant to a national referendum, Gambia was proclaimed a republic.
April 29, Wednesday: 6,000 South Vietnamese soldiers marched into Cambodia’s “Parrot’s Beak” west of Saigon.
Israel confirmed that Soviet pilots were flying combat missions for Egypt.
An Egyptian commando raid in force across the Suez Canal failed.
A play about Henry Thoreau’s night in jail, and Thoreauvian civil disobedience, had been produced at Ohio
State University in Columbus, Ohio one year earlier (this play would debut as “The Night Thoreau spent in
Jail” in Washington DC in October). Students at Ohio State had begun protesting the presence on campus of
ROTC, the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. 1,200 National Guardsmen appeared and used tear gas to
disperse the demonstrators. They arrested some 600 students. About 20 shotgun wounds would be treated.
Speaking for the first time since his release from custody, Mikis Theodorakis called for a “national council of
resistance” to overthrow the Greek government.
Ringing Changes for twelve percussionists by Charles Wuorinen was performed (performed without
interruption this time), at Jersey City State College.
April 30, Thursday: President Richard Milhous Nixon stunned American with an announcement that US and South
Vietnamese troops had crossed the border into Cambodia. The incursion had been planned in response to
continuing Communist gains against General Lon Nol’s forces in Cambodia and also had been intended to
weaken overall North Vietnamese military strength in order to ease the difficult problem of a safe US pullout
from the theater of war. They had not crossed the border, he declared, “for the purpose of expanding the war
into Cambodia.” Not at all, they had crossed the border “for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and
winning the just peace we desire.” The announcement would generate a tidal wave of protest by politicians,
the press, students, professors, clergy members, business leaders, and many average Americans.
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desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
May 1, May Day: This was the traditional Communist holiday. A combined force of 15,000 US and South Vietnamese
soldiers attacked North Vietnamese supply bases inside Cambodia. However, throughout this offensive, the
enemy soldiers and the Viet Cong would carefully avoid large-scale battles and instead would withdraw
westward, deeper into Cambodia, leaving behind base camps containing huge stores of weapons and
ammunition.
That was in Vietnam. Meanwhile, in America, President Richard Milhous Nixon was terming anti-war
students “bums blowing up campuses.”
desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
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May 2, Saturday: American college campuses erupted in protest over the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.
May 4, Monday: Neither of the two groups of US and Saigon government forces penetrating Cambodia reported any
substantial contact with the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong.
The Greek government freed Greek-born French journalist Jean Starakis and flew him to Paris.
Palestinian terrorists entered the Israeli mission in Asuncion, Paraguay. They killed the wife of the first
secretary and injured an employee. They were arrested.
The Pulitzer Prize in music was awarded to Charles Wuorinen for his Time’s Encomium. When asked about
the meeting of April 9th, Pulitzer board member Vermont C. Royster repeated his performance over the
telephone for a New York Times reporter. “It goes something like this: ‘bum, beep, deetely doot.’”
At Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen fired indiscriminately into a crowd of students, killing
four anti-Vietnam student protesters and wounding nine. More than 400 colleges and universities across
America immediately shut down. In Washington DC, nearly 100,000 protesters surrounded various of the
government buildings including the White House and the historical monuments. The message was clear:
“This is the sort of conduct up with which we are not going to put.”
from a defeat.”
For the first time more than a million US citizens would join in nonviolent anti-Vietnam protests.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
May 6, Wednesday: In Saigon, over the previous week, 450 Vietnamese civilians had been killed during Viet Cong
terrorist raids throughout the city — the highest weekly death toll to date.
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May 8, Friday: 200,000 people began three days of anti-US protests in Melbourne and Sydney. They also protested
against their own government for supporting the US.
Construction workers wearing helmets attacked a civil disobedience anti-war demonstration in the financial
district of New York. 70 were injured. These helmeted conservatives then invaded City Hall to force city
officials to raise a flag to full staff that had been at half-staff in mourning for the four students killed at Kent
State University.32
Seven members of the Black Panther Party, indicted for taking part in a shootout with police, were released by
the State of Illinois (there was a lack of evidence that any of them had discharged a firearm).
Gymkhana Formule I for tape by Pierre Henry was performed for the initial time, in the Gymnase de Malakoff.
Time’s Encomium for synthesized and processed synthesized sound by Charles Wuorinen was performed
completely for the initial time, at the State University of New York, Albany.
Piano Sonata no.4 by Lejaren Hiller was performed for the initial time, in Buffalo, 20 years after it was
composed.
The POTUS, Richard Milhous Nixon, couldn’t sleep, and so he got his valet up at 4AM to go out with him and
talk with the anti-Vietnam students camping out at the Lincoln Memorial. Exiting the safety of the White
House without the awareness of his Secret Service security detail, he tried to chat up the young protesters with
talk about football. In the course of the event he informed everyone who would listen that, having been raised
as a Quaker, he was about as much of a pacifist as anyone could possibly be.
Now for a little lesson in logic. Many arguments are based on a simple “if... then” structure. These arguments
are so common and useful they have been awarded a special Latinate name, modus ponens.
In addition to the phrase “modus ponens,” logicians have special technical words for the various features of
these arguments. The “If... Then” premise is called a conditional, and the two truth claims, the beginning one
and the end one, are called the antecedent and the consequent:
32. US Attorney General John Mitchell would announce in 1971 that there wasn’t going to be any federal grand jury investigation
of the killings at Kent State. The State of Ohio would agree in 1979 to the settlement of a civil lawsuit over the killings. They would
agree to pay $600,000 to the parents of the students killed, and to nine students who had been injured but survived, and in addition
$75,000 for legal and other expenses. Although Governor James Rhodes and 27 National Guardsmen who were defendants in the
case would sign a statement that the killings “should not have occurred,” no-one would ever offer any sort of apology.
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Main Premise (antecedent)
Helping Premise (If antecedent, then consequent)
Conclusion (consequent)
The solid connection between premises and conclusion is known as deductive validity. If both premises are
true, then the argument is sound. In the next, generalized, illustration, the letters P and Q are used to stand for
the distinct claims expressed in whole sentences.
Main Premise (P)
Helping Premise (If P then Q)
Conclusion (Q)
Consider the following example of an argument purporting to have valid logical structure and purporting to be
dealing in true assertions:
Obviously, the above is a proper use of the modus ponens form of logic. Now let’s consider another one:
President Richard Milhous Nixon was proclaimed to be a Quaker.
A Quaker would have opposed the war in Vietnam.
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Therefore, Friend Richard opposed the war in Vietnam.
Although they are about very different topics, these two arguments have the same basic structure: Notice that
the claim P occurs twice: once in the main premise, and once after the If part of the helping premise. The claim
Q also occurs twice: once after the then part of the helping premise, and once in the conclusion.
The nice thing about modus ponens arguments is that their conclusions are quite as good as their premises.
The connection between premises and conclusion is solid. This means that all you really have to do in order
to evaluate a modus ponens argument is check for the sense in which the premises are true. In this modus
ponens argument, if the premises are both at least probably true, the reasoning must be strong and the
conclusion must be established. As always, if there is a sense in which at least one of the premises is not true,
the reasoning may well be incorrect and lead to spurious conclusions. Contrariwise, if the conclusion is
obviously false, then one or the other of the premises was also, in some important sense, false. The inference
above is an improper one because there was a very real sense in which Richard Nixon, although he had been
raised by a Quaker mother in a Quaker church, and although he was never officially disowned by that church,
should not be considered to have been a Quaker.
RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
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desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
May 20, Wednesday: Saigon government forces opened a new front into Cambodia from Duclap, north of Saigon.
An interview with Jean Starakis appeared in the Paris weekly L’Actualite. He described the tortures he endured
as a prisoner of the Greek military government.
100,000 construction workers, longshoremen, and office workers, many wearing helmets, demonstrated
around City Hall in New York City in support of our Quaker President Richard Milhous Nixon and his war
policies. These guys really understood.
“Power is not for the nice guy down the street
or for the man next door.”
— Richard Milhous Nixon
June 3, Wednesday: The North Vietnamese Army began a new offensive, toward Phnom Penh in Cambodia.
To prevent the defeat of Lon Nol’s inexperienced young troops, the US provided them with air cover.
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June 22, Monday: Our usage of defoliants in Vietnam was halted.
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
June 23, Tuesday: George W. Bush finished combat crew training school.
He was locked and loaded, and ready to serve his country. Well, but he had trained to fly the F-102
“Delta Dagger” and this aircraft had by this point become so obsolete that all overseas units flying the DD were
being closed down as of June 30, 1970. Too bad how sad!–Who could have anticipated such a turn of events?
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(1951), act 1
Vietnam
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June 24, Wednesday: The US Senate repealed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
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CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
June 30, Tuesday: US troops withdrew from Cambodia. More than 350 Americans had been killed.
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July 23, Thursday: After 3 weeks of North Vietnamese attacks, US forces abandoned “Fire Base Ripcord” near the
Ashau Valley.
Britain’s House of Commons was in session when a visitor shouted “Belfast, see how you like it!” He dropped
a couple of tear gas bombs into the chamber, which needed to be evacuated. Could this visitor have been
expressing a general dissatisfaction with the condition of things in Ireland? The Northern Ireland government
banned parades for a period of 6 months.
Egypt agreed to a US plan for ceasefire and negotiations on peace.
Two Arabs were convicted of throwing hand grenades into an El Al office in Athens on the previous November
27th, killing a child, and one was sentenced to 18 years and the other to 11 years.
The Akron Beacon Journal revealed a Justice Department report based on FBI investigations, that found the
shootings at Kent State University on May 4th had been “not necessary and not in order.”
At the Tomb of Charles Ives for trombone, two psalteries, two dulcimers, three harps, tam-tam, five violins,
viola, cello, and bass, by Lou Harrison, was performed for the initial time, in Aspen, Colorado.
August 11, Tuesday: South Vietnamese troops took over the defense of border positions from US troops.
Two Northern Ireland policemen were killed by a booby-trapped car in County Armagh.
Vietnam
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August 24, Monday: There was heavy B-52 pattern bombing all along the Demilitarized Zone.
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Antiwar sentiment was as pervasive among students on American campuses as prowar sentiment was among
politicians in Washington DC. A few months earlier, National Guardsmen sensing our nation’s “romance with
violence” had seized an opportunity to shoot down four students and wound several others during an antiwar
demonstration at Kent State University. The New Left’s parallel “romance with violence” had intrigued four
young men living in Madison, Wisconsin, two of whom were students at the University of Wisconsin campus
there. During the very early morning, the four blew up Sterling Hall, the math building, with a powerful
homemade bomb, because the building contained among other things an Army Math Research Center.
A graduate student was killed and three others were injured. The FBI investigated both the Kent State incident
and the Madison incident. Together, these events helped end the “romance with violence” for all but a handful
of hardcore New Left revolutionaries and hardcore government addicts.
September 5, Saturday: Operation Jefferson Glenn began in Thua Thien Province — the last US offensive in Vietnam.
October 7, Wednesday: In the course of a speech, President Richard Milhous Nixon proposed a “standstill” cease-fire
in which all the combatants were simply to cease shooting at one another and remain in place pending a formal
peace agreement. It would appear that this idea would not sound as plausible to the humorless people in charge
in Hanoi, as it did to clueless TV audiences in America.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s “Happy Birthday, Wanda June” opened in New York and would continue through March
14, 1971 (it would be published by Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence).
October 24, Saturday: The South Vietnamese kicked off a new offensive into Cambodia.
November 12, Thursday: It wasn’t a great day for America. The General Courts-Martial of Lieutenant William Calley
convened in regard to allegations of the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai began at Fort Benning,
Georgia.
The cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich sent a letter to 4 Soviet newspapers defending Alyeksandr
Solzhenitsyn. On this day he began a 36-hour general strike against the government in Argentina.
President Salvador Allende of Chile announced resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba.
November 20, Friday: American troop levels in Vietnam dropped to 334,600.
December 10, Thursday: President Richard Milhous Nixon warned Hanoi that more bombing raids might ensue were
the North Vietnamese attacks to continue in the South.
yourself.”
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December 22, Tuesday: The Cooper/Church amendment to the US defense appropriations bill forbade the use of any
US ground forces either in Laos or in Cambodia. American troop levels in Vietnam would drop to 280,000 by
the end of this year. During this year, according to the US command, an estimated 60,000 of the soldiers in
theater had been experimenting with drugs. Many of the units were becoming ineffective due to interracial
tensions. Also, there had been more than 200 incidents of what was known popularly as “fragging,” in which
officers had been subjected to attack by fragmentation grenades by the enlisted men under their command.33
December 26, Saturday: Vietnam veterans occupied the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, and the Betsy Ross
House in Philadelphia. They were trying to make some sort of point.
33. Austin Meredith had already been aware, back in 1963, as a Marine ground officer with a twisted spine whose deformity was
found intensely embarrassing by the men under his command, that had he signed the extension papers that had been proffered to
him and gone into lockon with them, and from Camp Pendleton to Vietnam with them — they would have had to frag him. He could
not have survived through a tour of duty in Vietnam.
ASSLEY
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1971
During the Vietnam War the United States military had sprayed nearly 20,000,000 gallons of chemical
herbicides and defoliants in Vietnam, eastern Laos, and parts of Cambodia as part of a chemical-weapon
program known as Operation Ranch Hand (the peak years for this craziness had been from 1967 to 1969).
Under the chemical-warfare program known as Operation Ranch Hand, 12% of the total area of South Vietnam
had been sprayed with defoliating poisons at an average concentration of 13 times the recommended US
Department of Agriculture application rate for domestic use. In South Vietnam alone an estimated 10,000,000
hectares of agricultural land became poisoned. In some areas TCDD dioxin concentrations in soil and water
were hundreds of times greater than levels considered safe by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
The Washington Post revealed that a research team at the University of Cincinnati, under the leadership of Dr.
Eugene L. Saenger and under contract to the Department of Defense, had since 1960 been knowingly
irradiating “mentally enfeebled” patients –all poor and mostly black– with doses known to do harm, in order
to discover whether and under what conditions soldiers on an atomic battlefield would be cognitively
impaired. Despite disclosure, the program with human guinea pigs at the University of Cincinnati would
continue, albeit with a greater effort to do all the paperwork and secure official “informed consent” signatures
from these patients selected for “low-educational level ... low-functioning intelligence quotient ... and strong
evidence of cerebral organic deficit”! — Continue, despite the fact that in Dr. Saenger’s own estimation eight
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patient deaths could possibly be attributed to his radioactive “treatments.”
Dr. Eugene L. Saenger of the University of Cincinnati?
Incidentally, the work of this Dr. Saenger, Cincinnati radiologist under contract to the Department of Defense,
had already been brought before the American College of Radiology, at some point during the late 1960s, and
the good Dr. had already been cleared of accusations of his unethical conduct for having irradiated his cancer
“patients” without informed consent for military and space science, rather than for personal medical,
objectives. It wasn’t that he hadn’t murdered these poor people, but that murdering people in such a manner
had not constituted, in the eyes of these medical ethical experts, murder. They had merely died earlier than they
would otherwise have died. –And, of course, it hadn’t been as if Dr. Saenger had been enjoying what he was
doing. He had been doing it only because he was getting paid to do it, and anyway, all this was for the good of
our nation. His poor “patients” had unknowingly given a few weeks or months at the end of their lives, for
their country. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) would conduct a Congressional investigation.
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I, Austin Meredith, was a systems analyst for General Electric, employed at the GE Armament Systems
Department in Burlington, Vermont. Toward the end of the Vietnam war due to the decline in contracts for our
Minigun, there was a layoff and my family and I were relocated from Burlington to San Jose, California where
I would work at the GE Nuclear Energy Division.34 As an employee in the embattled industry of the nuclear
generation of civilian electrical power –beset as it was by protesters and green freaks and peaceniks and, in
general, terrified traumatized citizens– I needed to receive the most careful schooling (after business hours in
employee classes) in the utterance of recitations such as “A nuclear power plant for the peaceful production of
useful electricity cannot go off like an atomic bomb. No member of the general public has ever been injured
in an atomic accident at any nuclear power plant.” The whole point was to burnish this deceptiveness until it
had the sheen and gloss of truthtelling. I was instructed, in these night classes in safe power and studied
deception, that as a General Electric employee I must never deviate in the slightest from this officiously chosen
wording, because we needed to make certain that none of us would ever be accused of telling lies on behalf of
the Company. However, the truth of such recitations depended entirely upon the most careful predefinition of
all of the terms employed, such as “an atomic bomb” and “member of the general public” and “injured” and
“atomic accident” and “nuclear power plant.” Whenever any green intervener offered a true and accurate
instance of an accident or death, we needed to be able to dismiss this instance as outside the parameters of our
nuclear safety concerns. If a member of the armed forces is injured, for instance, that does not count because
such a person is most assuredly not a “member of the general public.” Likewise, if a plant employee is injured,
that does not court because such a person is not a “member of the general public,” and if an act of sabotage
takes place, not only is that classified information but also it would not qualify as any “accident,” and if a
suicidal act took place, that likewise would not amount to an “accident.” The initial test at Alamogordo,
Mexico did not count because that had been a stationary device at the top of a tower, rather than something
that dropped like a bomb, and therefore had not amounted to “an atomic bomb.” The bombs we dropped upon
Hiroshima and Nagasaki did of course count as bombs, but they did not count in this calculation as atomic
bombs because the explosions produced unfortunately due to defects in the firing devices had amounted to
mere singularities, converting only a few incidental ounces of their warheads from matter into energy. These
devices that had been intended to go off “like atomic bombs” had in point of fact not gone off “like atomic
bombs,” and therefore these explosions did not count (they were mere singularities of the sort that can easily
happen when a peaceful nuclear power plant melts through the reactor pressure vessel and the resultant mass
of liquid “corium” heads in the direction of China). The device dropped on Hiroshima merely produced a flashbang singularity that was equivalent to between 13 and 18 kilotons of TNT, and although it ignited many
structure fires it produced no hole in the ground (efficiency ~1.38%). Then the device dropped on Nagasaki
merely produced a flash-bang singularity equivalent to between 20 and 22 kilotons of TNT, only slightly
better, and likewise did not produce a hole in the ground, but anyway we had dropped it through clouds and it
had missed our industrial port aiming point entirely, falling directly onto a Catholic cathedral and a camp full
34. At first the Personnel Department was obviously stiffing me, pretending to look for in-corporation interviews for me, but I
persuaded my section manager Larry Moylan, who had a walleye, to intercede. He demanded that they actually help me find another
job. One Personnel type then frankly explained to me, privately, that at first they had misunderstood and had just been ignoring my
plight, until this section manager had interceded with “No, we actually do want you to help him.”
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of American POWs.35 Similarly, if a person is merely dangerously exposed to radiation, that would not count
as an “injury.” And if the facility that explodes is a mere test reactor not hooked to the commercial power grid,
that facility does not count as a “nuclear power plant” and if it should happen to explode, this would have no
bearing on the truthfulness of the recitations we were being so carefully trained to utter. When India would test
its atomic device on Siddhartha Gautama Buddha’s birthday in 1974, for instance, the word would be passed
around the corridors in my place of employment that this “Smiling Buddha” test although it might well have
been enabled by fissile materials the Indian military had surreptitiously removed from our Tarapur reactors
was not to be described as having been “an atomic bomb,” but rather had amounted merely to a “peaceful
nuclear explosion,” releasing only an approximate 12 kilotons. (Besides, no-one could be certain that they had
stolen these fissile materials from us rather than from some other local source of such low-hanging fruit.)
Oh! What a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
— Walter Scott, MARMION: A TALE OF FLODDEN FIELD, 1808
“Because of the kind of fuel used (ie the concentration of U235, see below), if there is a major uncorrected malfunction in
a reactor the fuel may overheat and melt, but it cannot explode
like a bomb.”
THAT CANNOT HAPPEN!
“Q. Can a nuclear plant blow up like a bomb?
“A. No. A bomb converts a large part of its U-235 or plutonium
into fission fragments in about 10^-8 seconds and then flies
apart. This depends on the fact that a bomb is a very compact
object, so the neutrons don’t have far to go to hit another
fissionable atom. A power plant is much too big to convert an
important part of its fissionable material before it has
generated enough heat to fly apart. This fact is based on the
fundamental physics of how fast fission neutrons travel.
Therefore, it doesn’t depend on the particular design of the
plant.”
YOU CAN TRUST ME!
“It is impossible for a commercial nuclear reactor to explode
like a nuclear bomb since the fuel is never sufficiently
enriched for this to occur.”
THAT CANNOT HAPPEN!
“Though both reactors and nuclear weapons rely on nuclear chainreactions, the rate of reactions in a reactor occurs much more
slowly than in a bomb.”
YOU CAN TRUST ME!
35. These WWII devices more or less resembled the sort of blast effect that North Korea would be able to generate in 2006, a blast
that our newspapers would mock as a “fizzle.” By way of comparison, one of our B53 warheads can produce an explosion equivalent
to some 9,000 kilotons of TNT. In 1984 I would attend a lecture by Professor Freeman J. Dyson at Stanford University, and listen
to him opinion that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not done the job that needed to be done, because we now misappreciate how very
destructive a modern A-bomb is. We need for a third city to be nuked now, he would assert, in order to tune up our appreciation of
such weaponry.
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“It should be emphasised that a commercial-type power reactor
simply cannot under any circumstances explode like a nuclear
bomb. The fuel in a nuclear reactor is not enriched beyond about
5% and a bomb require a much high level of enrichment.”
THAT CANNOT HAPPEN!
“One concern about nuclear power plants, of course, is the
memory of the world’s first exposure to nuclear power: the
atomic bomb blasts. Many people fear that a nuclear power plant
may go out of control and explode like a nuclear weapon. Most
experts insist that such an event is impossible.”
YOU CAN TRUST ME!
In our after-hours classes at the General Electric Nuclear Energy Division in San Jose, California, practice
made perfect. We divided up into teams of one inquisitive reporter and one obliging interviewee and bantered
back and forth as our instructor carefully observed. One of our inquisitive reporters went “What you’re saying
is that nuclear power hasn’t ever hurt anyone” to which an obliging interviewee responded “No, I said no
member of the general public has ever been injured in an atomic accident at any nuclear power plant.” At this
the instructor broke in, to forbid the introduction of words such as “No, I said ....” We must not add anything
such as this, he pointed out, because to do so would reveal that what the reporter had said had contained a
different information content from what the obliging interviewee had provided. So our inquisitive-reporter
roleplayer tried again, “What you’re saying is that there’s just no way that a power plant can go off like an
bomb,” to which our obliging-interviewee roleplayer responded “Yes, a nuclear power plant for the peaceful
production of useful electricity cannot go off like an atomic bomb.” The instructor frowned and pointed out
that the addition of a word such as “Yes” implied falsely that what the reporter had said was the same as what
the interviewee had said. “It’s not the same,” he pointed out, “because although we don’t want to point this out
there are various ways that a power plant can go off like a non-atomic bomb. For instance, a runaway nuclear
reaction can produce hydrogen which can create a very serious explosion, blowing the entire plant into the sky
and creating all sorts of nuclear contamination over a large area, although such an explosion would be
classified as a mere chemical explosion rather than an atomic one.” And we kept on and on like this until we
had satisfied our instructor that we could recite exactly “A nuclear power plant for the peaceful production of
useful electricity cannot go off like an atomic bomb. No member of the general public has ever been injured
in an atomic accident at any nuclear power plant” — without adding or subtracting any jot or any tittle.
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January 4, Monday: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat acknowledged for the first time that Soviet military personnel
had been engaging in operational combat roles (six had been killed when Israel attacked a missile site).
“Exhortatio” from Tempus destruendi/Tempus aedificandi for chorus by Luigi Dallapiccola was performed for
the initial time, in Beit HaHayal Auditorium, Jerusalem.
President Richard Milhous Nixon announced that “the end is in sight.”
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“Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth — to
see it as it is, and tell it like it is — to find the
truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.”
— Republican Presidential nominee
Richard Milhous Nixon, 1968
(a birthright Quaker)
Was he telling us the truth at this juncture? –Well, were his lips moving?
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desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
January 8, Friday: Fuel rationing was imposed in Phnom Penh.
After Palestinian guerrillas kidnapped two Jordanian soldiers, Jordanian forces launched a drive against
Palestinians around Jarash, Salt, and Ruseifa.
UN representative Gunnar Jarring met with Israeli officials in Jerusalem and found them willing to raise the
level of the UN mediated talks. They gave him specific proposals to carry to Egypt and Jordan.
A special immigration panel recommended the expulsion of West German student leader Rudi Dutschke from
Great Britain.
At the trial of Sergeant Charles Hutto in Ft. McPherson, Georgia for crimes committed at the My Lai Massacre,
his original statement to Army investigators was brought to the court’s attention. It read, in part, “orders came
down to kill all people, destroy the food and kill all the animals.” (But of course, that couldn’t have been what
happened.)
Tupamaro guerrillas kidnapped Geoffrey Jackson, the British ambassador in Montevideo.
January 19, Tuesday: US fighter-bombers carried out massive air strikes against supply camps of the North
Vietnamese Army in Laos and Cambodia.
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January 30, Saturday-April 6: In Operation Lam Son 719, an attempt to sever the Ho Chi Minh trail, some 17,000
South Vietnamese soldiers attacked some 22,000 North Vietnamese soldiers inside Laos. There were no US
troops on the ground but the South Vietnamese Army was aided by heavy US artillery and air strikes and was
being ferried by American helicopter pilots. The operation bogged down and the North Vietnamese were able
to bring in reinforcements. The South Vietnamese lost 7,682, nearly half their force. The body count of North
Vietnamese came in at an estimated 20,000 or more, mostly said to be the result of the intense American
bombardment. The end came as 40,000 North Vietnamese soldiers chased the approximately 8,000 South
Vietnamese soldiers who had survived back into Vietnam. The US lost 215 soldiers and more than a hundred
helicopters, and more than 600 additional choppers were damaged while in support of this offensive. President
Richard Milhous Nixon would declare at the end of this operation that “Vietnamization has succeeded.” Was
he telling us the truth? Well, were his lips moving?
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February 8, Monday: About 5,000 troops of the Saigon government, with the support of the USAF, invaded Laos,
encountering at first minimal resistance (the government of Laos of course protested).
Prime Minister Lon Nol of Cambodia suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed. He turned over control to
Deputy Prime Minister Sisowath Sirik Matak.
About 200 Belfast residents attacked British troops after an armored vehicle ran over a five-year-old girl.
Four of the protesters were struck by bullets.
In New York City, UN mediator Gunnar Jarring submitted his own peace proposal to Israel and Egypt.
After four days of race riot in Wilmington the North Carolina National Guard restored order, at the cost of two
deaths.
In the Durham monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends:
Clerks of Meeting
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2013-
David Bridge
February 15, Monday: The Saigon government claimed to have cut the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Great Britain and Ireland switched to a decimal system for currency.
Egypt told UN mediator Gunnar Jarring that it would sign a peace treaty with Israel if the Israelis would
withdraw from all occupied territories.
The Polish government announced a roll-back of the increases in food prices that had created such unrest in
December.
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Lassus ricercare for ten instruments by Betsy Jolas was performed for the initial time, in Paris.
Mise en musique du Corticalart by Pierre Henry and Roger Lafosse was performed for the initial time
(this was an attempt to turn brain waves into art).
For the 23d time in the history of the nuclear agenda, this time at the Kirchatov Institute in Russia, some fissile
material unexpectedly went beyond criticality into prompt-criticality, the final stage before an atomic
explosion.
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February 26, Friday: All charges against the US Army officers not actually present at My Lai, Vietnam were dropped.
If you weren’t there you weren’t there. If the glove don’t fit you must acquit.
March: Opinion polls indicated that President Richard Milhous Nixon’s approval rating among Americans has slipped
to 50%, while approval of his Vietnam strategy has slipped to 34%. Half the Americans polled believed that
our involvement in the war in Southeast Asia was “morally wrong.”
yourself.”
March 1, Monday: At this time of rising opposition to US policy in Vietnam and Laos, a bomb exploded in a Senate
restroom, causing no injuries to persons but doing a lamentable amount of damage to the fixtures.
WATER CLOSET
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March 31, Wednesday: Fighting began for Fire Base 6 near Dakto, Vietnam.
President Nguyen Van Thieu of the Saigon government announced that his invasion of Laos was “the biggest
victory ever.”
The day arrived on which Lieutenant William Calley stood before the judge and got himself formally
sentenced to life in prison at hard labor for the war crimes he had perpetrated at My Lai. (So, do you suppose
an American guy who’s been sentenced to life in prison at hard labor for war crimes is actually going to be
sent to prison to do some hard labor? Guess again. –Not while Tricky Dicky was in the White House in
Washington DC! Calley’s sentence would get reduced first to 20 years, then to 10 years, and after 31/2 years
of house arrest during his appeal process, due to the influence of President Richard Milhous Nixon —
he would simply be released. He would wind up as a pudgy jewelry salesman, married to the boss’s daughter
and with, to all appearances, absolutely nothing on his conscience. :-)
NOBODY HOME
(Jimmy Carter instituted “American Fighting Man’s Day” and asked Georgians to protest the injustice of his
sentence by driving for a week with their lights on.)
April 1, Thursday: President Richard Milhous Nixon ordered the convicted war criminal Lieutenant William Calley
released pending his appeal. It’s so nice to have a Friend in the White House!
MY LAI
April 3, Saturday: President Richard Milhous Nixon committed to a personal review of the case of William Calley,
who had been convicted of the commission of a mass murder of defenseless civilians, men, women, and
children at My Lai.
April 10, Saturday: A provisional Bangladeshi government took its oath of office in Meherpur Kushtia.
To report on the United States table tennis team in the People’s Republic of China (refer to the movie “Great
Wall”), 7 western reporters were allowed to enter.
At the age of 90, Jeanette Pickering Rankin, who had been the 1st woman in the US Congress and had been to
India 7 times to study the nonviolent civil disobedience tactics of Gandhiji, led an 8,000-women march on the
Pentagon against the Vietnam war and for nuclear disarmament. 1,000 veterans protested the war, followed by
the largest demonstration ever against the war.
April 19, Monday: “Vietnam Veterans Against the War” began a week of nationwide civil disobedience protests.
April 24, Saturday: Another mass anti-Vietnam-war civil disobedience demonstration was staged in Washington DC,
attracting nearly 200,000 protesters.
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April 29, Thursday: The sum total of American deaths in Vietnam surpassed 45,000.
April 30, Friday: The last US Marine combat units departed Vietnam.
May 3, Monday-5, Wednesday: In our nation’s capital, there was a mass arrest of 12,000 citizen protesters. These civil
disobedience thingies are not without their consequences.
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June:
Ted Kaczynski visited his younger brother David Kaczynski, who was working for Anaconda Corporation in
Great Falls, Montana. The brothers purchased a 1.4-acre plot south of Lincoln, Montana and Ted began
construction of a cabin.
HERMITS
During a college commencement speech, Senator Mike Mansfield labeled Vietnam “a tragic mistake.”
Gosh, do you suppose?
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June 13, Sunday: George Jackson replaced William Colby as head of CORDS in Vietnam.
The New York Times began publication of the History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy,
something they were calling the “Pentagon Papers.” This was a secret Defense Department archive, prepared
during 1967, 1968, and 1969, of the paperwork involved in decisions made by previous White House
administrations concerning Vietnam. Publication of such government secrets infuriated President Richard
Milhous Nixon. The archive had been leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who,
alarmed and outraged, had made a personal copy of the 7,000 pages on an office copier.
Ellsberg would be indicted for theft, conspiracy, and espionage, though the Supreme Court would refuse to
stop the publishing of the papers.
WATERGATE
June 15, Tuesday: Mayor Alfonso Martínez Dominguez and Chief of Police Rogelio Flores Curiel of Mexico City
resigned their posts following the “Corpus Christi Massacre” of students that had taken place on June 10th.
President Richard Milhous Nixon attempted to stop further publication of the Pentagon Papers by taking legal
action against the New York Times. What, freedom of the press? –What freedom of the press?
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desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
June 18, Friday: The Washington Post began its own publication of the Pentagon Papers. These people just didn’t get
it, and were going to persecute the President who, because he was the boss of the Secretary of the Department
of Justice, was literally above the law. The New York Times and the Post would become involved in a series
of legal wrangles with the Nixon administration which would soon find its way before the US Supreme Court.
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June 22, Tuesday: A non-binding resolution survived a vote in the US Senate, urging that all American troops be
removed from Vietnam before the end of the year.
June 25, Friday: The last US Marine ground troops left Vietnam.
June 26, Saturday: The US Justice Department issued a warrant for the arrest of Daniel Ellsberg, accusing him of
giving away the Pentagon Papers.
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June 28, Monday: The source of the Pentagon Papers leak, a RAND employee named Daniel Ellsberg, surrendered to
the police.
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A “Plumbers” unit would be created in the White House to gather materials with which to discredit this man.
WATERGATE
June 29, Tuesday: When a US Senator attempted to read a portion of the “Pentagon Papers” into the Congressional
Record, the other Senators stayed away from the chamber so he would be prevented from doing so by lack of
a quorum.
The US Supreme Court voted 8-0 to overturn Muhammad Ali’s 1967 conviction for draft evasion. He would
return to the ring, knocking out Jerry Quarry in the 3rd round on October 26, 1970 at Atlanta. After a court
order that New York restore his license, he would fight the new champion, Joe Frazier, at Madison Square
Garden on March 8, 1971, but at the end of 15 rounds Frazier would obtain a unanimous decision.
I wouldn’t call him a draft dodger.... He stood up and said this
is something I cannot do and I will take whatever consequences
come from that decision. I admire that in a man.
— Colin Powell36
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June 30, Wednesday: The crew of Soyuz 11 suffocated on return from a successful mission aboard the Russian space
station, because their air supply was lost through a faulty valve.
The US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the New York Times and Washington Post publication of the
Pentagon Papers. Guess what, it had not been them who had sinned against our nation and its liberties.
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36. General Powell was speaking of Muhammad Ali, boxer — but might as well have been speaking of John R. Kellam, Quaker.
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July 1, Thursday: On this day exactly 6,100 Americans got the hell out of Vietnam — that was something of a record.
July 15, Thursday: A group of 45 Jews, in the 3d day of their hunger strike in Moscow’s central telegraph office to
protest the failure of Soviet authorities to process their applications for emigration to Israel, were taken into
custody.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
President Richard Milhous Nixon announced that Premier Chou En-lai had invited him to visit Communist
China in 1972 and that he has accepted — a major diplomatic breakthrough by our foreign relations
president.37
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yourself.”
37. For more about this, you can listen to Philip Glass’s “Nixon in China,” available on CD.
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July 17, Saturday: In the Nixon White House, Presidential aides John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson created a secret
surveillance unit known as the “Plumbers” to conduct an investigation of this Daniel Ellsberg who had leaked
the Pentagon Papers, and to “plug” various other news leaks.
WATERGATE
Did Ellsberg have a secret mental history that the President could burglarize out of his shrink’s office?
Colson began to compile an “enemies list,” featuring the names of some 200 prominent Americans considered
to be interfering with their boss’s best efforts for America.38
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38. Since then, being “on the list” has become a matter of pride for many of these Americans, who have been able to feature this in
their resumes.
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desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
August 1, Sunday: The Apollo 15 astronauts engaged in a 2d day of lunar exploration.
Flooding of the Red River killed 100,000 people in North Vietnam.
August 2, Monday: The US ackn owledged that we had some 30,000 CIA-sponsored irregulars operating in Laos.
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The government of Sudan expelled the Bulgarian ambassador and the counselor of the Soviet embassy for
complicity in a recent coup attempt.
After a 3d exploration of the lunar surface, David Scott and James Irwin blasted off and rejoined Alfred
Worden in orbit.
US Secretary of State William Rogers announced that his country would no longer opposes membership in the
United Nations by the Peoples Republic of China — but also it would insist that the Taiwan government
remain in the organization.
Helio Bicudo, prosecutor in Sao Paulo who indicted several policemen involved in conservative death squads,
was sacked by the government.
Transitions, a Fantasy for Ten Instruments by T.J. Anderson was performed for the initial time, at Tanglewood
near Lenox, Massachusetts.
August 17, Tuesday: The trial of Captain Ernest L. Medina commenced, for alleged war crimes at My Lai.
Iran recognizes the Peoples Republic of China.
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August 18, Wednesday: Australia and New Zealand announced the pending withdrawal of all their troops from
Vietnam.
August 20, Friday: Surprise, the system works! William Calley’s sentence for his war crimes at My Lai got reduced
by the commanding general of the American Third Army from life imprisonment to 20 years. Get out your
calculators and we will figure out how many years that is, per child.
General Duong Van Minh withdrew from the campaign for president of the Saigon government (he believed
the election will be rigged).
After a 16-hour meeting, the Common Market Council of Ministers agreed to reopen exchange markets on
August 23d but did not agree on a common approach to the newly floating dollar.
The International Monetary Fund recognized the US dollar as a floating currency.
The FBI began a covert investigation of journalist Daniel Schorr.
WATERGATE
September 18, Saturday: Four separate rallies took place in Saigon, in opposition to the upcoming single-solitarycandidate presidential election. Some of these rallies became violent.
Egyptian and Israeli forces began exchanging barrages with one another bigtime across the Suez Canal, for the
1st time since August of last year.
Justices Hugo L. Black and John Marshall Harlan having retired from the Supreme Court on the previous day,
Oval Office tapes captured a conversation between President Richard Milhous Nixon asked Attorney General
John N. Mitchell: “To play an awful long shot, is there a woman yet? That would be a hell of a thing if we
could do it.”
SEXISM
September 22, Wednesday/23, Thursday: After the jury had deliberated for one hour, it acquitted Captain Ernest L.
Medina of all charges relating to the war crimes that had admittedly been perpetrated at My Lai. The superior
officer had been an innocent bystander to the misdeeds of a junior officer, Lieutenant William Calley, deeds
for which he himself bore no responsibility whatever. (Maybe he had told Calley, paste ’em, and Calley had
though he had said, waste ’em? –Well, something like that. There had been an unfortunate misunderstanding
and the result was that there had been a whole bunch of collateral damage. Tsk tsk. :-)
October 3, Sunday: Guess what, President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam got re-elected. Well, he had been
unopposed.
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October 4, Monday: How the Stars Were Made for percussion ensemble by Peter Sculthorpe is performed for the first
time, in the Playhouse, Canberra.
A bomb exploded in the Springfield Road section of Belfast, killing 1 British soldier and injuring 9 other
people.
The Soviet vehicle Lunokhod 1 stops operating after 11 months on the moon, when it ran out of fuel. It has
surveyed 8 hectares of the lunar surface.
Con Antonio Machado for voice and piano by Joaquín Rodrigo was performed for the initial time, in Salón
Carlos V, Seville.
October 9, Saturday: Members of the US 1st Air Cavalry Division refused an assignment to go out on patrol,
expressing the scrivener Bartleby’s “desire not to go.” Hey, whazzup?
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October 31, Sunday: The first Viet Cong POWs were released by Saigon. (Nearly 3,000 Viet Cong had been being held
as prisoners rather than executed.)
December 17, Friday: A cease fire went into effect along the western India-Pakistan border. India was in control of
4,000 square kilometers of Pakistan while the Pakistanis held 130 square kilometers of India.
Colonel Oran Henderson was acquitted of covering up the massacre of unarmed civilians by American soldiers
in My Lai. This was the last legal proceeding stemming from the crime. Lieutenant William Calley was the
only person who stood convicted of either participating in or covering up the massacre.
The US troop levels in Vietnam dropped to 156,800.
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December 26, Sunday-30, Thursday: The US heavily bombed military installations in North Vietnam, citing violations
of the agreements surrounding the 1968 bombing halt.
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1972
January 25, Tuesday: In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersch charged the US Army with having destroyed documents
pertaining to the murder of hundreds of civilians by US troops at My Lai.
Eight Tone Poems for Two Violas by Otto Luening was performed for the initial time, in Albany, New York.
President Richard Milhous Nixon revealed that National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger has been secretly
negotiating with the North Vietnamese and announced a proposed 8-point peace plan for Vietnam. However,
Hanoi would reject Nixon’s overture.
January 31, Monday: Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland observed an Irish Republican Army call for a general strike
until the victims of the previous day were buried. After being refused permission to give an eyewitness account
of the events on the floor of the House of Commons, Bernadette Devlin, MP physically attacked Home
Secretary Reginald Maudling, calling him a “murdering hypocrite.” Ireland withdrew its ambassador from
London.
North Vietnam made public its 9-point plan for ending the war.
Canzona for twelve instruments by Charles Wuorinen was performed for the initial time, in Town Hall, New
York, the composer conducting. The work was dedicated to the memory of Igor Stravinsky.
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February 21, Monday-28, Monday: This year was marked by the return of the island of Okinawa, seized during World
War II, to the control of Japan.
As a further great leap forward, our foreign policy president, Richard Milhouse Nixon, went as promised to
meet Chairman Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in Beijing. Nixon’s visit caused great concern in
Hanoi that, in order to improve Chinese relations with the US, their wartime ally China might agree to some
unfavorable settlement of the war.
Visiting the Great Wall of China with Secretary of State William Rogers, President Nixon commented “I think
you will have to agree, Mr. Secretary, that this is a great wall.” He and the leaders of the PRC seemed to have
so little difficulty understanding one another!
After six weeks and winning their demands, the coal miners of Britain called off their strike.
The Soviet space probe Luna 20 made a soft landing on the moon and began drilling into the surface for
specimens.
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WALDEN: The religion and civilization which are barbaric and
heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call
Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes
towards its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the
Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the
fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend
their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it
would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile,
and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent some
excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it. As for the
religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all
the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the
United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring
is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter.
Mr. Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back
of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let
out to Dobson & Sons, stonecutters. When the thirty centuries
begin to look down on it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for
your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in
this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so
far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles
rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire
the hole which he made. Many are concerned about the monuments of
the West and East, –to know who built them. For my part, I should
like to know who in those days did not build them, –who were above
such trifling.
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
M ARCUS V ITRUVIUS P OLLIO
DE ARCHITECTVRA LIBRI DECEM
EGYPT
March 10, Friday: The US 101st Airborne Division withdrew from Vietnam.
March 23, Thursday: The US boycotted the Paris peace talks while President Richard Milhous Nixon accused Hanoi
of refusing to “negotiate seriously.”
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March 30, Thursday: The North Vietnamese Army began its “Easter” attack on Quang Tri. South Vietnam’s Army had
performed very poorly during Operation Lam Son 719 in 1971. From March into September, in what would
be known as the Easter offensive, General Vo Nguyen Giap’s 200,000 soldiers would be waging an all-out
attempt to conquer the South. The offensive was a tremendous gamble for General Giap but was being
undertaken because US troop withdrawals, and the strength of the anti-Vietnam movement in America, were
likely to prevent any US retaliatory response. They were attempting to capture of Quang Tri in the northern
part of South Vietnam, Kontum in the mid-section, and An Loc in the Mekong Delta. North Vietnam’s leaders
were hoping that a successful offensive would harm President Richard Milhous Nixon politically during this
presidential election year in America, much as President Lyndon Baines Johnson had suffered as a result of
the 1968 Tet Offensive, as they believed that Nixon’s removal would disrupt American assistance to South
Vietnam.
Great Britain imposed direct rule over Northern Ireland to try to bring order to the beleaguered province. Prime
Minister Heath appointed William Whitelaw to the newly created post of Secretary of State for Northern
Ireland.
April 2, Sunday: In response to the Easter offensive, President Richard Milhous “No More Mr. Nice Guy” Nixon
authorized the US 7th Fleet to shower air strikes and naval gunfire upon North Vietnamese Army troops
massing around the Demilitarized Zone.
April 4, Tuesday: In a further response to the Easter attacks, President Richard Milhous Nixon authorized a massive
bombing campaign targeting all North Vietnamese troops invading the South, along with B-52 air strikes
against North Vietnam. “The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to bombed this time,” Nixon
indicated privately. If you think you can fool around, you don’t know Dick.
desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
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April 10, Monday: There was heavy B-52 bombardment, ranging 145 miles into North Vietnam. The bastards had
never been bombed like they were getting bombed this time.
The US signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.This convention, when it would go into effect
during 1975, would prohibit further research, development, and testing of biological weapons, agents and
compounds — but there would be a wide open barn door for prophylactic and defensive research,
development, and testing by which we could accomplish all the offensive weapons development that our hearts
could possibly desire. Meanwhile the Pentagon would retain a Chemical and Biological Warfare unit,
underfunded but waiting for the first excuse to spring back as a major program.
GERM WARFARE
April 12, Wednesday: The North Vietnamese Army’s Easter attack on Kontum in central South Vietnam began. If this
attack were to have succeeded, South Vietnam would effectively have been cut in two.
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April 15, Saturday: Hanoi and its Haiphong harbor were bombed. The bastards had never been bombed like they were
getting bombed this time.
April 15, Saturday-20, Thursday: Protests against our bombing of North Vietnam erupted in America.
April 19, Wednesday: The North Vietnamese Army’s Easter attack on An Loc began.
April 25, Tuesday: President Richard Milhous Nixon was recorded on tape in the White House, engaged in a deepthink conversation about tactics in Vietnam with his adviser Henry Kissinger:
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“I’d rather use the nuclear bomb.... The nuclear bomb.
Does that bother you? I just want you to think big,
Henry, for Christ’s sake.... You’re so goddamned
concerned about the civilians, and I don’t give a damn.”
— President Richard Milhous Nixon, on tape, 1972
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ATOM BOMB
“Fiddle-dee-dee, war, war, war,
I get so bored I could scream!”
—Scarlet O’Hara
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April 26, Wednesday: President Richard Milhous Nixon announced 20,000 more troops would be withdrawn from
Vietnam over the following 2 months.
Linaia-Agon for horn, trombone and tuba by Iannis Xenakis was performed for the initial time, in London.
Three vocal works with words by Frank O’Hara were performed for the initial time, in the Whitney Museum,
New York: from “Sneden’s Landing Variations” for voice and piano by Virgil Thomson, I Will Always Love
You, a song by Ned Rorem, and Three Airs for Frank O’Hara’s Angel for speaker, soprano, female chorus,
four instruments and tape ad lib by Lukas Foss.
April 27, Thursday: North Vietnamese forces advanced to within 5 kilometers of Quangtri.
Kwame Nkrumah died in Bucharest.
Vietnam peace talks resumed in Paris a month after President Richard Milhous Nixon had suspended them.
At 1945 UTC Astronauts Don Young, Charles Duke and Ken Mattingly returned to earth aboard their
spacecraft Apollo 16, in the Pacific Ocean southeast of Christmas Island, within 2 kilometers of their target.
April 30, Sunday: US troop levels in Vietnam dropped to 69,000.
May 1, Monday: The South Vietnamese abandoned Quang Tri City to the North Vietnamese Army.
May 4, Thursday: The US and South Vietnam indefinitely suspended their participation in the Paris peace talks.
An additional 125 US warplanes were designated for Vietnam.
May 8, Monday: The FBI Academy opened a new training facility on the US Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia.
In response to the ongoing North Vietnamese Army Easter offensive, President Richard Milhous Nixon
announced Operation Linebacker I, the mining of North Vietnam’s harbors combined with intensified
bombing of roads, bridges, and oil facilities. The announcement brought international condemnation of the US
and ignited more anti-war protests in America.
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desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
May 9, Tuesday: Operation Linebacker I commenced, with US jets laying mines in Haiphong harbor.
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May 10, Wednesday: President Nguyen Van Thieu of the Saigon government declared martial law throughout South
Vietnam.
When the Soviet freighter Grisha Akopyan was struck by US planes in the port of Campha, North Vietnam,
one sailor was killed and two injured.
A national referendum in Ireland approved entry into the European Economic Community.
May 15, Monday: The headquarters for the US Army in Vietnam was decommissioned.
The United States formally returned Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands to Japanese sovereignty.
100,000 people marched in Tananarive demanding that Malagasy President Philibert Tsiranana release student
leaders recently arrested after three days of violence.
A bomb severely injured Mrs. Gerta Buddenberg in her car in Karlsruhe. She was the wife of Judge Wolfgang
Buddenberg who had been investigating the Red Army Faction.
While campaigning for his party’s presidential nomination, Governor George Wallace of Alabama was shot
and seriously wounded by Arthur Bremer. Bremer’s bullets also hit and wound three others. Bremer, a
deranged man, was subdued and arrested. Wallace would survive but would be paralyzed.
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String Quartet no.3 by George Rochberg was performed for the initial time, in Alice Tully Hall, New York.
The US Supreme Court decided, in the case of Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, dealing with an Amish
reluctance to school their children beyond the 8th grade, that a way of life, however virtuous and admirable,
may not be interposed as a barrier to reasonable state regulation of education if it is based on purely secular
considerations. The court held that to have the protection of the religion clauses of the US Constitution, the
Amish would have needed to base their claim on their religious belief, rather than through the creation of a
way of life based on a mere subjective evaluation and rejection of contemporary societal norms. This is not
the sort of world in which every person is going to be allowed to decide his or her own standards on matters
of conduct in which society as a whole has important interests. In the words of Chief Justice Warren Burger:
Thus, if the Amish asserted their claims because of their
subjective evaluation and rejection of the contemporary secular
values accepted by the majority, much as Thoreau rejected the
social values of his time and isolated himself at Walden Pond,
their claims would not rest on a religious basis. Thoreau’s
choice was philosophical and personal rather than religious, and
such belief does not rise to the demands of the Religion Clauses.
(Of course this Supreme Court decision, however abhorrent, would have no impact at the Moses Brown School
in Providence, since not only was the school’s curriculum entirely secular but also nothing was being offered
to its children that would even remotely approximate a religious orientation. There was simply no conflict –
and no plausible expectation of any conflict– with reasonable regulation of public education by the Rhode
Island legislature.)
May 17, Wednesday: According to US reports, Operation Linebacker I was damaging North Vietnam’s ability to
supply North Vietnamese Army troops engaged in the Easter offensive.
May 22, Monday: Ceylon became the Republic of Sri Lanka. Governor-General William Gopallawa became the first
president.
President Richard Milhous Nixon arrived in Moscow for talks with Soviet leaders and treaty signings.
This was the first visit of an American president to Moscow. He woiuld be there until May 30th and would
meet with Leonid Brezhnev to forge new diplomatic relations. Nixon’s visit caused great concern in Hanoi that
their Soviet ally might be inclined to agree to an unfavorable settlement of the war to improve Soviet relations
with the US.
yourself.”
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May 30, Tuesday: A North Vietnamese Army attack on Kontum was thwarted by South Vietnamese troops, assisted
by massive US air strikes.
Three Japanese terrorists in the employ of a Palestinian group fired automatic weapons and threw hand
grenades indiscriminately into a crowd at Lod Airport, Tel Aviv. 30 were killed (including two of the terrorists)
and 76 injured. The 3d attacker was subdued by an Israeli airline mechanic and would on July 18th be
sentenced to life imprisonment.
Leonard Bernstein defended his Mass before the National Press Club in Washington. He read two letters from
the Kennedy family praising the work.
Lyle B. Snider and Susan T. Snider of the Durham, North Carolina monthly meeting of the Religious Society
of Friends, graduates of Swarthmore College, declined to make voluntary payment of US federal income taxes
that would be used in large part to threaten the peace and security of every person on earth. There being at that
time some 3,000,000,000 human beings on the face of the planet — their W-4 form indicated that they had
three billion dependents.
In an attached letter to the federal government the two Quakers described and justified this symbolic gesture
(the reaction of the federal authorities would be, in essence, of course “We are not amused and we think we
are going to want to hurt you”).
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June:
During an air strike conducted by Vietnamese pilots in US aircraft, US-supplied napalm and white phosphorus
was accidentally used on South Vietnamese civilians, including children. Of course, despite these having been
our planes and our munitions, we were blameless. Unfairly, an enduring image of the war would be a little girl
who had stripped off her burning clothing, fleeing the destruction of the hamlet of Trang Bang.
The US soldiers in the rear of the photograph would attempt to pour water from their canteens onto bits of
burning white phosphorus embedded in little Kim Phúc’s flesh, but as we all know, when it’s white phosphorus
(termed in the military profession “Willie Peter”), water doesn’t help a whole lot.39
June 1, Thursday: Hanoi admitted that the US Operation Linebacker I was causing severe disruptions.
June 9, Friday: In a helicopter crash near Pleiku, senior US military advisor John Paul Vann, who had been assisting
South Vietnamese troops in the defense of Kontum, was killed.
June 28, Wednesday: The South Vietnamese Army, aided by US Navy gunfire and B-52 bombardments, began a
counter-offensive to retake Quang Tri Province.
June 30, Friday: General Frederick C. Weyand replaced General Creighton W. Abrams as MACV commander in
Vietnam.
39. Kim Phúc has survived. We have more recently gone back to this village and interviewed her. Her scars have of course had a
determining impact upon her life trajectory — for instance, a series of 17 operations. Now more recently she has escaped from
Vietnam and has become a peace activist. She has this to offer us:
Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine. Water boils
at 100 degrees Celsius. Napalm generates temperatures of 800 to
1,200 degrees Celsius.
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July 11, Tuesday: A North Vietnamese attack on An Loc was thwarted by South Vietnamese with the assistance of a
few B-52 air strikes.
Cuba joined the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, an economic organization of the Soviet Union,
East European socialist countries, and Mongolia.
July 13, Thursday: The Paris peace talks with the North Vietnamese resumed.
July 14, Friday: The Democrats chose Senator George McGovern of South Dakota as their presidential nominee.
McGovern, an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam, was advocating “immediate and complete withdrawal.”
July 18, Tuesday: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat ordered 5,000 Soviet military advisors out of his country.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco clarified the succession to be followed after his death — Prince Juan Carlos
was to become king.
During a visit to Hanoi, Jane Fonda made antiwar comments. She would come to be referred to in certain
circles as “Hanoi Jane.” She allowed herself to be photographed wearing the helmet of a North Vietnamese
anti-aircraft gunner — a piece of symbolism which she would most deeply regret as it would be instantly
seized upon by the prowar people (as if this indicated an eagerness for our boys to suffer harm).
July 19, Wednesday: In Binh Dinh Province, the South Vietnamese began a major counteroffensive against the North
Vietnamese.
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August: No longer in any danger whatever of being sent to Vietnam to get killed, George W. Bush failed to show up
for a required flight physical examination. He joined his father at the Republican National Convention in
Miami, Florida.
(1951), act 1
ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST.
ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT.
(TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED,
THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)
Vietnam
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August 1, Tuesday: National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger met again with Le Duc Tho in Paris to negotiate peace
in Vietnam.
The 1st Bernstein/Woodward article exposing the Watergate scandal.
August 11, Friday: The last American combat troops in Vietnam were withdrawn from action.
A confidant of President Anwar Sadat revealed in Al Ahram that in 1970 Israeli planes had shot down five
Egyptian jets piloted by Soviets.
Voices and Instruments for chorus and nine players by Morton Feldman was performed for initial first time, in
Dartington.
La Koro Sutro (The Heart Sutra) for chorus, organ, harp and gamelan by Lou Harrison was performed for the
initial time, at San Francisco State University.
August 12, Saturday: The final US combat troops departed South Vietnam from Danang.
The New York Times reported widespread torture of thousands of suspected communist sympathizers by the
Saigon government throughout South Vietnam since the beginning of the communist offensive March 30th.
August 23, Wednesday: The last US combat troops exited Vietnam.
August 29, Tuesday: President Richard Milhous Nixon announced a reduction in US troop levels in Vietnam from
39,000 to 27,000 by December 1st. This did not include 100,000 US military involved in air operations from
outside Vietnam.
August 30, Wednesday: President Richard Milhous Nixon announced that John Dean had completed his investigation
into the Watergate wiretapping debacle. No one from the White House had been involved. I’m your President,
your President wouldn’t lie to you. Mr. Dean is a lawyer, a member of the bar of justice, so he wouldn’t lie
either. You can trust us.
September 16, Saturday: Quang Tri was recaptured by South Vietnamese troops as North Vietnamese troops began a
new offensive in Quangngai Province.
Israeli forces began a major incursion into Lebanon against Palestinian guerrilla bases.
Protestant mobs attacked Catholics with gasoline bombs in Larne, Northern Ireland. One person was killed by
gunfire.
Double Concerto for flute, oboe and orchestra by György Ligeti was performed for the initial time, in Berlin.
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September 29, Friday: US air raids destroyed another 10% of the air force of North Vietnam.
Prime Ministers Chou En-lai of China and Kakuei Tanaka of Japan signed agreements in Peking ending their
joint state of war and establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries.
WORLD WAR II
The Washington Post reported that former Attorney General John Mitchell and former Commerce Secretary
Maurice Stans were among five people in control of a secret cash fund used by Republicans for information
gathering about Democrats.
October 8, Sunday: The long-standing diplomatic stalemate between National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and
Le Duc Tho finally ended as both sides agreed to major concessions. The US would allow North Vietnamese
troops already in South Vietnam to remain there, while North Vietnam would drop its demand for the removal
of South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu and the dissolution of his government. Although Kissinger’s
staff members privately express concerns over allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain in the South,
Kissinger rebuffed them, pointing to the need to “end this war before the election.”
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October 22, Sunday: National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger visited President Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon and
the meeting went badly as an emotional Thieu adamantly opposed allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain
indefinitely in South Vietnam. Kissinger angrily reported Thieu’s reaction to President Richard Milhouse
Nixon, who threatened a total cut-off of American assistance. Thieu did not back down and Kissinger flew
back to Washington DC.
Operation Linebacker I ended. US warplanes flew 40,000 sorties and dropped over 125,000 tons of bombs
during this bombing campaign, which effectively disrupted North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive. During the
failed offensive, the North suffered an estimated 100,000 military casualties and lost half its tanks and artillery.
The leader of the offensive, the legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap, the victor at Dien Bien Phu, would be
quietly ousted in favor of his deputy General Van Tien Dung. 40,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the
stopping of this offensive, in the heaviest fighting of the war.
October 24, Tuesday: President Nguyen Van Thieu of Vietnam publicly denounced Kissinger’s peace proposal.
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October 26, Thursday: Radio Hanoi reported that a 9-point plan for peace was in its final negotiating stages in Paris.
It revealed the terms of the peace proposal and accused the US of attempting to sabotage the settlement. At the
White House, this being the week before the presidential election, National Security Advisor to President
Richard Milhous Nixon Henry Kissinger held a press briefing to declare that “We believe that peace is at hand.
We believe that an agreement is in sight.”
Communists launched 113 attacks throughout South Vietnam, the largest number for any day since the Tet
Offensive of 1968.
Les momies d’Egypte op.439 for chorus by Darius Milhaud to words of Régnard, was performed for the initial
time, over the airwaves of Radio Graz.
Dinah and Nick’s Love Song for three melody instruments and harp by Harrison Birtwistle was performed
publicly for the initial time, in Firth Hall at the University of Sheffield. Also premiered was Birtwistle’s La
Plage: Eight Arias of Remembrance to words of Robbe-Griller for soprano, three clarinets, piano, and
marimba to words after Robbe-Grillet.
November 6, Monday: Agreement was reached in Bonn between East and West Germany for eventual diplomatic
relations and admission to the UN.
The British government imposed a 90-day freeze on wages, prices, rents and dividends.
In its issue dated today, Time magazine disclosed that the FBI has been enlisted in the reelection effort of
President Richard Milhous Nixon.
November 7, Tuesday: Eleven air force officers were sentenced to death for their parts in the attempt to overthrow
King Hassan II of Morocco.
La Fauvette des Jardins for piano by Olivier Messiaen was performed for the initial time, in L’Espace Cardin,
Paris.
Parable VIII op.120 for horn by Vincent Persichetti was performed for the initial time, in Alice Tully Hall,
New York.
Something we have been struggling mightily to forget: it was not in any close-call election, but in the most
overwhelming electoral landslide to date in US history, that Richard Milhous Nixon achieved his 2d term as
our President, carrying 49/50 states (520-17 in the electoral college) and 61% of the popular vote. There was
something about this guy that we liked, at least for the moment, very much.
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November 14, Tuesday: President Richard Milhous Nixon wrote secretly to President Nguyen Van Thieu, to threaten
that if North Vietnam were to violate the proposed peace treaty there would be “swift and severe retaliatory
action.”
Now for a little lesson in logic. Many arguments are based on a simple “if... then” structure. These arguments
are so common and useful they have been awarded a special Latinate name, modus ponens.
In addition to the phrase “modus ponens,” logicians have special technical words for the various features of
these arguments. The “If... Then” premise is called a conditional, and the two truth claims, the beginning one
and the end one, are called the antecedent and the consequent:
Main Premise (antecedent)
Helping Premise (If antecedent, then consequent)
Conclusion (consequent)
The solid connection between premises and conclusion is known as deductive validity. If both premises are
true, then the argument is sound. In the next, generalized, illustration, the letters P and Q are used to stand for
the distinct claims expressed in whole sentences.
Main Premise (P)
Helping Premise (If P then Q)
Conclusion (Q)
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Consider the following example of an argument purporting to have valid logical structure and purporting to be
dealing in true assertions:
Obviously, the above is a proper use of the modus ponens form of logic. Now let’s consider another one:
President Richard Milhous Nixon was proclaimed to be a Quaker.
A Quaker would have opposed the war in Vietnam.
Therefore, Friend Richard opposed the war in Vietnam.
Although they are about very different topics, these two arguments have the same basic structure: Notice that
the claim P occurs twice: once in the main premise, and once after the If part of the helping premise. The claim
Q also occurs twice: once after the then part of the helping premise, and once in the conclusion.
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The nice thing about modus ponens arguments is that their conclusions are quite as good as their premises.
The connection between premises and conclusion is solid. This means that all you really have to do in order
to evaluate a modus ponens argument is check for the sense in which the premises are true. In this modus
ponens argument, if the premises are both at least probably true, the reasoning must be strong and the
conclusion must be established. As always, if there is a sense in which at least one of the premises is not true,
the reasoning may well be incorrect and lead to spurious conclusions. Contrariwise, if the conclusion is
obviously false, then one or the other of the premises was also, in some important sense, false. The inference
above is an improper one because there was a very real sense in which Richard Nixon, although he had been
raised by a Quaker mother in a Quaker church, and although he was never officially disowned by that church,
should not be considered to have been a Quaker.
RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
desperation.”
— Murray Kempton
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November 30, Thursday: The American troop withdrawal from Vietnam was completed — although 16,000 of our
advisors and administrators were still needing to remain, to help South Vietnam’s military leadership find its
ass with both hands.
December 13, Wednesday: In Paris, peace negotiations between National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Le
Duc Tho collapsed after Kissinger presented a list of 69 changes demanded by President Nguyen Van Thieu.
President Richard Milhous Nixon then issued an ultimatum to North Vietnam that serious negotiations must
resume within 72 hours. Hanoi would not respond and our president would authorize Operation Linebacker II
— eleven days and nights of all-out B-52 pounding of military targets in Hanoi.
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December 18, Monday: Operation Linebacker II began as President Richard Milhous Nixon ordered the heaviest
bombing of the Indochina war. B-52s were used for the first time against Hanoi. 15 would be shot down. These
so called “Christmas bombings” would be widely denounced by American politicians, the media, and various
world leaders, including the Pope. Footage of civilian casualties filmed by the North Vietnamese would further
fuel the outrage. In addition, a few of our downed B-52 pilots would make public statements in North Vietnam
against the bombing.
The last Australian troops left Vietnam.
The Ugandan government seized several British firms and tea plantations in the country.
December 26, Tuesday: Agence France-Presse reported that bombing raids on Hanoi were the heaviest of the war.
North Vietnam agreed to resume peace negotiations within five days of the cessation of bombing.
Former US President Harry S Truman died in Independence, Missouri at the age of 88. (The body would on
December 28th be interred in the courtyard of the Truman Library.)
December 29, Friday: Operation Linebacker II ended what had been the most intensive bombing campaign of the
entire war, with over 100,000 bombs dropped on Hanoi and Haiphong. Fifteen of our 121 B-52s had been shot
down by the 1,200 SAMs fired by the North Vietnamese. Hanoi reported 1,318 civilian deaths from the
bombing.
December 30, Saturday: President Richard Milhous Nixon ordered a halt to bombing of North Vietnam north of the
20th Parallel. The US government simultaneously announced that peace talks between Le Duc Tho and Henry
Kissinger would resume on January 8th.
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1973
The US Congress enacted a War Powers Act which would soon be being ignored by presidents both of the
Republican and of the Democratic persuasion. A joint Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger and
North Vietnam’s chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho — who would indignantly repudiate an award that was being
given also to a man of the likes of Kissinger.
In this year of great hypocrisy there would be no Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League.
The United Kingdom and the Irish Republic joined the European Economic Community. The Sunningdale
agreement; a power-sharing assembly was proposed for Northern Ireland. Local Government was re-organized
in Northern Ireland: 6 Counties were abolished and 26 Districts were created with minimal powers. De Valera
retired from the Presidency of the Republic and Erskine Childers was elected President. The government of
the Republic fell and a Fine Gael/Labour coalition came into power. The Council of Ireland was agreed to by
Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, with limited powers. Faulkner became the leader of the Northern
Ireland Assembly. Britain passed a Northern Ireland Emergency Powers Act which updated the “1922 Special
Powers Act” to allow for one-judge Diplock Courts to hear “terrorism cases” without normal civil protections.
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January 1, Monday: Bangladeshis protesting the bombing of North Vietnam set fire to the US Information Service in
Dacca. During the demonstration two people were killed by the police.
Great Britain, Ireland, and Denmark entered the European Common Market.
British Honduras was renamed “Belize.”
January 8, Monday: National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho resumed negotiations in Paris.
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January 9, Tuesday: All remaining differences were resolved between National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and
Le Duc Tho. President Nguyen Van Thieu, once again threatened by President Richard Milhous Nixon with a
total cut-off of American aid to South Vietnam, unwillingly accepts this peace agreement which allowed North
Vietnamese troops to remain in South Vietnam. Thieu, however, labeled the terms “tantamount to surrender.”
January 23, Tuesday: Con voce for three mute players by Mauricio Kagel was performed for the initial time, in the
Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
String Quartet no.3 by Elliott Carter was performed for the initial time, in Alice Tully Hall, New York.
President Richard Milhous Nixon announced that an agreement has been reached by negotiators Henry
Kissinger and Le Duc Tho about Vietnam which would “end the war and bring peace with honor.”
Former President Lyndon Johnson died in a plane transporting him to San Antonio, Texas for treatment of
a heart attack he suffered at his home in Johnson City.
yourself.”
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January 27, Saturday: The final American soldier to die in combat in Vietnam was Lieutenant Colonel William B.
Nolde, who was killed on this day.
The Paris Peace Accords were signed by the US, North and South Vietnam, and the Viet Cong. Under the
terms, the US agreed to immediately halt all military activities and to withdraw all remaining military
personnel within 60 days. The North Vietnamese agreed to an immediate cease-fire and to the release of all
American POWs within 60 days. The estimated 150,000 North Vietnamese soldiers already in South Vietnam
would be allowed to remain. Vietnam was still divided. South Vietnam was considered to be one country with
two governments, one led by President Nguyen Van Thieu and the other by the Viet Cong, pending future
reconciliation.
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced that the draft was ended, in favor of voluntary enlistment.
(The draft was history. The draft board, however, was not history — mandatory registration would continue.)
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January 29, Monday: Prime Minister Lon Nol of Cambodia declared a unilateral cease fire.
The two groups charged with overseeing the Vietnam cease fire, the ICCS and the JMG, held their 1st meetings
in Saigon. The ICCS discussed procedures while the JMG was crippled by a refusal by the Viet Cong
delegation to submit a list of it members.
Violence began anew in Northern Ireland when two Catholics were shot to death by Protestant terrorists.
Busing to achieve racial integration in schools went into effect peacefully in Prince Georges County, Maryland
(suburban Washington DC).
Mikis Theodorakis advised reporters in London that he could no longer describe himself as a Communist.
February 7, Wednesday: Protestant terrorists fired on the funeral in Belfast of three Catholics killed in recent violence
in Northern Ireland. Two people were wounded. A strike called by Protestants brought Belfast to a standstill.
Protestants rampaged through Catholic districts of Belfast, attacking police stations, churches, and Catholic
homes.
Dwight Chapin, a former White House aide, confessed to the FBI that he had instructed Herbert Kalmbach,
President Nixon’s personal attorney, to pay Donald Segretti for a campaign of sabotage against Democratic
presidential candidates.
The US Senate approved the creation of a select committee to investigate irregularities in the Presidential
campaign of 1972.
Canada formally recognized North Vietnam.
February 12, Monday: Operation Homecoming began the release of 591 American POWs from Hanoi, with a plenty
of tear jerking photo ops. We were all immensely glad that they were back home, even those of us who
considered that our boys shouldn’t have been put in harms way in the first place.
A 4th Mark I boiling water nuclear reactor began construction on the coast of Japan, at the Fukushima Daiichi
Power Station.
“If anything bad can happen, it probably will.”
— Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss
in the Chicago Daily Tribune, February 12, 1955)
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March 26, Monday: Truong Dinh Dzu, a losing candidate in the 1967 presidential elections, was released from a
Saigon prison after serving five years for the crime of suggesting that they ought to negotiate with the Viet
Cong.
President Anwar Sadat of Egypt named himself to the post of prime minister.
Students at Athens University suspended an 8-week strike because school administrators had agreed to consult
with the university’s faculty senate.
March 29, Thursday: Tekin Ariburun replaced Cevdet Sunay as President of Turkey ad interim.
Over 15,000 Saudi Arabian troops entered Kuwait to help defend it against Iraqi incursions.
The final remaining American troops withdrew from Vietnam as the North Vietnamese released the last 67
prisoners-of-war they held. Former POWs presently in the United States told of physical and psychological
torture practiced on them by their captors. President Richard Milhous Nixon declared that “the day we have
all worked and prayed for has finally come.” During 15 years of military involvement, over 2,000,000
Americans had served in Vietnam with 500,000 seeing actual combat and 47,244 being killed in action
(including 8,000 airmen). There had been in addition 10,446 non-combat deaths and 153,329 had been
seriously wounded (including 10,000 amputees). In addition, more than 2,400 of the Americans being
hopefully listed as POWs/MIAs were still unaccounted for and presumably should be added either to the
47,244 combat deaths or to the 10,446 non-combat deaths. America’s longest war was concluded by its first
defeat.
What if they gave a war and nobody came?
April: Presidents Richard Milhous Nixon and Nguyen Van Thieu met in our President’s home at San Clemente,
California and Nixon renewed his earlier secret pledge that if North Vietnam violated the peace agreement, we
would respond militarily. (President Thieu evidently failed to notice that when President Nixon said this, his
lips were moving.)
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April 1, Sunday: Captain Robert White, the last known American POW in North Vietnam, was released. The future
remained for charm bracelets and conspiracy theorists.
A report titled UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION IN PSYCHOLOGY, informally termed the Kulik report,
summarized a survey of American undergraduate psychology programs and 17 site visits, with special
emphasis on 10 institutions.
June 19, Tuesday: The US Congress passed the Case/Church Amendment which forebad any further US military
involvement in Southeast Asia effective August 15, 1973. The veto-proof vote obtained was 278 over124 in
the House of Representatives and 64 over 26 in the Senate. The amendment would of course enable North
Vietnam to invade the South without the hindrance of US bombing strikes.
July:
The US Navy removed mines which had been installed during Operation Linebacker from ports in North
Vietnam.
July 16, Monday: The US Senate’s Armed Forces Committee began studying the history of the “secret” bombing of
Cambodia that we had been conducting during 1969 and 1970.
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During the Senate Watergate hearings, former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield publicly revealed the
existence of President Richard Milhous Nixon clandestine Oval Office taping system.
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July 17, Tuesday, 1973: Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger testified before the US Senate’s Armed Forces
Committee that to protect American troops through the targeting of positions occupied by North Vietnamese
troops, 3,500 bombing raids had been launched into Cambodia. Many in Congress began to posture before the
cameras as being angered to “discover” the extent of President Richard Milhous Nixon’s secret bombing
campaign. On the positive side, this made it safe for the first hue and cry to go up among the politicians, that
this was a President who ought to have his ass impeached.
July 31, Tuesday: All 249 Canadian members of the ICCS departed South Vietnam. The US announced that Iran has
agreed to take their place.
Thailand reported that its troops have begun to withdraw from Laos.
Protestant hard liners disrupted the 1st meeting of the newly elected Northern Ireland legislative assembly,
forcing it to adjourn.
August 14, Tuesday: In accordance with the Congressional ban resulting from the Case/Church amendment, the US
bombing of Cambodia ceased.
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September 22: Near Pleiku, South Vietnamese troops assaulted troops of the North Vietnamese.
South Vietnam was going to be able to go it alone, not.
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October: Fighter pilot George W. Bush received an honorable discharge from the US military eight months prior to the
expiration of his obligation.
He had been extremely fortunate and, during the entire Vietnam war, had had no dangerous encounters with
enemy aircraft. He would be able to go and sit in a classroom at Harvard University and chew snuff like a
fighter pilot and spit into a cup.
(1951), act 1
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November 7, Wednesday: Saigon’s bombers devastated Loc Ninh, the Viet Cong administrative center.
The United States and Egypt agreed to resume diplomatic relations.
The US Congress overrode President Richard Milhous Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Resolution, thus
limiting the president’s ability to make war without congressional approval. The President was to be required
to obtain the consent of Congress within 90 days after sending American troops abroad.
READ THE FULL TEXT
The government of Luxembourg ordered gas stations to close on weekends. In a national address, the President
outlined mandatory and voluntary measures to deal with the projected shortfall in oil. He also informed us that
he had no intention of resigning.
The Board of Education of Drake, North Dakota had 32 to 36 copies of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE OR THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE A DUTY-DANCE WITH DEATH burned, terming
them “tools of the Devil” (they would not renew the contract of the teacher who had assigned this book).
Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what
I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main
thing was a book about Dresden.
I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker,
one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired,
“Is it an anti-war book?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re
writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book
instead?’”
What he meant, of course, was that there would always
be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.
I believe that, too.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
OR THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE
A DUTY-DANCE WITH DEATH. NY: Dell, 1971, page 3.
December 3, Monday: The Viet Cong destroyed 18,000,000 gallons of fuel stored near Saigon.
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December 21, Friday: West Germany established diplomatic relations with Bulgaria and Hungary.
The first Middle East peace conference opened in Geneva. Those attending were Egypt, Israel, Jordan, the
USSR, and the US.
Viet Cong negotiators walked out of both the political talks and the military talks in Paris.
The Military Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of William Calley for his war crimes at My Lai. He was
guilty, guilty, guilty. Since once upon a time we had sent a Quaker like John R. Kellam to the slammer merely
for refusing to believe in war — I bet you suppose that for mass murder we are also going to send Calley to
the slammer, the slammer, the slammer! (It seems plausible, on first sight, that killing innocent civilians is a
somewhat worse offense than refusing to believe in war, and therefore deserves a somewhat more severe
punishment.)
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1974
February 27, Wednesday: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia appointed Endalkachew Makonnen prime minister after
the entire cabinet resigned in the wake of the military mutiny in Asmara.
The Swedish Riksdag approved a new constitution to go into effect the following January 1st. Most of
whatever power the King had was removed and the Riksdag was made unicameral.
Lieutenant William Calley, the sole convicted war criminal of My Lai, was released from house arrest on
$1,000 bond.
About 800 conservative policemen seized the government of Cordoba, Argentina, removing a leftwing
government.
April 16, Tuesday: The Saigon government broke off political talks with the Viet Cong near Paris because of Viet Cong
truce violations.
Surprise! William Calley’s sentence for his war crimes at My Lai was further reduced, by the Secretary of the
US Army, this time from 20 years to 10 years. (The court had delayed its announcement for a couple of weeks
after April 1st, for reasons that will be immediately obvious to any fool.)
August 9, Friday: Finally fearful of imprisonment, Richard Milhous Nixon resigned the presidency of the United
States of America, becoming our first president to resign the office. Vice-President Gerald Rudolph Ford was
sworn in as 38th US President, becoming the 6th in succession to attempt to cope with the mess we were
making in Vietnam.
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(In the following month, Ford would grant an unconditional pardon to former President Nixon for all crimes,
real or imagined, detected or undetected. Go thou and sin no more. Nixon would write a series of books telling
us what a great guy he was and how he had been right all along. By the way, have you heard that Nixon was a
Quaker? Both of these gentlemen would wind up in the autumn of their days, very tanned, very rested, very
ready, and rather perplexing. :-)
September: The federal Congress appropriated only $700,000,000 for South Vietnam. This would leave the South
Vietnamese Army underfunded and would result in a decline of military readiness and of morale. “Why should
we try? –Obviously, you don’t love us anymore!”
Senators Claiborne Pell (D-Rhode Island) and Jacob Javits (R-New York) visited Cuba — the 1st US elected
officials to visit the island since the break of diplomatic relations.
September 16, Monday: President Gerald Rudolph Ford announced a clemency program for draft evaders and military
deserters. This program was to run through March 31, 1975, and would require the fugitives to take an oath of
allegiance and provide up to two years of alternative community service. Out of an estimated 124,000
Americans who were eligible, about 22,500 would take advantage of the offer.
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Future Democratic president William Jefferson Clinton and future Republican president George Walker Bush
would not need to take advantage of this offer because, although each of them had been evading the draft for
many years, they had been doing so in such manner as always to manage to avoid being legally classifiable as
a draft evader. They were either very, very cunning or they were so positioned as to have the advantage of very,
very good counsel, or both. Their futures were open. They would rise to be our maximum leaders, commanders
in chief of our armed forces.
At the French embassy in The Hague, Japanese Red Army terrorists released two of their hostages.
A federal judge dismissed all charges against two leaders of the American Indian Movement (their indictment
had sprung out of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee). The judge severely criticized the federal
government’s handling of the case.
September 25, Wednesday: Sun Music for Film, a film about the creation of Peter Sculthorpe’s The Song of Talitnama,
was aired by the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
The conviction of Lieutenant William Calley for war crimes was overturned by a United States district judge
in Columbus, Georgia. This meant that no one at all stood convicted of the murder of hundreds of civilians at
My Lai in 1968 and the subsequent army coverup.
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October The Politburo of North Vietnam decided to kick off the final takeover of South Vietnam sometime in 1975.
November 9, Saturday: Surprise! William Calley, convicted of killing 22 unarmed civilians at My Lai in 1968, was
free on bond after serving one-third of a 10-year prison sentence. Such a nice all-American boy!
He had only been serving his country and trying to do what he considerd to be right.
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November 13, Wednesday: A portion of the Peers Report about the war crimes at My Lai was made public. Yes, that’s
right, a portion. All the news that’s fit to print.
The film Tabuh Tabuhan: Peter Sculthorpe in Bali, about Sculthorpe’s use of Balinese musical materials, was
aired by the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
General George Brown, Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top military leader,
apologized for remarks he recently made claiming that Jews had undo influence over financial and media
institutions.
Karen Silkwood, a technician at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Nuclear Facility in Crescent, Oklahoma, had an
automobile accident while on her way to meet union officials and a New York Times reporter. Allegedly, she
was bringing to them documentary proof that the company was failing to protect its workers from radiation.
Union officials would charge that the accident had been caused by Ms. Silkwood’s car being struck from
behind by another car (it seems that the documents in question quite vanished with the crash and her death).
November 19, Tuesday: William Calley was freed after serving 31/2 years under house arrest during his appeal process
after his conviction by general courts-martial for the murder of 22 My Lai civilians.
(He would go on to manage a Georgia jewelry store where he would marry the owner’s daughter. It’s the
American success story. :-)
December 13, Friday: North Vietnam violated the Paris peace treaty and tested President Gerald Rudolph Ford’s
resolve by attacking Phuoc Long Province in the South. President Ford sent a diplomatic protest but, in
compliance with the Congressional ban on all US military activity in Southeast Asia, without recourse to
military force.
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December 18, Wednesday: North Vietnam’s leaders met in Hanoi to lay plans for their final victory.
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Inspired by some tall tales of hand-to-hand Korean ferocity in Vietnam, the commanding general of the United
States Army’s 25th Infantry Division brought a high-ranking taekwondo teacher from Seoul for the purpose
of teaching unarmed killing techniques to American soldiers. –This general’s wet dream failed of
accomplishment, however, when in a Honolulu nightclub the Korean in question got himself shot dead.
January 8, Wednesday: The general staff of the North Vietnamese Army’s plan to use 20 divisions in the final conquest
of South Vietnam was approved by North Vietnam’s Politburo. By this point, the Soviet-equipped North
Vietnamese Army had become the 5th largest in the world. They were anticipating a couple more years of
struggle although as it would turn out, they would be able to bring South Vietnam to collapse in a mere 55 days.
Judge Sirica released Watergate’s John W Dean III, Herbert W Kalmbach, and Jeb Stuart Magruder from
prison.
January 14, Tuesday: Testifying before the US Congress, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger pointed up the fact
that the US was not living up to the commitment it had made to South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu,
that we would take “severe retaliatory action” if North Vietnam were to violate the peace treaty they had agreed
to in Paris.
January 21, Tuesday: Pressed by reporters during a press conference, President Gerald Rudolph Ford declared that,
regardless, the US wasn’t about to re-enter the Vietnam war.
February 5, Wednesday: General Van Tien Dung secretly crossed into South Vietnam to take command during the final
North Vietnamese offensive.
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March 10, Monday: The final offensive began with an assault by 25,000 North Vietnamese soldiers upon Ban Me
Thuot in the Central Highlands.
March 11, Tuesday: After half the 4,000 South Vietnamese soldiers defending it had surrendered or deserted, Ban Me
Thuot fell.
March 13, Thursday: President Nguyen Van Thieu decided to abandon the highlands and its two northern provinces to
the North Vietnamese. This resulted in a mass exodus of civilians and soldiers, clogging roads and bringing
general chaos. The North began to shell the disorganized retreat, which would come to be known as “the
convoy of tears.”
March 18, Tuesday: With the South Vietnamese Army so near collapse, the leaders of North Vietnam met and decided
to accelerate the offensive so as to have a final victory to celebrate on May Day (May 1st).
March 19, Wednesday: Quang Tri City fell to the North Vietnamese.
March 22, Saturday: The Saigon government abandoned Gia Nghia, capital of Quang Duc Province,
170 kilometers northeast of Saigon.
US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger suspended his efforts to reach a peace agreement between Egypt and
Israel, because the two sides were too intractable.
Chamber Music for percussion and electronics by Lukas Foss and Joel Chadabe was performed for the 1st
time, in Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
While I was working in nuclear energy, there was an alarming fire at one of the 3 reactors of Brown’s Ferry in
northern Alabama. The fire, burning in the one tunnel that connected the one control room with all three reactor
pressure vessels, came close to requiring the total evacuation of a tri-state area. It was an electrical fire and got
put out when the untrained local firemen charged in and dumped water on it — although putting water onto an
electrical fire is exactly what one does not do. In this case, most fortunately for us all, this El Stupido localfireman mistake happened to do the trick. After the fire was out, all of us in the nuclear industry sat around
and mused: “How could we have planned entirely redundant safety wiring to each of the three nuclear reactors
— and then channeled all three sets of wires through the same conduit? What kind of El Stupido safety
redundancy is that?” We found out that the fire had been set when a technician had been checking the tunnel
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for air currents, and had been stopping up these air currents with flammable foam — Mr. El Stupido had been
checking for air currents by the use of the open flame of a candle, right next to all this flammable foam and
electrical insulation! (Afterward, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would attempt to persuade power plant
operators to install entirely redundant control cables, and these people would refuse. What right did the NRC
have to interfere with licenses previously granted? This would cost money, and who would pay? They would
instead create an “Operator Manual Action” routine by which designated runner heros would be appointed
from among their technicians, whose task in case of any control cables burning away in a fire would be to make
martyrdom dashes through the contaminated area, throwing switches and closing valves. I suppose that, if the
event arose and any of these “Operator Manual Action” people refused to commit suicide, we’d just have to
dump water on an electrical fire again — and hope against hope that this would again do the trick.)
“If anything bad can happen, it probably will.”
— Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss
in the Chicago Daily Tribune, February 12, 1955)
March 24, Monday: Tam Ky was overrun by the North Vietnamese.
March 25, Tuesday: After a 3-day siege, Hue fell to the North Vietnamese without further resistance. South
Vietnamese troops began to break and run from other threatened areas. Millions of refugees fled toward the
south.
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March 26, Wednesday: Chu Lai was evacuated.
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The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological
(Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction that the US had signed on April 10, 1972 at this
point entered into force.
READ THE FULL TEXT
This convention prohibits the research, development, and testing of biological weapons, agents, and
compounds but has a wide open back door allowing all sorts of prophylactic and defensive research,
development, and testing. In addition, since all signatories were such decent people, there was no perceived
need for any verification protocol whatever. The Pentagon retained its Chemical and Biological Warfare unit,
underfunded but ready for any excuse to spring back as a major program.
March 28, Friday: Da Nang came under shelling as 35,000 North Vietnamese prepared to attack.
March 30. Sunday: Da Nang fell as 100,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, abandoned by their commanding officers,
surrendered.
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March 31, Monday: The North Vietnamese kicked off their “Ho Chi Minh Campaign,” the final push to Saigon.
April 3, Thursday: The last two ports serving the Saigon government, Cam Ranh and Nha Trang, were cut off by the
North Vietnamese.
Japan and South Korea closed their missions in Phnom Penh. The US began evacuating staff and dependents.
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” a film directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, was released in Great
Britain.
Dybbuk Suite no.1 for tenor, bass-baritone and orchestra by Leonard Bernstein to words of various Jewish
texts, was performed for the initial time, in Avery Fisher Hall, New York, conducted by the composer.
April 9, Wednesday: As 40,000 North Vietnamese soldiers closed in on Xuan Loc, 38 miles from Saigon, Vietnam,
they began for the first time to encounter stiff resistance from South Vietnamese troops.
April 12, Saturday: A few days after Josephine Baker had performed, at the Bobino Theater in Paris, her retrospective
medley of routines of her 50-year career, she had slipped into a coma. On the early morning of this day there
was a cerebral hemorrhage. More than 20,000 people would crowd the streets of Paris to watch the funeral
procession on its way to the Church of the Madeleine. The French government would honor this performer
with a 21-gun salute, which would make her the first American woman to be buried in France with military
honors. Her gravesite is in the Cimetiére de Monaco.
US Marines evacuated foreigners before the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
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April 19, Saturday: On the occasion of the bicentennial of the slaughter of militiamen by army troops in Lexington,
some 30,000 patriots assembled on the green to observe a modest re-enactment.
Since “pont” means bridge, we may punningly refer to this as “pontification.”
With the help of the Soviet Union, India was launching its first satellite. In Concord on this day, the controlling
sentiment was fear of Communist influence.40 A member of the NRA (National Rifle Association)
courageously stood behind a podium upon which was mounted a target with a big blue bull’s-eye, at the Old
North Bridge in Concord, and attempted to recite some grand old words in honor of our nation’s grand old
history of people killing each other with guns, while some men stood around in period costume behind him,
carrying antique single-shot guns, unloaded, and some other men, with their business suit jackets covering
very modern multiple-shot guns, locked and loaded, stood around intently staring at various members of the
crowd of assembled citizenry:
President Gerald Rudolph Ford may have been just a tad nervous. He quoted, from a piece of doggerel that
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had written as his contribution to the recruitment campaign for the war that was
being given in 1863,41 the immortal patriotic drivel “one if by day, and two if by night.”42
Also in attendance at that commemorative scene, Concord version, was Hurricane Bob out of Orange County,
California, our congressman who was then currently striving toward the Republican presidential nomination
(he characterized President William Jefferson Clinton as “draft-dodging, pot-smoking, philandering” — a
40. It is a famous date, for a certain type of person with a certain type of personality. For other April 19 celebrations of renown,
consider Patriots’ Day 1993 at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco TX, Patriots’ Day 1995 at the federal building in
Oklahoma City OK, and Patriots’ Day 2013 at the marathon race in Boston MA.
41. What if they gave a war and nobody came?
42. And perhaps no poet has been parodied more: it’s all because, while he was at Bowdoin College in 1822 with author-to-be
Nathaniel Hawthorne (still Hathorne) and president-to-be Franklin Pierce, he was accustomed to play whist without a helmet.
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fairly accurate if incendiary characterization).
PATRIOTS’ DAY
Bob Dornan and his wife Sallie were standing by the rude bridge that arched the flood on this 200th
anniversary, where the embattled farmers had stood and fired the shot heard round the world, and Bob was
eating an orange while Sallie was carrying the family umbrella, when they spotted a protester carrying the flag
of North Vietnam. The hand with which Bob punched this unholy flag-bearer happened to be the hand with
which he was holding the orange (let’s hear it for Orange County). Well, sir, the Dornans lived up to their
heritage, for that mocking flag wound up in the mud underfoot in small shreds. Sallie found out that a family
umbrella came in handy, too, as a club. In their race toward the White House, Bob would wear a wristwatch
which bore a cartoon face of President Bill Clinton and a digital number which declined from day to day —
the number 566 as of May 1, 1995, representing the number of remaining days in the Clinton one-term
presidency. The number on Sallie’s matching watch, however, was 642, which represented the number of days
until she planned to take possession of the living spaces in the White House. Well, what goes around comes
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around, doesn’t it?
What
goes
around
keeps
coming
around
and
around
and
around...
I recently wrote to Former President Ford at his and Betty’s home in Southern California, that I had seen a
photo of him and four other living ex-Presidents, striding along. The news story had been that they were
getting in touch with the American Way, and had begun to sell their autographs. Therefore, I sent him a
printout page from the textbase, about that day in Concord, and a very brief explanation of hypertext, and
I also sent along a dollar bill –which, I did not neglect to point out, in Thoreau’s day had been worth as much
as a C-note today– and asked if he would please show his good humor by initialing my printout page on the
dotted line where it said “Nihil Obstat.” Just in case he didn’t know, I mentioned that “Nihil Obstat” meant
“no problem” in Latin, and out of courtesy I included a SASE. And what did I receive back? Here it is:
Nihil Obstat X _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ]
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April 20, Sunday: Given the gravity of the situation and the unlikelihood that President Nguyen Van Thieu could ever
negotiate with these Communists, US Ambassador Graham Martin met with the President to press him to
resign.
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April 21, Monday: During a rambling 90-minute TV speech to the people of South Vietnam, the bitter and tearful
President Nguyen Van Thieu resigned. He read from a pledge President Richard Milhous Nixon had made in
1972 that if South Vietnam were ever threatened we would take “severe retaliatory action.” He condemned the
Paris Peace Accords, he condemned Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and he condemned the United States
of America: “The United States has not respected its promises. It is inhumane. It is untrustworthy. It is
irresponsible.” Then, shepherded by our CIA agents, he made his escape into exile in Taiwan.
April 22, Tuesday: After a 2-week defense in which more than 5,000 of the attacking North Vietnamese were killed,
South Vietnam’s 18th Army Division abandoned Xuan Loc.
April 23, Wednesday: With Saigon full to overflowing with war refugees and 100,000 North Vietnamese soldiers
moving relentlessly toward the capital city, President Gerald Rudolph Ford commented at Tulane University
that the conflict in Vietnam was “finished as far as America is concerned.”43
April 27, Sunday: Saigon, Vietnam was encircled and the 30,000 South Vietnamese soldiers inside the perimeter were
leaderless. The city of course erupted into chaos and widespread looting as North Vietnamese Army rockets
rained into the downtown civilian areas.
April 28, Monday: Proclaiming himself as a “Neutralist,” General Duong Van “Big” Minh took over the presidency of
South Vietnam and appealed for a cease-fire. He was ignored.
43. Over the course of this action, 1,053 uniformed personnel from Minnesota had gotten killed.
Minnesotans were saying they had given their lives for their country.
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April 29, Tuesday: The North Vietnamese shelling of the Tan Son Nhut air base of Saigon, Vietnam killed two US
Marines at the compound gate. Conditions deteriorated as the South Vietnamese began to loot the base, and
President Gerald Rudolph Ford gave the go-ahead to Operation Frequent Wind, a helicopter evacuation of the
remaining 7,000 Americans and their South Vietnamese collaborators from the capital city to three US aircraft
carriers standing by off the coast, an operation which began with the pre-arraigned radio signal of Bing Crosby
singing on the local radio station about a “White Christmas.” (We’ll never experience that song in the old way
again.) So many frantic civilians were swarming the helicopters at Tan Son Nhut, that the evacuation had to
be shifted to the American embassy, which was of course secured by locked-and-loaded Marines. The scene
there also deteriorated into some serious photo opportunities as thousands of our collaborators, rightly fearing
instant execution, and rightly fearing abandonment, attempted to get inside. Meanwhile, many South
Vietnamese pilots were managing to bring their American-made helicopters down onto the flight decks of the
carriers offshore. We would have at the end an enduring image, in film footage of these choppers, at $250,000
each worth as much as a fine home anywhere in America, being simply shoved over the edge to make room
for those still hovering.
April 30, Wednesday, 8:35AM: The 4th Marines under Colonel Alfred M. Gray completed the evacuation by
helicopters from the Saigon embassy and from Tan Son Nhut airfield. With the evacuation of the final ten
Marine defenders from the United States embassy in Saigon, our presence in Vietnam came to an end. The
North Vietnamese troops pouring into Saigon would of course encounter little resistance.
April 30, Wednesday, 11AM: The red and blue flag of the Viet Cong was raised at the presidential palace.
With President Minh broadcasting a message of unconditional surrender, war in Vietnam came to an end.
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1976
April 5, Monday: In response to congressional concerns raised by the Church and Pike Committees, Attorney General
Edward Levi placed limitations upon future FBI domestic security investigations. No more of this cowboy
stuff, guys.
100,000 Chinese protested the removal of the previous day’s remembrances to Chou En-lai in Tiananmen
Square. They were dispersed by police. 388 marchers were arrested.
Cambodian Chief of State Prince Norodom Sihanouk resigned his position.
The United States Supreme Court refused to review the conviction of Lieutenant William Calley for murdering
innocent Vietnamese civilian families. Army sources announced that Calley would be released on parole,
having served 3 years under home arrest of what had originally been a life sentence.
Leonard James Callaghan replaced James Harold Wilson as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
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1977
January 21, Friday: President Jimmy Carter issued Proclamation 4483, granting pardon for certain violations of the
Selective Service Act committed between August 4, 1964 and March 28, 1973:44
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Acting pursuant to the grant of authority in Article II, Section
2, of the Constitution of the United States, I, Jimmy Carter,
President of the United States, do hereby grant a full, complete
and unconditional pardon to: (1) all persons who may have
committed any offense between August 4, 1964 and March 28, 1973
in violation of the Military Selective Service Act or any rule
or regulation promulgated thereunder; and (2) all persons
heretofore convicted, irrespective of the date of conviction,
of any offense committed between August 4, 1964 and March 28,
1973 in violation of the Military Selective Service Act, or any
rule or regulation promulgated thereunder, restoring to them
full political, civil and other rights.
This pardon does not apply to the following who are specifically
excluded therefrom:
(1) All persons convicted of or who may have committed any
offense in violation of the Military Selective Service Act, or
any rule or regulation promulgated thereunder, involving force
or violence; and
(2) All persons convicted of or who may have committed any
offense in violation of the Military Selective Service Act, or
any rule or regulation promulgated thereunder, in connection
with duties or responsibilities arising out of employment as
agents, officers or employees of the Military Selective Service
system.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this 21st day
of January, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventyseven, and of the Independence of the United States of America
the two hundred and first.
44. 42 FR 4391, 3 CFR, 1977 Compilation, page 4
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1979
Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the evil Soviet empire there.
He was one of the good guys who eventually would receive funding and training through our Central
Intelligence Agency. We would teach him dirty tricks. We would help him kill people. He was our kinda
Muslim guy.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s film “Apocalypse Now,” Airmobile Infantry Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore
(portrayed by Robert Duvall) asserted “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.... It smells like ... victory.”
Actually this helicopter soldier in Vietnam would have been referring not to the smell of burning napalm, since
this was no longer in use, but to the smell of burning NP2 or in helicopter soldier talk “super-napalm.”
January 5, Friday: The Malaysian government refused to accept any more boat people from Vietnam.
Work stoppages in Iran slowly came to an end.
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January 7, Sunday: Phnom Penh was captured by Vietnamese forces along with a Cambodian group, the Cambodian
National United Front for National Salvation.
Jersey Hours for voice and three harpsichords by Ulysses Kay to words of Dorr was performed for the initial
time, in Teaneck, New Jersey on the composer’s 62nd birthday.
January 8, Monday: The Vietnamese-backed forces in Cambodia proclaimed the government of the Peoples Republic
of Kampuchea. Heng Samrin was named President.
John Wayne Gacy was indicted in a Chicago court for the murder of 7 young men. He indicated that he had
actually killed 32, after having sex with them.
Argentina and Chile agreed in Montevideo to refrain from force to settle their dispute over the Beagle Channel,
and to ask Pope John Paul II for mediation.
On Tourne, a ballet by Bohuslav Martinu, was performed for the initial time, in Brno, 52 years after it had been
composed.
January 13, Saturday: Vietnamese forces were reported to have taken Sisophon and Siem Reap.
A 9-member regency council was formed to carry out the duties of the Shah of Iran after he left the country.
100,000 people demonstrated peacefully in Teheran against the government.
Three Palestinian terrorists who attempted to take over a hotel in the Israeli town of Maalot were killed by
Israeli soldiers.
Jubilatio for four percussionists by Sofia Gubaidulina was performed for the initial time, in Moscow.
January 15, Monday: Pol Pot’s forces retook Kompong Som from the Vietnamese.
January 18, Thursday: There was rioting in Ahwaz and Dizful, Iran. At least 23 were killed and 80 injured.
Palestinian terrorists exploded a bomb in a Jerusalem marketplace, injuring 21.
Vietnamese forces retook Kompong Som from the Khmer Rouge.
Reflections of Emily for treble voices, piano, harp and percussion by Peter Mennin to words of Dickinson was
performed for the initial time, in New York.
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January 19, Friday: John N. Mitchell (former Attorney General and Watergate figure) was released on parole from
federal prison.
Hong Kong authorities temporarily accepted 3,383 boat people from Vietnam.
Israeli forces struck at Palestinian terrorist camps in Lebanon, killing 40.
A million people demonstrated in Teheran against the government of Prime Minister Shapur Bakhtiar and for
the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
In a winter full of labor disputes, British truck drivers ended a strike after winning 17%-20% wage increases.
February 1, Thursday: The exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran. In a few days it would all be over
(until of course it would begin again).
February 17, Saturday: 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese troops invaded Vietnam in retaliation for alleged Vietnamese
border violations which had allegedly cost the lives of 300 Chinese. The attack occurred all along the border
between the two countries.
February 20, Tuesday: Vietnam acknowledged that it had lost Lao Cai to the invading Chinese forces.
Eleven members of the Protestant paramilitary group Ulster Volunteer Force were sentenced to a total of 42
terms of life in prison for terrorist killings of Catholics. These men had been colloquially known as the Shankill
Butchers.
February 22, Thursday: Vietnam acknowledged that the invading Chinese forces had advanced 25 kilometers into their
country.
St. Lucia, under Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister John Compton, was proclaimed independent of Great
Britain in ceremonies in Castries.
Over 48 hours, over 100 Sandinista bombs exploded within Managua.
February 26, Monday: Chinese forces advanced as far as 65 kilometers inside Vietnam.
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March 1, Thursday: Western sources in Bangkok communicated that Chinese forces had captured Lang Son, Vietnam,
a provincial capital.
The People’s Republic of China and the United States of America exchanged ambassadors.
Parliamentary elections in Spain left the major parties virtually unchanged.
6 people, including a former Italian defense minister and a former air force chief of staff, were convicted of
receiving $1,600,000 in bribes from Lockheed (5 others were acquitted).
Voters in Wales voted 4-1 against devolution of power to the province. In Scotland, a bare majority voted in
favor of dissolution, but approval by 40% of the total electorate had been necessary for approval, and more
than a third of Scottish voters had failed to show up at the polls.
Palintropos for piano and orchestra by John Tavener was performed for the initial time, in Birmingham Town
Hall.
Sweeney Todd, with music by Stephen Sondheim, opened in New York.
March 5, Monday: The Chinese army began to withdraw from Vietnam.
A US Navy task force was dispatched to the waters off Yemen to provide logistical support to Saudi Arabia
should they decide to intervene in the fighting between North and South Yemen.
American space probe Voyager I passed within 275,000 kilometers of Jupiter, discovering a new moon that
would be named Thebe.
The US Supreme Court ruled that state laws requiring divorced men to provide alimony, but not divorced
women, were unconstitutional.
March 6, Tuesday: In an attempt to end the flood of boat people, the United Nations brokers a deal with Vietnam to
allow for the orderly emigration of Vietnamese citizens to nations which will accept them.
Over a million local-authority employees vote to end their strike and accept a pay settlement.
March 15, Thursday: Chinese forces completed their withdrawal from Vietnam. In the month-long war, 70,000 had
died.
The Egyptian cabinet approved the peace agreement with Israel.
Turkey withdrew from the Baghdad Pact (CENTO).
Léonide Massine died in Cologne at the age of 82.
João Baptista de Oliveira Figuerredo replaced Ernesto Geisel as President of the military government of
Brazil.
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March 16, Friday: Columbia Pictures released the Michael Douglas movie “The China Syndrome.”
(This film would be pulled from some theaters subsequent to the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island.)
March 31, Saturday: Vietnamese forces began a new offensive against the Khmer Rouge in northwest Cambodia.
A boat carrying 227 refugees from Vietnam capsized off Malaysia. 104 people are killed.
Results from a referendum in Iran showed 97% of voters in favor of an Islamic Republic over a monarchy.
Meeting in Baghdad, the Arab League voted to end all economic and diplomatic ties with Egypt because it had
gone to peace with Israel.
The 11-day government of Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti lost a confidence vote and resigned.
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March 31, Saturday: Vietnamese forces began a new offensive against the Khmer Rouge in northwest Cambodia.
A boat carrying 227 refugees from Vietnam capsized off Malaysia. 104 people are killed.
Results from a referendum in Iran showed 97% of voters in favor of an Islamic Republic over a monarchy.
Meeting in Baghdad, the Arab League voted to end all economic and diplomatic ties with Egypt because it had
gone to peace with Israel.
The 11-day government of Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti lost a confidence vote and resigned.
April 21, Saturday: Over the following five days, about 50,000-80,000 Cambodians would cross the border into
Thailand. These would be civilians and soldiers of the Khmer Rouge government, fleeing a Vietnamese
offensive in western Cambodia.
July 21, Saturday: At the end of a 2-day conference in Geneva, Vietnam indicated that it would attempt to stop
the flow of refugees from its shores.
The total number of executions since the Islamic takeover in Iran reached 350.
September 25: Vietnamese forces began a new offensive against the Khmer Rouge in central Cambodia.
After 29 months of imprisonment without charge, newspaper publisher Jacobo Timermann was put on a plane
in Buenos Aires bound for Rome.
Evita opened in New York City.
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1981
The Senators’ Washroom that had been installed just off the floor of the US Senate meetingroom in 1859
needed at this point, due to improvements in the standards of military medicine and evacuation procedures of
our MASH hospitals in Vietnam, to be rendered handicapped-accessible. Certain spinal wounds, rather than
causing prompt death on the battlefield as in all previous wars such as the US Civil War, were at this point not
even interfering with a citizen’s subsequent election to Congress!45
WATER CLOSET
GOD IN THE JAKES
45. A separate restroom especially for women Senators would need to be added in 1993 as the number of elect females was
increased — from two who evidently had not ever needed either to urinate or to defecate, to six who occasionally needed to do both.
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1983
February: News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: Microsoft established a
subsidiary company in West Germany.
Following the sudden death of 62 horses in Times Beach, Missouri in 1971, owners had suspected the waste
oil used to tamp down dust in their stable and had brought their suspicion to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, which had begun investigating the area. Then, from 1971 to 1976, the same waste oil had been
used on the area’s gravel roads to hold down dust. In 1979 a company had confessed that it was mixing dioxinladen waste oil with its conventional waste oil. In 1982 the Environmental Protection Agency had identified
levels of dioxin in Times Beach soil about 300 more than considered safe. During this month the US
government therefore bought out the town for $33,000,000, and began to relocate its 2,200 residents. The
subsequent clean-up would cost the US government $110,000,000, of which $10,000,000 was paid by the
company that had sold the contaminated oil product.
June:
In response to the Times Beach, Missouri dioxin contamination, the American Medical Association called for
a public information campaign on dioxin that would “prevent irrational reaction and unjustified public fright.”
It reported reassuringly that while dioxin “may well be one of the most toxic substances known to man,” there
is “still very little substantive evidence for many of the alleged claims made against the compound.” Get on
with your lives, folks, there’s no known problem here.
News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Microsoft quote: “We have a long-term relationship with IBM and have solid plans involving PCDOS.”
The 1,000,000th Apple II was made.
Intel quote: “Accessing memory using a segmented architecture holds many advantages over the
earlier linear-addressing method.”
Mattel announced the scrapping of plans for the Intellivision III.
Mattel announced the Entertainment Computer System.
Coleco announced the Adam, a Z80-based computer with SmartWriter daisy wheel printer, 80KB
RAM (64KB user RAM, 16KB video RAM), 3 sound channels, 16 color graphics, 4 MC6801
microprocessors controlling operation of peripherals, and 512KB tape-cartridge device, for
US$600.
Shipments of Apple computers reach 1,000,000.
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Our national birthday, Monday the 4th of July: In Bladensburg, Maryland we unveiled a Korean and Vietnam
War Memorial.
KOREAN WAR
In Boston Harbor, the bronze cannon of the 185-year-old USS Constitution offered a 21-gun salute.
CELEBRATING OUR
B-DAY
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1984
April 14, Saturday: Vietnamese forces launched a new offensive against three Cambodian opposition groups.
The Texas Board of Education repealed its rule that severely limits the teaching of evolution in the state’s
schools.
May:
During October 1983 a consortium of attorneys for American Vietnam veterans, headed by Victor Yannacone,
had been unable to continue to fund its litigation and had appealed to Judge Jack Weinstein to appoint a
Plaintiff’s Management Committee. Yannacone was deprived of decision-making authority and 3 new law
firms took control within this new committee. During this month, on the morning of the opening day of trial,
they settled the Vietnam Veterans’ Agent Orange lawsuit out of court. Under the terms of the settlement the
veterans who claimed exposure to the war chemical would receive $180,000,000 from the chemical companies
without the companies admitting any culpability from exposure to their product. The US government was not
a party to this litigation. The settlement would lead to roughly 50,000 sickened people receiving
compensations of $5,000 or less. The 3 law firms asked Judge Weinstein to award them a legal fee of
$40,000,000 and were granted $9,200,000.
News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC
•
•
•
•
WALDEN technology:
Apple Computer named Kay Power as a research fellow of Apple.
Apple Computer introduced the DuoDisk dual 5.25-inch floppy disk drive unit for the Apple II line.
Apple Computer released the AppleMouse II with MousePaint and a peripheral card for the Apple
IIe or Apple II Plus (or directly in the Apple IIc).
Quarterdeck Office Systems officially launched DESQ, a text-based windowing environment for
running DOS programs.
October 24, Wednesday: The federal Congress enacted Public Law 98-542 designed to compensate Vietnam veterans
for soft tissue sarcoma, and ordering the Veterans’ Administration to establish standards for Agent Orange and
atomic radiation compensation.
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1989
May 11, Thursday: Administrator of Veterans Affairs Edward J. Derwinski announced his Department’s response to a
recent US District Court decision invalidating a portion of the regulations which govern the payment of
compensation for specific diseases relating to exposure to Agent Orange. He explained that “an appeal would
not be in the best interests of the Administration or the veterans community served by this Department,” but
offered that the agency would take a “fresh look” at the issue, rewriting regulations as soon as possible and
reconsidering Vietnam veteran claims that had been denied.
In response to General Manuel Noriega’s disregard of the results of the Panamanian election, President George
Herbert Walker Bush ordered a brigade-sized force of approximately 1,900 troops to augment the estimated
11,000 US forces already in the area.
David Hackworth, a retired US Army colonel, alleged that at least 20% of United States casualties during the
Vietnam War had been due to “fratricide” rather than to enemy action. Hackworth offered nothing to back up
his allegation and the Army admitted to a “fratricide” rate of only around 3%.
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1991
January: Public Law 102-4, the Agent Orange Act, gave the Department of Veterans Affairs the authority to declare
certain conditions “presumptive” to exposure to the war poison dioxin. This law made Vietnam veterans
eligible to receive treatment and compensation for their Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma, Non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma, Porphyria cutanea tarda, respiratory cancers, soft-tissue sarcoma, or Chloracne without needing to
demonstrate in court that they had been exposed.
News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
WALDEN technology:
Apple Computer discontinued the Mac Portable.
RDI announced the availability of Mac emulation software for SPARC systems.
A judge rules that Mosaic Software infringed on Lotus Development’s copyrights on Lotus 1-2-3.
Sun Microsystems began shipping the SPARCstation 2.
Compaq Computer reported its 1st billion dollar quarter.
Microsoft released Microsoft Excel for Windows 3.0.
After a year of delays due to technical difficulties, Motorola’s 68040 microprocessor became
available.
November 5, Tuesday: China and Vietnam normalized relations after 13 years.
When the corpse of Robert Maxwell, British media billionaire, was found floating off the Canary Islands, foul
play was not suspected.
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1992
May:
Anne Corpening Welsh described her involvement with the Quaker monthly meeting in Durham, North
Carolina:
MY PERSONAL, SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
AND THE DURHAM, NC FRIENDS MEETING
by Anne Corpening Welsh
One Sunday in the fall of 1955, in my junior year at Duke
University, two friends and fellow students, Bill Jeffries and
JoAnne Lee, invited me to go with them to meeting for worship
at the Durham Friends Meeting on Alexander Avenue, between East
and West Campus. Though I knew nothing about Quakerism, I was
sufficiently curious to accept their invitation. Bill was
enrolled in Duke Divinity School preparing for the Methodist
ministry. Even so, he identified with Quaker values and must
have felt that I might find a place among Friends for my restless
soul.
At that time, Durham Friends were meeting in a little frame hut
which had served as a construction site office elsewhere on the
campus. The building project for the current Meeting House on
the property was already underway.
When I entered the plain, narrow building for the first time,
I saw a few people with heads bowed, sitting on folding chairs
in a half circle around a pot-bellied stove. Some literature was
on a side table and there were a couple of posters on the wall,
nothing one could call ecclesiastical art or icon.
The meeting room’s appearance was the first surprise. The second
was seeing Dr. Donald Adams, my much-admired psychology
professor, sitting meditatively in the little group. He could
not have easily seen me enter the Meeting House but when he
spoke, it was as if he spoke for me.
“There is a God beyond the God of our theology and creeds. It is
this Ultimate Reality we seek and it is this that we would
worship,” he said quietly.
I knew that my soul had found a home.
After about an hour, the meeting ended with the shaking of hands
by everyone. I felt an immense relief that I was not required
to say any words, in creeds and hymns, that I could not honestly
affirm.
The Meeting spoke to my condition, which was that of a deeply
troubled, closet agnostic. During my sophomore year, I had begun
to experience some spiritual contradictions which grew into a
personal dilemma: I realized that I could no longer affirm a
belief in the God that I had grown up with in the Methodist
church, yet I had become a leader in the Methodist Student
Fellowship (MSF) at the university. I was even the vicepresident of the statewide MSM, the Methodist Student Movement.
With new perspectives on religion and civilization, I had taken
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to examining the God I had known and worshipped for years and
found cracks in His edifice. The disintegration of my old faith
happened gradually but it was progressive, and felt like a
terminal disease. I saw no way to put back together the broken
God of my childhood and make Him —and me— whole again.
Yet I was in that position of responsibility in Methodist
student activities! As a Freshman I had joined the local MSF,
quickly becoming involved in its activities. Then Rev. Arthur
Brandenburg came to Duke as the Methodist student chaplain and
advisor.
Talented
and
committed,
Art
revitalized
and
strengthened MSF. An inspiring and challenging mentor, Art
encouraged us to take our faith seriously and to put it into
action in our lives. I found myself even more involved, such as
in planning joint activities with students from nearby N.C.
Central University, an all-black institution, and trying in vain
to convince the Duke administration to invite black ministers
to preach at Chapel services. When I became active in the state
MSM, I travelled regularly to meetings and gatherings, and
eventually spearheaded a regional MSM conference in the fall of
my junior year.
Yet inside, I felt increasingly like a traitor and a hypocrite.
When I confessed once to Art that I had been dishonest regarding
my beliefs, his warm and quick response, “Well, Anne, join the
human race!” relieved me somewhat, but still the doubts and bad
feelings persisted.
At the invitation of another fellow classmate, I went to
Chautauqua, N.Y. to work as a waitress during the summer of 1955.
Even though I had a wonderful time there, I felt spiritually
dead as far as Christianity was concerned. By coincidence, an
MSM advisor from Virginia, Rev. Gerry Speidel, whom I admired
and respected, was vacationing at Chautauqua with his family
that summer.
One afternoon Gerry and I sat in the coolness of the great
Chautauqua Amphitheater and I was able to share with him my
spiritual anguish and questioning. He knew me as a leader in our
state Methodist organization. Like Art, he assured me that I was
not alone, that others in the church had had problems with
theology.
“But Gerry, I find that I cannot honestly say the Apostle’s Creed
anymore,” I protested.
“Just say as much of it as you can,” he counseled, “and keep
quiet during the rest.”
That summer at Chautauqua, I discovered Martin Buber and the
Ethical Culture Society. More momentous for my life, I also met
the man I was to marry, Norman Morrison. A senior at The College
of Wooster and already preparing for the Presbyterian ministry,
Norman was a staunch pacifist and was interested in world peace
and international relations. Later on, as our relationship
developed, I learned that he was also interested in Quakerism
and often attended the little Friends worship group or Meeting
which met in the Library basement at Wooster. Norman believed
strongly in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and told me, just
days after we had met, that he felt its hand in our coming
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together. He had a vision (not yet shared by me) of the union
of our lives.
Returning to Duke, I became less and less active in the state
MSM and stopped attending Sunday worship services in the Duke
Chapel. Despite Gerry’s suggestion about the Creed, there was
just too much else required of me to honestly participate in
Chapel services.
Even after I was led to Durham Meeting that fall, it was four
years before I became a member of the Society of Friends.
Nevertheless, to me, that first day at meeting really felt like
my birthday into the family of Friends. During the years that
followed, the Quaker way of worship, personal pacifism, concern
for world peace and racial justice, and equality between the
sexes resonated with my deepest inward urgings and beliefs. The
reverence and vitality of silent worship brought me into the
presence of a living God, One who was much more than all my
definitions and concepts. It was a time of exciting spiritual
and personal growth for me.
Finally, even though I felt like a beginner in the faith, I
thought I was ready to become a Quaker. Pacifism still seemed
an unreachable ideal for me, a confession I openly made when,
in 1959, Norman and I were being considered for membership in
the Pittsburgh, PA Friends Meeting. But I was welcomed into
membership, as a seeker and sojourner on the way.
I think it was that first day at Durham Meeting that I met Susan
and David Smith, founders and guiding lights of the Meeting.
After meeting was over, Susan announced an upcoming state
meeting of the United World Federalists — the first time I had
heard of UWF.
In the months to follow I was to learn more from the Smiths about
UWF and the Smiths’ way of living in the world. Susan became the
president of that state organization and was instrumental in
bringing Norman Cousins to speak at Duke. I joined UWF and
through it became acquainted with Sam Levering, a Quaker
orchardist and peace activist from Virginia. Later, I arranged
for Sam to speak on peace and the UWF to our Methodist fellowship
at Duke. I met Cousins again in 1956 when I covered his lecture
series at Chautauqua for The Chautauquan Daily.
Retired from their medical professions, the Smiths were
energetic and devoted workers in the cause of peace, race
relations, and world federalism. They were the prime movers not
only in the founding of the Durham Meeting but in the building
of the new Meeting House. With a style that blended serious
social concerns with an unaffected deep South charm, they
dedicated their later years to Quaker causes. Their gracious and
quietly elegant home in Hope Valley hosted many gatherings of
interest to Friends and others of similar outlook.
Other stalwarts of the Durham Meeting during the time of my
sojourn, 1955-57, were Frances Jeffers, a research assistant in
the Duke Center for the Study of Aging, Fred McKinney, a graduate
assistant in Sociology, Ed and Sally Flaccus (Ed taught in the
Botany Department) and Peter and Martha Klopfer. The Klopfers
were active in the Meeting from the time Peter joined the Zoology
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Department, establishing the outstanding project with primates.
Peter and Martha donated land adjoining their own property
between Durham and Chapel Hill for the site for the Carolina
Friends School, working closely with the Smiths on the
establishment of that institution.
Around the edges of the Meeting “core group” then were such
colorful persons as Wadi Salah from Egypt, who was studying
parapsychology with Dr. J.B. Rhine, and Dr. Paul Richard, an
Eastern philosopher and mystic.
The presence of the Flaccus children and others at meeting
presented a need for a religious education program. With the
help of literature from Friends General Conference in
Philadelphia (and probably drawing on my Methodist experience
more than I’d admit), I worked with the children during 195657. This may have been part of the beginning of an organized
First Day School for the meeting’s children.
During my senior year I discovered a younger Duke student, Shade
Marie Rushing, from Texas, who was (deja vu!) a young Methodist
restless and struggling over her faith. She was interested in
exploring the Society of Friends and before long was regularly
attending meeting. One day after meeting, Shadie said with great
feeling, “The thing I value about Quakers is that they really
listen.” After my graduation in June 1957, “Shadie” took over
the responsibilities for First Day School.
Up until the time I graduated, I was often a guest in the Smiths’
home and became very close to them, regarding them as mentors
and almost like family. When Norman and I were married on
September 7, 1957 under the care of the Meeting, we were the
first couple to wed in the new Meeting House. Susan and David
offered their home for the wedding reception, since we were
married away from our homes — I was from Granite Falls, N.C.,
and Norman’s home was in Chautauqua. Their daughter Rosalind,
who lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, allowed me to use her
beautiful wedding gown.
At the time we were married, it would have been inconceivable
to think that our marriage would only last a short time. Just
eight years later, on November 2nd, 1965, Norman was led to
sacrifice his life through self-immolation at the Pentagon, an
ultimate act of protest against the horror of the growing war
in Vietnam. At the time, we were both members of Stony Run
Meeting in Baltimore, where Norman was Executive Secretary.
An
active Quaker-pacifist, Norman had already opposed the war
openly, in many ways, including war tax resistance. But his
private agony over the war and its claim on innocent children
and civilians in Vietnam went even deeper than I knew. His
witness radically changed the course of my life and the lives
of our three children. Ben, Tina, and Emily, as well as deeply
affecting our close friends and countless others. I believe that
it also affected, at least indirectly, the ultimate course of
the war.
Even though the rough and irregular trail of my life has taken
me far away from Durham Meeting, whenever I have returned, even
though infrequently, it has always felt a lot like home.
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Clerks of Meeting
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2013-
David Bridge
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1993
Our national birthday, Sunday the 4th of July: In Washington DC, Johnny Cash recited his patriotic poem
“Rugged Old Flag” while citizens held up flags that represented the “POW/MIA”: Vietnam-era prisoners of
war and servicemen and women still not accounted for after the ending of hostilities.
United Nations arms inspectors left Iraq because they were not allowed to install cameras at missile sites.
The last Russian troops left Cuba (having been a constant presence on the island since 1962).
Suite for saxophone by Robin Holloway was performed for the initial time, in West Road Concert Hall,
Cambridge.
October: The FBI offered a reward of $1,000,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator
of the UNABOM series of killings.
Members of a Vietnamese cult headed by Ca Van Lieng, who had been predicting an apocalyptic flood for the
year 2000, evidently had decided not to wait it out, as at this point they committed mass suicide. It’s really so
sad, their fate — since in the year 2000 they weren’t around to notice that their apocalyptic flood didn’t
materialize (or perhaps we should say, didn’t liquidate).
MILLENNIALISM
•
•
•
•
Motorola’s 1st copies of the PowerPC 603, a new chip in the PowerPC family.
NEC Technologies’s triple-speed (450KBps) CD-ROM drive.
Apple Computer’s Macintosh TV combined Mac and CD-ROM with television.
The PowerBook Duo 250 and 270c. John Sculley announced his departure.
Initial TV show distributed over the internet in digital format.
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1995
Our national birthday, Tuesday the 4th of July: Dunbarton, New Hampshire welcomed five presidential hopefuls: Bob
Dole of Kansas, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, Patrick Buchanan, Bob Dornan of Orange County, California,
and Alan Keyes.
Atlantis and Mir decoupled.
Israel and the Palestine Authority agreed that Israel would withdraw from Palestinian population centers, and
that elections would shortly thereafter take place.
In Oklahoma City, Oklahoma all flags were raised to full staff at precisely 9:02AM — that having been when
the Federal Building there had been blasted by Timothy McVeigh’s fertilizer bomb on April 19th.
In Indianapolis, Indiana this was the final Independence Day flag raising at Fort Benjamin Harrison — due to
the ongoing downsizing of the US Army. Meanwhile, in Hanoi at the former site of the American Consulate,
500 Americans were staging the only 4th-of-July celebration to occur there since our retreat at the end of the
Vietnam War.
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1996
May:
President Clinton ordered that Veterans’ Administration disability benefits be expanded to cover veterans who
served in Vietnam who were suffering from prostate cancer or a nerve disease.
A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: Microsoft shipped version
3.0 of the Internet Explorer.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
you must first invent the universe.”
— Carl Sagan
October: The Veterans’ Health Care Eligibility Reform Act of 1996 ordered the Veterans’ Administration to provide
its Medical Benefits Package –including outpatient and inpatient medical care at VA facilities, prescription
medications and home health and hospice care– to veterans with disorders associated with herbicide exposure
in Vietnam.
•
•
USRobotics shattered modem speed barrier, delivering 56Kbps over standard telephone lines.
Microsoft and Intel launch NetPC with industry leaders.
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6
1997
December 3, Wednesday: A treaty banning land mines was signed, in Ottawa, by 122 nations. Russia, China, India,
Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, but the United States of America and South Korea of course
refused to sign any such treaty, because we have a love affair with these neato devices — it’s so easy, not to
mention inexpensive, to instantaneously blow off some unsuspecting person’s leg with a land mine!
Former Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi was convicted in a Milan court of fraud in the 1989 purchase
of a film company by his firm, Fininvest SpA. He was given a 16-month suspended sentence and fined
60,000,000 lire.
Shortly before dawn the flatbed truck carrying Theodore John Kaczynski’s 10-foot-by-12-foot tarp-covered
cabin left Malmstrom Air Force Base heading for California. The wide-load vehicle made its way through
Great Falls to Interstate 15, where it could only be on the freeway during daylight hours, and headed south.
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1998
For his heroic rescues at My Lai, the chopper pilot Hugh Thompson was honored in a 30th anniversary
commemoration.
July:
In Rome a treaty was being signed by 120 nations, to set up an International Criminal Court. This court would
be created at The Hague, Netherlands to try political leaders and military personnel charged with war crimes
and crimes against humanity. 7 nations intransigently opposed the setting up of any such court one of those 7
nations intransigently opposed to the setting up of any such court was, and if you are surprised at this you are
one of the several varieties of fool, the United States of America).
The Vietnam Red Cross established a Vietnam Agent Orange Victims Fund to provide direct assistance to
impacted families.
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1999
November: Armageddon46 to culminate with “wholesale obliteration” as foreseen by Richard Kieninger in his 1963
book The Ultimate Frontier (Abanes, Richard. END-TIME VISIONS. NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998,
page 68).
MILLENNIALISM
A South Korean organization, The Association of Vietnam War Veterans Suffering from Exposure to Agent
Orange, waged a legal battle for compensation for the South Korean veterans who fought in Vietnam and were
exposed. The organization sought $4,300,000,000 from Agent Orange manufacturers Dow Chemical and
Monsanto, plus another $1,000,000,000 from the US government.
46. Armageddon = the place (possibly to be identified with Har Megiddo, the Mount of Megiddo, near Tel Aviv, near which many
battles were fought) designated in Revelation 16:16 as the scene of the final battle between the kings of the earth at the end of the
world.
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2000
March: During a trip to Hanoi, Defense Secretary William Cohen had pledged greater US cooperation with Vietnam’s
Agent Orange problem. During President Clinton’s 5-day trip to Vietnam 8 months later, the United States and
Vietnam had agreed to set up a joint research study on the effects of dioxin/Agent Orange. At this point that
study, conducted by the US Air Force, discovered a link between Agent Orange and adult-onset diabetes in its
veterans.
The Rapture was to take place diromg March 2000, 3 1/2 years after the Second Coming of Jesus Christ,
according to Marvin Byers.
MILLENNIALISM
June 21, Wednesday: An article making a connection between Thoreauvian civil disobedience and draft resistance,
written by James Matlack in regard to the death in Vietnam of David Mossner, appeared in the Christian
Science Monitor:
[following screen]
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DAVID MOSSNER: A GRADUATE’S POSTSCRIPT
Christian Science Monitor, June 21, 2000
Byline: James Matlack, director of the Washington office of the American Friends Service
Committee, a Quaker agency devoted to humanitarian aid, peace, and social justice
concerns.
As the bittersweet graduation season comes around each year, I remember David Mossner. The last time I saw
him was at a Cornell University commencement in the late 1960s — the Vietnam War era in which graduation
held an ominous portent for young men in the senior class.
There are countless other individuals and events that crowd my recollections of those turbulent years, but first I
remember David. He was a gifted student of mine. He died in Vietnam.
I was an assistant professor of English at Cornell. Also a Quaker and pacifist, I engaged fully in the anti-Vietnam
War teach-ins and protests of that time.
Although I was overage, married, a father, and recognized by my draft board as a conscientious objector — with
draft status to match — in 1967, I turned in my draft card to my local board in New Jersey with a letter indicating
my refusal to cooperate further with the system of conscription for the war in Vietnam. As a result, I faced
“punitive reclassification” to 1-A status and a call for induction, which I had pledged to refuse.
David Mossner was an honors student in a special program for exceptional undergraduates. He’d taken one of
my courses where Henry Thoreau’s “Walden” was among the readings. I frequently included Thoreau in my
courses and encouraged discussion of the relevance of his essay “On Civil Disobedience” in light of then-current
debates on civil rights and the Vietnam War.
I supervised David’s senior honors project on Thoreau’s “political” essays and lent him some of my personal
books, including a fine biography of Thoreau, by Walter Harding, himself a World War II conscientious objector.
David turned in a long and thoughtful essay. He examined the interplay between Thoreau’s personal conduct in
the antislavery advocacy of the 1850s set against the philosophical principles Thoreau articulated in his essays
on John Brown, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” and chapters in “Walden.”
The fundamental tension between citizen and state power, between individual conscience, corporate political
authority, and social obligation lay at the heart of the matter. We discussed these principles and the clash of
loyalties at length, with inevitable reference to the call to serve in Vietnam. I found David intellectually and
personally committed to basing his life on consistency of conscience. I also understood him to be deeply, morally
opposed to the conduct of the Vietnam War. He seemed likely to apply for recognition as a conscientious objector
or in some other way affirm his stance by not going to Vietnam after graduation when his student deferment
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would expire.
OHNE MICH!
I congratulated David on a fine piece of work. He returned my book and graduated in June. I continued teaching
at Cornell, speaking out against war, and wrestling with my own issues of conscience and legal jeopardy over the
draft.
In spring term the following year, I received the stunning news that David had been killed in Vietnam. I could
hardly absorb the fact. I was surprised to learn he’d enlisted and gone to Vietnam while simultaneously grieving
his death so soon after he arrived there.
Within days of this shock, I was leafing through my copy of the Walter Harding biography and found there, stuck
between the pages, the burned stub of David’s draft card.
He had not said anything to me about putting the card in my book. Other young men in that time burned their
draft cards in public as protest against conscription and the war. The very act of burning the card was a felony.
I was overcome with emotion that still brings tears to my eyes. What private and complex statement was David
making by this action? Why had he shared it with me, yet not told me, so that I did not discover the card until he
was already dead in Vietnam? Was the burned card a sign of David’s decision to resist being drafted or serving
in Vietnam, after which he changed his mind and enlisted?
I would never know. I held the card, remembered David, and wept.
I taught Henry Thoreau often over the following years. In most of those classes I talked about David as a young
man who took Thoreau seriously, who tried to base his life on moral principles, who wrestled with issues of
conscience around the war in Vietnam. I shared with many students the story of David’s search and final decision,
his death in Vietnam, and the burned stub of his draft card as an enigmatic emblem of his deep convictions.
Nearly two decades passed before I learned more of David’s story. In 1983, I took a new position as director of
the Washington office for the American Friends Service Committee, the major Quaker agency in the US for
humanitarian aid as well as peace and social justice work.
Soon after I came to Washington, I went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The first name that I searched for on
the long granite wall was David Mossner. He was the person I knew best of all those who were killed in the war.
I touched the carved letters, as so many others were doing, as if to make real the fact of his vibrant young life and
far-away death.
One of the issues that I worked on in Washington for my Quaker agency was the quest for peace in the Middle
East. My efforts were channeled through a working group of staff from church-based advocacy offices called
Churches for Middle East Peace. In 1987, one of my colleagues in this group shared with the rest of us a new
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publication on peace in the region issued by the Presbyterian Church. As I read through it, I noticed a small entry
on behalf of the donor who had funded the publication, dedicating the booklet to “David C. Mossner.”
I promptly inquired how to locate that donor. He turned out to be a Presbyterian clergyman devoted to public
policy issues. When I reached him, he also identified himself as a relative of David’s who funded various projects
devoted to peace and conflict resolution to honor the memory of David Mossner. He told me more of David’s
story in going to Vietnam.
Upon graduation from Cornell, David was committed to a life based upon moral principle and to a career that
would in some way advance the cause of peace and justice in the world. With his deferment gone, he also faced
the grim reality of a draft call.
As he sought a clear way forward, apparently David reconsidered the option of refusal to serve in Vietnam.
Perhaps he was influenced by being from Texas, where conscientious objection to military service was less
known and much less tolerated.
In any event, as I was told, David felt his future work for peace would lack credibility if he declined to enter and
take the risks of Vietnam — the war for his generation of young men coming of age. However paradoxical, he
decided his principles and dedication to peace could better be advanced if he advocated for them as a Vietnam
veteran.
Once having made this fundamental decision, David enlisted rather than wait for the draft to call him. He was
smart, able, and easily qualified for officer candidate training. When shipped out, he went as a junior officer in
an infantry combat unit.
Some letters survive that portray his early experiences in the war. David was posted to an active war zone where
he led combat patrols, the jarring realities of war all around him. He was truly earning his credibility as a witness
to the violence and brutality of warfare. Before many weeks passed, however, as he led another patrol, David
stepped on a land mine and was killed instantly.
Even after all these years, my sadness runs deep when I think about David. In part, this is due to the fact that I
knew him personally. He puts a face, a tangible identity, on the terrible toll of the Vietnam War. David focuses
my grief when I confront the thousands of names carved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the countless
Vietnamese and others who perished in the long years of the war.
Yet David’s story is more broadly compelling because he symbolizes so many aspects of the struggles and the
tragedy of Vietnam — student and soldier, an idealist who enlisted, antiwar principles and combat experience,
doubts about the rightness of the war yet a decision to serve, to fight, to die in the far-off fields of Vietnam. Like
many others of his generation, a young life of promise cut off.
Each of us has our own memories –our joys and our griefs– when we see promising young graduates enter the
world of adult decisionmaking each June. In my case, I remember David Mossner.
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September: Kurt Vonnegut taught advanced writing at Smith College.
Jerry Grenough foresaw the end of the present age, and perhaps The Rapture, in September of 2000, using
various passages from the BIBLE to divine this date.
The Veterans’ Administration recognized that Agent Orange had been used in Korea during the late 1960s and
approved Agent Orange examinations for US veterans who had served in Korea during 1968 or 1969. The
agency took this action despite reports that Republic of Korea troops, rather than US military personnel, had
conducted the actual spraying. The government of South Korea reported that as many as 50,000 South Korean
veterans might have been exposed during spray operations there.
November 16, Thursday: President William Jefferson Clinton made the 1st visit of a US president to Vietnam since
1969.
Yugoslavia announced it would resume diplomatic relations with France, Germany, the UK, and the US.
Coca-Cola Co. agreed to pay $192,000,000 in a settlement of a class action lawsuit by black employees
charging discrimination.
Romanza for solo violin by Donald Martino was performed for the initial time, in John Knowles Paine Hall of
Harvard University.
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2001
At a primary school in Osaka, Mamoru Takuma killed eight children.
The US Air Force would posted a “disinformation alert” on the internet asserting that the US military in this
year destroyed its entire stock of napalm bombs. That in fact did in this year occur — in the sense that the US
military, moving right along with more effective forms of incendiary gels, did destroy its obsolete burninducing munitions, replacing them with more up-to-date, more catastrophic forms of incendiary gels, ones
that no longer made use either of the NApthenic or of the PALMitic acid that had originally supplied this
Harvard-invented material with the name “NA-PALM.” Their new forms of incendiary gel were called, not
“napalm,” but “NP2” (a mixture of 21% benzene, 33% gasoline, and 46% polystyrene) and the “MK-77
firebomb,” and were no longer referred to by the military as “napalm,” except informally. Disinformation
indeed! Most of the material dispersed so freely in the Vietnam War (hundreds of thousands of tons of it) and
referred to at the time as napalm had, for instance, been not the original Harvard napalm but instead the
improved NP2. When, for instance, in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film “Apocalypse Now,” Airmobile
Infantry Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (portrayed by Robert Duvall) was made to assert “I love the smell of
napalm in the morning.... It smells like ... victory,” he would have been referring not to the smell of burning
napalm, since this was no longer in use, but to the smell of burning NP2 or in soldier talk “super-napalm.”
Platoon Cadence Call: “Napalm Sticks to Kids”
We shoot the sick, the young, the lame,
We do our best to maim,
Because the kills all count the same,
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Napalm sticks to kids.
Chorus: Napalm sticks to kids,
Flying low across the trees,
Pilots doing what they please,
Dropping frags on refugees,
Goods in the open, making hay,
But I can hear the gunships say,
“There’ll be no Chieu Hoi today,”
See those farmers over there,
Watch me get them with a pair,
Blood and guts just everywhere,
I’ve only seen it happen twice,
But both times it was mighty nice,
Shooting peasants planting rice,
Napalm, son, is lots of fun,
Dropped in a bomb or shot from a gun,
It gets the gooks when on the run,
Drop some napalm on a farm,
It won’t do them any harm,
Just burn off their legs and arms,
CIA with guns for hire,
Montagnards around a fire,
Napalm makes the fire go higher,
I’ve been told it’s not so neat,
To catch gooks burning in the street,
But burning flesh, it smells to sweet,
Children sucking on a mother’s tit,
Wounded gooks down in a pit,
Dow Chemical doesn’t give a shit,
Bombardiers don’t care a bit,
Just as long as the pieces fit,
When you stuff the bodies in a pit,
Eighteen kids in a No Fire Zone,
Rooks under arms and going home,
Last in line goes home alone,
Chuck in a sampan, sitting in the stern,
They don’t think their boats will burn,
Those damn gooks will never learn,
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Cobras flying in the sun,
Killing gooks is lots of fun,
Get one pregnant and it’s two for one,
Shoot civilians where they sit,
Take some pictures as you split,
All your life you’ll remember it,
NVA are all hard core,
Flechettes never are a bore,
Throw those PSYOPS out the door,
Gather kids as you fly over town,
By throwing candy on the ground,
Then grease ’em when they gather ’round,
May:
The nations of the European Union decided to meet to discuss issues of economic espionage, and of the
electronic surveillance of phonecalls, Email, and faxes. The US was invited to participate, either at the top
level or a lower level of government — and declined.
At the 1st Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, 128 parties and 151 signatories ratified an
international environmental treaty that aimed to eliminate or restrict the production and use of persistent
organic pollutants such as dioxin.
September 1, Saturday: From the magazine The Priest: “The Story of the Chaplain Corps,” by Father Daniel Mode:47
Therefore take the whole armor of God that you may be
able to withstand in the evil day.... Stand therefore,
having girded your loins with truth, and having put on
the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your
feet with the equipment of the Gospel of peace; above
all taking the shield of faith, with which you can
quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take
the helmet of salvation, and the word of the Spirit,
which is the Word of God (EPHESIANS 6:13-17).
Boom! Another F-14 Tomcat was just launched off the 1,000 foot
deck of the USS John F. Kennedy. Boom! The steam-driven catapult
shakes the ship again. It is 5:30 a.m. and a ship that never
sleeps is starting another 12-hour shift. The alarm clock does
not need to ring I have the Boom of a continuous flow of Tomcats
to get my day started aboard my home for the next two weeks an
aircraft carrier. As a reserve Navy chaplain for the past 12
years, I have spent my time serving the Navy family in a variety
of assignments. From ships, hospitals, bases and in the field,
I have found a powerful way to serve God and my country. I am a
Catholic priest and a chaplain.
I grew up in the Navy. My father, a Navy Captain, spent 30 years
serving our country, and his dedication inspired my brother and
me to seek the same sense of commitment and service. My call to
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the priesthood and my desire to serve my country go hand in hand.
The first priest I talked to about my vocation was a Navy
chaplain. I was 13 years old, and my only knowledge of the
priesthood came from the witness of military priests. Eight
years later at the Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton in
Emmitsburg, Maryland, I was commissioned as a Naval officer at
a Mass celebrated by Archbishop Joseph T. Ryan, who was then the
Archbishop of the Military Services. Every year the Archdiocese
offers a Mass for the Sea Services at the Shrine to commemorate
that Mother Seton’s two sons served as midshipmen in the Navy.
The day I raised my hand to swear my oath and receive my
commission, I knew I was continuing a long tradition of priests
serving the needs of the military.
The Church has recognized this union of serving God and country.
47. I am just so terribly perturbed when I read something like this! –It is so wrong on so many levels. I think first of my father,
Captain Benjamin Bearl Smith during World War II, and how as a Protestant chaplain in the US Army in San Diego, California, he
had been such a cocksman, such an unfaithful husband and inattentive father, and how he had sought to profit from the enlisted men
by selling them at a very considerable markup little steel-jacketed New Testaments, that they were to carry in their shirt pocket over
their heart to prevent those atheistic Japs from being able to kill them. I think of hypocrisy. I think then of the general offensiveness
of a religion of salvation being offered basically in order to seduce young men who are being sent off with the objective of killing
other young men whom they do not know. This also makes me think of hypocrisy. –So I wonder, “Is there anything, anywhere in
this world, but hypocrisy?” and I answer myself, that yes, there is something in this world other than hypocrisy, something rather
worse even than hypocrisy: I think of General George Smith Patton, Jr., he of “Even the chaplain is important, for if we get killed
and if he is not there to bury us we’d all go to hell.” I think that worse than hypocrisy is cold-blooded murderousness and associated
patriotism.
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The Second Vatican Council stated:
All those who enter the military services in loyalty to
their country should look upon themselves as the
custodians of the security and freedom of their fellow
countrymen and when they carry out their duty properly,
they are contributing to the maintenance of peace [CHURCH
IN THE MODERN WORLD, no. 79].
Noting mankind’s need for spiritual comfort during periods of
conflict, General Douglas MacArthur maintained, “History
teaches us that religion and patriotism have always gone hand
in hand.”
Ancient civilizations acknowledged that the presence of Gods
representatives in battle was vital; the Old Testament refers
to priests accompanying troops in various campaigns.
The word “chaplain” evolves from the fourth century when St.
Martin of Tours, an officer in the Roman Army, encountered a
freezing beggar. Dividing his cloak, Martin shared it with the
beggar. Later that evening Martin experienced a vision of Christ
wearing the cloak which inspired him to convert to Christianity
and to dedicate the remainder of his life to the Church.
The cloak itself, called in Latin a “cappa,” became a holy relic,
carried by French kings into battle. The caretaker priest, “the
cappellanus,”
carried
the
relics
portable
shrine,
the
“cappella.” Eventually all clergy serving with the military were
called “cappellini” and ultimately chaplain.
In 742AD the Council of Ratisbon authorized for the first time
the use of chaplains, yet prohibited these “servants of God”
from bearing arms or fighting.
In the United States the Chaplain Corps traces its origins back
to the Revolutionary War, when in 1775 the Continental Congress
adopted a Navy regulation citing the provision for “divine
service.” The regulation read, “The commanders of the ships of
the thirteen United Colonies are to take care that divine
service be performed twice a day on board, and a sermon preached
on Sundays, unless bad weather or other extraordinary accidents
prevent.”
It wasn’t until 1824 that Father Adam Marshal became the first
priest to serve as a naval officer; another Jesuit chaplain,
Father Anthony Rey, was the first priest to die in action during
the Mexican War. The Civil War witnessed for the first time many
Catholic chaplains in the field who served with distinction on
both sides.
In subsequent wars and conflicts, Catholic chaplains have
continued to serve as Christ’s representatives in their witness
of patriotism, courage, service and faith.
On March 25, 1985, the Holy See created the Archdiocese for the
Military Services; its chaplains serve military installations,
three military academies, VA hospitals, and those US government
employees serving overseas.
Boom! Another catapult launches yet another flight. It is noon,
and 17 sailors gather in a small chapel, which holds no more
than 40 people. I offer Mass for the 15 men and two women who
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are so far from home and family, but they have found a “home”
and a place of daily comfort in the reassuring celebration of
the Eucharist. After Mass, one of the sailors asks me to hear
his confession and to bless a rosary his mom just sent. If I
were not surrounded by gray paint and uniforms, I could almost
imagine that I am back at St. Mary of Sorrows Parish in Fairfax,
Virginia, celebrating the daily 9:00AM Mass. The same needs that
are found in a parish are found in the midst of a 5,000-man ship.
In the course of a year the three full-time chaplains, one
Catholic and two Protestant, on the USS Kennedy will counsel
2,000 sailors, will hold 40 religious services per week, will
perform burials at sea for military veterans and will deliver
approximately 13 messages usually informing sailors of family
crises, deaths, divorces or financial problems that arrive each
day via the Red Cross or the Navy Relief. One in seven
crewmembers will have a financial or medical emergency during a
six-month cruise. The chaplain’s role is to break the news to
the men and provide whatever help is possible from arranging for
an emergency trip home to lending a friendly ear. The day-today mission of caring for a diverse flock where up to one-fourth
of the personnel is Catholic is always tempered by the knowledge
that this ship and her crew could be called into battle or be
attacked at any time. Although the closest I have ever been to
battle was the live fire training I received with the Marines
at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, I am well aware that the history
of the Chaplain Corps is filled with the stories of men of God
in the midst of the hell of war.
In commending the role of the chaplain, Admiral Chester W.
Nimitz stated: “By their patient, sympathetic labor day in and
day out and through many a night, every chaplain I know
contributed immeasurably to the moral courage of our fighting
men.”
The chaplain’s mission can be somewhat paradoxical. As Christ’s
representative, he must bring the Gospel of Peace to the
battlefield reminding the troops that God has not forgotten
them. Some chaplains have not only exemplified strength and
inspiration but have demonstrated a true love in action by their
willingness to sacrifice their lives for their fellow soldiers.
One such hero and the only chaplain recipient of the Medal of
Honor during World War II was Lt. Cmdr. Joseph T. O’Callahan.
Father O’Callahan was on board the USS Franklin, in March 1945
when it was hit by a Japanese kamikaze attack during the battle
for Okinawa. In the ensuing inferno caused by the ignition of
munitions on board the aircraft carrier, O’Callahan seemed to
be everywhere consoling the wounded and administering last rites
to the dying, jettisoning live bombs and organizing rescue
parties for those sailors trapped below deck. The Franklin’s
casualties were significant: 724 killed and 265 wounded, but
many of the men attributed their survival to the heroism of their
chaplain and attested, “He was the bravest man I ever saw.”
During the Korean Conflict as a soldier on the battlefield and
later as a prisoner of war Father Emil Kapaun of the 1st Cavalry
Division risked his life attending to the wounded in the camp,
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sharing his own meager rations, leading his fellow prisoners in
prayer, and burying the dead. Awarded the Bronze Star prior to
his capture, Father Kapaun died of pneumonia in captivity and
posthumously received the Distinguished Service Cross.
Another priest whose heroic passion to serve God was Father
Vincent Capodanno, The Grunt Padre. Ordained for Maryknoll in
1958 and assigned as a missionary to Formosa, Father Capodanno
heeded a second vocational call in 1965 when he sought
permission and joined the Navy Chaplain Corps for duty in the
Vietnam War. When asked why he had chosen such a dangerous
assignment, Father Capodanno responded characteristically “...I
think I am needed here as are many more chaplains. I’m glad to
help in the way I can.” His first assignment, a Marine battalion,
initiated him in the service of the Grunts, the enlisted
infantry troops. He later was transferred to a medical unit, and
in all of his responsibilities Father Capodanno chose to be more
than a priest ministering within the horrific arena of war. He
became a constant companion to the Marines, living, eating,
sleeping, with the men; he established libraries, gathered and
distributed gifts and organized outreach programs for the local
villagers.
He
spent
hours
reassuring
the
weary
and
disillusioned, consoling the grieving, hearing confessions,
instructing converts and distributing St. Christopher medals.
Such commitment to his work “energized” him and he requested an
extension to remain with the Marines. It was during his second
tour on September 4, 1967, that Father Vincent Capodanno made
the ultimate sacrifice. After hours of heavy fighting from a
North Vietnamese ambush, Father Capodanno sighted a wounded
corpsman pinned down by an enemy machine gunner. Although
seriously wounded himself, Father Capodanno ran to the Marine
and administered medical and spiritual attention. Despite the
chaplains being unarmed, the enemy opened fire and Father
Capodanno, the victim of 27 bullet wounds, died faithfully
performing his duty as priest and soldier. He is one of three
Catholic chaplains who received the Medal of Honor for their
heroic service in Vietnam.
Boom! Once again the sound of another launched plane is
overwhelmingly close. This time I’m on board the COD (Carrier
On Board Delivery), an airplane that carries mail, supplies and
people who need to get back to land. I have finished my two weeks
of active duty at sea, and it is time to return to my civilian
parish. The ship will continue to head toward the Mediterranean
with her assigned Catholic chaplain. During my relief of his
responsibilities, he attended the annual retreat for the priests
of his diocese.
As I head back to port, I wonder whether the personnel on these
ships, the Army and the Marines in the field, the Air Force and
Coast Guard who serve on military bases will have a Catholic
priest to care for their spiritual needs in the near future. As
priest and chaplain I have a three-fold responsibility: my
primary mission is to God, then to represent His Church,
followed by my service to our country. In the 12 years of my
chaplain experience, the military personnel and their families
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have greatly impressed me by their many sacrifices and sincere
awareness of their significant roles. As makers and preservers
of peace, Catholic military members deserve all the spiritual
and sacramental elements of the faith and the reminder of the
universality of the Church no matter where their assignment.
I have enjoyed ministering to this predominantly younger segment
of society and the opportunity to influence and assist in their
growth of faith. As counselor, intermediator and catechist I
have experienced numerous challenges but the opportunity to
evangelize, educate and participate in ecumenical settings has
enlightened for me an even greater awareness of my priesthood.
When a two-star admiral sits across my desk in tears over a
marriage problem, he identifies me as not just another person
in uniform. I am a priest, I am his chaplain. Or the joy I have
experienced when instructing 15 young enlisted Marines on duty
at Camp LeJeune, many of them seeking to become Catholic because
of the inspirational witness of their chaplain. The needs are
great, and the opportunity to serve souls is endless.
I have witnessed in action the well-known phrase, “There are no
atheists in foxholes.” I have seen sailors who have no faith
come to God, and Marines who have a faith come closer to God.
Father William Cummings, M.M., who originated the phrase,
personally observed the horror of war. Serving as a Maryknoll
missionary in the Philippines, he chose to become an Army
chaplain when World War II broke out, and even after enduring
serious wounds during a hospital bombing, he courageously
offered to join the front lines. His subsequent capture there
led to his enduring the Bataan Death March and eventual death
as a prisoner of war on board a ship to Japan.
Sadly, current statistics reveal that the number of active duty
Catholic chaplains is quickly dwindling. In recognizing the
increased responsibilities resulting from this shortage, the
head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, Archbishop
Edwin F. O’Brien, has reiterated the duties of the Catholic
chaplain emphasizing that the needs of the service personnel and
their families must supersede all military obligations of the
officer chaplain.
In all the military services the decreasing numbers of Catholic
chaplains is evident. Many more priests are needed to minister
to the needs of those in uniform and to their families.
The call that motivates a man into a life of priestly service
in the Church is the same call that motivates him to consider
becoming a military chaplain. Missionary zeal, service, the
spread of the Gospel message and bringing the sacraments to the
people are all found within a civilian ministry, yet the
military chaplain experiences, often dramatically, these vital
ministries.
Buzzzz! The alarm is going off. Time to get up and open St. Marys
parish for the 6:15AM Mass. My thoughts turn back to the sea and
the men and women I have had the joy to serve.
Father Mode, a reserve
Fairfax, Virginia.
Navy
chaplain,
writes
from
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2002
The United States and Vietnam signed a memorandum of understanding that specified future collaborative
research on the human health and environmental effects of Agent Orange and dioxin, as well as creating a Joint
Advisory Committee to oversee such collaboration. Following the conference the US National Institute of
Environmental and Health Sciences would begin scientific exchanges between the US and Vietnam and
discussions for a joint research project on the human health impacts of Agent Orange.
From this year into 1005, some 400 trees propagated from the surviving trees from the 1912 donation by Japan
would be being planted around Washington DC, to ensure that the genetic lineage of the original trees would
be preserved.
Eileen Welsome’s THE PLUTONIUM FILES: AMERICA’S SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS IN THE COLD WAR
(New York: Dial Press reprint of 1999 publication of 1994 research for which she had received the Pulitzer
Prize
Looking Back in Anger
In the 1970s, Americans might well have wondered if they were
captive to a cadre of lunatic research doctors. Throughout the
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decade, disclosures of strange experiments conducted on
unwitting citizens by their own government popped up with
unnerving regularity.
The initial revelation came in 1972. A press report disclosed
that during the previous 40 years, the US Public Health Service
had systematically studied 600 syphilitic black men. Centered
in Tuskegee, Alabama, the study involved denying treatment to
400 of them so that Public Health Service doctors could observe
the course of their illness. Several died from complications of
syphilis, clueless that they had been in an experiment concocted
by their amiable health care providers.
Public anger about the callousness of the study was intensified
by its racist overtones. The project and its sponsors were
castigated, and institutions around the country that sponsored
human subject experiments began to establish panels to review
their safety and ethics.
Meanwhile, reports about other disquieting experiments began to
surface. Two years after the Tuskegee story, the public learned
that during the 1950s Central Intelligence Agency researchers
had slipped mind-altering substances into the drinks of
unsuspecting victims to watch the effects. The drugs sometimes
induced psychotic episodes that in at least one case led to a
victim’s death.
In 1976 came a news story about an odd Army program. From 1949
to 1969, scientists had conducted biological warfare tests by
releasing bacteria and chemicals from sprayers, automobiles, and
airplanes over American cities and states. During that 20-year
period, millions of citizens were unknowingly breathing in the
Army’s test agents. The purpose was to see whether the
microorganisms would spread and survive and whether the country
would be vulnerable to an attack with lethal germs.
Army spokesmen contended that the test bacteria, which included
Serratia marcescens, were harmless. But they evidently ignored
reports that had appeared in the medical literature years before
the tests indicating that the bacteria were dangerous to people
in weakened conditions. Indeed, a 1950 Army test in San
Francisco should by itself have been a show-stopper. Three days
after the city was blanketed with Serratia bacteria, patients
at a local hospital began coming down with Serratia infections.
Eleven patients were infected, one of whom died. Yet Army
scientists continued to spray citizens with so-called harmless
bacteria for the next 19 years.
All these revelations appeared not long after people discovered
they may have been at risk from the country’s nuclear weapons
programs. The United States, the Soviet Union, and several other
countries had agreed in 1963 to ban aboveground nuclear testing
because radiation poisons could travel far beyond the test
sites. Before the ban, more than 500 bombs had been exploded
outdoors, mostly by the two superpowers. In the process,
millions of people were exposed to radioactivity that increased
their risk of cancer. People who lived downwind from the sites
were particularly vulnerable. So were thousands of American
troops who in the 1950s were made to drill in radiation-filled
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environments after nuclear explosions.
Eileen Welsome’s THE PLUTONIUM FILES deals with radiation-related
experiences and experiments. But her uncompromising brief
against government, scientific, and medical officials who ran
the radiation programs echoes earlier criticisms by others of
Tuskegee, the CIA, and the Army germ warfare tests. Her interest
in the subject began in the late 1980s. While reporting for the
Albuquerque Tribune, she came upon Army documents indicating
that at the dawn of the Atomic Age humans had been injected with
plutonium to learn how much their bodies retained. She obtained
more documents and tracked down survivors, family members, and
officials. Her findings led to a series of Tribune articles in
November 1993 about the plutonium experiments.
Those articles were something of an epiphany for then-Secretary
of Energy Hazel O’Leary, whose department guarded mounds of
classified documents about long-ago radiation tests. That
inventory included information about experiments under the
department’s predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission,
and before that the Manhattan Project, which produced the first
atomic bomb in 1945.
A month after Welsome’s articles appeared, O’Leary announced
that she was “appalled and shocked” about the plutonium
injections. President Bill Clinton then ordered federal agencies
to open all records on human radiation experiments, and he
appointed an Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments
to review the matter. The committee learned that hundreds of
tests had been conducted. Thousands of documents and interviews
later, the committee’s 1995 report empathized with the many
people who had been victimized by “arrogance and paternalism on
the part of government officials and the biomedical community.”
Welsome is most effective when describing the poor, often
uneducated souls who were unwitting guinea pigs. One subject’s
daughter lamented that telling her father that he was injected
with plutonium “would be like telling him he was injected with
ice cream.” Names and addresses were hard to come by because
identities were buried in anonymous aggregates or referred to
by code.
But her sleuthing identified a subject called “CAL-1” as Albert
Stevens, then a 58-year-old house painter who had moved from
Ohio to California in the 1920s in search of a better climate
for his asthmatic wife. In 1945, diagnosed with cancer, he was
injected with plutonium days before portions of his liver and
spleen were removed. He had no idea he was part of a radiation
experiment even as his urine and stools were collected to
measure their plutonium concentrations. The medical insult to
Stevens was compounded when analysis of his removed tissues
showed no signs of cancer, just inflammation from a gastric
ulcer.
No less dismaying was what happened to “CAL-3.” That was Elmer
Allen, who in 1947 was a 36-year-old railroad porter whose leg
was scheduled for amputation. Doctors injected plutonium into
his presumably cancerous leg. After surgery the leg was packaged
off to a laboratory for plutonium measurements. Neither Stevens
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nor Allen nor the 16 other subjects injected with plutonium
between 1945 and 1947 knew the real purpose of the injections.
Nor, a few years later, did the 74 boys at the Fernald school
for retarded and troubled children in Massachusetts know they
were eating radioactive elements in their oatmeal. Nor did 829
pregnant women know that the “nutrition” cocktails they were
drinking at a Tennessee prenatal clinic were laced with
radioactive iron. The doctors in charge never let on that the
purpose was to measure the amount of radioactive materials
absorbed by their bodies.
Most of the radiation experiments, though not all, seem to have
caused no ill effects. Welsome herself acknowledges that the
small amounts of radioactive materials used in the majority of
experiments “probably caused no harm.” When she caught up with
Elmer Allen’s widow in 1992, she learned that he had died the
year before from complications of pneumonia at 80. Still, Mrs.
Allen spoke touchingly of how her husband had been exploited.
“It just gives me a better view of how people will do you when
they feel like you don’t know better,” she said.
But Welsome also reviews a horror project in which subjects knew
they would suffer radiation injury. Between 1963 and 1971, 131
men in Oregon and Washing-ton prisons underwent radiation of
their testicles in experiments sponsored by the Atomic Energy
Commission. The commissioners wanted to learn how much radiation
would permanently damage sperm cells. Volunteers received $5 a
month while in the program, up to $25 for a testicular biopsy,
and $100 for a vasectomy at the end of the program. The tests
were halted when some researchers began to wonder whether
prisoners, no matter how well instructed about the experiment,
could truly be considered volunteers.
So who was doing all these tests, and do the testers deserve
Welsome’s unforgiving condemnation? “Beyond everything else,”
she writes, “the experiments violated a fundamental right that
belongs to all competent adults: the right to control one’s own
body.” Doubtless, the experiments commonly ignored the ethical
requirement that human subjects be informed about the nature of
the experiment and that they participate voluntarily.
From today’s perch, the experiments seem indefensible, and their
sponsors obtuse if not malicious. Yet there remains a nagging
unease about describing the researchers as aberrational or evil.
Welsome’s own reporting records the eminence of many of the
practitioners and their institutions. Indeed, the idea for the
human plutonium experiments came from Manhattan Project
physicians, led by the project’s medical director, Dr. Stafford
Warren, a respected radiologist.
Wanting to know more about the risk of plutonium and other
radioactive materials, Warren brought the proposal to J. Robert
Oppenheimer, the venerated scientific director of the Manhattan
Project. Oppenheimer endorsed Warren’s proposal, suggesting
only that the experiments not be conducted at the project’s Los
Alamos laboratories. This was evidently for practical reasons,
since Oppenheimer said that Los Alamos “was not equipped for
biological experiments.”
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The injections subsequently were given to patients being
“treated” at many of the country’s finest institutions,
including the University of Rochester, the University of
California in San Francisco, and the University of Chicago.
Similarly, the Fernald boys were part of an experiment devised
by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The radioactive iron experiment on the pregnant women was at
Vanderbilt University.
Welsome dismisses observers who allow that these and other Cold
War era experiments were understandable by the standards of the
time. She appears perplexed to find that many surviving
scientists still do not “accept the idea that they or their peers
had committed any wrongs.” Her arguments are not strange to me.
In Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ-Warfare Tests over
Populated Areas (1990), I expressed similar misgivings about the
Army’s biological warfare tests.
After all, the well-publicized Nürnberg Code was part of the
postwar verdict against Nazi doctors who killed thousands of
Jews and others in ghastly experiments. It unambiguously
affirmed the ethical requirement of informed consent. Welsome
also notes that the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947 and the
Defense Department in 1953 had rules “requiring researchers to
obtain the consent of sick patients for therapeutic and
nontherapeutic experiments.”
But the fact that so many reputable researchers were ignoring
the standards is puzzling. The likely explanation is that the
values of the time were still in transition. The social
environment did not yet fully match the newly underscored
standards. Moreover, it was a time when authority of many kinds
–governmental, scientific, medical– was commonly trusted and
deferred to. Citizens had faith in a government that had led
them to victory over the Germans and Japanese and now was
protecting them against new enemies.
Scientific authority commanded respect by virtue of spectacular
scientific achievements, most obviously splitting the atom.
Medical authority derived from a longstanding deference to the
healer. Doctors traditionally were demigods who were not obliged
to detail their treatments to patients. The arrangement was not
simply an arbitrary imposition by the powerful over the
powerless but was largely accepted by a deferential citizenry.
By the 1970s, deference to authority had yielded to increasing
skepticism. Disclosures about the array of unethical experiments
only enhanced a distrust of authority seeded by the Vietnam War
and Watergate.
Appreciating that shift in values would have helped Welsome’s
presentation. Instead, her division between good actors and bad
is too neat and appears self-righteous. She condemns the
findings of the president’s advisory committee as “disappointing
and timid.” She condemns the post-World War II atmosphere that
encouraged doctors to publish papers and view “patients as
little more than white mice.” She condemns everyone who ran the
Energy Department and its predecessor agencies before O’Leary,
calling them an unbroken “line of steely-eyed patriots.”
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Conversely, Welsome glorifies O’Leary, suggesting that her
resignation at the end of Clinton’s first term was prompted in
part by bureaucrats who resented her shining “the bright light
of truth” on the radiation experiments. O’Leary’s infamous trade
missions “may have been overstaffed,” concedes Welsome, but she
implies that Republicans overreacted with “hostile questions.”
Welsome surely understates the magnitude of problems that
O’Leary brought on herself. She writes nothing about the $4.5
million that O’Leary spent on foreign trips, including one to
India with an entourage of 76 in a plane that had previously
been leased by Madonna. O’Leary also was found to have spent
$43,000 to find out which reporters were writing favorable
articles. And as department records later showed, she routinely
manipulated statistics to exaggerate the number of Energy
Department contracts with businesses owned by women and
minorities.
None of this minimizes the service that O’Leary and the
administration performed by opening the radiation records or
that Welsome performed with her compelling descriptions of the
experiments. But the lack of balance in Welsome’s treatment of
O’Leary mirrors her insensitivity to the value differences
between the postwar decades and the present. Public demands for
accountability simply were not the same. The distinction is
wonderfully, if inadvertently and grotesquely, demonstrated by
a scientist who, at a 1955 Atomic Energy Commission conference,
estimated that after all-out atomic war, a few people would
survive and “keep the race going.” According to this scientist,
“They might not populate the earth with just the descendants we
would like to see. They might not be highly civilized like we
are. They might not know anything about atomic warfare, for
example.”
Cold and ludicrous as such a calculus now seems, there is no
indication that it put off any of the scientist’s listeners.
Unless we believe that he and thousands of other American
scientific, medical, and governmental leaders were psychopaths,
we must allow that they were acting within the value framework
of the time. It would take another generation for values to catch
up to the newly codified standards.
Welsome’s manner of criticism has implications beyond the
radiation and experimentation issues. By using a contemporary
template to rigidly judge yesterday’s behavior, she implicitly
invites future generations to do the same to us. Who is to say
which values that today are embraced by large segments of the
population could not be viewed with unforgiving contempt in the
future? Frying humans in electric chairs? Killing a fetus, or,
conversely, denying choice to a pregnant woman? Refusing samesex partners the opportunity to marry? Whatever one’s personal
views on these issues, fair-minded observers understand that
people of good will may be found on all sides. Of course, some
behaviors are so egregious as to deserve condemnation in any
era: The Nazi medical experiments, for example, in which victims
were injected with toxins or placed in high pressure chambers
to observe the manner in which they would die.
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To extend a generosity of understanding to earlier generations
is not to excuse or defend past reprehensible behavior, but to
acknowledge that future generations will almost certainly judge
many of our own actions –even and perhaps especially those done
for the “greater good”– as harshly as Welsome judges the
radiation researchers.
Leonard
A.
Cole
<[email protected]>
teaches
political science at Rutgers University and is the
author of CLOUDS OF SECRECY: THE ARMY’S GERM-WARFARE TESTS OVER
POPULATED AREAS (1990) and of THE ELEVENTH PLAGUE: THE POLITICS
OF BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL WARFARE (W.H. Freeman Company).
Professor Martha Stephens’s THE TREATMENT: THE STORY OF THOSE WHO DIED IN THE CINCINNATI
RADIATION TESTS (Durham NC: Duke UP, 2002)
During World War II and the Cold War that followed, the US
government conducted a comprehensive radiological research
program involving many federal agencies and departments. A large
number of these studies involved human subjects. Human radiation
research during World War II focused on studies to evaluate the
behavior and effects of such radioactive materials as uranium
and plutonium, which were important in the development of
nuclear weapons. After the war, the US government expanded its
radiological research efforts to include human research programs
sponsored by the Department of Defense, National Institutes of
Health, and the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor of the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy).
While some projects sought to chart the behavior of radioactive
materials in the body, others examined the biological effects
of radiation and the potential for using radioactive materials
and external radiation exposure in the diagnosis and treatment
of human diseases. One such study was conducted at the
University of Cincinnati from 1960 to 1972 under the guidance
of Dr. Eugene Saenger, a well-known and highly respected
radiologist. The study was supported in part by a contract with
the University of Cincinnati by the US Department of Defense to
obtain further information on the acute effects of whole-body
ionizing radiation exposure and to develop a biological
dosimeter. Such work was of great interest to the military
during the Cold War. The Cincinnati study was the last in a long
line of studies supported by the federal government to evaluate
radiation effects in humans undergoing total-body irradiation.
The 88 subjects had inoperable and disseminated cancer but were
considered not near death; their average life expectancy was
about 24 months. The subjects, 60% African American, were
elderly, poorly educated, and economically disadvantaged. Many
patients died within weeks of receiving whole-body radiation.
The Treatment is an account of the whole-body radiation studies
at the University of Cincinnati. The author, Martha Stephens,
is a retired professor of English at the University of
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Cincinnati. As a junior faculty member in 1971, she became
interested in the Cincinnati radiation experiments and, under
the auspices of the university’s Junior Faculty Association,
wrote a report alleging that the patients were not informed of
the risks of the study and were given high doses of whole-body
radiation without any benefit. However, an internal report
commissioned by the university president and an independent
report by the American College of Radiology found no substantive
wrongdoing by Saenger and his colleagues and disagreed with the
findings in the Stephens report. The matter was essentially put
to rest after the radiation study was terminated in 1972.
Interest in the study resurfaced in 1994 when the Advisory
Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was created by
President Clinton to investigate reports of possibly unethical
experiments funded by the federal government. The Cincinnati
study was among hundreds of human radiation experiments
carefully examined by the advisory committee. The author’s
stated objective in writing this book “was to recreate the full
anatomy of one major medical project gone badly wrong.”
Accordingly, I expected a thorough description and analysis of
the Cincinnati studies and a balanced presentation of the
issues. Sadly the book fails to deliver. For the most part, the
book is a recounting of the author’s challenges to bring to light
the details of the medical records and to secure some measure
of justice for the patients and their families. An antimedical
stance is apparent from the beginning. On the first page of
chapter 1, Stephens notes that since her work on the Cincinnati
radiation study, she has refused medical and dental x-rays and
decided that her children should receive no medical radiation
except “in a genuine medical crisis.” Such a perspective does
not reflect appreciation of the role of radiation in medical
diagnosis and therapy and the importance of balancing risks and
benefits in medical management. I was particularly disappointed
in the lack of any substantive discussion of many key issues in
the human radiation experiments, including informed consent and
the deliberate withholding of risk information, the impact of
the sociopolitical climate of the times and how that environment
affected support and conduct of the studies, the importance of
distinguishing between experimental research and medical care
of the patient, and the use of vulnerable groups as experimental
subjects. The author effectively conveys the tragic story of the
subjects and their families. Her personal struggle to get the
story out and to serve as a patients’ advocate is inspiring and
courageous. However, it is unfortunate that the Cincinnati story
is not put into the larger context of human experimentation. The
lessons learned from the Cincinnati experiments and hundreds of
other human studies have served to improve protection of human
subjects from research risks so that the human experiments
conducted during the Cold War will not happen again. That is the
real monument to the Cincinnati radiation subjects.
Reviewed by Kenneth L. Mossman, PhD,
Arizona State University, Tempe AZ
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December: The shortlist of proposals to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for this year included a proposal to award
the prize to Hamid Karzai, the untested puppet ruler of Kabul, Afghanistan, and a proposal for a joint award
to US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair — but the committee had been
overwhelmed by 43,000 protest letters from all over the world. Therefore it was former US President Jimmy
Carter who received the Nobel Peace Prize from the hands of the unassuming bicycling monarch of Norway.48
Bear in mind that it had been during this president’s administration that the CIA had begun to allow the killers
who were running death squads in Argentina to train Nicaraguan Contras in Honduras. Bear in mind that it had
been during the Carter years that millions in aid and riot equipment had been given to the Salvadorian military,
and that US personnel had trained Salvadorian officers in Panama. Bear in mind that it had been during the
Carter years that special envoy Richard Holbrooke had gone to South Korea and given US backing to the
military so that it could crush workers and students who were demanding democracy, the result being that
48. Historical Marker erected in 1986 at the Old Train Depot, Plains GA:
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER
From this depot in 1975, James Earl Carter, Jr. launched a two-year campaign for the presidency of the United States. At first an
unknown referred to as “Jimmy Who,” Carter was inaugurated as America's 39th President on January 20, 1977.
James Earl Carter, Jr. was born October 1, 1924, in Plains. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and married Rosalynn
Smith in 1946. After seven more years of naval service he returned to run a family agribusiness. In 1962, Jimmy Carter was elected
to the Georgia Senate and in 1970, became Governor. As governor, he reorganized state government, reformed the budgetary
process, improved race relationships, health care, education, and environmental quality. Notable achievements of his presidency
(1977-1981) were based on the values he considered most important “...human rights, environmental quality, nuclear arms control,
and the search for justice and peace.” Successes included the resolution of the Panama Canal issue, signing the Strategic Arms
Limitation Treaty, the Camp David accords and peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, normalizing relations with China and
reorganization of the federal government. This Depot and surrounding historic district symbolize the culture of this small rural
community which produced a highly respected international leader.
129-9
GEORGIA HISTORIC MARKER
1986
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about 3,000 South Korean protesters were killed during March 1980. Bear in mind that it had been under Carter
that the covert CIA operation in Afghanistan had begun, that would lead to the creation of the mojahedin and
would give the green light for Saudi religious, ideological and financial intervention to begin under the
leadership of Osama bin Laden. Bear in mind that it had been Carter who had re-armed Pol Pot and his Khmer
Rouge after they had been defeated by the Vietnamese. Bear in mind that it was Carter who released William
Calley, who had officered a mass murder at My Lai. Bear in mind that it had been during the Carter
administration that support and weaponry had been provided for the Indonesian military dictatorship after its
brutal occupation of East Timor. Bear in mind that it had been while Carter had been leading us that the
righteous Christian right had arisen in America. Bear in mind that it had been under Carter that financial help
had been solicited from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International while this outfit was calmly cheating
its depositors. Bear in mind that it had been Carter who had been phoning the Shahanshah of Iran to
congratulate him on the way he was leading his nation toward democracy and freedom, while he was having
his troops shoot down women and children in the streets and while his political prisons were crammed with
torturers and torturees. –Obviously, we were not awarding this man the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 because of
his conduct of his administration during the late 1970s, because his conduct in office had been simply clueless.
The men of evil had walked right past him, while he postured righteously this way and that way. –No, this guy
is now being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because, after he had left the government service, he has made
himself into the best damned ex-president this world has ever seen or may soon see again.
Jimmy, you’re OK — or at least, you’re OK now even if you weren’t OK back when we needed for you to be
not only as innocent as the doves but also as cunning as the vipers.
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2003
Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange was formed in Vietnam to provide medical care,
rehabilitation services, and financial assistance to those impacted by Agent Orange.
Alston Chase’s HARVARD AND THE UNABOMBER: THE EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN TERRORIST (W.W.
Norton & Company) connected the dots between Ted Kaczynski’s abusive experiences as an undergraduate
under Professor of Clinical Psychology Henry Alexander Murray to his subsequent life trajectory. In fact,
however, he was aware that he was being studied and participated in this CIA-sponsored experiment more or
less willingly. Although the subjects were lied to, being informed that they would be debating personal
philosophy with a fellow student while actually they were being subjected to a “purposely brutalizing
psychological experiment,” Ted could have opted out. During the test he was taken into a room and connected
to electrodes that monitored his physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a one-way mirror. Each
subject had previously written an essay detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations, and this material had
been turned over to an anonymous attorney who entered the room and individually belittled each student based
in part on disclosures they had offered. This was filmed and later in the study the subjects’ facial expressions
were played back to them several times.
Books intended for little children, such as this one “Henry Climbs a Mountain” by D.B. Johnson published
during this year, tend to falsify history by misrepresenting the $1 poll tax that Thoreau had famously refused
to pay as having had something to do with human slavery (books intended for grown-ups, to the contrary, tend
to falsify history by misrepresenting the poll tax that Thoreau refused to pay as having had something to do
with our War on Mexico):
“Henry wants to climb a mountain, and nothing is going to stop
him. Then Sam, the tax collector, puts him in jail for not paying
his taxes. Henry refuses to pay to a state that allows slavery.
But being locked up doesn’t stop Henry. He still gets to splash
in rivers, swing from trees, and meet a stranger. This bear,
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modeled on the real Henry David Thoreau, roams free.”
D. B. JOHNSON
There are two dangers here. First, to pretend that this $1-per-year poll tax had something to do with human
slavery, or had something to do with our War on Mexico –when those factoids are easily demonstrated to be
historically false– leaves the doctrine of civil disobedience open to the disrepute, that it was something
founded merely upon historical falsehoods and is therefore something to be sniffed at. Second, to presume that
you understand the doctrine of civil disobedience when you presume falsely that it has to do merely with
disobeying laws that are evil, that it does not extend beyond the domain of evil law, is to presume that you
already fully understand something that you have not yet even begun to comprehend.
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2004
January: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that the Bush-II administration had
“systematically misrepresented” the threat from Iraq’s weapons programs.
The Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange sued the US chemical companies responsible for
producing the toxic chemicals used during the war.
February 15, Sunday: Attorney General John Ashcroft admitted to being a fervent admirer of the Confederate States
of America:
We’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else
we’ll be taught that these people were giving their lives,
subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some
perverted agenda.
Our nation’s chief law enforcement officer is and has always been a hard-line opponent of civil rights,
affirmative action, school desegregation, women’s rights, abortion, gay rights, and protection of civil liberties.
–How did we get to the point at which the laws of our country are being enforced and interpreted by an attorney
general who supposes human enslavement to have been something other than a “perverted agenda”? –How did
we get to the point at which the Attorney General of the United States is being described by some citizens as
“pure and unadulterated evil”?
On this day Attorney General Ashcroft wrote to the New York Times Magazine, objecting to an article that
this magazine had published condemning the ongoing human trafficking in young females for purposes of
prostitution. While acknowledging that many young women do in fact become trapped in an abusive sexual
trade, and that any number of these are young women who have been brought here from abroad, he insisted
that we give him a break. He’s trying very hard:
Stamping out this vile trade has ranked among the Bush
administration’s top priorities since its earliest days.
In 2001, the Justice Department announced a new initiative to
battle human trafficking, built on the pillars of prosecution,
enhanced outreach and law-enforcement cooperation. Three years
later, our prosecution standards are the highest ever. From the
fiscal years 2001 to 2003, the department charged 111
traffickers, a nearly threefold increase over 1998-2000. Of
those, 79 were charged with sex trafficking. During that same
period, we convicted 77 defendants –59 of them on sextrafficking charges– a 50 percent increase over the previous
three-year period. Overall, since fiscal year 2001, we have
opened a total of 229 investigations, double the number opened
in the preceding three years. Our work continues: at present,
the department has open 142 investigations, double the number
open in January 2001.
On January 29, a federal court in Texas handed down lengthy
prison sentences to the leaders of a sex-trafficking ring. These
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criminals smuggled young girls from Central American nations
into America, holding them in forced servitude and repeatedly
raping them. In another case — the largest human-trafficking
prosecution ever, the operators of a forced-labor factory in
American Samoa, who had imprisoned over 200 Vietnamese and
Chinese, face American justice in Hawaii. These traffickers
employed bondage, starvation and beatings so brutal that they
left one female worker without an eye. These are just two of our
many prosecutions.
While prosecution efforts are central to defeating human
trafficking, we are also reaching out to local and faith-based
organizations who work with the non-English speaking communities
most frequently victimized. By building close ties to those
groups, we hope to root out the problem and help the victims.
Effective interagency and intergovernmental cooperation is also
a key part of our strategy to combat human trafficking, and we
are training federal and local law enforcement. Last month, we
held the largest, most comprehensive anti-trafficking training
session ever for federal prosecutors and investigative agents.
We are developing interagency crisis teams for deployment to
major trafficking hubs and are also working with other agencies
to obtain visas and humanitarian assistance for trafficking
victims. Since 2000, we have assisted more than 450 victims in
accessing immigration and refugee benefits.
In order to address trafficking at its root, Justice Department
officials have traveled to foreign “source” nations, including
Thailand, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala.
Finally, the government is devoting substantial effort to a
public awareness campaign, launching the Trafficking in Persons
and Worker Exploitation Task Force Complaint Line, 888-428-7581.
At its core, human trafficking is pure and adulterated evil. It
is medieval in conception and brutal in execution, and
unfortunately still touches far too many lives. The trafficking
and compelled abject servitude of one human being by another is
a practice that should long ago have been consigned to the ash
heap of discarded inhumanity. It is a practice that this
administration will not countenance, and one that we work daily
to defeat.”
It is interesting to note what Attorney General Ashcroft does not say in this boastful letter to the Times.
He is the Attorney General of the nation which after its Civil War enacted a XIIIth Amendment to its
Constitution, supposedly outlawing human enslavement, and therefore he might be expected to write
something like the following: “Long ago this nation defined human enslavement as a federal criminal offense,
and created a rigorous and evaluable definition of precisely what constituted enslavement, and began to
investigate, arrest, prosecute, convict, and punish offenders. Now we have a sex traffic that is in clear violation
of this federal criminal code, and those who enslave young women and force them into prostitution are being
investigated, arrested for human enslavement, prosecuted for human enslavement, convicted of human
enslavement, and punished for human enslavement.”
He cannot say that, of course, simply because it is not an accurate description of our legal situation.
The XIIIth Amendment did not outlaw human enslavement, but merely specified that if human enslavement
were ever to be outlawed, this could only be done by the federal Congress — it could not be done by any of
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the state governments and it could not be done by either the federal executive branch or the federal judicial
branch. Then, during Reconstruction, we allowed Southern politicians (Southern politicians like Ashcroft!) to
come back and take their seats in the United States Congress prior to our enacting any such federal law
criminalizing human enslavement — and of course then we did not ever enact any such law defining and
criminalizing human enslavement. Because we could not. Because the Southern representatives and senators
wouldn’t let us. As Attorney General, Ashcroft is well aware of this sad history — and cannot mis-state what
is and is not in our criminal code without getting caught in inaccuracy by his own deputy attorneys.
Even if there were a federal crime of human enslavement, the US Supreme Court has pointed out, this would
because of the manner in which it originated in the XIIIth Amendment be legislation that would only protect
black Americans, and would provide white Americans with no protection whatever (refer to the 1889 case that
is termed the “2d Dred Scott decision,” in Hyman Weintraub’s ANDREW FURUSETH, EMANCIPATOR OF SEAMEN.
Berkeley CA: U of California P, 1959, page 35). But what sort of situation would we be creating, if we were
to come upon a group of forced-labor prostitutes, and were able to rescue only the black ones, and were unable
to rescue the white ones? No, a law that would provide protection for black Americans that it would deny to
white Americans would be a law –even if we had it, which we don’t– which would be a dead letter because
completely unenforceable. No official would cooperate with such a law. Enforcing such a law protecting
blacks while leaving whites at risk would amount to career suicide.
What Ashcroft means by “stamping out this vile trade,” therefore, is that without –shudder– enacting any law
criminalizing human enslavement, he is going to willingly prosecute those who are engaged in this vile trade
for something or other they are doing wrong, something or other other than human enslavement. Because,
as he pointed out before he became Attorney General, he supposes human enslavement in the Confederate
States of America to have been something other than a “perverted agenda.” He’s now telling us “I’m going to
tie one hand behind my back as is right and proper, and then I’m going to address this problem.”
May 27, Thursday: Lifelong protester David Dellinger died. Here is his obituary as it appeared in the Washington Post,
written by Patricia Sullivan, staff writer:
David Dellinger, 88, a lifelong radical pacifist and one of the
Chicago Seven antiwar demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic
National Convention, died of pneumonia May 25 at the Montpelier,
Vt., retirement home where he lived. He had Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Dellinger, who had been protesting since the 1930s, was the
oldest of the seven (originally eight) Vietnam War protesters
charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot after a massive
demonstration in the streets and parks of Chicago turned
violent. Among the bearded, beaded and wild-haired defendants,
he was balding and wore a coat and tie. He and Abbie Hoffman,
Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis were convicted of
inciting a riot, but the convictions were overturned on appeal.
One of his four surviving children, Michele McDonough, said
yesterday that Mr. Dellinger remained actively engaged in issues
until just a few years ago. The “last real trip he made,” she
said, was three years ago when he hitched a ride to
demonstrations in Quebec City against the creation of a free
trade zone in the Western Hemisphere.
“He felt this is one of the most important times to be active,”
she said. “He was working on a wide range of things: prisoners’
rights, supporting a living wage, demonstrating and writing
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about foreign policy of this government.”
Mr. Dellinger had been to court, to jail and to prison long
before the ’60s, although that is the era with which he is most
identified. He supported union organizing drives in the 1930s
and civil rights in the 1950s. He was jailed so often that he
had lost count.
“I went from Yale to jail,” he said, “and got a good education
in both places.”
He refused to register for the draft during World War II, even
though he could have had a deferment because he was studying for
the divinity at Union Theological Seminary. The courts were not
in a mood to hear his critique of the “strategic disagreement”
between the U.S. imperialists and the Third Reich; he was sent
to federal prison in Danbury, Conn., for a year and a day. When
he got out, he still refused to register, and was sent to the
maximum-security prison at Lewisburg, Pa., where he staged
hunger strikes and spent time in solitary confinement. Three
years later, he was released.
Mr. Dellinger continued to protest — against nuclear testing,
against the bomb, against the Korean War, for prisoners’ rights
and for Puerto Rican independence. A critic called him “the
Kilroy of radical politics,” who appeared at nearly all the big
demonstrations. He worked with the radical Catholic priests, the
Berrigan brothers, to write a “declaration of conscience” to
encourage resistance to the draft, and he was one of the
organizers of the National Coordinating Committee to End the War
in Vietnam, which staged the huge antiwar marches in Washington
in 1970.
He made two trips to China and North Vietnam in 1966 and 1967.
He marched on the Pentagon repeatedly. After the Chicago Seven
trial, North Vietnam decided to release a few U.S. prisoners of
war, and its leaders asked Dellinger, among others, to come to
Hanoi to escort them back to the United States, which he did.
At the 1969 trial, just before Judge Julius Hoffman sentenced
him, he was offered a chance to speak. But when the judge tried
to cut him off, Mr. Dellinger said: “You want us to be like good
Germans, supporting the evils of our decade, and then when we
refused to be good Germans and came to Chicago and demonstrated,
now you want us to be like good Jews, going quietly and politely
to the concentration camps while you and this court suppress
freedom and the truth. And the fact is, I am not prepared to do
that. You want us to stay in our place like black people were
supposed to stay in their place....”
His life took him a long way from his start in Wakefield, Mass.,
where he was an outstanding long-distance runner and high school
athlete. He enrolled at Yale in 1933, during the depths of the
Depression, and, embarrassed by the elitism he saw, spent
vacations as a hobo, which he regarded as on-the-job training.
He graduated Yale as a Phi Beta Kappa economics major and won a
scholarship to Oxford University. On his way to England, he
slipped down to Spain, then into the middle of its civil war,
and nearly defected from academia. But he went on to Oxford,
then returned to Yale for graduate study and to the Union
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Theological Seminary to study for Congregationalist ministry.
Because protests did not pay the bills, Mr. Dellinger was a
printer, writer and editor throughout his life. He was an editor
of a series of small magazines — Direct Action, Alternative,
Individual Action and, finally, Liberation magazine, from 1956
until it closed in 1975. He wrote six books, the latest in 1993,
“From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter.”
“Mainly, I think he’ll be remembered as a pacifist who meant
business,” Hayden told the Associated Press. “His pacifism was
very forceful. He didn’t mind interjecting himself between armed
federal marshals and someone they were pushing around.”
Colman McCarthy, director of the Center for Teaching Peace Inc.
in Washington, called Mr. Dellinger “truly a kind and lovable
man, both a natural storyteller about all his decades of jamming
the gears of the world’s war machines, and an icon of nonviolence
who taught that all of us are called to be peacemakers. In an
era diseased with war, his arguments for pacifism remain
bedrock-sound.”
Survivors include his wife of 62 years, Elizabeth Peterson, and
four children.
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
Vietnam
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2005
Lyndon LaRouche opposed President George W. Bush’s plan for the privatization of Social Security (which
had it been enacted would have brought utter financial collapse upon an entire generation of retirees during
the Great Recession soon to come).
The Environmental Protection Administration began to work with the Vietnamese government to measure the
levels of dioxin at the former Da Nang Airbase.
The Joint Advisory Committee on Agent Orange made up of US and Vietnamese government officials and
experts held its initial meeting to explore areas of scientific cooperation, technical assistance, and
environmental remediation of dioxin hotspots. Additional meetings would be held in 2008 and 2009.
March: The Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange lawsuit filed during January 2004 was dismissed by
Judge Jack Weinstein (he who had settled the American veteran lawsuit in 1984), because he could find no
legal basis for the plaintiffs’ claims. He explained that there had been no law between 1961 and 1971
prohibiting wartime use of defoliants. His decision would be appealed. Negotiations between Vietnam and the
US, started in 2000 to set up a joint research project studying affects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese
population, would break down during 2005 because the sides could not agree on the research protocol. The
research project would be canceled.
Joseph Kip Kosek’s “Richard Gregg, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Strategy of Nonviolence,” The Journal of
American History 91.
RICHARD GREGG AND GANDHI
Excerpts are presented below:
Shortly after the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955/1956
established Martin Luther King Jr. as the nation’s leading
practitioner of nonviolent direct action, an official from the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) asked him to name the books that had most influenced his
thinking. King chose five texts. Four of them seem unsurprising:
Mohandas Gandhi’s autobiography, Louis Fischer’s 1950 biography
of the Indian leader, Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil
disobedience, and Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel classic,
CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. The fifth book on the list,
however, was Richard Bartlett Gregg’s 1934 THE POWER OF NONVIOLENCE, a text virtually unknown today among historians of
modern America. Even major biographies of King, such as those
by Taylor Branch and David Garrow, largely ignore Gregg. Yet he
was the first American to develop a substantial theory of
nonviolent resistance. Militant nonviolence did not emerge in
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the United States as a response to racial segregation in the
1950s. Its central characteristics appeared during the interwar
period, amid a worldwide crisis of democracy fomented by
industrial conflict, economic instability, an increasingly
precarious colonial system, and the ascendant threats of fascism
and Communism. In this context, Richard Gregg became part of a
small radical pacifist vanguard that went beyond mere opposition
to international war to insist that the future of democratic
societies depended on their members’ absolute renunciation of
violence as a means of social change or conflict resolution. As
an alternative, members of pacifist organizations such as the
Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the War Resisters League
(WRL) began to experiment with social and political practices
that they came to call nonviolent direct action, nonviolent
resistance, militant nonviolence, or simply nonviolence. Then,
during World War II, a new generation of pacifists and their
allies took the project further, particularly through their work
in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). By the time that King
read Gregg’s writings in 1956, the method of nonviolence had
undergone decades of elaboration, revision, and occasional
practical application. The recovery of Richard Bartlett Gregg’s
career opens a window on the early trajectory of nonviolent
action as an intellectual, theoretical, and political project.
...
More than any other single figure, Gregg taught American
pacifists and social reformers that nonviolence was more than
an ethical or religious principle; it was also a self-conscious
method of social action with its own logic and strategy.
Specifically, he argued that the method, particularly when it
involved suffering, became a dramatic performance that would
elicit guilt and shame from opponents and sympathy from
onlookers.
...
The railway shopmen’s strike of 1922 probably did more to shape
Richard Bartlett Gregg’s ideas about violence than did the
military slaughter of the Great War. A total of 1.6 million
workers went on strike that year, including not only railway
shopmen but also miners and textile workers. For many Americans,
the labor battles that ensued posed a far more immediate threat
to their way of life than the bloodshed across the Atlantic Ocean
had. Soldiers had not occupied American cities in 1918, as they
had in Europe, but federal troops did march through the streets
of many industrial communities in the United States during the
summer of 1922. In addition, local marshals and company guards
patrolled major railroad shops in Chicago, where Gregg worked,
and in cities across the nation. Guards occasionally fired on
strikers, who fought back by kidnapping and assaulting
replacement workers, sabotaging trains, and dynamiting tracks.
In this desperate climate, the Harding administration became
increasingly intent on ending the conflict, and in September a
federal judge issued an injunction against the rail strike as a
conspiracy in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Over the
next few months, the shopmen reached separate agreements with
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the railway companies and returned to work. Federal law had
given the railroad owners almost total victory.
...
Neither Mohandas Gandhi nor Richard Gregg invented the practice
of nonviolent resistance. People lacking power have probably
employed what the anthropologist James C. Scott has called
“weapons of the weak” as long as social inequalities have
existed in human societies. In the American context, black
slaves in particular used forms of sabotage and subterfuge short
of open revolt to assert their autonomy and improve their
material conditions. Yet by its nature such “everyday
resistance” renounced any attempt at systematic social change.
Closer to Gregg’s own theories was the approach of the
nonresistant followers of William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830s
and 1840s. Those radical pacifists, while promising to
“repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of
authority,” placed great faith in the power of public opinion.
An 1839 article in one of their journals described the peculiar
advantage that nonresistants held over attackers: “The aggressor
of a nonresistant will be placed in the wrong; he will be
condemned by himself, by byestanders, by the public.” Yet,
although Garrison and his associates certainly knew how to
deploy public spectacle, they ultimately saw their stance as an
inner
conviction
to
do
right
regardless
of
political
consequences. For Garrison, the strategic advantages of
nonviolence were incidental to its religious superiority;
Gregg’s writing made nonviolent strategy itself a subject of
careful
analysis
and
conscious
manipulation.
Gregg’s
innovations in nonviolent action developed alongside, and later
within, the new radical pacifism that revitalized and
transformed the Garrisonian tradition in the decades after World
War I. The devastating effects of the conflict in Europe and the
jingoistic and reactionary climate of the home front led a few
Americans, most of them left-leaning ministers and reformers,
to embrace absolute pacifism. The most important organization
for the dissemination of their views in the interwar period was
the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which had been founded in
1914. The FOR’s roots in the Social Gospel showed in its
nonsectarian Christian orientation and in its wide-ranging
attempts to infuse pacifist principles into diverse arenas of
social life, such as industry, education, and race relations.
The War Resisters League, begun in 1923 as a secular offshoot
of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, focused more narrowly on
international war but shared its parent’s radicalism. In the
1930s, Gregg would become a member of the WRL and a leader in
the FOR.
...
He thought of his books as a way to extricate pacifism “from the
profitless atmosphere of emotional adjectives and of vague
mysticism, futile protests and sentimentalism combined with
confused thinking.” For this project, he cultivated a diffident
writing style marked by constant hedging; he frequently
acknowledged to his readers that he might be “mistaken” or even
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“wrong.” The reservations were an organic part of his argument,
for he believed that a practitioner of nonviolence (like a
theorist of it) “recognizes that no matter what his beliefs and
convictions are, he may possibly be mistaken or at fault.” In
part Gregg borrowed this tone from Gandhi himself, who became
both legendary and notorious for his public confessions of
uncertainty and his nearly obsessive self-examination. Gregg
tried to move pacifists beyond allegiance to moral truisms and
toward a more pragmatic politics.
...
Earlier religious pacifists (and before the twentieth century,
virtually all American pacifism was grounded in religious faith)
tended to view their condemnation of violence as an internal
conviction. Its effect on others, though sometimes profound, was
ultimately irrelevant in comparison with the believer’s own
determination to follow the divine will. Gregg, in contrast,
said little about the nonviolent resister’s own beliefs,
focusing instead on the reactions of both violent attackers and
disinterested spectators. By doing so, he helped make
nonviolence a technique for social change. “Let us ... try,”
Gregg suggested, “to understand first how non-violent resistance
works.” In each of the three books, he presented a pair of
dramatic scenes. First, he asked readers to imagine two men, one
who attacks violently and another who defends himself by the
same method. Such combatants, he explained, implicitly consent
to a common set of moral values, despite their apparent
opposition. Both believe in the efficacy and appropriateness of
using physical force to settle disputes. Then Gregg changed the
scene, portraying a violent attacker who faces a nonviolent
resister. In failing to defend himself, the second person
intentionally disrupts the attacker’s value system. He employs
“a sort of moral jiu-jitsu” that causes his attacker to “lose
his moral balance.” This was a psychological game, and Gregg
counted on the violent attacker to cave in from sympathy, pity,
or sheer bewilderment. He suggested that the nonviolent
conversion of an opponent was “analogous to ... religious
conversion, though in this case the change is moral rather than
religious.” More often, however, he drew on modern psychological
models to explain how it happened. Gregg’s use of psychological
theories was opportunistic and eclectic; he was equally likely
to employ Freudianism, the early behaviorism of John B. Watson,
or the theory of emotion formulated by William James and Carl
Georg Lange to make his case. The larger point was that
scientific authority could validate the methods that Gandhi
explained in moral and spiritual terms. Just as modern economics
had shown the unlikely rationality of hand spinning, so modern
psychology proved the effectiveness of standing defenseless
before an enemy’s assault. The nonviolent method, though a
sincere expression of principle, was also a public performance
intended to persuade an audience. Gregg’s construction of
nonviolent
action
rested
on
the
power
of
sympathy.
“Undoubtedly,” he wrote, “the sight of another person
voluntarily undergoing suffering for a belief or ideal moves the
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assailant and beholders alike and tends to change their hearts
and make them all feel kin-ship with the sufferer.” He proposed
two reasons for this phenomenon. One was physiological: humans
had evolved to react to one another’s pain. “Hence the sight of
suffering, in all probability, causes an involuntary sympathetic
response in the nervous system of the beholder, especially in
the autonomic nervous system,” Gregg wrote. The other reason
stemmed from a psychological desire for vicarious experience.
Gregg noted that “everyone wants, in his heart, to be strong and
brave.” At the sight of a nonviolent resister, “we wonder if we
could do so well, and perhaps we even unconsciously identify
ourselves with him.” That potential for identification made
“beholders” into a potent force in Gregg’s scheme. Spectators
played an important role in the victory of the nonviolent
resister. Gregg, who was fundamentally optimistic about human
nature, believed that a violent attacker would indeed convert,
but he argued that third parties could assist the process. “If
there are onlookers,” he wrote, “the assailant soon loses still
more poise. Instinctively he dramatizes himself before them and
becomes more aware of his position.” The “audience,” Gregg
thought, became “a sort of mirror,” reflecting back to the
attacker his egregious violation of moral standards. Gregg
believed that mass media had created a global audience, for both
nonviolent resisters and their violent opponents. Under modern
conditions, he explained, “ruthless deeds tend to become known
to the world at large.” He acknowledged the existence of state
censorship but maintained that the power of mass media would
eventually overcome it. “Newspaper reporters are always keen for
scenting a ‘story,’” Gregg opined, “and as soon as they learn
of a censorship anywhere they are still more eager.” Whatever
its moral import, the scene of defenseless men and women
voluntarily succumbing to vicious assaults made a fascinating
“story.” Nonviolent resistance “makes wonderful news,” Gregg
insisted. “It is so unusual and dramatic.” He even compared the
power of the nonviolent resister’s appeals to the persuasive
effects of “commercial advertising.” He concluded, with both
prescience and unwarranted optimism, that the threat of bad
publicity would give the practitioners of nonviolence a decisive
advantage over their violent opponents. Gregg’s pragmatic
theories led him to the daring argument that “non-violent
resistance is perhaps ... more like war than we had imagined.”
...
Nonviolent resistance became a kind of war without killing, for
Gregg thought that killing was unnecessary to achieve war’s
goals. “Though war uses violence,” he explained, “the effect it
aims at is psychological. Non-violent resistance also aims at
and secures psychological effects, though by different means.”
If nonviolent action was a kind of conflict and not a retreat
from the world, it needed to draw on the “truths and virtues of
militarism.” Following Gandhi, Gregg’s work suggested that
nonviolent action had many of the characteristics of war: It
relied on courage, loyalty, and other martial qualities; it
required attention to strategy; and it depended on moral,
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emotional, and psychological advantages, not solely physical
ones.
...
THE POWER OF NON-VIOLENCE garnered enthusiastic reviews in radical
pacifist and liberal Protestant circles. It became, in the words
of one FOR leader, “the ‘Bible’ of non-violence.” It was the
first of Gregg’s books to be published in America, rather than
India. The FOR promoted it in its journal FELLOWSHIP, while Gregg
himself led study groups across the Northeast and promoted his
views during a short stint as director of Pendle Hill, a Quaker
school. (“Calm yourself,” he wrote a friend, “because I have not
become a Quaker.”)
...
King came to understand the boycott, in part, as a dramatic
spectacle designed to elicit the sympathy of opponents and
onlookers, just as Gregg’s theories had posited. “I tell you,”
he warned black Montgomerians in a November 1956 speech, “if we
hit back ... we will be shamed before the world.” To prevent
such humiliation, the MIA adopted the CORE technique of the
sociodrama. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation on
buses unconstitutional, the prevention of violence between white
and black riders remained a daunting task. To smooth the
transition, the boycott leaders rehearsed scenarios that they
would encounter on the buses. In the churches where MIA meetings
were held, King recalled, boycott leaders “lined up chairs in
front of the altar to resemble a bus, with a driver’s seat out
front.” Then “actors” from the audience came forward to fill the
roles of driver and white and black passengers, some pretending
to be “hostile” and others “courteous.” These “actors played out
a scene of insult or violence,” and a general discussion among
the performers and the audience followed. The participants
played their parts with the utmost conviction. “Sometimes,” King
admitted, “the person playing a white man put so much zeal into
his performance that he had to be gently reproved from the
sidelines.” In other sessions, an actor playing a black
passenger would return insults or blows; “whenever this happened
we worked to channel his words and deeds in a nonviolent
direction.” The MIA sociodramas brought together the religious
and performative elements of nonviolence. In the sacred space
of a church, black Montgomerians became “actors” practicing for
a real-life show of Christian nonviolence before a world
audience. Indeed, the tension in Gregg’s work between the
religious principle of nonviolence and its strategic spectacles
proved a great resource. Niebuhr had faulted Gregg for refusing
to choose between moral idealism and political realism; King too
refused to choose. This ambiguity may have made the civil rights
movement logically inconsistent, but it also gave that movement
a unique potency. The gaps in Gregg’s theories let religious and
secular proponents of nonviolence coexist and allowed its moral
and strategic elements to reinforce each other.
...
Gregg’s relationship to the method of nonviolent direct action
was, finally, a paradox. In his wide-ranging studies and
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interpretations of Gandhi and India, he had aimed to set out the
characteristics of a new civilization, not simply to write a
handbook for a new political technology. Gregg cared deeply
about nonviolent action and racial justice, but his broader goal
was to create a countermodernity that would use modern knowledge
to foster a more humane, less artificial society.
...
Whether he was seeking to mediate industrial disputes during
World War I, defending Gandhi’s plans for a decentralized
agrarian economy, or farming his way through World War II,
Gregg’s life was a long search for spheres of authentic,
meaningful work under conditions of modern alienation and
regimentation.
...
[In a footnote] Civil disobedience against the state, and the
anarchist spirit of protest it represented, was also a departure
from the Gandhian concept. Civil disobedience as proposed by
Thoreau and practiced by anarchists depended on individual acts.
Mass action was suspect because participants might not share the
same conviction or some might feel coerced into action.... In
Gandhian protest, civil disobedience could begin with individual
acts, but only for the purpose of mobilizing mass protest.
Otherwise, civil disobedience was an ego trip, not a moral
action.
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2006
January: Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and other US makers of Agent Orange were ordered to pay damages to South
Korean veterans of the Vietnam War in a South Korean court. Approximately 7,000 veterans out of the 17,200
who filed would be awarded from $5,000 to $40,000 each. The awards would add up to $63,000,000.
However, this court had almost no ability to enforce such awards.
The US Food and Drug Administration’s labeling law took effect, requiring trans fats to be included on the
Nutrient Facts Panel of packaged foods. “Warning: This edible product has cheap stuff in it that may cause you
to die early of a heart attack.”
An obituary in Utne Magazine for Thoreau scholar Brad Dean, who just died of a heart attack at the age of 51:
Speaking a Word for Success
Brad Dean, 1954-2006
By Chris Dodge, Utne.com January 2006 Issue
Picture, if you can, a Thoreau scholar riding a motorcycle.
In late February 2003, I emailed the editor of the Thoreau
Society Bulletin addressing him as “Bradley P. Dean,” saying
that I was a new member of the Society and had just enjoyed
reading the Fall 2002 Bulletin. Telling him that I’d been
finding many Thoreauvian references of late, I quoted Thoreau’s
journal entry of November 4, 1858 — “We cannot see anything until
we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see
anything else” — and then appended a dozen or so bibliographic
notes from a variety of contemporary sources.
I heard back within minutes: “Hello Chris. Call me Brad.”
Dean’s response, thanking me for the notes I’d sent, began a
correspondence that grew over time from collegial to friendly,
fueled by a shared passion.
There are now 476 items in my email folder titled “Brad.” That’s
nearly one for every two days since then. The last was sent to
him on Friday the 13th, the day before Brad Dean had a heart
attack and died at home.
He was just 51.
When I learned the news I felt shattered. Then a sense of vast
personal loss welled up. Brad was not just my closest but my
only Thoreauvian correspondent. He encouraged me, gently edited
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and published my words, and, many times it seemed, was alone in
understanding an important part of my world.
Brad was generous in sharing his knowledge. Now I’m not sure how
to imagine my ecosystem without him. To whom do I go with my
questions about Thoreau? Who will continue his work? I always
thought we’d meet someday. Now he is gone and his important work
remains uncompleted.
Brad Dean edited two highly acclaimed works from Thoreau’s
unpublished manuscripts, Faith in a Seed and Wild Fruits, as
well as Letters to a Spiritual Seeker, a collection of Thoreau’s
letters to H.G.O. Blake. As a brief obituary in the Bloomington,
Indiana, Herald-Times notes, Brad was working on Thoreau’s
unpublished “Indian Notebooks” at the time of his death. I’ve
looked forward to reading this book some day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote on the death of Thoreau at age 44:
“The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to
require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden
disappearance. The country knows not yet, or in the least part,
how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should
leave in the midst his broken task which none else can finish,
a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that he should depart out
of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for
what he is.”
The same words apply now as well.
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2007
May:
President George W. Bush managed a whole lot of his war expenditures –since he “did not believe in raising
taxes”– through the legislative trick known as “earmarks.” He slipped costly details of his pointless wars into
otherwise innocuous pieces of legislation, where they would be less likely to raise anybody’s blood pressure.
During this month, for instance, he signed into law a supplemental spending bill for his wars that included one
of these earmarks of his — $3,000,000 for remediation of dioxin “hotspots” on former US military bases in
Vietnam and for public health programs in the surrounding communities. An earmark for a war that was a war
no more! It would take his administration more than a year to figure out how to dispose of these newly
earmarked funds. First they would budget $500,000 to hire and support a full-time environmental remediation
advisor, who was to operate for the next couple of years out of the US Embassy in Hanoi (hire somebody, that’s
easy, some loyal Republican always needs a job and an office). Then half the funding would go for
environmental containment and remediation planning at the Da Nang airport (keyword “planning,” with
everybody sitting around in air-conditioned offices in suits and nothing actually getting accomplished), and
then the remaining $1,000,000 would trickle away into 3 nongovernmental organizations providing assistance
to people with disabilities, mostly around Da Nang (hey, they had to produce some results with some of this
gummint moola, otherwise it woulda looked sorta bad).
Rebecca Solnit wrote, in Orion magazine during this month and the following one, on “The Thoreau Problem:
When the route to paradise threads through prison”:
Thoreau was emphatic about the huckleberries. In one of his two
most famous pieces of writing, “Civil Disobedience,” he
concluded his account of a night in Concord’s jail with, “I was
put in jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which
was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to
finish my errand, and having put on my mended shoe, joined a
huckleberry party.” He told the same story again in Walden, this
time saying that he “returned to the woods in season to get my
dinner of huckleberries on Fair-Haven Hill.” That he told it
twice suggests that he considered the conjunction of prisons and
berry parties, of the landscape of incarceration and of pastoral
pleasure, significant. But why?
The famous night in jail took place about halfway through his
stay on Emerson’s woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in
the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic
retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nature,
though he went back to town to eat and talk with friends and
family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn’t fit into
Walden‘s narrative. He went to jail not only because he felt
passionately enough about national affairs –slavery and the war
on Mexico– to refuse to pay his tax, but also because the town
jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended.
Says the introduction to my paperback edition of Walden and
“Civil Disobedience”: “As much as Thoreau wanted to disentangle
himself from other people’s problems so he could get on with his
own life, he sometimes found that the issue of black slavery
spoiled his country walks. His social conscience impinged on his
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consciousness, even though he believed that his duty was not to
eradicate social evils but to live his life independently.”
To believe this is to believe that the woods were far from
Concord jail not merely by foot but by thought. To believe that
conscience is an imposition upon consciousness is to regard
engagement as a hijacker rather than a rudder, interference with
one’s true purpose rather than perhaps at least part of that
purpose.
Thoreau did not believe so or wish that it were so, and he
contradicted this isolationist statement explicitly in “Civil
Disobedience” (completed, unlike Walden, shortly after those
years in the woods), but many who have charge of his reputation
do. These scholars and critics permit no conversation, let alone
any unity, between Thoreau the rebel, intransigent muse to
Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and that other Thoreau who wrote
about autumnal tints, ice, light, color, grasses, woodchucks,
and other natural histories, essays easily and often defanged
and diced up into inspiring extracts. But for Thoreau, any
subject was a good enough starting point to travel any distance,
toward any destination.
This compartmentalizing of Thoreau is a microcosm of a larger
partition in American thought, a fence built in the belief that
places in the imagination can be contained. Those who deny that
nature and culture, landscape and politics, the city and the
country are inextricably interfused have undermined the
connections for all of us (so few have been able to find
Thoreau’s short, direct route between them since). This makes
politics dreary and landscape trivial, a vacation site. It
banishes certain thoughts, including the thought that much of
what the environmental movement dubbed wilderness was or is
indigenous homeland –a very social and political space indeed,
then and now– and especially the thought that Thoreau in jail
must have contemplated the following day’s huckleberry party,
and Thoreau among the huckleberries must have ruminated on his
stay in jail.
If “black slavery spoiled his country walks,” it spoiled the
slaves’ country walks even more. Thus the unresisting walk to
jail. “Eastward, I go only by force; but westward I go free,”
Thoreau wrote. His thoughts on the matter might be summed up
this way: You head for the hills to enjoy the best of what the
world is at this moment; you head for confrontation, for
resistance, for picket lines to protect it, to liberate it. Thus
it is that the road to paradise often runs through prison, thus
it is that Thoreau went to jail to enjoy a better country, and
thus it is that one of his greatest students, Martin Luther King
Jr., found himself in jail and eventually in the way of a bullet
on what got called the long road to freedom, whose goal he spoke
of as the mountaintop.
Conventional environmental writing has often maintained a strict
silence on or even an animosity toward the city, despite its
importance as a lower-impact place for the majority to live, its
intricate relations to the rural, and the direct routes between
the two. Imagining the woods or any untrammeled landscape as an
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unsocial place, an outside, also depends on erasing those who
dwelt and sometimes still dwell there, the original Americans —
and one more thing that can be said in favor of Thoreau is that
he spent a lot of time imaginatively repopulating with Indians
the woods around Concord, and even prepared quantities of notes
for a never-attempted history of Native America.
Not that those woods were unsocial even after the aboriginal
population was driven out. “Visitors” was one of the chapters
of Walden, and in it he describes meeting in the woods and
guiding farther on the road to freedom runaway slaves. Rather
than ruining his country walks, some slaves joined him on them,
or perhaps he joined them in the act of becoming free. Some of
those he guided were on the Underground Railroad, in which his
mother and sisters in Concord were deeply involved, and a few
months after that famous night in jail Thoreau hosted a meeting
of Concord’s most important abolitionist group, the Concord
Female Anti-Slavery Society, at his Walden Pond hut. What kind
of a forest was this, with slaves, rebels, and the ghosts of the
original inhabitants all moving through the trees?
If he went to jail to demonstrate his commitment to the freedom
of others, he went to the berries to exercise his own recovered
freedom, the liberty to do whatever he wished, and the evidence
in all his writing is that he very often wished to pick berries.
There’s a widespread belief, among both activists and those who
cluck disapprovingly over insufficiently austere activists,
that idealists should not enjoy any pleasure denied to others,
that beauty, sensuality, delight all ought to be stalled behind
some dam that only the imagined revolution will break. This
schism creates, as the alternative to a life of selfless
devotion, a life of flight from engagement, which seems to be
one way those years at Walden Pond are sometimes portrayed. But
change is not always by revolution, the deprived don’t generally
wish that the rest of us would join them in deprivation, and a
passion for justice and pleasure in small things are not
incompatible. That’s part of what the short jaunt from jail to
hill says.
Perhaps prison is anything that severs and alienates, paradise
is the reclaimed commons with the fences thrown down, and so any
step toward connection and communion is a step toward paradise,
even if the route detours through jail. Thoreau was
demonstrating on that one day in Concord in June of 1847 both
what dedication to freedom was and what enjoyment of freedom
might look like — free association, free roaming, the picking
of the fruits of the Earth for free, free choice of commitments.
That is the direct route to paradise, the one road worth
traveling.
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2008
February: A groundbreaking ceremony was held for an additional classroom building, “West House,” at the Princeton
Friends School on the grounds of the Quaker monthly meeting at Stony Brook near Princeton, New Jersey.
This facility was to feature 2 primary classrooms, 2 science labs, a Learning Center, an art room, and a nurse’s
office.
Fidel Castro announced his resignation as President of Cuba.
The 2d US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld the decision by Judge Jack Weinstein that the US
chemical companies Dow and Monsanto had not committed war crimes or intentionally caused harm by
providing defoliants to the US government for use during the Vietnam war (evidently this judge never became
aware that it would have cost these companies like pennies a pound of product to use a low-temp process rather
than their high-temp process that generated significant quantities of dioxin as a product contaminant). In a
separate opinion, the appellate court also pointed out that such companies are protected from any lawsuits that
might happen to be brought by misguided US military veterans or their misguided relatives — because they
had been mere government contractors, merely looking the other way while merely doing, as they had been
instructed, the necessary work for which they were being so very well rewarded.
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2009
February: Conference attendees of the United Nations Development Program agreed on their goals — for now,
containment of some more of the dioxin-contaminated soil at the 3 major known “hot spots,” Bien Hoa, Da
Nang, and Phu Cat in Vietnam, and (eventually) completely eliminating this supremely poisonous chemical
from these barrels of contained soil and sediment. Attending the meeting were representatives of the US State
Department, USAID, and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Milk the cash cow, guys and dolls, our
motto is doing good and doing well!
Here is an evaluation of the drop-in traffic at the www.kouroo.info site, as offered by a commercial corporation
that makes a very real business in the evaluation of the lucrative possibilities of placing advertisements on
various for-profit internet sites:
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March: Raúl Castro removed some of Fidel Castro’s appointees.
The federal Congress appropriated an additional $3,000,000 for dioxin removal and health care facilities in Da
Nang, Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was refusing to hear an appeal by the Vietnam Association of
Victims of Agent Orange case against chemical companies as decided by the Court of Appeals in 2008, as well
as some other lawsuits filed by American veterans who had been taken ill after the 1984 class action
settlement. Taking the easy way out, the Court of Appeals decision was allowed to stand — is it time for lunch
yet?
May:
The US Department of Veterans Affairs established “AL Amyloidosis” as a presumptive condition on the
Agent Orange/herbicide list. The Institute of Medicine concluded that there was suggestive evidence of
association between exposures to herbicides and this disease.
September: Frances Crowe and 3 other women were arrested for non-violent civil disobedience at the Vermont Yankee
Nuclear Power Plant.
A new scientific study, conducted by Vancouver-based Hatfield Consultants, showed a direct link between
dioxin-contaminated hot spots in Vietnam and the blood and breast milk of humans, by tracking dioxin’s
chemical fingerprint. They were able to follow its movements through food chains out of the soil and lake
sediment, into the fat of fish and ducks, and into the bodies of humans.
October: The US Department of Veterans Affairs established a service connection for Vietnam veterans with B cell
leukemias such as hairy cell leukemia, Parkinson’s disease, and ischemic heart disease, that would make it less
difficult in the future for them to obtain care at a vets hospital.
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2010
August: Parkinson’s disease, ischemic heart disease, and B cell leukemias (including hairy cell leukemia) were finally
added by the federal Congress to a list of “presumptive” Agent Orange conditions. More than 150,000 veterans
would be expected to submit claims during the following 12 to 18 months, many of whom would be potentially
eligible for retroactive disability payments based on past claims. Additionally, the Veterans’ Administration
would review approximately 90,000 previously denied claims by Vietnam veterans.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,
such as extensive quotations and reproductions of
images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great
deal of special work product of Austin Meredith,
copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will
eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some
of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button
invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap
through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—
allows for an utter alteration of the context within
which one is experiencing a specific content already
being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin
Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by
all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any
material from such files, must be obtained in advance
in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”
Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please
contact the project at <[email protected]>.
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until
tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”
– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”
in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: June 28, 2016
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a
human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that
we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the
shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these
chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by
ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the
Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a
request for information we merely push a button.
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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious
deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in
the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we
need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —
but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary
“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this
originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,
and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever
has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire
operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished
need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect
to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic
research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge.
Place requests with <[email protected]>. Arrgh.

Vietnam - Kouroo Contexture

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