Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  Worse, argued Spock and Zimmerman, was America's true agenda in Vietnam: capitalist greed. “We first got involved in Vietnam,” the authors explained, “for the same reasons nations have always interfered in business of other peoples: they had something and we wanted it.… We feared that, if they [the Communists] won, our businessmen might not be allowed to get what they wanted from that part of the world.”44

  It was as if Ho and his boys had fired their shot at Lexington and Concord, and Uncle Sam responded with napalm—solely because of greed, a lust for territory and money.

  If that was not offensive enough to the American cause, Spock and Zimmerman claimed that America's South Vietnamese allies were akin to Nazi storm troopers—corrupt, degenerate village burners. As evidence, the authors predictably went back to the New York Times. Yet they also culled a new source: a young senator from Massachusetts named Edward “Ted” Kennedy.

  Kennedy had just returned (January 1968) from a fact-finding trip to the refugee camps in South Vietnam.45 As Spock and Zimmerman noted, the senator had discerned that “half of the 30 million dollars a year the United States has given South Vietnam for refugee relief was finding its way into the pockets of government officials and province chiefs.”46 Kennedy complained of rampant corruption, the kind that was apparently absent—or at least not mentioned—among North Vietnamese officials.47

  The authors described the South Vietnamese as moral reprobates who “extorted” and “executed,” who committed routine “acts of terror,” who “looted villages,” and who ran not refugee camps but “concentration camps,” as they cruised around in Mercedes Benzes and as their wives wore the most expensive clothes and jewelry.48

  Not that American soldiers were any better. Spock and Zimmerman cited a letter to Senator William J. Fulbright by a GI who claimed that “90 percent” of U.S. military attacks were waged against the people of South Vietnam. Basically, the authors argued, American soldiers were locking up the countryside of South Vietnam. Here again, for backing, the authors went to the New York Times and Ted Kennedy. Of the South Vietnamese who were now refugees, reported Senator Kennedy, “the vast majority—I would say over 80 percent—claimed that they were either deposited in camps by the Americans or fled to camps in fear of American airplanes and artillery. Only a handful claimed they were driven from their homes by the Viet Cong.”49

  All of this the authors described in a section titled “Their Terror and Ours.” Spock and Zimmerman, drawing from Senator Kennedy, the New York Times, and other choice sources, portrayed South Vietnam as virtually one enlarged terror/ concentration camp, thanks to America and its soldiers. Millions had been forced into captivity, compliments of the Red, White, and Blue. At best, “only a handful” of South Vietnamese people (according to Kennedy) were refugees because of anything done by the Communists of North Vietnam. Everything was the fault of the anti-Communists, from the United States to South Vietnam.

  The authors next sliced at the Domino Theory. They dismissed the crucial Soviet and Chinese involvement in the Vietnam War as unimportant by saying, “Today neither of the two major communist powers, Russia or China, is advancing toward our shores. Neither has any troops stationed in North or South Vietnam at the present time.”50 Besides, Spock and Zimmerman suggested, even if China were somehow involved in Vietnam, why would this be a bad thing? After all, Mao Tse-tung, like Ho Chi Minh, and like Fidel Castro, was a “revolutionary.” In Vietnam and China and Cuba, “The motivation for revolution is the same today as it was in 1776: the desire for justice and a better life.”51

  In the very next sentence came perhaps the most tragic false prophecy in the book. Again dismissing fears of a spread of Communism in Asia, Spock and Zimmerman maintained that “Cambodia, right next door to Vietnam, is in no danger of revolution.”52

  In fact, within only a few years of the publication of this book, the criminally insane Pol Pot and his vicious Communist Khmer Rouge would seize Cambodia and turn it into arguably the worst killing field in human history, with upwards of two to three million people slaughtered out of a population of only five to seven million over the course of barely four years.

  Highly Recommended Reading—by the Vietcong

  Dr. Spock's book was a smash among the political Left. The good doctor had joined the side of the antiwar “progressives.” And whether he knew it or not, he had also joined the same team as America's Communists, who could not have dreamed up a better teammate.

  The book had another audience—a set of admirers much farther away. An eyewitness to this new Benjamin Spock book club was Lieutenant Robert Frishman, U.S. Navy, a twenty-eight-year-old former dental student turned Vietnam fighter pilot. Frishman, who received the Distinguished Flying Cross, nine Air Medals, two Navy Commendation Medals, and a Purple Heart, was shot down over hostile territory on October 24, 1967. He ended up being held in captivity for twenty-one months, until August 4, 1969.53

  Once detained, Frishman and his fellow American soldiers were granted only antiwar information and propaganda permitted by their captors. Around 6 a.m. each day, they were awakened to a voice they called “Hanoi Hannah,” the Vietnamese equivalent of Japan's “Tokyo Rose” during World War II. They would end the day to the dulcet tones of Hanoi Hannah at 8 p.m. That was the routine.54

  In between these voices of Vietnam, Frishman and his friends got intermittent doses of misinformation. Much of this material came courtesy of liberal Americans. “We would also get other information about the events in the United States,” Frishman later told Congress. “We would hear about the moratoriums, the peace marches.” The former POW politely expressed frustration at the ignorance of the “peace” activists as to how America's enemies exploited their presence at antiwar rallies: “I have people come to me and say, ‘I think I will go to one of those moratoriums because I am for peace.’ I say, ‘What does your participation in a moratorium mean?’”55 These “young, impressionable youth [get] swallowed up” by the ringleaders in these movements, said Frishman. Even the “well-educated,” the lieutenant said, were susceptible to being used, again and again.56

  Lieutenant Frishman learned in captivity about New Mobe and SDS, and recalled reading an American magazine with a sparkling profile of Dave Dellinger, Dr. Spock's new best friend. Frishman and the other inmates suffered the news about the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention, which had greatly impressed the North Vietnamese; the convention blow-up became a handy propaganda tool to use against the soldiers. Frishman and the POWs also heard “quite a bit” about the Black Panther Party, Stokely Carmichael, and the assassination of Dr. King—all for the purpose of conveying to them the Frank Marshall Davis image of the “repressive” and “racist” American state.57

  This negative information from the United States, explained Frishman, was used not only to try to demoralize the POWs but also to inspire the North Vietnamese. He said, “They use these statements … to gain support for their people, for their cause, to try to rally their troops—they say, ‘Look, this is the way the American people believe.’” He noted how his interrogators pulled antiwar material from the American press and “they shoved it down our throat.” The enemy had its favorite congressmen: Frishman most often heard the Vietcong quoting the remarks of Democratic senators William Fulbright, George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, and Bobby Kennedy.58

  The enemy also fed the POWs books. Originally the North Vietnamese gave them books published in Russia, Albania, China, North Korea, and other Communist countries, but Frishman told his captors that “all that stuff” was mere “propaganda” from the Communist world. So the Vietcong got smart, reaching for a better form of information: they gave the POWs selective readings from back home. Frishman recalled the authors most popular among the Vietcong prison guards, including Bertrand Russell, author of War Crimes in Vietnam, who started an “International War Crimes Tribunal,” which received funding from Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnamese regime;59 Wilfred Burchett, later identified as a Soviet agent;60 and a certain
extremely popular book by Benjamin Spock—namely, Dr. Spock on Vietnam.61

  Apparently, the doctor's antiwar work was a mainstay at the POW camp, used for regular drilling and anti-American indoctrination. Said Frishman: “Dr. Spock on Vietnam, I got to read that four or five times.”62

  “The Progressive, True American People”

  Nearly identical testimony came from another former POW, Doug Hegdahl. Hegdahl was a U.S. Navy petty officer from Clark, South Dakota, who received a number of ribbons and commendations during the war, including the National Defense Medal. On the night of April 6, 1967, he came to the deck of his ship, the USS Canberra, which was engaged in a firing mission off the coast of North Vietnam. (Contrary to the military expertise of Dr. Spock and Senators Kennedy and Fulbright, Hegdahl's ship was engaging enemy combatants, not children in villages.) “I came up on the deck and the next thing I remember I was in the water,” recalled Hegdahl, “and I can't tell you how I fell from my ship.”63

  Hegdahl managed to regain his senses, kept afloat, and then swam for about five hours before he was picked up by a North Vietnamese fishing boat. The fishermen treated him “reasonably well,” but when they brought him to shore, hostile North Vietnamese villagers turned him over to the village militia. He did not know the name of the village, though he did recognize the material he was handed: it was a “pamphlet on the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal and some cartoon clippings from the American papers.”64

  Hegdahl was held in captivity for more than two years in multiple detention centers, including the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” where men like future U.S. senator John McCain were brutally tortured and permanently disabled. Like Lieutenant Frishman, Hegdahl learned all about groups like New Mobe and antiwar activists like Dave Dellinger from his Communist captors. He was saturated with the thinking of individuals who were a virtual “who's who” of the April 1967 New York City antiwar rally headed up by Dr. Spock, including SDS leaders like Nick Egleson and Black Panther Stokely Carmichael.65

  Carmichael, in fact, joined Hanoi Hannah in being broadcast over the airwaves in Vietnam, his voice used to demoralize Americans there. Hegdahl explained:

  Stokely Carmichael's voice actually came over the radio at times to broadcast to the GIs in the South. At one time he was pleading with his brother, who was a soldier in South Vietnam, “What are you fighting for? Why are you fighting for the imperialists, the white imperialist power structure?” Then he went on to say, “Can you vote in Tennessee? Can you vote in Texas? No, you can't, so why are you fighting?”66

  Asked explicitly whether it seemed that Carmichael had been “giving aid and comfort to the enemy,” Hegdahl did not hesitate to respond: “Definitely, yes.”67

  The North Vietnamese who tortured and attempted to deprogram Doug Hegdahl and other POWs were big advocates of America's progressives. Hegdahl's captors told him “we want you to be loyal to the progressive, true American people.”68 The Vietcong looked earnestly for reading material from the progressives, to be furnished for the edification of America's boys in captivity. Two American newspapers were particular favorites of the Vietcong, Hegdahl said: “They quoted American papers such as, well, the New York Times and the Washington Post.” There was plenty of negative material in the Times and Post for the Vietcong to excerpt.

  Hegdahl also recalled a series of pamphlets by Helen Boyden Lamb. A word on Lamb: Born Helen Elizabeth Boyden in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 1906,69 she attended Radcliffe College, where she received a bachelor's degree in 1928 and a Ph.D. in 1943. Her first husband, Robert Keen Lamb, died from cancer in 1952. Ten years later, she remarried and moved to New York City.

  At that point there was a clear upsurge in Lamb's left-wing activities—evident in her private papers, which are housed at the Arthur M. Schlesinger (Sr.) Library at Harvard.70 Starting around the time of her remarriage, Lamb's name began to appear frequently in newsletters from the American Humanist Association, in works distributed by the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, in correspondence and even greeting cards with Vietnamese officials as high up as Ho Chi Minh himself, in letters to and from Owen Lattimore (one of the most duplicitous Communist suspects and sympathizers of the entire Cold War), through involvement with Religious Left clergy protesting the war, in dealings with numerous Communist front groups, and via her many speeches to student groups and civics clubs, ranging from the Columbia Student Union (October 3, 1963), to the Liberal Club at Rutgers University (April 22, 1964), to the Columbia University Humanist Society (November 12, 1964), to Americans for Democratic Action (November 18, 1964), to the New York City YWCA (May 14, 1965).

  By 1964 Dr. Lamb was speaking out against the war at colleges, to civic organizations, on radio shows, and in published articles, pamphlets, and books. Her popular pamphlets, “The Tragedy of Vietnam,” started publishing in May 1964. In these and in her later book Vietnam's Will to Live (1972), she gloried in Vietnam's “steadfastness and resolve” against “America's frightful capacity and willingness to destroy.” As Doug Hegdahl attested, the Communist Vietcong so valued her work that they handed out her pamphlets to American POWs to attempt to convince U.S. soldiers of the injustice of their cause.71

  One wonders whether Helen Lamb and other favored authors of the Vietcong were troubled when they heard the congressional testimony of former POWs like Doug Hegdahl and Robert Frishman and learned how their materials were being used to brainwash tortured American soldiers. More likely, the testimony reinforced their view that they were making a positive impact, far and wide, from the Heartland to Havana to Hanoi.

  And no doubt, Dr. Helen Lamb could count on the encouragement of her spouse: Dr. Corliss Lamont.

  Lamont surely assured his new wife that she was on the right track if the Vietcong enjoyed her work. After all, the Soviets had once enjoyed the work of Corliss and his ex-wife, Margaret.

  Aside from Lamb's pamphlets and the articles from the New York Times and Washington Post, did the Vietcong prison guards provide Doug Hegdahl with any choice books? Oh, yes: There was Dave Dellinger's In the Teeth of War, as well as such antiwar books as I Protest and Vietnam! Vietnam! There was also, of course, the must-read, Dr. Spock on Vietnam.72

  America's Doctor, and Hanoi's

  As usual, the likes of Dr. Benjamin Spock could not imagine the full ramifications of their actions. Spock and his comrades likely had no clue of the extent to which they and their work were exploited by Communists at home and abroad, from New York City to Hanoi.

  Spock's manifesto against the war in Vietnam—a Vietcong favorite—was far from the pediatrician's swan song. He found himself atop invite lists for every new and exciting Communist “offensive” against the war, frequently offered the chance to be a headline speaker.73 By 1972 he had veered so far to the left that he ran for president as the People's Party candidate, through which the children's doctor campaigned for legalization of abortion (pre–Roe v. Wade), gay rights, decriminalization of marijuana, socialized medicine, minimum- and maximum-wage caps, and other measures consistent with the permissive, libertine lifestyle of the flower children. Of course, his People's Party platform was also marked by staunch opposition to the Vietnam War.

  To current knowledge, Dr. Spock was not a Communist or even a small “c” communist, even though he moved about as far left as one could at the time. Generally, he was a non-Communist liberal who came to adamantly oppose the war in Vietnam. Opposition to the war was not in itself troubling. Some of America's leading generals, such as Matthew Ridgway and Douglas MacArthur, had long warned of the peril of getting involved in a land war in Asia, and some of the nation's sharpest anti-Communists, including the theologian Bishop Fulton Sheen, were steadfast critics of the war.74 These and many other Americans practiced honorable dissent, reasonably questioning the Johnson administration's handling of the war as well as the immorality of total war.

  Countless Americans achieved the task of protesting the war without being co-opted and humiliated by the Reds. Dr. Benj
amin Spock was not among them. He was a dupe—over and over and over and over.

  Dr. Spock was taken in in part because legions of students, duped and dupers, were there to aid and abuse him. Among the worst culprits was a hodgepodge of the oblivious and the insidious known as Students for a Democratic Society.

  16

  RADICALS: BILL AYERS, BERNARDINE DOHRN, SDS, AND THE WEATHERMEN

  As grown-ups like Dr. Spock misbehaved like political bad boys, some of the ’60s kiddies reveled in their big opportunity to defy authority. For many of them, it was a thrill to go to battle on manicured campus quads and take to city streets to denounce the “pigs” keeping people safe at home and the “fascist” military trudging through swamps, jungles, and landmines in Southeast Asia. Among the student movement's rank and file, surely at least some were more interested in the rush of the protests—in the accompanying sex, drugs, and psychedelic music—than in the actual matters being protested.