Howard Zinn
MS. RIDOLFI: Today we would like to call our brother Howard Zinn.
HOWARD ZINN, having been duly sworn, was examined and testified as follows:
BY MS. RIDOLFI:
(defendant)
Q. Howard, what is your occupation?
A. I am a historian. I am a professor of political science at Boston University.
Q. What is your educational background?
A. Well, I went to high school. Then I didn't go to school again for a while. I worked at various jobs, went into the Air Force and then worked again in various jobs. Then when I was old I went to school under the GI Bill of Rights and got a bachelor's degree at New York University. I went to Columbia, did graduate work there, got a master's degree at Columbia University in history and political science. Then I got a PhD. at Columbia University in history and political science.
A few years after that I did some postdoctoral work at Harvard University. I was a [undecipherable] in the Center of southeast Asian History, studied Chinese history and east Asian history in that time. That is about my formal education.
Howard Zinn served as a bombadier in the Air Force during World War II.
Q. What employment have you held in the past?
A. Well, I mentioned that after high school I went to work. I was a shipyard worker for about three years before I went into the Air Force, and then after I got out, I went back to the shipyard. I worked at various jobs for a couple of years. Worked on the lower east side of New York City for the Housing Authority.
I went to school, and after I did my graduate work I began teaching and I taught history and political science for three years at [undecipherable] College in East Orange, New Jersey.
Then I went down south to Atlanta, Georgia, and I was offered a job as chairman of the history department at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, which is a black college. We used to call it a Negro college in Atlanta, Georgia.
I was chairman of the history department there, professor of history for seven years in Atlanta from 1956 to 1963.
Then for a while there I also held a job as director of the non-Western studies program of the Atlanta University Center, which is a group of Negro colleges in Atlanta.
Then I came North and I got a job as professor of political science at Boston University, where I have been for the last seven or eight years.
[I've been] involved in the Civil Rights Movement and [have written] about it, so I've lectured a lot on the Civil Rights Movement and on the race question in the South and in the North and that sort of thing.
And then when the war in Vietnam escalated, I began doing a lot of lecturing about the war, about war in general [and] about the war in Vietnam in particular.
Reverends Philip and Daniel Berrigan of the Catonsville Nine on the cover of TIME magazine on January 25, 1971. Cover designed by Jim Sharpe. Read the cover story
Q. Howard, have you yourself been involved in any movements of civil disobedience?
A. Well, I mentioned that when I was teaching in the south, it was hard not to be involved with my students. I began teaching at Spelman College in 1955. Atlanta was a totally segregated city. My students began engaging in civil rights disobedience. They went to the public library in Atlanta and they tried to take books out of the Atlanta Public Library, and I discovered they couldn't take books out of the Atlanta Public Library because the Atlanta Public Library was for whites only. So we decided together as a class that we would go to the library anyway and just go there again and again — and this was a kind of beginning action, I guess, of civil disobedience.
And then I remember visiting as a class, you know, how in school, you go on what they call field trips — always a good way to get out of school — and I remember I thought that we would go on a nice field trip in Atlanta, and that my students and I would go and visit the Georgia State Legislature in action.
And so I and my students went to Atlanta, went to the general assembly and discovered that the balcony in the general assembly was segregated, you know, blacks in this little section, and we decided that we would sit where we wanted to sit. And that was an action of civil disobedience.
And then in 1969, the sit-ins began. They began in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then students in Atlanta and my students began to get the same idea. We can't go into restaurants, we can't get a cup of coffee, whites only. We'll — We'll break the law. We'll sit down and we'll ask for a cup of coffee and we won't move until we get it.
And so in Atlanta my students began doing that and I began sitting in with them — although it was easier for me to get a cup of coffee. But we [did this] together, and sit-ins grew in Atlanta, so I became very much involved with my students in these things.
And then I became a member of the Executive Board of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. It was just one other person on the executive board who was sort of considered older than the rest. That was a black woman named Ella Baker. We became involved with them. So I began going around to do several things ——
MR. BARRY: Excuse me.
THE WITNESS: Yes.
MR. BARRY: Your Honor, I've been listening to this testimony rather patiently, and I'm wondering where it's all leading us. I would like at this time to ask for an offer of proof. What does it have to do with the events between June and August of 1971 here in Camden?
MS. RIDOLFI: Your Honor, this is an offer of proof. What he's talking about are his experiences which are all reflected in his writings, and he's just outlining — he's not going into them in detail.
MR. BARRY: Of that I have no doubt, Your Honor, but how does that relate to this draft board raid? That's why I'm asking for an offer of proof.
MR. WILLIAMSON: Your Honor, I may be mistaken, but I think that Mr. Zinn is still in the area of his qualifications — I believe that he's an expert on the subject of civil disobedience and he's qualifying them.
THE COURT: All right. I think the jury knows what we are about here. If they don't [find it] useful, they just reject it. I'll allow it.
MR. BARRY: Well, I think — excuse me. I think we can concede, Your Honor, that Professor Zinn will qualify as an expert witness and I think it's now appropriate to ask for some proof.
THE COURT: Overruled. Could you hurry along for us, though, Professor?
THE WITNESS: Okay. I'm sorry. Those were years. I'm pressing them into minutes.
A: (continuing) Where am I? We were talking about movements in civil — I'll just say very quickly that from Atlanta, involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, I began both being involved in the movements of civil disobedience and beginning to write about them. I went to southwest Georgia, to Albany, Georgia. I went to Mississippi. I went to Alabama, Thelma, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I was involved in civil rights action in these various places in the deep South and wrote about them.
Members of the Camden 28 were profiled in a newspaper article. Paul Couming (second from left) said he was influenced by Howard Zinn's writing.
MS. RIDOLFI: Okay. I [think it] would... help, your Honor, just to add to the connection between Howard and the defense, the defendants who have read his books [and] have been influenced by them who can stand up.
(Eleven defendants stand.)
MR. COUMING: I read the whole thing.
MR. KATRYS: How about the lawyers that have read it?
(Mr. Breeze, Mr. Kairys, Mr. Stolaw and Mr. Loving, stand.)
THE COURT: I'm a lawyer and you'll notice I did not stand.
MR. GOOD: You didn't read them or you weren't influenced by them?
THE COURT: All right, It's almost lunchtime.
MS. RIDOLFI: I think it's a good time to break because the offer of proof is completed.
THE COURT: All right. 2 o'clock ladies and gentlemen.
Next: The Pentagon Papers »
Paperback edition of The Pentagon Papers. New York Times, 1971. You can read the full text of the Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition online.
MS. RIDOLFI: Yes. The publication of the Pentagon Papers, as other defendants have already mentioned, were very, very important in confirming the truth of what we had known before. [indecipherable] coming from the Pentagon it meant a great deal to us, and we would like Howard to tell the jury and tell folks just what — you know, briefly outline — what that was, what our history had been and how it influenced us.
MR. BARRY: I press my objection, Your Honor, on a number of grounds. First of all, I don't think the witness is in any position to testify as to what influenced any particular defendant in this case. Also, the Pentagon Papers speak for themselves. Beyond that, they are incredibly voluminous and any short capsule characterization of what they contain I don't think is particularly helpful.
MS. RIDOLFI: I'm not trying to say —
THE COURT: The second part of the objection doesn't bother me so much as the first. How could this witness testify —
MS. RIDOLFI: That's what I was going to say. I'm not trying to say that Howard knows what influenced me, but his expertise on the Pentagon Papers — and the Pentagon Papers were, you know, the impact of that had a great deal of influence on myself and the other defendants, and — Howard can testify what is in those papers.
MR. GOOD: And books that he wrote.
MS. RIDOLFI: And also covers the books that he has written.
MS. GOOD: That we read.
MR. BARRY: Your Honor, I had understood that the witness is going to be testifying as to how, basically influences and motivation, but as to testifying in the form of characterizing the Pentagon Papers — what they show, what they don't show — I think goes far beyond the scope of any of your prior rulings.
I mean, that gets us into a number of issues that do not really bear directly on this case.
THE COURT: Wait a minute. Will it be tied up in some way?
MS. RIDOLFI: Definitely, Your Honor.
Related Links: The Pentagon Papers Case
» TIME magazine: Pentagon Papers, Case Dismissed
"I HAVE decided to declare a mistrial and grant the motion to dismiss." With these 13 terse words, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. ended one of the most extraordinary legal — and in many ways, illegal — proceedings in the history of American justice.
» The National Archives: The Pentagon Papers - Secrets, Lies and Audiotape
Listen to the audio and read transcripts of President Nixon's first recorded phone conversations on June 13, 14 and 15, 1971, after publication of the Pentagon Papers began.
» The National Archives: The Pentagon Papers - Secrets, Lies and Audiotape
Listen to streaming audio of the oral argument before the Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case.
THE COURT: All right, let's do it this way. Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to permit the testimony here over the objection of the government because of what Miss Ridolfi has just told us. Keep in mind, however, that it is for that limited purpose and we are not concerned with the Pentagon Papers per se here.
As I understand, Judge Byrne and a good jury out there (in Los Angeles) is having enough problems with it.
But, at any rate, for the limited purpose that Miss Ridolfi just succinctly stated, I will allow it, subject to it being stricken.
THE WITNESS, MR. ZINN: Well, the Pentagon Papers are an official history of American policy in Vietnam, and it is true, it is hard to sum up. I didn't think I would agree with you, but I think Mr. Barry is right. It is hard to sum up.
I will try to say what I think is important and then what people reading the Pentagon Papers might find important in them. The Pentagon Papers disclose the facts about the Vietnam War which to some extent were known already, but known only to a very, very small section of the American public, known to those people who read a lot of books about Vietnam, who were specialists in the field, who had a very special access to certain material about the Vietnam War.
But the general public did not know most of the material that was disclosed in the Pentagon Papers.
For instance, what you find in the Pentagon Papers is that from the very beginning of the postwar period, that is, from the end of World War II on, American policy in Vietnam was hypocritical. It's a strong word to use, but I think that is an accurate assessment, because what you find in the Pentagon Papers is that in 1945, World War II is coming to an end and there was a great question about what will happen to Vietnam because Vietnam has been under the control of the French by that time for about 80 years, ever since the 19th century.
Vietnam was a colony ruled by the French. But now the war is over and the Japanese have been defeated, the Germans have been defeated, and Roosevelt and Churchill meet in the middle of the Atlantic in 1941 and they produced something called the Atlantic Charter.
In the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt and Churchill said when this war is over, those people who were controlled by foreign powers are going to be free. That's what the charter said. It was a promise of freedom to people who are run by colonial powers. So when 1945 came, the people of Vietnam said to the world that "we are going to take the Atlantic Charter, what Roosevelt and Churchill said, at face value. We want our freedom from the French."
The trouble was at that particular point, the United States, with England, with France, with Nationalist China, because Chiang Kai-shek was in power in China, all four of those governments collaborated to give Vietnam back to the French because the French were out of it as a result of the war. There had been an independent movement that grew up in Vietnam during World War II [led by] Ho Chi Minh.
Ho Chi Minh was two things. He was a Communist and he was a Nationalist. He wanted independence and he led this great movement of people. Some of them were Communists. Most of them were not. But they all wanted independence from France. Ho Chi Minh wrote — and this is in the Pentagon Papers — Ho Chi Minh wrote many letters to Harry Truman. Roosevelt died in the spring of '45. Truman took his place, and Ho Chi Minh, at the end of 1945, wrote — I counted in the Pentagon Papers 14 communications from Ho Chi Minh to President Truman — saying, "Remember the pledge of the Atlantic Charter. You promised us our independence. We want it now. Keep the French out."
According to the Pentagon Papers, not one of those communications was answered.
No answer.
That told the story. The United States set out, starting in 1945 slowly, but more and more firmly, to put the French back into power in Vietnam, and the British collaborated.
And so the French came back in 1945, and they faced this independence movement; and in the Pentagon Papers, one of the remarkable things that appears [is] a document which is the Declaration of Independence that Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnam and independence movement drew up in 1945.
When we defeated the Japanese and the Germans, and the Japanese had got out of Indochina, and these people in Vietnam thought they would be free now — they thought maybe that would keep the French out, too — they drew up this Declaration of Independence and had a tremendous celebration in Hanoi. A hundred thousand people gathered in Hanoi [for a] huge celebration, and they read this Declaration of Independence, and it read: "All men are created equal. There are certain inalienable rights: life, liberty [and] the pursuit of happiness."
Well, those are the words of the American Declaration of Independence. Now, Ho Chi Minh and his people took from the American Declaration of Independence and they took from the French Declaration of Rights from the French Revolution, and they created a new declaration of their own.
But the French were put back by the United States and England, and then the war started ... The French bombarded Haiphong Harbor. They killed 8,000 civilians in that bombardment. It was a sudden surprise bombardment of Haiphong Harbor.
The war started between the Vietnamese Independence Movement and the French. And that war lasted from 1946 to 1954.
This is another very important thing in the Pentagon Papers. It shows what the United States did in that war. Because here was the United States, which supposedly stood for the self-determination of nations, which supposedly stood for liberty. We didn't want other countries to overrun other countries or control other countries, we said. Here were the French trying to control Vietnam and fighting a war against the Vietnamese to control Vietnam. And the United States helped the French from the beginning to the end of that war. They helped them more and more until by the end of the war, by 1954, the United States was supplying 80 percent of the money that the French were using to finance their war. The French couldn't have done it without the United States.
THE WITNESS: With all of this, with all of this aid, the French were not able to defeat Ho Chi Minh or the Vietnamese Independence Movement. And the Pentagon Papers make clear why. Because the Pentagon Papers point out that Ho Chi Minh was a popular, respected, beloved figure all over Vietnam.
To Americans, it was hard to understand that somebody could be a Communist ... and that the people in the country would like him, that he would be popular. But in Vietnam, this was true. Ho Chi Minh was a Communist; and at the same time he was a leader of the Nationalist Movement and he was popular. People told stories about him, how kind he was and how intelligent he was.
His movement believed in changing conditions in Vietnam so that the people who didn't have any money in Vietnam or didn't have any land would be able to have a bit of land, that the wealth of Vietnam would be shared, that the French would not be able to make all that money from the rubber plantations in Vietnam that they were making. That's what Ho Chi Minh stood for and that's one of reasons he was popular. The French were fighting against a movement that had its roots in the countryside.
So with all the American aid, the French lost Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954. Big battle. The French lost the war. And they came to Geneva, and that's when the Geneva Agreement was signed. Everybody got together in Geneva, and they made a peace agreement — at least they thought it was a peace agreement — to end the war ... The Geneva Agreement just said that, well, we'll allow two years and then there'll be an election all through Vietnam; and in the meantime, Ho Chi Minh and his group, they'll stay in the north and the French will stay for a while in the south. And that would be it. There would be no more colonial power in Vietnam.
Here's where in the Pentagon Papers the story also becomes very clear, and that is that the United States at this point made a very important decision. The United States decided, we are not going to let this independence movement take over in Vietnam; if the French are getting out, we are going to go in. And that's exactly what happened.
The United States went into Vietnam in 1954. They went in through the man that they put in office in Vietnam, and who became the head of state in Vietnam, a man named Mr. Diem... The Americans wanted him in power. He became our man in Saigon.
From 1954 to 1956, the United States built up Diem, built up his power, gave him money, gave him arms; and the elections that were supposed to take place didn't take place because Diem refused to have elections take place. And the United States went along with Diem. No elections. We're going to build up South Vietnam into a fortress, and the Pentagon Papers carry this in full. And they tell how Diem, between 1954 and 1963, made South Vietnam into a police state.
When critics of the Vietnam policy had said Vietnam is creating a police state, a dictatorship in South Vietnam, the government of the United States denied this. The government of the United States said, "No, Diem is our friend. Diem is a member of the free world. We said he's a member of the free world; therefore, he's okay. Diem stands for democracy."
What's the proof? "The proof is he's our friend. We're helping him."
That's what the United States was saying. But the Pentagon Papers disclosed in their interoffice memos to one another, that the United States officials were admitting to one another [that] Diem is losing the confidence of the people. He is putting a lot of people in jail.
And you may remember, and the Pentagon Papers talk about this, that in 1963 the opposition to Diem in Saigon became very great. He was putting too many people in jail. He was shoving down too many newspapers. He was cutting down too many freedoms. He was not distributing lands to the peasants.
The Buddhists were beginning to protest against him, and he sent out his police, and these police fired into the monasteries. They killed monks. They imprisoned thousands of Buddhists. They shut down the Buddhist temples, and these police, according to the Pentagon Papers, were trained by the United States.
And so Diem was getting unpopular. And then the Pentagon Papers has a long section in which it tells how Mr. Diem, who we had put in power in 1956, was toppled from his seat of power in 1963 in a sudden military takeover of the Saigon Regime and was executed, and how the United States' officials were in Saigon, who had helped put Diem in power in 1954, helped plan his removal in 1963.
Henry Cabot Lodge, our ambassador in Saigon, worked secretly with the generals in Saigon, who were planning to overthrow Mr. Diem; and one week before the overthrow , Diem, who thinks Lodge is his friend, invites Lodge to spend a weekend with him and have some fun. They spend the pleasant weekend together, one week before Diem is going to be removed and is going to be killed.
This is why the Pentagon Papers had such an impact when they first came out and people began reading them, because these disclosures [about] all of this double dealing of the American government, things that the government had always denied, now were coming out. Wow. All this[about a] government that we had supported, which was so corrupt, which was so bad, and then which we overthrew because it couldn't maintain support.
So the Pentagon Papers tell us that in 1964/65: The United States made another crucial decision ... to move large numbers of American troops into Vietnam and large numbers of American bombers into Vietnam.
Related Links: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
» NPR: Gulf of Tonkin's Phantom Attack
Forty years ago today, a murky military encounter at sea plunged the United States deeper into the war in Vietnam. In 1964, CBS commentator and TV anchor Walter Cronkite knew only what official reports acknowledged. Four decades later, he offers a perspective on the incident he didn't have at the time.
» The National Security Archive: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Later
Signals intercepts, cited at time, prove only August 2nd battle, not August 4;
purported second attack prompted congressional blank check for war.
That's when the great bombardment begins, 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin. Another thing referred to in the Pentagon Papers [is] where the word is sent out to the American public that they have shot at us. They fired at us in the Gulf of Tonkin, which is right off the coast of Vietnam. What nerve they have. Vietnamese firing at American ships a few miles off their shore.
The American public was given the impression that they had done something terrible, and therefore, they deserved to be bombed.
But as it came out, not just in the Pentagon Papers, even before the Pentagon Papers, but the Pentagon Papers confirmed it, turned out to be a lot of doubt, a lot of doubt that what the United States government claimed [had] happened in the Gulf of Tonkin had happened.
At that time, as it turned out, the United States government had lied about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, that the shots that were supposed to have been fired at our destroyers [on August 4, 1964] were not fired, that the members of the crew of the American naval vessels said that no shots were fired.
We started to bomb North Vietnam in '64. It became very heavy in '65. In 1965, we sent almost 200,000 troops into Vietnam. The next year, 200,000 more, and the next year another 100,000. So that by 1968, we had 500,000 troops in Vietnam. We were bombing the South, bombing the North, bombing Laos — an enormous military operation.
The Pentagon Papers tells us all this in great detail.
Then something interesting takes place in the spring of 1968... We are bombing Vietnam more heavily than Germany and Japan were bombed in World War II, an enormous number of people have been killed in Vietnam. Oh, many Americans, but many, many more Vietnamese.
In 1968, or the beginning of that year, the Tet Offensive takes place. The National Liberation Front, the great offensive in South Vietnam which drives back American Forces, even gets into Saigon itself, so much into Saigon that it reaches the American Embassy and they are fighting inside the American Embassy in Saigon. They have so much support, these guerrillas, these NLF, what we call the Viet Cong, have so much support among the people of Saigon that the United States has to send B-52s to bomb the outskirts of Saigon, and many sections of Saigon are bombed by American B-52s in early 1968 in a desperate attempt to hold back this offensive.
Well, at this point General Westmoreland asked Lyndon Johnson for 200,000 more men on top of the 500,000 men. In one of the volumes of the Pentagon Papers, it tells how Johnson now has to decide: Should he send 200,000 more men to Vietnam on top of that 500,000? He decides [to do] what most presidents seem to do in a time of crisis: They set up committees to study the question.
He appoints a new secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, and McNamara, the old secretary of defense is going out.
He said to Clark Clifford, "I want you to take charge of this new investigation and I want to you to report back to me on what I should do now about this request for 200,000 men."
Then, the Pentagon Papers show, these committees surveyed the situation and they come back and they report to Clark Clifford, and then to Johnson, and they say, "Two hundred thousand more men is not going to do it. We can't do it. We can't win. These people are — It doesn’t seem that we can defeat them."
You see, there has been a lot of material in the Pentagon Papers which the high officials of this country knew about, which they did not tell the public and which said that the morale of the Viet Cong was very strong, that they were very popular and that the morale on the side of the Saigon government, on our side, was very low.
All of our officials kept wondering why is their morale so high. Why do they feel they have so much to fight for and why does our side not feel it has very much to fight for?
Well, in 1968 this little study group came out and said that we can't beat them with 200,000 more men. So we better not do it. That was one reason they gave for not sending 200,000 men. The other reason they gave was this — and this is very important — they said, we cannot do it because the American people won't stand for it.
They said, and this is in the little memo that they sent up to the president, they said there is too much opposition growing in this country to the war, too many people have protested, too many people have resisted the draft. Black people have resisted in the cities. In 1967 and 1968, there was a lot of trouble in this country. This is an unpopular war. We had better not go ahead.
Now, this is a tremendously important disclosure in the Pentagon Papers because up to this point the government had been acting as if the antiwar movement did not have any effect on it at all. What the Pentagon Papers brought out was that the protest of people against the war was having an effect, not a tremendous effect, maybe, but some effect, enough of an effect to make Johnson decide he was not going to send 200,000 more men. He was going to start moving in the other direction. He was going to leave the presidency, and he was going to start peace talks in Paris.
That may not be a tremendous achievement, but it's an achievement. The reason, it seems to me, this is so important for anyone reading the Pentagon Papers is that it suggests that the high policymakers who hold in their hands the lives of young Americans, [those who] decide which young people are going to stay alive and which of them are going to die at the age of 20, 21 and 23, that these high policy makers, who don't seem to be affected by elections and votes, because they promise one thing and then they do something else when they are elected, those high policymakers are affected by protest movements.
Therefore, it seems to me [that] anybody reading those Pentagon Papers and understanding that, might very well come to the conclusion [that] if lives are going to be saved, if important policy decisions are going to be changed to help the American people to stop war, then maybe those protests, yes, the kind of protest that they talk about right there in the Papers, civil disobedience — and they mention civil disobedience in the Pentagon Papers, they use that phrase, civil disobedience — had an effect on the decision makers of this country when they made that decision in 1968 to begin turning the other way.
Well, all of these things, or maybe most of these things had been said by people in books, in articles, in speeches, and at teach-ins and meetings all over the country. But for the first time when [the Pentagon Papers] came out in 1971, for the first time those same things were being said now, revealed by the American government, not voluntarily, the government was still trying to hide it. The government still didn't want those papers to come out. But they were out and now the public could see them.
So this about sums up pretty much what I have to say about the Pentagon Papers.
Q: Did the Pentagon Papers reveal what the United States' interest was in Vietnam, why were we so interested in that country?
A: There is a section of the Pentagon Papers that talked about why the United States is in Vietnam. At one point it says, there is a memo that is written to the French ambassador in 1947 from Washington, and the memo says that we must not, we must not let the other side win. We must not let the other side win. We must not let the guerrillas — at that time it was the Viet Minh, the Ho Chi Minh — we must not let them win in Vietnam because we don't want any country that is dominated by the Kremlin to be there in Asia.
They talk about the wealth of Southeast Asia. This starts way back. It starts in 1941 when Secretary of State Hull is worried about the Japanese moving into that area, and he says we can't afford to let the Japanese move into that area. He doesn't say we don't want the Japanese to move into that area because we want the Vietnamese to be free. He says no, we don't want the Japanese to move into that area because that is a very valuable area for us. It commands strategic routes.
Furthermore, in that area there is lots of tin, of rubber, lots of oil. That's in 1941. Then in 1947, '48, '49 and 1950, there is a whole series of memoranda in the Pentagon Papers in which different high officials discuss the importance of Vietnam to the United States. What they say again and again, and it almost comes as a chorus: tin, rubber, oil. Not that Vietnam has all those things, but Indonesia has those things. Malaysia has those things, and we want that.
This is a very important disclosure in the Pentagon Papers, because the public had been led to believe that we were fighting in Vietnam for freedom or to save America from attack. By whom? It wasn't clear. After Vietnam would fall, San Francisco would fall. Really, there was all this speculation about why we are fighting in Vietnam. How when they talk to themselves those high officials don't talk about freedom. They don't talk about defending America from attack. They talk about tin, rubber and oil.
So when this comes out in an official memorandum, this is very, very important. I suppose if you had to say what do the Pentagon Papers show [that] the high officials of the United States — when they are not talking to the public, when they are talking to one another — what do they think is the reason the United States is in Vietnam, the answer would have to be, it seems, that we are interested In the wealth of this area. In other words, that we are interested in what empires have been interested in all through history; why England was interested in Asia and the Near East and Africa, why Germany and Russia and Japan, why all the other great countries of the world, were interested in exploiting Africa and Latin America and Asia — the wealth of these areas.
Here was the United States, which a lot of people thought was pure and innocent, didn't have any of those motives, here was the United States with the same motives as the British Empire and all the other empires in world history. That is why the Pentagon Papers are very revealing and very important and may be very influential over the years.
Next: The Logic of Withdrawal »
Zinn, Howard. Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal.
South End Press, 1967. 144 pgs. Read the book online.
A It's a little book. I say this so you won't get scared. You might think I am going to go through it page by page. I will try — when you ask people to summarize their own books, it is a very dangerous a thing to do. They always try to make it seem much better than it is. But I wrote this book after I came back from my trip to Japan. I had gone to Japan to lecture at about 13 different Japanese universities about Vietnam.
I was startled. This was in 1966, and it was in the light of the American escalation and before there was any big American movement against the war, and what fascinated me in Japan was that the Japanese people, wherever we went, at every place we went in Japan, and we traveled in Japan from the very north, Hokkaido, all the way down to, to Okinawa, the Japanese people seemed to be virtually unanimously against the war, against American policy in Vietnam. This was interesting because the Japanese government was sort of cuddling up to the American government and having all sorts of nice friendly relations with the government. The governments seemed to be getting along fine. But the Japanese people were unanimously or close to unanimously against American policy in Vietnam.
So I was interested in this because if the United States was telling the American people that if Vietnam became Communist, that would be a threat to the United States, and the United States was 10,000 miles away, here was Japan, Japan is much closer to Vietnam. How come the Japanese people didn't feel that if Vietnam became Communist it would be a threat? The Japanese people did not seem to care if people became Communist or not. In fact, they said it probably would be better if Vietnam went that way, better than if she is controlled by some foreign power like France or the United States.
So I was curious. The Japanese weren't troubled about that. Americans were troubled. So I thought that I would start writing about that and say, here is a new perspective on the war. Here is a new way of looking at it.
Then I remember also — I was now just a few years out of the South — and I remember how in the last years of the Civil Rights Movement, there was this time when the end of the Civil Rights Movement coincided with the beginning of our escalation in Vietnam and how the black people, especially the young black people in the Civil Rights Movement in the South, immediately reacted to what the United States was doing in Vietnam and said, this is no good, this is wrong and we shouldn't be doing this.
I specifically remember December of 1964. I was in Mississippi. It was a summer where there was a lot of civil rights activities going on, and that summer, these young civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi: Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. One black, two white. They were murdered by a group of white people from that area. The bodies were not discovered until August, and when their bodies were discovered I remember we held a memorial service. The service was held in Philadelphia, Mississippi where they had gone and where this had happened to them. All of us left Jackson, Mississippi, and other places in Mississippi where people were working to register people to vote and other things like that. We all went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to hold those memorial services. This was August 3, 1964.
"Missing": Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner (FBI poster). 1964.
We all gathered there at the very solemn memorial, and one of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, a young black man, Robert Moses, stood up to talk, and he held up that morning's newspaper from Jackson. The headline in the morning newspaper said: "LBJ says shoot to kill in the Gulf of Tonkin."
The Gulf of Tonkin incident had just taken place, and LBJ's reaction to it was, "Oh, they fired at one of our destroyers. Go get them."
As it turned out later they hadn't, you see. But that's what the headline read: "Shoot to kill, LBJ says, in the Gulf of Tonkin." Bob Moses held this up, and he said that this is what we are against. We are against the violence that killed those three young men here in Mississippi, and we are against the violence that our government wanted to inflict on these Vietnamese people way over there in Vietnam.
So I thought there was a perspective, there was a special viewpoint of the Japanese looking at what we were doing in Vietnam, and there was a special viewpoint of the black people in this country looking at what we were doing in Vietnam. Maybe they had something to tell us that we average Americans could not see so well for ourselves.
So that started me off writing about the Vietnam War. So I wrote about what we were doing there. I wrote about the villages we were destroying, the families that we were killing, the kids whose legs were amputated as a result of our bombing. I wrote about the terror and devastation we were causing, and how, when people were killed in Vietnam as a result of our bombs, we paid compensation to their families. When plantations were destroyed, we paid compensation to the owners, and how the compensation that we paid for a rubber tree that was destroyed was greater than the compensation that we paid for a person that was killed.
Then I asked, why are we doing this? I went into the question of Communism, and the domino theory of containment and all the arguments that were being given by the government as to why we were there. I tried to examine them, and none of them stood up. None of them made any sense.
I came to the conclusion in this book that we were wrong, that we were doing something that, well it wasn't the first that we had done it. We had done it to the Indians for a long time. We had done it to the Filipinos back at the turn of the century. We had done it to the Mexicans in the Mexican war. I mean, our country was not a beautiful, innocent country. We have things to be proud of, like other countries, but this was one of the shameful things in our history.
So I came to the conclusion we were doing terrible things in Vietnam. We were doing them for no good reason. Maybe we were helping somebody who wanted political power or somebody who wanted the economic resources or wealth, but we weren't doing it for any people in America. There was only one solution, and that is to get out as fast as possible. That is why the title of the book was "The Logic of Withdrawal."
In 1967 it was unusual to talk about getting out of Vietnam. Just people, certainly nobody in government, and no one in books, were talking about simply packing up and getting out.
Anyway, that was the idea of the book.
Next: Civil Disobedience and Democracy »
On May 17, 1968, nine Catholics went to the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, took 378 draft files, brought them to the parking lot in wire baskets, dumped them out, poured homemade napalm over them and set them on fire.
It was about people breaking laws. And the reason they broke laws was because they had grievances, and these grievances were not being dealt with. And the result of breaking these laws by the colonists — the Boston Tea Party, the Philadelphia Tea Party, the New Jersey Tea Party — you know, there were a number of tea parties. They were having wild times in those days. But they were, you know, if you looked at them, if you wanted to get very sober and very curious, take those people into courts, what did they do? They destroyed tea? Oh, what a terrible thing. They broke the law.
You say, well, oh, tea — tea is not a big deal. But they broke the law. And there is this thing, this mysterious thing that hovers over people. Well, it hovers there because it's put there. It's put there by people who are in power, who want everybody to always obey all the rules, no matter how bad things get.
But the breaking of those laws was not a terrible thing because in the final analysis, it's human beings that count and human freedom that counts. Tea isn't important. Cottons aren't important. Things aren't important. People and freedom and human life are important. And so are the laws that are broken, you might say. Yes, they were. But that had to be done in order to get people together, so they could do away with a tyranny that was over them and that was preventing them from living out their lives the way they wanted to.
The handcuffed Berrigan brothers (both Catholic priests) after the Catonsville Nine action.
So when the Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson and his little committee, [they] wrote civil disobedience into it. Sometimes people forget this. That's the most basic fundamental document of our history — also, the most forgotten document of our history — and that document has civil disobedience written into it. And because the spirit and the words of that document are that when governments become too oppressive, when governments take away our lives or our liberties, our right to pursue happiness, then the regular rules may have to be broken. It's not because you want to go around wildly breaking laws.
The point is not chaos or anarchy, all these things that people talk about when they talk about breaking laws. No. The point is that when you do have chaos in the country or in the world or in your soul, chaos being people being oppressed, that then you may have to break the law in order to bring back some better harmony in the situation, in yourself and among people.
The Declaration of Independence said governments are not sacred things. The laws are not sacred things. Governments are set up by people to defend rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And when governments become destructive of those ends, it's the right of the people to alter or abolish those governments.
The Declaration of Independence goes even further than breaking laws.
Ite goes even further than overthrowing laws. The Declaration of Independence says you can not only overthrow laws you can overthrow governments if those governments oppress you if those governments take away what governments are set up to do. That's why Thomas Jefferson said, when he was in France and writing back, he said, [we] may need a rebellion in this country every 20 years. Rebellion means breaking laws. If injustices pile up, we may need some of that in order to make things right again. That was the spirit of the American Revolution, and that was the spirit of the founding document of our system [that] we have forgotten. But some people didn't forget.
And when they encountered grievances, they committed civil disobedience all through our history. The Declaration of Independence was there and the Revolution took place, but a lot of people were still not free. And most notably, the black slaves in this country, millions of them who were almost 20 percent of the population at the time of the American Revolution — today, blacks are maybe, 12, 13 percent of the population, but at that time black slaves were 20 percent of the population in the colonies. One out of every five persons was a black slave.
"How are they going to be free?" the people said "Well, we don't like slavery, but you mustn't break the law." Those slaves would not have been freed if people had not broken the laws. If people had not defied the Fugitive Slave Act, if the abolitionists, white and black, had not aroused the conscience of this country by committing civil disobedience.
William Lloyd Garrison, one of the white abolitionists leaders in New England, went out to a meeting in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1835, and he burned the Constitution of the United States. People burn draft cards today. Everybody gets excited. People burn draft records, and everybody talks as if the world is coming to an end.
William Lloyd Garrison burned the Constitution of the United States and he did it because he wanted to arouse the conscience, yes, irritate people, maybe annoy people, but he wanted to tell people about slavery. He wanted to tell the Constitution, this is the Constitution of a country which has slavery. And it was actions like this that helped mobilize more and more opinions in this country against slavery.
The Fugitive Slave Act was a law that provided for the capture of black slaves wherever they were found and returning them to their owners, and this law was violated again and again by people who did not believe in slavery. And what would you say to these people? If you had to decide what would happen to these people? Say, well, I'm against slavery, but you broke the law, therefore, I think you should go to jail because you helped this slave escape?
I wonder who, making a decision like that, could live with his or her conscience or, making a decision like that, could be said to really be against slavery.
That was an important period of civil disobedience in American history; and, of course, that wasn't the last time that blacks were going to be engaged in civil disobedience. Because every black who ran away from his plantation was committing civil disobedience. And I can just see somebody pointing their finger at one of these blacks who ran away from slavery saying, "You shouldn't have done that. You broke the law. You should go back to your master. You don't want to be a law-breaker, do you?"
No, that's the great advantage of history. Because from a historical viewpoint, you could see things straight. But when you are living in the midst of a situation, the most absurd things can be said to you, and you believe that. Because an atmosphere is created and you go along with the atmosphere. One must admonish the people. They broke the law.
Well, that spirit of disobedience continued. Whenever there was a serious grievance in American history, groups of Americans rose up and broke the law, committed civil disobedience to make their point.
Farmers did it in the 1880s and 1890s because they felt, the farmers felt they were being taken advantage of. The country was being run by the big railroads and the big banks and the big granaries. They were making all this money. The farmers were being squeezed out, and the farmers didn't have any money to pay the debts; and the farms were being foreclosed, were being taken away from them. They couldn't pay their mortgages. The farmers got together and they wouldn't let their places be foreclosed. They just got together and they stood in front of the sheriff and the auctioneer, and they said, "This is it. You are not auctioning off — this is our friend's house. We are all getting together. You're not auctioning off his house."
They were violating a law because they believed that it really was his house, and that money shouldn't determine whose house is whose, and this is what farmers did again and again.
And then the labor movement did it. Strikes were illegal for a long time. So whenever workers went out on strike, they were breaking the law. In fact, they were engaged in conspiracy because for a long time, unions were considered a conspiracy. And in the 1930s, the working men in the auto plants and rubber plants in the Midwest, trying to organize unions because they were being taken advantage of by the big corporate giants, by Ford and General Motors and Good Year Rubber, and all these companies. They needed to get together and raise their wages and get their workweek down from 60 hours to 40 hours, and the company would not recognize their union, [and] fired them for organizing unions.
So what did they do? They committed civil disobedience. They went into work, and then when the bell rang for them to go home, they didn't go home. They stayed there. And they said, "We are not leaving until you recognize our union." That was the sit-down strikes of May 1936, early 1937 in Flint, Michigan, and in other places.
By 1937 there had been close to 500 sit-down strikes all over the country. Workers who sat in — now, that's a violation of law. That's trespassing. That's — you can find five different legal violations there.
But in the course of history, we came to recognize they were right. They were not punished because there was some recognition by the community, I think, that they were right.
Of course, lately, in the last 10 to 15 years, we have seen many more examples of civil disobedience; that tradition carried on. And the Civil Rights Movement, which we talked about before, carried on that tradition. And when my students went into the Rich's Department Store in Atlanta, aptly named for the owner, when they went into Rich's Department Store and they sat down and they refused to move because they wouldn’t be served, because they were black, they were violating the law.
And what would you say to them? What would any of us say to them? That's what civil disobedience is.
We recognize years later [that] those people were right. And if they went to jail, they shouldn't have gone to jail because they were right.
A lot of people in the sit-ins, in fact, did not go to jail because judges found ways of saying — you know, it's something: When people want to find ways of getting people out of jail they get them out — judges found ways; the Supreme Court found ways of saying let's not send these people to jail. Yes, they violated the law, but let's not do that. That can be done. Even though there are always people who [say] you must go to jail, what if we don't send this person to jail. The world will collapse. That's not the way the world goes.
So civil rights movements, an awful lot of civil disobedience — Martin Luther King and lots of others broke the law again and again and again. And then, of course, the entire war movement and many, many more examples of that. And I guess we don't have to go into that because we've all lived through that recently and we know that.
And that's not crime. Civil disobedience is not crime. I know that there are people who want to say it's a crime. People want to say, "Well, look. Let's just look straight ahead at the black and white type, not think about anything else, empty your head." It's always better to have an empty head and straight-looking eyes, and black and white type, and you'll see they broke the law. But the world would not have the little bit of progress that we have made, little bit of progress for black people, little bit of progress for laboring people, little bit of progress for farming people; wouldn't even have this little bit of progress if civil disobedience had not been committed by committed people.
You know, you asked me as an American historian what is the role of civil disobedience in history. All I can say is it's been very healthy, and we will probably need a lot more of it if we are going to become a healthier society.
Zinn, Howard. Disobedience and Democracy.
Random House, 1968.
Read the book online.
Q. Howard, what are some of the ideas of civil disobedience in your book "Disobedience and Democracy"?
A. We'll I'll try to do that briefly because maybe more people are getting impatient. But it also is a little book. Little books are always better than big books, I think.
Anyway, I wanted in this little book "Disobedience and Democracy," I wanted to take up this whole question that I just discussed, of a kind of blind obedience to law without thinking of the human consequences and discuss that. And so I discussed that, sort of in the way I was just talking about it until now.
I also wanted to point out that very often people say, now, we know we have grievances, and we know things have to be changed, but still the way to change is not to break the law. The way to change is to go through ordinary channels: Write to your congressman. Write a letter to the newspaper. Vote. Join the League of Women Voters. Go through normal channels. But don't commit civil disobedience, don't break the law if you want to change things.
Now, I wanted to talk about that because it seemed to me there was something wrong with that idea. What was wrong with it was that — look at the ways we have to change things in this country; even though we call ourselves a democracy, the ways that we have to change things are not adequate. Sure, we have elections. Sure, people go through the motions. Sure, we elect representatives and we elect a president every four years. These turn out to be very inadequate for changing important policies.
They did not help the black person in this country. That's why the black person had to turn to the streets in order to begin to get anything. They did not help working people. That's why working people had to do what they did. They could not go through the democratic processes.
And when it comes to war — that's the most critical example.
When it comes to war and peace, we are not a democracy. Even if you think we are a democracy in other respects, when it comes to war and peace, we are not a democracy because war is made by the president of the United States, not even made by the representatives of the United States, not even made by Congress of the United States even though the Constitution gives Congress the right to declare a war.
I say this as a historian, just looking at how we got into wars in history. Few people decide it. It's not democratically decided. Voting didn't matter. People voted for Johnson over Goldwater in 1964 because they thought Johnson was for peace and Goldwater was for war. They voted for peace and they got war.
And so it went, and it turns out that you may have democracy. If you live in a town and your town has a meeting when you are deciding whether to build a new store, that's pretty democratic Put the entire people, town together. Should we have a new store in this area? Should we put a new traffic light here? Should we build a new hospital with our tax money? You get all the people in the city together and you vote on it. That's very democratic.
Where I come from in Massachusetts, there are various things like that town hall meeting. People do that.
It turns out that we have the most democracy when we are dealing with the pettiest of issues, and we have the least democracy when we are dealing with the most important issues. We have the most democracy when we're dealing with sewers. We have the least democracy when we're dealing with life and death, and whether 50,000 Americans are going to be killed in a war or a 100,000 or 200,000. That decision is made by one man or three men or six men. It's not a democratic decision.
And so I was very anxious to make the point in this book that when it comes to war and peace, we cannot depend upon the ordinary democratic channels of voting and representative government. People must directly express themselves to the government. And that's why we have antiwar movements, and protests and marches, sit-ins, civil disobedience, rallies, draft resistance. What this means, you see, is that all of this civil disobedience is not against democracy. All of this civil disobedience is democracy. It's a way of establishing democracy in an area where we don't have democracy. Because democracy means people speaking out their minds and telling the government what they want. And if you have no other way of speaking out your minds and telling the government what you want, you may have to picket, you may have to demonstrate, you may have to carry a sign, you may have to cry out, you might have to break the law, you might have to do all of these things; and that is enhancing democracy. That is enriching democracy. That is not against it.
Just one or two other points. One is that when we think about people committing civil disobedience as breaking the law and, therefore, they must be punished, we must consider that we are then guilty ourselves of us a double standard; and by a double standard, I mean one standard for one group and another standard for another group. And we are supposed to have, if there is anything we say justice is, it's equality before the law. And double standard means we're not treating one group equally with another group.
And by that I mean when ordinary people commit civil disobedience for something that means something to them we want to put them in jail. And furthermore, the power is [such] that we go ahead, they have the courts, they have the prosecutors, they have all the resources: they go ahead, and they use all that money and that energy, and they set out to try and put them in jail.
But when the leaders of our governments commit crime, there is nobody to put them in jail. If the FBI commits a crime, who is going to arrest the FBI when the people who have a right to make arrests are the FBI?
It's like asking one policeman to arrest another policeman or to arrest himself.
So the leaders of the United States, and I think this is true of other governments in the world, [this] is not just picking on the United States, just living here, I am more concerned with the United States. But I think this true of the leaders of governments in general. The leaders of governments are always getting away with committing crimes, always doing that. Their crimes of theft are far greater than this petty crime of theft that we see every day. Their crimes of violence are far greater that the crimes of violence we see every day.
If somebody kidnapped somebody, we would send that person to jail for a long period of time. If the government kidnaps a million young men — I know some people might not call that kidnapping. But when you take somebody by force out of their home and keep them somewhere for a specific period of time against their will and against their family's will, that is something like kidnapping. In fact, it's mass kidnapping, maybe. It's not punishable. Nobody is going to punish them. And nobody's going to punish them for dropping bombs, and nobody is going to punish them for sending men to slaughter.
So here's a strange thing. If somebody commits these crimes because they are officials of the government of the United States, they will go unpunished. They will not spend one day in jail. If somebody is arrested for trespassing, or for destroying property, or for burning papers, or for stealing papers, or for doing something that constitutes a technical violation of the law, they are going to be hauled up before the courts, and people are going to try to send them to jail. That's the double standard.
The point I make in this book is that civil disobedience shows up this double standard very clearly because what's happening is that those citizens who have the nerve — not all of us have the nerve to do it — but those citizens who have the nerve to protest against the great crimes committed by the government are then put in jail for committing petty crimes... People who commit petty technical crimes go to jail. People who commit enormous human crimes remain out.
One other point I make, and that is that there has been developing constitutional theories, among scholars in the field, among lawyers and even among some judges, the idea that maybe if somebody commits civil disobedience of a cause that that person believes in, even though that's a technical violation of law, that person should not be found guilty. That idea has been growing and developing.
There was an article written by a constitutional theorist named Joseph Sar in the Yale Review in 1968 in which he discusses this and he says —
MR. BARRY: Excuse me, Your Honor.
A. — there is no need —
MR. BARRY: Now we are going beyond the work of Professor Zinn into the work of other people.
THE COURT: That's well taken.
MS. RIDOLFI: Excuse me?
THE COURT: I think that's quite well taken. Mr. Zinn was talking about his own book. Now he's talking about somebody's article.
Q. Howard, could you stick to your own —
A. All right. I won't talk about the forbidden article. I'll just talk about the ideas I developed myself. And the basic idea is that the criminal violation of the law has to be weighed against human consequences, against the motive of the breaking of that law, against the social evils that the breaking of that law is against; and anybody who is considering guilt or innocence, punishment or nonpunishment must begin to weigh these things so that we can no longer say, "Well, we like what those people have done or we approve it or maybe we at least sympathize with them. They are good people. They have good motives. They are just trying to stop the war, but still they broke the law and must be punished."
The point I was making is that that way of looking at it is beginning to be attacked and has a lot that is wrong with it. More and more it is beginning to be recognized and we should recognize that if somebody commits civil disobedience, they may have broken the law in some very technical sense, but that must be weighed and it must be measured against what they were trying to do. [Matters of] life and death must be measured, matters of war and peace, ask as you would ask of somebody who broke a speed law in order to take somebody to the hospital why are they doing this? Somebody who broke a window of a house in order to save somebody from the flames. What is this for?
Yes, you are not supposed to break the window of a house. Yes, you are not supposed to exceed the speed limit. Yes, there is a technical violation of law. But there is something very important involved here.
Anyway, this is the point I was trying to make.
Q. Howard, what we want to know is, [is] this concept of a jury's action is a new concept or has this been going on in history?
A. Well —
MR. BARRY: Your Honor, again it seems to me —
THE COURT: The jury will get its instructions from me.
MS. RIDOLFI: I am not asking Howard to instruct the jury, I just think that this is very important, has a close connection to civil disobedience, and I would like Howard to tell us what that connection is and describe how it has grown.
MR. WILLIAMSON: We are asking him to speak him as a historian, not as a legal expert.
THE COURT: I understand that, but we are concerned here with what goes on here in this courtroom, not what other jurors do.
MR. COUMING: In the spring of 1969 when I was on the stand, I talked about being at the trial of the Milwaukee 14. At that trial I met Howard Zinn and we talked. We flew home to Boston together in the same plane. We talked while in Milwaukee and on the plane. We talked about the history of jurors taking power that the courts are [not always] willing to admit into their hands.
I think that is the question that is being asked, to talk about that history. We have talked about it and that is very much — when I talk in my opening statement to the risk, that is the risk I took. The risk wasn't the risk of laws, it was the risk of judgment by my fellow citizens.
MR. BARRY: Your Honor, the evidence in this case —
THE COURT: Objection sustained.
MS. RIDOLFI: We don't have any more questions on direct of Howard. We would to encourage the jury to ask any questions they might have. And thank you, Howard, it was delightful.
MR. BARRY: No, Your Honor, we have no questions.
THE COURT: Any of the jurors have any questions?
MR. GOOD: Could we take a break and maybe come back —
VOICES: No, Bob.
THE COURT: Maybe the jurors have a question. Raise your hands.
THE COURT: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we'll pick up on Monday. Come in at 9:30. I don't think it will be giving away any secrets if I do not at least tell you that the hope is that the defendants will be done with their evidence some time next week. How much further this trial will go then, I cannot predict. At least we have that. Have a good weekend.
Introduction
The trial of the Camden 28 lasted 105 days, from February 5 to May 20, 1973. During the more than two months the defense took to present its case, each of the defendants spoke at length, often with moving eloquence. In an unusual arrangement, three young lawyers aided the activists, who chose either to act as their own lawyers or to have "co-counsel," in which defendants could both speak for themselves and have an attorney speak for them. Far from pleading innocent to the charges, they proudly proclaimed their guilt. "I ripped up those files with my hands," declared the Rev. Peter D. Fordi, adding, "They were the instruments of destruction."
The Camden activists asked the jury to "nullify the laws" against breaking and entering and to acquit them as a means of saying that the country had had enough of the "illegal and immoral" war in Vietnam. They also asked the jury to acquit on the grounds that the raid would not have taken place without the help of a self-admitted FBI informer and provocateur. The defendants emphasized that they had given up their plan, for lack of a practical means, until the informer-provocateur had resurrected it and provided them with the encouragement and tools to carry it out.
After three and a half months, the case went to the jury. Judge Clarkson Fisher's charge broke new legal ground. Despite the fact that the defendants admitted plotting the action before the informer appeared, Judge Fisher informed the jury they could acquit if they felt government participation in setting up the crime had gone to "intolerable" lengths that were "offensive to the basic standards of decency and shocking to the universal sense of justice." He did add, however, that although it was in their power, it would not be proper for the jury to reach their verdict based on the issue of the war, (that is, nullify the laws that were broken) and that "protest is not an acceptable legal defense, as sincerely motivated as I think they were."
Read excerpts from the testimony of Howard Zinn and Elizabeth Good.
Howard Zinn
"The spirit and the words of [the Declaration of Independence] are that when governments become too oppressive, when governments take away our lives or our liberties, our right to pursue happiness, then the regular rules may have to be broken."
Read more »
Elizabeth Good
"So as time went on I began to see ... [that] if we middle-class Americans would just stop looking at you young people and the way you look, and would see you and hear you and what you had to say, that you really were a group of beautiful people that had your right to your own conscience."
Read more »
Howard Zinn - April 26, 1973
Zinn's Background
MORNING SESSION
(Jury present.)
THE COURT: Do you have the witness ready?
MS. RIDOLFI: Today we would like to call our brother Howard Zinn.
HOWARD ZINN, having been duly sworn, was examined and testified as follows:
BY MS. RIDOLFI:
(defendant)
Q. Howard, what is your occupation?
A. I am a historian. I am a professor of political science at Boston University.
Q. What is your educational background?
A. Well, I went to high school. Then I didn't go to school again for a while. I worked at various jobs, went into the Air Force and then worked again in various jobs. Then when I was old I went to school under the GI Bill of Rights and got a bachelor's degree at New York University. I went to Columbia, did graduate work there, got a master's degree at Columbia University in history and political science. Then I got a PhD. at Columbia University in history and political science.
A few years after that I did some postdoctoral work at Harvard University. I was a [undecipherable] in the Center of southeast Asian History, studied Chinese history and east Asian history in that time. That is about my formal education.
Howard Zinn served as a bombadier in the Air Force during World War II.
Q. What employment have you held in the past?
A. Well, I mentioned that after high school I went to work. I was a shipyard worker for about three years before I went into the Air Force, and then after I got out, I went back to the shipyard. I worked at various jobs for a couple of years. Worked on the lower east side of New York City for the Housing Authority.
I went to school, and after I did my graduate work I began teaching and I taught history and political science for three years at [undecipherable] College in East Orange, New Jersey.
Then I went down south to Atlanta, Georgia, and I was offered a job as chairman of the history department at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, which is a black college. We used to call it a Negro college in Atlanta, Georgia.
I was chairman of the history department there, professor of history for seven years in Atlanta from 1956 to 1963.
Then for a while there I also held a job as director of the non-Western studies program of the Atlanta University Center, which is a group of Negro colleges in Atlanta.
Then I came North and I got a job as professor of political science at Boston University, where I have been for the last seven or eight years.
[I've been] involved in the Civil Rights Movement and [have written] about it, so I've lectured a lot on the Civil Rights Movement and on the race question in the South and in the North and that sort of thing.
And then when the war in Vietnam escalated, I began doing a lot of lecturing about the war, about war in general [and] about the war in Vietnam in particular.
Reverends Philip and Daniel Berrigan of the Catonsville Nine on the cover of TIME magazine on January 25, 1971. Cover designed by Jim Sharpe. Read the cover story
Q. Howard, have you yourself been involved in any movements of civil disobedience?
A. Well, I mentioned that when I was teaching in the south, it was hard not to be involved with my students. I began teaching at Spelman College in 1955. Atlanta was a totally segregated city. My students began engaging in civil rights disobedience. They went to the public library in Atlanta and they tried to take books out of the Atlanta Public Library, and I discovered they couldn't take books out of the Atlanta Public Library because the Atlanta Public Library was for whites only. So we decided together as a class that we would go to the library anyway and just go there again and again -- and this was a kind of beginning action, I guess, of civil disobedience.
And then I remember visiting as a class, you know, how in school, you go on what they call field trips -- always a good way to get out of school -- and I remember I thought that we would go on a nice field trip in Atlanta, and that my students and I would go and visit the Georgia State Legislature in action.
And so I and my students went to Atlanta, went to the general assembly and discovered that the balcony in the general assembly was segregated, you know, blacks in this little section, and we decided that we would sit where we wanted to sit. And that was an action of civil disobedience.
And then in 1969, the sit-ins began. They began in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then students in Atlanta and my students began to get the same idea. We can't go into restaurants, we can't get a cup of coffee, whites only. We'll -- We'll break the law. We'll sit down and we'll ask for a cup of coffee and we won't move until we get it.
And so in Atlanta my students began doing that and I began sitting in with them -- although it was easier for me to get a cup of coffee. But we [did this] together, and sit-ins grew in Atlanta, so I became very much involved with my students in these things.
And then I became a member of the Executive Board of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. It was just one other person on the executive board who was sort of considered older than the rest. That was a black woman named Ella Baker. We became involved with them. So I began going around to do several things ----
MR. BARRY: Excuse me.
THE WITNESS: Yes.
MR. BARRY: Your Honor, I've been listening to this testimony rather patiently, and I'm wondering where it's all leading us. I would like at this time to ask for an offer of proof. What does it have to do with the events between June and August of 1971 here in Camden?
MS. RIDOLFI: Your Honor, this is an offer of proof. What he's talking about are his experiences which are all reflected in his writings, and he's just outlining -- he's not going into them in detail.
MR. BARRY: Of that I have no doubt, Your Honor, but how does that relate to this draft board raid? That's why I'm asking for an offer of proof.
MR. WILLIAMSON: Your Honor, I may be mistaken, but I think that Mr. Zinn is still in the area of his qualifications -- I believe that he's an expert on the subject of civil disobedience and he's qualifying them.
THE COURT: All right. I think the jury knows what we are about here. If they don't [find it] useful, they just reject it. I'll allow it.
MR. BARRY: Well, I think -- excuse me. I think we can concede, Your Honor, that Professor Zinn will qualify as an expert witness and I think it's now appropriate to ask for some proof.
THE COURT: Overruled. Could you hurry along for us, though, Professor?
THE WITNESS: Okay. I'm sorry. Those were years. I'm pressing them into minutes.
A: (continuing) Where am I? We were talking about movements in civil -- I'll just say very quickly that from Atlanta, involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, I began both being involved in the movements of civil disobedience and beginning to write about them. I went to southwest Georgia, to Albany, Georgia. I went to Mississippi. I went to Alabama, Thelma, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I was involved in civil rights action in these various places in the deep South and wrote about them.
Members of the Camden 28 were profiled in a newspaper article. Paul Couming (second from left) said he was influenced by Howard Zinn's writing.
MS. RIDOLFI: Okay. I [think it] would... help, your Honor, just to add to the connection between Howard and the defense, the defendants who have read his books [and] have been influenced by them who can stand up.
(Eleven defendants stand.)
MR. COUMING: I read the whole thing.
MR. KATRYS: How about the lawyers that have read it?
(Mr. Breeze, Mr. Kairys, Mr. Stolaw and Mr. Loving, stand.)
THE COURT: I'm a lawyer and you'll notice I did not stand.
MR. GOOD: You didn't read them or you weren't influenced by them?
THE COURT: All right, It's almost lunchtime.
MS. RIDOLFI: I think it's a good time to break because the offer of proof is completed.
THE COURT: All right. 2 o'clock ladies and gentlemen.
Next: The Pentagon Papers »
Zinn: The Pentagon Papers
The Pentagon Papers
AFTERNOON SESSION
(Jury present.)
HOWARD ZINN, having previously sworn, resumed the stand.
DIRECT EXAMINATION CONTINUED BY MS. RIDOLFI:
Q. Howard, could you discuss -- as briefly as you can -- I guess, what our history is in Vietnam according to the Pentagon Papers and your studies.
MR. BARRY: I object, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Well, Miss Ridolfi, you indicated informally to me this was in some way connected with [the case]. So, would you establish that first?
MS. RIDOLFI: Yes. The publication of the Pentagon Papers, as other defendants have already mentioned, were very, very important in confirming the truth of what we had known before. [indecipherable] coming from the Pentagon it meant a great deal to us, and we would like Howard to tell the jury and tell folks just what -- you know, briefly outline -- what that was, what our history had been and how it influenced us.
MR. BARRY: I press my objection, Your Honor, on a number of grounds. First of all, I don't think the witness is in any position to testify as to what influenced any particular defendant in this case. Also, the Pentagon Papers speak for themselves. Beyond that, they are incredibly voluminous and any short capsule characterization of what they contain I don't think is particularly helpful.
MS. RIDOLFI: I'm not trying to say --
THE COURT: The second part of the objection doesn't bother me so much as the first. How could this witness testify --
MS. RIDOLFI: That's what I was going to say. I'm not trying to say that Howard knows what influenced me, but his expertise on the Pentagon Papers -- and the Pentagon Papers were, you know, the impact of that had a great deal of influence on myself and the other defendants, and -- Howard can testify what is in those papers.
MR. GOOD: And books that he wrote.
MS. RIDOLFI: And also covers the books that he has written.
MS. GOOD: That we read.
MR. BARRY: Your Honor, I had understood that the witness is going to be testifying as to how, basically influences and motivation, but as to testifying in the form of characterizing the Pentagon Papers -- what they show, what they don't show -- I think goes far beyond the scope of any of your prior rulings.
I mean, that gets us into a number of issues that do not really bear directly on this case.
THE COURT: Wait a minute. Will it be tied up in some way?
MS. RIDOLFI: Definitely, Your Honor.
Related Links: The Pentagon Papers Case
» TIME magazine: Pentagon Papers, Case Dismissed
"I HAVE decided to declare a mistrial and grant the motion to dismiss." With these 13 terse words, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. ended one of the most extraordinary legal -- and in many ways, illegal -- proceedings in the history of American justice.
» The National Archives: The Pentagon Papers - Secrets, Lies and Audiotape
Listen to the audio and read transcripts of President Nixon's first recorded phone conversations on June 13, 14 and 15, 1971, after publication of the Pentagon Papers began.
» The National Archives: The Pentagon Papers - Secrets, Lies and Audiotape
Listen to streaming audio of the oral argument before the Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case.
THE COURT: All right, let's do it this way. Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to permit the testimony here over the objection of the government because of what Miss Ridolfi has just told us. Keep in mind, however, that it is for that limited purpose and we are not concerned with the Pentagon Papers per se here.
As I understand, Judge Byrne and a good jury out there (in Los Angeles) is having enough problems with it.
But, at any rate, for the limited purpose that Miss Ridolfi just succinctly stated, I will allow it, subject to it being stricken.
THE WITNESS, MR. ZINN: Well, the Pentagon Papers are an official history of American policy in Vietnam, and it is true, it is hard to sum up. I didn't think I would agree with you, but I think Mr. Barry is right. It is hard to sum up.
I will try to say what I think is important and then what people reading the Pentagon Papers might find important in them. The Pentagon Papers disclose the facts about the Vietnam War which to some extent were known already, but known only to a very, very small section of the American public, known to those people who read a lot of books about Vietnam, who were specialists in the field, who had a very special access to certain material about the Vietnam War.
But the general public did not know most of the material that was disclosed in the Pentagon Papers.
For instance, what you find in the Pentagon Papers is that from the very beginning of the postwar period, that is, from the end of World War II on, American policy in Vietnam was hypocritical. It's a strong word to use, but I think that is an accurate assessment, because what you find in the Pentagon Papers is that in 1945, World War II is coming to an end and there was a great question about what will happen to Vietnam because Vietnam has been under the control of the French by that time for about 80 years, ever since the 19th century.
Vietnam was a colony ruled by the French. But now the war is over and the Japanese have been defeated, the Germans have been defeated, and Roosevelt and Churchill meet in the middle of the Atlantic in 1941 and they produced something called the Atlantic Charter.
In the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt and Churchill said when this war is over, those people who were controlled by foreign powers are going to be free. That's what the charter said. It was a promise of freedom to people who are run by colonial powers. So when 1945 came, the people of Vietnam said to the world that "we are going to take the Atlantic Charter, what Roosevelt and Churchill said, at face value. We want our freedom from the French."
The trouble was at that particular point, the United States, with England, with France, with Nationalist China, because Chiang Kai-shek was in power in China, all four of those governments collaborated to give Vietnam back to the French because the French were out of it as a result of the war. There had been an independent movement that grew up in Vietnam during World War II [led by] Ho Chi Minh.
Ho Chi Minh was two things. He was a Communist and he was a Nationalist. He wanted independence and he led this great movement of people. Some of them were Communists. Most of them were not. But they all wanted independence from France. Ho Chi Minh wrote -- and this is in the Pentagon Papers -- Ho Chi Minh wrote many letters to Harry Truman. Roosevelt died in the spring of '45. Truman took his place, and Ho Chi Minh, at the end of 1945, wrote -- I counted in the Pentagon Papers 14 communications from Ho Chi Minh to President Truman -- saying, "Remember the pledge of the Atlantic Charter. You promised us our independence. We want it now. Keep the French out."
According to the Pentagon Papers, not one of those communications was answered.
No answer.
That told the story. The United States set out, starting in 1945 slowly, but more and more firmly, to put the French back into power in Vietnam, and the British collaborated.
And so the French came back in 1945, and they faced this independence movement; and in the Pentagon Papers, one of the remarkable things that appears [is] a document which is the Declaration of Independence that Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnam and independence movement drew up in 1945.
When we defeated the Japanese and the Germans, and the Japanese had got out of Indochina, and these people in Vietnam thought they would be free now -- they thought maybe that would keep the French out, too -- they drew up this Declaration of Independence and had a tremendous celebration in Hanoi. A hundred thousand people gathered in Hanoi [for a] huge celebration, and they read this Declaration of Independence, and it read: "All men are created equal. There are certain inalienable rights: life, liberty [and] the pursuit of happiness."
Well, those are the words of the American Declaration of Independence. Now, Ho Chi Minh and his people took from the American Declaration of Independence and they took from the French Declaration of Rights from the French Revolution, and they created a new declaration of their own.
But the French were put back by the United States and England, and then the war started ... The French bombarded Haiphong Harbor. They killed 8,000 civilians in that bombardment. It was a sudden surprise bombardment of Haiphong Harbor.
The war started between the Vietnamese Independence Movement and the French. And that war lasted from 1946 to 1954.
This is another very important thing in the Pentagon Papers. It shows what the United States did in that war. Because here was the United States, which supposedly stood for the self-determination of nations, which supposedly stood for liberty. We didn't want other countries to overrun other countries or control other countries, we said. Here were the French trying to control Vietnam and fighting a war against the Vietnamese to control Vietnam. And the United States helped the French from the beginning to the end of that war. They helped them more and more until by the end of the war, by 1954, the United States was supplying 80 percent of the money that the French were using to finance their war. The French couldn't have done it without the United States.
THE WITNESS: With all of this, with all of this aid, the French were not able to defeat Ho Chi Minh or the Vietnamese Independence Movement. And the Pentagon Papers make clear why. Because the Pentagon Papers point out that Ho Chi Minh was a popular, respected, beloved figure all over Vietnam.
To Americans, it was hard to understand that somebody could be a Communist ... and that the people in the country would like him, that he would be popular. But in Vietnam, this was true. Ho Chi Minh was a Communist; and at the same time he was a leader of the Nationalist Movement and he was popular. People told stories about him, how kind he was and how intelligent he was.
His movement believed in changing conditions in Vietnam so that the people who didn't have any money in Vietnam or didn't have any land would be able to have a bit of land, that the wealth of Vietnam would be shared, that the French would not be able to make all that money from the rubber plantations in Vietnam that they were making. That's what Ho Chi Minh stood for and that's one of reasons he was popular. The French were fighting against a movement that had its roots in the countryside.
So with all the American aid, the French lost Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954. Big battle. The French lost the war. And they came to Geneva, and that's when the Geneva Agreement was signed. Everybody got together in Geneva, and they made a peace agreement -- at least they thought it was a peace agreement -- to end the war ... The Geneva Agreement just said that, well, we'll allow two years and then there'll be an election all through Vietnam; and in the meantime, Ho Chi Minh and his group, they'll stay in the north and the French will stay for a while in the south. And that would be it. There would be no more colonial power in Vietnam.
Here's where in the Pentagon Papers the story also becomes very clear, and that is that the United States at this point made a very important decision. The United States decided, we are not going to let this independence movement take over in Vietnam; if the French are getting out, we are going to go in. And that's exactly what happened.
The United States went into Vietnam in 1954. They went in through the man that they put in office in Vietnam, and who became the head of state in Vietnam, a man named Mr. Diem... The Americans wanted him in power. He became our man in Saigon.
From 1954 to 1956, the United States built up Diem, built up his power, gave him money, gave him arms; and the elections that were supposed to take place didn't take place because Diem refused to have elections take place. And the United States went along with Diem. No elections. We're going to build up South Vietnam into a fortress, and the Pentagon Papers carry this in full. And they tell how Diem, between 1954 and 1963, made South Vietnam into a police state.
When critics of the Vietnam policy had said Vietnam is creating a police state, a dictatorship in South Vietnam, the government of the United States denied this. The government of the United States said, "No, Diem is our friend. Diem is a member of the free world. We said he's a member of the free world; therefore, he's okay. Diem stands for democracy."
What's the proof? "The proof is he's our friend. We're helping him."
That's what the United States was saying. But the Pentagon Papers disclosed in their interoffice memos to one another, that the United States officials were admitting to one another [that] Diem is losing the confidence of the people. He is putting a lot of people in jail.
And you may remember, and the Pentagon Papers talk about this, that in 1963 the opposition to Diem in Saigon became very great. He was putting too many people in jail. He was shoving down too many newspapers. He was cutting down too many freedoms. He was not distributing lands to the peasants.
The Buddhists were beginning to protest against him, and he sent out his police, and these police fired into the monasteries. They killed monks. They imprisoned thousands of Buddhists. They shut down the Buddhist temples, and these police, according to the Pentagon Papers, were trained by the United States.
And so Diem was getting unpopular. And then the Pentagon Papers has a long section in which it tells how Mr. Diem, who we had put in power in 1956, was toppled from his seat of power in 1963 in a sudden military takeover of the Saigon Regime and was executed, and how the United States' officials were in Saigon, who had helped put Diem in power in 1954, helped plan his removal in 1963.
Henry Cabot Lodge, our ambassador in Saigon, worked secretly with the generals in Saigon, who were planning to overthrow Mr. Diem; and one week before the overthrow , Diem, who thinks Lodge is his friend, invites Lodge to spend a weekend with him and have some fun. They spend the pleasant weekend together, one week before Diem is going to be removed and is going to be killed.
This is why the Pentagon Papers had such an impact when they first came out and people began reading them, because these disclosures [about] all of this double dealing of the American government, things that the government had always denied, now were coming out. Wow. All this[about a] government that we had supported, which was so corrupt, which was so bad, and then which we overthrew because it couldn't maintain support.
So the Pentagon Papers tell us that in 1964/65: The United States made another crucial decision ... to move large numbers of American troops into Vietnam and large numbers of American bombers into Vietnam.
Related Links: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
» NPR: Gulf of Tonkin's Phantom Attack
Forty years ago today, a murky military encounter at sea plunged the United States deeper into the war in Vietnam. In 1964, CBS commentator and TV anchor Walter Cronkite knew only what official reports acknowledged. Four decades later, he offers a perspective on the incident he didn't have at the time.
» The National Security Archive: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Later
Signals intercepts, cited at time, prove only August 2nd battle, not August 4;
purported second attack prompted congressional blank check for war.
That's when the great bombardment begins, 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin. Another thing referred to in the Pentagon Papers [is] where the word is sent out to the American public that they have shot at us. They fired at us in the Gulf of Tonkin, which is right off the coast of Vietnam. What nerve they have. Vietnamese firing at American ships a few miles off their shore.
The American public was given the impression that they had done something terrible, and therefore, they deserved to be bombed.
But as it came out, not just in the Pentagon Papers, even before the Pentagon Papers, but the Pentagon Papers confirmed it, turned out to be a lot of doubt, a lot of doubt that what the United States government claimed [had] happened in the Gulf of Tonkin had happened.
At that time, as it turned out, the United States government had lied about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, that the shots that were supposed to have been fired at our destroyers [on August 4, 1964] were not fired, that the members of the crew of the American naval vessels said that no shots were fired.
We started to bomb North Vietnam in '64. It became very heavy in '65. In 1965, we sent almost 200,000 troops into Vietnam. The next year, 200,000 more, and the next year another 100,000. So that by 1968, we had 500,000 troops in Vietnam. We were bombing the South, bombing the North, bombing Laos -- an enormous military operation.
The Pentagon Papers tells us all this in great detail.
Then something interesting takes place in the spring of 1968... We are bombing Vietnam more heavily than Germany and Japan were bombed in World War II, an enormous number of people have been killed in Vietnam. Oh, many Americans, but many, many more Vietnamese.
In 1968, or the beginning of that year, the Tet Offensive takes place. The National Liberation Front, the great offensive in South Vietnam which drives back American Forces, even gets into Saigon itself, so much into Saigon that it reaches the American Embassy and they are fighting inside the American Embassy in Saigon. They have so much support, these guerrillas, these NLF, what we call the Viet Cong, have so much support among the people of Saigon that the United States has to send B-52s to bomb the outskirts of Saigon, and many sections of Saigon are bombed by American B-52s in early 1968 in a desperate attempt to hold back this offensive.
Well, at this point General Westmoreland asked Lyndon Johnson for 200,000 more men on top of the 500,000 men. In one of the volumes of the Pentagon Papers, it tells how Johnson now has to decide: Should he send 200,000 more men to Vietnam on top of that 500,000? He decides [to do] what most presidents seem to do in a time of crisis: They set up committees to study the question.
He appoints a new secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, and McNamara, the old secretary of defense is going out.
He said to Clark Clifford, "I want you to take charge of this new investigation and I want to you to report back to me on what I should do now about this request for 200,000 men."
Then, the Pentagon Papers show, these committees surveyed the situation and they come back and they report to Clark Clifford, and then to Johnson, and they say, "Two hundred thousand more men is not going to do it. We can't do it. We can't win. These people are -- It doesn't seem that we can defeat them."
You see, there has been a lot of material in the Pentagon Papers which the high officials of this country knew about, which they did not tell the public and which said that the morale of the Viet Cong was very strong, that they were very popular and that the morale on the side of the Saigon government, on our side, was very low.
All of our officials kept wondering why is their morale so high. Why do they feel they have so much to fight for and why does our side not feel it has very much to fight for?
Well, in 1968 this little study group came out and said that we can't beat them with 200,000 more men. So we better not do it. That was one reason they gave for not sending 200,000 men. The other reason they gave was this -- and this is very important -- they said, we cannot do it because the American people won't stand for it.
They said, and this is in the little memo that they sent up to the president, they said there is too much opposition growing in this country to the war, too many people have protested, too many people have resisted the draft. Black people have resisted in the cities. In 1967 and 1968, there was a lot of trouble in this country. This is an unpopular war. We had better not go ahead.
Now, this is a tremendously important disclosure in the Pentagon Papers because up to this point the government had been acting as if the antiwar movement did not have any effect on it at all. What the Pentagon Papers brought out was that the protest of people against the war was having an effect, not a tremendous effect, maybe, but some effect, enough of an effect to make Johnson decide he was not going to send 200,000 more men. He was going to start moving in the other direction. He was going to leave the presidency, and he was going to start peace talks in Paris.
That may not be a tremendous achievement, but it's an achievement. The reason, it seems to me, this is so important for anyone reading the Pentagon Papers is that it suggests that the high policymakers who hold in their hands the lives of young Americans, [those who] decide which young people are going to stay alive and which of them are going to die at the age of 20, 21 and 23, that these high policy makers, who don't seem to be affected by elections and votes, because they promise one thing and then they do something else when they are elected, those high policymakers are affected by protest movements.
Therefore, it seems to me [that] anybody reading those Pentagon Papers and understanding that, might very well come to the conclusion [that] if lives are going to be saved, if important policy decisions are going to be changed to help the American people to stop war, then maybe those protests, yes, the kind of protest that they talk about right there in the Papers, civil disobedience -- and they mention civil disobedience in the Pentagon Papers, they use that phrase, civil disobedience -- had an effect on the decision makers of this country when they made that decision in 1968 to begin turning the other way.
Well, all of these things, or maybe most of these things had been said by people in books, in articles, in speeches, and at teach-ins and meetings all over the country. But for the first time when [the Pentagon Papers] came out in 1971, for the first time those same things were being said now, revealed by the American government, not voluntarily, the government was still trying to hide it. The government still didn't want those papers to come out. But they were out and now the public could see them.
So this about sums up pretty much what I have to say about the Pentagon Papers.
Q: Did the Pentagon Papers reveal what the United States' interest was in Vietnam, why were we so interested in that country?
A: There is a section of the Pentagon Papers that talked about why the United States is in Vietnam. At one point it says, there is a memo that is written to the French ambassador in 1947 from Washington, and the memo says that we must not, we must not let the other side win. We must not let the other side win. We must not let the guerrillas -- at that time it was the Viet Minh, the Ho Chi Minh -- we must not let them win in Vietnam because we don't want any country that is dominated by the Kremlin to be there in Asia.
They talk about the wealth of Southeast Asia. This starts way back. It starts in 1941 when Secretary of State Hull is worried about the Japanese moving into that area, and he says we can't afford to let the Japanese move into that area. He doesn't say we don't want the Japanese to move into that area because we want the Vietnamese to be free. He says no, we don't want the Japanese to move into that area because that is a very valuable area for us. It commands strategic routes.
Furthermore, in that area there is lots of tin, of rubber, lots of oil. That's in 1941. Then in 1947, '48, '49 and 1950, there is a whole series of memoranda in the Pentagon Papers in which different high officials discuss the importance of Vietnam to the United States. What they say again and again, and it almost comes as a chorus: tin, rubber, oil. Not that Vietnam has all those things, but Indonesia has those things. Malaysia has those things, and we want that.
This is a very important disclosure in the Pentagon Papers, because the public had been led to believe that we were fighting in Vietnam for freedom or to save America from attack. By whom? It wasn't clear. After Vietnam would fall, San Francisco would fall. Really, there was all this speculation about why we are fighting in Vietnam. How when they talk to themselves those high officials don't talk about freedom. They don't talk about defending America from attack. They talk about tin, rubber and oil.
So when this comes out in an official memorandum, this is very, very important. I suppose if you had to say what do the Pentagon Papers show [that] the high officials of the United States -- when they are not talking to the public, when they are talking to one another -- what do they think is the reason the United States is in Vietnam, the answer would have to be, it seems, that we are interested In the wealth of this area. In other words, that we are interested in what empires have been interested in all through history; why England was interested in Asia and the Near East and Africa, why Germany and Russia and Japan, why all the other great countries of the world, were interested in exploiting Africa and Latin America and Asia -- the wealth of these areas.
Here was the United States, which a lot of people thought was pure and innocent, didn't have any of those motives, here was the United States with the same motives as the British Empire and all the other empires in world history. That is why the Pentagon Papers are very revealing and very important and may be very influential over the years.
Next: The Logic of Withdrawal »
Zinn: The Logic of Withdrawal
The Logic of Withdrawal
AFTERNOON SESSION
(Jury present.)
Q Howard, could you summarize for us your book "Vietnam, The Logic of Withdrawal"?
South End Press, 1967. 144 pgs. Read the book online.
A It's a little book. I say this so you won't get scared. You might think I am going to go through it page by page. I will try -- when you ask people to summarize their own books, it is a very dangerous a thing to do. They always try to make it seem much better than it is. But I wrote this book after I came back from my trip to Japan. I had gone to Japan to lecture at about 13 different Japanese universities about Vietnam.
I was startled. This was in 1966, and it was in the light of the American escalation and before there was any big American movement against the war, and what fascinated me in Japan was that the Japanese people, wherever we went, at every place we went in Japan, and we traveled in Japan from the very north, Hokkaido, all the way down to, to Okinawa, the Japanese people seemed to be virtually unanimously against the war, against American policy in Vietnam. This was interesting because the Japanese government was sort of cuddling up to the American government and having all sorts of nice friendly relations with the government. The governments seemed to be getting along fine. But the Japanese people were unanimously or close to unanimously against American policy in Vietnam.
So I was interested in this because if the United States was telling the American people that if Vietnam became Communist, that would be a threat to the United States, and the United States was 10,000 miles away, here was Japan, Japan is much closer to Vietnam. How come the Japanese people didn't feel that if Vietnam became Communist it would be a threat? The Japanese people did not seem to care if people became Communist or not. In fact, they said it probably would be better if Vietnam went that way, better than if she is controlled by some foreign power like France or the United States.
So I was curious. The Japanese weren't troubled about that. Americans were troubled. So I thought that I would start writing about that and say, here is a new perspective on the war. Here is a new way of looking at it.
Then I remember also -- I was now just a few years out of the South -- and I remember how in the last years of the Civil Rights Movement, there was this time when the end of the Civil Rights Movement coincided with the beginning of our escalation in Vietnam and how the black people, especially the young black people in the Civil Rights Movement in the South, immediately reacted to what the United States was doing in Vietnam and said, this is no good, this is wrong and we shouldn't be doing this.
I specifically remember December of 1964. I was in Mississippi. It was a summer where there was a lot of civil rights activities going on, and that summer, these young civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi: Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. One black, two white. They were murdered by a group of white people from that area. The bodies were not discovered until August, and when their bodies were discovered I remember we held a memorial service. The service was held in Philadelphia, Mississippi where they had gone and where this had happened to them. All of us left Jackson, Mississippi, and other places in Mississippi where people were working to register people to vote and other things like that. We all went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to hold those memorial services. This was August 3, 1964.
We all gathered there at the very solemn memorial, and one of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, a young black man, Robert Moses, stood up to talk, and he held up that morning's newspaper from Jackson. The headline in the morning newspaper said: "LBJ says shoot to kill in the Gulf of Tonkin."
The Gulf of Tonkin incident had just taken place, and LBJ's reaction to it was, "Oh, they fired at one of our destroyers. Go get them."
As it turned out later they hadn't, you see. But that's what the headline read: "Shoot to kill, LBJ says, in the Gulf of Tonkin." Bob Moses held this up, and he said that this is what we are against. We are against the violence that killed those three young men here in Mississippi, and we are against the violence that our government wanted to inflict on these Vietnamese people way over there in Vietnam.
So I thought there was a perspective, there was a special viewpoint of the Japanese looking at what we were doing in Vietnam, and there was a special viewpoint of the black people in this country looking at what we were doing in Vietnam. Maybe they had something to tell us that we average Americans could not see so well for ourselves.
So that started me off writing about the Vietnam War. So I wrote about what we were doing there. I wrote about the villages we were destroying, the families that we were killing, the kids whose legs were amputated as a result of our bombing. I wrote about the terror and devastation we were causing, and how, when people were killed in Vietnam as a result of our bombs, we paid compensation to their families. When plantations were destroyed, we paid compensation to the owners, and how the compensation that we paid for a rubber tree that was destroyed was greater than the compensation that we paid for a person that was killed.
Then I asked, why are we doing this? I went into the question of Communism, and the domino theory of containment and all the arguments that were being given by the government as to why we were there. I tried to examine them, and none of them stood up. None of them made any sense.
I came to the conclusion in this book that we were wrong, that we were doing something that, well it wasn't the first that we had done it. We had done it to the Indians for a long time. We had done it to the Filipinos back at the turn of the century. We had done it to the Mexicans in the Mexican war. I mean, our country was not a beautiful, innocent country. We have things to be proud of, like other countries, but this was one of the shameful things in our history.
So I came to the conclusion we were doing terrible things in Vietnam. We were doing them for no good reason. Maybe we were helping somebody who wanted political power or somebody who wanted the economic resources or wealth, but we weren't doing it for any people in America. There was only one solution, and that is to get out as fast as possible. That is why the title of the book was "The Logic of Withdrawal."
In 1967 it was unusual to talk about getting out of Vietnam. Just people, certainly nobody in government, and no one in books, were talking about simply packing up and getting out.
Anyway, that was the idea of the book.
Next: Civil Disobedience and Democracy »
Zinn: Civil Disobedience and Democracy
Civil Disobedience and Democracy
Q. Howard, as an American historian, can you tell us about the role of civil disobedience in this country?
MR. BARRY: I object, Your Honor.
THE COURT: I will allow it on the same ground as I did before. We'll handle it later.
A. Well, it is strange to talk about the role of civil disobedience in this country almost as if, well, it's some little thing that plays some little part in American history, because anybody who reads a little history [can see] that we wouldn't exist as a country without civil disobedience. Civil disobedience founded this country. This is what the American Revolution was about.
On May 17, 1968, nine Catholics went to the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, took 378 draft files, brought them to the parking lot in wire baskets, dumped them out, poured homemade napalm over them and set them on fire.
It was about people breaking laws. And the reason they broke laws was because they had grievances, and these grievances were not being dealt with. And the result of breaking these laws by the colonists -- the Boston Tea Party, the Philadelphia Tea Party, the New Jersey Tea Party -- you know, there were a number of tea parties. They were having wild times in those days. But they were, you know, if you looked at them, if you wanted to get very sober and very curious, take those people into courts, what did they do? They destroyed tea? Oh, what a terrible thing. They broke the law.
You say, well, oh, tea -- tea is not a big deal. But they broke the law. And there is this thing, this mysterious thing that hovers over people. Well, it hovers there because it's put there. It's put there by people who are in power, who want everybody to always obey all the rules, no matter how bad things get.
But the breaking of those laws was not a terrible thing because in the final analysis, it's human beings that count and human freedom that counts. Tea isn't important. Cottons aren't important. Things aren't important. People and freedom and human life are important. And so are the laws that are broken, you might say. Yes, they were. But that had to be done in order to get people together, so they could do away with a tyranny that was over them and that was preventing them from living out their lives the way they wanted to.
So when the Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson and his little committee, [they] wrote civil disobedience into it. Sometimes people forget this. That's the most basic fundamental document of our history -- also, the most forgotten document of our history -- and that document has civil disobedience written into it. And because the spirit and the words of that document are that when governments become too oppressive, when governments take away our lives or our liberties, our right to pursue happiness, then the regular rules may have to be broken. It's not because you want to go around wildly breaking laws.
The point is not chaos or anarchy, all these things that people talk about when they talk about breaking laws. No. The point is that when you do have chaos in the country or in the world or in your soul, chaos being people being oppressed, that then you may have to break the law in order to bring back some better harmony in the situation, in yourself and among people.
The Declaration of Independence said governments are not sacred things. The laws are not sacred things. Governments are set up by people to defend rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And when governments become destructive of those ends, it's the right of the people to alter or abolish those governments.
The Declaration of Independence goes even further than breaking laws.
Ite goes even further than overthrowing laws. The Declaration of Independence says you can not only overthrow laws you can overthrow governments if those governments oppress you if those governments take away what governments are set up to do. That's why Thomas Jefferson said, when he was in France and writing back, he said, [we] may need a rebellion in this country every 20 years. Rebellion means breaking laws. If injustices pile up, we may need some of that in order to make things right again. That was the spirit of the American Revolution, and that was the spirit of the founding document of our system [that] we have forgotten. But some people didn't forget.
And when they encountered grievances, they committed civil disobedience all through our history. The Declaration of Independence was there and the Revolution took place, but a lot of people were still not free. And most notably, the black slaves in this country, millions of them who were almost 20 percent of the population at the time of the American Revolution -- today, blacks are maybe, 12, 13 percent of the population, but at that time black slaves were 20 percent of the population in the colonies. One out of every five persons was a black slave.
"How are they going to be free?" the people said "Well, we don't like slavery, but you mustn't break the law." Those slaves would not have been freed if people had not broken the laws. If people had not defied the Fugitive Slave Act, if the abolitionists, white and black, had not aroused the conscience of this country by committing civil disobedience.
William Lloyd Garrison, one of the white abolitionists leaders in New England, went out to a meeting in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1835, and he burned the Constitution of the United States. People burn draft cards today. Everybody gets excited. People burn draft records, and everybody talks as if the world is coming to an end.
William Lloyd Garrison burned the Constitution of the United States and he did it because he wanted to arouse the conscience, yes, irritate people, maybe annoy people, but he wanted to tell people about slavery. He wanted to tell the Constitution, this is the Constitution of a country which has slavery. And it was actions like this that helped mobilize more and more opinions in this country against slavery.
The Fugitive Slave Act was a law that provided for the capture of black slaves wherever they were found and returning them to their owners, and this law was violated again and again by people who did not believe in slavery. And what would you say to these people? If you had to decide what would happen to these people? Say, well, I'm against slavery, but you broke the law, therefore, I think you should go to jail because you helped this slave escape?
I wonder who, making a decision like that, could live with his or her conscience or, making a decision like that, could be said to really be against slavery.
That was an important period of civil disobedience in American history; and, of course, that wasn't the last time that blacks were going to be engaged in civil disobedience. Because every black who ran away from his plantation was committing civil disobedience. And I can just see somebody pointing their finger at one of these blacks who ran away from slavery saying, "You shouldn't have done that. You broke the law. You should go back to your master. You don't want to be a law-breaker, do you?"
No, that's the great advantage of history. Because from a historical viewpoint, you could see things straight. But when you are living in the midst of a situation, the most absurd things can be said to you, and you believe that. Because an atmosphere is created and you go along with the atmosphere. One must admonish the people. They broke the law.
Well, that spirit of disobedience continued. Whenever there was a serious grievance in American history, groups of Americans rose up and broke the law, committed civil disobedience to make their point.
Farmers did it in the 1880s and 1890s because they felt, the farmers felt they were being taken advantage of. The country was being run by the big railroads and the big banks and the big granaries. They were making all this money. The farmers were being squeezed out, and the farmers didn't have any money to pay the debts; and the farms were being foreclosed, were being taken away from them. They couldn't pay their mortgages. The farmers got together and they wouldn't let their places be foreclosed. They just got together and they stood in front of the sheriff and the auctioneer, and they said, "This is it. You are not auctioning off -- this is our friend's house. We are all getting together. You're not auctioning off his house."
They were violating a law because they believed that it really was his house, and that money shouldn't determine whose house is whose, and this is what farmers did again and again.
And then the labor movement did it. Strikes were illegal for a long time. So whenever workers went out on strike, they were breaking the law. In fact, they were engaged in conspiracy because for a long time, unions were considered a conspiracy. And in the 1930s, the working men in the auto plants and rubber plants in the Midwest, trying to organize unions because they were being taken advantage of by the big corporate giants, by Ford and General Motors and Good Year Rubber, and all these companies. They needed to get together and raise their wages and get their workweek down from 60 hours to 40 hours, and the company would not recognize their union, [and] fired them for organizing unions.
So what did they do? They committed civil disobedience. They went into work, and then when the bell rang for them to go home, they didn't go home. They stayed there. And they said, "We are not leaving until you recognize our union." That was the sit-down strikes of May 1936, early 1937 in Flint, Michigan, and in other places.
By 1937 there had been close to 500 sit-down strikes all over the country. Workers who sat in -- now, that's a violation of law. That's trespassing. That's -- you can find five different legal violations there.
But in the course of history, we came to recognize they were right. They were not punished because there was some recognition by the community, I think, that they were right.
Of course, lately, in the last 10 to 15 years, we have seen many more examples of civil disobedience; that tradition carried on. And the Civil Rights Movement, which we talked about before, carried on that tradition. And when my students went into the Rich's Department Store in Atlanta, aptly named for the owner, when they went into Rich's Department Store and they sat down and they refused to move because they wouldn't be served, because they were black, they were violating the law.
And what would you say to them? What would any of us say to them? That's what civil disobedience is.
We recognize years later [that] those people were right. And if they went to jail, they shouldn't have gone to jail because they were right.
A lot of people in the sit-ins, in fact, did not go to jail because judges found ways of saying -- you know, it's something: When people want to find ways of getting people out of jail they get them out -- judges found ways; the Supreme Court found ways of saying let's not send these people to jail. Yes, they violated the law, but let's not do that. That can be done. Even though there are always people who [say] you must go to jail, what if we don't send this person to jail. The world will collapse. That's not the way the world goes.
So civil rights movements, an awful lot of civil disobedience -- Martin Luther King and lots of others broke the law again and again and again. And then, of course, the entire war movement and many, many more examples of that. And I guess we don't have to go into that because we've all lived through that recently and we know that.
And that's not crime. Civil disobedience is not crime. I know that there are people who want to say it's a crime. People want to say, "Well, look. Let's just look straight ahead at the black and white type, not think about anything else, empty your head." It's always better to have an empty head and straight-looking eyes, and black and white type, and you'll see they broke the law. But the world would not have the little bit of progress that we have made, little bit of progress for black people, little bit of progress for laboring people, little bit of progress for farming people; wouldn't even have this little bit of progress if civil disobedience had not been committed by committed people.
You know, you asked me as an American historian what is the role of civil disobedience in history. All I can say is it's been very healthy, and we will probably need a lot more of it if we are going to become a healthier society.
Random House, 1968.
Read the book online.
Q. Howard, what are some of the ideas of civil disobedience in your book "Disobedience and Democracy"?
A. We'll I'll try to do that briefly because maybe more people are getting impatient. But it also is a little book. Little books are always better than big books, I think.
Anyway, I wanted in this little book "Disobedience and Democracy," I wanted to take up this whole question that I just discussed, of a kind of blind obedience to law without thinking of the human consequences and discuss that. And so I discussed that, sort of in the way I was just talking about it until now.
I also wanted to point out that very often people say, now, we know we have grievances, and we know things have to be changed, but still the way to change is not to break the law. The way to change is to go through ordinary channels: Write to your congressman. Write a letter to the newspaper. Vote. Join the League of Women Voters. Go through normal channels. But don't commit civil disobedience, don't break the law if you want to change things.
Now, I wanted to talk about that because it seemed to me there was something wrong with that idea. What was wrong with it was that -- look at the ways we have to change things in this country; even though we call ourselves a democracy, the ways that we have to change things are not adequate. Sure, we have elections. Sure, people go through the motions. Sure, we elect representatives and we elect a president every four years. These turn out to be very inadequate for changing important policies.
They did not help the black person in this country. That's why the black person had to turn to the streets in order to begin to get anything. They did not help working people. That's why working people had to do what they did. They could not go through the democratic processes.
And when it comes to war -- that's the most critical example.
When it comes to war and peace, we are not a democracy. Even if you think we are a democracy in other respects, when it comes to war and peace, we are not a democracy because war is made by the president of the United States, not even made by the representatives of the United States, not even made by Congress of the United States even though the Constitution gives Congress the right to declare a war.
I say this as a historian, just looking at how we got into wars in history. Few people decide it. It's not democratically decided. Voting didn't matter. People voted for Johnson over Goldwater in 1964 because they thought Johnson was for peace and Goldwater was for war. They voted for peace and they got war.
And so it went, and it turns out that you may have democracy. If you live in a town and your town has a meeting when you are deciding whether to build a new store, that's pretty democratic Put the entire people, town together. Should we have a new store in this area? Should we put a new traffic light here? Should we build a new hospital with our tax money? You get all the people in the city together and you vote on it. That's very democratic.
Where I come from in Massachusetts, there are various things like that town hall meeting. People do that.
It turns out that we have the most democracy when we are dealing with the pettiest of issues, and we have the least democracy when we are dealing with the most important issues. We have the most democracy when we're dealing with sewers. We have the least democracy when we're dealing with life and death, and whether 50,000 Americans are going to be killed in a war or a 100,000 or 200,000. That decision is made by one man or three men or six men. It's not a democratic decision.
And so I was very anxious to make the point in this book that when it comes to war and peace, we cannot depend upon the ordinary democratic channels of voting and representative government. People must directly express themselves to the government. And that's why we have antiwar movements, and protests and marches, sit-ins, civil disobedience, rallies, draft resistance. What this means, you see, is that all of this civil disobedience is not against democracy. All of this civil disobedience is democracy. It's a way of establishing democracy in an area where we don't have democracy. Because democracy means people speaking out their minds and telling the government what they want. And if you have no other way of speaking out your minds and telling the government what you want, you may have to picket, you may have to demonstrate, you may have to carry a sign, you may have to cry out, you might have to break the law, you might have to do all of these things; and that is enhancing democracy. That is enriching democracy. That is not against it.
Just one or two other points. One is that when we think about people committing civil disobedience as breaking the law and, therefore, they must be punished, we must consider that we are then guilty ourselves of us a double standard; and by a double standard, I mean one standard for one group and another standard for another group. And we are supposed to have, if there is anything we say justice is, it's equality before the law. And double standard means we're not treating one group equally with another group.
And by that I mean when ordinary people commit civil disobedience for something that means something to them we want to put them in jail. And furthermore, the power is [such] that we go ahead, they have the courts, they have the prosecutors, they have all the resources: they go ahead, and they use all that money and that energy, and they set out to try and put them in jail.
But when the leaders of our governments commit crime, there is nobody to put them in jail. If the FBI commits a crime, who is going to arrest the FBI when the people who have a right to make arrests are the FBI?
It's like asking one policeman to arrest another policeman or to arrest himself.
So the leaders of the United States, and I think this is true of other governments in the world, [this] is not just picking on the United States, just living here, I am more concerned with the United States. But I think this true of the leaders of governments in general. The leaders of governments are always getting away with committing crimes, always doing that. Their crimes of theft are far greater than this petty crime of theft that we see every day. Their crimes of violence are far greater that the crimes of violence we see every day.
If somebody kidnapped somebody, we would send that person to jail for a long period of time. If the government kidnaps a million young men -- I know some people might not call that kidnapping. But when you take somebody by force out of their home and keep them somewhere for a specific period of time against their will and against their family's will, that is something like kidnapping. In fact, it's mass kidnapping, maybe. It's not punishable. Nobody is going to punish them. And nobody's going to punish them for dropping bombs, and nobody is going to punish them for sending men to slaughter.
So here's a strange thing. If somebody commits these crimes because they are officials of the government of the United States, they will go unpunished. They will not spend one day in jail. If somebody is arrested for trespassing, or for destroying property, or for burning papers, or for stealing papers, or for doing something that constitutes a technical violation of the law, they are going to be hauled up before the courts, and people are going to try to send them to jail. That's the double standard.
The point I make in this book is that civil disobedience shows up this double standard very clearly because what's happening is that those citizens who have the nerve -- not all of us have the nerve to do it -- but those citizens who have the nerve to protest against the great crimes committed by the government are then put in jail for committing petty crimes... People who commit petty technical crimes go to jail. People who commit enormous human crimes remain out.
One other point I make, and that is that there has been developing constitutional theories, among scholars in the field, among lawyers and even among some judges, the idea that maybe if somebody commits civil disobedience of a cause that that person believes in, even though that's a technical violation of law, that person should not be found guilty. That idea has been growing and developing.
There was an article written by a constitutional theorist named Joseph Sar in the Yale Review in 1968 in which he discusses this and he says --
MR. BARRY: Excuse me, Your Honor.
A. -- there is no need --
MR. BARRY: Now we are going beyond the work of Professor Zinn into the work of other people.
THE COURT: That's well taken.
MS. RIDOLFI: Excuse me?
THE COURT: I think that's quite well taken. Mr. Zinn was talking about his own book. Now he's talking about somebody's article.
Q. Howard, could you stick to your own --
A. All right. I won't talk about the forbidden article. I'll just talk about the ideas I developed myself. And the basic idea is that the criminal violation of the law has to be weighed against human consequences, against the motive of the breaking of that law, against the social evils that the breaking of that law is against; and anybody who is considering guilt or innocence, punishment or nonpunishment must begin to weigh these things so that we can no longer say, "Well, we like what those people have done or we approve it or maybe we at least sympathize with them. They are good people. They have good motives. They are just trying to stop the war, but still they broke the law and must be punished."
The point I was making is that that way of looking at it is beginning to be attacked and has a lot that is wrong with it. More and more it is beginning to be recognized and we should recognize that if somebody commits civil disobedience, they may have broken the law in some very technical sense, but that must be weighed and it must be measured against what they were trying to do. [Matters of] life and death must be measured, matters of war and peace, ask as you would ask of somebody who broke a speed law in order to take somebody to the hospital why are they doing this? Somebody who broke a window of a house in order to save somebody from the flames. What is this for?
Yes, you are not supposed to break the window of a house. Yes, you are not supposed to exceed the speed limit. Yes, there is a technical violation of law. But there is something very important involved here.
Anyway, this is the point I was trying to make.
Q. Howard, what we want to know is, [is] this concept of a jury's action is a new concept or has this been going on in history?
A. Well --
MR. BARRY: Your Honor, again it seems to me --
THE COURT: The jury will get its instructions from me.
MS. RIDOLFI: I am not asking Howard to instruct the jury, I just think that this is very important, has a close connection to civil disobedience, and I would like Howard to tell us what that connection is and describe how it has grown.
MR. WILLIAMSON: We are asking him to speak him as a historian, not as a legal expert.
THE COURT: I understand that, but we are concerned here with what goes on here in this courtroom, not what other jurors do.
MR. COUMING: In the spring of 1969 when I was on the stand, I talked about being at the trial of the Milwaukee 14. At that trial I met Howard Zinn and we talked. We flew home to Boston together in the same plane. We talked while in Milwaukee and on the plane. We talked about the history of jurors taking power that the courts are [not always] willing to admit into their hands.
I think that is the question that is being asked, to talk about that history. We have talked about it and that is very much -- when I talk in my opening statement to the risk, that is the risk I took. The risk wasn't the risk of laws, it was the risk of judgment by my fellow citizens.
MR. BARRY: Your Honor, the evidence in this case --
THE COURT: Objection sustained.
MS. RIDOLFI: We don't have any more questions on direct of Howard. We would to encourage the jury to ask any questions they might have. And thank you, Howard, it was delightful.
MR. BARRY: No, Your Honor, we have no questions.
THE COURT: Any of the jurors have any questions?
MR. GOOD: Could we take a break and maybe come back --
VOICES: No, Bob.
THE COURT: Maybe the jurors have a question. Raise your hands.
THE COURT: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we'll pick up on Monday. Come in at 9:30. I don't think it will be giving away any secrets if I do not at least tell you that the hope is that the defendants will be done with their evidence some time next week. How much further this trial will go then, I cannot predict. At least we have that. Have a good weekend.
Elizabeth Good, April 30, 1978
Life at Home
MORNING SESSION
(Jury Present.)
MR. BOB GOOD: Camden 28 would like to call my mother.
ELIZABETH HILDEN GOOD, having been duly sworn, testified as follows:
BY MR. GOOD
(Member of the Camden 28)
Q. Hi.
A. This is a switch.
Q. Tell the court what kind of family and religious tradition we were raised in?
A. Yes, I think I can do that. Bob, you came from a family that -- at least, we tried our best to bring you up according to the Gospels, to have our children stand on their own two feet, to have the courage of their convictions.
We're rather a large family. You were the eighth of 10 children.
We lived out on a farm. We have five acres and it was a nice life.
Q. Do you remember when I brought up for the first time, I was talking to you and Dad, that I was going to apply for conscientious objector status? Then we had conversations.
A. Yes, I do, Bob, because it kind of shook us up. Every argument that you brought up was really bringing -- handing it right back to me -- the way we had brought you up, the love of God, the love of your fellow man, no violence.
You just threw it right back in my own face, stood on your two feet, had the courage of your convictions, lived according to your conscience.
So as time went on I began to see a little bit where if we middle-class Americans would just stop looking at you young people and the way you look, and would see you and hear you and what you had to say, that you really were a group of beautiful people that had your right to your own conscience.
We had your oldest brother who was in the Reserves. I had three brothers who served in the Second World War, one of whom was injured. It was just something, I guess, that we had to kind of learn from our more younger family, from our younger people.
Q. Can you also recall conversations the three of us had, say, from the time that I kind of shocked you again by quitting school and sort of doing different things until, say, the time that I was arrested here in Camden?
Various times I came home and [we] had conversations about what I was going through.
A. Yes. Again, this was awfully hard for us to accept at the time; my husband and I neither had a college education. We thought this was really great, the boys could go to college, we had it planned for you, how you were to live in our idea.
So when this happened, we had a lot of discussions. It was very hard for us to accept this new thing that so many of the young people were into. But, again, it was back to the same old story of your right to decide yourself.
I think little by little you made us see where we just weren't always right, that we were so much involved in making a living and the main thing was paying off your home, and we didn't think enough about what was going on outside of our world.
We had a very provincial existence. I can remember one time we were in Cleveland and you called home long distance and you wanted to know how to make stuffed peppers.
What in the world you want to make stuffed peppers for?
"It is my turn to cook tonight and we're taking in quite a few alcoholics. Please give me the recipe for about 15 people."
This was the kind of thing that you got into with us, and when you came home you would tell us how you had never known there were things like that that existed in the inner city, such as children having no place to play when you had all this ground out in the country to play.
We tried to understand just what was going on with you, although we had -- it took a long time, let me say that. It took really a long time to accept it.
Next: Losing Paul in Vietnam »
Good: Losing Paul in Vietnam
Q. Also, then, going back a bit, was there a particular event that our family had to face in the summer of '67 that sort of had a profound effect on all of us?
A. Yes.
Q. Would you like to tell us about that a little bit?
A. Yes. I would say there was a particular event. Your brother Paul, who is the seventh child, and the one next to you, and we thought of -- Paul and Bobby, we thought of almost like one person. They slept together and they grew up together. When one would -- you would see one outside, you would see the other one playing, two towheaded boys and a family. It's Rosemary, Betty, Jane and Dorothy; and it was Paul and Bobby.
So Paul was drafted in the summer -- I mean in the year of '66. He got out of high school. He was following the trade of his father being a carpenter, and in the summer of '65 Bobby graduated -- I mean '67 Bobby graduated from four years in the seminary and Jimmy graduated the same month from Loyola in Chicago.
Here was Paul going to Vietnam. So Dad and I took him to the airport in Pittsburg, first plane ride. So this was like six years ago yesterday, we took him on a plane.
I really wasn't worried because we had lost our oldest boy in an automobile accident, Matthew.
I don't know, I guess I just must have thought the Lord wouldn't take another child from us. I really didn't worry about Paul. About six weeks after Paul left, it was June 19, I received a letter from him, a beautiful letter telling us -- telling his father -- I had a brother Paul in Hawaii -- he was telling his father in his letter that he thought he should take me to Hawaii after all these years. We worked hard, had a large family. We had taken foster children into our home, various times took care of them. So we really thought that we deserved a vacation and that when he was going to take his R&R (which is rest and relaxation) from the war, that he was going to Hawaii and visit his uncle Paul and the relatives that we have there.
So I read the letter and set it down on the table where your dad always comes in at night and sits, and went out and prepared dinner, and started to prepare dinner.
About 2 o'clock I began to feel this terrible sadness. I couldn't explain it. I just knew that all of a sudden something was wrong.
So your dad got home about 4:30, and 5 o'clock I went into the room and I said, "John, did you read Paul's letter?"
He said, "Yes."
I said, "What did you think of it?"
He said, "Well, are we ready to go to Hawaii?"
I said, "Do you think he's all right?"
He said, "Why, sure, he's all right."
I said, "No, I think something has happened to him."
That was Monday, June the 19th.
So later in the evening, my oldest daughter Rosemary -- lives two doors away from us -- I said to her, "Rosemary, how does the Army let you know when something has happened?"
She said, "Why, Mom?"
"I think something has happened to Paul."
She said, "Well, I think an Army officer comes and tell you."
So from that moment on, I knew that man would be coming. I could just imagine that I would see him. We have a long kind of driveway and everybody pulls up to the back of the house where our kitchen is. I had a feeling I would see him walking.
So all day Tuesday I had this feeling. Wednesday my oldest son, John, came out and I wanted to tell him. I didn't want him to leave me. I wanted to tell him to stay with me, that I felt that this man was actually looking for us and I couldn't get out.
So he left and my daughter Marilyn was cleaning out the refrigerator and I heard a car door slam. I had to look up over the kitchen window and sure enough it was the Army officer already walking up the driveway.
He got out of his car down the end of the drive.
So I said to Marilyn, "My God, the Army officer is here to tell us about Paul."
She said, "What is the matter with Paul, Mom?"
I hadn't told her. I just told Rosemary.
I said, "He's gone."
By that time the man was at the door. It was summer and the screen door was open.
He said, "Is this the home of John Good?"
I said, "Yes, come in, I've been expecting you."
So I got a little excited, and I said, "Do you care if I call my daughter?'
He said, "Don't get excited, Mrs. Good, he's just missing in action."
I said, "No, he's gone."
So my daughter came over, and he read this to us, about missing in action, and he didn't know anything about it, when it had happened, when he was last seen or anything like that. And I told him it happened Monday.
So this was Wednesday, and he said that they'd let us know that within an hour, the time he'd been found dead or alive, that we would know.
So on Friday morning, I said to the children, "Let's go to Mass this morning." So Bobby went, and Marilyn and Rosemary. We went to Mass.
And after I received communion, I asked Our Lord if he would see to it that we heard about Paul -- that I wanted his body, and I wanted to bury him besides his brother.
So we got home and about 3:30 that afternoon, the Army officer came back, and he said that he would have to read this telegram or this message in the presence of my husband. So he got called home from work, and, you know, "The Army regrets to inform you that your son Paul was killed by hostile action."
So this is what kind of happens. You know, a lot of people -- this message was received by almost 60,000 parents, but I think that we forget that it's just us. We just remember, think of our own.
We don't stop and think of every mother who has the same kind of a heart, and indeed all these people, children and people, that were killed in Vietnam were suffering something of what our family was suffering.
So then we waited for two weeks. July the 1st our boy came home. We had to go out to the airport. A lot of his friends were there. And they brought his body back. And I don't -- never have been able to figure out to this day that my son was killed. On July 19th we were able to view his body, which is very unusual, because they say that in the heat of the jungle, which he was killed in the Mekong Delta, that 24 hours they are just not able to be viewed. But we were able to view his body. He was buried on July the 3rd, military funeral.
Next: Sending Boys to Die for Tin, Rubber and Oil »
Good: Sending Boys to Die for Tin, Rubber and Oil
Sending Boys to Die for Tin, Rubber and Oil
ELIZABETH GOOD: So it was after that, that Bob seemed to get more concerned -- all of us did -- about this war in Vietnam and what was happening. And I still, even last Friday, I still tried to hang on to that theory that my boy died for his country.
But after Mr. Zinn was on the stand, and he spelled it out, "Tin, rubber and oil," that's when I broke down in court. That's when I broke down and I realized, you know, it was pretty stupid of us to have swallowed that business about America being over there to save South Vietnam from the Communists; and when we had permitted, as we say, Cuba, 90 miles from our shore, to be a Communist country.
So after this happened, Jimmy went to the Peace Corps, in the Dominican Republic, and we had many discussions about that. We had many discussions when he came back home, that it just wasn't the way it was told to us, that our country is down there, for instance -- Dominican Republic -- to help these people.
We see so many poor. He's telling me about the cost, the wages for a boy or a man down to raise a family in the Dominican Republic is a dollar and a half a day, and still we're down there, Rockefeller's down there, and the different companies are down there, and the top man in his group really gets the money from foreign aid, but not the people.
So I guess that's just about all I have to say. Everybody has to figure out for themselves what this war has cost in human lives, what this war has cost in money that could have been spent in this country.
I think the president said a hundred thousand dollars in his first State of the Union address, a hundred thousand dollars would go for research of cancer. The only member of my family, my sisters and brothers that have died, lovely women have died of cancer. And there is a hundred thousand dollars going to be spent for the research of cancer, and 70 billion for a defense. Where are our priorities?
I really feel guilty -- I feel guilty that we have sat aside and let them take our boys. Mr. Zinn put it so beautifully when he said they are kidnapped, literally, and they are taken 10,000 miles away from home. Most of them just kids that maybe haven't been more than 50 miles away from home. Like my son -- he never owned a car, something he was looking forward to. Why should lives be cut off for tin, rubber and oil? That's the real reason.
I think if our country is attacked, I don't think there is a boy in the country that wouldn't fight for the defense of it. None of my boys. All of my boys surely would. But I don't believe in sending them to these places for tin, rubber and oil, or whatever it maybe, and I think if there is any criminals in this case, it's the middle-class America who sits by and allows this to happen, allows our boys -- we not only give our boys, we give the money. Because it's our money, our taxes. Nine hundred dollars in New Jersey for the average home for taxes. How hard is that to get together?
This is the reason why so many of us do not have vacations. Two years ago my husband and I went on our first vacation.
So, it's just wrong. Things should be turned around. Things should be turned around so that we could really enjoy life. Life is a beautiful thing. A boy is a beautiful thing.
I feel Paul should be here. He should be enjoying life. He would be 25. He might be married and have a child. He wouldn't know what it was to hold his first son, like we did.
No, I really think that things were wrong. I really think we have a lot -- maybe these middle-class Americans don't realize what these kids are trying to do. They are trying to show us where we're wrong. We should be showing them and instead they are showing us, even with their lives.
I certainly don't want to see my son in prison for what he's done. But I'm proud of what he's done. He's done what we brought him up to do. I know he loves his country. We brought him up to stand on his own two feet, to have the courage of his convictions; and I think he's done just that. And I think we have a beautiful country, but I think our priorities are wrong, very wrong.
Just read something over the weekend -- if the acting head of the FBI can burn files, why can't my son burn them? And he is burning them for a much better reason. A much better reason. I would say of the two, my son was the patriot. Much more so than the acting head of the FBI.
We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. I know that I am. I am ashamed of the day I took my son to that airplane and put him on. I'm ashamed of any pride that I had when the Taps were played, and I did have pride. And I'm proud of my son because he didn't know. We should have known, but we didn't know. A kid that never had a gun in his life, because we, like the Reillys never had a gun in our home. When I say we were taught non-violence, our children were taught non-violence, that's exactly what I mean. And to take that lovely, lovely boy and to tell him, "You are fighting for your country." How stupid can we get? He was fighting for his country. Can anybody stand here and tell me how he was fighting for his country?
If Mr. Zinn's testimony was his own, or was the radical's idea, so-called, then I would say, you know, there is still room for doubt. But when it came from the Pentagon Papers, when it came from that little circle up above who knows what's going on in this country, then I say it's time for us to turn around and God help us. God give us the time before it's too late.
Who gives us the power to go over to a little country, over there, that small, and bomb the hell out of it? Who give us the authority to do this? This is what we sat back for so many years, war after war, promise after promise, that it would never happen again.
I don't think there was any mother within 500 miles of our home that was more anti-Communist than I was. I was hung up on it. Every time the boys tried to talk, I brought in Communism. And this is the way all of us are. I feel this is the way most of us middle-class Americans are. We really are hung up on Communism; in fact, so much that we don't know what we're doing. We don't even know what our own government is doing. We read the newspaper and whatever it tells us, we believe. Even though when Paul died, so many people tell us we have no business being over there. I can't understand -- I can't -- what we're doing over there. We should get out of this. But not one of us, not a one of us raised our hands to do anything about it. We left it up to these people, for them to do it. And now we are prosecuting them for it. God! That's all I could say. I can't say anymore. And Bobby said to keep it short. He knows me, I guess.
I come from an Irish-Catholic background. I have heard my mother speak many times of the Irish patriots who were put in prison too, for disobeying the laws that they're still fighting over and they've been fighting for 700 years, and it looks -- maybe they might win, giving them one more time.
I want to thank everybody for allowing me to speak.
Q. Is there anything else you'd like to say? Or just thanks very much?
A. Well, there's one thing I had in mind to say: that when you were arrested, you sent me the most beautiful letter. And if I thought I was going to be up here, I would have brought it. But he spelled it out for us, why he was doing this, how he felt it was something he had to do, and indeed put the blame back on us because of the way we brought him up, that he was doing this for the country, not against the country. And it was really a letter that I'll treasure and keep until I die.
MR. GOOD: Thank you very much. I have no more questions, Mom.
(Witness excused.)