We met again that summer at our parents’ place in Coral Gables outside Miami. It was an all too brief reunion – Jeff and I both had to get on with our stateside lives. I headed north to Washington to finish up research on my doctoral dissertation at the Library of Congress. Jeff went west, back to Indiana University (IU) – where I was taking my PhD – to complete his undergraduate education.†
Back from Vietnam – Jeff in Florida,
Summer ‘64
A half year later Jeff and I
were again off on our different trajectories, I starting my academic career at
the University of Missouri (Mizzou), Jeff beginning spring term at IU. I was
teaching introductory courses on politics and international relations along
with an upperclass course on Soviet politics with no prior classroom experience.
Jeff was taking a full course
load, including US and comparative politics, American intellectual history, a
course on the novel, and a course on totalitarian political
patterns—totalitarianism at the time was very much in vogue as a descriptor of
Soviet Bloc and Asian communist regimes. Colleagues and I would later successfully
challenge the concept, but that’s another story.
Meanwhile back in South
Vietnam (SVN), the low-key war had been steadily heating up. The South
Vietnamese army (ARVN), assisted by some 15,000 US military advisers, was fighting
a communist guerrilla insurgency against the Viet Cong (VC) supported by North Vietnam (NVN).
The war was not going well for SVN, which had persuaded the late President Kennedy
(JFK) to accede to the South Vietnamese generals’ coup against President Diem
in November ’63.
Unfortunately, the situation
in Saigon had only grown worse following the coup. A junta of generals, divided
among themselves, could not effectively govern. Political instability combined
with military ineptitude weighed down the floundering regime. A second coup toppled
the junta a few months later. Then followed
a series of coups and attempted coups throughout ‘64. None of this confusion was
lost on the VC, nor on their military mentors in the North. By early ’65, the
VC had achieved de facto control of large parts of the country.
All this produced alarm among
the Washington policy makers. The CIA had forecast that the time was near when
the VC could triumph. The US guarantee of the independence of a non-communist
SVN was at stake. More and more, the emboldened VC were infiltrating the cities
and populated areas specifically to attack US military facilities and places
where American personnel gathered for recreation.
On January 20, 1965, President
Johnson (LBJ) was inaugurated, and just two days at a confidential briefing of
the congressional leadership he broadly intimated that he was about to begin
bombing North Vietnam. All he needed was a pretext; the VC obliged in early
February with a destructive attack on the American base at Pleiku in the
Central Highlands, and LBJ responded with air strikes against NVN. A few days
later, a concerned Jeff wrote me, “I could get recalled very easily (Ready
Reserves, Vietnamese linguist, Intelligence experience).”
It was soon evident that the
retaliatory strikes had been pre-planned dress rehearsals for a full-scale
bombing campaign, code-named Rolling Thunder, that was launched in March.
Marine combat battalions soon followed to secure the air bases from which
strikes against the North were being flown. By those two abrupt moves, LBJ had
dramatically escalated the war. The sudden exponential increase in American
involvement in the civil war of a country most people couldn’t find on a map,
in turn elicited a sharp negative reaction among faculty and students at a
number of major universities.
♫We'll smash down your doors, we don't bother to knock
We've done it before, so why all the shock
We're the biggest and the toughest kids on the block
And we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World††
We've done it before, so why all the shock
We're the biggest and the toughest kids on the block
And we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World††
The University of Michigan at
Ann Arbor quickly became the focal point of opposition to the escalation. A
number of UM students were veteran activists of the civil rights movement in
the South, and the campus had a strong chapter of SDS, Students for a
Democratic Society, a national organization formed there in the early ‘60s.
Michigan was also home to a sizeable number of politically active professors. These
forces came together to organize what became the first ‘Teach-In’ on Vietnam,
an initial step toward what would eventually become a nationwide antiwar
movement.
As a political and moral
response to Washington, a group of Michigan faculty planned a one-day teaching
strike. The strikers would refuse to teach their regular classes and instead
spend the time introducing interested students to the critical issues of
America’s war in Vietnam. Nearly 50 professors signed up, but Governor George
Romney and the university president opposed the strike. At the 11th
hour, a compromise was reached: instead of cancelling classes, concerned
faculty would teach their courses, but continue teaching through the night;
thus was born the idea of a teach-in as a forum for informed protest.
Ann Arbor Teach-In Poster
The first teach-in began at 8
PM on Wednesday, March 24th and went on through the night until
daybreak the 25th. The dorm curfew for women was suspended, greatly
swelling the turnout to over 3,000 students; along with 200 faculty, it was the
largest demonstration in the university’s history.
The main speakers were two
academics with field experience in Vietnam who knew the country well, an
economist from the East, and a Michigan State anthropologist. One speaker
recited Vietnam’s long history of fending off invaders, while the other simply
pronounced the war unwinnable.
University of
Michigan Teach-In, March 24-25,
1965
At other colleges and
universities, small groups of activists gathered to listen in to the Michigan
speakers via telephone hook-ups. At IU, Jeff was undoubtedly one of the best
informed on the subject, judging by the discussion of Vietnam in his letters
from that period.
Activist
Leaders at Indiana – Bernella & David Satterfield, ‘64
Thanks to national media
coverage of the Michigan event, the teach-in format was soon replicated at over
100 other campuses, including the University of Missouri. At Mizzou, however,
the organizers decided to stage a teach-in as a balanced debate between pro-
and anti-Administration speakers. In contrast to brother Jeff’s growing
opposition to US policy, I along with an American historian was the lead
debater on the pro side of the question. We were opposed by two scholars of
South Asia, one a political scientist, the other a historian.
For nearly five hours, the
four of us debated US policy in Vietnam before an audience of 500+ students
crammed into an auditorium in the Business School. The South Asian specialists
both viewed the Vietnam conflict in historical and regional contexts,
emphasizing the need for a negotiated settlement before the US got in too
deeply. At the time as a JFK liberal internationalist, I looked at the problem
within the framework of the bi-polar Soviet-American Cold War conflict.
The Cold War was then at an
uncertain point. Khrushchev, a reformer, had been ousted from power in Moscow
by a coalition of former Stalinists just six months earlier. Although he’d been
aggressive in the international sphere (witness the Cuban Missile Crisis of
’62), the following year he’d agreed to JFK’s proposed treaty banning nuclear
tests in the atmosphere – a very important step in the effort to slow down the
dangerous arms race. By the spring of ’65 when I spoke at Mizzou, the full
foreign policy intentions of Khrushchev’s successors, especially in the former
colonial world now called the Third World, were by no means yet clear.
Hence, I saw Vietnam as a
surrogate war between NVN, a Soviet and Chinese Communist ally, and SVN, a US
ally. In those years, the US had put in place a policy of global ‘containment’
by means of an encircling network of bases and military alliances. The idea was
to keep the Soviet empire and, by then, its rival Chinese sphere of influence, in
check, i.e., not permit either the Soviets or the Chinese to extend the
authoritarian communist model beyond their borders.
The US was particularly
concerned about the Third World, which was undergoing rapid decolonialization
that left power vacuums in its wake. South Vietnam was, of course, a Third
World country; from a Cold War angle of vision, both the USSR and China were
probing, via their proxy NVN and its agent, the VC, to expand the international
communist domain to the South. No one, not even the ‘doves’ had any illusions
that the North could carry the fight to the South without massive military and
economic aid from the two giants of the Communist world.
After the debaters presented,
the Mizzou audience was invited to pose questions or make short statements from
the floor. In retrospect, the most prescient remark of that long afternoon was
made by Professor William Allen, a noted young historian of Germany. He
vigorously opposed US policy and advocated complete withdrawal from Vietnam. Of
course, he was right.
♫It's written in the ashes of the village towns we burn
It's written in the empty bed of the fathers unreturned
And the chocolate in the children's eyes will never
understand
When you're white boots marching in a yellow land†††
At the end of the debate, the
moderator asked the audience to signal by applause which set of arguments they
found most persuasive. While both sides found support, by dint of applause, the
pro-Administration position seemed to prevail.
Most notable of the
post-Michigan teach-ins were the national teach-in in mid-May and the ‘mother’
of all teach-ins that season, the huge one at Berkeley toward the end of the
month. At the national event in Washington, broadcast live on radio and
television throughout the country, two leading specialists on Vietnam, Kahin of
Cornell and Scalapino of Berkeley, duked it out.
The Berkeley affair attracted
an aggregate of 30,000 participants from the San Francisco Bay area listening
to nearly 50 speakers over a period of 36 hours, by far the longest and the
largest teach-in that spring. Although not intended as a balanced debate, at
least one pro-Administration speaker was included. He and the lead-off
presenter ended up as polar opposites in the spectrum of comments at the
teach-in – one wildly idealistic, the other darkly dystopian.
A historian from Yale opened
the teach-in, proposing civil disobedience so massive and persistent that LBJ
and his war cabinet “will forthwith resign.”* At the other end of the spectrum,
a Berkeley political scientist foresaw – absent continued US resistance – SVN as
“Communist totalitarian regime” with a regimented population wakened in the
mornings to the sound of bugles and forced to work long days in pursuit of the
regime’s goals.**
That first turbulent spring
of the newly escalated American war in Vietnam came to an end with what would
become legions of ‘antiwarriors’*** mobilizing on the nation’s campuses. As for
Jeff and me, our respective academic business finished for the summer, we continued
our separate ways – he off to Mexico to hang out with friends; I to Washington
to advise on US-USSR arms control. Brothers divergent.
*L Menashe, ed, Berkeley Teach-In: Vietnam (1966), 3
**Ibid
***The term is from Melvin
Small, Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and
Minds (2002)†
†† Cops of the World: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaTbI7FCLl0
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