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5. Mission to Hanoi: Knocking on the Other Side’s Door
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98 The Admirable Radical Chapter Five ✴ ✴ ✴ Mission to Hanoi Knocking on the Other Side’s Door They may use thousands of aircraft for intensified attacks against North Vietnam. But never will they be able to break the iron will of the heroic Vietnamese people to fight against U.S. aggression . . . Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom . . . It is common knowledge that each time they are about to step up their criminal war, the U.S. aggressors always resort to their “peace talks” swindle in an attempt to fool world opinion and blame Vietnam for unwillingness to negotiate ! President Johnson, reply publicly to the American people and the peoples of the world: Who has sabotaged the Geneva Agreements which guarantee the sovereignty, independence and unity and territorial integrity of Vietnam? Have Vietnamese troops invaded the United States and massacred Americans? Is it not the U.S. government which has sent U.S. troops to invade Vietnam and massacre Vietnamese? —Ho Chi Minh, 1966 We were wrong, terribly wrong. —Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, writing in 1995 The communists of North Vietnam were less interested in promoting world revolution than in unifying their country under socialist rule. We deluded ourselves into thinking that we were defending freedom against totalitarianism . . . Here the experience of Vietnam following the U.S. defeat is instructive. Once the Americans departed, the Vietnamese began getting their act together. Although not a utopia, Vietnam has become a stable and increasingly prosperous nation. It is a responsible 98 Mission to Hanoi 99 member of the international community. In Hanoi, the communists remain in power. From an American point of view, who cares? —Vietnam veteran and conservative international relations scholar Andrew Bacevich In September 1965, after his arrest during the August activities of the Assembly of Unrepresented People, Lynd was invited to New York by Communist historian Herbert Aptheker. Over the summer Aptheker had attended the Peace Congress in Helsinki, Finland, and had met a delegate of the Peace Committee of North Vietnam, who asked Aptheker to visit Hanoi. The Vietnamese representative suggested a three-person convoy, with two non-Communist members. Aptheker, a loyal Communist Party member since 1939, was a serious historian, whose pathbreaking study American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) sharply challenged the prevailing scholarship that minimized the resistance of slaves. He also had penned a controversial defense of the Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution, The Truth about Hungary (1957). As a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA, Aptheker was emblematic of the Old Left. So when he returned to the United States, he “sought out” a prominent New Leftist for the Hanoi sojourn, Staughton Lynd. The New Haven historian’s “courageous participation in civil rights, civil liberties and peace activities had long gained my respect,” Aptheker wrote.1 Lynd invited one of the founders of SDS, Tom Hayden, as the third party. Lynd had known Hayden from his days in the Southern civil rights movement and he was a leading figure among student activists. During a visit to New Haven on a snowy day, Tom accompanied Lynd and his two children, Barbara and Lee, as they rode sleds down an icy hill. Here Lynd asked Hayden, “How would you like to go to Hanoi?” Hayden was eager to go but was involved in the Newark Community Union Project and needed to discuss the implications of the trip with its fellow organizers. Hayden “respected” Lynd, “an honorable man who led the anti-war movement in its beginning phase.” The two men soon agreed to join the Communist historian for a journey to Hanoi.2 In Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones reports that Lynd “was reluctant to travel with an American Communist.” Hayden noted in his memoir that Lynd was concerned about the public repercussions of traveling with Aptheker.3 Lynd remembers it somewhat differently. When Aptheker asked him to go to Hanoi, “I immediately said yes,” recalls Staughton, although he deferred a final decision until he returned to New Haven to consult Alice. Reluctance implies opposition or an [54.226.126.38] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:23 GMT) 100 The Admirable Radical unwillingness to do something. It would be more accurate to say, as Hayden does, that Lynd was worried about the consequences of traveling to a Communist country with which the United States was at war in the company of a Communist. “I lost my profession for making that trip...