Dupes

  No doubt, then, Moscow was elated as antiwar sentiment exploded in the United States in the late 1960s. More than that, the Soviets, and the Communist movement generally, particularly CPUSA, sought to infiltrate, support, and manipulate American antiwar sentiment wherever and whenever possible, but always with the most careful concealment.

  This is most certainly not to say that the American antiwar movement was a Soviet or Communist movement. The vast majority of students participating in the demonstrations were in no way connected to the Communist Party or the international Communist movement. But the truth is that many of the planners and organizers of antiwar demonstrations did have those sympathies and links. In other words, the Communists and their supporters found many dupes among sincere American antiwar protesters.

  Of course, many of the antiwar organizers with Communist sympathies were smart enough never to join the party and to deny any membership when asked—including when asked by congressional committees.

  Congressional Investigations—by Democrats

  As valuable a source as Morris Childs was, the information he produced was nothing compared to what congressional investigators were learning at the time. Once again on the case was the House Committee on Un-American Activities—or, as it became known in 1969, the House Committee on Internal Security.

  Given the common dismissal of congressional investigations into Communism as the product of “right-wing Republicans,” it is important to understand that these committees were controlled by Democrats. From 1965 to 1969 the Committee on Un-American Activities was chaired by Democratic congressman Edwin E. Willis, a twenty-year veteran of the House from Louisiana. Joining Willis on the committee were such Democrats as John Culver of Iowa and William Tuck of Virginia (who had been governor before entering Congress). The newly renamed House Committee on Internal Security was chaired by Democrat Richard Ichord of Missouri beginning in 1969, and it included such prominent Democrats as Edwin Edwards of Louisiana (a future governor), Richardson Preyer of North Carolina, the very liberal Louis Stokes of Ohio, and no less an authority on Communism than Claude “Red” Pepper of Florida, who was no longer a senator. Ichord, a crusading anti-Communist Democrat, dominated the most heated hearings exploring the associations between the American antiwar movement and the global Communist movement, which took place from 1967 to 1969. The only Republican who received even a portion of Ichord's camera time was the well-known conservative John Ashbrook of Ohio.

  In short, the House committee was not some right-wing kangaroo court.

  Nor were their hearings a travesty of justice or a black mark on the history of Congress, as the conventional treatment would have it. In truth, as any objective observer can see from the formal resolutions issued by the committee, as well as the transcripts of the hearings, congressmen and their investigators took great care to make the crucial distinctions between Communists and non-Communists, between threats and non-threats, between the guilty and the innocent. The goal was not to toss into jail any eighteen-year-old in Berkeley who hoisted a bong and a banner alongside a hammer and sickle. Quite the contrary: the purpose was to ascertain whether certain Americans were formally cooperating with foreign Communist governments with which the United States was engaged in either hot war or cold war. The House committees took the time to articulate this distinction again and again. Congressman Ichord, in particular, did so repeatedly, with both vigilance and sensitivity.

  To see this requires pausing to actually read the transcripts, as scholars should. Too often historians have relied on secondhand accounts from their colleagues in the academy—some of whom were themselves ’60s protesters.

  The “New Mobe” Committee

  One of the organizations that came to the attention of congressional investigators was “New Mobe”: the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

  New Mobe was the successor to the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, or “Mobe.” Mobe was launched September 10–11, 1966, in Cleveland, while New Mobe was formed the patriotic weekend of July 4, 1969, also in Cleveland. Together these organizations were the driving force behind several major subversive activities and domestic disturbances in the 1960s, such as the November 5, 1966, rally in New York City and the massive April 15, 1967, antiwar marches in New York City and San Francisco. Those were soon followed by a National Antiwar Conference in Washington, D.C., on May 20–21, 1967, which began laying the groundwork for the October 21, 1967, march on the Pentagon. There followed other activities: the August 1968 uprising at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; the violence at the January 1969 “counter-inaugural” demonstrations in Washington, which protested the swearing-in ceremony of incoming president Richard Nixon; and the huge protests in San Francisco and Washington on November 15, 1969, which were part of the Mobilization Committee's 1969 “Fall Offensive.”12

  From the beginning Mobe and New Mobe were infiltrated by Communists. The organizations grew out of several conferences staged by radicals in Cleveland. There Communists mixed in among socialists, Communist sympathizers, as well as non-Communist liberals and peaceniks. According to a major congressional report, “a large percentage” of the several hundred delegates at the conferences came from front groups and openly Communist groups such as CPUSA, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, and the Young Socialist Alliance.13 Other entities participating in Mobe and New Mobe included the DuBois Clubs of America, the Workers World Party (a dissident Trotskyist group formed in 1959), Youth Against War and Fascism (a front group that was a youth arm of the Workers World Party), Harry Bridges's usual suspects at the ILWU, the pro-Hanoi Women Strike for Peace, Veterans for Peace in Vietnam (begun in Chicago in 1966 by CPUSA member Leroy Wolins), the Black Panther Party, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).14 Among the fellow travelers, groups like the Black Panthers and SDS brought together Communists and non-Communists, the dupers and the duped. Overall, Mobe and New Mobe endeavored to reach beyond these groups into a wider swath of American youth, all united against American policy in Southeast Asia. Many of the young people who signed onto Mobe and New Mobe events were non-Communist peace activists utterly unaware of the true intentions of some of the organizers.

  New Mobe caught the attention of the House Committee on Internal Security. The congressional committee eventually produced a formal staff study that reflected its careful approach. The foreword to the study, by Congressman Ichord, the Democratic chair, shows that the committee did not blindly assume that commies were under every New Mobe bed:

  This study reveals how the New Mobe has operated from its inception with significant domestic and international communist support, and it details for the interested reader “the basic pattern of communist participation that has remained a characteristic of all Mobe activity.” …

  One additional aspect must be emphasized. The New Mobe is a coalition of organizations, both communist and noncommunist [emphasis original]. Its basic organizational principle is nonexclusion. Were it not for this “umbrella” nature of New Mobe, providing association with many sincerely motivated noncommunists, the communists and other subversives within the group would have little effectiveness. All too often such “umbrella” coalitions are cynically exploited by the communists and thereby serve to promote international communism's objectives. This has traditionally been the pattern when communists have coalesced with noncommunists in united front operations.15

  As this opening to the House study demonstrates, the Committee on Internal Security discovered the crucial role of the dupe in the antiwar fray. The committee recognized that New Mobe would have been dead without the dupes. The Communists within New Mobe needed a big tent, a wide “umbrella,” to bring in the non-Communists who gave them surface legitimacy. The dupes were being used—“cynically exploited,” as Congressman Ichord put it—by the Communists in order “to promote international communism's objectives.” It was an old pattern of exploitation, as old as the Communist movement itself.

 
; We're for Peace

  The final sentence of the foreword to Congress's report exculpates New Mobe's dupes from any real guilt, since they were unaware that they were being used. “While the staff study focuses on subversive involvement in New Mobe,” Congressman Ichord wrote, “I would caution readers that mere mention of an individual or organization should not necessarily be construed as a finding of subversive intent.” Most of those who aided and abetted had no clue that they were aiding and abetting.

  The congressional report also noted that New Mobe's mission statement was broad enough to attract thousands of non-Communist liberals under the guise of “peace.” New Mobe described itself as “a broad coalition of organizations and individuals whose purpose is to gain an immediate end to the war in Vietnam through immediate and total withdrawal of American men and materiel.”16 Of course, the statement was also, to the letter, the goal of the USSR and the Communist movement, since American withdrawal would allow Vietnam to become a single Communist state and Marxism to spread deeper into Asia, and would represent a massive failure for America. But from that artfully worded mission statement, non-Communist dupes would not be able to detect the Communists’ other, overriding objectives.

  The dupes cannot be wholly absolved of blame, however. They willingly signed on to an organization whose words became viciously anti-American. New Mobe's ringleaders escalated their rhetoric, deeming U.S. proposals for peace as fraudulent, the insincere demands of an “imperialist,” “warmongering” nation supporting “fascism.” This was the same language that the American Peace Mobilization had used a generation earlier, and that was now being printed on the front pages of Pravda and newspapers up and down the Communist bloc.17

  New Mobe also insisted on a “unilateral decision for withdrawal,” or that Americans immediately begin paying reparations to the people of Vietnam. The language, as Congress noted in its official report, was “militantly pro-Hanoi and anti–United States.” The group acted as if there was no South Vietnam at all, nor anyone, anywhere, in all of Vietnam, who was against the Communist Vietcong. In Vietnam, New Mobe saw only naked, brutal aggression, and therein from only one source: America.

  For instance, Professor Sidney M. Peck, one of several national cochairs of New Mobe, issued such militant (and childish) demands. “We want the complete and total withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam,” stated Peck, a sociology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “If that results in a victory of the National Liberation Front, we are pleased with that result because that would in effect be the wishes of the Vietnamese people.”18

  That “pleasing” result also just happened to be the wishes of CPUSA, of the Soviet Union, of the USSR's International Department, of the Communist bloc, of Mao's Red China, of Kim's North Korea, of the fledgling Khmer Rouge movement in Cambodia, of Castro's Cuba, and, of course, of the Vietcong. As it happens, Peck was a former member of the Wisconsin State Committee of CPUSA. He was one of many CPUSA associates explicitly identified among the New Mobe hierarchy.19

  As Peck's statement shows—and again, the professor was national cochair of New Mobe—ringleaders of American “peace movements” genuinely hoped for a defeat of the United States and a Communist takeover in Vietnam. They wanted America not only to leave but also to lose. That is not an exaggeration or misrepresentation.

  Another professor and national cochair of New Mobe, Douglas Dowd of Cornell University, waxed wistful about a world where he and his young comrades joined the enemy. Said Dowd: “One of the tensions that we've had to work out within the New Mobilization Committee is that the people who do the organizing for this kind of thing, almost all of them, really feel that not only the war should end but, that, if there had to be a side in that war, I think most of us feel we would be on the other side.”20

  Note that Dowd, an expert on Karl Marx and the “evolutionary economist” Thorstein Veblen, here referred to “almost all” of the organizers.

  Not that many of the marchers were much better than the organizers. Some of them actually preferred to see American boys killed rather than the Vietcong. Those who thought that way were not isolated nutcases who were never heard from again. Consider the case of Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr., who in the 1960s was such a committed antiwar activist that he was twice arrested during protests. He was asked by his father, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger Sr., a simple question: “If a young American soldier comes upon a young North Vietnamese soldier, which one do you want to see get shot?” Pinch responded without hesitation, saying this was “the dumbest question I ever heard in my life.” He answered: “I would want to see the American get shot. It's the other guy's country.”21

  Today, young Pinch serves as publisher of the New York Times, which from 2003 to 2008 led an unrelenting campaign against President George W. Bush's policy in Iraq.

  All of this raises the question of just how many of the thousands of young Americans who joined the protests—many simply for the sex and drugs—had any idea of the views and intentions of organizers and some of their fellow protesters. How many knew they were marching arm-in-arm with comrades whose sympathies lay on “the other side”?

  How many knew they were being used?

  Both the Communist and defeatist sympathies at Mobe and New Mobe rallies were transparent from the outset, making it difficult to excuse the dupes. For instance, the November 5, 1966, protest in New York City, which attracted twenty thousand people—including members of CPUSA, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, and the Workers World Party—featured signs that read: “Defeat the U.S. Imperialists—Victory for NLF [National Liberation Front (the Viet-cong)].”22 That kind of truth in advertising was blatant to anyone but the blind.

  Mobe and New Mobe were about more than marches, too. The groups began targeting local Selective Service and IRS offices. Professor Peck, a sponsor of the Communist-manipulated Vietnam Week (April 8–15, 1967), was one of the adult professionals who spearheaded the group RESIST, which specialized in instructing young people in how to avoid being drafted into military service.

  The Communist Party always sought a strong presence at conferences organized by Mobe and New Mobe. Consider just one example (among many revealed in congressional reports): on December 28–30, 1966, antiwar organizers gathered for a conference at the University of Chicago to discuss a nationwide student strike and other demonstrations for the explicit purpose of demanding U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Among the 257 attendees were representatives of CPUSA, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, and at least four other identified Communist organizations. Three Communist organizations, the DuBois Clubs of America, the ultra-radical Progressive Labor Party, and the Young Socialist Alliance, set up tables and handed out literature in the lobby of the university's Kent Hall, where plenary sessions were held. The Communist presence was open and undeniable.23

  The main speakers on the first day of the conference included Fred Kushner, SDS leader and son of Sam Kushner, a longtime CPUSA leader and editor of the Los Angeles–based People's World; and Dan Styron of the Young Socialist Alliance, a contributor to The Militant, the weekly newspaper of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. Also addressing the delegates was Professor Peck, who told them openly, “We hope to energize and consolidate opposition movements throughout the world.”24

  The level of Communist infiltration in Mobe and New Mobe activities was so extensive that the House Committee on Internal Security's final staff study report ran to roughly one hundred small-print pages and included more than four hundred endnotes. This was a major operation, with serious infiltration.

  Summer of ’68

  But all of that was merely a warm-up. Mobe played a special role in the unforgettable chaos that enflamed the summer of 1968. That season was a glorious one for Communist radicals in the United States. It was truly their heyday.

  The intentions of the radicals that summer—particularly the SDS contingent—was made clear in a June 4, 1968, letter from the SDS cofounder Tom
Hayden to a North Vietnamese Communist official addressed as “Colonel Lao” (the correct spelling was “Lau”). The letter, which was entered into the official congressional record (see page 292), is one of many pieces of evidence which counter the common claim that 1960s antiwar organizers were merely seeking “peace.” As the letter makes clear, the goal for many was victory by North Vietnam:

  June 4, 1968

  Dear Col. Lao;

  This note is to introduce you to Mr. Robert Greenblatt, the coordinator of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. He works closely with myself and Dave Dellinger, and has just returned from Hanoi.