GI in a Pagoda – From Olive Drab to Saffron Yellow

The Army Language School (ALS) sat on a vast bluff on the central coast of California overlooking Monterey Bay. Subsequently renamed the Defense Language Institute (DFI), the school still sits high on that bluff above the now revitalized Cannery Row. When the writer John Steinbeck roamed the area during the Great Depression, the canneries along the waterfront below thrived on the catch of the sardine fishing fleet.

Much later in the mid-‘50s when I was assigned to ALS for language study, the sardine fisheries had collapsed, and the canneries had gone into decline; it was a ramshackle scene notable only due to Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row (1945). After I graduated, the street of defunct canning factories was officially renamed in honor of the novel and its famous author who a few years later was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The language school was first established in ’41 for training GIs in Japanese. After the war, ALS moved to its present location, the Presidio of Monterey, an old Spanish fort. The school’s curriculum grew rapidly apace with the challenges of the postwar international situation. When I studied at Monterey, over 25 languages were being offered by native speakers from various countries. By the end of the ‘50s, more than 20,000 military personnel had passed through ALS.

Not surprisingly, given international tensions, the school emphasized the intensive training of service personnel in the languages of the United States’ Cold War adversaries and their client states as well as instruction in the languages of our allies in the global struggle. Russian was by far the largest language program then, followed by Chinese and Korean. Collectively, the various languages of the USSR’s Baltic and East European satellites also enrolled a large group of military students.

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Given international tensions, the school emphasized the intensive training of service personnel in the languages of US Cold War adversaries as well as in the languages of our allies in the global struggle.

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Smaller numbers of soldier-students studied Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Burmese, Indonesian, and Thai as well as several West European and Scandinavian languages. During the year I spent at ALS studying Czech, one of my college friends was learning Persian across the post.

When I revisited the school several years ago the curriculum had changed radically since the end of the Cold War and onset of the war on terrorism. The barracks and classroom buildings where the East Europeanists had lived and studied still stood, but had been repurposed. With the liberation of the former Soviet Union’s satellites and the inclusion of most of the now-independent countries in NATO, the study of their languages was no longer essential. 

Instead, my old billet and neighboring barracks had been converted to additional classrooms for the hundreds of men and women soldiers training for America’s contemporary challenges – studying among others two of the heretofore secondary languages of the ASA/DLI curriculum -- Arabic and Farsi (Persian) – as well as new additions such as Pashto, a language of Afghanistan, and Urdu, spoken in Pakistan. 

In the ‘60s, my brother Jeff Sharlet followed me to Monterey as a GI student of Vietnamese. In ’62 a low intensity ‘hot’ war was underway in South Vietnam, and the Pentagon was steadily but quietly building up its cadres of translators and interpreters. As the war heated up, Jeff and most of his ALS cohort ended up in Vietnam.

Vietnamese had first been taught in the US during WWII. A special program for a small number of GIs was created at University of California – Berkeley and University of Wisconsin – Madison. Later during the Cold War ‘50s, Vietnamese was added to the roster of languages taught at ALS. Vietnamese native speakers joined the school’s faculty in ’54, the year of France’s defeat in the first Indochina War when the US began to assume its fateful responsibility for the newly created state of South Vietnam.

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In the course of the second Indochina War – the American war – 

20,000 military personnel passed through the gates of the Defense

   Language Institute and its regional branches to study Vietnamese.

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In the course of the second Indochina War – the American war – 20,000 military personnel passed through the gates of the Defense Language Institute and its regional branches to study Vietnamese. The great majority were sent for a short course (8-weeks) designed for officers and non-commissioned officers headed to Southeast Asia as military advisors to units of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

A much smaller contingent, including Jeff and his buddies, spent 11.5 months in the classrooms of the Monterey Presidio being trained as translators and interpreters. Most of the long-term students were part of the Army Security Agency (ASA), an autonomous communications intelligence outfit, or they were assigned to the Military Intelligence (MI) branch of the Army.

Unlike my generation of Cold War GIs who, because of the Iron Curtain could at best only observe the countries of the Soviet Bloc from afar, Jeff and his fellow linguists lived and worked in a Vietnamese language environment. As a result they were able to hone their language skills with some of them becoming quite fluent in Vietnamese.

Of my fellow linguists of the European communist states who continued using their languages after leaving the military, a number became academics, specialists on the countries whose languages we had learned and worked in for a couple of years of our military tour. Jeff and his group also parlayed their language skills as well as the Vietnam experience after the service, but in more varied ways.

At least two became academics, one becoming a distinguished scholar of Vietnamese politics. Another stayed on in Vietnam, and yet another returned as a civilian employee of a US company that constructed infrastructure for the military. Another GI linguist, for whom the romance of Vietnamese culture was strong, became a student of Oriental languages back in the States as well as a poet of the Vietnam experience.

Doffing the uniform, a couple of others became players in the Vietnam War writ large. One young ex-Vietnam GI became station chief for the National Security Agency (NSA) in Saigon, later rising to the number two position in the agency back in Washington.

Then there was brother Jeff who founded the first GI-edited underground antiwar paper directed to serving GIs and in the process became an early leader of the emerging GI opposition to the war. *

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Among Jeff’s generation of Vietnam GIs, one young ex-Army Security   

Agency linguist took the unusual step of becoming a Buddhist monk.

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However, among Jeff’s generation of Vietnam GIs, one young ex-Army Security Agency linguist took the unusual step of becoming a Buddhist monk. Steve Shlafer had completed a couple of years of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) when he dropped out and enlisted in ASA. Like Jeff, Steve was sent to ALS for intensive language training in Vietnamese and upon graduation deployed to South Vietnam for classified work. 

 

Steve Shlafer (r) at an ASA base outside Saigon, 1963

During the requisite 12-month tour in-country, Steve Shlafer became not only an outstanding linguist, but also deeply interested in Vietnamese Buddhist culture. After completing his military obligation, he returned to Vietnam, enrolling at Saigon’s Van Hanh University in – a Buddhist-run school – where he studied Buddhist theology as well as Chinese and Vietnamese literature. Finishing his studies in ‘67, Steve was hired by an American subcontractor to a Washington agency to research and write an in-depth study of a particular Buddhist sect.

In early December of ‘67, he submitted an extensive report on the Hoa Hao religious tradition. Hoahaoism is a relatively modern version of Buddhism with a populist and social welfare orientation. The movement, which today claims two million adherents across Vietnam’s Mekong River Delta, focuses mainly on peasant farmers, emphasizes Buddhist lay worship at home and in the fields rather than primarily in temples, and favors aid to the poor over pagoda-building and expensive rituals.

Three years later, Steve Shlafer’s nearly 300-page study was cited in a State Department training manual for Foreign Service officers assigned to Vietnam.

Cover page of Foreign Service Institute manual on Vietnam (1970)

A few days after handing in his manuscript, Steve Shlafer completed final preparations for becoming a Theravada (also known as Southern Buddhism, the most prominent form in Southeast Asia) Buddhist monk, an extraordinary commitment for a foreigner in general and an American ex-GI in particular. After performing the ritual of walking three times around the pagoda, he entered and took his vows. With shaved head he donned the traditional saffron gown with yellow sash and was assigned a cell in the pagoda. Almost immediately the new monk became the center of media attention back in the States.

Steve Shlafer making the ritual walks around the pagoda, 1967

To further characterize Steve Shlafer’s dramatic act in the midst of the Vietnam War, the Associated Press (AP) highlighted that he was Jewish. Of course, for the American public it would have been hardly less remarkable if a Vietnamese speaking ex-GI of the Christian persuasion had been inducted into the Buddhist religion.

Steve Shlafer (l) taking his monastic vows, 1967

At a mini-press conference in his pagoda cell, Thich Thien Hien, aka Steve Shlafer, told the newsmen that his parents back home were aware of his plans, and he had just written them that he had taken the step. He fended off questions about his parents’ reaction, saying – perhaps with a smile, “They probably think it’s another one of my wild schemes.”**

Simultaneously, the New York Times interviewed his mother in New Jersey who expressed skepticism of her son’s whole venture. Saying that she had tried to “kid him out of it,” his mother speculated that Steve would give up the idea of being a monk in a few months and return to college in the States.***

Not long after the solemn ceremony – in late January ’68 when the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army launched the Tet Offensive throughout South Vietnam – Steve in his religious regalia reportedly took temporary cover with his old unit out near the airport. Given the fact that Saigon was a battle zone, it was probably a wise decision notwithstanding his new status and appearance as a monk – especially as a rather conspicuous American Caucasian Buddhist.

         

In the end Mrs Shlafer was right since Steve eventually did give up monkhood. However, that wasn’t and still isn’t unusual in Buddhist practice where men have been known to enter the pagoda for a period of time and then return to their previous lives. In any event, Steve Shlafer married and spent a dozen years in Sweden from 1974 to 1986 where he completed medical school at the University of Goteborg.

Returning to the States, he did his medical residency and became a physician. Many decades on since wartime Saigon, Dr Stephen Shlafer has long been a respected pediatrician in the Pacific Northwest.

*For an account of the GI antiwar paper, Vietnam GI, see http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/

**AP story run in the New York Times, 4 December 1967

**New York Times, 4 December 1967

Cuba Dispatches – The View from Moscow

In the fall of ’62, brother Jeff and I were each doing our thing. He was reluctantly learning Vietnamese – he had wanted Russian – at the Army Language School (ALS) in Monterey while I hunkered down in Bloomington feverishly preparing for my PhD exams at Indiana University (IU).

One day in October I was surprised to find the Cold War swirling around me. I had thought that day-to-day reality was behind me when I finished my tour on the front lines of the great East-West conflict in Europe four years earlier. However, the Soviets had secretly begun their build-up in Cuba during late summer. First, ground troops were sent by sea from Leningrad. To avoid detection by US and British aircraft routinely surveilling Soviet shipping out of the eastern Baltic, the troops were kept out of sight below decks by day.

         

Even when the literary-minded infantry commander requested permission to go topside as the ship was passing through the narrow strait off the Danish coast – just to glimpse the legendary castle at Elsinore where Shakespeare’s Hamlet was set – the ship’s captain turned him down. To all intents and purposes, the vessels that NATO overflights observed were just ordinary Soviet freighters routinely carrying cargo to Cuba.

         

Not until early October when Soviet missile launchers had been emplaced in Cuba and the defensive ground force was encamped ashore did the US detect Khrushchev’s near fait accompli. The ominous ’13 days in October’ ensued with National Security Advisor Bundy convening an ad hoc ‘executive committee’ (Ex-Comm) chaired by the President and his brother to cope with the crisis.

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During the crisis, anticipating missile strikes on their bases, the Strategic Air Command dispersed 200 bombers with nuclear loads to civilian airports.

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Meanwhile at normally placid IU, a fellow grad student in Soviet Studies, the left activist George Shriver had done his political work well. Although he had withdrawn from grad school in the spring of ’62, moved to New York, and opted for a career as a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) staffer, George left behind at the university a solidly organized, albeit small SWP affiliate, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), and its off-shoot, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC).

         

Coming to the end of my time at IU that fall semester, I was unaware of those small campus activist groups. A typical liberal, left politics were not my thing. My PhD coursework completed, I was intensely studying for the doctoral exams in November.

The exams loomed large in a grad student’s life. If one passed successfully, one was admitted to ‘candidacy’, meaning you moved on to researching and writing a dissertation – in effect, a book-length manuscript – toward attaining a PhD degree and beyond, an academic career.

For me then, nothing had higher priority in October ’62 – not even the hair-raising confrontation between the United States and the USSR over little Cuba just 90 miles off-shore. Likewise, the unfolding Cuban Missile Crisis made barely a ripple in the routine at ALS on the California coast. Jeff and his fellow GI students continued to attend language classes six hours a day while the Kennedy (JFK) Administration was quietly building up its assets for the low-key but escalating war in Vietnam.

Meanwhile off the Florida coast, tensions were rising. Soviet anti-aircraft missiles brought down an American U-2 over Cuba while another US spy plane, actually on a high altitude weather mission, accidently strayed into Soviet airspace, a provocation even at the best of times. Soviet MiGs scrambled, US fighters rose to meet them, and the errant U-2 pilot barely escaped, not to mention that an aerial dogfight was avoided.

Serious people in the States feared the possibility of full-scale armed conflict between the superpowers, one that could rapidly escalate into nuclear war. They weren’t far off the mark as we subsequently learned. In the Ex-Comm meetings in the White House, shielded from public view, the generals were strongly pushing JFK to attack Cuba and take out the Soviet missile batteries soon expected to be ready to threaten American cities and military installations.

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The protestors – Fair Play for Cuba stalwarts – were trying to march down a 

broad avenue amidst several thousand shouting and cursing fellow students.

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Anticipating missile strikes on Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases, the Pentagon dispersed 200 bombers loaded with nuclear bombs to civilian airports from Portland to Philadelphia. In turn, the Army mobilized a quarter of a million troops for an invasion of Cuba – my parents living in Miami told me the roads south to the sea were clogged with military vehicles. Even inexperienced, first-year student nurses in training at hospitals across the country were put on alert for casualties from a nuclear attack.

Naturally I was deeply concerned – who wouldn’t be – and I had to make a very fundamental decision. Time was short before my PhD exams, but so was the nuclear fuse lit between the superpowers. With WWIII waiting in the wings, should I hang it up – forget about studying day and night and have a final fling before everything came to an end – or should I push on. I voted for a future.

As the missile crisis deepened, I was walking across campus to the library one afternoon to collect more books and saw a clutch of people – perhaps eight in number – carrying signs critical of the President’s naval blockade of Cuba. American warships were on station to prevent Soviet freighters from delivering the missiles, the final step in the dangerous contretemps underway. The protestors – FPCC stalwarts – were trying to march down one of IU’s broad avenues amidst a huge crowd of several thousand shouting and cursing fellow students.†

Occasionally a hostile student would dash out of the crowd, snatch a protester’s sign, and tear it up to stormy cheers. Farther along the march route,

another onlooker ran out, threw a punch, and a brief scuffle ensued – the marcher slugged was trying to shield the two women at the center of the group.

Throughout the ordeal, campus security and the city cops stood by impassively as the FPCC folks struggled on, advocating at that moment as the nation was rallying around the flag probably the most unpopular position imaginable. As I walked on, I thought, ‘God, those people are brave’.

Fortunately for the world, cool heads prevailed in the Kremlin and at the White House, and the crisis came to a peaceful resolution. We all breathed a sigh of relief. It might have been otherwise if JFK had not fended off General Curtis LeMay and other hawks on the Ex-Comm pushing for a preemptive air and land attacks on Cuba.

After the USSR collapsed in ’91, it was revealed in Moscow that the Soviet combat brigade in Cuba had been equipped with tactical nuclear weapons, and the commander was authorized to use them if American forces came ashore.

Castro was furious the Soviets had backed off and pulled their missile batteries, leaving revolutionary Cuba high and dry. He was well aware of the CIA’s attempts to assassinate him and assumed the ‘imperialist’ United States would not stop at taking him out, but would launch another invasion of the island.

At IU, but for a few bruises, IU’s pro-Cuba contingent survived its ordeal to protest another day. Jeff finished at the language school and shipped out to Vietnam, and I passed my PhD exams and headed for Moscow late summer ‘63 for a year of dissertation research for my doctorate.

I had been selected for the official US-Soviet graduate student exchange designed to encourage better mutual understanding to help avoid war. The idea was that each side’s young scholars would get an up-close experience in their respective societies. I was assigned to the law school at Moscow University. It was to be a remarkable year.

My arrival at Moscow Law School in September ’63 was preceded by Castro’s state visit to the USSR that spring. Khrushchev wanted to make amends to the unhappy Cuban leader for the Soviets’ abrupt retreat from Cuba. Castro had agreed to go to Moscow to discuss a very generous Soviet aid package as a kind of reparations. The trip was organized around the May Day celebrations, the second most important holiday in the Soviet calendar.

It was the most elaborate welcome ever extended to a foreign head of state. A red carpet was laid out from Lenin’s Tomb to Swan Lake. Castro reviewed the gala May Day parade in Red Square from atop Lenin’s Mausoleum along with the Soviet leadership – a rare honor for a foreign leader.

Castro & Khrushchev, May Day parade, 1963

Soviet crowds were ecstatic over the charismatic Cuban leader, a genuine revolutionary hero. In the late ‘50s American media had lionized the guerrillas for their daring forays against the Batista regime, so one can easily imagine the exuberant Soviet press adulation that preceded Castro.

For Khrushchev, the visit was of the utmost significance as it helped repair the damage to his image with his comrades after the humiliating withdrawal from the Caribbean. It also shored up his flagging leadership position in the international communist movement – for the time being.

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Soviet crowds were ecstatic over Castro, a genuine revolutionary hero.

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Fidel understood the great leverage he had and extracted a huge political, economic, and military aid package. On the symbolic side of the state visit, the USSR heaped honors and laurels on him, including an honorary Doctorate of Laws from what would shortly become my Soviet alma mater, Moscow University (MGU). The degree was conferred in the Great Hall at MGU’s Lenin Hills campus high above the River Moskva. The citation noted Castro’s contribution to the “application of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine to State and Law.”

In his acceptance remarks before the throng of students, including my soon-to-be fellow law students, Fidel told them that his first big mistake in life was to study law in a capitalist society with its main emphasis on commercial, property, and real estate law, “laws of a society doomed to disappear.” He assured his audience to rousing cheers that Marxism-Leninism would guide the solutions to all of Cuba’s constitutional, legal, and institutional questions.

Castro went on to tour the length and breadth of that vast country from Murmansk near the Arctic Circle to ancient Samarkand in the Soviet Central Asian desert. At every stop he was enthusiastically feted by the local establishment and the general public. After more than 40 days, he returned triumphantly to Havana.

Castro and Soviet sailors in Leningrad, 1963

I arrived in Moscow for my research year in early September. The university was still on summer break so I had time to look around. I made a point of going to several Soviet movies – nothing remarkable, ordinary fare – primarily to ‘tune up’ my Russian language ear. The only one I recall was a WWII drama which, given the country’s staggering losses of 27 million dead, was in ’63 still well within living memory of nearly all.

The scenario followed a predictable plot line – first the Soviet forces suffered serious reverses, but then regrouped and through great heroism exacted a terrible toll on the enemy. What surprised me though was that all around me in the theater older men were weeping.

A few weeks later I was no longer the only occupant on my floor of the dorm – the law students had come back for fall semester. Most had been working in Kazakhstan, one of the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics, performing their pro bono ‘social duty’ helping bring in the harvest. Moscow Law School soon came alive, and it was time for me to present myself to my Soviet advisor.

The law school was near the city center, lodged in a time-worn 18^th century building not far from the Kremlin. It was a rather ornate structure and must have been at one time the grand residence of a wealthy merchant.

At the appointed hour, I climbed the stairs to the Jurisprudence Department on the second floor. The door stood open, and I entered the cavernous room with elaborately ornamented flourishes along the high ceiling, décor I’d never before seen in an academic office.

My advisor, Dr Professor A I Denisov, a nationally known jurist, chaired the department and had assembled his faculty to welcome the American visitor. For me, a rookie in Russia, it was somewhat daunting as they all rose to greet me with customary handshakes. Andrei Ivanovich introduced me to each colleague, several of whose names I recognized from having read their books.

Everyone was cordial, but it was still little overwhelming since the huge windows overlooking the street below were open – AC not an option – and noise rising from passing buses and trolleys sometimes drowned out the chair’s deep hoarse voice. Finally, an ice-breaker of sorts as I was introduced to a junior docent about my age.

He asked where I lived in the States. Told him my parents lived in south Florida, at which he lit up with a big smile and said, “I’ll be flying over there in a few days.” He was bound for Havana for the academic year to lecture at the law school through simultaneous translation on Soviet administrative law.

The docent was part of the vanguard of the big Soviet aid package negotiated by Castro during his spring visit – one of a number of law profs being dispatched to Cuba, effectively to transmit the Soviet legal model. Coincidentally, a generation earlier when East Europe fell behind the Iron Curtain, Professor Denisov, as a young scholar, had performed the same function in Communist Bulgaria as the new regime there struggled to put a Soviet-style system in place.

As had been the case in Communist East Europe earlier, by the late ‘60s most of the textbooks used in the Cuban law schools were verbatim translations of Soviet texts into Spanish.

I soon settled into a routine in Moscow – research at the Lenin Library, classes at the law school, and occasional forays into the impressive world of Soviet high culture, music, ballet, and theater. One evening that fall I was at the Bolshoi Theater with a group of fellow American exchange students. We had gone to see the Russian opera Boris Godunov. As foreign visitors in the USSR, we were privileged to have excellent orchestra seats at nominal cost.

Bolshoi Theater, Moscow

We arrived early and waited for the curtain, which was delayed a few minutes. I had noticed that the theater’s first three rows were empty and cordoned off by ushers. Finally, some 75 Cuban Army officers trooped in and filled the seats as honored guests of the evening. They doubtlessly didn’t know Russian, so what they might have thought of that melodramatic opera – a dark tale of royal intrigue in the 17^th century Kremlin – we’ll never know.

During intermission in the lobby, the officers kept to themselves. Just as the US trained allied Latin American military personnel in our higher command schools, the Bolshoi’s guests were also part of the Soviet aid program to revolutionary Cuba. They were in Moscow for advanced tactical training in Soviet Army schools.

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North Vietnamese students posted a large sign in our dorm lounge gleefully  welcoming Kennedy’s death; Russian students tore it down in a fury. _________________________________________________________

During my Moscow sojourn, I became aware of Cuba for the last time in late ’63. I was in my room in the Lenin Hills dorms when the terrible news arrived that JFK had been assassinated in Dallas just an hour earlier on the other side of the world.††

There were just a few Americans in the dorm, and we were desperate for information. From what we could glean from special Soviet news announcements interspersed with funereal music, Voice of America shortwave broadcasts, and phone calls to the embassy, the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had a possible Cuban connection. He was married to a young Soviet woman and had lived for a time in the USSR. Once back in the States, he identified himself with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

My Russian dorm mates greatly admired Castro and were quite upset at the suggestion that Cuba might be involved in the death of the President. Paradoxically, they also thought well of JFK even though he was the chief adversary of their country.

Sub rosa they appreciated JFK’s youth and vigor as a leader. Unspoken, but well understood, was an implicit comparison with their own sluggish, geriatric leadership. When North Vietnamese students from the floor below posted a large Russian-language sign in our dorm lounge that gleefully welcomed Kennedy’s death, the Russian students tore it down in a fury.

Two days later, when Jack Ruby shot Oswald before the cameras of the world, the Soviet public was shocked and dismayed by our gun-crazy culture, and nothing further was heard of a Cuban link. For me, dissertation research beckoned, and Cuba fell off my radar screen.

I returned to the States the following summer, and several months later Khrushchev’s comrades ousted him in a bloodless coup. The bill of particulars against him included a number of his policies dubbed ‘harebrained schemes’, among which the USSR’s Cuban debacle loomed large.

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† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/12/for-better-world-lives-of-new-left-iv_18.html

†† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/11/moscow-thanksgiving-63.html

         

         

         

         

Catching Sight of A Revolution – From Harvard to IU

In the time between the world wars, our father, like so many Americans, had visited Cuba’s exotic capital in the interwar period. He was in Havana in 1930 during the country’s heady Republican Period, but decades later my brother Jeff and I had only passing awareness of revolutionary Cuba of our own time.  We’d both seen the family photo of Irving as a young man – he was 21 – dressed to the nines with a good looking blonde at the bar in Sloppy Joe’s – the famous celebrity hangout on Cuba’s Golden Riviera.

Irving Sharlet (l), our father, in Havana, 1930

Irving had grown up in comfortable circumstances; he had some money and was something of a playboy. At the time, Prohibition reigned as the law of the land in the States. To get a drink without a password in a back alley speakeasy, well-heeled Americans would sail off to Europe or head to the Caribbean to relax with a highball in fashionable public places. Sloppy Joe’s was one of the in-places, just off-shore so to speak, where one might see John Wayne or Clark Gable or even Cuba’s most famous North American visitor, Hemingway, down the bar.

Decades afterward during the postwar period when dramatic changes began happening in Cuba, the island country was on the periphery of our young lives. Jeff in his short life – he died at 27 – had been heavily involved with Vietnam. Serving there early in the growing conflict, he later became an international leader of GI opposition against the war. I became an academic, a specialist on the Soviet Union, where I had studied and visited periodically. I spent most of my adult years teaching and writing about the country.

Still, as the Cuban Revolution emerged in the ‘50s and consolidated in the early ‘60s, quite serendipitously Jeff and I bore witness to some of the salient moments of the island’s transition from a popular Caribbean tourist destination to the epicenter of the global Cold War. Cuba first came to my attention unexpectedly in late fall ’56. In the phrase of the day, I was fulfilling my military obligation in the army.

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The rebellion in Cuba is over, and students of foreign affairs can now 

give  themselves again to Hungary and the Middle East.

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I was fortunate, having been assigned to a congenial posting for a year of study at the Army Language School (ALS) on the sunny California coast. I was being trained in a Slavic language, my only duties six hours a day of class and a little homework. At lunch break, I always had the latest issue of the airmail edition of the British paper, Manchester Guardian, in my back pocket as I waited in the chow line. Reading it was a pleasant respite from the morning’s grammar lessons, pronunciation drills, and vocabulary tests.

One noontime I was glancing through the early December ‘56 issue of the Guardian. Hungary and the Suez Canal were the lead stories. The Soviets had just bloodily crushed the Hungarian Revolution while the Israeli, British, and French forces had defeated the Egyptians, whose nationalization of the Canal had touched off a brief but fierce war.

Perusing the back pages, my eye fell on an unfamiliar story, ‘The battle for Cuba’, with a dismissive opening line, “The rebellion in Cuba is over, and students of foreign affairs can now give themselves again to Hungary and the Middle East.” Reading on, I found a lighthearted account, rife with British irony, of a hapless invasion of the island by a band of Cuban revolutionaries sailing from Mexico.

As I would learn a few years later, the Guardian had some of the key details wrong, but it was right on the end of the affair – the armed forces of the dictator Batista had quickly routed the invaders – killing or capturing most of them on the beach.

The invasion group – 82 of them – had arrived offshore aboard a yacht perilously overloaded with men, weapons, and ammo and leaking to boot. Departing from the Gulf of Mexico, most of them became seasick and were depleted as the boat twice nearly capsized in rough waters. Then, after crossing the Caribbean Sea, they missed their landing spot on the Cuban coast, ran aground in a swamp, and had to wade ashore in chest-high water. Needless to say, the would-be revolutionaries were sitting ducks for the defenders.

The leader of the unlucky band, Fidel Castro, an exiled revolutionary, was reportedly killed, but he actually made it off the beach and into the mountains along with some 20 survivors to fight again another day. But in late ’56, the Guardian wrote the expedition off with the sardonic line that the “invasion fleet” (the yacht) “was badly damaged and might be unfit for charter for the rest of the tourist season.”*

I had reached the mess hall food line, laughed off the Caribbean caper, and gave neither Fidel nor Cuba any further thought. Afternoon classes awaited, and it was back to the Cold War. But to my surprise, Cuba briefly reappeared on my radar just over a year later while I was serving in the forces in West Germany. On an off-duty weekend, I had covered the German Grand Prix – an international Formula 1 car race in the Eifel Mountains – for an American paper.

It was an exciting, closely contested race at staggering speeds – won by the reigning world champion, the Argentine Juan Fangio at the wheel of a Maserati, edging out his British challenger in a Ferrari by a margin of three seconds. I filed my story stateside and it was again back to the Cold War. So much for the glamorous world of F-1 racing.†

But then, El Maestro Fangio, whose name was usually found on the world’s sports pages, turned up as front page news in the Paris Herald Tribune. He had gone to Havana in ‘58 for the Cuban Grand Prix to defend his title and was ‘politely’ kidnapped by the Fidelistas – by then a formidable guerrilla movement with broad support, they constantly tweaked Batista’s forces in classic hit and run encounters.

They held Fangio just a few days to garner maximum international publicity. When released unharmed, the champion spoke favorably of his captors, a propaganda coup for Castro. He had shown he could snatch a world famous figure right off the streets of Havana with impunity, a sure sign the regime was on its last legs.

Later that year I got out of the Army and was back in college, just in time for fall semester at Brandeis University outside Boston. My father had gone bust financially, so I was on my own, on borrowed money for tuition and working nights as a cabbie for Boston Checker. To be closer to my job and because it was a cool place, I rented inexpensive digs on Eliot Street just off Harvard Square, Cambridge.

While I was settling back into the world of books and classes, Castro and his revolutionary army finally defeated Batista. Entering Havana as victors, they took power on New Year’s Day ’59. The old regime had been notorious for its cruelty and corruption, so the Cuban Revolution was greeted warmly by Americans as well as Europeans, not to mention the Communist Bloc and Third World nations.

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At Harvard I was in the crowd of 10,000 exuberantly welcoming Castro.

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Several months after the victory Castro was invited to the States. Landing in Washington – although coolly received by the Eisenhower (Ike) Administration – the charismatic Maximum Leader took the country by storm, making his way up the East Coast city by city in a triumphant tour. Castro looked and acted the hero, and the American public took to him.

Not everyone was happy about his visit though – there were death threats at every stop. As a result, when Castro reached New York, the city organized the greatest security cordon in its history, even more so than for a president. His final stop in the US was Boston where he was scheduled to speak at Harvard. I saw the posters in Harvard Square and decided to go hear him.

It was late April ’59 – actually 55 years ago this week – when Castro  appeared at the Harvard Field House on a warm Saturday evening. After a bomb scare in New York, Boston was taking no chances. The Cuban leader’s train had been met at Back Bay Station by 300 of the city’s finest. As he was driven the several blocks to his hotel, cheering crowds lining the route were held back by a wall of blue.

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Cuba’s Ethan Allen leading the Green Mountain boys had taken on and defeated King George III in the guise of Fulgencio Batista.

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A few hours later, Castro was accompanied to Harvard by a combined force of Boston cops, Metro police, State Department security, and the FBI. As he walked across the grounds of the field house complex, he was flanked by a phalanx of tall Massachusetts State Troopers in their sky blue jackets, jodhpurs, and black boots.

Castro being escorted by Massachusetts State Troopers, 1959

I drove down Boylston Street to the Charles River, crossed the Eliot Bridge, and walked on up Soldiers Field Road to the field house. There I found myself part of an enormous crowd of some 10,000 students and others exuberantly welcoming the Cuban leader. He took the salute from a speaker’s stand high above the field where we all stood.

Harvard Law School was his host – Fidel was educated as a lawyer – although he was introduced by the Dean of Harvard College, McGeorge Bundy. It turned out that Fidel had applied to the law school as a young man in ‘48, but was turned down. Dean Bundy made light of this, saying that Harvard wanted to make amends and would now accept him.

Cuban and American flags were on display, and Castro was decked out in his trademark olive-green military fatigues and field cap. Standing at the podium above the Harvard crest, he was unobtrusively shielded on both sides by personal bodyguards and Boston security. When he was introduced, the roar of the crowd was deafening – Fidel and the guerrillas were seen through the prism of American legend. Cuba’s Ethan Allen leading the Green Mountain boys had taken on and defeated King George III in the guise of Fulgencio Batista.

Castro speaking at the Harvard Field House

Fidel was a forceful rather histrionic speaker given to dramatic gestures. His remarks were billed as ‘The Cuban Revolution’, but he didn’t dwell long on past battles. Instead he gave a thoughtful, albeit rambling, speech on the problems of backwardness and underdevelopment plaguing revolutionary Cuba.

From the press, he well understood that Americans, in their enthusiasm for his victory over a dictatorial regime, were expecting democracy and the rule of law to follow, but he patiently explained the more immediate problems facing his government were hunger, mass illiteracy, and a level of unemployment greater in scale than during the American Depression.

Castro went on to say all things would come in due time, but for now elections – absent political parties – would have to be put off at least two years. And he added pointedly that rights of the criminally accused would have to wait until the revolution dealt summarily with the many who had administered the terror and carried out torture under the old regime.

Up to that point, he still had the majority of the audience with him, but then a law student called out a question about a recent criminal case in Havana. A couple of Batista’s pilots had attempted to bomb the presidential palace. They received a stiff prison sentence, but Castro, dissatisfied, ordered a retrial.

Second time around they got the death penalty.

Wasn’t that double jeopardy the questioner persisted? Castro bridled at the challenge, responding aggressively that the second trial was justified by the higher right of the revolution to defend itself. At that, a chorus of boos floated up from below.

Fidel grew visibly angry, and his speech dissolved into a rant as he occasionally slipped from English into Spanish. The crowd’s good will toward him began to ebb. The atmosphere in the field house complex had changed, and the evening ended on a down note for many there.

I went off to grad school a year later. Indiana University (IU) had given me fellowship money to study Soviet Russia. As it happened, brother Jeff also arrived in Bloomington for his Freshman year. I was delighted with the lively, competitive graduate school milieu – in the midst of the Cold War, Soviet Studies was the hottest field around.

Jeff, however, was unhappy at the university. He had graduated from a small Eastern prep school and felt lost on the vast campus, a virtual small city in itself. He had hoped to go to an Ivy League school where all his friends were, but Pop’s business reversal precluded a costly private college.

One of my friends in the Russian Institute was George Shriver. Like me, he had come out to IU from the East – from Harvard where he’d majored in Russian. While I was in the Political Science PhD program, George’s focus was Russian language and literature. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, George was also a left political activist.

At IU that fall he had quietly organized a campus chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), the youth affiliate of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Then, from the small band of campus Trotskyists, George also spun off a local branch of the national Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in support of the Cuban Revolution.

George Shriver speaking at an YSA meeting, Indiana University

As fall term ‘60 was coming to an end, George, as FPCC chair, was organizing a trip to Cuba over Christmas break. Jeff got wind of the trip and put his name down, but even though the cost was modest, he didn’t have the money. He wrote home for funds. While our parents were apolitical, they were wary of anything controversial when it came to their sons, so Jeff had to make a persuasive pitch since the US government considered Cuba leaning toward Communism.

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Yet to come, the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion was an open secret in Miami émigré circles, and Castro’s forces were more than ready for them.

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In his letter, he explained that the trip was sponsored by FPCC, a national organization dedicated to offsetting critical media coverage of Cuba and giving the revolution a fair shake. He added:

   The Cuban government wants Americans to come there and judge the situation and the results of the revolution for themselves. There is nothing political involved. It’s just to have a good time and get informed on the real situation in Cuba.

Jeff asked me to add an endorsement to his letter, which I was happy to do. I knew he was drifting at IU and was glad to see him finally taking an interest in something.

Apparently the parents were persuaded, but in the end Jeff never made it to revolutionary Cuba. There weren’t enough takers, so the trip was called off. Not long after he dropped out of school and a year later found himself in my old military outfit. However, instead of sailing off to Europe as I did, he was taught Vietnamese and landed in Southeast Asia in the middle of a small war.

But I’m getting ahead of the story. By that spring of ’61 Cuba was back in the headlines. The time was JFK’s first 100 days, and he had adopted Ike’s animus toward Castro and, worse, his predecessor’s misbegotten plan to remove him from power – another hamhanded invasion of the island by Cuban exiles – although this time not a revolutionary vanguard, but a brigade of CIA-trained anti-Castro ‘patriots’.

Once again McGeorge Bundy, by then JFK’s National Security Advisor, was out front – serving as White House liaison to the Agency’s invasion planners. The ensuing Bay of Pigs fiasco is well-known – the whole ill-fated enterprise had become an open secret in Miami’s Cuban émigré circles, and Castro’s forces were more than ready for them.

         

The operation was a personal tragedy not just for the hundreds of brigadistas who survived, languishing in harsh Cuban prison camps for nearly two years – it was also a political disaster for America’s new young president. However, the image of his administration as a bunch of bunglers and himself personally as lacking in resolve only steeled JFK’s determination to get Castro. One of the President’s favorite maxims was ‘Don’t get mad, get even’.

         

After purging senior CIA people responsible for the debacle, JFK tasked the Agency to covertly eliminate Fidel – in a word, assassinate him. The hit plan, code-named ‘Operation Mongoose’, enlisted Cuban émigrés again, but this time the American Mafia as well – the very guys whose Havana casinos had been seized by the Castro regime in ’59.  

By summer ’62 the bizarre plotting to decapitate Communist Cuba was well underway.  Some of the looney ideas the plotters came up with included a lethal exploding cigar, exposing Castro to a fountain pen treated with poison, and, perhaps looniest of all, slipping a chemical into his shoes to cause his signature beard to fall out – that wouldn’t have worked anyway.

Unbeknownst to the US, that very summer Khrushchev was planning clandestine operations to carry out regime change in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, Latin American dictatorships firmly in the Western camp.

However, sensing that Kennedy might attempt another attack on Cuba, Khrushchev changed his mind and decided instead to secretly reinforce his new Caribbean client state, a move which would erupt in the coming months into the Cuban Missile Crisis – arguably the most dangerous moment of the long Cold War – but that’s a story for another post.

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*Manchester Guardian (December 4, 1956).

†  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-good-life-in-cold-war-europe.html

High Road From Moscow

Shortly after brother Jeff headed back to the ‘world’ via the Army’s labyrinthine bureaucracy – late spring ’64 – I was departing Moscow, metropolis of the mighty Soviet Empire, to return home by way of the Continent. During the ‘50s, I had served in the military in West Europe, but those carefree days as a Cold War soldier were well behind me.†

Jeff’s return began from a remote American base about 60 miles below the 17th parallel, the line then nominally dividing North and South Vietnam. He had been dispatched to Vietnam in August ’63; I had reached Moscow a month later.

He was soldiering, I was studying. We were both preoccupied with Communism – he with the North Vietnamese military across the border, I with the Marxian legacy of its patron, the USSR.

Each of us had gone abroad with some political baggage, but as a result of our respective experiences – mine with the ‘enemy’, Jeff’s with our Vietnamese allies – on return, we were traveling much lighter, more enlightened.

For Jeff – a Vietnamese linguist – becoming familiar with the country’s culture and seeing the war up close tended to blur the US image of saving South Vietnam from what would become its ultimate fate. He found that the average soldier or simple peasant had far less enthusiasm for Saigon’s war and the US effort to help them ‘win’ it, than reflected through the prism of Washington policy.

           

As for me, a year of studying with Soviet professors and living among their students had begun to subtly alter my image of the great East-West divide. Few of the Soviets I got to know well were as hard core Cold War as portrayed in American media. Then meeting Communist East Europeans on my journey homeward changed my perceptions even more.

My closest Soviet friend, the late Avgust Alexievich Mishin, the USSR’s leading specialist on ‘bourgeois constitutional law’, saw me off from Moscow with the better part of a bottle of scotch.

Avgust had lost an arm fighting outside Moscow in the late ’41 counter-offensive that saved the capital. His empty left sleeve (Soviet prosthetics were primitive), was a vivid reminder that WWII was still living memory for millions of Soviet citizens.

Professor Mishin (l) at the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Moscow, 1991

My journey west, first to Poland, began from the Belorussky railroad station. Nina, the department secretary at Moscow Law School; Valery, a Russian grad student friend; and my Soviet academic adviser came to see me off. Nina brought a bouquet, Valery, a box of chocolates. We exchanged farewells on the platform.

At the conductor’s signal, the professor helped me aboard with my luggage. Once in my private compartment, he quietly asked if I had enough Soviet currency for the long train ride across the steppe – he knew foreigners weren’t permitted to leave the USSR with rubles.

I had held back a ten-spot, which Anatoly Grigorevich didn’t feel was sufficient. To my astonishment, he reached into his pocket and discreetly handed me more rubles. I was deeply touched – not merely by his generosity, but by the trust and courage it took to pass money to an American in the middle of Cold War Moscow. If anyone had witnessed him, he would have been in serious trouble.

Belorussky Station, Moscow

Reaching Warsaw, I momentarily had the crazy illusion I was back in the West – the atmosphere was ‘lighter’, more open – it was a livelier place, more on a human scale than Moscow. But in fact, I was in the capital of the USSR’s largest and most important East European satellite.

The Ford Foundation of New York had given me funds to head home via Communist East Europe. I would be interviewing legal scholars in several countries starting in Poland.

Arriving at my hotel, I thought perhaps I had stepped through a looking glass into West Europe. Though of course a state-run concern, the lobby was inviting with many stylish people coming and going, but the biggest surprise was an inviting, well-stocked bar with polished mahogany paneling.

The barkeep was an attractive young blonde with a décolletage that would have shocked puritanical Moscow. Stepping up to the bar, I ordered a beer not knowing what to expect. With a flourish she pulled a tap and set before me a cold beer with a nice head. I marveled – I hadn’t been served a cold beer in a year.

Sure, they had beer in Russia – pivo – but it was not readily available. In what passed for cafés in Moscow, the main beverages on offer were Russian vodka, Armenian cognac, or Georgian wine. Once in a blue moon I’d see an announcement at the university that beer would go on sale, two warm bottles per person until they ran out, so I’d arrive early, and then let Russian winter chill the beer on my window ledge.

I bore letters of introduction from Moscow, and my first interview the next day was with the top Polish legal theorist, a law prof at Warsaw University. Professor Ehrlich, a tall, slender man in his late 40s, received me at the Journalist’s Club located in an elegant 19^th century palace.

Before going in for an excellent lunch, we sat in the garden having an aperitif – a small stemmed crystal glass of Polish vodka. I waited to see how he would drink it – in Russia vodka was downed by the tumblerful – but to my relief my host sipped his drink.

Over the next few hours Professor Ehrlich took all my questions, answering each fully and with refreshing candor. I was accustomed to Soviet academics responding cautiously, especially with a foreign scholar asking questions and taking notes.

Soviet academics never uttered criticism of a fellow scholar. Ehrlich quite freely evaluated his colleagues as well as my Soviet interlocutors. He didn’t have a high opinion of the legal philosophers to the east.

While in town, I wanted to meet other Polish jurists, and it just happened that the leading jurisprudence professors from Poland’s major law schools were in the capital for a conference. The Warsaw law faculty was conference host, so I was invited to an informal gathering the following day – a picnic on the sandy banks of the Vistula, Poland’s main river.

It was a great opportunity since I couldn’t otherwise have met jurists from far corners of the country during my limited stay there. The conference was wrapping up, and one of the best-known of the group invited me to visit him at his law school where he also happened to be rector of the university.

I took a train to Lublin and spent a fascinating day and a half with Grzegorz Leopold Seidler, a prolific scholar of Polish legal thought as well as the history of political ideas. We became good friends and later had occasion to collaborate.

Portrait of Rector Seidler of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland

A Communist patriot, the rector insisted on showing me an important historical site before I left. His chauffeur drove us to what looked like a small, well-tended park in a birch forest. We entered, and I soon realized I was in a cemetery, a very special military burial ground.

There was an obelisk in the middle but no tombstones, just raised markers inscribed in Russian at the center of dozens of grassy mounds, each framed by low stone borders.

Lublin was the region where the Soviet Army had first crossed into Poland in pursuit of the Germans forces. Total Soviet losses on that front had been staggering, far too many for a fast-moving army to set individual markers. So unit by unit, the dead were buried in large graves.

Accordingly, markers, for instance, read, here lie with eternal honor men of the 1^st battalion, 8^th Guards Army, or troops of the 5^th squadron, 7^th Cavalry, and on and on. I felt the emotion of the place, and as we left Rector Seidler said, “You understand now how much we owe the Soviet Union.”

I took a train south to Prague. I had written my Master’s thesis on Czechoslovakia and knew a good deal about the country, but wasn’t prepared for an encounter at the main railway terminal. Until the Communist coup in ‘48, Czechoslovakia had been the only democracy in interwar Eastern Europe.

A line of porters identifiable by their caps was awaiting my train; one took my bags. As we walked toward the taxis, we talked – he spoke English well and told me that up to ‘48 he’d been a successful Prague lawyer pleading before the Constitutional Court. After the coup, the new regime had sent all the ‘bourgeois’ judges and lawyers packing.

Since then, working as a porter was the best job he could hope for. Learning of his background and misfortune, I felt somewhat abashed that this distinguished-looking older man was carrying my luggage.

Meeting the senior Czech legal philosophers, I found that I was something of an anomaly, the rare American not on the left who came to Prague. Other than the off-limits diplomats at the US Embassy, the only Americans resident in the city were Communists on the run from McCarthyism and the FBI. Prague, a strikingly beautiful and livable European city, was their favored place of exile.

One of many bridges in Prague, Czech Republic

The scholars who received me were politically and theoretically divided. Those at the Law Faculty of Charles University, the Harvard of Czechoslovakia, tended to be uncritically pro-regime and conservative in their intellectual tastes.

Other jurists, research scholars at the Czech Academy of Sciences, were less enthusiastic about the prevailing neo-Stalinist status quo, and far more venturesome. They read any foreign books on democratic political theory they could get their hands on, and discussed Western ideas.

Of the latter group, most memorable were Zdenek Mlynar and his wife Rita along with their interesting and lively circle of academic friends. They took me to dinner at Prague’s French restaurant, and afterward we strolled the city center. I was shown where a monumental statue of Stalin had once stood.

Following Stalin’s death in ’53, and especially after Khrushchev’s public denunciation of the tyrant in ’56, the East European satellites were expected to eliminate Stalinist excesses. Removing offending statuary was the symbolic first step.

By ’64, the former site of the statue in Prague was marked only by a very large empty plinth, although beyond that the regime had dragged its feet on more significant changes.

Zdenek and his wife, an economist, were interested in Western ideas about government, particularly the role of interest groups in politics, discreetly suggesting that permitting them could provide a more pluralistic direction to the hidebound Czech Communist system. I silently reflected that such a change would be a radical departure from the centralized Soviet model.

Zdenek Mlynar during the Prague Spring, 1968

I didn’t realize at the time, but what I was hearing was part of the sub rosa ferment that would lead to the dramatic emergence of the 1968 ‘Prague Spring’, a major reform program led by the new Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcek.

Under Dubcek, Mlynar rose rapidly in the party hierarchy, becoming a high official and one of the leader’s principal advisers. He became the key idea man behind the startling reforms, including the emergence of non-communist interest groups.

The Soviet leadership, ever watchful of their satellites, had become increasingly uneasy with Prague’s political direction. In August ’68, Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia, shutting down the reform movement.

Dubcek and his chief advisers, including Mlynar, were arrested by Soviet troops and hustled off to Moscow for political ‘re-education’. When Mlynar was allowed to return to Czechoslovakia, he had no choice but to fall back on his avocation, entomology, to earn a living  working at a Prague museum.

By 1970, he had been expelled from the Communist Party, and in ‘77, after co-organizing ‘Charter 77’, an emerging dissident group, Mlynar was forced into exile.

A few pleasant weeks in the company of sophisticated, urbane East Europeans had had a lulling effect on me. But enroute to my last stop, Yugoslavia, a minor encounter jolted me back to reality. When I politely questioned a border guard’s order on the train passing through Hungary, his hand immediately went to his holster, reminding me what part of the world I was still in.

Crossing the Yugoslav frontier, I had entered an independent Communist country – the USSR and Yugoslavia had broken off relations in ‘48, and, although ties had later been renewed, the Yugoslavs continued their separate ways.

The US even provided foreign aid to encourage the country’s independence from Moscow’s orbit. I was headed for Belgrade, the capital, for the final leg of my three-week swing through East Europe.

My credentials again opened many doors: a letter from the chair of Jurisprudence at Moscow University, travel under Ford Foundation auspices, and that I had been a former student of Jerome Hall, a premier American philosopher of law.

The academic legal elite of Belgrade were more open to the West.

A number of research institutes had intellectual ties to West European institutions, while several were closely associated with Strasbourg in northeastern France, the international center for the study of comparative law, a subject not welcome in Moscow.

The Yugoslav capital was a relatively relaxed city compared to where I’d been living the past year. There were a number of nice looking restaurants where service and food were a departure from the Soviet culinary model. Like all large cities, there were many movie theaters, but it was refreshing to see quite a number of good foreign films on offer, including several well-regarded American feature films.

Three of the jurists with whom I spoke – Tadic, Pasic, and Lukic – reflected the intellectual diversity of the Yugoslav theory establishment as well as its generational structure. Tadic, the youngest, had been a Marxist since boyhood and was philosophically closest to the utopian aspects of the Marxian tradition.

Pasic, who was middle-aged, had completed his legal education in the late ‘40s and, at the time of the Soviet-Yugoslav split, became a principal critic of the Soviet system. By the time I met him, he was quite interested in American political and legal theory. He was fairly well read.

The grand old man of the Yugoslav scene was Lukic, who had earned a PhD in the Sociology of Law in Paris during the interwar period. He was head of the jurisprudence section at the University of Belgrade Law School.

I found Professor Lukic, who resembled the older Mark Twain, in his well-appointed office behind a massive desk. After I introduced myself, his secretary brought in demitasses of Turkish coffee, as black and thick as anything I’d ever seen. 

Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia

We discussed the new Yugoslav Constitution – he had been a draftsman. Although a far cry from constitutional charters in the West, the document was light years ahead of Soviet Bloc constitutions.

However, I noted a puzzling paradox in a key clause. In its basic law, Yugoslavia repudiated the use of force in international relations, but with a major caveat – except for ‘wars of national liberation’. Professor Lukic merely nodded without comment.

It was a familiar Soviet concept that included the war in Vietnam Jeff had just left behind. So while Yugoslavia was beyond the pale of the Soviet Bloc, there was still clearly ambivalence about the country’s independent path.

It was time for me to move on, so I booked a sleeper train, a descendant of the old Orient Express, and awoke the next morning in Paris where I had spent a leisurely week during my army days in ’58. I stayed a few days with a French girl, a fellow grad student I’d met in Moscow, before flying home to New York.

I came away from my long sojourn in the East with a more nuanced and subtle sense of the Cold War than the prevailing black & white view in the US. At Moscow University, a great many of my fellow Soviet students never knew their fathers who had died in the war. Most of the law profs were veterans, and several were missing limbs. None of those people were anxious to see international tensions heat up.

By the time I left Moscow, the well-defined shape of the Cold War had begun to soften. My travels through Communist East Europe left the notion of a monolithic Soviet Bloc somewhat tattered. Compared to the ideological certainties in the USSR, East Europe was relatively alive with diversity in the realm of ideas.

The region may have been subject to Soviet control, but it was not marching in lockstep with Moscow. On the contrary, the tolerance of a strong Catholic Church, the repository of nationalism, clearly set Poland apart. In Czechoslovakia, just below the surface, critical intellectual ferment which subsequently surfaced in the Prague Spring, was bubbling. Then there was Yugoslavia, the outlier astraddle the Cold War frontiers between East and West.

Finally, Communist East Europe in no way reflected Soviet ideological rigidity. In fact, I found much admiration for America.  Yes, I of course heard the de rigueur criticism of ‘capitalism’, but I also noted appreciation for our open society.

I was headed for my first college teaching position. There would be much to talk about. For me, the Cold War had become a diverse and multi-hued phenomenon. Détente lay ahead.

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† For the relaxed atmosphere of my military tour in West Germany of the ‘50s, see

http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-good-life-in-cold-war-europe.html