40 Years Ago

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)

This month, Yale junior Garry Trudeau began to draw a comics series about the football team, called 'bull tales'; they would run in the Yale Daily News, starring BD and Mike Doonesbury.

On the cover of GQ, September 1968: Omar Sharif, wearing a plaid wool jacket.

On September 7 at the Miss America pageant, Atlantic City: Despite the legend, no bra burning took place. several dozen women's liberation protesters from New York City joined with women from around the country to stage a show on the boardwalk. From Jo Freeman, who was there:

Women’s liberation took advantage of this to stage several guerilla theater actions. A live sheep was crowned Miss America. Objects of female oppression – high heeled shoes, girdles, bras, curlers, tweezers – were tossed into a Freedom Trash Can. A proposal to burn the can’s contents was scuttled when the police said that a fire would pose a risk to the wooden boardwalk. Women sang songs that parodied the contest and the idea of selling women’s bodies: ‘Ain’t she sweet; making profits off her meat.’ A tall, Miss America puppet was auctioned off.

That weekend, Led Zeppelin performed for the first time at a club in Europe; at their first show, they were billed as The Yardbirds (the Yardbirds had disbanded two months earlier, and guitarist Jimmy Page subsequently formed this new group).

On September 16, Dr. Orlando Bosch, an anti-Castro terrorist, drove his Cadillac to Dodge Island, the Port of Miami, where he and his accomplices fired a 57-millimeter bazooka, hitting the Polish freighter Polanica. Years later a Cuban news report would accuse Bosch and cronies of being responsible for several dozen bombings or attempted bombings against countries that traded with Cuba, that year.

On September 18 presidential candidate Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh-In, sticking his head through the well-known wall of opening doors and saying “Sock it to ME?”

Protesters against the government continued in Mexico, increasing as the international focus was on the Olympics, to be held in Mexico City in October. President Díaz Ordaz ordered the army to occupy the National Autonomous University campus on the 18th. Students were beaten and arrested indiscriminately and fighting continued around the city including at Polytechnic, occupied five days later.

60 minutes debuted on CBS September 24, the first weekly news magazine on television. It was on a Tuesday.
Funny Girl starring Barbra Streisand, opened in theaters. Streisand had been a hit on Broadway in 1964 with this musical about the life of Fanny Brice.

On Sept. 26, President Johnson appointed Washington Post editor J. Russell Wiggins to be UN ambassador, after George W. Ball resigned to join the Humphrey campaign. Russ Wiggins would be sworn in on Oct. 4, leaving Ben Bradlee as the top editor of the Post 3 months early. Graham and Bradlee offered the managing editor job to Eugene Patterson, recent editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Howard Simons, passed over for the managing editor job, would get it three years later when Patterson left the Post, disgruntled. About this time Steve Isaacs was named metropolitan editor and Richard Harwood, national editor.

September 29: “Piece of My Heart,” the lone Top Forty hit by Big Brother and the Holding Company, enters the charts. It would reach #12.

On September 30, the first Boeing 747 rolled out of the Everett, WA, factory.

On that day, the 900th US plane was shot down over Hanoi. 538 Americans were killed in action that month, highest of the year.

Sometime around this time the Post library staffer who had casualty duty went on vacation. I got to fill in, and call the Pentagon a few Fridays for 'body counts'. Many things made the war personal to me, despite not having a loved one in it. This one was deeply felt, talking to the enlisted man who read the numbers in a dull voice over the phone. Just numbers.

40 Years Ago

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)

In Memphis, sanitation workers went on strike on February 12. 1,300 workers walked out of their jobs to force the city to recognize their union, AFSCME Local 1733, trying to change “a long history of mistreatment and disrespect amid shameful working conditions.” www.afscme.org/about/1029.cfm.

In Vietnam, reporters were having difficulty – as usual -- finding out the truth about the war effort. The military kept reporting all was going well while reporters on the streets in Hue knew it was not. Halberstam tells a story in The Powers That Be about Walter Cronkite being flown to Hue from Saigon to see the pacified Hue streets; on the flight back he flew with bodies of 12 American boys killed that day in the ‘non-fighting’. As Halberstam tells it,

here was Cronkite flying to Saigon, where the American military command was surrounded by defeat and calling it victory.

Not long after that, on February 27, Cronkite would report on his evening news program, "Who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities? I‘m not sure…It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out...will be to negotiate, not as victors but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could." Lyndon Johnson’s reaction was that if he had "lost Cronkite," he‘d "lost Mr. Average Citizen."

Other events of February: Lisa Marie Presley was born to Elvis and Priscilla. Eldridge Cleaver published his blockbuster memoir ‘Soul on Ice’. The first 911 telephone emergency system was inaugurated in Alabama. The Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads merged into Penn Central. British astronomers announced the discovery of pulsars. Another 10,000 U.S. troops were sent to Vietnam. On February 23, Over 1,300 artillery rounds hit the Marine base at Khe Sanh and its outposts, more than on any previous day of attacks.
On the cover of GQ magazine: a dashiki.

And so it went.

Bush and Vietnam

Following up on yesterday's post, more refutations of Bush's comparison of Iraq to Vietnam:
In the New York Times, Historians Question Bush’s Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq.

“It is undoubtedly true that America’s failure in Vietnam led to catastrophic consequences in the region, especially in Cambodia,” said David C. Hendrickson, a specialist on the history of American foreign policy at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
“But there are a couple of further points that need weighing,” he added. “One is that the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam — this dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same thing has happened in the Middle East today. Foreign occupation of Iraq has created far more terrorists than it has deterred.”

In FireDogLake, Bush Tries to Sell the Neocon’s Favorite Vietnam Myth:

David Gergen put his finger on the greater blunder of drawing the Vietnam parallel: “If you learned so much from history, Mr. President, how did you get us involved in another quagmire?” Vietnam reminds Americans of the quagmire, a lost war and 58,000 dead Americans.

And, via The Guardian's Newsblog, a link to a Keith Olbermann commentary from last year: Olbermann: Lessons from the Vietnam War. Can't beat this one:

The fourth pivotal lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If the same idiots who told Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to stay there for the sake of “peace With honor” are now telling you to stay in Iraq, they’re probably just as wrong now, as they were then ... Dr. Kissinger.

Vietnam, again

I'm flabbergasted by Bush's speech today to the VFW comparing Iraq to Vietnam. Isn't that what we've been saying all along? Didn't they all call us crazy?

Of course, our perception of Vietnam is different than George's. After all, he was there...ummm, sorry, NOT! At any rate, those of us who were against the war in Vietnam, and are now against the war in Iraq, see it quite differently still.

Bush:

Finally, there's Vietnam. This is a complex and painful subject for many Americans. The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I'm going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.
...Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like "boat people," "re-education camps," and "killing fields."

And then, this:

There are many differences between the wars we fought in the Far East and the war on terror we're fighting today. But one important similarity is at their core they're ideological struggles.

Nobody expected the killing would end. But it would be the people who cared about Vietnam killing each other, and it wouldn't last long. And didn't.
'Killing Fields'? That was Cambodia. And, there are plenty of Iraqis, and Iraqi refugees, suffering now.
And last, ideology. We were in that war for ideological reasons, but were the Vietnamese? I don't think so. They were in it to save their country, and unite it if possible. And if we were in this new war for ideology, wouldn't we be concentrating on Afghanistan?

But then, that's how we were divided back then. Still are. Some comments: Pensito Review; Talking Points Memo; Think Progress; AmericaBlog...

Here's Tribune's The Swamp, on Bush's bizarre citing of Graham Greene's scathing novel on 'The Quiet American' in Vietnam:

But Greene wrote his book about the way American bumbled into Vietnam, not how it left it.
By reminding people of Greene's book, Bush was inviting listeners to recall the mistakes his administration made in entering and prosecuting the Iraq War. Did he really want to do that?

Health care proposal, Iraq and Vietnam, a Florida tax revelation, and campaign tech coverage

Here's a link to a proposal that first came out in 1989 and has been reprinted by Physicians for a National Health Program: A National Health Program for the United States: A Physicians' Proposal. From the summary:

As physicians, we constantly confront the irrationality of the present health care system. In private practice, we waste countless hours on billing and bureaucracy. For uninsured patients, we avoid procedures, consultations, and costly medications.
...We envisage a program that would be federally mandated and ultimately funded by the federal government but administered largely at the state and local level. The proposed system would eliminate financial barriers to care; minimize economic incentives for both excessive and insufficient care, discourage administrative interference and expense, improve the distribution of health facilities, and control costs by curtailing bureaucracy and fostering health planning.

Says the poster who linked to this on Knox Views: "I think anyone could get behind a candidate who endorsed this plan."

From McClatchy correspondent Nancy Youssef, a fascinating interview: Iraq and Vietnam: Two wars, same mistakes, about retired Gen. Volney Warner, who says the death of his West Point-graduate granddaughter in Iraq has help shaped his views:

...The flawed assumptions of Vietnam and Iraq are nearly mirror images of each other.
In Vietnam, Kennedy and other policymakers believed in the ''domino theory'': If South Vietnam fell, other U.S. allies in the region -- Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia -- also would fall to the communists.
In Iraq, Bush and the neoconservative policymakers in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office had a democracy theory: Implanting democracy in Iraq would be easy, and from there it would spread to Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and beyond.
The fact that the most democratic nation in the region, by most standards, is Iran and that Islamists dominate some of the region's most popular political parties, including Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon, seems not to have made an impression.

Via Stuck on the Palmetto, a link to a report in the Palm Beach Post about another way corporations get out of paying taxes: Critics push to plug drain in tax loophole. This package represents the best in newspaper public service. Says the story, by Jeff Ostrowski, corporations in Florida can bypass paying documententary stamp tax on property sales by simply declaring a sales price of $10. So three properties that recently sold for a total of $600 million gained the state less than $2 in taxes, rather than the $4.2 million they would have garnered.

No one knows how much the loophole costs the state. Neither the Florida Department of Revenue nor county property appraisers calculate taxes lost in this manner because the numbers are difficult to track. In some cases, no deed is filed when a property changes hands. In others, buyers and sellers refuse to divulge sale prices.
Yet even as the stakes for this practice rise, there's little interest in Tallahassee in closing the loophole, Nikolits and other property appraisers said. They hope the big savings enjoyed on high-profile sales will spur lawmakers to action.

(Added later: On a related topic, from Will Bunch: Bush discovers why Americans are unhappy: Corporate taxes aren't low enough.)

And finally, from the list of Knight-Batten award finalists, a link to TechPresident, where Micah Sifry and others collect news and links on campaign coverage with an emphasis on blog, social networking, and technology. Great links and info here, too, including stats on Facebook supporters, MySpace Friends, and You Tube views by candidate.

The Vietnam circle

It just keeps coming around and around and ending up in Iraq, one way or another.

In this episode, thoughts from a column in the Salt Lake Tribune, by David R. Irvine: U.S. reaps what the Army sows. (Via Metafilter.)

Irvine discusses Tiger Force, the secret Army unit, and how allegations of brutality were covered up by then-Ford administration staffers Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Says Irvine:

The common thread which runs from Tiger Force through My Lai, to Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib, to a hundred episodes of sadistic brutality inflicted by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, is the remarkable fact that the official responsibility for all these tragedies never runs higher than the lowest-level trigger-pullers or body-stackers.

Twenty-some years later, someone leaked documents about Tiger Force to a reporter from the Toledo Blade, which led to a Pulitzer Prize winning series. One part of the series focuses on Col. David Hackworth, a unit leader, and why he was allowed to retire rather than be prosecuted for some of his actions; he isn't linked to any atrocities in the story, though. (The Metafilter posting makes note of Hackworth's connection).

I've read a couple of David Hackworth's books and found them remarkable. His military record was amazing as he worked his way from an orphaned, unschooled, underaged recruit sent to Italy, to combat hero in Korea to Colonel in Vietnam, then anti-war speaker, columnist and author. When he died last year, he was given full military honors and buried at Arlington.

Hackworth believed his tactics in Tiger Force were necessary and fair. He admitted to using unusual motivations, including gambling, liquor and women, to keep his men happy. He claimed the only money he took was gambling winnings. He also said the accusations were in retaliation for his outspoken statements that the Vietnam war was a mistake and unwinnable. Before his death, he criticized the Iraq war too.

Sometimes it seems the whole Iraq war is retaliation for the anti-Vietnam War movement.