VIET NAM: NEGLECTED
ANTECEDENTS
(An unpublished manuscript from about 1969)
By Ira Bodry
CONTENTS: Background Introduction Letter From A Dead Man page 1, 2 Chapter I Stubborn and patient National Resistance page 10 Chapter II Modern Viet Nam: Product of or Reaction to the Spanish Inquisition page 16 Chapter III "Mad Jack" Disguised as Uncle Sam Draws First Blood page 44 ------------ Letters to and from Captain John Percival, Captain, USS Constitution page 58 Chapter IV The American Revolution and War of Independence page 90 Chapter V Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God page 95
Chapter V - Resistance to Tyranny is Obediance to God
How different today the Vietnamese Resistance from all the rest of tropical Afro-asia in their capacity and will never to yield! General Nguyen Van Vinh (see page 1) is supposed to have said, in April of 1966, that the newer ‘nationalist’ countries of Africa and Asia were advising negotiation on U.S. terms since it was unthinkable his people could triumph over the American colossus.*
RESISTANCE TO TYRANNY IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD
One part of Lincoln’s speech in the Thirtieth Congress deserves repetition; “… Any people anywhere, being inclined and have the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, - a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movement. Such minority was precisely the case, of the stories of our own revolution…”** Lincoln’s attachment to “our own revolution” brings us to the relevant passages in the Declaration of Independence of 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal***, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are
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*Ralph Hammond, Communist Affairs, November – Dec.1967. pp.25 et seq. No mention is made of Japan, while China is suppose to have advised no negotiating until 1972. One might then ask, what does the Vietnam have in common with Afro-asian ‘nationalists’ Brian Crozier, albeit contemptuously, saw a part of the answer: “Like Nasser, Sekou Toure or Ho Chi Minh (one is struck) by the deep wound of bitterness they keep alive. Eyes and voices harden at some hidden memory of earlier injury, and the smile of welcome vanished in a scowl, habitually followed by a tirade.” Crozier, The Morning After. Oxford. 1963. P. 27
**See pp. 87-88 for the context.
***Created equal here meaning there is no birthright to a monopoly of political power. Perplexity may arise here as regards the negro. Although favoring eventual emancipation, and trying vainly to include remarks on the “execrable slave trade” in the original draft of the Declaration Jefferson continued to believe negroes inherently inferior mentally. When past sixty five and (see reverse side of the text (***)
(Conclusion of footnote***) about to retire from the Presidency. He modified his views. The following letter to one of Napoleon’s bishops pertains: Washington, Feb. 25, 1809
Sir, - I have received the favor of your letter… and with it the volume you were so kind as to send me on the ‘Literature of Negroes’. Be assured that no person living wished more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limed sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be the degree of their talent, it is not measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others…
From a letter to M. Henri Greoire, Bishop and Senator, Paris.
Before castigating the temporizing of Jefferson, a Virginian by every tie and view point, the reader might consider the observations of Dickens, an outsider free from any attachment to the Commonwealth of Virginia, and most sympathetic to the victims of slavery: “…All men who know that there are laws against instructing slaves, of which the pains and penalties greatly exceed in their amount the fines imposed on those who maim and torture them, must be prepared to find their faces very low in the scale of intellectual expression. But the darkness – not of the skin, but of mind – which meets the stranger’s eye at every turn; the brutalizing and blotting out of all fairer characters traced by Nature’s hand; immeasurably outdo his worst belief. That traveled creation of the great satirist’s brain (the reference here is to the last part of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels), who, fresh from living among horses, peered from a high casement down upon his own kind with trembling horror, was scarcely more repelled and daunted by the sight than those who look upon some of these faces for the first time must surely be.”
Dickens, American Notes. P. 122. Cheap edition. Books, inc.
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“instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and institute new governments, laying its foundations… to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a ling train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, … to provide new guards for their future security…”
So unmistakable an assertion of the right, nay, the duty, of revolution, the duty of mankind to overthrow governments evil and unrepenting [sic], is surely a universal incitement to sedition. It has set going a current of uprising whose end is not yet in sight. To deny the prominence of sedition in the American character is, perhaps, conceivable for Mao Tse Tung, beset by senility and encirclement, the maddening, unrelenting pressure of Dulles’ ghost and of Truman’s abrasive intrusion*; but for the Croniad[sic] seated in Washington to ignore all that, and condemn the founders is to call up the hounds of hell.**
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*As quoted in large sixe [sic], bold print by the official Peking Review: “Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all boil down to the one sentence, “It is right to rebel!! For thousands of years, it had been said that it was right to oppress, it was right to exploit, and it was wrong to rebel. This old verdict was only reversed with the appearance of Marxism. This is a great contribution…..” Peking Review, no. 24, June 14, 1968. P. 30. This astounding absurdity is all the more puzzling when we consider that Edgar Snow, in June of 1936, found that Mao “knew the American system in theory and had studied both our Revolutionary and Civil wars… and had been inspired by the life of George Washington and Carlyle’s lives of the French Revolution”. Snow, Journey to the Beginning. Random House. N.Y. 1958. Pp. 168 & 163. The only explanation is senility.
**If one wishes to traverse the bush in Viet Nam it is impossible to avoid leeches. Those of Mr. Johnson’s inner sanctum stick to the body politic here and suck up self-importance as they drain it of virtue and intelligence. One, calling himself a historian, compared the Suppression of Viet Nam to the Civil War and Lincoln’s troubles with that of current opposition. The last person to suggest such a comparison, between a war to suppress a people just emerging from colonial rule, and a rebellion in our midst, was President McKinley, who had the merit, at least of seeming to really believe it.
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No flimsy thread of descent by vague speculations, but a solid cable link of philosophies printed for monumental actions, joined Jefferson to the two centuries he looked back on. Since the Declaration revives the very language, tends to copy whole phrases from Locke’s treatise, too much is ascribed too often to that philosopher, making Jefferson and his fellow patriots merely a kind of burly club of Lockians. That Locke was neither the nor the original founder influence for the America creed as to the source of just power, the right to resist unjust, the great principle of government as a contract or compace [sic] between ruler and people, the latter prior to and superior of their governors, that it all goes far deeper and back to a time he, Locke, dared not to mention, such is the case. To fan a blaze so devouring as Jefferson’s would seem even at first glance to overtax the prudent strictures of that legalistic priest of property. Four decades farther back there was a Milton. The deep imprint of his message could not be effaced by the hangman’s pyre. His pamphlets did not smolder in English thoughts, while New English never ceased to practice them.* What engraved his writing on minds who could not name him, but would transmit his pith untainted was his association with Cromwell. Cromwell, the squire whose revolutionary authority brought to trial a King of England, condemned him, and led the convict to stand at last above the watching crowd only to publish the proper ending for an attempt at absolute monarchy. Those years of civil war in Britain, the solemnly lawful cleaving of royal head, that terrifying vision of wrath, unspeakable and unforgettable, hovering ever after before the crowned rulers of the English realm, a landmark whose brink must be shunned by self-restraint lest the kingdom crash; and yet; there dreadful subjects, though uppermost in every political discussion, must be never be discussed as such. Locke could not examine or touch the tender regions Milton had explored so fiercely, for was the law.**
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*One of Milton’s principal political works was burned by the common hangman the year of the Restoration (1660); In New England, comrades in arms of Cromwell retord [sic] the glories of his eminence knowing Puritan audiences proof against royalist retaliation. Of. Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, The First Americans, 1607-1690. P. 299.
**Even in Puritan Connecticut, the law in 1750 carried a capital punishment for compassing the death of the king, which Milton’s writing might have, if discussed too freely, produced. L.H. G Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, Vol. III. P. 94
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Milton’s ‘Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’ is too long to reproduce, but salient passages merit rehearsal. Firstly, “neither do bad men hate tyrants”* “although sometimes for shame, and when it comes to their own grievances of purse especially, they would seem good patriots and side with the better cause”**… “they plead for him (the king captive), pity him, extol him, protest against who talk of bringing him to the trial of justice, which is the sword of God, superior to all mortal things,…” “…hazarding the welfare of a whole nation, to have saved one whom they so oft have termed Ageg [sic]***”, and vilifying the blood of so many Jonathans**** who have saved Israel…” (After giving a version of the compact theory very close to that which Locke offered forty years later, Milton goes much further) : “And this often times with express warning , that is the king or magistrates proved unfaithful to his trust, the people would be disengaged…. It follows… that the titles of sovereign lord, natural lord, and the like, are either arrogances or flatteries, not admitted by emperors and kings of best note, and disliked by the church both of the Jews (Isaish xxvi. 13) and ancient Christians… Although generally the people of Asia, and with them the Jews also, especially since the time they chose a king against the advise and counsel of God, are noted by wise authors much inclinable to slavery… Unless the people must be thought created all for him, he not for them, and they all in one body inferior to him single; which were a kind of treason against the dignity of mankind to affirm… it follows, that to say kinds are accountable to nine but God, is the overturning of all law and government… for if the king fear not God (as how many of them do not), we hold then our lives and estates by the tenure of his mere grace and mercy… the people (may) as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either chose him or reject him, retain him or depose him, though no tyrant, merely by the liberty and right of freeborn men to be governed as seems them best… The Greeks and Romans, as their
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*The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, from which all these extracts are drawn was written during the trial of Charles the First, and published on 13 Feb. 1649, fourteen days after his execution.
**This passage refer to the commercial Presbyterians of London , Glasgo and elsewhere, whose interests were economic, and who must have triumphed straightaway, if the economic interpretation of history is adequate; in fact, it was Cromwell and the Army of bible-reading revolutionaries who won out, for awhile, since he understood that ‘men of religion’, the Independents, whose voice Milton became.
***Samuel, the Prophet of the Lord, commanded Saul, King of Israel, to slay the captive king of Amalek, Agag or Agog, but Saul balked. Samuel then took up the sword and cut down the enemy of God’s people.
****Jonathan, whom David found a more tender feeling for in friendship pf loyal goodness to a righteous, i.e. a divinely appointed sovereign.
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“prime authors witness, held it not only lawful, but a glorious and heroic deed, rewarded publicly with statues garlands, to kill an infamous tyrant at any time without trial; and but reason, that he, who trod down all law, should not be vouchsafed the benefit of law. Insomuch that Seneca, the tragedian, beings in Hercules, the grand suppressor of tyrants, thus speaking; … There can be slain no sacrifice to Jove more acceptable than an unjust and wicked king”*…. Surely it is not for nothing that tyrants, by a kind of natural instinct, both hate and fear none more than the true church and saints of God, as the most dangerous enemies and subverts of monarchy, though indeed of tyranny. … In the year 1564 John Knox, a most famous divine, and the reformer of Scotland to the Presbyterian discipline, at a general assembly maintained… that subjects might and ought to execute God’s judgments upon their king; that fact of Jehu** against their king, having the ground of God’s ordinary command to put such and such offenders to death, was not extraordinary, but to be limited of all that preferred the honour of God to the affection of flesh and wicked princes; that kings, if they offend, have no privilege to be exempted from the punishments of law more that any other subject; so that if the king be a murderer, adulterer, or idolater, he should suffer, not as a king, but as an offender; and this… he repeats again and again…… (After deposing their lawful and hereditary queen in 1567) the Scots… alleged they had used more lenity towards her than she deserved; that their ancestors had heretofore punished their kings by death or banishment; that the Scots were a free nation, made king who, they freely chose, and with the same freedom un-kinged him if they saw cause… all which bore witness that regal power was nothing else but a mutual covenant… between king and people…
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*Milton translates Jovi as ‘God’, a turn open to dispute; a discussion of Milton in ca. 1750 with up to date references might now appear more clearly felonious than before. Consider then how such a discourse today with such references might not be regarded as jocular. How changed America today from 1944, when with a World war still not done with, Gen. Deane was highly amused to hear from Soviet general of secret police that an American engineer at Baku had been overheard to esteem, or rather disesteem F.D.R. as an ‘S.O.B. who should be taken out and shot’. Maj. Gen. John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance. P. 59
**Anointed by Elisha command and told to kill Ahab, King of Israel, and take his place.
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“Which no less in England than in Scotland*, by the mouths of those faithful witnesses commonly called puritans and nonconformists,… one of them, whose name was Gibson, foretold King James he should be rooted out, and conclude his race, if he persisted to uphold King James he should be rooted out, and conclude his race, if he persisted to uphold bishops… Therefore when the people, or any part of them, shall rise against the king and his authority, executing the law in anything established, civil or ecclesiastical, I do not say it is rebellion, of the thing commanded, though established, be unlawful, and that they first sought all due means of redress (and no man is further bound to law”. In the Areopagitica [sic], composed five years earlier, “For this is not the liberty which we can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the commonwealth; that let no man in this world expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for.”** resuming ‘The Tenure of Kings’: “… And surely they that shall boast, as we do, to be a free nation, and not have in themselves the power to remove or to abolish any governor supreme, or subordinate, with the government itself upon urgent causes, may please their fancy with a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to cozen babies; but we are indeed under tyranny and servitude, as wanting that power, which is the root and source of all liberty, to dispose and economize in the land which God hath given them, as masters of family in their own house and free inheritance.”
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*George Buchanan, born in Scotland a century before Milton’s time, had lived in France, and pursued philosophy there for years before returning to tutor the royal father of Milton’s target. Practically every line of thought quoted in this section was anticipated less eloquently by Buchanan in a work published in 1579 at Edinburgh; less eloquently for in Latin. Jefferson had in his library a complete set of Buchanan in translation of 1766. The best account of Buchanan’s views is in Professor James Brown Scott, The Catholic Conception of International Law, observed quaintly: “So it doubtless was in Marina’s day, (ca. 1600). But with the source of power in individuals, and therefore in the people, it would be suicidal on the part of a modern monarch or other chief of state to arrogate to himself alone the authority to declare war. Indeed, in the United States the Congress, by an express provision of the Constitution, is possessed of the exclusive right to declared by the Congress of the United States. It is also the custom in our day to separate the executive from the judicial power, lest justice be contaminated at its source.” That is on p. 296
**We shall refer to this again as the Principle of No Outlet, or of Last Resort. It bears so much on Viet Nam a particular title is advisable.
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“And certainly if men, not to speak of heathen, both wise and religious, have done justice upon tyrants what way they could soonest, how much more mild and humane then is it to give them fair and open trial; to teach lawless kings, and all who so much adore them, that not mortal man, or his imperious will, but justice, is the only true sovereign and supreme majesty upon earth?”* And finally, ”...perhaps in future ages, if they prove themselves not to degenerate, will look up with honour, and aspire towards these exemplary and matchless deeds of their ancestors, as to the highest top of their civil of their civil glory and emulation; which heretofore, in the pursuance of fame and foreign domination, spent itself vaingloriously abroad; but henceforth may learn a better fortitude, to dare execute highest justice on them that shall by force of arms endeavor the oppressing and bereaving of religion and their liberty at home. That no unbridled potentate or tyrant, but to his sorrow, for the future may presume such high and irresponsible license over mankind, to havoc and turn upside down whole kingdoms of men,** as though they were no more in respect of his perverse will than a nation of pismires.” So spoke Milton, the ripe scholar, past his fortieth summer, who once planned to minister, but soon found a clergyman much “subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that could retch, he must straight perjure himself… better to prefer a blameless silence (than) with speaking, bought and begun with servitude and foreswearing.” Impossible to dismiss his genius, its political side was concealed and denied, set down to personality, when the pursuit of foreign domination overreached the seas.***
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*Carlyle considered what was done to Charles Stuart “perhaps the most daring action any body of men to be met with in History ever, with clear consciousness, deliberately set themselves to do/” Carlyle, op. cit. p. 414. Carlyle studied Cromwell about 1840.
**England and Scotland were separate kingdoms though both had Charles for sovereign.
***We refer to the British Empire a century after Cromwell’s death, when that most splendid English lucidity, Samuel Johnson, who could not even bear too long his own calumny of Milton, wrote, almost had to write, for such was the age of Adam Smith and the self-seeking,: hated monarchs in the State and prelates in the Church, for he hated all whom he was required obey. It is to be suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy rather than establish that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to authority…” More of the devastating Mr. Johnson a bit later on.
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Britain, in the midst of what was the first real World War in human history, excluding only the Pacific, went from reverse to repulse to confusion at the start, though never doubting victory. Sam. Johnson, much less remote from the public, which as then also less remote from one another, than our editorialists keep themselves nowadays, struck a note almost familiar: “The time is now come in which every Englishman expects to be informed of the national affairs, and in which he has a right to have that expectation gratified. For whatever may be urged by our ministers, or those whom vanity or interest make the followers of ministers….”*
This then was the sprouting time for what is now become one of the dogmas, those affirmations unconsciously taken from proven without any evidence but affirmation, of representative government. British opinion was already being prepared by the vicissitudes of a great war to believe that being informed, having the right to be informed, and surveying with uneven thoroughness a printed gazette, were about the same thing. We may even take it a result of the war for North America, and India, and much more, that both Parliament, who conducted the government without publicity, and opinion which elected Parliament without privacy, felt they were being informed correctly and fully.
This contentment led to a Revolution in America, just as the like premise concerning Indochina brought, in our century, both the Third and Fourth Republics in France and the United States to a fanciful confusion of print and pith.
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*Johnson in the Literary Magazine of 1756. The author of that sentiment did not get his Royal Pension, 300 a year, until the world war was about over. Its regularity and prestige, after much solitary drudgery on a pauper’s brink of anxiety, subdued what remained of any youthful impulse to “disregard all power and authority” so that both his revulsion for Milton’s politics and the rebellious Virginians and Bostonians are clearly lapses such as success and old age afforded to one whose ease was no sooner procured. Johnson’s eccentricities were tolerated in an age which only disdained poverty and enthusiasm, the latter being an uncomfortable literal application of the official Christianity which disdained wealth and luke-warmness. That apart from royal myopia Johnson esteemed and applauded Milton, in a moderate and balanced expression to be sure is plain from these quotations: (this was seven years before the pension)”… but I shall not my employment useless or ignorable, if my assistance forging nations and distant ages, access to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, or Boyle”. From the Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language.
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A decade after Johnson’s pension, and just before the Americans violently captured attention, Benjamin Franklin wrote in irritation to his employers: “The Great defect here (i.e. in London) is in all sorts of people a want of attention to what passes in such remote countries as America; an unwillingness to read anything about them if it appears a little lengthy, and disposition to postpone the consideration even of the things they know they mist at last consider, so that they many have time for what more immediately concerns them, and withal enjoy the amusements, and be undisturbed in the universal dissipation.”* Franklin’s exasperation was justly provoked, since each family in Boston town was matched by a soldier, the numbers of the latter in regiments of occupation almost more than the number of families. That for five years, and not a glimmer of intelligent interest or concern could Franklin detect. Oh, you may be sure Boston, and with it, Philadelphia, and Charleston, and the whole of Virginia were highly attentive to all such proceedings. They were the targets of a policy contrived by Ministers of State “under a disadvantage peculiar to themselves. While other Englishmen were ignorant, they were habitually misinformed… the personages upon whose reports Lord Hillsborough and Lord Dartmouth had to depend for forming their notions of the American population… were in many cases utterly unworthy of their trust.”**
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*Letter to Samuel Copper. London, 7 July, 1771. There are literally a dozen example forming an American counterpart as regards Viet Nam. In August. 1963, when Saigon appeared a madhouse to more than one observer, “The Attorney General (Rob’t F. Kennedy) reported back with great concern that nobody knew what was going to happen in Viet Nam and that our policy had not been fully discussed, as every other major decision since the Bay of Pigs had been discussed… Kennedy, beset by the missile crisis, congressional elections, Skybolt, de Gaulle, Latin American, the test ban negotiations and the civil rights fight, had little time to focus on Southeast Asia. His confidence in McNamara, so wholly justified in many areas, led the President to go along with the optimists on Viet Nm.” A.M> Schlesinger, Jr. A Thousand Days. Pp. 991, 982. Schlesinger’s attempt to excuse is typically dishonest, and typically callous, since although de Gaulle, etc. are important, the only place American soldiers (called advisors) were fighting and dying was Viet Nam; even though they were merely professional military men whom, Schlesinger views as rivals in the power game of influence of course McNamara as he admitted in testimony, under oath, knew nothing of foreign affairs, and had probably no one on his staff who had done his homework on Viet Nam. 25 August, 1967. Hearing, Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Armed Service Committee, U.S. Senate. Air War against North Viet Nam. Of course, the latter part of Franklin’s letter fits perfectly people on the fringes of power, such as radio news and interview people, editors, etc. G.O. Trevelyan, The American Revolution. Edit. By Rich. B. Morris. P. 11
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In France also the public has generally been “extraordinary uninformed about its colonies chiefly because it is not interested. This cannot be blamed on a lack of information facilities… The Press is a slender reed of information on which to lean. Here, again, is the same vicious circle. The public is only interested in reading about colonial scandals which conform their prejudices because they are uninformed, and they are uninformed because the papers print only sensational news about the colonies.”* In this country, the overall situation is worse, since American thinking, even the best of American observers disregard the fact that it was France which remolded Viet Nam with a heavy pestle.** This is so substantial a consideration that in additional, in indirect argument, merits a place here. Cuban realities must always be more accessible, assuming probity and sincerity than Vietnamese. And so it is conclusive that Herbert L. Matthews and his opponent, Earl T. Smith, who disagree in nearly everything else, are unanimous on the failure of the Press to report or to even understand the course of events. Smith, a wealthy broker, who got his appointment largely as ambassador from contributing to party funds in the 1956 Eisenhower victory, affirms: “In some cases before they (reporters) returned home to write their opinion of a complicated situation, they spent only twenty four hours in Cuba, hardly enough to obtain more than a glimpse of the country… too many people, without thoughtful consideration and with our diligent study of the facts reached fixed conclusions about complex political and economic situations of a nation in a day or two. This is unfortunately true not only for tourists, but also of
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*Virginia Thompson, op cit. p. 408
**Some might mention that the late esteemed Professor Fall as an eminent refutation of the above statement. Fall, despite his brilliance, and cogency on tactics military, remained a French voice defending France against the monotonous verdict of guilty in Indochina, almost universally accepted here after Geneva. His monotonous apologia, publicly at least, for Indochina Françoise, when added to the typical sweeping anti-colonialism stance of leading Americans added up, when taken together, to exactly aero as far as elucidating complexities in Viet Nam, fails in his otherwise outstanding effort to avoid repeating the mistakes of other American secondary sources. Corson, The Betrayal. Pp. 26-27. Ironically, back in the days when the CIA was gestating as OSS, Dr. K.P. Landon its very first employee, State Department neophyte accredited as expert on S.E. Asia found that all the information in the latter’s files on French Indochina was from French sources. Corson Quotes None.
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newspapermen and TV commentators… The U.S. Press continued to intervene in the affairs of Cuba by grossly exaggerating and slanting the news on violent conditions thereby influencing public opinion in the U.S. and keeping American tourists away from Cuba… Jules Dubos ((veteran Latin American correspondent of the Chicago Tribune)) came out to the Embassy and ? asked me right off when I would get on the band wagon and get rid of that S.O.B. ((Battista)). He thought the State Department should issue a statement which would bring about the overthrow of the government of Cuba.”* Mr. Matthews, a pillar of the N .Y. Times lists itself until he questioned the veracity and preparation of his colleagues, some essential qualifications for a journalist reporting on Cuba: Some knowledge of the country, its history, its people, the language, Latin America generally, and Communism. Mr. Mathews was what is still called a liberal; he was as sympathetic to Fidel Castro as the American Ambassador was hostile. His deliberated view that “The problem was not that there were so few American newspapermen with all the qualifications I listed. Nearly all the correspondents and editors handling the story could not fill a single one the qualifications.”** Disparagement of journalist by government officials often reveal their own incompetence. William P. Bundy, the brother of Mc George, and son-in-law of Dean Acheson, is, for the last three years at least the State Department official most concerned day to day with Viet Nam. He “descended”,*** along with the more imposing General Taylor and the more influential Mr. Walt Rostow, on Saigon in Oct. 1961. He has therefore been connected officially and physically, though perhaps not philosophically, with Viet Nam for seven years. Yet he condescended to mention two books by journalists in the Washington Post review of his own favorite reading, casually sneering at the same time that they weren’t quite up to the best, which, oh by the way, he was not so immodest as to have actually read, although he had “dipped” into Paul Mus la Sociologie d’ une guerrre; which, I might addd, is probably more than either of the journalists ever did.****
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*Carl E. T. Smith, The Forth Floor. Pp. 50, 129.
**Mattews, The Cuban Story. P. 281
***Corson, op. cit. p. 45.
****Washington Post Sunday Book Review, 10 March, 1968.
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If Cuba, the American protectorate almost within sight of Florida, was such a riddle for the Press, and Mr. Matthews believed, for the government also*, how much more the inscrutable “poop, tiny, weak, insignificant” View Nam.** Little has changed since the prelude to the American Revolution, except that ignorance today is more immune to criticism. Dr. Johnson felt that “the mental disease of the present generation, is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity. The wit of these happy days… cut the knots of sophistry which if was formerly the business of years to untie, solve difficulties by sudden irradiations of intelligence and comprehend long processes of argument by immediate intuition. Men who have flattered themselves into this opinion of their own abilities, look down on all who waste their lives over books, as a race of inferior beings condemned by nature to perpetual pupillage… Cicero remarks that not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always to child.”*** Was it not childish indeed that “Washington, which were unusual store by documents signed and sealed assumed that when the Vietnamese agreed to do something, the thing would be done… Washington assumed that when the Vietnamese agreed to do something, the thing would be done… Washington assumed that because there was a civil service and French trained at that, it worked.”*** Childish since Virginia Thompson had noted, and she not ineligible by any un-American origins, in her indispensable digest for busy thinkers: “The French)) ((predecessors of Mr. Lodge and those under him)) have consistently found apparent acceptance of their projects did not guarantee in any way their execution… Mandarins … can block with bland courtesy any measure they choose…****
“The ignorance of Latin America in American official and public life is appalling.” op. cit. p. 234 and passim. MR. Smith angrily insists State Dept. told him to rely on Matthews. Prominent commentators such as Eric Sevaeid and observant wits such as Russell Baker join the Administration they dissect in these errors. Viet Nam is not, and wasn’t a century ago, small, or weak, or poop, or unimportant, except if compared to China. Not the spot for a limited war.
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*Ward S. Just, To What End. Boston, 1968. Houghton Mifflin Co. p. 102
** V. Thompson, op. cit. p. 453.
***The Rambler, 7 Sept. 1751
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CONTENTS: Background Introduction Letter From A Dead Man page 1, 2 Chapter I Stubborn and patient National Resistance page 10 Chapter II Modern Viet Nam: Product of or Reaction to the Spanish Inquisition page 16 Chapter III "Mad Jack" Disguised as Uncle Sam Draws First Blood page 44 ------------ Letters to and from Captain John Percival, Captain, USS Constitution page 58 Chapter IV The American Revolution and War of Independence page 90 Chapter V Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God page 95 Editors notes: This unpublished manuscript by Ira Bodry, was written and typed sometime between 1968 and given for publication to Walter Teague in 1970. Unfortunately some of the citations are unreadable and a few may be missing. Where possible such items are indicated. The preparation of this text for the the web and a scanned and notated version were prepared by Walter Teague and other volunteers from 1999 through 2013. This publication is copywrited by Walter Teague, Adelphi, Maryland. (C).
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