Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  Spock's first public foray into politics came in 1962, when he joined the anti-nuclear-bomb group Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, commonly known as SANE. His political involvement would soon spike up, mirroring the trajectory of rising body bags and protests relating to the Vietnam War.

  The Care and Nurturing (and Recruiting) of Dr. Spock

  It is difficult to say when, exactly, Dr. Spock got involved in Vietnam War protests, though there is evidence that CPUSA targeted him for manipulation as early as September 1966, and that he had links to Communist front groups possibly as far back as 1963.

  Indisputably, longtime Communist Bettina Aptheker singled out Spock for Vietnam Week in April 1967. Organizers planned a week of antiwar demonstrations on campuses and in major cities across the United States, culminating in huge rallies in San Francisco and New York City on April 15. The plans included a national Student Strike for Peace—a brilliant tactic sure to enlist the participation of not merely intensely political students but also apathetic, nonpolitical students simply anxious to skip a few classes.

  So blatant was the Communist agitation in this effort that Congress's report on the matter, “Communist Origin and Manipulation of Vietnam Week,” was released on March 31, 1967, a week before the protests were to be launched.14 Congressman Edwin E. Willis, Louisiana Democrat, said in the preface to the report, and in an even earlier press release (January 28, 1967), that Vietnam Week was a “crash program” to “undermine and sabotage U.S. resistance to Communist military aggression in Vietnam.” Willis wisely warned that “the cry will be raised” that Congress, “in releasing this report, is trying to stifle honest and legitimate dissent. Nothing could be farther from the truth.” Liberals cried exactly that. Willis understood how too many in his own party often behaved. He knew the suckers would drift toward the bait.

  Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike saw how the objectives of the Vietnam Week organizers were a direct extension of the goals of CPUSA and Moscow. Congressman Willis and his colleagues understood that the organizers were not practicing “honest dissent” but rather were using “deliberate deception” to lure dupes—Dr. Spock among them. Willis stated: “We must not permit Communist propaganda [and] trickery to obscure the difference between legitimate dissent and planned betrayal.”15

  The congressional report on Vietnam Week pointed to Bettina Aptheker as a key ringleader. Unlike many other radicals, the University of California–Berkeley student, who gained notoriety as a leader of the nationally known Free Speech Movement, was quite open about her membership in CPUSA. She wrote an open letter “To my fellow students” in the November 9, 1965, issue of the Berkeley student newspaper, the Daily Californian, in which she stated categorically: “I have been for a number of years, I am now, and I propose to remain a member of the Communist Party of the United States.”16

  Aptheker—who today is a professor and chair of Women's Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz—was the red-diaper daughter of two Brooklyn Communists.17 Her father, Herbert Aptheker, who had earned his bachelor's and master's degrees as well as his doctorate from Columbia University, signed up for the Communist Party in 1939, the year of the Hitler-Stalin Pact—when Communists were bolting rather than joining the party. Her mother had joined the party well before that. Herb Aptheker became a well-known figure in the Communist movement, and its leading theoretician. In 1957 he published The Truth about Hungary, a loathsome defense of the Soviet slaughter of tens of thousands of freedom-loving Hungarians in the Budapest uprising of October–November 1956.18 (Curiously, years later, the New York Times did not mention this book in its obituary of Aptheker, instead highlighting his books on “civil rights.”)19 He also edited the party's monthly theoretical journal, Political Affairs (which still exists today), and was a member of the Communist Party's National Committee. In 1964 he founded the American Institute of Marxist Studies near Columbia in New York City.

  In the 1960s both father and daughter became radical antiwar activists. In January 1966 Herb Aptheker made a trip to Hanoi with SDS's Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd, a Yale history professor.20 A few months after that trip Bettina Aptheker issued a call for a “nation-wide student-faculty strike” in the Spring 1966 issue of Dimensions, a “discussion journal” of the DuBois Clubs, a Communist front group begun under the mandate of new CPUSA chief Gus Hall. Hall desired what the FBI called a “Marxist-oriented youth organization to attract non- Communists as the first step toward their eventual recruitment into the party.”21 Bettina Aptheker and the DuBois Clubs were helping the Communist movement do precisely that. The DuBois Clubs were at the least a duping mechanism, and they could serve as a way station on the road to full party membership.

  Bettina Aptheker followed up her Dimensions piece with a September 1966 letter titled “Proposal for a National Student Strike for Peace”—a copy of which was obtained by government investigators and published by Congress. The letter called for a meeting in Chicago in late December 1966 to plan a strike. (See pages 314–15.) It declared that “the primary object” of the demonstrations was “to develop a militant, effective and broad united demonstration against the war” (emphasis in the original).

  Aptheker developed a list of thirty-three “initial sponsors” for the strike, which included Berkeley professor Donald Kalish, who described himself as “far to the left” of even CPUSA;22 SDS leader Carl Oglesby; Brian O'Brian, president of the Berkeley chapter of the American Federation of Teachers; Linda Baughn of the Methodist Student Movement; Clyde Grubbs of the national group Student Religious Liberals; SDS chairman Alex Stein; Episcopal minister Allan Dale; and New York University's Leslie Cagan, among others.23

  Aptheker also listed Dr. Howard Zinn, a Boston University professor.24 Zinn is an interesting case. He had been a World War II bombardier, a patriot, who went on to attend Columbia University for graduate school on the GI Bill, where he earned a master's degree and doctorate. With Columbia's training, Zinn was primed for another kind of service. His work found a captive audience in POW camps in Hanoi, where the Vietcong so admired his arguments that it provided his material to detained American airmen (that is, downed bombardiers). Specifically, the Vietcong stocked the prison library with Zinn's book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal.25 He eventually became a runaway bestselling historian, with his leftist work A People's History of the United States a staple for many high-school history teachers and devoured by liberal college students.26

  Zinn and friends made for a strong list of initial sponsors, but Aptheker needed more supporters, especially from unsuspecting non-Communists. Her letter listed potential targets under the subhead “SPONSORSHIP, ENDORSEMENT, PARTICIPATION.” The list included “the Young Democrats,” “religious student organizations,” “churches, the civil rights movement, trade unionists for peace (and in some local areas perhaps even some unions), Women for Peace, [and] American Friends Service Committee.” Aptheker also detailed “prominent individuals” who should be targets, including civil rights activist Julian Bond; “Scheer,” probably referring to antiwar activist Robert Scheer, who today is a popular liberal columnist; and “King (as a Nobel Peace Prize Winner)”—that is, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.27 As Congress later reported, King ended up signing on for the effort, agreeing to “play a leading role in the April 15 demonstrations in New York City.” Landing King, a genuine man of peace, was a coup for the Communists; it showed their success in assembling a “united front” that went well beyond CPUSA hacks.28

  Aptheker's letter identified another target, “Spock”—Dr. Benjamin Spock. And with that, the co-opting of the good doctor began in earnest. Spock's shop, at 541 Madison Avenue in New York, was just around the corner from the National Conference for New Politics—easily approachable. Soon he was enlisted as cochairman of the organization, in which capacity he put his signature to the huge December 10, 1967, New York Times ad that heralded preparations for “the largest demonstration this country has ever seen” at the 1968 Democratic conventi
on in Chicago. This was the protest where Spock predicted no chance of “violence or civil disobedience.”29

  Dr. Spock was now on board as a formal war protester, ready for frequent use.

  The college comrades, from Columbia to Berkeley, had done yeoman's work in recruiting the pediatrician to their cause. The radical organizers knew they needed a prominent non-Communist to be the face of the Vietnam Week rallies. Spock was a superb pick, since parents would think to themselves, If Dr. Spock is so passionately against the war, maybe it really is a bad thing.

  Chairman Spock

  A huge crowd of 100,000 to 125,000 participated in the march in New York that closed Vietnam Week on April 15, 1967. Spock served as cochair for the rally along with Dave Dellinger, the cochair of New Mobe, who organized trips to Hanoi for members of the “peace movement,” and whose name surfaced more than any other in Congress's October 1968 hearings on the disruption of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.30 The speakers in New York included several well-known Communists, plus non-Communist radicals like black militant Stokely Carmichael and SDS president Nick Egleson. Also, well-known Communist/far-left musicians performed at the rally, including Pete Seeger (who had performed at American Peace Mobilization rallies in 1941).31

  It seems unfathomable that the intelligent Dr. Spock could have been oblivious to the Communist orchestration at this parade. In a lengthy report Congress listed sixty-two key participants in the spring offensive, operating on both coasts. The list included some big CPUSA names, such as Bettina Aptheker, Robert Treuhaft, Jessica Mitford, and a wide assortment of representatives from the National Lawyers Guild. Another name on the list was the Reverend William Howard Melish, the Episcopal minister and friend of Arthur Miller and Frank Marshall Davis, whom Davis portrayed in his columns as a lovable liberal persecuted by anti-Communist Torquemadas, but whom the U.S. government now unhesitatingly described in its reports as an “identified member, CPUSA.” Also involved, according to Congress's report, was renowned scientist and eventual Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, a radical leftist whom Congress called an “identified” CPUSA member.32

  And, of course, not missing the protest was Corliss Lamont.

  Spock had to have noticed the strong Communist presence. If not, then he was duped even worse than we can imagine.

  In sponsoring these antiwar activities, Dr. Spock lent legitimacy to the effort. He fulfilled the hope that the West Coast organ of the Communist Party, People's World, had expressed four months earlier, on January 21, 1967: that the “national sponsors” of the march would generate “possibilities of unprecedented breadth.”33

  After Vietnam Week, Spock's Red friends were not about to let this big fish slip away. Six months later the doctor was tasked with participating in chaotic demonstrations in Washington, D.C. The rallies, held on October 21, 1967, involved thirty thousand to sixty thousand participants, and included the uprising outside the Pentagon, where as many as a thousand protesters were arrested. Spock joined seven other speakers at the Lincoln Memorial, including Dave Del linger; Dagmar Wilson, a New Mobe cochair; John Wilson, who made a plea for a moment of silence in memory of the late Che Guevara; and Lincoln Lynch, who urged American soldiers in Vietnam to “lay down their arms by the thousands and come on home and fight.” A host of Communist organizations and front groups were present, such as the pro-Chinese Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Action Movement.34

  It was no coincidence that companion demonstrations were held the same day in Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, Stockholm, Munich, and five major cities in Canada. There was even a companion Vietnam Week staged behind the Iron Curtain (October 15–21), as the Hungarian Peace Council showed solidarity with the comrades in the United States. The Soviet-controlled World Peace Council had issued a call: “The organizations and groups working for peace in Vietnam should mark October 21 … by demonstrations in many countries and towns.”35

  Whether Spock knew it or not, he was part of—actually, a central figure in—a concerted international Marxist campaign to undermine America in Vietnam. The Communists had drummed up a stellar global protest against America, and Dr. Benjamin Spock was there as a poster boy.

  Dr. Spock on Vietnam

  Dr. Spock was suddenly the toast of the American Communist movement, which now offered him all kinds of awards, honors, and, most assuredly, platforms. One group that commended and joined him at the dais was the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, the creation of Corliss Lamont and I. F. Stone. The “civil liberties” committee marketed itself to non-Communist liberals as a gallant fighter for First Amendment freedoms against the tyranny of McCarthyism; the group sponsored the National Committee to Abolish HUAC.36

  Dr. Spock would soon pay back his new friends on the far Left with a gem of a gift: a major screed against the war in Vietnam, which was published in 1968, and titled simply Dr. Spock on Vietnam.37 The cover of the short book (less than a hundred small pages, with large print) was an eye-grabber, appropriate for the great childcare advocate: a photo of a small Vietnamese girl, a toddler, abandoned on a sidewalk strewn with debris, crying—an unmistakable victim of war. The banner across the front cover cried out, “THE FAMOUS DOCTOR SPEAKS OUT!”

  The book began with a foreword by Dr. Spock in which he stated, “I have never been a pacifist,” noting that he favored going to war against Hitler “long before we actually did.” Though an astute anti-Communist reader might deduce that Spock was merely mimicking the Communist Party line in late June 1941, the doctor quickly quelled that thought by noting that he also supported the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, and defending South Korea against Communist North Korea—none of which the likes of Frank Marshall Davis advocated. Turning to the subject of the book, Spock condemned President Lyndon B. Johnson for escalating the conflict in Vietnam “when he promised not to escalate.” Vietnam was different, he explained—poorly prosecuted by a bad president, illegally pursued, and not in America's national interest.

  These were reasonable objections. The doctor had established credibility with readers.

  From there, Spock and his coauthor, Mitchell Zimmerman (identified on the book jacket only as “a twenty-five year old New Yorker who has studied political science at The City College of New York and at Princeton University, where he received his Master's degree”),38 dove straight into the book's first and shortest chapter, titled “Babies and Vietnam.” It played right into the doctor's strength, and to the hearts of his readers. Spock and Zimmerman had adopted an emotionally effective writing approach.

  The book, however, began to unravel at the end of that opening chapter—fittingly, the first time it quoted the New York Times, which was the dominant source of information the authors tapped to argue against the war. Their slight book quoted the Times at least thirteen times, while wisely avoiding quoting any of Spock's new comrades from the Communist movement: no Bettina or Herb Aptheker, no Dave Dellinger, no Corliss Lamont.39

  Spock and Zimmerman cited a quote from the New York Times that made for an odd, off-theme conclusion to the first chapter—which was on “Babies and Vietnam,” remember. The Times had quoted an American infantryman in Vietnam as saying: “If you put it up [the war] to a vote among the G.I.’ s, we would all vote to chuck this whole place. They say we're stopping communism here, but that's just politics, just words.”40

  Of course, it wasn't just politics and words; it was the objective. Perhaps the objective was being poorly pursued, but it was the objective nonetheless. And, of course, there was no way that “all” American GIs would vote to “chuck” the whole of Vietnam. This was nonsense, and a destructive assessment of the war. Spock and Zimmerman, however, took no pause to make such distinctions, allowing the quote to stand without comment. This was symptomatic of the overreach and simplistic analysis of the entire book.

  The authors consistently likened the Vietcong—“communist patriots”41—to the American revolutionaries of 1776, even as the North Vietnamese battled for the antithesis of the American repu
blic. “The Vietnamese people declared their independence from France,” Spock and Zimmerman wrote, “much as we declared our independence from England in 1776.” More so, “Their war of independence was fought by a united front of various political groups and was led by the communist patriot Ho Chi Minh.… Ho is sometimes called the George Washington of Vietnam.”42

  Upon reading this book, moms who nursed their babies with copies of Spock's earlier books on their lap were probably wondering why America was not fighting with, rather than against, Ho Chi Minh and the Communists. Why would Uncle Sam be at war with George Washington?

  Spock and his coauthor also maintained that the Vietnamese Communists were really nationalists—which, of course, was a refrain of the American Left each time a Communist movement sprang up in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, from the 1920s to the 1980s. These modern incarnations of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin had earned the support of the population (though they were never elected). To drive home this point the authors marshaled “evidence” from a number of sources, including popular liberal columnist Joseph Alsop, Professor Howard Zinn, and New York Times reporter James “Scotty” Reston. They quoted Alsop, for example, saying that “it was difficult for me, as it was for any Westerner, to … imagine a communist government that was also a popular government and almost a democratic government.”43 But, lo and behold, argued Alsop, and Spock and Zimmerman, the North Vietnamese Communists had planned to take their country in that very direction—until America began blowing it up. Where was the true spirit of 1776?