Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  But as Oscar Handlin pointed out in the American Scholar, “ ‘Tet’ was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders.”94 Not to mention that “the offensive was not a success and that the [National Liberation Front] evoked no signs of popular support.”95 According to Stephen Morris, in South Vietnam, Tet made previously “neutral or fence-sitting segments of the population commit themselves more to the South Vietnamese government cause.” It helped in the ongoing pacification program to “win hearts and minds” because “the southern Communist cadres who had surfaced in the campaign were able to be identified and either captured or killed. The expansion of the number of South Vietnamese troops and reconstitution of local village, district, and provincial armed forces brought new stability.”96 Lewis Sorley, author of A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, agrees that the Communists in the South never recovered and progressively lost influence. The encounter with the “Communist guerrilla forces” who were “routed” made “fence-sitt[ers] commit themselves to the South Vietnamese government cause.”97

  Yet the media reported Tet as a Communist victory. They dwelt on the “photograph of South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a man in the head, claiming the man was a ‘Vietcong suspect.’ ” He was not a suspect, but was a man Loan knew, “a Viet Cong colonel in civilian clothes . . . and by the rules of war, a spy,” as Schweikart and Allen, the authors of A Patriot’s History of the United States, explain. Morris tells us that the executed Viet Cong spy had “been found with a pistol adjacent to a hastily dug grave that held the bodies of seven South Vietnamese policemen and their families.” While Morris concedes that the execution “may still have been unjustified,” Schweikart and Allen note, “Andrew Jackson had done almost exactly the same thing to British agents. . . .”98

  Podhoretz relates how the media falsely reported that rural areas had “fallen under Communist control,” and characterized North Vietnamese General Giap as “a genius,” when he actually had “made serious errors of military judgment.” Newscaster Walter Cronkite, “who had earlier seen Vietnam as another expression of the ‘courageous decision that Communism’s advance must be stopped. . . . ’ ” portrayed Tet as so much of a defeat that the United States should give up hopes of victory and negotiate a way out.99 The Tet Offensive did turn American elite opinion further against the war. But it did not cause a dramatic shift in [U.S.] public opinion. In fact, polls showed that Johnson consistently drew higher support when he restarted the bombing of the North.100

  Zinn’s account of the U.S. “Operation Phoenix” is—surprise!—equally distorted. In his telling, it was a secret operation directed against innocent civilians: “The CIA in Vietnam, in a program called ‘Operation Phoenix,’ secretly, without trial, executed at least twenty thousand civilians in South Vietnam who were suspected of being members of the Communist underground.”101 In fact, the Phoenix program was a joint effort by the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments to destroy the Viet Cong Infrastructure in South Vietnam “without direct engagement by the U.S. military.” As Colonel Andrew L. Finlayson points out at the CIA website, the secret program was often falsely portrayed by “the antiwar movement and critical scholars” (attention, Howard Zinn!) as an “assassination program targeting civilians.” In reality, the program targeted Viet Cong agents. After Phoenix identified Viet Cong operatives at the village level, U.S. or South Vietnamese forces attempted to arrest or capture the individuals for interrogation, and “if they resisted, they were killed.” According to Finlayson:

  In 1972 CORDS [Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support, which oversaw all pacification programs] reported that since the 1968 Tet Offensive, Phoenix had removed over 5,000 VCI [Viet Cong Infrastructure, or party leaders of the Viet Cong] from action, and that conventional military actions and desertions—some prompted by Phoenix—accounted for over 20,000 more. The US claimed that Phoenix and the US military’s response to the Tet Offensive, along with other rural security, and militia programs, had eliminated upwards of 80,000 VCI through defection, detention, or death.

  “By most accounts,” writes Finlayson, “including those of Vietnamese communists—Phoenix (which ended in 1971) and other pacification programs drove the VCI so far underground that it was unable to operate effectively. In the 1972 Easter offensive, and again in 1975, there was no sign of the VCI or the Viet Cong military because Phoenix and its allied activities had dealt them a very serious blow.”102 So, the program seemed to have accomplished its objective—that is, to neutralize the Viet Cong without bombing. But in Zinn’s opinion, the Viet Cong are folk heroes. Zinn perpetuates the false image of a program that rescued South Vietnamese peasants from the “genocidal” Viet Cong as a CIA-led assassination team directed at civilians.

  In spite of the hopeless picture that anti-war protestors—prominent among them Howard Zinn—were painting toward the end of the Vietnam War, there was a definite turnaround after Tet. The United States and the South came tantalizingly close to beating the Communists. Stephen Morris described his two visits to South Vietnam “in early 1970 and again in early 1972.” By the second trip, he was able to drive in a car with official license plates and “in a taxi with Vietnamese locals.” He comments that had “the Viet Cong . . . not been suppressed I would probably have been captured or killed.”103 William Colby had a similar experience there in 1971, as Lewis Sorley recounts in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. In fact, Sorley says that by “late 1970,” “the war was won. The fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won. . . . the South Vietnamese countryside had been widely pacified. . . . our million members of the People’s Self-Defense Force, armed with 600,000 weapons . . . constituted an overt commitment to the government in opposition to the enemy.”104

  In 1972, there were fewer than seventy thousand American troops in Vietnam, down from the “peak more than half a million.”105 During the Easter Offensive that year, “practically no American combat forces participated in the defense of South Vietnam.” The defeat of the North was the result of the pacification and Vietnamization (preparation of the Vietnamese Army), along with “lavish American logistical support in the form of ammunition, fuel, and advanced weaponry,” according to CIA officer William Colby. With the South Vietnamese bearing “the main burden of the fight on the ground. . . .” “[a] free Vietnam had proven that it had the will and the capability to defend itself with the assistance, but not the participation, of its American ally.” That was in a fight against an enemy “assisted by Soviet and Chinese allies.” And then comes the wistful refrain heard so often about Vietnam: “On the ground in South Vietnam, the war had been won.”

  But Colby also was beginning to “appreciate a new factor in the war—the virulence of the antiwar movement,” which had “erupted over our incursion into Cambodia in 1970,” an incursion that was clearly justified as an “effort to clean out the Communist base areas along the frontier with South Vietnam”—something that would become tragically clear after the American withdrawal.106 Even the liberal Stanley Karnow admitted the effectiveness of Tet and the Easter Offensive as he reported the Communists’ comments about them.107

  The military draft in the United States ended in 1973. In 1974, “there were only 500 Communist cadres left in Saigon, a city of 2.5 million,” and at least 70 percent of Southerners were opposed to reunification.108 But between 1973 and 1974, as victory was within sight, a Democratic-controlled Congress “emboldened” by the Watergate scandal and encouraged by the protestors slashed aid to Vietnam. “When Congress ordered an end to American air support, South Vietnam’s fate was sealed,” writes Jonathan Leaf. The abandonment of South Vietnam “was guided by a clique of antiwar activists.”109

  Zinn, of course, was the elder leading the charge. The poor execution at the beginning o
f the war allowed him and his cadres to gain momentum: bad military decisions were made at the beginning of the war (such as the assassination of Diem), the attempt to fight it on the cheap, and the failure to make a bold moral case. Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen recount President Lyndon Johnson’s problems arising after President Kennedy’s assassination due to his lack of popularity with Kennedy’s staff, except for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was “obtuse” about mission and strategy. McNamara ceded “the propaganda campaign to the communists and their allies [the protestors],” and Johnson himself displayed a lack of commitment to the war—he was more interested in winning praise for his grandiose social programs.110 Lewis Sorley criticizes Johnson’s unwillingness to call up the reserves, which produced too much reliance on young, inexperienced conscripts. Morale among the troops suffered after “it became clear that the United States no longer sought to win the war, but to disengage.” And the “turmoil and upheaval” of the social revolution took their toll on the soldiers. These included such harmful things as challenges to “established authority, received wisdom, to long-standing customs, to concepts of individual freedoms and responsibilities,” as well as recreational drug use.111 This is not to mention the vilification of the military and the outright assaults on returning U.S. soldiers.

  Howard Zinn did his bit to promote the societal breakdown that impacted the troops. The chapter of A People’s History on Vietnam celebrates the defeat of the U.S., so it is fitting that Zinn devotes more than half of its pages to the “people” who brought defeat to the home front: the protestors and his fellow leaders in the anti-war movement. Zinn is at his most cheery when he can report, “In the course of that war, there developed in the United States the greatest antiwar movement the nation had ever experienced, a movement that played a critical part in bringing the war to an end.”112

  In his teaching and political activism, Zinn himself had done his best to turn the Civil Rights Movement into an anti-war movement. He celebrates the fact that in 1966 “six members of SNCC were arrested for an invasion of an induction center in Atlanta.” He relives his glory days, repeating the slogans, “Hell no, we won’t go!” and “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”113 He fills pages of his “History of the United States” with anecdotes about protesters and draft dodgers, including one Philip Supina, “a Boston University graduate student in history” (where Zinn was teaching at the time) who “wrote on May 1, 1968, to his draft board” advising them of his refusal to report for his pre-induction physical exam114—and Alice Herz, an eighty-two-year-old peace activist who followed the example of the Buddhist monks and self-immolated. For Zinn, these are positive signs.

  The burning of draft cards was a great celebration among students. Adults, too—including Zinn’s travel buddy to North Vietnam, Father Daniel Berrigan, and his brother Philip, along with seven others—went to a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, and then came outside and, before an audience that included reporters, burned the records. They “became famous as the ‘Catonsville Nine.’ ” Zinn gives an account of Daniel Berrigan’s escape from FBI agents by hiding inside a giant theater figure and remaining underground for four months. Not so lucky, according to his account, was Mary Moylan, a former nun, and “the one woman among the Catonsville Nine.” (Actually, there was another woman in the group, Marjorie Bradford Melville.) Moylan “refused to surrender to the FBI,” and as Zinn ominously notes, “She was never found.” Zinn then devotes nearly an entire page to an extensive quotation about jail and the “black scene” from the journal of the woman presumably murdered by the FBI or other government agents.115

  Moylan, however, surrendered in 1979. Both the New York Times and Washington Post reported this on June 21, 1979—news that should not have escaped Zinn’s notice as he was writing his book. She had spent nine years underground but served only one year in prison. She then resumed her career as a nurse and worked for several years at Queen Anne’s Hospital in Chestertown, Maryland. She died in 1995 at the age of fifty-nine.116 As much as Zinn would like to make Moylan a martyr, the reality is that Moylan, in almost any other country, would not have gotten so light a punishment and then been allowed to resume her job as a nurse.

  Indeed, most anti-war activists got off with light or no punishment. That is probably why there were so many protests. According to Zinn’s count, in the first six months of 1969, 215,000 students in 232 of the nation’s 2,000 institutions of higher education had participated in protests, 500 underground newspapers existed in high schools, and two-thirds of the 1969 graduating class at Brown University turned their backs on Henry Kissinger’s commencement address.117 Zinn reports happily that students at 400 colleges and universities went on strike—“the first general student strike in the history of the United States.” The normally statistics-averse Zinn wraps up, “During that 1969–1970 school year, the FBI listed 1,785 student demonstrations, including the occupation of 313 buildings.” Polls showed an increasing opposition to the war, especially among the working class, and there was a “general change in the entire population of the country.”118

  The “climax,” for Zinn, was Kent State, on May 4, 1970, “when students gathered to demonstrate against the war” and “National Guardsmen fired into the crowd,” killing four students and paralyzing one.119 Zinn, however, ignores the fact that one of the students had pointed a gun at the guardsmen after pistol-whipping another student with it. This came after “looters and arsonists” had taken over the campus, “torching the Air Force ROTC building,” setting fire to the president’s building, and then rioting downtown and at an airstrip, stealing a truck, attacking six planes, and starting a fire. When the guardsmen were facing the gun, they had already had rocks thrown at them by students and had become trapped, “caught behind a chain-link fence of a practice football facility.” The disorder had started on that campus earlier in the semester, under the leadership of “self-professed Communist Robert Franklin.” The protesters occupied buildings. On May 1, students buried a copy of the Constitution, burned a draft card and an American flag, and began more serious acts of arson. Before the four students were shot, “the ringleaders had organized” a large group of students around them “as human shields.”120

  The coup de grace was the shift in Americans’ attitude toward the military. Zinn saw the drop in ROTC enrollment as a sign of “the capacity for independent judgement among ordinary Americans.” The largest and most fervent opposition to the war in our armed forces began with “isolated protests,” such as Richard Steinke’s refusal to board an aircraft to a Vietnamese village in 1965. “The following year three army privates, one black, one Puerto Rican, one Lithuanian-Italian—all poor—refused to embark for Vietnam” and were “court-martialed and imprisoned.” Later came the court martial of “a navy nurse, Lieutenant Susan Schnall” and displays of opposition by a sailor in Norfolk, Virginia, “an army lieutenant,” and “two black marines, George Daniels and William Harvey.”121 As Zinn tells us, these “individual acts multiplied.” Someone named Ray Kroll, who came from “a poor family,” fled and deserted after being charged with drunkenness. He hid out in the chapel of Boston University (where Zinn was teaching at the time—not coincidentally, a great number of the anti-war protests seem to have taken place on the campus where Zinn was fomenting anti-war sentiment and activism). Michael S. Foley, author of Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War, describes Zinn and his friend and fellow Boston academic Noam Chomsky as “ubiquitous professors,” who could be “heard at almost all antiwar demonstrations.” Zinn inspired young men to the point of weeping. One named David Clennon told Foley that Zinn “spoke so eloquently about the horrors of war that I was convinced all over again that turning in my draft card was the right thing to do” that he “was crying with relief. . . .”122

  More good news: “Underground newspapers sprang up at military bases,” “We Shall Overcome” was sung at the Presidio in protest of a guard shooting “
to death an emotionally disturbed prisoner for walking away from a work detail,” GIs wore black armbands in Vietnam, black soldiers expressed their bitterness in recordings, cadets dropped out of West Point, and “[m]ore and more cases of ‘fragging’ were reported in Vietnam—incidents where servicemen rolled fragmentation bombs under the tents of officers who were ordering them into combat, or against whom they had other grievances. The Pentagon reported 209 fraggings in Vietnam in 1970 alone.”123

  In the “Winter Soldier” investigations, American solders testified “publicly about atrocities they had participated in or seen in Vietnam. . . . in April 1971 more than a thousand of them went to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate against the war. One by one, they went up to a wire fence around the Capitol, threw over the fence the medals they had won in Vietnam, and made brief statements about the war, sometimes emotionally, sometimes in icy, bitter calm.”124 One of those Winter Soldiers was John Kerry, who would become a U.S. senator representing Massachusetts; he was defeated in his 2004 run for the presidency in large part by the efforts of a group of Vietnam veterans called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose testimony refuted his claims about heroic service in Vietnam. Their open letter accused him of “seek[ing] to clad yourself in the very medals that you disdainfully threw away” and of endangering fellow servicemen (including prisoners of war) with falsehoods about their conduct in Vietnam.125

  Howard Zinn was doing his part to make this history happen. Not only did he infuse his students with his ideas about war and Communism, but he did the same with American servicemen on a European teaching jaunt. As Zinn wrote to his former student, Alice Walker, he had been on a tour with “two days each in Rome, Naples, Paris, five days in Malta—yes, teaching sailors on a US ship in the harbor at Valetta, Malta, and teaching them (or rather talking with them about) international affairs including communism, democracy, Vietnam—not because the Navy has gone mad or I have suddenly been revealed as a CIA agent operating in the New Left—but because all large bureaucracies have their moments of amnesia.”