The Martin Duberman Reader (25 page)

Howard Zinn, though he had no illusions about Communist rule in Vietnam, became one of the earliest critics of the war, feeling that protest against it was inescapable, and especially when the United States began its deliberate, large-scale bombing of civilians. Nor did he feel that such protest would detract from the black struggle he'd been centrally active in—he thought the two intricately linked. Civil rights workers in the South had long ago learned to distrust the government, local and federal, and they were among the first
to resist the draft—unlike the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) membership.

The older, more conservative black organizations—especially the Urban League, the NAACP, and SCLC—initially tabled all resolutions that condemned American policy in Vietnam. But increasing numbers of young blacks were scornful of those organizations and were outspoken against the war. In 1965, it remained unclear whether the civil rights movement and the protest against the war in Vietnam would become mutually supportive issues or divisive ones.

In the fall of 1964, Howard began to teach at his new academic home, Boston University. He was as conscientious and as devoted to his students as he'd earlier been at Spelman—and no less conscientious about what he viewed as his public obligations. In the spring of 1965, he and Herbert Marcuse were the principal speakers at an antiwar protest on the Boston Common. It drew a disappointingly small crowd of about a hundred people. Still more discouraging, at Howard's own university it was possible to get six thousand signatures on a petition that pledged support for Johnson's Vietnam policy.

In a Gallup poll, only 4 percent of Americans believed there was no communist influence in the antiwar protests—against a full 78 percent convinced that there was “some” or “a lot.” At the same time, Johnson began the bombing of North Vietnam and by the end of 1965 had sent 185,000 troops to South Vietnam. It was a difficult, even dangerous time for those openly declaring themselves against the war.

In August 1965, Zinn wrote an article in the
Village Voice
in which he advocated a discussion within SNCC on the question of whether civil rights workers should take a stand on the war in Vietnam. He gave as his own opinion that they should. How would they feel, he asked, if the various peace organizations refused to take a stand on black civil rights on the grounds that it might drain time and energy from protesting the war? Further, Howard likened the Vietcong—originally a small, armed force consisting
of various ideologies and committed to land reform, which the autocratic Diem government had labeled “Communistic”—to civil rights workers in the American Deep South, characterizing both as “homemade uprisings against an oppressive system.” But it wasn't entirely clear in 1965 who in South Vietnam was oppressing whom, and a number of people protested what they called Howard's “simplistic” analogy.

Yet he started to get a mounting number of requests to talk about the war at this rally or that teach-in. If the date on his calendar was open, he nearly always said yes. He did so primarily out of a sense of moral obligation rather than personal egotism, though being human, he did enjoy the crowds, the give-and-take, and the admiration. In 1966, the peace movement in the United States still wasn't very strong, consisting of roughly 10 to 15 percent of the population; the first large-scale protest march wouldn't take place until the spring of the following year.

In a piece for the
Nation,
Howard argued that our military action in Vietnam could only be justified if it was “helping a determined people to defend itself against an outside attacker.” The administration liked to argue that it was acting to counteract the “aggression” of communist North Vietnam against the South. But in fact, guerrilla insurrection in the South was itself a grassroots reaction against the Diem regime's policy of herding villagers into concentration camps called “strategic hamlets” and consistently using torture; the insurgency did not originate in Hanoi and preceded the communist North's decision to take part in it. When the first battalion of some five hundred North Vietnamese—and this is according to U.S. intelligence reports—arrived in the South in late 1964 or early 1965, the United States already had forty thousand troops there and had flown thousands of bombing missions. The first foreign invader of South Vietnam had been the United States.

Central to the argument of Howard's path-breaking 1967 book,
Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal,
was the falsity of the Johnson administration's claim that the conflict was due primarily to aggression from the North. The government didn't truly believe in its
own argument (it knew that if any cause was “primary,” it was the wish to thwart China's domination in Asia) and Johnson had failed to prove his case against North Vietnam. The National Liberation Front (NLF) had inaugurated a civil war in the South as a local rebellion against its own malign government; only several years later, after the United States had entered the war in force, did substantial aid from the North begin to flow (as late as January 1966, when the United States already had 170,000 troops in Vietnam, a senatorial committee under Mike Mansfield visited Vietnam and reported to the Committee on Foreign Relations that there were still only about 14,000 North Vietnamese troops in the South—some 6 percent of the NLF's total strength of 230,000).

The NLF
did
represent a nationalist-communist revolt against Diem's, and, later, General Ky's, brutal puppet administrations—and that alone, given the United States' attitude toward communism (still phobic, though Senator Joseph McCarthy no longer ruled the roost), would probably have mandated intervention. The threat of a unified and communist Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh was quite literally waving a red flag in the face of the United States—though as Howard argued, the chances for social reform and improving the lot of millions of poor Vietnamese would almost certainly be better than under Diem or Ky. But that was hardly the opinion of President Johnson: in the summer of 1965, he said “an Asia so threatened by communist domination would imperil the security of the United States itself.”

Howard urged that the United States discard the notion that its withdrawal from Vietnam would—as a result of the often-stated but never proved “domino theory”—lead one Asian nation after another, with the help of China, to succumb to communism. Attempting military solutions for the socioeconomic problems of the underdeveloped world, he argued, tended to “bring about exactly what it is supposed to prevent”: the destruction wrought by war made conditions still more miserable and their amelioration more distant. Howard used the earlier Korean War as an analogy. The United States had “won” that war “in the sense that we prevented
the North Koreans from forcibly unifying the country. But the cost in human terms was frightful.” Estimates of the number of civilians killed ran into the millions, with the landscape turned into a pile of wreckage—to say nothing of the dictatorship brought into power and “the end of political democracy.”

Insisting that the United States did not belong in Southeast Asia, Howard broadened his indictment to question whether our numerous bases throughout the world were—despite the national mantra—in any way necessary to our “national security.” Why assume, he asked, that various upheavals in Asia resulted from the “domino effect” rather than from a homegrown attempt to topple repressive regimes and to create better living conditions? Howard made the heretical point that Marxist ideals (which he never, unlike most people, confused with communist totalitarianism) appealed to people around the globe—“And why should they not?” he asked. “These ideals include peace, brotherhood, racial equality, the classless society, the withering away of the state.”

It can even be argued that some totalitarian governments do improve living conditions. Perhaps Maoist China had done more in this regard than the preceding Chiang Kai-Shek government had, and perhaps Castro's Cuba was preferable in that same regard to Batista's. In any case, Howard was surely on the mark when chastising the U.S. government as tending to see “every rebellion as a result of some plot concocted in Moscow or Peking.”

And surely, too, Howard's precocious insistence that withdrawal from Vietnam was the only sensible policy was prophetic. Withdraw we did some five years later, though in the interim causing a vast amount of additional death and destruction. When Howard wrote
Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal
in late 1966 (it was published in 1967), he was far ahead of the position nearly all public intellectuals—as well as the population at large—had adopted. Howard believed that “predation”—war and other aggressive manifestations
—was
deeply ingrained in our culture, but was
not
wired into our brains or our evolutionary past.

On April 30, 1970, President Nixon announced on national television
that the United States had invaded Cambodia in order to attack North Vietnamese army strongholds there—a decision, he claimed, that he'd previously refrained from making “because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation.” Not quite. For the previous thirteen months, the United States had secretly but steadily been bombing Cambodia. As documents revealed only many, many years later, Nixon had directly told Henry Kissinger, “I want them to hit everything,” which Kissinger then relayed to the Pentagon as: “A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” In other words, “Let's git us a little mass murder.” General William Westmoreland once openly asserted that “Orientals don't value lives.”

For three
years
the Nixon administration had been bombing neighboring Laos, escalating by 1970 to the point where the Plain of Jars, previously a prosperous area, was all but obliterated. Now it was Cambodia's turn. Nixon had led the American public to believe that he was turning the war over to the Vietnamese and would be sending American troops home. But his April 30 speech, full of outright lies and overweening arrogance, declared that our “vital interests” were—again—at stake. The speech managed all at once to stun the American public and to give a shot in the arm to the antiwar movement. Nixon, predictably, denounced demonstrators against his ferocious policies as “bums.”

One of the hundreds of protests against the invasion of Cambodia took place at Kent State University in Ohio. None of the marchers, who were mostly students, carried weapons or engaged in any violent act. Yet the Ohio National Guard nonetheless fired sixty-seven rounds into the crowd in a mere thirteen seconds, killing four, wounding nine (one of whom suffered permanent paralysis). A huge national response to the frightening event followed, with some four million students leaving their classrooms to protest the National Guard's unwarranted attack. A Gallup poll reported that 61 percent of the country now wanted the United States out of Vietnam no later than the end of 1971.

Howard's own protest activities continued unabated. Political
commentators had been widely suggesting that the antiwar movement was in decline, an assessment that proved widely off the mark. Even during the winter months of 1970–71, a hastily planned demonstration in Boston brought hundreds of people out in zero-degree weather to protest in front of the Federal Building and then to march spontaneously through the streets. Only a few days later, fully five thousand turned out on the Common, though the press—unwilling to give the lie to its own analysis of “decline”—barely covered it.

Then, when the weather began to thaw, came the “Mayday” actions in the Capitol. Thousands were arrested on the steps of Congress, Howard included. He'd made the mistake of asking a policeman why he was beating up a long-haired young man—and after being beaten himself, ended up in a one-person cell packed with half a dozen others. They stood for six hours in a pool of water several inches deep, but were comparatively lucky: thousands of protesters were put for some thirty hours into the Coliseum stadium, so crowded and cold that there was no space on the floor to lie down at night, let alone food or blankets.

The following day, May 5, 1971, Howard was back in Boston, speaking on the Common before a crowd of some twenty-five thousand. “People who commit civil disobedience,” he said, “are engaging in the most petty of disorders in order to protest against mass murder. These people are violating the most petty of laws, trespass laws and traffic laws, in order to protest against the government's violation of the most holy of laws, ‘Thou shalt not kill.' ”

—from
Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left
(2012)

T
wo crucial dates frame this story: 1951 and 1973.

In 1951 a book entitled
The Homosexual in America
appeared as out of nowhere, its author, Donald Webster Cory, entirely unknown. The book was the first full-scale nonfiction account of gay life in the United States, and its author spoke as an insider, an avowed homosexual. In opposition to psychiatric calls for “cure” and religious demands for “repentance,” Cory's message to the homosexual was to “turn inward and accept yourself. . . . You are what you are and what I am—a homosexual. You will not outgrow it, will not evolve in another direction, will not change on the couch of an analyst.”

We jump to 1973.

The January issue of
Contemporary Sociology
carried a lengthy essay reviewing some dozen books on homosexuality published in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall Riots. The author was Edward Sagarin, professor of sociology and criminology at the City University of New York (CCNY), a specialist in the study of deviance, president-elect of the American Society of Criminology, and the prolific author of a slew of books and articles.