The Zinn Reader (55 page)

I think of Lillian Gobitis, from Lynn, Massachusetts, a seventhgrade student who, back in 1935, because of her religious convictions, refused to salute the American flag even when she was suspended from school.

And Mary Beth Tinker, a thirteen-year-old girl in Des Moines, Iowa, who in 1965 went to school wearing a black armband in protest against the killing of people in Vietnam, and defied the school authorities even when they suspended her.

An unnamed black boy, nine years old, arrested in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 for marching in a parade against racial segregation after the police said this was unlawful. He stood in line to be booked by the police chief, who was startled to see this little boy and asked him: "What's your name?" And he replied: "Freedom, freedom."

I think of Gordon Hirabayashi, born in Seattle of Japanese parents, who, at the start of the war between Japan and the United States, refused to obey the curfew directed against all of Japanese ancestry, and refused to be evacuated to a detention camp, and insisted on his freedom, despite an executive order by the President and a decision of the Supreme Court.

Demetrio Rodriguez of San Antonio, who in 1968 spoke up and said his child, living in a poor county, had a right to a good education equal to that of a child living in a rich county.

All those alternative newspapers and alternative radio stations and struggling organizations that have tried to give meaning to free speech by giving information that the mass media will not give, revealing information that the government wants kept secret.

All those whistleblowers, who risked their jobs, risked prison, defying their employers, whether the government or corporations, to tell the truth about nuclear weapons, or chemical poisoning.

Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, who have refused to pay taxes to support the war machine, and all their neighbors who, when the government decided to seize and auction their house, refused to bid, and so they are still defending their right.

The 550 people who occupied the JFK Federal Building in Boston in protest when President Reagan declared a blockade of Nicaragua. I was in that group—I don't mind getting arrested when I have company—and the official charge against us used the language of the old trespass law: "failure to quit the premises." On the letter I got dropping the case (because there were too many of us to deal with), they shortened that charge to "failure to quit."

I think that sums up what it is that has kept the Bill of Rights alive. Not the President or Congress, or the Supreme Court, or the wealthy media. But all those people who have refused to quit, who have insisted on their rights and the rights of others, the rights of all human beings everywhere, whether Americans or Haitians or Chinese or Russians or Iraqis or Israelis or Palestinians, to equality, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is the spirit of the Bill of Rights, and beyond that, the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, yes, the spirit of '76: refusal to quit.

4

T
ESTIFYING AT THE
E
LLSBERG
T
RIAL

In the summer of 1971, the
New York Times
created a sensation by beginning the publication of excerpts from a 7,000-page top-secret history of the Vietnam War, compiled for the Department of Defense by the Rand corporation. The
Times
had received the document, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, from one of the people who worked on it, Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was a former Harvard scholar who had held a number of important government posts, and also served as a Marine in Vietnam. He and Anthony Russo, a former colleague at the Rand Corporation, both of whom had turned against the war, decided to secretly photocopy the Pentagon Papers and release them to the public, to expose the lies of the U.S. government about the war. They were eventually arrested and put on trial in Los Angeles on charges of violating the Espionage Act, which made it a crime to make public information that might do injury to the national defense. The multiple indictments added up to over a hundred years in prison for Ellsberg, forty years for Russo. Ellsberg and I had become friends, and he had given me some of the Papers to read before they became public. I went to Los Angeles to testify in his trial, and wrote the following story for an alternative newspaper in Boston called
The Real Paper
(April 11, 1973). While the case was before the jury, the Watergate affair exploded into national attention. It was discovered that the Nixon administration had planned a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, to find information that might discredit him, and the judge in the Pentagon Papers case then declared a mistrial.

Ihave just come back from testifying in the trial of Anthony Russo and Daniel Ellsberg in Los Angeles. It is a trial whose historic importance has been smothered under a double weight—the procedures of the judicial system, and the gleeful stomping of liberals and radicals who find the defendants an amusing target. It is not the first time in history that rightwing executioners and left-wing dilettantes combined in an unconscious conspiracy to knock down someone who did not fit either of their scrupulous standards.

We live in an age where issues are too gigantic to be hidden away, but they can be covered up. And, conveniently, it is also an age whose gross national product of trivia is so enormous that a little skillful shoveling can do the job. The shovelers from the left and those from the right can remain invisible to one another, and even snarl at each other from time to time, while burying the same target.

It works like this in the Pentagon Papers case, as I saw it in Los Angeles last week. The trial procedures—what we fondly call due process—successfully enshroud, in tedious routine and properly executed interruptions ("I object" and "objection overruled" and "let the clerk have Exhibit A-3" and "would the stenographer please repeat the last four sentences" and "let us confer at the side-bench" and "that is not relevant to the case") the matters of life and death, the cries and whispers of war and treachery, that led Ellsberg and Russo to spend a year of surreptitious evenings Xeroxing 7000 pages of secret government documents.

And, from the other side (I exempt a huge number of sympathizers—radical, liberal, and uncategorizable folk of heart) we have the journalistic taunters and chucklers and revolutionary purists who find (since today's reality is a super-supermarket in which one can find anything) something salable for good money or good political grades. What do they find? A post million-dollar defense, easing the late-night strategy meetings with morning swims in Olympic pools and weekends at Malibu Beach. A defendant (Dan Ellsberg) vulnerable to the fatuous observations of pretentious portraitists who manage to agree on three devastating facts: he and his wife have money; he was an enthusiastic Marine, Harvard Fellow, Defense Department analyst, and Rand Corporation whiz-kid; and he is, above all,
intense.

As for Tony Russo, he gets less attention, because it would take too much imagination to find something to poke at in this ex-student of aeronautical engineering and physics, son of an Italian man and a Virginia woman, who worked with a Rand research team in Vietnam, and now doodles poems in the courtroom during the many gaps in intelligibility. Tony wrote one for me while I was testifying, and gave it to me, with his great broad smile, when I came off the stand. He is always thinking beyond that courtroom.

Fly face on.
      Pan American wounds,
      Wounded heart,
      Wounded Knee,
      Right the Arm of Lady,
      Liberty.
      

There are two kinds of witnesses in the case, from a legal standpoint. There are the "fact" witnesses, who testify, if they are government witnesses, that the defendants stole the documents, and try to explain why it really was a theft even though Ellsberg worked for Rand, was entitled to have the documents, and returned them to the office each morning after his Xerox operation at night. And there are the "expert" witnesses, who testify for the government that they have read the 18 volumes of the Pentagon Papers picked out for indictment purposes (less than half of the total reproduced by Ellsberg and Russo) and that, if given to the public in 1969 (the year of the Xeroxing), the Papers would have done injury to the national defense or been of advantage to a foreign power. And then there are the "fact" and "expert" witnesses for the defense, who say the opposite.

Called in as an "expert," I was "the first radical witness," the
New York Times
reporter wrote on the first day of my testimony. I "made a good impression on the jury," he said, there would be more radical witnesses. There was a wrangle in the defense team, he wrote, between Ellsberg and Russo, over whether there should be "radical" witnesses. The reporter was about as far off on this as when he referred to me as "the six foot six educator, towering over the courtroom." That is, about four inches off.

In fact, both Ellsberg and Russo, and just about everybody on the defense team, agreed that their first witnesses (Schlesinger, Sorenson, Bundy, Galbraith) may have performed a useful function in saying that what they read of the Pentagon Papers clearly did not relate to national defense, and could not be injurious to the United States. But they also agreed that these witnesses did not place before the jury and the public those clear and burning facts about this vicious war of white Westerners against Asian peasants, which alone could make the Ellsberg-Russo behavior morally understandable.

And while they want legal acquittal, there is something more important to the defendants: the American public should learn from those cold official memoranda what really went on inside the closed doors and closed minds of the plotters of mass murder in Washington and Saigon. And so, they agreed that the White House witnesses would have to be followed by people who had worked against the war and could speak a bit of their thoughts and feelings to the jury; people like Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, Ernest Gruening, Wayne Morse, Don Luce, Richard Falk, and the defendants themselves. The only disagreement was on the number of such witnesses, and on exactly which of the radical and near-radical antiwar people should be invited. They agreed to start with me.

On the stand, I had before me five of the 18 volumes cited in the indictment. "Will you tell the court what is in those volumes?" said Leonard Weinglass, one of the five defense-team lawyers. The jury was a few feet away from me: ten of the twelve are women, of whom at least three are black and one an emigrant from Australia. One of the two men is a black local official of an auto union; another is a wounded Marine veteran of Vietnam. The prosecutor sits and takes notes. The judge, Matthew Byrne, is youngish, smooth, a consummate dispenser of "fair" decisions in a trial whose very existence is a monstrosity of injustice: Ellsberg and Russo face 130 years and 40 years for revealing to the American people what the government was doing behind their backs. At the defense table, lawyers and defendants sit a little forward in their seats, like rooters in the bleachers trying to push a line drive into the stands.

I turn to the jury and start telling what is in those five volumes, quoting occasionally. How the Vietnamese movement rose in World War II, after 80 years of French colonial rule in which the peasants starved eight months out of the year. How Ho Chi Minh came to lead this movement, and everyone (even French and Americans) said he was an intelligent, dedicated, charming, gentle man, loved by the people of Vietnam. And how in spite of the noble words of Roosevelt and Churchill in the Atlantic Charter, promising freedom to colonial peoples after Hitler was defeated, the United States, when World War II was won, helped the French back into control in Vietnam. And what a blow this was to the Vietnamese, who on September 2, 1945 had adopted a Declaration of Independence which said "All men are created equal, etc., etc."

And how Ho Chi Minh wrote letter after letter to the White House, asking that the pledges be kept, that the French be kept out of Indochina, that the Vietnamese be allowed to rule themselves. And how not one of these letters—14 communications in all—was answered by the United States. I read to the jury from one of those letters, in which Ho wrote Truman and said: there is drought and famine, and the French have taken away the rice, and two million Vietnamese have died, and won't the American people help? No reply.

Then came the war, from 1946 to 1954, the French against the Viet Minh, which was a coalition of Vietnamese for independence, led by Ho Chi Minh and other communists. And the United States, by the end of that war, was supplying most of the guns and money for the French. And when the French were defeated, and had to sign a peace in Geneva, promising a united Vietnam in two years based on elections, the United States stepped in, propping up as head of state in Saigon Mr. Ngo Dinh Diem (the volumes refer to his "mandarin style") who refused to hold those elections.

The early volumes of the Pentagon Papers say why the United States intervened in Vietnam, why we had eased the French back in, why we opposed self-determination and the Atlantic Charter, why we replaced the French in 1954 with ourselves, through our man Diem, fresh from his stay in New Jersey. They say why Indochina was so important to us. There it is, again and again, in the official memoranda. Rubber, tin, oil, rice. We need that. Japan needs that, and we don't want Japan to have to turn to a Communist country instead of to us. Oh yes, and there is the matter of security. If Indochina falls, then the other dominoes will fall: Malaya, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, And...

I was able to point out to the jury that those in the higher circles of government never did explain, even to one another, how one country going Communist would lead to another country going Communist, and how any country going Communist would affect the national defense of the United States. And that the idea of containment, which started presumably, as preventing Russian aggression against her neighbors, ended as justifying American aggression against any country in the world that decided to be Communist.

Finally, the coup against the Diem regime, by his own generals, with the connivance of the United States. After nine years of collaboration, Diem counted on the U.S. for support. But he was not keeping order. He was attacking the pagodas, putting people in jail. And monks were burning themselves to death in downtown Saigon in protest against the cruelty of the regime. And the Vietcong were popular and winning.

The CIA met with the Saigon generals. The White House watched coolly, with Kennedy saying: let's not do anything openly, but covert stuff is okay. And Henry Cabot Lodge, our new Ambassador, enthusiastic for the coup, and in touch with the plotters. Lodge, who, between contacts with the plotters, accepted an invitation to spend a holiday weekend with Diem, a week before the attack on the palace and the execution of Diem and his brother Nhu. Lodge, who later told the
New York Times:
"We had nothing whatsoever to do with it."

So, I was able to give, without interruption, a brief history of the first 20 years of the war, in a one-hour presentation to the jury on Friday afternoon, and another hour the following Monday morning. This is very rare in a political case, but it would have been hard, legally, to stop this, since I was just saying—in my own words, and sometimes in the words of the documents—what was in those papers that were supposed to be the materials of a terrible crime.

"Are you finished?" Len Weinglass asked.

"Yes." Now the big question.

"Having read those volumes, would you say that, if made known to the public in 1969, they would have injured the national defense?"

"No."

"And what is the basis of your opinion?"

Four points. One, there is no military information in these volumes; what we have here is political history, period. Two, if there were military information, we would have to distinguish: there are military activities for the defense of the country; there are others which are acts of intervention in the affairs of other countries, having nothing to do with defending ours, and such was the war in Vietnam.

Point three. A country's national defense rests partly on military strength, but mostly on the health of its society, the confidence of the people in the government, the sense of community, the belief that the principles of the nation are being fulfilled. All this adds up to the morale of the people, crucial in national defense. History has shown us nations whose main strength in self-defense was their morale, not their weapons. What was the morale of the American people in 1969? Very poor. Thirty thousand dead. Our soldiers destroying peasant villages, to our shame. Anti-war feeling growing. A hundred billion dollars spent for war, and the cities so neglected that blacks rose all over in 1967 and 1968. (I was going too far now, and the judge stopped me: "Mr. Weinglass, ask the witness a question.")