Vietnam War Archives - Not Even Past

“Free Walter Collins!”: Black Draft Resistance and Prisoner Defense Campaigns during the Vietnam War

On December 10th, 1970, Dara Abubakari led a delegation of activists to Washington, D. C., where they visited the Department of Justice, the Selective Service headquarters, and the White House.[1] Activists representing a range of civil rights, Black nationalist, and anti-war organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Republic of New Africa (RNA), and the National Association of Black Students (NABS), participated in the December demonstration. Outside the Department of Justice, one group posed for a photo with signs, which read “Free Collins!” The delegation appeared on behalf of Abubakari’s son, Walter Collins, who had been imprisoned a few weeks earlier. Convicted of refusing induction into the U.S. military based on his opposition to the Vietnam War, Collins was facing five years in prison, even after numerous appeals. With few remaining avenues available for challenging Collins’ sentence in court, his supporters presented their case to individual government officials, and the broader public, in hopes of arousing concern.

A December 1970 photograph of pro-Collins demonstrators outside the Justice Department's headquarters in Washington, D. C. — *A December 1970 photograph of pro-Collins demonstrators outside the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington, D. C.* *Image courtesy of the author.*

Collins’ legal predicament was not unique. Hundreds of thousands of Americans avoided compulsory military service during the Vietnam War by filing exemptions as conscientious objectors, seeking medical deferments, leaving the country, or simply failing to report for induction—practices broadly categorized as draft evasion or resistance. Of those who refused induction or committed other draft violations, around 9,000 were convicted, and over 3,000 were imprisoned.[2] However, Collins’ legal case and the popular movement that developed around it offer particularly vivid examples of political repression and collective resistance during the Vietnam War era.

Between his sentencing in 1969 and his release from prison in 1972, Collins, his legal team, and his supporters worked tirelessly to appeal his sentence, publicize his case, and mobilize people on behalf of other draft resisters and political prisoners. They petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, organized public demonstrations, and distributed literature across the country and abroad. Instead of stifling resistance, Collins’ imprisonment actually spurred the development of new campaigns and organizations tailored to advocate for Black political prisoners.

Campaigns around the cases of Black draft resisters like Collins also reveal the particular ways in which civil rights activists engaged in anti-war organizing. Collins’ supporters constructed a large and diverse coalition, and in the process, they developed a critique of the draft as a weapon against movements for social and racial justice. Their campaign blurred the line between foreign policy and domestic politics, revealing how thoughtfully Black civil rights activists situated themselves on the world stage during the 1960s and 70s.

From Civil Rights to Draft Resistance

Walter Collins was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. His family had a long history of involvement in the Southern Black Freedom Struggle. His maternal grandparents, Arthur and Izama Young, were active in the fight to abolish the poll tax, and they helped establish a school system for Black students in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. They belonged to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the nation’s earliest civil rights organizations, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a group founded by Marcus Garvey on a platform of racial pride and economic self-sufficiency.[3] These groups offered the Youngs and other African American families important organizational structures for challenging discrimination in employment, voting, and education.

Civil rights organizers leading a column of participants in 1963's March on Washington. — Civil rights organizers leading a column of participants in 1963’s March on Washington up Constitution Avenue in Washington, D. C. Martin Luther King, Jr. is situated in the middle of the first row of marchers. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Collins’ mother, born Virginia Young, followed in her parent’s footsteps. She engaged in activism surrounding voting rights, reparations, and police violence, and she participated in landmark events, like the March on Washington in 1963. She held leadership positions in organizations including the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), an interracial civil rights group, and the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women (UAEW), a Pan-African organization founded by Audley “Queen Mother” Moore. During the late 1960s, she became a regional vice president of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), a Black nationalist organization, and she adopted the name Dara Abubakari around this time.[4]

Walter Collins’ career as an activist began in the early 1960s, when he participated in the New Orleans sit-in movement as a high school student. During the following years, he attended Louisiana State University in New Orleans and worked with groups like SCEF and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to organize communities across the Deep South around issues including voting rights, working conditions, and public education. At the time of his arrest, Collins was active in SCEF’s Grass Roots Organizing Work (GROW) project in Laurel, Mississippi, where he and his colleagues provided support to a local woodcutter’s union.[5]

Over the course of the 1960s, as the Vietnam War escalated, Collins became more deeply involved in anti-war activism. In this respect, he was not unique. While the popular imagery of the 1960s and 1970s anti-war movement typically centers on white students, activists involved in civil rights and Black Power organizing were among the most vocal critics of the war. Many viewed American intervention in Vietnam as an imperialist project, and they objected to the enormous financial cost of the war, which undercut domestic programs. The draft also became a major issue, as Black men were overrepresented as draftees and among wartime casualties.[6] Leading civil rights organizations and activists issued statements and delivered speeches condemning the war.[7]

In April 1967, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr. deplored American militarism in a powerful speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam.” Speaking at Riverside Church in New York City, King directed criticism toward the draft, which took “black young men who had been crippled by our society and [sent] them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”[8] Sharing many of these concerns, Collins joined the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO). He also began providing informal draft counseling to Black students in New Orleans, quickly gaining a reputation for his knowledge on the subject.[9]

Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking at an April 1967 rally against the Vietnam War on the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Minnesota Historical Society. Image reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons’ Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

Black women like Dara Abubakari also played critical roles in anti-war and anti-draft organizing. They published news articles, created and distributed literature, and established organizations, including the National Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union (NBAWADU). Some of these women framed their activism in gendered terms and relied on their positions as wives or mothers to claim authority on the subject.[10] Gwendolyn Patton, a NBAWADU founder and SNCC member, laid out this logic in an article published in 1968. She wrote: “If there has ever been a time when we want to know what we can do for the revolution, we can begin now by not allowing this system to draft our sons, our loved ones, our men.”[11] Abubakari consistently used her position as the mother to spark conversations about the war with other women and to advocate on behalf of Collins and other draft resisters.

The Draft as Political Repression

In January 1967, Draft Board 156 in New Orleans reclassified Collins as 1-A, meaning that he was eligible for military service. When he initially registered with the Selective Service System in 1963, Collins received a student deferment. He supplied the required material to confirm his status as a full-time student between 1964 and 1966, but failed to provide this evidence in January 1967, leading to his reclassification. Over the next three years, Collins’ conflict with the draft board intensified. In August 1967, they attempted to send him an induction notice, but it was delivered to the wrong address. After receiving the second notice in September, and learning that he no longer had a student deferment, Collins tried to register as a conscientious objector. While draft officials supplied the required paperwork, they informed him that it was too late to submit it because he had already received an induction notice. Between September and the following March, Collins received four additional notices and failed to report for induction each time. On two occasions, he actually appeared at the induction center, but officials turned him away for wearing an anti-war pin and carrying anti-war literature.[12]

While Collins’ student deferment may have legitimately expired, many of his SCEF colleagues believed his civil rights and anti-war activism had factored into the draft board’s decision. As SCEF Executive Director Anne Braden recounted, Collins’ “trouble with the draft started in the fall of 1966, just after he [had] spent the summer organizing opposition to the Vietnam War in New Orleans.”[13] Many civil rights and anti-war groups experienced heightened government surveillance and repression during the 1960s. Through initiatives like the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Operation CHAOS, government officials illegally surveilled, infiltrated, and discredited civil rights, Black Power, and anti-war organizations. For activists like Collins, it seemed that draft boards were performing a similar function. Numerous activists associated with groups like SCEF and SNCC were drafted during this period. In June of 1967, for instance, SNCC reported that seventeen members had already been indicted for draft resistance.[14] Others were arrested for holding anti-war demonstrations at induction centers.[15] Within this context, Collins’ supporters understood his being drafted as a form of political repression. They viewed him as a draft resister and a political prisoner.

"The enemy is racism": two graphics combining antiwar and pro-civil rights messaging. — *“The enemy is racism”: two graphics combining antiwar and pro-civil rights messaging.*
*Source:* *Flo Kennedy, “Harlem Against the War,”* The Movement 3, no. 5 (May 1967).

On June 18, 1968, Collins was indicted on six counts of refusing induction. His case came before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana in July 1969, and the jury found him guilty of five counts of draft evasion. Judge Edward Boyle sentenced Collins to five years for each count—to be served concurrently—and issued a fine of $2,000.[16] Following his sentencing, Collins and his legal team brought the case before the Fifth U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans. They focused their case on two key issues. First, the composition of Draft Board 156 violated Section 10(b)(3) of the Selective Service Act. Four of the board’s five members were not residents of the area that it covered, and the chair was not even a resident of Orleans Parish. Other draft resisters had successfully appealed their sentences on this basis. Second, Collins and his attorneys took the argument further by claiming that, regardless of residency, the all-white draft board could not be representative of the majority Black population that it covered. This was a major issue across the country and particularly in the South. In Louisiana, along with a handful of other Southern states, there were no Black members serving on draft boards as of 1966.[17] Despite these efforts, however, Collins’ appeal was unsuccessful.

After the Fifth U.S. Court of Appeals refused to overturn Collins’ sentence in April 1970, his attorneys turned to the U.S. Supreme Court. They filed three petitions in August, November, and December of 1970, but the court ultimately declined to hear the case. Authorities arrested Collins in his home in New Orleans in November 1970 and placed him in Parish Prison.[18] There, he awaited transfer to the federal prison in Texarkana, Texas.

“Free Walter Collins and All Political Prisoners!”

Although Collins’ appeals failed, his supporters continued advocating on his behalf. They circulated petitions, published articles, and organized demonstrations to publicize his case. Drawing from prior experience organizing defense campaigns, Abubakari worked with colleagues in SCEF and other groups to spearhead a popular campaign on Collins’ behalf. In addition to financially supporting his legal defense, SCEF coordinated a publicity campaign around the case in hopes that public protest would pressure officials to reverse his sentence. Articles about Collins frequently appeared in the group’s monthly publication, the Southern Patriot, and in its news briefs. The organization also distributed fliers with information about his case. One flier from 1970 titled “An Enemy of the People” characterized the draft as “a weapon to jail young men who are active in movements against social injustice.”[19] The author urged readers to actively support Collins and other political prisoners by writing to Judge Boyle and contributing funds to the legal defense. SCEF also circulated petitions that accumulated almost 20,000 signatures.[20]

An article about Collins published by the Southern Patriot, the official publication of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), in October 1970 — *An article about Collins published by the* Southern Patriot, *the official publication of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), in October 1970.*
*Image courtesy of the author.*

While SCEF provided an important base for organizing on behalf of Collins, Abubakari also worked to create a more permanent organization dedicated solely to defending Black draft resisters. On the weekend of March 5, 1971, just a few months after the December demonstrations in Washington, D.C., Abubakari and other delegates reconvened in the national capitol. They congregated at the NABS headquarters and founded the International Committee for Black Resisters (ICBR). The founding members, who included notable activists like Ella Baker and Queen Mother Moore, laid out the following program:

International support for Black resisters and political prisoners;
Opposition to apprehension of Black men into the military or into jail for refusing the military;
Research and communications on the international level about the cases of Black resisters and political prisoners;
An international Legal Resistance Network;
Black draft counseling and programmatic planning for high school students;
“Free Walter Collins” campaign.[21]

In Abubakari’s words, the ICBR aimed to “internationalize the struggle for Black draft resisters and to generate international and national support for their release.”[22] As her statement suggests, ICBR members not only worked to free Collins but also supported larger campaigns to provide amnesty to all Black draft resisters. Collins’ supporters also looked to international forums to publicize the case, and they distributed petitions abroad through organizations like Amnesty International. They understood their project as global in scope and explicitly sought international support for U.S. political prisoners. Although there are few traces of ICBR activities in the historical record after this founding meeting, the group’s platform, and their particular emphasis on the status of Black draft resisters, represented an important intervention within the anti-war movement.

Following the meeting, Abubakari embarked on a cross-country tour with Carl Braden, a longtime civil rights activist and SCEF director. They visited college campuses, churches, and community centers in over forty states to publicize Collins’ case. Abubakari delivered speeches in cities across the United States, including New York, Chicago, Louisville, Austin, and Los Angeles.[23] When asked about her upcoming plans in November 1971, Abubakari emphasized her determination to free her son. She responded, “I’ll finish a whole year of touring and if Walter’s not out of prison by then, I’ll start all over again.”[24]

*One of the petitions circulated by the SCEF during its campaign to free Walter Collins.*
*Image courtesy of the Georgia State University Library’s Special Collections Division.*

While Abubakari mobilized activists across the country on his behalf, Collins translated his organizing skills to a new context—the federal prison in Texarkana, Texas. While imprisoned, Collins allied himself with fellow inmates to protest mail censorship, corporal punishment, and the lack of adequate medical care in the facility. Firsthand experience with long-term incarceration not only solidified his understanding of his predicament as political repression, but it also brought him face-to-face with the issues that incarcerated people across the nation—from San Quentin to Attica—raised through legal suits, popular protests, and uprisings. During the spring of 1972, Collins became involved in a hunger strike and work stoppage at Texarkana.[25] Although the strike lasted less than a week, newspaper reports reveal that almost five-hundred men participated in the protest. They compiled a list of grievances addressed to Warden Connett and elected a group, which included Collins, to serve as a negotiating team. In response, prison authorities transferred many of the leaders to other facilities and temporarily placed Collins in solitary confinement.

During the fall of 1972, Collins’ parole board recommended an early supervised-release based on “good time” he had accrued while incarcerated. Although Warden L. M. Connett initially refused to free Collins, based on his participation in the strike earlier that year, he eventually complied due to public pressure. After spending two years in prison, Collins was paroled in December 1972.[26] He joined his SCEF colleagues in extending his gratitude to supporters: “Protests from across the nation and around the world helped the warden to change his mind about keeping Collins in prison for an extra five months and voiding his chances of parole. . . . Walter Collins joins the board and staff of SCEF and the editors of The Southern Patriot in thanking all of those who supported him and his fellow prisoners while he was at Texarkana.”[27]

*Walter Collins imprisoned at the federal penitentiary in Texarkana, Texas after his conviction for refusing induction.*
*Image courtesy of the author.*

Following his release, Collins remained active in campaigns to free draft resisters and other political prisoners. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter granted full pardons to any person who had violated the Selective Service Act between 1964 and 1973. Collins went on to serve as an Executive Director of SCEF and a coordinator for the National Moratorium on Prison Construction in Atlanta, Georgia. During the late 1980s, he returned to New Orleans, and in 1995, at the age of fifty, he passed away after being diagnosed with cancer.[28]

Conclusion

Walter Collins was one of many political prisoners whose legal cases captured national attention and inspired widespread protest during the 1960s and 1970s. Although the individuals and organizations involved in this campaign did not achieve all of their goals—Collins’ eventual release was based on procedure rather than a landmark court case and the ICBR seems to have had only a brief existence—they were able to construct coalitions and develop strategies that could be used in future organizing. Both Abubakari and Collins continued to participate in campaigns to free draft resisters and political prisoners, and they shared the skills they developed with other activists. They led workshops on movement building, spoke at demonstrations, and provided organizational support for other campaigns.

Studying defense campaigns allows historians and community organizers to think more expansively about social movements and their relative success. Defense campaigns were not only logistical solutions to political repression but also represented important sites where participants articulated larger ideas about freedom and justice. Collins’ supporters did not only object to the drafting of conscientious objectors, but to the draft and the war more generally. They understood all draft resisters, and particularly Black draft resisters, as political prisoners, and they used the campaign to free Walter Collins as a space to organize around these issues. By engaging seriously with the ideas that activists involved in defense campaigns put forward and exploring the various strategies that they developed, we can think more critically about their impact over time, while also identifying tools that might be useful in present struggles for racial and social justice.

[1] “Widespread Support Builds For Black Draft Resisters,” Southern Patriot 28, no. 10 (December 1970): 8; Fred Shuttlesworth and Carl Braden to SCEF Board, Advisory Committee and Staff, November 18th, 1970, Anne and Carl Braden Papers, Box 76, Folder 2, Wisconsin Historical Society; “News from Southern Conference Educational (SCEF),” December 11th, 1970, GI Press Collection, 1964-1977, Wisconsin Historical Society, https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/id/25229.

[2] David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 165.

[3] Ashley Farmer, “Mothers of Pan-Africanism: Audley Moore and Dara Abubakari,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 4, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 276, 286.

[4] “SCEF Blasts Hoover On ‘Justice’ Remark,” Chicago Daily Defender, November 27th, 1968, 10; “Orleanian Named VP of Republic of New Africa,” Louisiana Weekly, April 19th, 1969, 1; “Women taking deeper look at cause of war,” Daily World, July 19th, 1969, 10; “Republic New Africa’s New Executive Council,” New York Amsterdam News, April 25th, 1970, 3; “Mrs. Collins Is Delegate To Women’s Congress,” Louisiana Weekly, July 25th, 1970, 2; Ashley Farmer, “Reframing African American Women’s Grassroots Organizing: Audley Moore and the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, 1957-1963,” Journal of African American History 101, no 1-2 (Winter/Spring 2016): 87-89.

[5] “SCEF Worker Convicted For Refusing Draft,” Southern Patriot 27, no. 7 (September 1969): 4; “Cancel Summer Vacations For Ballot Fight,” Louisiana Weekly, June 22nd, 1963, 1; Bob Zellner, “Report, Evaluation, and Proposals for the Future,” November 13th, 1970, Civil Rights Vertical Files, Box 159-13, Folder 11, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Walter Collins, interview by Kim Lacy Rogers, Part 6, May 20th, 1979, Box 4, Side 2, Kim Lacy Rogers Civil Rights Oral History Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, https://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/islandora/object/tulane%3A83107; Kim Lacy Rogers, Righteous Lives: Narratives of the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement (New York: NYU Press, 1993), 20.

[6] Office of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, “Negroes and the War in South-East Asia,” Anne and Carl Braden Papers, Box 76, Folder 2, Wisconsin Historical Society.

[7] See, for instance: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, “MFDP and Viet Nam,” July 31st, 1965, https://www.crmvet.org/docs/pr/650731_mfdp_pr_vietnam.pdf; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Statement on Vietnam,” January 6th, 1966, https://www.crmvet.org/docs/snccviet.htm; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Report on Draft Program,” 1966, https://www.crmvet.org/docs/6608_sncc_draft-resist.pdf; Diane Nash Bevel, “Journey to North Vietnam,” Freedomways 7, no. 2 (Spring 1967): 118-128, https://www.crmvet.org/info/67_nash_vietnam.pdf; Flo Kennedy, “Harlem Against the Draft,” The Movement 3, no. 5 (May 1967): https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mvmt/6705mvmt.pdf; Huey P. Newton, “Message on the Peace Movement [1969],” in The Black Panthers Speak, ed. Philip S. Foner (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995), 67-70.

[8] Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence,” April 4th, 1967, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm. King’s longtime associate Vincent Harding wrote the original draft of this speech.

[9] “On the Military: Interview with Walter Collins,” Southern Exposure 1, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 6; “SUNO Students To Strike If 10 Demands Are Not Met,” Louisiana Weekly, April 12th, 1969, 1, 7; Marcus S. Cox, “‘Keep Our Black Warriors Out of the Draft’: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement at Southern University, 1968-1973,” Educational Foundations (Winter/Spring 2006): 123-144, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ751764.pdf.

[10] Ashley Farmer, “’Heed the Call!’ Black Women, Anti-Imperialism, and Black Anti-War Activism,” Black Perspectives, August 3rd, 2016, https://www.aaihs.org/heed-the-call-black-women-anti-imperialism-and-black-anti-war-activism/; Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2014), 143-146; Lauren Mottle, “‘We Resist on the Grounds We Aren’t Citizens’: Black Draft Resistance in the Vietnam War Era,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 6, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2020): 26-52.

[11] Gwen Patton, “Black Militants and the War,” Student Mobilizer, January 1, 1968, GI Press Collection, 1964-1977, Wisconsin Historical Society, https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/id/34169.

[12] United States v. Collins, 426 F.2d 765 (5th Cir. 1970).

[13] Annie Braden, “Southern Group Launches Campaign,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 11th, 1969, 18.

[14] “New SNCC Leaders Outline Their Plans,” Southern Patriot 25, no. 6 (June 1967): 1, 6; “Fred Brooks Refuses Draft,” Southern Patriot 25, no. 11 (December 1967): 4; “‘You Can’t Do This To Me’: Draft Evader Gets 5 Years,” Miami Herald, April 28, 1968, 22-A; “Black Draft Resisters: Does Anybody Care? A Fact Sheet,” undated, Anne and Carl Braden Papers, Box 76, Folder 2, Wisconsin Historical Society.

[15] “SNCC Workers Indicted,” The Movement 3, no. 5 (Spring 1967): 4.

[16] United States v. Collins, 426 F.2d 765 (5th Cir. 1970); “Orleans Man Indicted On Draft Charges,” Shreveport Journal, June 19th, 1968, 12; “Louisiana Man Indicted On Draft Charges,” Daily Advertiser, June 19, 1968, 12; “Collins Is Free On Bond Pending Appeal of Term,” Shreveport Journal, July 10th, 1969, 20; “Sentenced To 5 Years In Draft Case,” Louisiana Weekly, July 19th, 1969, 1; “Jail Black Activist As A Draft Evader,” Michigan Chronicle, July 26th, 1969, 15.

[17] United States v. Collins, 426 F.2d 765 (5th Cir. 1970); “‘Bias’ Charged In New Orleans Draft Case,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 8th, 1970, 20; “US Argues against Collins Appeal,” Southern Patriot 28, no. 9 (November 1970): 5; News Release, Office of Public Information, Selective Service System, December 16th, 1970, Anne and Carl Braden Papers, Box 76, Folder 2, Wisconsin Historical Society, 6.

[18] United States v. Collins, 426 F.2d 765 (5th Cir. 1970); Walter Collins v. U.S., 400 U.S. 919 (1970); “Court Upholds Charges Against Walter Collins,” Louisiana Weekly, May 9th, 1970, 9; “Court Rejects Challenge Of Draft Board Alignment,” Town Talk, November 16th, 1970, 4; “Judge Boyle Refuses To Cut Draft Resister’s Term,” Louisiana Weekly, February 27th, 1971, 5; “Nab La. Activist on draft dodge rap,” Chicago Daily Defender, December 1st, 1970, 4; “24-year-old draft activist arrested to serve 5 years,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 12th, 1970, 16.

[19] Southern Conference Educational Fund, “An Enemy of the People,” GI Press Collection, 1964-1977, Wisconsin Historical Society, https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/id/61302/rec/148.

[20] Southern Conference Educational Fund Revenue and Expense Operating Fund, June 30th, 1970, Civil Rights Vertical Files, Box 159-13, Folder 11, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Southern Conference Educational Fund, “An Enemy of the People,” GI Press Collection, 1964-1977, Wisconsin Historical Society, https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/id/61302/rec/148; “20,000 petition Nixon for black,” Chicago Defender, February 17th, 1971, 27.

[21] “International Black Draft Resisters Committee Formed in Washington,” Sun Reporter, March 20th, 1971, 13; “Draft Resisters Group Formed,” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 25th, 1971, A2; “Draft Resisters Organize in Washington,” Sacramento Observer, March 25th, 1971, C10; “Group organized to aid black draft dodgers,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 10th, 1971, 14.

[22] “International Black Draft Resisters Committee Formed in Washington,” Sun Reporter, March 20th, 1971, 13.

[23] “Lawman Guest Speaker,” New York Amsterdam News, April 17th, 1971, 28; “Freedom for draft resisters,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 23rd, 1971, 18; “Foe of draft to speak,” Courier-Journal, May 16th, 1971, 24; “Interracial Officials Due at UT,” Austin Statesman, June 14th, 1971, 8; “Prisoner’s Mother Guests,” Los Angeles Sentinel, November 11th, 1971, B6.

[24] Jean Murphy, “Lifelong Battler in Struggle to Free Jailed Draft Resisters,” Los Angeles Times, November 14th, 1971, D3.

[25] “Inmates End Strike At Texarkana Prison,” Corpus Christi Times, April 12th, 1972, 11; “Men Strike in Texarkana,” Southern Patriot 30, no. 5 (April 1972): 6; “News from the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF),” May 10th, 1972, 1; “Collins Letters on Revolt,” Southern Patriot 30, no. 5 (May 1972): 6; “Federal Prisoners Protest,” San Antonio Register, July 7th, 1971, 7.

[26] “Walter Collins’ Parole in Doubt,” Southern Patriot 30, no. 8 (October 1972): 8; “Collins Wins Release,” Southern Patriot 30, no. 9 (November 1972): 8; “Draft Resister Freed One Month Late,” New Pittsburgh Courier, January 6th, 1973, 22.

[27] “Collins Wins Release,” Southern Patriot 30, no. 9 (November 1972): 8.

[28] “New executive director of SCEF is named,” Courier-Journal, December 12th, 1973, 12; ; “Statement of Walter J. Collins, Coordinator, National Moratorium on Prison Construction,” in Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1983), 125, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/88401NCJRS.pdf; Jeanne Friedman, “Fallen Comrades: Walter Collins,” http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=305.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era (2022)

While most Americans are likely to think of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) in connection with the Vietnam War, Johnson himself wanted to be remembered in terms of his domestic achievements in the form of the Great Society. Lacking in many accounts of LBJ are his policies toward the rest of the world. In The End of Ambition, Mark Atwood Lawrence brings into focus U.S. foreign policy during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, by focusing on the Third World, with the notable exclusion of Vietnam, during LBJ’s tenure. Few scholars are better positioned to undertake this study. Lawrence is currently the Director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum and an accomplished scholar specializing in the Vietnam War and more broadly in the history of U.S. foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s. As an historian steeped in the politics of the era, Lawrence addresses an important shortfall in scholarship on the Johnson Administration and U.S. foreign policy in general.

book cover for The End of Ambition : The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era

Lawrence begins by considering the legacy bequeathed to LBJ by John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK). Johnson began his presidency by committing to JFK’s agenda and maintained much of his team. This proved problematic as JFK had often failed to establish clear objectives or priorities and seemed to lack a fixed set of guiding principles. In Lawrence’s words the Kennedy administration was a “conglomeration of tendencies, rather than [an] executor of a core set of ideas.” Lawrence reviews the Kennedy Administration’s approach to four countries—Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia—and one region—Southern Africa—to provide context for his investigation of the Johnson administration’s approach. Supporters of Kennedy might object to Lawrence’s critical portrayal of the JFK administration as lacking context and depth. However, considering Lawrence’s focus on LBJ’s foreign policy pertaining to the Third World, he does an admirable job in providing the right amount of context critical to a nuanced exploration of LBJ’s approach to the third world, without overwhelming the reader.

LBJ’s ambitions in the domestic context were clear, as was his desire to focus on domestic affairs over foreign policy. In line with this basic intent, the Johnson administration adopted a distinct approach to the Third World that, for better or worse, resolved the ambiguities of JFK’s administration. LBJ sought to lower U.S. ambitions in the Third World and reduce risk while shoring up U.S. control over global affairs by establishing or bolstering cooperative regimes. Despite the judgment of many, including LBJ himself, that he lacked foreign policy expertise, LBJ’s approach to international affairs was rooted in intellectual tendencies distinct from those of JFK, not ignorance. Where JFK sought to transform, LBJ sought to manage. Still, Lawrence points out that LBJ was more visionary than JFK in areas that today we refer to as transnational issues. Further, while LBJ’s ambitions in foreign policy may have been tempered by his desire to focus on domestic affairs, he nonetheless displayed the state-building impulse of the 1930s in both the domestic and foreign arenas. This might be expected based on LBJ’s admiration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and LBJ’s desire to bring to full fruition the wider new deal program.

Five case studies form the heart of Lawrence’s book, covering U.S. policy toward Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. Central to LBJ’s foreign policy in each of these case studies was a desire to minimize U.S. burdens so as to not further distract from efforts in Vietnam as well as Johnson’s broader goal of advancing the Great Society program. This was the key driver in the LBJ administration’s bringing to power, or enhancing relations with, often authoritarian regimes that could effectively govern and reduce the potential for conflict or communist advances while acting in concert with U.S. interests more broadly. In Brazil, LBJ presided over transformative events and constructed a new relationship with a military regime that effectively dismantled Brazilian democracy. The administration’s patterns and policies in Brazil informed his approach to the Third World for the duration of his tenure. These tendencies included favoring the development of constructive change and democracy over the long-term by countering the danger’s posed by communist movements.

A general labeled "anti democratic rulers" says to President Johnson: "Where I'm in charge, there's absolutely no danger of democratic government being subverted." — This cartoon by Herb Block was published in the Washington Post on May 3, 1965, a few days after U.S. Marines landed in the Dominican Republic to bolster a friendly regime. The cartoon hints at the Johnson administration’s attraction to reliable authoritarian leaders across the Third World. Source: The Herb Block Foundation

With India, LBJ shared Kennedy’s hope that resistance to Chinese expansion would serve as a basis for cooperation, but by early 1966 he was losing hope for reasons including India’s lack of support for U.S. actions in Vietnam. In LBJ’s approach toward India, we see another principle emerge: the emphasis on economic development more so than military assistance. This certainly held true in the case of U.S. policy toward Iran. There was also a China angle in enhancing relations with Tehran as a hedge against Islamabad’s improving relations with China.

In Indonesia, the rise to power of the military led to the “evisceration of the world’s third-largest communist party.” Still, among the countries explored, Indonesia was the most resistant to U.S. influence. The Johnson administration wisely opted for a low-key approach, playing the long game by building influence in select elements of the Indonesian military and society. LBJ and his team viewed Indonesia as a success story that gave American leaders renewed confidence that the Vietnam War was achieving important results even absent a clear military victory. Johnson felt that if the United States had not taken a stand in Vietnam the countercoup in Indonesia in 1965 and the defeat of communism would not have come to pass.

A meeting of the National Security Council on January 7, 1964, reached consensus on the need to keep providing aid to Indonesia despite Sukarno’s provocations. CIA Director John McCone sits at the far end of the table, with Budget Director David Bell to his right and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to his left. Around the table in a clockwise direction are Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, President Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Assistant Secretary of Defense William Bundy, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, an unidentified official, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Source: LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto

Even though Southern Africa held less strategic importance to the United States, it provoked more political controversy. This was based on intersections with the U.S. domestic context, specifically civil rights. Here Lawrence’s case study differs in that it involves a region, not just a nation, though Rhodesia is the primary focus. Despite the differences, the same patterns and policies were clearly in evidence including a desire to minimize U.S. direct involvement, particularly any type of military involvement. Vietnam was certainly a consideration, but one can also appreciate a sense of realistic assessments and expectations regarding the importance of the region and what U.S. power could accomplish. Although one could argue that an appreciation of U.S. constraints emerged only due to Vietnam, such a judgment seems to underestimate LBJ’s priorities. It is likely that LBJ would have opted for such an approach even absent Vietnam as his priority was the Great Society. In fact, Lawrence’s work supports the contention that LBJ had across a broad basis a preference for restraint overseas and action on the home front.

Lawrence not only covers this history of foreign policy during a critical period in American history, but he also considers patterns and precedents. The title of the book may be mildly misleading in this regard. Lawrence asserts that the United States is shaped by the competing impulses of worldmaking and self-interest. In this context Lawrence asserts that the United States has faced multiple inflection points in which it curbed its worldmaking ambitions in favor of a narrower pursuit of its self-interest. It might be more accurate to say that the United States tempered its ambition, but that the pattern that Lawrence alludes to in the ebbing and flowing of American ambition remains intact and returned with a vengeance in the 1990s.

Lawrence’s volume raises many important issues including the relationship between domestic and foreign policy that in total represent the national interest. There are few case studies as potentially rich in this regard as LBJ’s basic dilemma – Vietnam vs the Great Society. Such a study would provide additional context and understanding of the priorities and rationale guiding how the Johnson administration faced the rest of the world, aside from Vietnam. For scholars of the Cold War, the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, and U.S. foreign policy toward the third world more generally, Lawrence’s The End of Ambition makes an invaluable and much needed contribution.

Bryan Port is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin and a civil servant with the Department of the Army assigned to U.S. Army Futures Command as a strategist. He is a historian of the United States focusing on U.S. intellectual history. His research interests include the construction and application of the idea of national interest as well as grand strategy. Bryan holds a M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University and a M.S. in National Security Strategy from the National War College. His ongoing research centers on American progressive leaders and thinkers of the first half of the 20th century.

Legacies of the Vietnam War

(via Flickr)

The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War (2017), shown in 10 parts on PBS, once again brought a divisive and contested conflict into American living rooms. Mark A. Lawrence, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and preeminent historian of the Vietnam War, recently wrote about what we are learning from historians’ renewed interest in the subject, especially with new scholarship based on Vietnamese sources. Last month, Lawrence discussed the legacies of the Vietnam War on a panel marking the 35th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the National Archives in Washington D.C. and on a CSPAN program on the state of the war in 1967.

Watch: 35th Anniversary of the Wall

“In partnership with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF), we present a panel discussion about the history and legacy of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated on November 13, 1982. Participating in the discussion will be Jan Scruggs, Founder and President Emeritus (VVMF), Jim Knotts, President and CEO (VVMF), author and historian Kristin Ann Hass (Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), and others.”

Watch: State of the War in 1967

“Historians Mark Atwood Lawrence of the University of Texas at Austin and Lien-Hang Nguyen of Columbia University responded to viewer calls and tweets about the state of the Vietnam War in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s strategy, and the politics and motivations of the North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong guerrilla forces.”

Also by Mark A. Lawrence on Not Even Past:

Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship has Changed
Must Read Books on the Vietnam War
The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam
Changing Course in Vietnam – or not
LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation

Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Originally published as “Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed” in the Fall 2017 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.”

Editors Note: The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War premiered on PBS last Sunday, September 17. Mark A. Lawrence, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and preeminent historian of the Vietnam War, reflects on what we are learning from historians’ renewed interest in the subject, especially with new scholarship based on Vietnamese sources.

These are boom times for historians of the Vietnam War. One reason is resurgent public interest in a topic that had lost some of its salience in American life during the 1990s. At that time, the end of the Cold War and surging confidence about U.S. power seemed to diminish the relevance of long ago controversies and the need to draw lessons from America’s lost war. But then came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: grueling conflicts that, in key respects, resembled the war in Southeast Asia three decades earlier. Critics complained that George W. Bush had mired the nation in “another Vietnam,” and military strategists focused anew on the earlier war for clues about fighting insurgents in distant, inhospitable places. For their part, historians seized the opportunity to reinterpret Vietnam for a younger generation and especially to compare and contrast the Vietnam conflict with America’s new embroilments.

More recently, intense public interest in the war has been sustained by fiftieth anniversaries of the war’s most harrowing years for the United States. Publishers have used these occasions to release high-profile histories, including Mark Bowden’s widely reviewed Hue 1968, a sprawling account of the largest battle between U.S. and Communist forces during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The media are taking part as well. During 2017 and early 2018, the New York Times is publishing an online series of approximately 130 op-eds focused on the events of 1967. The biggest moment of all is due in late September: the premiere of the much anticipated 18-hour documentary on the war from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, an event certain to inspire new waves of commentary about Vietnam and to rekindle debate in living rooms across the nation.

Footage of Vietnam being broadcast in an American living room, February 1968 (via Wikipedia). The first episode of the highly anticipated The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick premiered on Sunday, September 17, once again bringing a divisive and contested history into American living rooms.

But there is another, less noticed reason for renewed attention to the Vietnam War: Spectacular new source material has transformed the possibilities for writing about the subject. Some of this new documentation has emerged from U.S. archives as a result of declassification in the last decade or so. Records from the Nixon and Ford presidencies (1969–1977), especially, are making it possible for historians to write with more confidence and in greater detail about the final stages of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, long a relatively neglected era of the war.

Indeed, the last phase of U.S. military operations has recently spawned an especially contentious debate on one of the most fundamental controversies about Vietnam: Could the United States and its South Vietnamese allies have won the war if the American public had not turned against it? Provocative new works by Lewis Sorley and Gregory Daddis lead the way in arguing for and against, respectively, the notion that the U.S. military could have secured overall victory, if not for crumbling political support within the United States.

Meanwhile, writing about every phase of American decision-making has been enhanced by the release of audio recordings that U.S. presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon made of important meetings, telephone conversations, or both. Because these often convey the mood and emotions of senior policymakers, they are invaluable in helping historians gain a richer understanding of the motives that underlay decision-making about the war. It is now possible, for example, to hear Lyndon Johnson’s anguish about escalating the U.S. role in 1964 and 1965. LBJ’s doubts, along with his obvious awareness of the problems that would beset U.S. forces if he escalated the war in Vietnam, have led many historians to scrap the once dominant idea that leaders in Washington, ignorant of Vietnamese politics and blinded by Cold War assumptions about the dangers of communism, walked step-by-step into a “quagmire” that no one had anticipated. The old question—How could Americans have been so ignorant?—has been replaced by a new one: Why did U.S. leaders commit the nation to war despite abundant doubts and accurate knowledge of the obstacles they would confront?

President Lyndon B. Johnson at a National Security meeting on Vietnam, July 1965 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The most impressive new source material, however, has emerged from countries other than the United States. As recently as 30 years ago, historians were limited to U.S. and West European sources, making it impossible to write with authority about Vietnam itself or decision-making by North Vietnam’s allies, China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern European nations. Everything changed with the end of the Cold War. East European nations went furthest in opening their archives to researchers. For its part, the Russian government opened some Soviet-era records, most notably the records of the Communist party. China and Vietnam, where the end of the Cold War did not produce dramatic political change, lagged behind, yet even those governments gradually permitted access to some records from the Cold War years. Most strikingly, the Vietnamese government opened troves of material amassed by the defunct regime in Saigon that ruled below the seventeenth parallel during the heyday of U.S. involvement.

The result has been a large and growing body of new work by ambitious and linguistically skilled scholars eager to explore fresh dimensions of the war. Historians Mark Philip Bradley, Robert K. Brigham, William J. Duiker, Christopher Goscha, David S. Marr, and Sophie Quinn-Judge led the way in examining Vietnam’s experience, drawing on newly available Vietnamese sources to produce pathbreaking studies around the turn of the century. A younger generation of scholars, most of whom wrote dissertations rooted in extensive research in Vietnam, has built on those accomplishments and even, for the first time, begun delving into decision-making by the Communist government in Hanoi. Meanwhile, historians of Soviet and Chinese foreign policy, most notably Ilya Gaiduk, Chen Jian, and Qiang Zhai, have used new documentation to examine the complex relationships between the Vietnamese Communists and their superpower patrons.

Unquestionably, archival openings in Russia and China, just as in Vietnam, remain partial and selective, leaving studies rooted in newly accessible material—stunning as it may be—highly susceptible to debate and revision as more documentation becomes available. Yet, measured against the near impossibility of doing this kind of work just three decades ago, historians have made remarkable progress toward rethinking the Vietnam War as an episode not just in U.S. history but also in Vietnamese and world history. Historians, in short, increasingly appreciate the war for what it was at the time: a multisided conflict involving numerous Vietnamese and international actors and driven by extraordinarily complicated and shifting motives.

What precisely has this new research in non-U.S. sources revealed thus far? Three examples point to the variety and significance of the new discoveries. First, studies of Chinese foreign policy have revealed details of North Vietnam’s dependence on its mighty neighbor to the north in the years before the Cultural Revolution, which greatly diminished China’s ambitions abroad. Despite historical tensions between Vietnam and China, newly available sources show definitively that Chinese military helped train and advise Vietnamese Communist forces from as early as 1950 and played an especially pivotal role in the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Vietnamese victory that ended French colonialism and dealt a major blow to the West in the Cold War.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, 1954 (via Wikimedia Commons)

More strikingly, new documents clarify the vast amounts of equipment and even manpower that China provided to North Vietnam during the later fighting that involved U.S. combat forces. According to historian Qiang Zhai, China sent everything from military gear and weapons to table tennis balls, playing cards, sewing needles, and vegetable seed under a series of agreements with North Vietnam. At the same time, Qiang Zhai asserts, a total of 320,000 Chinese soldiers served in North Vietnam between June 1965 and March 1968, peaking at 170,000 during 1967. To be sure, Chinese forces were not assigned combat roles. But Zhai observes that they enabled North Vietnam to send more of its own forces to southern battlefields by performing valuable functions such as repairing bridges and rail lines, building and relocating factories, and manning antiaircraft guns. Such tasks could, of course, be hazardous, not least because of U.S. bombing of some parts of North Vietnam. According to Zhai’s sources, 1,100 Chinese soldiers died in North Vietnam and another 4,200 were wounded.

Second, new sources from Vietnam are exposing the complexity of decision-making among Communist leaders in Hanoi. For many years, historians assumed that North Vietnamese leaders marched in lockstep and permitted no dissent. This view was sustained in part by the belief that the regime in Hanoi was totalitarian to its core and utterly subservient to its most powerful leaders, above all Ho Chi Minh. Recent discoveries have, however, called all of this into question. For one thing, historians Lien-Hang Nguyen and Pierre Asselin have revealed that Ho Chi Minh—long assumed to have been the preeminent North Vietnamese leader all the way to his death in 1969—in fact, lost a great deal of influence around 1960.

The pivotal figure thereafter was Le Duan, a Southern-born revolutionary who remained relatively obscure to Western historians until recent years. Thanks to recent publications, though, it’s clear that Le Duan, a firebrand eager to throw enormous blood and resources into the effort to reunify his country under Communist leadership, dominated decision-making in Hanoi during the peak years of American involvement. Understanding the importance of Le Duan and the hawks who surrounded him helps enormously to appreciate the escalatory pressures that operated on the Vietnamese side, even as Lyndon Johnson and his aides stepped up the American commitment in the mid 1960s. We can now see that leaders on both sides rejected diplomacy and banked on military victory, a tragic convergence of hawkishness that fueled escalation.

The dominance of the hawks in Hanoi does not mean, though, that there were no contrary voices once they were in the driver’s seat. Scholars working with Vietnamese sources have discovered evidence of substantial factionalism within the Hanoi regime throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. Broadly speaking, some high-ranking North Vietnamese leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, prioritized consolidation of Communist rule above the seventeenth parallel and were wary of major expenditures of lives and treasure to bring about reunification. Others, including Le Duan, strongly favored reunification—even at the cost of a major war likely to draw in the United States—over all other North Vietnamese priorities. New studies of the war show that North Vietnamese policy flowed from the interplay of these two points of view. During the late 1950s, the moderate faction held sway, and the result was a period of relative peace in Vietnam. With the triumph of the hawks, however, Hanoi embraced a new war and transformed North Vietnam into a full-fledged police state in order to keep the skeptics at bay.

Third, the new scholarship has shed valuable new light on the nature of the South Vietnamese state that endured from its beginning in 1954 to its collapse in 1975. Was South Vietnam merely a puppet of the United States, an artificial creation doomed to fall apart whenever Washington withdrew its economic and military assistance? Or was it a viable nation with a legitimate government that, absent the onslaught by northern Communists, could have endured as a stable, pro-Western entity into the indefinite future? For many years, the debate was more a matter of polemics than historical inquiry. Opponents of the war argued that the United States hitched itself to a hopeless Potemkin experiment led by venal, authoritarian leaders, while supporters saw South Vietnam as a beleaguered young nation that, for all its faults, was doing its best to resist Communist aggression.

Leonid Brezhnev during talks with Le Duan, October 1975 (via Flickr)

Unsurprisingly, much of the new scholarship rooted in Vietnamese sources has argued for a gray area between these two extremes. Historians such as Edward Miller and Jessica Chapman focus especially on the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting that the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem possessed a degree of legitimacy and popular support unrecognized by Diem’s critics at the time or since. To be sure, they also point out the government’s inability to expand its base further among the South Vietnamese population. But they show that the South Vietnamese state possessed a remarkable amount of agency that its leaders might have exercised differently. All in all, these historians have helped restore the Vietnamese to the center of their own history.

What do all these revelations mean for how we should understand the Vietnam War in its totality? Clearly, the new work in non-American sources holds implications for primordial questions about the U.S. role in Vietnam. Was the U.S. commitment to Vietnam justified by any genuine security interests in the region? Why did the United States fail to achieve its objectives despite monumental effort? Might different decisions by American leaders have led to a different outcome? Knowing more about the international and Vietnamese contexts makes it far more possible than ever before to form authoritative opinions about questions that cannot logically be answered fully on the basis of U.S. sources alone. But the new work also underscores the possibility of addressing questions that transcend the American experience and viewing the Vietnam War within the context of, for example, decolonization, the international Communist movement, and the Sino-Soviet split. The good news is that, given the range of new and still-to-be-released source material and robust interest in the war four decades after it ended, historians are sure to move forward energetically on both tracks. The boom times may stick around for a while.

Also by Mark A. Lawrence on Not Even Past:

Must Read Books on the Vietnam War
The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam
Changing Course in Vietnam – or not
LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation

Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse (2013)

By Aden Knaap, Harvard University

The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer has a thing for squid. (Think less calamari, more American Pie.) The bastard son of a Vietnamese maid and a French priest, he discovers at the age of thirteen that he has a peculiar fetish for masturbating into gutted squid, lovingly—albeit unwittingly—prepared by his mother for the night’s meal. Unfortunately for him, squid are in short supply in working-class Saigon in the late nineteen-fifties, and so he is forced to wash the abused squid and return them to the kitchen to cover up his crime. Sitting down to dinner with his mother late one night, he tucks into one of those very same squid, stuffed and served with a side of ginger-lime sauce. “Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene,” he concedes. “Not I!” he declares. “Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much.” He should know. By the time he is narrating the novel, he has lived through the Vietnam War as an undercover communist agent in South Vietnam, has sought asylum in America, and is now living as a refugee-cum-spy in Los Angeles.

The Sympathizer was published in 2015—three years after Kill Anything that Moves—but it could just as easily have been written as a prompt for historian turned investigative journalist Nick Turse. Indeed, Turse’s central aim in Kill Anything that Moves is to expose the unparalleled obscenity of the Vietnam War: unparalleled both in terms of the devastating scale and variety of harm done and the diabolical levels of premeditation on the part of the U.S. military. Historians of the Vietnam War, as much as the American public, have traditionally remembered the massacre at Mỹ Lai—in which upwards of five hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians were hacked, mowed down, and violated by the American military—as an outlier in an otherwise largely acceptable war (at least in terms of American actions). But as Vietnam veteran and whistleblower Ron Ridenhour explains, and Turse quotes approvingly, Mỹ Lai “was an operation, not an aberration” (5).

Bodies near a burning hut in My Lai (via Wikimedia Commons).

Murder, rape, abuse, arson, arrest, imprisonment, and torture were, in Turse’s words, a “daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam” (6). More than this, they were carried out on orders issued from the uppermost echelons of the American army. They were “the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest level of the military” (6). The outcome? The statistics Turse assembles almost speak for themselves: 58,000 American, 254,000 South Vietnamese, and 1.7 North Vietnamese soldiers dead; 65,000 North Vietnamese and 3.8 million South Vietnamese civilians dead. And these are conservative estimates. Add to that 5.3 million wounded civilians, eleven million refugees, and as many as four million exposed to toxic herbicides like Agent Orange. “[A]ll wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” Viet Thanh Nguyen has written in a different context.[1] With Kill Anything, Turse plunges into the fray of this second war, taking aim at staid diplomatic histories that fail to take stock of the purposeful barbarity of the American military’s actions in Vietnam.

Perhaps Turse’s greatest accomplishment in this book is to capture the systematic nature of American wartime savagery. In the Introduction, Turse sets the scene with a series of vignettes, devastating in their unambiguous incrimination of the American military. To take just one of many, an army unit storms a sleepy Vietnamese hamlet occupied by local civilians in February 1968. The captain orders his troops to round up all the civilians. A lieutenant asks what is to be done with them. “Kill anything that moves,” the captain coldly responds.

Victims of the My Lai Massacre (via Wikimedia Commons).

In the chapters that follow, Turse argues that indiscriminate killing was a deliberate strategy of the U.S. military. Basic training conditions of shock, separation, and physical and psychological stress was intended to break troops down, dehumanize the Vietnamese enemy, and render soldiers amenable to killing without compunction. The Pentagon employed a “system of suffering,” a policy of promoting and rewarding troops based on their “body counts.” In the most blisteringly effective section of the book, Turse chronicles the fate of two South Vietnamese provinces over the course of three years. Turse explores the specific effects of widespread bombing and military rule on urban areas in South Vietnam like Saigon, Da Nang, and Qui Nhơn. He spotlights the actions of a single general—Julian Ewell, known as the Butcher of the Delta—whose demand for bodies from his troops led to the mass murder of close to 11,000 mostly civilian Vietnamese in a single operation. He also explores governmental cover-ups of American war crimes and the distortion of public perceptions of the war.

Accusations against Turse of leftist partisanship, of “imbalanced” treatment of American atrocities, and the use of “uncorroborated” source material miss the point. Kill Anything is self-consciously iconoclastic.[2] Turse takes as his target two hallowed American institutions and traditions—the U.S. military and the idea of American exceptionalism—and turns them on their heads. In Turse’s hands, the organized brutality of the American military in Vietnam becomes the very source of American exceptionalism. In order to do this, Turse relies partly on the U.S. military’s own records and reports, most notably that of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group: a Department of Defense task force that catalogued more than three hundred substantiated atrocities, dismissing hundreds more as unfounded. Turse adds flesh to the bones of this governmental archive by amassing an unofficial oral archive, the product of interviews he conducted with American army veterans as well as Vietnamese survivors and their descendants from across Vietnam. Accessing this oral history—a history that frequently stands in contention to the official record, Turse is at pains to point out—lets Turse trace the reverberations of violence from small Vietnamese villages to large urban centers, all the way back to the American military command at the Pentagon. In this way, the deep roots of American cruelty in Vietnam are laid bare.

U.S. army troops taking a break while on patrol during the Vietnam War (via WIkimedia Commons).

But if Turse’s greatest achievement is to reveal the systematic character of American war crimes in Vietnam, he fails to apply the same organizing principle to the American antiwar effort. Turse is clearly aware of the existence of the antiwar movement: his footnotes are littered with references to exposés they published and uncovered. And Turse devotes much of the introduction and conclusion to singling out individual whistleblowers like Jamie Henry, who risked their lives, families, careers, and mental and physical health in speaking out against American atrocities in Vietnam. By isolating individual whistleblowers, however, Turse ignores the collective nature and effectiveness of the American antiwar movement, that coordinated attacks on the military, liaised with the media, and shielded informants. “Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness,” Turse laments. But it was the antiwar movement that first brought American war crimes in Vietnam to public attention.

Antiwar protest in Washington, D.C., 1971 (via Wikimedia Commons).

More concerning still is Turse’s uncritical assumption of an overwhelmingly U.S.-centric vantage point. In the pages of Killing Anything that Moves, we meet a diverse cast of American soldiers and medics, statesmen and lawyers, protestors and patriots. The book itself opens and closes with Jamie Henry, a former U.S. army medic who returned from Vietnam bent on bringing attention to the atrocities committed by his unit. Even as Turse denounces America, however, he places Americans firmly at the heart of the narrative. Some Vietnamese civilians are given space to speak, but the vast majority are raped, stabbed, shot, bombed, and left for dead. Soldiers from South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front remain largely absent from the text, hovering around the edges but never taking center stage. But Turse, by his own admission, conducted numerous interviews with survivors in Vietnam. And anyway, what could be more affecting than the testimonies of America’s Vietnamese victims themselves? There is a way in which the marginalization of Vietnamese voices itself enacts a kind of violence: a silencing and an erasure. It turns a story of Vietnamese victimhood into one of American guilt. War wounds run deep, and while Turse expertly attends to some, he leaves others untreated. The war in Vietnam awaits its Vietnamese sympathizer, in all his squid-fucking glory.

Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Picador: New York, 2013).

[1] Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 4.

[2] Gary Kulik and Peter Zinoman, “Misrepresenting Atrocities: Kill Anything that Moves and the Continuing Distortions of the War in Vietnam,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review No. 12 (2014), 162-198; Gary Kulik, “The War in Vietnam: Version 2.0,” History News Network (2015), < http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158645>.

You may also like:

Changing Course in Vietnam — or Not.
A War with Ourselves: How the Media Affected the Vietnam War.
50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American Perspective.

Stokely Carmichael: A Life

June 2016 marked fifty years since Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) called for “Black Power!” during a political rally for racial justice in Greenwood, Mississippi. Carmichael defined Black Power as radical social, political, economic, and cultural self-determination Carmichael’s political legacy indelibly shaped civil rights and Black Power organizing and provides important historical context for understanding the contemporary movement for black lives.

Poised between Dr. Martin Luther King’s shield and Malcolm X’s sword, Stokely Carmichael stands as the bridge between two generations of black political activists. Born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, Carmichael arrived in America in 1952, attended the prestigious Bronx School of Science, and was mentored by Bayard Rustin, the openly gay black social-democratic activist and pacifist who would serve as a key advisor to King and organize the March On Washington in 1963.

Like the current generation of Black Lives Matter activists, Carmichael devoted his energies to exposing American myth and lies. At Howard University he became the most charismatic and outspoken student activist in the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the campus satellite of the larger Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). SNCC grew from lunch counter sit-ins that spread across the south, then nationally, in the winter of 1960 into the most important grassroots civil rights organization in postwar American history. The group, guided by the political and organizing genius of Ella Jo Baker, organized for voting rights, set up freedom schools, and civic education in some of the most dangerous parts of America.

While attending Howard University, Carmichael participated in local struggles in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Maryland for racial and economic justice, the desegregation of restaurants and public accommodations, and the integration of the building trades. Beginning in 1961, he traveled to Mississippi where he was arrested as a Freedom Rider and jailed in Parchman Penitentiary, alongside future March On Washington speaker, SNCC chairman, and Georgia Congressman John Lewis. By Stokely’s count, between 1961 and 1966 he was arrested twenty-seven times for civil rights activism.

Like many of his Howard colleagues, Carmichael utilized non-violence as a political tactic, rather than a way of life. His own political philosophy hewed close to the social-democratic teachings of Rustin, the Marxist-Leninism he imbibed in study groups in high school, and the pan-Africanism he reveled in while hearing reports of successful liberation movements in Ghana and listening to South African singer Miriam Makeba (his future wife) on the radio.

Carmichael’s allegiance to civil rights struggle did not prevent him from listening to Malcolm X at Howard University or form friendships with black nationalists and political radicals who fit outside the civil rights mainstream. Despite his militancy, Stokely led the Second Congressional District during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 and dutifully protested outside the Democratic National Convention on Atlantic City’s Boardwalk in a vain effort to seat the Mississippi Freedom Party Delegation led by sharecropper turned activist Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.

The Democratic Party’s refusal to seat an integrated delegation that organized for democracy under the threat of death convinced Stokely to forever abandon mainstream politics. He re-emerged from the disappointment in Atlantic City as one of SNCC’s biggest voices supporting independent black politics, which took shape in tiny Lowndes County, Alabama during 1965-1966. Carmichael helped to organize sharecroppers, poor people, and community activists to create the Lowndes County Freedom Organization that would be nicknamed the Black Panther Party.

By the time he called for Black Power in 1966 Stokely Carmichael had become a touchstone to multiple streams of political and cultural radicalism. Carmichael spread the word about black being beautiful before James Brown, came out against the Vietnam War before Dr. King and Muhammad Ali, and helped to popularize the Black Panthers by headlining “Free Huey” rallies in Oakland and Los Angeles, California.

In doing so, Carmichael defied the dictates of American hegemony by traveling overseas to Cuba, challenging the Johnson Administration’s moral and political integrity, and vowing to go to jail rather than ever serving in the armed forces.

Global black lives mattered to Carmichael. During his 1967 tour of Africa, the Middle East, Cuba, and Europe he visited Conakry, Guinea and met former Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and Guinean President Sekou Toure. By 1969 Carmichael relocated to Conakry where he argued that Pan-Africanism represented Black Power’s highest stage and would, over the next three decades until his premature death in 1998, remain an unapologetic black revolutionary.

Contemporary movements for racial and economic justice owe a deep debt to Carmichael’s legacy of grassroots organizing, student activism, and willingness to speak truth to power. Before Black Lives Matter activists identified the criminal justice system as a gateway to racial oppression, Stokely Carmichael called out America as an empire who subjugated black and Third World people domestically and internationally. As a local organizer, Carmichael testified before civil rights commissions, attended conferences, participated in debates, and mapped policy strategies to help build two black independent political parties. Hounded by the FBI, local law enforcement, the State Department, and the CIA, Carmichael remained a committed political revolutionary until his dying breath. Carmichael’s legacy extends to the iconography of the black freedom struggle. His friendships with Martin Luther King Jr., Fidel Castro, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer offer nothing less than a political and intellectual genealogy of postwar decolonization and anti-racist movements, one that continue to reverberate from Black Power to Black Lives Matter.

Kissinger’s Shadow, by Greg Grandin (2015)

By Clay Katsky

Tickets to “An Evening with the Honorable Henry Kissinger” at the LBJ Library’s Vietnam War Summit sold out in less than one minute. The attention that Kissinger continues to command in 2016 could be linked to the premise of Greg Grandin’s new book. Grandin, a history professor at NYU, portrays the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State as extraordinarily influential on U.S. foreign policy before, during, and after leaving office. But from the author’s unambiguously leftist point of view, Kissinger’s legacy is anything but honorable. While Grandin cites his most positive achievements, opening China and stabilizing relations with the Soviet Union, the book’s main contention is that Kissinger’s worldview and access to power led him to create a new imperial presidency “based on even more spectacular displays of violence, more intense secrecy, and an increasing use of war and militarism to leverage domestic dissent and polarization for political advantage.” Kissinger brought the old national security state into the post-Vietnam War era.

Kissinger relaxes at the LBJ Presidential Library before his public appearance on Tuesday, April 26, 2016 at The Vietnam War Summit. Courtesy of the LBJ Library : photo by David Hume Kennerly.

Starting with Kissinger’s legendarily long Harvard undergraduate thesis, Grandin seeks to uncover the ideas, insights, and assumptions that influenced his theories on diplomacy and drove his desire to fashion a new world order based on a balance of power. In focusing on Kissinger’s own writings, the book combines intellectual and diplomatic history. And it offers something new by examining Kissinger’s unique mixture of realism and idealism, which Grandin labels a kind of “imperial existentialism” in which conjecture is more preferable for action than fact because hard facts can be polarizing. Most historians have labeled Kissinger an arch-realist, yet Grandin insists that his more philosophical writings stressed the importance of conjecture in decision-making. In tribute to Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kissinger exalted decisiveness above all else: “In reaching a decision, he must inevitably act on the basis of an intuition that is inherently unproveable. If he insists on certainty he runs the danger of becoming prisoner to events.” But Grandin’s link to Cheney’s 1% Doctrine, which he describes as the United States taking action as if mere threats are forgone conclusions, seems tentative and is based on little evidence. Kissinger had hoped that showing strength in Cuba would lead to bolder foreign polices and legitimize American power, but in office his agenda shifted to preventing a decline in American prestige stemming from the pull out of Vietnam.

Kissinger being sworn in as Secretary of State by Chief Justice Warren Burger, September 22, 1973. Kissinger’s mother, Paula, holds the Bible upon which he was sworn in while President Nixon looks on. Via Wikipedia.

According to Grandin, power and prestige were crucial elements in Kissinger’s perception of American security interests. Consciousness of power comes from a willingness to act, and he believed the best way to produce willingness was to act. But nuclear weapons complicated Cold War power dynamics because leaders were afraid to use them. Taking stock of Kissinger’s early academic career at Harvard, Grandin points out that in 1956 he wrote that the more powerful the weapons “the greater becomes the reluctance to user them.” Strength turned to weakness. But Grandin’s emphasis on the future statesman’s earliest writings freezes his worldviews in the 1950s. This in spite of the fact that Kissinger’s early musings on limited nuclear warfare later evolved into his belief that action in small wars in marginal areas could produce enough awareness of power to break the impasse of nuclear power. In this regard, Kissinger saw Southeast Asia as more of an opportunity than a burden. But Grandin doubts his escalation in Vietnam was based on any geostrategic reasoning. Like détente it served a more domestic purpose and, therefore, he brands the extensive bombing of Cambodia as both Kissinger’s most heinous crime and his most enduring contribution to U.S. foreign policy.

In terms of its legality, the bombing set an important precedent for U.S. warfare because it targeted a neutral country. Kissinger justified violating Cambodian sovereignty by citing the need to destroy Communist “sanctuaries” along its border with Vietnam. Grandin links such logic to more recent attacks on terrorist “safe havens,” from George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 to Barack Obama’s extensive use of drone attacks in Pakistan and Syria. Although Kissinger fell out of favor with the conservative establishment when Reagan began hammering him on détente, this connection is based on good evidence. Desperate to distance itself from talk of power balances and American decline, the New Right began to show Kissinger the door in the late 1970s. But Grandin explains that Kissinger’s defense of the Vietnam War and his arguments for escalation into Cambodia had already become deeply embedded in the ideology of Republican establishment. While Reagan distanced himself from the Secretary of State during his 1976 presidential primary campaign, by 1980 Kissinger was back speaking at the Republican National Convention.

Kissinger’s legacy in the realm of diplomacy is the focus of the book’s second half. Looking at other parts of Asia, Grandin examines his encouragement of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and his ambivalence towards selective genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Turning to Africa, he exposes in great detail Kissinger’s support for apartheid governments, and in terms of the Middle East, he blames him for locking the United States into a perpetual crisis by vehemently pursuing American hegemony in the region. Kissinger’s impact was global, spanning “from the jungles of Vietnam to the sands of the Persian Gulf.”

Meeting in the Oval Office between Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmi, 31 October 1931. Via Wikipedia.

Grandin’s most interesting chapter is domestically focused and intellectually based. The Church Committee inaugurated a new era of foreign policy oversight that Kissinger described as “a merciless congressional onslaught.” Congress’ season of inquiry into matters of national security during the 1970s produced a new relationship between secrecy and spectacle. According to Grandin, the spectacle of continuous congressional hearings nullified the need for secrecy partly because oversaturation leads to public indifference. And when important controversies become mere visual entertainment, public attention fades as crimes are turned into procedural questions or differences of opinion between political parties. Further confusing the issue, arguments over whether the ends justify the means usually leave the hawks in Congress in agreement, and so for the general public such inquiries often act to justify both sides. For his contribution, Kissinger is described as a master at reframing controversial policies into technical matters. But Grandin’s conclusion that Kissinger decided to go covert with the coup against Allende in Chile because Congress was breathing down his neck over Vietnam seems circumstantial. Still, his insight into the parallel nature of secrecy and spectacle fits well anecdotally – in the following decade, Reagan’s full-scale invasion of Grenada smacks as a distraction from the covert wars being carried out in Central America.

Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet shaking hands with Kissinger in 1976. Via Wikipedia.

Kissinger’s Shadow connects the sustained American militarism and the increased political polarization that followed the end of the Cold War. Grandin convincingly argues that Kissinger’s influence on U.S. foreign policy has reverberated into the twenty-first century. While he might rely too heavily on a career’s worth of Kissinger’s writing as ammunition to attack him with, the author’s bias against the now elder statesman does not nullify the facts that he presents and most of his interpretation of those facts. The support that many Americans continue to give to a broad policy of intervention and perpetual war may have started out as a product of the superpower rivalry, but Kissinger’s enduring popularity has allowed such machinations to transcend the Cold War.

Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Enduring Statesman (Metropolitan Books, 2015).

You may also like our collection of essays on US Presidents and Mark Battjes’ recent review of David Milne’s Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (2015)

Screening Vietnam: First Blood and Jaws

Good afternoon, everyone! Thanks so much for joining us. Today, I will be offering a short meditation on cultural memory and the Vietnam War using two case studies that first appeared as blockbuster novels published during the war, and then adapted into popular films, which premiered after the war had ended. While the novels vividly articulated a fractious and divided national zeitgeist during the war, the films transformed the cultural memory of the war through plot twists of revisionism and historical erasure. The first case study, First Blood, is readily familiar as a Vietnam story; the second, Jaws, is less so.

In August 1968, a twenty-five year old graduate student named David Morrell had a creative epiphany while watching the CBS Evening News. The first story was at the scene of a chaotic firefight in the heavily foliated outskirts of Saigon. American soldiers fired from M-16s in response to an enemy assault. The second story—as Morrell recalled it—was about urban unrest in America. Images of smoke, burning buildings, broken glass, and National Guardsmen marching with M-16s filled his small TV screen. (Given the vagaries of memory, Morrell might have actually been watching a report about the antiwar protests at the Democratic National Convention on August 26-29, rather than the urban rebellions, which occurred in the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968.): “It occurred to me that, if I’d turned off the sound…I might have thought that both film clips were two aspects of one horror…. The juxtaposition made me decide to write a novel in which the Vietnam War literally came home to America.”[i]

Cover art of First Blood novel. Source: Wikipedia.

Morrell’s protagonists were both veterans and both told their own story from different generational perspectives. The first was a longhaired Vietnam veteran named Rambo, a Green Beret who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor, but suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), adrift, alone, and unemployed in a softening American economy. The second was a Korean War veteran and winner of the Distinguished Service Cross named Wilfred Teasle, a police chief in Madison, Kentucky. Rambo walks into Madison looking for something to eat, where Teasle immediately picks him up and drops him off outside the city limits. Tired of being treated as a social outcast, Rambo decides to stand his ground and return to the town—twice. Finally he is arrested, brutalized in the town jail, escapes, amasses a small arsenal, and returns to war as he lays siege in the woods and kills countless people. His commanding Special Forces officer in Vietnam, Sam Trautman, is called to mediate the standoff, which ends badly: Rambo shoots and kills Teasle and Trautman kills Rambo. Published in 1972, First Blood was translated into twenty-one languages and Morrell immediately sold the film rights to Columbia Pictures.

First Blood film poster. — First Blood movie poster. Source: Wikipedia

But the film languished for ten years.[ii] Morrell’s sympathetic portrayal of Rambo and Teasle as complex and flawed human beings did not readily translate into visual form. Finally, after its new directors made substantial changes to the plot, the film was released in 1982. Rambo was given a first name—Johnny, as in “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” His movement through the small town—set here in the Pacific Northwest—is now purposeful: in the opening scene, Rambo is trying to find a fellow soldier, Delmar Berry, whose family sorrowfully informs him that Delmar is dead. Teasle is now a flat, purely reactionary character. While still volatile, Rambo rarely kills. Rambo merely wounds Teasle. Most significantly, Rambo lives, which allowed for the possibility of serialization.[iii] In the film’s final moments, Rambo surrenders to Trautman, but indicts the society that failed him, “And I had to do what I had to do to win. But somebody wouldn’t let us win.”[iv]

The theme of the abandoned soldier is blasted writ large in the film’s first sequel, Rambo (First Blood Part II): Rambo is released from prison to return to Vietnam on a special mission to search for American POWs. Released in 1985, the film was an international box office hit—the first of three sequels, which Morrell likened to “westerns or Tarzan films.” First Blood Part II’s celebration of Rambo’s massively muscled heroics and its erasure of ambivalence about the nation’s involvement in Vietnam gave popular form to President Reagan’s full-throated declarations of whipping the “Vietnam Syndrome.”

Cover of the first edition of the novel Jaws. Via Wikipedia

At the time of First Blood’s publication in 1972, a writer named Peter Benchley was drafting an “Untitled Novel” about the social and economic chaos unleashed by a murderous great white shark that eats five people at a beach community on Long Island. A member of the celebrated Benchley literary family, Peter grew up watching marine life at his family’s summer home in Nantucket. His childhood fascination with sharks endured at Harvard and his subsequent career as a journalist and a speechwriter in the Johnson Administration. Benchley’s privileged background gave him an intimate sense of the WASPY summer people who populate his fictional seaside community of Amity in the novel that he finally named Jaws.[v] References to Vietnam punctuate the novel. In an early draft, Benchley describes the young adult summer people, the lifeblood of this struggling seaside community, as virtually immune to the shocks of war and socioeconomic upheaval because of their wealth and their ready access to college draft deferments, or through desirable draft assignments as naval officers or reservists:

“If their IQs could be tested en masse, they would show native ability well within the top ten percent of all mankind…. Intellectually, they know a great deal. Practically, they choose to know almost nothing. For they have been subtly conditioned to believe (or, if not to believe, to sense) that the world is really quite irrelevant to them. And they are right…. They are invulnerable to the emotions of war.”[vi]

By contrast, a local police officer, Len Hendricks, who discovers the grisly remains of the shark’s first victim, is a Vietnam veteran. He is grateful to have a secure job. Trained as a radio technician, he struggled to find work in a glutted market after he returned home from Vietnam.[vii] In wartime Amity, the arrival of the shark is a catalyst for the town’s unraveling: the shark indiscriminately kills locals and summer people alike. Police Chief Martin Brody tries to close the beaches, but is repeatedly thwarted by Mayor Vaughn and his Mafia cronies. The novel is filled with political corruption, class conflict, racial strife, anti-Semitism, drug abuse, and marital infidelity. After Brody hires the crotchety sexagenarian seaman Quint to kill the shark, a tense confrontation erupts between Matt Hooper, the LaCoste-clad Ph.D. ichthyologist, and Quint over their firearms skills. The confrontation quickly turns to Vietnam: “Hooper didn’t know what Quint was doing either, but he didn’t like it. He felt he was being set up to be knocked down. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ve shot guns before.’ ‘Where? In the service?’ ‘No. I…’ ‘Were you in the service?’ ‘No.’ ‘I didn’t think so.’ ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Christ, I’d even bet you’re still a virgin.’”[viii]

Hooper and Quint are killed in pursuit of the shark. Only Brody survives. Published in the spring of 1974, the novel was an international bestseller. In the United States alone, the paperback sold over nine million copies.[ix] Benchley was amused to hear that Fidel Castro praised it as a wonderful metaphor for “the corruption of capitalism.” Jaws was also a bestseller in South Africa until it was banned under tightened censorship laws in 1975 for its salacious racial and sexual content.[x]

Even while Benchley was still finishing his “Untitled Novel,” he was working on an adapted screenplay for a movie version with Universal Studios. The movie became a dramatically different cultural product than the novel. Stripped of all references to Vietnam and contemporary socioeconomic conflict, the movie is a lean thriller centered on the rampaging shark and its climactic demise. Quint is now eaten by the shark—its final victim. But Hooper and Brody both live.

Despite the film’s erasure of Vietnam, the war provides an essential context for understanding the film’s reception in the summer of 1975. On April 29-30, North Vietnamese forces entered Saigon and dismantled the remains of South Vietnam, while the American evacuation mission, “Operation Frequent Wind,” frantically rescued Americans and South Vietnamese from the fallen city by helicopter. Just two weeks later, American troops were deployed again during the Mayaguez Incident in Cambodia. The last deaths of America’s longest war occurred in these final military operations.

Amid a jittery national mood, Jaws was released on June 20, 1975. The film was a smash hit, quickly creating a new cinematic category: the summer blockbuster. Directed by a virtually unknown twenty-eight-year-old named Steven Spielberg, Jaws grossed $60 million in its first month and became the most profitable film in American history (only to be displaced by “Star Wars,” two years later). Americans eagerly consumed Jaws paraphernalia: t-shirts, foam shark fins, and shark bones. Jaws terrified its audiences so completely that some coastal tourist towns experienced a recession. Frenzied swimmers occasionally became mobs as they fled the water, or even attacked harmless marine life thought to be sharks. On July 28, 1975, Newsweek dubbed this national hysteria, “Jawsmania.”

The shocks of war conditioned audiences for Jaws. Yet despite the film’s erasure of Vietnam, the movie explicitly remembered World War II in ways that the novel did not. In perhaps the film’s most haunting scene, just hours before his demise, Quint quietly recounts his experiences as a crewmember of the U.S.S. Indianapolis: “Soo, 1100 went in the water. 316 come out. The sharks took the rest. July 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the Bomb.”[xi]

The spring and summer of 1975 marked the thirtieth anniversary of America’s victory in World War II. Quint’s soliloquy reminded audiences of the “Good War,” a bygone era of national unity against a common fascist enemy. The movie’s unprecedented success also catapulted the stratospheric rise of Steven Spielberg, who would become, perhaps, the most influential architect of the nation’s cultural memory of World War II in subsequent decades. As the movie Jaws suggests, memorialization of the Good War could ease and recast the public’s memory of Vietnam.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following was originally presented to the roundtable: “The Vietnam War: Lessons and Legacies across a Half Century” Institute of Historical Studies, UT Austin, Thursday, November 12, 2015. Copyright © by Janet M. Davis

[i] David Morrell, forward, “Rambo and Me,” First Blood (1972, repr., New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000), viii.

[ii] Morrell, xi.

[iii] Morrell, xii.

[iv] First Blood, directed by Ted Kotcheff (Orion Pictures, 1982), mojvideo.com.

[v] Box 1, I. Manuscripts, A. Books, 2. Novels, a. JAWS (Doubleday, New York, 1974), Folder 19, (ii) Drafts, (i) 4 pages of holograph title suggestions for JAWS, Peter Benchley Collection, #956 (cited hereafter as PBC), Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University (cited hereafter as HGARC).

[vi] Box 1, I. Manuscripts, A. Books 2. Novels, a. JAWS (Doubleday, New York, 1974), Folder 6, (ii) Drafts, (a) Rough partial draft, untitled, TS with holograph corrections, pp. 1-174, June 1972, p. 58, PBC, HGARC.

[vii] Box 1, I. Manuscripts, A. Books 2. Novels, a. JAWS (Doubleday, New York, 1974), Folder 6, (ii) Drafts, (a) Rough partial draft, untitled, TS with holograph corrections, pp. 1-174, June 1972, p. 14, PBC, HGARC.

[viii] Peter Benchley, Jaws (1974, repr., New York: Random House, 2005), 251.

[ix] Benchley, introduction, Jaws, 5.

[x] Benchley, introduction, 4; Erik van Ees, “South Africa: More Censors than Writers,” Montreal Gazette, October 17, 1975, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19751017&id=YpMuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WKEFAAAAIBAJ&pg=5335,537667&hl=en.

[xi] Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg (Universal City Studios, 1975), DVD (Universal Pictures, 2012).

50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American Perspective

By Nancy Bui

Most Americans, including policy makers, and Vietnam Veterans have expressed their lack of knowledge of Vietnam’s history and culture before US’s involvement in Vietnam to fight a war over ideology. The War cost over 58,000 American lives and claimed the lives of over a quarter of a million South Vietnamese soldiers, over a million of North Vietnamese troops and an estimated 7 million civilians from both North and South Vietnam.

The war was over, but the misunderstandings continued. What can we learn from this war? Perhaps, we may want to look at the war from the Vietnamese perspective. After all, we carry the largest cost of the war and suffered unspeakable atrocities long before and long after America’s involvement. The outcome of the War has affected us tremendously and the ongoing process of healing will take us generations.

On May 8, 1965, 3,500 U.S Marines landed in Da Nang, a beach town North of South Vietnam. It marked the year America officially got involved in The Vietnam War by sending ground troops. However, for the Vietnamese, the war had started many years before. After World War II, Ho Chi Minh, an expat who was away from Vietnam for over 30 years, introduced communism into Vietnam. The Vietnamese have had a history of fighting for our sovereignty long before communism arrived. Our people fought the French for our independence from 1885, and we quickly had to fight another war against communists at the same time. In 1954, the Geneva Accords was signed to divide Vietnam into two parts at the 17th parallel. The North belonged to the communist party, and the South belonged to the free Vietnamese.

On May 19, 1959, Ho Chi Minh’s 69th birthday, with help from Russia and China, North Vietnam officially kicked off the invasion of South Vietnam. The South fought back in a Guerrilla War which lasted from 1959-1963. America wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and sent troops to Vietnam. President Ngo Dinh Diem on the other hand, only wanted economic aid, weapons, and training, because he believed that any foreign troops on Vietnamese soil would sooner or later offend the Vietnamese people, as fighting for their sovereignty from foreign invaders was their way of life. The conflict ended in his assassination on Nov. 2, 1963.

After sending troops to Vietnam, the conflict extended into a Total War. The battlefields became bloodier and bloodier. Over half a million U.S troops were in South Vietnam by 1968. Vietnam lost the media war, as public opinion and support for the War rapidly declined, triggering a decade of antiwar demonstrations. America started pulling troops out of Vietnam. By the end of 1972, all combat troops were completely withdrawn. In early 1973, Congress passed the resolution to prohibit any funding of The Indochina War. The US was quick to get involved in the war, but was even quicker to retreat from it.

The South Vietnamese Army fought for over two years without any outside assistance. On the other hand, Russia and China more than doubled their aids to North Vietnam. The South fought to their last bullet and finally surrendered on April 30, 1975. The following two slides offer further information what happened after the war.

Must Read Books on the Vietnam War

Must must-read books on the Vietnam War

by Mark A. Lawrence

Christian Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015).
The latest in a long line of studies focused on the legacies of the war in the United States, Appy’s book covers everything from film and literature to foreign and military policy.

Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 ( 2013).
Asselin’s book, rooted in extensive research in Vietnamese records, is one of the first to examine the North Vietnamese side of the decisions that led to a major war in 1965. Scholars will no doubt get better access to North Vietnamese materials in the years to come, but this book is an extraordinary accomplishment, shedding light on matters that have defied study for decades.

William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000).
Duiker’s exceptionally engaging biography draws on material from around the world deftly analyzes the blend of nationalism and communism at the heart of Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary activism.

Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Logevall’s book is the most influential study on U.S. decision-making during the critical years 1964-1965. It challenges the conventional notion that the U.S. decision to wage a major was nearly inevitable, showing instead that Lyndon Johnson had realistic alternatives to escalation.

Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and the America in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1989).
Sheehan, an influential journalist during the early stages of America’s war in Vietnam, examines the life and career of John Paul Vann, an American who spent years in Southeast Asia trying to transform South Vietnam into a viable nation capable of defending itself. Vann’s failure captures in microcosm the problems that beset American policy in the area.

Recent Posts