A Well-Read Woman

by Kate Stewart

  When the books quickly outgrew the space in the hotel, she requested to move the library into the former US dispensary, previously a villa with a separate building in the back and a swimming pool. It would have enough space for the main library, the growing field distribution center (book kits), and the library service center (processing and cataloging books for the main library and branches). The move was completed in February 1964. Across the street just a week later, the movie theater for Americans was bombed. It damaged the new library, which was used as a temporary staging area for the wounded and dead. This would not be the only time United States Information Agency and military libraries were damaged or targeted directly by the Viet Cong. A few Vietnamese employees were convinced the library was haunted and refused to work again until they were promised they could quit without penalty if they saw a ghost.6

  After repairs the Saigon Library became a popular hangout for newly arrived soldiers and officers. As one of the only air-conditioned buildings operated by the military, it became a peaceful refuge and provided some relief from the boredom many enlisted men experienced on deployments. Besides offering recreational reading, the library also provided nonfiction and technical books needed to perform official duties. By 1965 dependents of military officers could not stay in Vietnam due to the growing dangers of war. This meant that the libraries lost some of their English-speaking staff, the wives of officers.7

  The library system had expanded to eleven branches, and Ruth traveled by helicopter to supervise the delivery of new books, supplies, and furniture when new branches opened. By the spring of 1966, the library field distribution center was sending a hundred thousand paperback books and seventy-five thousand magazines to eight hundred addresses each month. Ruth developed a service to provide reel-to-reel tapes of spoken-word recordings of poetry and plays, as well as jazz and classical music, which were widely duplicated by troops, who took them to the field, despite copyright laws. Troops also used blank tapes to record messages to send home to their families.8 After the draft started, the most popular books were classics, read by former college students and those enrolled in correspondence courses.9 Ruth relished providing a wide-ranging collection of both serious and popular titles and binged on book ordering through the night while chain-smoking, right before major budget deadlines.10

  In 1961 the Army Library Operational Guide stated officially that army libraries did not censor. This same guide for librarians, probably similar to the guidelines the navy followed, also contradictorily advised, “Avoid subversive, biased, propagandist, sensational, and inflammatory books.”11 Ruth ordered thousands of subscriptions of Playboy each year for the magazine kits and the libraries. Playboy had been available at military post exchanges (known as PXs), but offering them as reading material was another thing entirely. But if anyone complained, there is no evidence of it today. Regarding an incident that occurred when she first started offering the magazine at the libraries in 1964, Ruth explained to a friend (the ellipses are Ruth’s):

  The other day my CO called up and wanted to know how many Playboys we were getting… thinking maybe a chaplain was behind this query[,] I started to hem & haw…and Kuntze says, “Ruthie, what’s the matter…you always know what you’re doing…why the stall….” And I swallow and say, “Hm, well, just why do you want to know…..?” and he says….“Well, with all that money we’re spending on Esquire….and Playboy is so much better…..” and I says “Well, well, there’s a hundred copies coming on the plane from Oki[nawa],” and he’s just as pleased as punch but thinks that maybe we need 150 copies! Honestly, sometimes he’s just not quite for real […] and it’s we all love Ruthie week for the time being.12

  Ruth seems to have fit into the social scene of American expats in Vietnam very well. She had always loved to socialize, especially at cocktail parties, and to debate and discuss politics and literature. She particularly enjoyed hanging out with reporters (as she had formerly been one herself) and other well-educated civilians and officers at the Cercle Sportif Country Club, where she was a regular swimmer. Taking the lead from the French, who had colonized Vietnam for decades, the Americans there now lived in villas and employed Vietnamese staff to run their households. Ruth lived in a hotel with other civilians and was one of just a few single American women there at the time.

  She didn’t get along with everyone in her professional circle, however. Ruth’s immediate superiors in the navy scoffed at how seriously she took her mission, calling it “Ruthie’s Little Empire” and writing on her travel authorizations that her mode of transportation to the American Library Association’s annual conference was by “broomstick,” which she found amusing.13 She battled them for more funding and became friendly with a supportive navy captain further up the chain of command—her “CO,” as she called him, Archie Kuntze, otherwise known as the “American mayor of Saigon.” Tasked with importing supplies to Vietnam for the entire military, Captain Kuntze flouted regulations by living with his Chinese girlfriend Jannie Suen, who worked at the Chinese embassy.

  In his book, To Spurn the Gods, former navy lieutenant A. A. Allison described his arrival at the libraries to work under Ruth. He was initially both surprised and disappointed that he had been assigned the duty. He wrote:

  Indeed, Saigon did have a library. I was in charge of it, at least notionally. In truth, a remarkable forty-something American ex-patriot government librarian named Ruth Rappaport and her staff of Vietnamese ladies had been running the library for years. My job was to set up library annexes around the country and to develop a distribution system to get paperback books and magazines to the men in the field.14

  But he soon found out that what he thought would be a boring job at the library would actually be something else entirely:

  Not long after I arrived, Captain Kuntze summoned me to his office, and, after brief personal welcomes and briefer pleasantries, he told me that I would be a regular courier to deliver funds for certain “local nationals” to CIA case officers and Special Forces officers. The assignment, he said, entailed risk not only because I would be carrying substantial funds but also because the enemy would target anyone it suspected of paying agents. For this reason, I was to tell no one—he emphasized no one—about this duty. I was to do nothing or say nothing that would arouse suspicions. My travels around the country on library business would be my cover.15

  Kuntze would pass Allison some of the thousands of dollars in different currencies from his safe; Allison would then slip it into magazines to be handed off at cafés in Saigon and while he “inspected” the branch libraries at military bases around the country. Some of the men who were paid off also supplied the libraries’ furniture and equipment in order to cover up where the money came from. He suspected that the man he paid off in Hue had something to do with the bombing of the library there so that he would profit from the rebuilding and new supplies it would need.16

  When asked if Ruth knew that Captain Kuntze was using the library system for this purpose, Allison speculated about her involvement. “I sometimes suspected that she, too, had another job. She was not supposed to know about my courier work . . . Whether I did that well enough, given Ruth’s remarkable intelligence and insight, is very much open to question.”17 He observed that Ruth and Kuntze were good friends, which could have been due to their similar personalities and outlook. Whether or not she knew about or was part of Kuntze’s courier network, their relationship was beneficial, if perhaps unspoken. Kuntze may have cynically encouraged her to expand the library for his own purposes, but his support for them does not preclude the possibility that he could have been just as idealistic as she was about the role of books in the Vietnam War.

  The year 1966 marked a turning point in Vietnam, not only in the United States’ overall strategy but within the library system as well. In the fall of 1965, it was announced that the logistics and support services the navy had operated for the whole military would be turned over to the army, although this took many months to fully impl
ement. A. A. Allison described the spring 1966 transition:

  Turning over the libraries to the Army captain was not complicated. He had no courier responsibilities . . . He had two lieutenants and dozens of soldiers to operate the system that my petty officer, a few Vietnamese helpers, and I had operated. He assigned one of his lieutenants the magazines and paperbacks and the other the annexes. To the consternation of Ruth Rappaport and her Vietnamese ladies, the library started to look like an Army headquarters, with specialists, corporals, and privates scurrying everywhere.18

  That same spring Allison was recovering in the hospital from an injury when he was visited by Ruth and Kuntze’s second-in-command, who wanted him to write a history of the navy’s HSAS division. Allison wrote about the effectiveness of the “cumshawing” that Kuntze and HSAS had employed to get things done. He wrote about his own work for the libraries but left out his courier duties. Kuntze was displeased with the report, labeled it classified, and ordered Allison to rewrite it. The captain also admitted that he was about to be court-martialed and asked Allison to contact a US senator he had interned for a few years earlier, on his behalf. Allison refused on both counts and left a week later.19

  Captain Kuntze was court-martialed a few months later in a scandal surrounded by rumor, innuendo, and unprovable accusations. Kuntze had fallen in love with Jannie Suen, who lived openly with him and frequently used his car and military planes for her own personal needs. It turned out that Suen had connections with high-level Communists in China, but it is unclear whether she was a spy. Although Allison claimed that Kuntze made every effort to stop the tide of black-market American goods into Vietnam, it was insinuated that the captain was in fact behind it all. His lavish lifestyle was what ultimately made him a target. At his court-martial trial in San Francisco, he was found guilty of living with Suen and illegally importing Thai silk for her. Kuntze’s downfall ultimately may have been a move by the army to make their takeover of logistics in Saigon easier.20

  It may be impossible to know what really happened concerning Kuntze’s court-martial, how he used the libraries, or his role with the CIA. Articles currently on the internet and those written by journalists at the time are clouded with rumors and speculation. Kuntze’s court-martial records and the records of the HSAS have apparently been lost or destroyed by the navy archives.21

  Joseph DiMona’s 1972 book, Great Court-Martial Cases, includes a chapter on Kuntze’s trial. Although he did not cite any sources, DiMona most likely had access to the trial transcripts and other materials that are lost today. He explained that the initial investigation of Kuntze centered on an unexplained $16,000 in his personal bank account and suspicious checks and loans he had given out to American men in Vietnam.22 Most of the charges against him concerned these unexplained checks and currency transactions, which ultimately could not be traced. Many navy officers personally testified that managing logistics in Vietnam was a complex maze of United States bureaucracy and a Vietnamese free-for-all grab for resources and power. Only Archie Kuntze had been able to make sense of it—and with much success. DiMona pointed out as an aside that at Kuntze’s trial:

  The shadowy area of espionage was barely touched on in his testimony, but it appeared that at one point a CIA agent had approached him, and asked him to change piasters to American money. From that point on, he had habitually done this for espionage agents when they were in a jam and couldn’t get money through regular channels.23

  This confirms that Kuntze did have a CIA connection, but it barely skims the surface of what his real involvement might have entailed. After Kuntze’s trial, Ruth wrote him a letter expressing support and sympathy for having to go through such an ordeal. This letter also revealed Ruth’s change in attitude about her work in Vietnam. She wrote:

  I’m still in Saigon…not because I enjoy it here any longer, or because the job has any challenges left…but simply because I’ve been too tired and indifferent to make any decisions on where to go and what to do. I’m beginning to wonder whether in one way or another this crazy war isn’t hurting all those who’ve gotten mixed up in it.24

  Allison summed up what he thought Ruth’s impact was as a librarian for the navy in Saigon in the early 1960s:

  In a sense, Ruth was an entrepreneur. She launched that library program from nothing. While it could [have] easily been forever a backwater special services program, through sheer will, perseverance, and hard politicking, she secured the budgets and backing to make the library into a premier project. She convinced the admirals and generals that books were weapons, that books would create a bond between us and the educated Vietnamese, that books would equip our people with the intellectual armor they needed to pursue that kind of war, and that books and periodicals provided the critical, healthy diversion necessary for morale.25

  Ruth understood the kind of counterinsurgency strategy the United States was undertaking in the early 1960s in Vietnam. Most of the Americans who went to Vietnam in these early years—all volunteers, whether they were civilians or military—believed that necessary resources could lead to stability and that democracy would win over the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. But it became increasingly clear that in order for these men—a growing number of whom had become wary of the United States’ role abroad—to change their hearts and minds, they would have to learn more about Communism itself and to understand what a critical role books and the freedom of the press played in a democracy. These soldiers’ free access to read whatever they wanted—even subversive material—in a war zone could only reinforce their understanding of the opportunities and freedoms afforded to citizens of the United States. If access to these ideas had to be facilitated through some kind of CIA money-laundering scheme, so be it.

  Chapter 28

  Allison mentioned in his book that Ruth and Kuntze’s second-in-command “were an item.” In a very long letter Ruth wrote in 1968 to her cousin Marvin Scott Rubinstein, a psychiatrist in San Francisco, she revealed many details about her time in Saigon and her relationship with the man that Allison referred to. Ruth started writing the letter during a week she spent in the George Washington University Hospital’s psychiatric ward, where she went after suffering a mental breakdown.

  The letter was dated February 2, 1968, but it was written over February 2–4. Some of the edges are cut off the thirty-page letter mimeographed onto shiny paper. It weaves in and out of time, describing the years 1965 to early 1968. Ruth began the letter by apologizing to Scott for a series of confusing phone calls. She then launched into a litany of complaints about her inattentive psychiatrist Dr. Frank, who continually missed appointments and took phone calls when he actually showed up; the teenagers on the ward who were hyped up on LSD and lashing out; the multitude of interns and medical students who inappropriately questioned her about her past; the people who left her confused about her day passes to leave the hospital and run errands; and other staff who would not stop insisting she take more than two Etrafon pills per day. Ruth finally got the attention of the powerful Dr. Yochelson, who encouraged her to stay at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, DC, but mostly ignored her questions about various treatment options. She understandably noted, “For a place that relies on words & communication almost exclusively there seem to be more misunderstandings here than anywhere I’ve ever been except a conference on semantics run by Dr. Hayakawa in Tokyo one year!”1 On page 10, she finally revealed the point of this long letter: “And somewhat reluctantly, I think I shall proceed to at least give you as adequate and honest a case record as I can. Foolish maybe . . . a little embarrassed to tell, yes, of course. I guess at least to me it was serious or I wouldn’t have acted the way I did, right????”

  She opened on the next page with, “This story really begins around May 1965. I was truly, completely and utterly exhausted, disillusioned, tired and fed up to the gills with Saigon.” She had been ready to quit, ready to throw away the empire she was building, because she could not tolerate the officers who supervised he
r, their mockery of her work, and the intolerable bureaucracy that festered indifference. “Without complaint, without bitterness,” she turned in her resignation. “Well, even the SSO [Special Services Officer] who wished me dead and the Admin O[fficer] who could care less were not prepared to cope with my resignation.” They made her an offer: a long vacation in the US, all-expenses-paid travel to the American Library Association conference, and the option to decide afterward whether she wanted to return. She one-upped them by bargaining for her own three-bedroom villa. In addition, when she returned she would have a new supervisor as part of an annual rotation of officers assigned to Vietnam.

  In DC, Ruth asked the navy librarians about her new boss. They answered, in Ruth’s memory:

  He’s very serious; very dedicated; a stickler for detail; almost but not quite a pedant. Yes, exceedingly interested in Special Services and the library program…a bit on the silent side; almost but not quite stuffy or pompous; very considerate and extremely helpful if he feels you’re doing your best. Gets very angry when you flub.2

  Ruth was now almost looking forward to going back to Saigon. In her letter to Scott, she explained what happened upon her return:

  I decided to go to the lion’s den and see for myself. The first thing that hit me was his asking, “may I call you Ruth?” …stuffy? Hardly […] temporarily I had forgotten …no overlooked the fact that he had been at the other [end] in Washington all these months and not only read all my reports and letters but had signed many of the answers. He too was asked what he thought of our “controversial librarian” [and] told the Exec and the CO “Why—I love” her already…This after having read the broomstick bit and a few other things….3