Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman Underground Association

Scope: Covering the years1962-1977, this file provides descriptions of anti-war rallies and materials produced by the Students for a Democratic Society. It also has detailed information on the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, a "defining moment" of the SDS. "The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a progressive, radical reformist student group, grew from the ranks of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), whose own student group, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) had become all but defunct by the end of the 1950s. . .Under new Field Secretary Robert Alan Haber, University of Michigan graduate student, SDS established a national office in New York and began to organize itself as a fringe political group within American academe by the end of the 1961-62 school year." "SDS had been monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as early as 1962, but SDS involvement in the April 1965 Student March on Washington against the Vietnam War caught the Johnson administration off guard and the order to monitor SDS activities followed swiftly. The Bureau investigation centered in Chicago, where SDS had established its national office at 1103 E. 63rd Street, in the heart of the ghetto." "The FBI could find no hard evidence of outside influence or control of SDS, even though many of its leaders were espousing the radical thinking of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro and Che Guevara. Because SDS had none of the traditional hall marks of foreign control or influence, they were classified as part of what became known as the 'New Left.'" From the Introduction of the Guide to the collection

This collection also includes information on the Weatherman Underground Organization, a faction that came out of the SDS and was of interest to the FBI. The guide to the collection also provides some information on this group.

Subject Categories: To find more information on this topic in our library, search under these subject headings in the WebCat:

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a369ce54973ab.htm

The Clinton administration is populated by individuals like Bill who were antiwar activist during Vietnam. Honor and truth telling was not a desired characteristic for Clinton and his antiwar friends in the late 60's and early 70's. It is not hard to understand why they are such skillful liars when their radical past is considered.

Senator J. William Fulbright - The guiding hand behind Clinton during this era was senator Fulbright. Bill Clinton was at Georgetown University in 1968 and also had a job in the office of Senator J. William Fulbright. Clinton was an eyewitness to Fulbright's success in destroying the American consensus on Vietnam. Fulbright was an extremist and lead a bitter fight with LBJ and Nixon against America's Vietnam policy. He was not particularly concerned with the truth. After graduation in 1968, Clinton was available for the draft (1-A). However, through Senator Fulbright's influence with the Arkansas draft board and with various lies, Bill Clinton was able to avoid military service during the Vietnam War.

Jim McDougal - During 1968, Clinton also became friends with Jim McDougal, then an assistant to Fulbright. With Fulbright's influence, Clinton ran unopposed for Attorney General in the mid 1970's. The relationship between Clinton, McDougal and Fulbright became so strong that the three entered into a successful land deal in Arkansas in 1977.

Clinton, then Arkansas attorney general, bought 20 acres of land from Rolling Manor Inc., a company owned by James McDougal and Fulbright. This deal made the partners 75% profit and was the first step to Whitewater.

Strobe Talbott - During 1969, while at Oxford (dodging the draft with the ROTC enlistment), Clinton became friends with Strobe Talbott. Clinton was an antiwar protester in England and Russia during this period and helped organize demonstrations (down with America) that burned the American flag. Talbott was aware of these events. He latter went to graduate school at Yale Law with both Clintons.

Fast forward to 1991. At this time, Strobe Talbott was the Washington Bureau Chief of Time magazine and a key Clinton defender. In a 1991 article, Talbott condemned those who would raise moral issues about Bill Clinton.

In the spring of 1992, he wrote a story about Clinton's conscience - wrestling about the draft while at Oxford. Theses stories by Talbott were big lies. Clinton rewarded Talbott by making him the number two person at the State Department. Sidney Blumenthal - The top White House spin master is a long time friend of the Clintons. Blumenthal is a former member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

The SDS was a key player in the antiwar movement and advocated violence. Vanity Fair magazine reports that Blumenthal is -- or at least once was -- a Communist accuses him of joining former SDS leader Carl Oglesby in "something called the Assassination Information Bureau" -- an effort to exonerate Marxist assassin Lee Harvey Oswald by discrediting the Warren Commission report on Oswald's murder of President Kennedy.

In 1968, SDS leaders traveled to communist Czechoslovakia, where they met with leaders of the Viet Cong and "held a seminar with the Communists on how to conduct their psychological warfare campaign against the United States.

Blumenthal learned the art of the big lie from from the masters of propaganda. Senator John Kerry - A goal of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam was to vilify combat soldiers and marines so that public opinion would turn from support to doubt. A fellow traveler of the antiwar movement then was John Kerry of Massachusetts (currently junior senator).

In January of 1971, Jane Fonda and other antiwar leaders organized a show trial called the Winter Soldier hearings in Detroit. These hearings included fake witnesses and fabricated events as well as some real personal stories. Kerry, at this time was a discharged and decorated navy veteran with political aspirations and was a key participant in these hearings. Winter Soldier statements claimed that war crimes were accepted policy in Vietnam and were committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

The intention of Winter Soldier was to create a graphic story of "out of control" americans killing innocent Vietnamese and the futility of the war. Claims of civilian casualties were greatly overestimated. The big lie worked and public doubt about American involvement in the war increased. Also, the unfortunate consequence of Winter Soldier is the negative and untrue portrayal of Vietnam combat veterans that was created and lasts until today.

History has revealed that John Kerry in 1971 was unconcerned that Winter Soldier testimony was not altogether truthful. Even when an fellow organizer of the Winter Soldier hearings was reviled to be a liar, John Kerry pressed on. In April of 1971, he testified before the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations (Fulbright). This hearing was televised and he again made his false claims that war crimes was the accepted policy of the military in Vietnam. The truth is that the Vietnam War was not any more brutal than previous wars. Observers with experience in Vietnam such as Peter Arnet, Daniel Ellsberg, David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Morley Safer support this point of view.

John Kerry was the Democratic nominee for the U.S. House, 1972 but was defeated in the general election. Organized Labor - The Left rejoiced when Sweeney became head of the AFL-CIO smelling a chance to capture the unions that it had not had since before the Vietnam War. Sweeney's staff is heavily dependent on long-time radicals. "The AFL-CIO is dominated at the department level by an SDS alumni association. These are Sweeney's base and where he gets his ideas from. Many of the old campus radicals around Carey had shilled for the Black Panthers, cheered on Ho Chi Minh, and cut sugar cane in Cuba. They are latter-day Leninists.

Sandy Berger - Clinton met Berger when they were working for McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. Sandy Berger opposed the Vietnam War not by protesting but working to get like-minded candidates -- Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern -- elected. The connection also extends to Senator Fulbright who joined his law firm after retiring from the Senate in 1975. Fulbright became a role model for Berger.

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Look here, from From “Mutiny Does Not Happen Lightly: The Literature of the American Resistance to the Vietnam War”

The game of the rich has caught up to Pig America. The Vietnamese have kicked ass out of U.S. occupational troops. More and more G.I.’s will no longer listen to Pig Nixon’s orders and are turning their guns around on the real enemy. The Provisional Revolutionary Government in Vietnam (Viet Cong) has led the Vietnamese people to complete victory.

–Roxboro School SDS- Cleveland Heights – June 4, 1972

Recently many articles have appeared in the movement press expounding the virtues of deserting and going AWOL. “Come to Canada and be a man.” “Soldiers are pigs,” “To remain in the imperialist U.S. Army rather than leaving is comparable to being a Nazi.” Last year there were, by Pentagon counts,, 250,000 AWOL’s and over 53,000 deserters. This has not made much of a dent in the fighting strength of the U.S.Army. That dent has clearly come from the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people under the leadership of the NLF and the Provisional Revolutionary Government.

–New York Regional SDS distributed at Boston University - Feb. 22, 1969

Students for a Democratic Society = SDS

Chicago '68: A Chronology

1967

August 15: At a convention of the National Student Association, Allard K. Lowenstein and Curtis Gans formally launch the "Dump Johnson" movement—an effort to oppose the renomination of Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson.

August 31: Five-day convention of the National Conference for a New Politics opens in Chicago. 3,000 delegates from some 200 left, community, and civil rights groups convene to discuss an electoral strategy for 1968. Some want a third-party slate with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., running for President and Dr. Benjamin Spock for Vice-president. But the conference breaks up in rancor and division. Leftists who want to be active in a national race have nowhere to turn but the Democratic Party.

September 23: Allard Lowenstein meets with New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy declines to run as the candidate of the anti-Johnson movement. (In his search for a candidate, Lowenstein will ask California Congressman Don Edwards, Idaho Senator Frank Church, Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith, General James M. Gavin, and South Dakota Senator George S. McGovern; no one accepts the role.)

October 20: Lowenstein meets with Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy. McCarthy agrees to be the movement's candidate.

October 21-22: A demonstration at the Pentagon organized by the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE) draws 100,000. Afterwards, MOBE begins to talk about antiwar protests during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where President Johnson is expected to be nominated for a second term.

November 30: Senator Eugene McCarthy officially enters the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, running on an antiwar platform.

December 31: Activists partying at Abbie Hoffman's New York loft resolve to hold a Festival of Life during the Democrats' "Convention of Death." Paul Krassner christens the group "Yippies."

1968

January 5: Dr. Benjamin Spock and four others are indicted on federal charges of conspiring to counsel draft evasion.

January 21: North Vietnamese troops surround the Khe Sanh combat base and begin a seventy-seven day siege of the 6,000 U.S. Marines stationed there.

January 30: The Tet offensive begins in South Vietnam; Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops strike at targets across South Vietnam, reaching even the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Often cited as a turning point in public support for the war. American troops will peak at 542,000 during 1968.

February 1: Richard Nixon enters the race for the Republican nomination for President.

February 8: Alabama Governor George Wallace enters the presidential race as an Independent.

Also on this date, three black students are killed and twenty-seven are wounded in Orangeburg, South Carolina, when state troopers fire at demonstrators demanding the integration of the local bowling alley. The incident is known as the "Orangeburg Massacre."

March 12: Voters in the New Hampshire primary give President Johnson only a narrow victory over antiwar candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy.

March 16: Senator Robert Kennedy reverses his earlier decision and announces his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, criticizing Johnson for his handling of the war.

Also on this date, in South Vietnam, Charlie Company (11th Brigade, Americal Division) enters the village of My Lai and kills over 300 apparently unarmed civilians. The American public will not hear about the My Lai atrocities until November 1969.

March 22-23: A MOBE conference in Lake Villa, Illinois brings together MOBE, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and Yippie activists to plan the Convention demonstrations.

March 31: Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the Democratic primary race. Read the New York Times story.

April 4: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots break out in more than a hundred cities. On the west side of Chicago, nine blacks are killed and twenty blocks are burned.

April 11: President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968. While primarily addressing open housing, the Act also includes a new federal anti-riot law, making it a crime to cross state lines with the intent to incite a riot.

April 15: Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley publicly criticizes Superintendent of Police James Conlisk's cautious handling of the riots that followed King's assassination. He said he was giving the police specific instructions "to shoot to kill any arsonist and to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting."

April 23: At Columbia University on New York, students opposed to defense contracts and a new gymnasium to be built on Harlem park land occupy several campus buildings. They are routed by city police a week later: 150 injuries, 700 arrests.

April 27: An antiwar march in Chicago draws 8,000 people. When the march ends, Chicago police order the crowd to disperse, then wade in with clubs. The unofficial Sparling report criticizes the police and the Daley administration.

Also on this date, Vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.

May 6-30: Student demonstrations in France lead to a general strike throughout the country. Ten million workers strike, 10,000 battle police in Paris.

May 10: Peace talks open in Paris with Averell Harriman representing the U.S. and Xan Thuy representing North Vietnam. Talks soon deadlock over the North Vietnamese demand for an end to all U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. More than 2,000 American soldiers die in combat in May, the highest monthly loss of the war.

May 13: In Washington D.C., Resurrection City rises, a demonstration by the Poor Peoples Campaign.

May 14: J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, sends a memorandum to all FBI field offices initiating a counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) to disrupt new left groups.

June 5: Senator Robert Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles moments after declaring victory in the California Democratic presidential primary.

June 14: Dr. Benjamin Spock and four others are convicted of conspiring to counsel draft evasion.

June 23: A group of Connecticut McCarthy supporters, disgruntled at being under-represented in their state's delegation to the upcoming convention, meet to create a Commission on the Selection of Presidential Nominees. This commission will submit proposals to the convention's Rules Committee calling for an end to the practice of winner-takes-all in state delegations. [The 1968 convention agreed to study the issue. The resulting committee—which in due course would be chaired by Senator George McGovern—made recommendations that were adopted by the Democratic National Committee in 1971 and effectively placed control of the Democratic presidential nomination process beyond the reach of the traditional party regulars.]

July 15: The Yippies apply for permits to camp in Lincoln Park (about two miles north of the Chicago Loop) and to rally at Soldier Field (on the lakefront south of the Loop).

July 29: MOBE applies for permits to march to and rally at the International Amphitheatre (site of the Democratic Convention and about five miles southwest of the Loop) and to march to and rally in Grant Park (just east of the Loop). All permits are denied, except one allowing the use of the Grant Park bandshell for a rally.

August 8: At the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, Richard M. Nixon wins the party's nomination for President. At the same time, not far away in the black neighborhoods of Miami, riots result in four deaths and hundreds of arrests.

August 10: Senator George S. McGovern announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.

August 21: Soviet tanks and troops roll into Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring" reform movement.

Convention Week

August 22, Thursday: Dean Johnson, a seventeen-year-old Sioux Indian from South Dakota, is shot dead by Chicago police on Wells Street. Police say he pulled a gun. A memorial march is held later in the day.

August 23, Friday: At the Civic Center plaza (located in the Loop and now known as the Daley Center) the Yippies nominate their presidential contender—Pigasus the pig. Seven Yippies and the pig are arrested.

Almost 6,000 National Guardsman are mobilized and practice riot-control drills. Special police platoons do the same.

August 24, Saturday: MOBE's marshal training sessions continue in Lincoln Park. Karate, snake dancing, and crowd protection techniques are practiced. Women Strike for Peace holds a women-only picket at the Hilton Hotel, where many delegates are staying. At the 11 PM curfew, poet Allan Ginsberg, chanting, and musician Ed Sanders lead people out of the park.

August 25, Sunday: MOBE's "Meet the Delegates" march gathers 800 protesters in Grant Park across from the Hilton Hotel. The Festival of Life, in Lincoln Park, opens with music. 5,000 hear the MC-5 and local bands play. Police refuse to allow a flatbed truck to be brought in as a stage. A fracas breaks out in which several are arrested and others are clubbed. Police reinforcements arrive.

At the 11 PM curfew, most of the crowd, now numbering around 2,000, leave the park ahead of a police sweep and congregate between Stockton Drive and Clark Street. The police line then moves into the crowd, pushing it into the street. Many are clubbed, reporters and photographers included. The crowd disperses into the Old Town area, where the battles continue.

August 26, Monday: In the early morning, Tom Hayden is among those arrested. 1,000 protesters march towards police headquarters at 11th and State. Dozens of officers surround the building. The march turns north to Grant Park, swarming the General Logan statue. Police react by clearing the hill and the statue.

At the Amphitheatre, Mayor Daley formally opens the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

As the curfew approaches, some in Lincoln Park build a barricade against the police line to the east. About 1,000 remain in the park after 11 PM. A police car noses into the barricade and is pelted by rocks. Police move in with tear gas. Like Sunday night, street violence ensues. But it is worse. Some area residents are pulled off their porches and clubbed. More reporters are attacked this night than at any other time during the week.

August 27, Tuesday: At 1 PM 200 members of the American Friends Service Committee and other pacifist groups leave a near-northside church to march to the Amphitheatre. Joined by others along their route, the marchers eventually number about 1,000. The police stop the march at 39th and Halstead, about half-a-mile north of the Amphitheatre. The marchers set up a picket line and remain in place until 10 AM the next morning. They are then ordered to disperse and 30 resisters are arrested. This is the only march of Convention Week that gets anywhere near the Amphitheatre—it also gets virtually no publicity.

About 7 PM Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale speaks in Lincoln Park. He urges people to defend themselves by any means necessary if attacked by the police.

An "Unbirthday Party for LBJ" convenes at the Chicago Coliseum. Performers and speakers include Ed Sanders, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, Terry Southern, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, and Rennie Davis. 2,000 later march from the Coliseum to Grant Park.

In Lincoln Park, 200 clergy and lay church people, toting a 12-foot cross, join 2,000 protestors to remain in the park past curfew. Again, tear gas and club-swinging police clear the park. Many head south to the Loop and Grant Park.

At Grant Park, in front of the Hilton, where the television cameras are, 4,000 demonstrators rally to speeches by Julian Bond, Davis, and Hayden. Mary Traverse and Peter Yarrow sing. The rally is peaceful. At 3 AM the National Guard relieve the police. The crowd is allowed to stay in Grant Park all night.

August 28, Wednesday: 10-15,000 gather at the old Grant Park bandshell for the MOBE's antiwar rally. Dellinger, Gregory, Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Jerry Rubin, Carl Oglesby, Hayden, and many others speak. 600 police surround the rally on all sides. National Guardsmen are posted on the roof of the nearby Field Museum.

In the Convention at the Amphitheatre, the peace plank proposed for the Democratic party platform is voted down.

At the bandshell rally, news of the defeat of the peace plank is heard on radios. A young man begins to lower the American flag flying near the bandshell. Police push through the crowd to arrest him. Then a group, including at least one undercover police officer, completes the flag lowering and raises a red or blood-splattered shirt. Police move in again. A line of MOBE marshals is formed between the police and the crowd. Police charge the marshal line. Rennie Davis is beaten unconscious.

At rally's end Dellinger announces a march to the Amphitheatre, while Hayden urges the crowd to move in small groups to the Loop. 6,000 join the march line, but, since it has no permit and the police refuse to allow it to use the sidewalks, the march does not move. After an hour of negotiation, the march line begins to break up. Protestors try to cross over to Michigan Avenue, but the Balbo and Congress bridges have been sealed off by National Guardsmen armed with .30 caliber machine guns and grenade launchers. The crowd moves north and finds that the Jackson Street bridge is unguarded. Thousands surge onto Michigan Avenue. Coincidentally, the mule train of Ralph Abernathy's Poor People's Campaign, which has a permit to go to the Amphitheatre, is passing south on Michigan. The crowd joins it. At Michigan and Balbo the crowd is halted again. Only the mule train is allowed to continue.

Deputy Police Superintendent James Rochford orders the police to clear the streets. Demonstrators and bystanders are clubbed, beaten, Maced, and arrested. Some fight back and the attack escalates. The melee last about seventeen minutes and is filmed by the TV crews positioned at the Hilton. While this was probably not the most violent episode of Convention Week—the Lincoln Park and Old Town brawls were more vicious—it drew the most attention from the mass media.

Inside the Amphitheatre, presidential nominations are underway. Senator Abraham Ribicoff, in his speech nominating George McGovern, denounces the "Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago." Mayor Daley's shouted reaction was on-camera, but off-mike. Lip-readers later decoded a vulgar rage. Hubert H. Humphrey wins the party's nomination on the first ballot.

500 antiwar delegates march from the Amphitheatre to the Hilton; many join the 4,000 protestors in Grant Park. Again, protestors are allowed to stay in the park all night.

August 29, Thursday: Senator Eugene McCarthy addresses about 5,000 gathered in Grant Park. Several attempts are made to march to the Amphitheatre. A group of delegates try to lead a march but are turned back with tear gas. Dick Gregory invites all the demonstrators to his house, which happens to be in the direction of the Amphitheatre. This too is turned back, at 18th Street.

Near midnight, the 1968 Democratic National Convention is adjourned. The arrest count for Convention Week disturbances stands at 668. An undetermined number of demonstrators sustained injuries, with hospitals reporting that they treated 111 demonstrators. The on-the-street medical teams from the Medical Committee for Human Rights estimated that their medics treated over 1,000 demonstrators at the scene. The police department reported that 192 officers were injured, with 49 officers seeking hospital treatment.

August 30, Friday: During Convention Week, 308 Americans were killed and 1,144 more were injured in the war in Vietnam.

September 9: In a press conference, Mayor Daley makes a now-famous slip of the tongue: "The policeman isn't there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder."

October 1: The House Committee on Un-American Activities convenes hearings to plumb the extent of Communist subversion in the Convention Week protests. Testifying over the course of the hearings are: Lt. Joseph Healy and Sgt. Joseph Grubisic, both of the Intelligence Division of the Chicago Police Department (the Red Squad); Robert Pierson, a Chicago police officer who went undercover and was Jerry Rubin's bodyguard; Robert Greenblatt, national coordinator of MOBE; Dr. Quentin Young of the Medical Committee for Human Rights; and soon-to-be-indicted Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and David Dellinger. (The hearings recessed on October 3rd and were concluded December 2 through 5.)

November 5: Nixon is elected, defeating Humphrey by 500,000 votes. George Wallace receives about 13% of the vote nationwide and wins five Southern states.

December 1: Public release of Rights in Conflict, commonly called the Walker Report. The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, charged with studying and reporting on urban riots, formed a Chicago Study Team headed by Daniel Walker, to investigate the Convention Week disturbances. They reviewed over 20,000 pages of statements from 3,437 eyewitnesses and participants, 180 hours of film, and over 12,000 still photographs. The Walker Report attached the label "police riot" to the events of Chicago '68. Read an excerpt—the summary to Rights in Conflict.

1969

March 29: Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Lee Weiner are indicted on Federal charges of conspiring to cross state lines with the intent of inciting violence and with individually crossing state lines to incite violence.

The same Federal grand jury that returned these criminal indictments also charged eight Chicago policemen with civil rights violations for assaulting demonstrators and news reporters. None of the policemen were convicted. (Forty-one officers of the Chicago Police Department were disciplined after internal investigations, and two resigned, for infractions like removing their badges and nameplates while on duty during Convention Week.)

June 8: Gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam begins as Nixon announces that 25,000 troops will be withdrawn.

June 18-22: SDS holds it national convention in Chicago. The organization splits into at least two factions—the Progressive Labor Party and the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM).

August 15-17: The Woodstock music festival—the "Festival of Life" a year late—convenes and communes in upstate New York.

September 24: The Chicago 8 conspiracy trial begins in the courtroom of Judge Julius Hoffman.

October 8-11: The Weatherman faction of SDS—which split off from RYM—holds its National Actions—the Days of Rage—in Chicago. As if seeking revenge for Convention Week, pipe-wielding Weathermen race through the streets, attacking police, windows, and cars.

October 15: An estimated 2 million people across the country participate in the first Moratorium against the war.

November 5: The Chicago 8 becomes the Chicago 7, when a mistrial is declared in the case of Bobby Seale and a new, separate trial is ordered. After repeatedly asserting his right to an attorney of his own choosing or to defend himself, Seale had been bound and gagged in the courtroom. He is sentenced to four years for contempt of court; the sentence is later reversed. Seale is never convicted of any Convention Week charges.

November 15: A MOBE-organized march draws 500,000 people to Washington, D.C.; 150,000 attend a march in San Francisco.

December 4: In an early morning raid, Chicago police fire nearly 100 shots into a west side apartment. Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and Party member Mark Clark are killed. One or two shots were fired by the Panthers.

1970

February 18: The Chicago 7 conspiracy trial ends. All defendants are acquitted on conspiracy charges. Froines and Weiner are acquitted on all charges. Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin are each convicted of individually crossing state lines to incite violence; each is sentenced to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. All the defendants, plus their lawyers William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, are given contempt citations ranging from 2 1/2 months to four years. Defendants are freed on bail pending an appeal.

March 6: Three members of Weathermen are killed when the bomb they are building in a New York townhouse explodes.

April 30: American troops cross over the border into Cambodia to destroy enemy camps and supplies. Student strikes shut down hundreds of college campuses over the next few days.

May 4: Four students are killed and nine injured by National Guard troops during protests at Kent State University in Ohio. In the aftermath, demonstrations spread to more than a thousand campuses and 100,000 rally in Washington, D.C.

May 15: At Jackson State College in Mississippi, two students are killed and twelve are injured when city police and highway patrolmen fire on a dormitory building.

August 24: A homemade bomb explodes in a stolen van parked at the loading dock outside the Army Math Research Center on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A graduate student is killed and five are injured. The Army Math bombing is the first loss of innocent life caused by antiwar activists and divides the Left into those who condemn it and those who justify it.

1971

June 13: The New York Times begins publication of the History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy, better known as the Pentagon Papers—a secret Defense Department study, prepared in 1967-69, of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers were leaked to the Times by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst. Go to an excerpt from the Pentagon papers.

1972

May 11: Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reverses most of the contempt citations of the Chicago Seven and their attorneys; jail time is voided for the remainder of the citations.

June 17: Five men are arrested in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington's Watergate complex.

November 1: Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reverses the conspiracy convictions of Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin.

November 7: Nixon is re-elected to a second term as President, defeating George McGovern.

1974

July 27-30: The House Judiciary Committee votes three articles of impeachment against President Nixon in connection with the Watergate burglary.

August 9: Facing possible impeachment and eroding public support, Nixon resigns.

1975

April 30: The last American personnel in Vietnam leave via helicopter from the roof of the U.S. Embassy as Saigon becomes Ho Chi Minh City.

Johnson Says He Won’t Run

Surprise Decision President Steps Aside in Unity Bid- Says ‘House’ Is Divided

By Tom Wicker
Special to The New York Times

Washington, March 31 – Lyndon Baines Johnson announced tonight: "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your President."

Later, at a White House news conference, he said his decision was "completely irrevocable."

The President told his nationwide television audience.

"What we have won when all our people were united must not be lost in partisanship. I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in partisan decisions."

Mr. Johnson, acknowledging that there was "division in the American house," withdrew in the name of national unity, which he said was "the ultimate strength of our country."

"With American sons in the field far away," he said, "with the American future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the worlds’ hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office, the Presidency of your country."

Humphrey Race Possible

Mr. Johnson left Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York and Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota as the only two declared candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

Vice President Humphrey, however, will be widely expected to seek the nomination now that his friend and political benefactor, Mr. Johnson, is out of the field. Mr. Humphrey indicated that he would have a statement on his plans tomorrow.

The President informed Mr. Humphrey of his decision during a conference at the latter’s apartment in southwest Washington today before the Vice President flew to Mexico City. There, he will represent the United States at the signing of a treaty for a Latin-American nuclear-free zone.

Surprise to Aides

If Mr. Humphrey should become a candidate, he would find most of the primaries foreclosed to him. Only those in the District of Columbia, New Jersey and South Dakota remain open.

Therefore, he would have to rely on collecting delegates in states without primaries and on White House support if he were to head off Mr. Kennedy and Mr. McCarthy.

Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon is the only announced major candidate for the Republican nomination, although Governor Rockefeller has said that he would accept the nomination if drafted.

Mr. Johnson’s announcement tonight came as a stunning surprise even to close associates. His main political strategists spent much of today conferring on campaign plans.

They were informed of what was coming just before Mr. Johnson went on national television at 9 P.M., with a prepared speech on the war in Vietnam.

As the speech unfolded, it appeared to be a strong political challenge to Mr. Kennedy and Mr. McCarthy, announcing measures that they had been advocating.

The President thus seemed to be acting in the political tradition of his office- demonstrating that his was the power to act while his critics had only the power to propose.

But Mr. Johnson was really getting ready to place himself in a more obscure tradition- that Vice Presidents who succeed to the Presidency seek only one term of their own. Before him in this century, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Harry S. Truman followed that pattern.

‘Willing to Pay Any Price’

Mr. Johnson ended his prepared speech and then launched into a peroration that had not been included in the printed text and that White House sources said he had written himself.

He began by quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt: "Of those to whom much is given- much is asked."

He could not say that no more would be asked of Americans, he continued, but he believed that "now, no less than when the decade began, this generation of Americans is willing to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

This quotation from a celebrated passage of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address of Jan. 10, 1961, appeared to be a jab at Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who now is campaigning against the war in Vietnam.

The ultimate strength of America, Mr. Johnson continued, in the rather funereal voice and with the solemn expression that he had maintained throughout his 40-minute speech, is not powerful weapons, great resources or boundless wealth but "the unity of our people."

He asserted again a political philosophy he has often expressed- that he was "a free man, an American, a public servant and a member of my party- in that order- always and only."

In his 37 years of public service, he said, he had put national unity ahead of everything because it was as true now as it had ever been that "a house divided against itself by the spirit of faction, of party, of region, of religion, of race, is a house that cannot stand."

Mr. Johnson spoke proudly of what he had accomplished in the "52 months and 10 days" since he took over the presidency, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Tex., on Nov. 22, 1963.

"Through all time to come," he said. "I think America will be a stronger nation, a more just society, a land of greater opportunity and fulfillment because of what we have all done together in these years of unparalleled achievement."

"Our reward," he said, "will come in a life of freedom and peace and hope that our children will enjoy through ages ahead."

But these gains, Mr. Johnson said, "must not now be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics….I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing."

And so it was that the man who won the biggest political landslide in American history, when he defeated Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona in the Presidential election of 1964, renounced the idea of a second term.

In American politics, a "draft" could override even words as strong as Mr. Johnson’s, and he did stop short of the ultimate denial- the assertion that he would not run if nominated nor serve if elected.

But the first reaction of close associates and of other political observers here was that he meant what he said. Moreover, the candidacies of Senator Kennedy and Senator McCarthy would make a draft even of an incumbent President virtually impossible.

Roosevelt Move Recalled

Still, if Vice-President Humphrey does not enter the race, suspicion will undoubtedly be voiced that Mr. Johnson is only trying to stimulate a draft.

Some observers with long memories recall that in 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky read the Democratic National Convention a message in which Mr. Roosevelt said that he had "never had and has not today, any desire or purpose to continue in the office of President, to be a candidate for that office, or to be nominated by the convention for that office."

The convention nevertheless nominated Mr. Roosevelt for a third term, and he won.

Mr. Roosevelt was not opposed for nomination by any candidate considered as powerful as Senator Robert Kennedy, however. In addition Senator McCarthy appears likely to win the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday, after having made a strong showing in New Hampshire.

The low point to which Mr. Johnson’s political fortunes have fallen was dramatized in a Gallup Poll published today. It showed that his conduct of his office had the approval of only 36 per cent of those polled, while his handling of the war in Vietnam was approved by only 26 per cent.

The war was unquestionably the major factor in Mr. Johnson’s slump in public esteem. He began a major escalation in February, 1965, by ordering the bombing of North Vietnam, just a few months after waging a Presidential campaign in which he had convinced most voters that he would not expand what was then a conflict involving only about 16,000 noncombatant American troops.

Over the years since then, the war has required a commitment of more than half a million combat troops, an expenditure of about $30-billion a year and heavy American casualties.

It limited Mr. Johnson’s expenditures for domestic programs, alienated many of his supporters in Congress and provoked a widespread and sometimes violent dissent- including draft card burnings, a march of thousands on the Pentagon last year, and ultimately the candidacies of Senators Kennedy and McCarthy.

‘A Nasty Fight’ Seen

Nevertheless, a close political associate of the President said tonight that Mr. Johnson had by no means been "forced" out of the race by his opponents, nor was it yet clear that he would fail to win renomination.

"It was going to be a nasty fight but he had a good chance to win it," was his summation of the political situation. He said that one factor in Mr. Johnson’s decision probably was that "this war’s upset the hell out of him" and as a result he "really didn’t have his mind on his politics."

There was some speculation tonight that Mr. Johnson might believe he could work more effectively for peace in Vietnam if he were not a partisan candidate for re-election- despite the "lame duck" status that would confer on him.

Senator Albert Gore, Democrat of Tennessee, an old antagonist of Mr. Johnson, said the withdrawal as "the greatest contribution toward unity and possible peace that President Johnson could have made."

To achieve peace, he said, will require "concessions and compromises which would subject a candidate for public office to the charge of appeasement, surrender and being soft on the Communists."

In support of this thesis, Mr. Johnson’s speech on Vietnam- which came before his withdrawal announcement- was notably conciliatory, although Senator Gore pointed out that "the President did not reveal a change in war policy tonight. He discussed only tactics- a partial bombing halt."

In the wake of the President’s announcement, some observers here were recalling signals that they had failed to recognize.

Theodore White the journalist interviewed Mr. Johnson earlier this week and is reported to have said later that the President’s remarks had a "valedictory" tone.

Others who have talked with the president lately have detected a note of "they can’t take this away from me" when he discussed his domestic and other achievements.

There was little insight here tonight on why Mr. Johnson chose to announce a withdrawal rather than to fight for renomination. One clue may have been in the theme of national unity on which he chose to base his announcement.

Almost since he took office, and at least until the political pressures generated by the war in Vietnam became intense, Mr. Johnson had sounded that same theme of unity.

Early in his Presidency, he seemed to have built a "consensus" of Americans that was reflected in the more than 60 per cent of the vote he won in 1964.

As a reflection of that vote, he could work in 1965 and 1966 with a heavily Democratic, remarkably liberal Congress that passed some of the most far-reaching social legislation of the post-war era- medical care for the aged, voting rights for Southern Negroes, Federal aid to education, and a sweeping civil rights package.

Unity Theme Recalled

Mr. Johnson campaigned on a unity theme in 1964 and as far back as when he was the Democratic leader in the Senate, from 1952 to 1960, he frequently appealed for "closing ranks" and for "working together."

In 1964, typically, he appealed to the voters to gather in "one great tent" to work together for progress and prosperity and peace.

Thus he was eminently qualified to say, as he did tonight, that "as President of all the people, I cannot disregard the peril to, the progress of the American people and the hope and the prospect of peace for all people. So I would ask all Americans whatever their personal interest or concern to guard against divisiveness and all of its ugly consequences."

On that note, Mr. Johnson took his own personal step to "guard against divisiveness."

He surprised everybody, the way he always likes to do, and it probably pleased him most that the news did not leak out before he announced it himself.

The violent confrontation of demonstrators and police in the parks and streets of Chicago during the week of the Democratic National Convention of 1968.

A report submitted by Daniel Walker, director of the Chicago Study Team, to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.

The report was publicly released on December 1, 1968 and is based on the Chicago Study Team's review of over 20,000 pages of statements from 3,437 eyewitnesses and participants, 180 hours of film, and over 12,000 still photographs. This excerpt reproduces in full the summary that prefaced the report.

A Summary

During the week of the Democratic National Convention, the Chicago police were the targets of mounting provocation by both word and act. It took the form of obscene epithets, and of rocks, sticks, bathroom titles, and even human feces hurled at police by demonstrators. Some of these acts had been planned; others were spontaneous or were themselves provoked by police action. Furthermore, the police had been put on edge by widely published threats of attempts to disrupt both the city and the Convention.

That was the nature of the provocation. The nature of the response was unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night.

That violence was made all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat. These included peaceful demonstrators, onlookers, and large numbers of residents who were simply passing through, or happened to live in, the areas where confrontations were occurring.

Newsmen and photographers were singled out for assault, and their equipment deliberately damaged. Fundamental police training was ignored; and officers, when on the scene, were often unable to control their men. As on police officer put it: "What happened didn't have anything to do with police work."

The violence reached its culmination on Wednesday night.

The report prepared by an inspector from the Los Angeles Police Department, present as an official observer, while generally praising the police restraint he had observed in the parks during the week, had this to say about the events that night:

There is no question but that many officers acted without restraint and exerted force beyond that necessary under the circumstances. The leadership at the point of conflict did little to prevent such conduct and the direct control of offices by first line supervisors was virtually non-existent.

He is referring to the police-crowd confrontations in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Most Americans know about it, having seen the 17-minute sequence played and replayed on their television screens.

But most Americans do not know that the confrontation was followed by even more brutal incidents in the Loop side streets. Or that it had been preceded by comparable instances of indiscriminate police attacks on the North Side a few nights earlier when demonstrators were cleared from Lincoln Park and pushed into the streets and alleys of Old Town.

How did it start? With the emergence long before convention week of three factors which figured significantly in the outbreak of violence. These were: threats to the city; the city's response; and the conditioning of Chicago police to expect that violence against demonstrators, as against rioters, would be condoned by city officials.

The threats to the City were varied. Provocative and inflammatory statements, made in connection with activities planned for convention week, were published and widely disseminated. There were also intelligence reports from informants.

Some of this information was absurd, like the reported plan to contaminate the city's water supply with LSD. But some were serious: and both were strengthened by the authorities' lack of any mechanism for distinguishing one from the other.

The second factor—the city's response—matched, in numbers and logistics at least, the demonstrators' threats.

The city, fearful that the "leaders" would not be able to control their followers, attempted to discourage an inundation of demonstrators by not granting permits for marches and rallies and making it quite clear that the "law" would be enforced.

Government—federal, state, and local—moved to defend itself from threats, both imaginary and real. The preparations were detailed and far ranging: from stationing firemen at each alarm box within a six block radius of the Amphitheatre to staging U.S. Army armored personnel carriers in Soldier Field under Secret Service control. Six thousand Regular Army troops in full field gear, equipped with rifles, flame throwers, and bazookas were airlifted to Chicago on Monday, August 26. About 6,000 Illinois National Guard troops had already been activated to assist the 12,000 member Chicago Police Force.

Of course, the Secret Service could never afford to ignore threats of assassination of Presidential candidates. Neither could the city, against the background of riots in 1967 and 1968, ignore the ever-present threat of ghetto riots, possibly sparked by large numbers of demonstrators, during convention week.

The third factor emerged in the city's position regarding the riots following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King and the April 27th peace march to the Civic Center in Chicago.

The police were generally credited with restraint in handling the first riots—but Mayor Daley rebuked the Superintendent of Police. While it was later modified, his widely disseminated "shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim looters" order undoubtedly had an effect.

The effect on police became apparent several weeks later, when they attacked demonstrators, bystanders, and media representatives at a Civic Center march. There were published criticisms—but the city's response was to ignore the police violence.

That was the background. On August 18, 1968, the advance contingent of demonstrators arrived in Chicago and established their base, as planned, in Lincoln Park on the city's Near North Side. Throughout the week, they were joined by others—some from the Chicago area, some from states as far away as New York and California. On the weekend before the convention began, there were about 2,000 demonstrators in Lincoln Park; the crowd grew to about 10,000 by Wednesday.

There were, of course, the hippies—the long hair and love beads, the calculated unwashedness, the flagrant banners, the open lovemaking and disdain for the constraints of conventional society. In dramatic effect, both visual and vocal, these dominated a crowd whose members actually differed widely in physical appearance, in motivation, in political affiliation, in philosophy. The crowd included Yippies come to "do their thing," youngsters working for a political candidate, professional people with dissenting political views, anarchists and determined revolutionaries, motorcycle gangs, black activists, young thugs, police and secret service undercover agents. There were demonstrators waving the Viet Cong flag and the red flag of revolution and there were the simply curious who came to watch and, in many cases, became willing or unwilling participants.

To characterize the crowd, then, as entirely hippie-Yippie, entirely "New Left," entirely anarchist, or entirely youthful political dissenters is both wrong and dangerous. The stereotyping that did occur helps explain the emotional reaction of both police and public during and after the violence that occurred.

Despite the presence of some revolutionaries, the vast majority of the demonstrators were intent on expressing by peaceful means their dissent either from the society generally or from the administration's policies in Vietnam.

Most of those intending to join the major protest demonstrations scheduled during convention week did not plan to enter the Amphitheatre and disrupt the proceedings of the Democratic convention, did not plan aggressive acts of physical provocation against the authorities, and did not plan to use rallies of demonstrators to stage an assault against any person, institution, or place of business. But while it is clear that most of the protestors in Chicago had no intention of initiating violence, this is not to say that they did not expect it to develop.

It was the clearing of the demonstrators from Lincoln Park that led directly to the violence: symbolically, it expressed the city's opposition to the protesters; literally, it forced the protesters into confrontation with police in Old Town and the adjacent neighborhoods.

The Old Town area near Lincoln Park was a scene of police ferocity exceeding that shown on television on Wednesday night. From Sunday night through Tuesday night, incidents of intense and indiscriminate violence occurred in the streets after police had swept the park clear of demonstrators.

Demonstrators attacked too. And they posed difficult problems for police as they persisted in marching through the streets, blocking traffic and intersections. But it was the police who forced them out of the park and into the neighborhood. And on the part of the police there was enough wild club swinging, enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous beating to make the conclusion inescapable that individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for crowd dispersal or arrest. To read dispassionately the hundreds of statements describing at firsthand the events of Sunday and Monday nights is to become convinced of the presence of what can only be called a police riot.

Here is an eyewitness talking about Monday night:

The demonstrators were forced out onto Clark Street and once again a traffic jam developed. Cars were stopped, the horns began to honk, people couldn't move, people got gassed inside their cars, people got stoned inside their cars, police were the objects of stones, and taunts, mostly taunts. As you must understand, most of the taunting of the police was verbal. There were stones thrown of course, but for the most part it was verbal. But there were stones being thrown and of course the police were responding with tear gas and clubs and every time they could get near enough to a demonstrator they hit him.

But again you had this problem within—this really turned into a police problem. They pushed everybody out of the park, but this night there were a lot more people in the park than there had been during the previous night and Clark Street was just full of people and in addition now was full of gas because the police were using gas on a much larger scale this night. So the police were faced with the task, which took them and hour or so, of hitting people over the head and gassing them enough to get them out of Clark Street, which they did.

But the police action was not confined to the necessary force, even in clearing the park:

A young man and his girl friend were both grabbed by officers. He screamed, "We're going, we're going," but they threw him into the pond. The officers grabbed the girl, knocked here to the ground, dragged her along the embankment and hit her with the batons on her head, arms, back and legs. The boy tried to scramble up the embankment to her, but police shoved him back in the water at least twice. He finally got to her and tried to pull her in the water, away from the police. He was clubbed on the head five or six times. An officer shouted, "Let's get the fucking bastards!" but the boy pulled her in the water and the police left.

Like the incident described above, much of the violence witnessed in Old Town that night seems malicious or mindless:

There were pedestrians. People who were not part of the demonstration were coming out of a tavern to see what the demonstration was . . . and the officers indiscriminately started beating everyone on the street who was not a policeman.

Another scene:

There was a group of about six police officers that moved in and started beating two youths. When one of the officers pulled back his nightstick to swing, one of the youths grabbed it from behind and started beating on the officer. At this point about ten officers left everybody else and ran after this youth, who turned down Wells and ran to the left.

But the officers went to the right, picked up another youth, assuming it was the one they were chasing, and took him into an empty lot and beat him. And when they got him to the ground, they just kicked him ten times—the wrong youth, the innocent youth who had been standing there.

A federal legal official relates an experience of Tuesday evening.

I then walked one block north where I met a group of 12-15 policemen. I showed them my identification and they permitted me to walk with them. The police walked one block west. Numerous people were watching us from their windows and balconies. The police yelled profanities at them, taunting them to come down where the police would beat them up. The police stopped a number of people on the street demanding identification. They verbally abused each pedestrian and pushed one or two without hurting them. We walked back to Clark Street and began to walk north where the police stopped a number of people who appeared to be protesters, and ordered them out of the area in a very abusive way. One protester who was walking in the opposite direction was kneed in the groin by a policeman who was walking towards him. The boy fell to the ground and swore at the policeman who picked him up and threw him to the ground. We continued to walk toward the command post. A derelict who appeared to be very intoxicated, walked up to the policeman and mumbled something that was incoherent. The policeman pulled from his belt a tin container and sprayed its contents into the eyes of the derelict, who stumbled around and fell on his face.

It was on these nights that the police violence against media representatives reached its peak. Much of it was plainly deliberate. A newsman was pulled aside Monday by a detective acquaintance of his who said: "The word is being passed to get newsmen." Individual newsmen were warned, "You take my picture tonight and I'm going to get you." Cries of "get the camera" preceded individual attacks on photographers.

A newspaper photographer describes Old Town on Monday at about 9:00 p.m.:

When the people arrived at the intersection of Wells and Division, they were not standing in the streets. Suddenly a column of policemen ran out from the alley. They were reinforcements. They were under control but there seemed to be no direction. One man was yelling, "Get them up on the sidewalk, turn them around." Very suddenly the police charged the people on the sidewalks and began beating their heads. A line of cameramen was 'trapped' along with the crowd along the sidewalks, and the police went down the line chopping away at the cameras.

A network cameraman reports that on the same night:

I just saw this guy coming at me with his nightstick and I had the camera up. The tip of his stick hit me right in the mouth, then I put my tongue up and noticed my tooth was gone. I turned around then to try to leave and then this cop came up behind me with his stick and jabbed me in the back.

All of the sudden these cops jumped out of the police cars and started just beating the hell out of people. And before anything else happened to me, I saw a man holding a Bell & Howell camera with big, wide letters on it, saying, 'CBS.' He apparently had been hit by a cop. And cops were standing around and there was blood streaming down his face. Another policeman was running after me and saying, "Get the fuck out of here." And I heard another guy scream, "Get their fucking cameras." And the next thing I know I was being hit on the head, and I think on the back, and I was just forced down on the ground at the corner of Division and Wells.

If the intent was to discourage coverage, it was successful in at least one case. A photographer from a news magazine says that finally, "I just stopped shooting, because every time you push the flash, they look at you and they are screaming about, 'Get the fucking photographers and get the film.' "

There is some explanation for the media-directed violence. Camera crews on at least two occasions did stage violence and fake injuries. Demonstrators did sometimes step up their activities for the benefit of TV cameras. Newsmen and photographers' blinding lights did get in the way of police clearing streets, sweeping the park, and dispersing demonstrators. Newsmen did, on occasion, disobey legitimate police orders to "move" or "clear the streets." News reporting of events did seem to the police to be anti-Chicago and anti-police.

But was the response appropriate to the provocation?

Out of the 300 newsmen assigned to cover the parks and streets of Chicago during convention week, more than 60 (about 20%) were involved in incidents resulting in injury to themselves, damage to their equipment, or to their arrest. Sixty-three newsmen were physically attacked by police: in 13 of these instances, photographic or recording equipment was intentionally damaged.

The violence did not end with either demonstrators or newsmen on the North Side on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. It continued in Grant Park on Wednesday. It occurred on Michigan Avenue in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, as already described. A high-ranking Chicago police commander admits that on occasion the police "got out of control." This same commander appears in one of the most vivid scenes of the entire week, trying desperately to keep individual policemen from beating demonstrators as he screams, "For Christ's sake, stop it!"

Thereafter the violence continued on Michigan Avenue and on the side streets running into Chicago's Loop. A federal official describes how it began:

I heard a 10-1 call [policeman in trouble] on either my radio or one of the other hand sets carried by men with me and then heard "Car 100-sweep." With a roar of motors, squads, vans, and three-wheelers came from the east, west, and north into the block north of Jackson. The crowd scattered. A big group ran west on Jackson, with a group of blue-shirted policemen in pursuit, beating at them with clubs. Some of the crowd would jump into doorways and the police would rout them out. The action was very tough. In my judgment, unnecessarily so. The police were hitting with a vengeance and quite obviously with relish. . . .

What followed was a club-swinging melee. Police ranged the streets striking anyone they could catch. To be sure, demonstrators threw things at police and at police cars; but the weight of the violence was overwhelmingly on the side of the police. A few examples will give the flavor of that night in Chicago:

"At the corner of Congress Plaza and Michigan," states a doctor, "was gathered a group of people, numbering between thirty and forty. They were trapped against a railing [along a ramp leading down from Michigan Avenue to an underground parking garage] by several policemen on motorcycles. The police charged the people on motorcycles and struck about a dozen of them, knocking several of them down. About twenty standing there jumped over the railing. On the other side of the railing was a three-to-four foot drop. None of the people who were struck by the motorcycles appeared to be seriously injured. However, several of them were limping as if they had been run over on their feet."

A UPI reporter witnessed these attacks, too. He relates in his statement that one officer, "with a smile on his face and a fanatical look in his eyes, was standing on a three-wheel cycle, shouting, 'Wahoo, wahoo,' and trying to run down people on the sidewalk." The reporter says he was chased thirty feet by the cycle.

A priest who was in the crowd says he saw a "boy, about fourteen or fifteen, white, standing on top of an automobile yelling something which was unidentifiable. Suddenly a policeman pulled him down from the car and beat him to the ground by striking him three or four times with a nightstick. Other police joined in . . . and they eventually shoved him to a police van.

"A well-dressed woman saw this incident and spoke angrily to a nearby police captain. As she spoke, another policeman came up behind her and sprayed something in her face with an aerosol can. He then clubbed her to the ground. He and two other policemen then dragged her along the ground to the same paddy wagon and threw her in."

"I ran west on Jackson," a witness states. "West of Wabash, a line of police stretching across both sidewalks and the street charged after the small group I was in. Many people were clubbed and maced as they ran. Some weren't demonstrators at all, but were just pedestrians who didn't know how to react to the charging officers yelling 'Police!'"

"A wave of police charged down Jackson," another witness relates. "Fleeing demonstrators were beaten indiscriminately and a temporary, makeshift first aid station was set up on the corner of State and Jackson. Two men lay in pools of blood, their heads severely cut by clubs. A minister moved amongst the crowd, quieting them, brushing aside curious onlookers, and finally asked a policeman to call an ambulance, which he agreed to do. . . . "

An Assistant U.S. Attorney later reported that "the demonstrators were running as fast as they could but were unable to get out of the way because of the crowds in front of them. I observed the police striking numerous individuals, perhaps 20 to 30. I saw three fall down and then overrun by the police. I observed two demonstrators who had multiple cuts on their heads. We assisted one who was in shock into a passer-by's car."

Police violence was a fact of convention week. Were the policemen who committed it a minority? It appears certain that they were—but one which has imposed some of the consequences of its actions on the majority, and certainly on their commanders. There has been no public condemnation of these violators of sound police procedures and common decency by either their commanding officers or city officials. Nor (at the time this report is being completed—almost three months after the convention) has any disciplinary action been taken against most of them. That some policemen lost control of themselves under exceedingly provocative circumstances can be understood; but not condoned. If no action is taken against them, the effect can only be to discourage the majority of policemen who acted responsibly, and further weaken the bond between police and community.

Although the crowds were finally dispelled on the nights of violence in Chicago, the problems they represent have not been. Surely this is not the last time that a violent dissenting group will clash head-on with those whose duty it is to enforce the law. And the next time the whole world will still be watching.

The Pentagon Papers
Gravel Edition
Volume 1
Chapter I, "Background to the Crisis, 1940-50," pp. 1-52.
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971)

"The contents of this volume are drawn from the official record of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds. No copyright is claimed in the text of this official Government document."

Summary
INDOCHINA IN U.S. WARTIME POLICY, 1941-1945

Significant misunderstanding has developed concerning U.S. policy towards Indochina in the decade of World War II and its aftermath. A number of historians have held that anti-colonialism governed U.S. policy and actions up until 1950, when containment of communism supervened. For example, Bernard Fall (e.g. in his 1967 postmortem book, Last Reflections on a War) categorized American policy toward Indochina in six periods: "(1) Anti-Vichy, 1940-1945; (2) Pro-Viet Minh, 1945-1946; (3) Non-involvement, 1946-June 1950; (4) Pro-French, 1950-July 1954; (5) Non-military involvement, 1954-November 1961; (6) Direct and full involvement, 1961- ." Commenting that the first four periods are those "least known even to the specialist," Fall developed the thesis that President Roosevelt was determined "to eliminate the French from Indochina at all costs," and had pressured the Allies to establish an international trusteeship to administer Indochina until the nations there were ready to assume full independence. This obdurate anti-colonialism, in Fall's view, led to cold refusal of American aid for French resistance fighters, and to a policy of promoting Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh as the alternative to restoring the French bonds. But, the argument goes, Roosevelt died, and principle faded; by late 1946, anti-colonialism mutated into neutrality. According to Fall: "Whether this was due to a deliberate policy in Washington or, conversely, to an absence of policy, is not quite clear. . . . The United States, preoccupied in Europe, ceased to be a diplomatic factor in Indochina until the outbreak of the Korean War." In 1950, anti-communism asserted itself, and in a remarkable volte-face, the United States threw its economic and military resources behind France in its war against the Viet Minh. Other commentators, conversely-prominent among them, the historians of the Viet Minh-have described U.S. policy as consistently condoning and assisting the reimposition of French colonial power in Indochina, with a concomitant disregard for the nationalist aspirations of the Vietnamese.

Neither interpretation squares with the record; the United States was less concerned over Indochina, and less purposeful than either assumes. Ambivalence characterized U.S. policy during World War 11, and was the root of much subsequent misunderstanding. On the one hand, the U.S. repeatedly reassured the French that its colonial possessions would be returned to it after the war. On the other band, the U.S. broadly committed itself in the Atlantic Charter to support national self-determination, and President Roosevelt personally and vehemently advocated independence for Indochina. F.D.R. regarded Indochina as a flagrant example of onerous colonialism which should be turned over to a trusteeship rather than returned to France. The President discussed this proposal with the Allies at the Cairo, Teheran, and Yalta Conferences and received the endorsement of Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin; Prime Minister Churchill demurred. At one point, Fall reports, the President offered General de Gaulle Filipino advisers to help France establish a "more progressive policy in Indochina"--which offer the General received in "Pensive Silence."

Ultimately, U.S. Policy was governed neither by the principle s of the Atlantic Charter, nor by the President's anti-colonialism but by the dictates of military strategy and by British intransigence on the colonial issue. The United States, concentrating its forces against Japan, accepted British military primacy in Southeast Asia, and divided Indochina at 16th parallel between the British and the Chinese for the purposes of occupation. . U.S. commanders serving with the British and Chinese, while instructed to avoid ostensible alignment with the French, were permitted to conduct operations in Indochina which did not detract from the campaign against Japan. Consistent with F.D.R.'s guidance, U.S. did provide modest aid to French--and Viet Minh--resistance forces in Vietnam after March, 1945, but refused to provide shipping to move Free French troops there. Pressed by both the British and the French for clarification U.S. intentions regarding the political status of Indochina, F.D.R- maintained that "it is a matter for postwar."

The President's trusteeship concept foundered as early as March 1943, when the U.S. discovered that the British, concerned over possible prejudice to Commonwealth policy, proved to be unwilling to join in any declaration on trusteeships, and indeed any statement endorsing national independence which went beyond the Atlantic Charter's vague "respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live." So sensitive were the British on this point that the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of 1944, at which the blueprint for the postwar international system was negotiated, skirted the colonial issue, and avoided trusteeships altogether. At each key decisional point at which the President could have influenced the course of events toward trusteeship--in relations with the U.K., in casting the United Nations Charter, in instructions to allied commanders--he declined to do so; hence, despite his lip service to trusteeship and anti-colonialism, F.D.R. in fact assigned to Indochina a status correlative to Burma, Malaya, Singapore and Indonesia: free territory to be reconquered and returned to its former owners. Non-intervention by the U.S. on behalf of the Vietnamese was tantamount to acceptance of the French return. On April 3, 1945, with President Roosevelt's approval, Secretary of State Stettinius issued a statement that, as a result of the Yalta talks, the U.S. would look to trusteeship as a postwar arrangement only for "territories taken from the enemy," and for "territories as might voluntarily be placed under trusteeship." By context, and by the Secretary of State's subsequent interpretation, Indochina fell into the latter category. Trusteeship status for Indochina became, then, a matter for French determination.

Shortly following President Truman's entry into office, the U.S. assured France that it had never questioned, "even by implication, French sovereignty over Indo-China." The U.S. policy was to press France for progressive measures in Indochina, but to expect France to decide when its peoples would be ready for independence; "such decisions would preclude the establishment of a trusteeship in Indochina except with the consent of the French Government." These guidelines, established by June, 1945--before the end of the war—remained fundamental to U.S. policy.

With British cooperation, French military forces were reestablished in South Vietnam in September, 1945. The U.S. expressed dismay at the outbreak of guerrilla warfare which followed, and pointed out that while it had no intention of opposing the reestablishment of French control, "it is not the policy of this government to assist the French to reestablish their control over Indochina by force, and the willingness of the U.S. to see French control reestablished assumes that [the] French claim to have the support of the population in Indochina is borne out by future events." Through the fall and winter of 1945-1946, the U.S. received a series of requests from Ho Chi Minh for intervention in Vietnam; these were, on the record, unanswered. However, the U.S. steadfastly refused to assist the French military effort, e.g., forbidding American flag vessels to carry troops or war materiel to Vietnam. On March 6, 1946, the French and Ho signed an Accord in which Ho acceded to French reentry into North Vietnam in return for recognition of the DRV as a "Free State," part of the French Union. As of April 1946, allied occupation of Indochina was officially terminated, and the U.S. acknowledged to France that all of Indochina had reverted to French control. Thereafter, the problems of U.S. policy toward Vietnam were dealt with in the context of the U.S. relationship with France.
U.S. NEUTRALITY IN THE FRANCO-VIET MINH WAR, 1946-1949

In late 1946, the Franco-Viet Minh War began in earnest. A chart (pp. 37 ff) summarizes the principal events in the relations between France and Vietnam, 1946-1949, describing the milestones along the route by which France, on the one hand, failed to reach any lasting accommodation with Ho Chi Minh, and, on the other hand, erected the "Bao Dai solution" in its stead. The U.S. during these years continued to regard the conflict as fundamentally a matter for French resolution. The U.S. in its representations to France deplored the prospect of protracted war, and urged meaningful concessions to Vietnamese nationalism. However, the U.S., deterred by the history of Ho's communist affiliation, always stopped short of endorsing Ho Chi Minh or the Viet Minh. Accordingly, U.S. policy gravitated with that of France toward the Bao Dai solution. At no point was the U.S. prepared to adopt an openly interventionist course. To have done so would have clashed with the expressed British view that Indochina was an exclusively French concern, and played into the hands of France's extremist political parties of both the Right and the Left. The U.S. was particularly apprehensive lest by intervening it strengthen the political position of French Communists. Beginning in 1946 and 1947, France and Britain were moving toward an anti-Soviet alliance in Europe and the U.S. was reluctant to press a potentially divisive policy. The U.S. [words illegible] Vietnamese nationalism relatively insignificant compared with European economic recovery and collective security from communist domination.

It is not as though the U.S. was not prepared to act in circumstances such as these. For example, in the 1945-1946 dispute over Dutch possessions in Indonesia, the U.S. actively intervened against its Dutch ally. In this case, however, the intervention was in concert with the U.K. (which steadfastly refused similar action in Indochina) and against the Netherlands, a much less significant ally in Europe than France. In wider company and at projected lower cost, the U.S. could and did show a determination to act against colonialism.

The resultant U.S. policy has most often been termed "neutrality." It was, however, also consistent with the policy of deferring to French volition announced by President Roosevelt's Secretary of State on 3 April 1945. It was a policy characterized by the same indecision that had marked U.S. wartime policy. Moreover, at the time, Indochina appeared to many to be one region in the troubled postwar world in which the U.S. might enjoy the luxury of abstention.

In February, 1947, early in the war, the U.S. Ambassador in Paris was instructed to reassure Premier Ramadier of the "very friendliest feelings" of the U.S. toward France and its interest in supporting France in recovering its economic, political and military strength:

In spite any misunderstanding which might have arisen in minds French in regard to our position concerning Indochina they must appreciate that we have fully recognized France's sovereign position in that area and we do not wish to have it appear that we are in any way endeavoring undermine that position, and French should know it is our desire to be helpful and we stand ready assist any appropriate way we can to find solution for Indochinese problem. At same time we cannot shut our eyes to fact that there are two sides this problem and that our reports indicate both a lack French understanding of other side (more in Saigon than in Paris) and continued existence dangerously Outmoded colonial outlook and methods in area. Furthermore, there is no escape from fact that trend of times is to effect that colonial empires in XIX Century sense are rapidly becoming thing of past. Action Brit in India and Burma and Dutch in Indonesia are outstanding examples this trend, and French themselves took cognizance of it both in new Constitution and in their agreements with Vietnam. On other hand we do not lose sight fact that Ho Chi Minh has direct Communist connections and it should be obvious that we are not interested in seeing colonial empire administrations supplanted by philosophy and political organizations emanating from and controlled by Kremlin. . . .

Frankly we have no solution of problem to suggest. It is basically matter for two parties to work out themselves and from your reports and those from Indochina we are led to feel that both parties have endeavored to keep door open to some sort of settlement. We appreciate fact that Vietnam started present fighting in Indochina on December 19 and that this action has made it more difficult for French to adopt a position of generosity and conciliation. Nevertheless we hope that French will find it possible to be more than generous in trying to find a solution.

The U.S. anxiously followed the vacillations of France's policy toward Bao Dai, exhorting the French to translate the successive "agreements" they contracted with him into an effective nationalist alternative to Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh. Increasingly, the U.S. sensed that French unwillingness to concede political power to Vietnamese heightened the possibility of the Franco-Viet Minh conflict being transformed into a struggle with Soviet imperialism. U.S. diplomats were instructed to "apply such persuasion and/or pressure as is best calculated [to] produce desired result [of France's] unequivocally and promptly approving the principle of Viet independence." France was notified that the U.S. was willing to extend financial aid to a Vietnamese government not a French puppet, "but could not give consideration of altering its present policy in this regard unless real progress [is] made in reaching non-Communist solution in Indochina based on cooperation of true nationalists of that country."

As of 1948, however, the U.S. remained uncertain that Ho and the Viet Minh were in league with the Kremlin. A State Department appraisal of Ho Chi Minh in July 1948, indicated that:

1. Depts info indicates that Ho Chi Minh is Communist. His long and well-known record in Comintern during twenties and thirties, continuous support by French Communist newspaper Humanite since 1945, praise given him by Radio Moscow (which for past six months has been devoting increasing attention to Indochina) and fact he has been called "leading communist" by recent Russian publications as well as Daily Worker makes any other conclusion appear to be wishful thinking.

2. Dept has no evidence of direct link between Ho and Moscow but assumes it exists, nor is it able evaluate amount pressure or guidance Moscow exerting. We have impression Ho must be given or is retaining large degree latitude. Dept considers that USSR accomplishing its immediate aims in Indochina by (a) pinning down large numbers of French troops, (b) causing steady drain upon French economy thereby tending retard recovery and dissipate ECA assistance to France, and (c) denying to world generally surpluses which Indochina normally has available thus perpetuating conditions of disorder and shortages which favorable to growth cornmunism. Furthermore, Ho seems quite capable of retaining and even strengthening his grip on Indochina with no outside assistance other than continuing procession of French puppet govts.

In the fall of 1948, the Office of Intelligence Research in the Department of State conducted a survey of communist influence in Southeast Asia. Evidence of Kremlin-directed conspiracy was found in virtually all countries except Vietnam:

Since December 19, 1946, there have been continuous conflicts between French forces and the nationalist government of Vietnam. This government is a coalition in which avowed communists hold influential positions. Although the French admit the influence of this government, they have consistently refused to deal with its leader, Ho Chi Minh, on the grounds that he is a communist.

To date the Vietnam press and radio have not adopted an anti-American position. It is rather the French colonial press that has been strongly anti-American and has freely accused the U.S. of imperialism in Indochina to the point of approximating the official Moscow position. Although the Vietnam radio has been closely watched for a new position toward the U.S., no change has appeared so far. Nor does there seem to have been any split within the coalition government of Vietnam. . . .

Evaluation. If there is a Moscow directed conspiracy in Southeast Asia, Indochina is an anomaly so far. Possible explanations are:

1. No rigid directives have been issued by Moscow

2. The Vietnam government considers that it has no rightist elements that must be purged.

3. The Vietnam Communists are not subservient to the foreign policies pursued by Moscow.

4. A special dispensation for the Vietnam government has been arranged in Moscow.

Of these possibilities, the first and fourth seem most likely.

ORIGINS OF U.S. INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM

The collapse of the Chinese Nationalist government in 1949 sharpened American apprehensions over communist expansion in the Far East, and hastened U.S. measures to counter the threat posed by Mao's China. The U.S. sought to create and employ policy instruments similar to those it was bringing into play against the Soviets in Europe: collective security organizations, economic aid, and military assistance. For example, Congress, in the opening paragraphs of the law it passed in 1949 to establish the first comprehensive military assistance program, expressed itself "as favoring the creation by the free countries and the free peoples of the Far East of a joint organization, consistent with the Charter of the United Nations, to establish a program of self-help and mutual cooperation designed to develop their economic and social well-being, to safeguard basic rights and liberties, and to protect their security and independence.." But, the negotiating of such an organization among the disparate powers and political entities of the Far East was inherently more complex a matter than the North Atlantic Treaty nations had successfully faced. The U.S. decided that the impetus for collective security in Asia should come from the Asians, but by late 1949, it also recognized that action was necessary in Indochina. Thus, in the closing months of 1949, the course of U.S. policy was set to block further communist expansion in Asia: by collective security if the Asians were forthcoming; by collaboration with major European allies and commonwealth nations, if possible; but bilaterally if necessary. On that policy course lay the Korean War of 1950-1953, the forming of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization of 1954, and the progressively deepening U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

January and February, 1950, were pivotal months. The French took the first concrete steps toward transferring public administration to Bao Dai's State of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh denied the legitimacy of the latter, proclaiming the DRV as the "only legal government of the Vietnam people," and was formally recognized by Peking and Moscow. On 29 January 1950, the French Nation, Assembly approved legislation granting autonomy to the State of Vietnam. 0n February 1, 1950, Secretary of State Acheson made the following public statement:

The recognition by the Kremlin of Ho Chi Minh's communist movement in Indochina comes as a surprise. The Soviet acknowledgment of this movement should remove any illusions as to the "nationalist" nature of Ho Chi Minh's aims and reveals Ho in his true colors as the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina.

Although timed in an effort to cloud the transfer of sovereignty France to the legal Governments of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, we have every reason to believe that those legal governments will proceed in their development toward stable governments representing the true nationalist sentiments of more than 20 million peoples of Indochina.

French action in transferring sovereignty to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia has been in process for some time. Following French ratification, which is expected within a few days, the way will be open for recognition of these local governments by the countries of the world whose policies support the development of genuine national independence in former colonial areas. . . .

Formal French ratification of Vietnamese independence was announced 4 February 1950; on the same date, President Truman approved U.S. recognition for Bao Dai. French requests for aid in Indochina followed within a few weeks. On May 8, 1950, the Secretary of State announced that:

The United States Government convinced that neither national independence nor democratic evolution exist in any area dominated by Soviet imperialism, considers the situation to be such as to warrant its according economic aid and military equipment to the Associated State of Indochina and to France in order to assist them in restoring stability and permitting these states to pursue their peaceful and democratic development.

The U.S. thereafter was deeply involved in the developing war. But it cannot be said that the extension of aid was a volte-face of U.S. policy precipitated solely by the events of 1950. It appears rather as the denouement of a cohesive progression of U.S. policy decisions stemming from the 1945 determination that France should decide the political future of Vietnamese nationalism. Neither the modest O.S.S. aid to the Viet Minh in 1945, nor the U.S. refusal to abet French recourse to arms the same year, signaled U.S. backing of Ho Chi Minh. To the contrary, the U.S. was very wary of Ho, apprehensive lest Paris' imperialism be succeeded by control from Moscow. Uncertainty characterized the U.S. attitude toward Ho through 1948, but the U.S. incessantly pressured France to accommodate "genuine" Vietnamese nationalism and independence. In early 1950, both the apparent fruition of the Bao Dai solution, and the patent alignment of the DRV with the USSR and Communist China, impelled the U.S. to more direct intervention in Vietnam.

(End of Summary)
1. INDOCHINA IN U.S. WARTIME POLICY, 1941-1945

In the interval between the fall of France in 1940, and the Pearl Harbor attack in December, 1941, the United States watched with increasing apprehension the flux of Japanese military power into Indochina. At first the United States urged Vichy to refuse Japanese requests for authorization to use bases there, but was unable to offer more than vague assurances of assistance, such as a State Department statement to the French Ambassador on 6 August 1940 that:

We have been doing and are doing everything possible within the framework of our established policies to keep the situation in the Far East stabilized; that we have been progressively taking various steps, the effect of which has been to exert economic pressure on Japan; that our Fleet is now based on Hawaii, and that the course which we have been following, as indicated above, gives a clear indication of our intentions and activities for the future.

The French Ambassador replied that:

In his opinion the phrase "within the framework of our established policies." when associated with the apparent reluctance of the American Government to consider the use of military force in the Far East at this particular time, to mean that the United States would not use military or naval force in support of any position which might be taken to resist the Japanese attempted aggression on Indochina. The Ambassador [feared] that the French Government would, under the indicated pressure of the Japanese Government, be forced to accede . . .

The fears of the French Ambassador were realized. In 1941, however, Japan went beyond the use of bases to demands for a presence in Indochina tantamount to occupation. President Roosevelt himself expressed the heightening U.S. alarm to the Japanese Ambassador, in a conversation recorded by Acting Secretary of State Welles as follows:

The President then went on to say that this new move by Japan in Indochina created an exceedingly serious problem for the United States . . . the cost of any military occupation is tremendous and the occupation itself is not conducive to the production by civilians in occupied countries of food supplies and new materials of the character required by Japan. Had Japan undertaken to obtain the supplies she required from Indochina in a peaceful way, she not only would have obtained larger quantities of such supplies, but would have obtained them with complete security and without the draining expense of a military occupation. Furthermore, from the military standpoint, the President said, surely the Japanese Government could not have in reality the slightest belief that China, Great Britain, the Netherlands or the United States had any territorial designs on Indochina nor were in the slightest degree providing any real threats of aggression against Japan. This Government, consequently, could only assume that the occupation of Indochina was being undertaken by Japan for the purpose of further offense and this created a situation which necessarily must give the United States the most serious disquiet . . .

. . . The President stated that if the Japanese Government would refrain from occupying Indochina with its military and naval forces, or, had such steps actually been commenced, if the Japanese Government would withdraw such forces, the President could assure the Japanese Government that he would do everything within his power to obtain from the Governments of China, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and of course the United States itself a binding and solemn declaration, provided Japan would undertake the same commitment, to regard Indochina as a neutralized country in the same way in which Switzerland had up to now been regarded by the powers as a neutralized country. He stated that this would imply that none of the powers concerned would undertake any military act of aggression against Indochina and would remain in control of the territory and would not be confronted with attempts to dislodge them on the part of de Gaullist or Free French agents or forces.

The same date, Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed Sumner Welles to see the Japanese Ambassador, and

Make clear the fact that the occupation of Indochina by Japan possibly means one further important step to seizing control of the South Sea area, including trade routes of supreme importance to the United States controlling such products as rubber, tin and other commodities. This was of vital concern to the United States. The Secretary said that if we did not bring out this point our people will not understand the significance of this movement into Indochina. The Secretary mentioned another point to be stressed: there is no theory on which Indochina could be flooded with armed forces, aircraft, et cetera, for the defense of Japan. The only alternative is that this venture into Indochina has a close relation to the South Sea area and its value for offense against that area.

In a press statement of 2 August 1941, Acting Secretary of State Welles deplored Japan's "expansionist aims" and impugned Vichy:

Under these circumstances, this Government is impelled to question whether the French Government at Vichy in fact proposes to maintain its declared policy to preserve for the French people the territories both at home and abroad which have long been under French sovereignty.

This Government, mindful of its traditional friendship for France, has deeply sympathized with the desire of the French people to maintain their territories and to preserve them intact. In its relations with the French Government at Vichy and with-the local French authorities in French territories, the United States will be governed by the manifest effectiveness with which those authorities endeavor to protect these territories from domination and control by those powers which are seeking to extend their rule by force and conquest, or by the threat thereof.

On the eve of Pearl Harbor, as part of the U.S. attempt to obtain Japanese consent to a non-aggression pact, the U.S. again proposed neutralization of Indochina in return for Japanese withdrawal. The events of 7 December 1941 put the question of the future of Indochina in the wholly different context of U.S. strategy for fighting World War 11.
A. ROOSEVELT'S TRUSTEESHIP CONCEPT

U.S. policy toward Indochina during World War 11 was ambivalent. On the one hand, the U.S. appeared to support Free French claims to all of France's overseas dominions. The U.S. early in the war repeatedly expressed or implied to the French an intention to restore to France its overseas empire after the war. These U.S. commitments included the August 2, 1941, official statement on the Franco-Japanese agreement; a December, 1941, Presidential letter to P6tain; a March 2, 1942, statement on New Caledonia; a note to the French Ambassador of April 13, 1942; Presidential statements and messages at the time of the North Africa invasion; the Clark-Darlan Agreement of November 22, 1942; and a letter of the same month from the President's Personal Representative to General Henri Giraud, which included the following reassurance:

. . . The restoration of France to full independence, in all the greatness and vastness which it possessed before the war in Europe as well as overseas, is one of the war aims of the United Nations. It is thoroughly understood that French sovereignty will be re-established as soon as possible throughout all the territory, metropolitan or colonial, over which flew the French flag in 1939.

On the other hand, in the Atlantic Charter and other pronouncements the U.S. proclaimed support for national self-determination and independence. Moreover, the President of the United States, especially distressed at the Vichy "sell-out" to Japan in Indochina, often cited French rule there as a flagrant example of onerous and exploitative colonialism, and talked of his determination to turn Indochina over to an international trusteeship after the war. In early 1944, Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador in Washin-ton, called on Secretary of State Hull to inquire whether the President's "rather definite" statements "that Indochina should be taken away from the French and put under an international trusteeship"-made to "Turks, Egyptians and perhaps others" during his trip to Cairo and Teheran-represented "final conclusions in view of the fact that they would soon get back to the French (The French marked well the President's views-in fact as France withdrew from Vietnam in 1956, its Foreign Minister recalled Roosevelt's assuring the Sultan of Morocco that his sympathies lay with colonial peoples struggling for independence. Lord Halifax later recorded that:

The President was one of the people who used conversation as others of us use a first draft on paper . . . a method of trying out an idea. If it does not go well, you can modify it or drop it as you will. Nobody thinks anything of it if you do this with a paper draft; but if you do it with conversation, people say that you have changed your mind, that "you never knew where you have him," and so on.

But in response to a memorandum from Secretary of State Hull putting the question of Indochina to F.D.R., and reminding the President of the numerous U.S. commitments to restoration of the French empire, Roosevelt replied (on January 24, 1944), that:

I saw Halifax last week and told him quite frankly that it was perfectly true that I had, for over a year, expressed the opinion that Indo-China should not go back to France but that it should be administered by an international trusteeship. France has had the country-thirty million inhabitants for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning.

As a matter of interest, I am wholeheartedly supported in this view by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and by Marshal Stalin. I see no reason to play in with the British Foreign Office in this matter. The only reason they seem to oppose it is that they fear the effect it would have on their own possessions and those of the Dutch. They have never liked the idea of trusteeship because it is, in some instances, aimed at future independence. This is true in the case of Indo-China.

Each case must, of course, stand on its own feet, but the case of IndoChina is perfectly clear. France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indo-China are entitled to something better than that.

1. Military Strategy Pre-eminent

Throughout the year 1944, the President held to his views, and consistent with them, proscribed U.S. aid to resistance groups-including French groups-in Indochina. But the war in the Asian theaters moved rapidly, and the center of gravity of the American effort began to shift northward toward Japan. The question of U.S. strategy in Southeast Asia then came to the fore. At the Second Quebec Conference (September, 1944), the U.S. refused British offers of naval assistance against Japan because Admiral King believed "the best occupation for any available British forces would be to re-take Singapore, and to assist the Dutch in recovering the East Indies," and because he suspected that the offer 11 was perhaps not unconnected with a desire for United States help in clearing the Japanese out of the Malay States and Netherlands East Indies." Admiral King's suspicions were not well-founded, at least insofar as Churchill's strategic thought was concerned. The Prime Minister was evidently as unwilling to invite an active American role in the liberation of Southeast Asia as the U.S. was to undertake same; as early as February, 1944, Churchill wrote that:

A decision to act as a subsidiary force under the Americans in the Pacific raises difficult political questions about the future of our Malayan possessions. If the Japanese should withdraw from them or make peace as the result of the main American thrust, the United States Government would after the victory feel greatly strengthened in its view that all possessions in the East Indian Archipelago should be placed under some international body upon which the United States would exercise a decisive concern.

The future of Commonwealth territories in Southeast Asia stimulated intense British interest in American intentions for French colonies there. In November and December of 1944, the British expressed to the United States, both in London and in Washington, their concern "that the United States apparently has not yet determined upon its policy toward Indochina." The head of the Far Eastern Department in the British Foreign Office told the U.S. Ambassador that:

It would be difficult to deny French participation in the liberation of Indochina in light of the increasing strength of the French Government in world affairs, and that, unless a policy to be followed toward Indochina is mutually agreed between our two governments, circumstances may arise at any moment which will place our two governments in a very awkward situation.

President Roosevelt, however, refused to define his position further, notifying Secretary of State Stettinius on January 1, 1945:

I still do not want to get mixed up in any Indo-China decision. It is a matter for postwar.-- . . . I do not want to get mixed up in any military effort toward the liberation of Indo-China from the Japanese.--You can tell Halifax that I made this very clear to Mr. Churchill. From both the military and civil point of view, action at this time is premature.

However, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were concurrently planning the removal of American armed forces from Southeast Asia. In response to approaches from French and Dutch officials requesting aid in expelling Japan from their former colonial territories, the U.S. informed them that:

All our available forces were committed to fighting the Japanese elsewhere in the Pacific, and Indochina and the East Indies were therefore not included within the sphere of interest of the American Chiefs of Staff.

American willingness to forego further operations in Southeast Asia led to a directive to Admiral Lord Mountbatten, Supreme Commander in that theater, to liberate Malaya without U.S. assistance. After the Yalta Conference (February, 1945), U.S. commanders in the Pacific were informed that the U.S. planned to turn over to the British responsibility for operations in the Netherlands East Indies and New Guinea. The President, however, agreed to permit such U.S. military operations in Indochina as avoided "alignments with the French," and detraction from the U.S. military campaign against Japan. The latter stricture precluded, in the U.S. view, the U.S. cooperation with the French at Mountbatten's headquarters, or the furnishing of ships to carry Free French forces to Indochina to undertake its liberation. This U.S. position came under particularly severe French criticism after 11 March 1945, when the Japanese overturned the Vichy regime in Vietnam, and prompted the Emperor Bao Dai to declare Vietnam unified and independent of France under Japanese protection. On 16 March 1945, a protest from General de Gaulle led to the following exchange between the Secretary of State and the President:

DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Washington
March 16, 1945

MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT

Subject: Indo-China.

Communications have been received from the Provisional Government of the French Republic asking for:

(1)Assistance for the resistance groups now fighting the Japanese in Indo-China.

(2) Conclusion of a civil affairs agreement covering possible future operations in Indo-China.

These memoranda have been referred to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in order to obtain their views concerning the military aspects of the problems, and I shall communicate with you further on the subject upon receipt of the Joint Chiefs' reply.

Attached herewith is the text of a recent telegram from Ambassador Caffery describing his conversation with General de Gaulle on the subject of Indo-China. From this telegram and de Gaulle's speech of March 14, it appears that this Government may be made to appear responsible for the weakness of the resistance to Japan in Indo-China. The British may likewise be expected to encourage this view. It seems to me that without prejudicing in any way our position regarding the future of Indo-China we can combat this trend by making public [material illegible] a suggested statement, subject to your approval, by the State Department.

/s/ E. R. Stettinius, Jr.

Enclosures:

Introduction: The Left Turn
By Susan Martin

Personally, I always held my flower in a clenched fist.
--Abbie Hoffman

I wasn't the one who littered. Nor was it the dozen or so protohippies and ersatz Marxists, their bodies bent against the gale-force winds, marching in front of Kirkland Air Force Base on the occasion of the First International Days of Protest against the war in Viet Nam. The year was 1965, the place Albuquerque, New Mexico, and when the police arrested the entire demonstration--all fourteen of us--for littering and obscene literature, it changed my life forever.

At the time of my arrest, I was a sophomore at the University of New Mexico and a member of the W.E.B. DuBois Club. I was naive and idealistic and thought the club a nice, liberal antiwar group, not the "Communist front" the FBI had pegged it. The campus was ruled by shitkickers and greeks, and the state by the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, with bases strung like deadly pearls from White Sands Missile Range in the south to Los Alamos Nuclear Research in the north. Too young to have participated in the Civil Rights movement, like many of my generation I was nevertheless a beneficiary of its fervor and impetus to reexamine received ideas and to challenge the status quo. The sixties were not The Sixties, yet. Two hundred million Americans sandwiched between the two coasts were just awakening to long hair, the sexual revolution, the Mothers of Invention and the Doors, psychedelics, pot, and the other new cultural trappings liberally purveyed along the Sunset Strip, in Greenwich Village, and on college campuses throughout the country.

Like hundreds of thousands of my generation, the war in Viet Nam was a seminal event in our psychic and social development. The forces for change that came together to create the antiwar movement were part of a zeitgeist that brought down the carefully constructed myths of a powerful and duplicitous government, and also unleashed an unprecedented revolution in social mores and a tidal wave of cultural production. It was a time of good vibes and bad trips, SDS and STP, burning bras and draft cards, the enemy pigs and the Family Dog. The fabled "military-industrial complex" was real, the lie of beneficent American paternalism was stripped of its veneer to reveal imperialism, and the rhetoric of liberation and revolution rang in the air.

Decade of Protest: Political Posters from the United States, Viet Nam and Cuba 1965-1975 at Track 16 Gallery organized with the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, brings together two remarkable collections: Tom Patchett's breathtaking collection of original art for posters from North Viet Nam, and the Center's vast holdings in political graphics. The exhibition provides a window onto an age of conflicting ideologies and social upheavals on a grand scale, utilizing the power of visual imagery to concretely render one of the defining events of that era: the Viet Nam War. Even in the most desperate situations, people express themselves in creative languages that both reveal and surpass the meanings of the conflict (and consensus) they were devised to reflect. This decade of protest stimulated arts of an amazing variety and richness, and this exhibition makes patently clear that political posters--often considered the poor stepchildren of graphic arts because they sell unpopular ideas rather than a consumer product--must be viewed as potent graphic statements in their own right, not just because they are aesthetically engaging, but also because of what they are.

Throughout this catalogue, I have endeavored to balance the social, political, and aesthetic concerns of the diverse cultures in the exhibition. The distance between them is measured in more than miles, as can be seen in the range of essays [in the hardcopy catalog]. Each contributor has bridged the gulf of time and place to instill these poignant artifacts with contemporary meaning. The social commentary revealed through the graphics of each country is astutely brought to light in "Viet Nam," by Carol Wells, founder and executive director of Los Angeles' Center for the Study of Political Graphics, who, together with Antonette DeVito of Track 16 Gallery, curated the exhibition of more than 120 posters. Delineating the themes and contrasting the political realities as well as the graphics Wells' insights into the context and content of the posters bring into focus the issues of those turbulent times that paradoxically formed the backdrop for the posters' singular creativity.

Carlo McCormick, senior editor of the culture magazine Paper, turns his critical eye to the mediating effect of television and the deconstruction of tried and true American icons to examine the graphic urgency and polemical force of the antiwar movement in the U.S.. Contextualizing the posters, he investigates the medium's potential for provocation and its contributions to the sixties atmosphere of rebellion, liberation, and dissent. Examining the visual threads inherent in the posters' design, he traces their roots from the broadsheets that functioned as manifestos in the Protestant Reformation's fifteenth-century fight against the Catholic Church through the lampooning of nineteenth-century political cartoonists to the rampant appropriation of Pop art and beyond, to locate their significance in the postmodernist critique of culture.

Among the most profound revelations of Decade of Protest are the posters from North Viet Nam that have recently come to light with the normalization of relations. Nguyen Ngoc Dung, professor of art criticism at the School of Industrial Arts in Ha Noi since 1961, has taught at the very epicenter of revolutionary poster production. He offers surprising insights into the power of the posters to motivate and inspire the Vietnamese at a time of ferocious adversity. Given free reign to write about any aspect of the history, artistry or political content of the posters, he returns again and again to the posters' role as a rallying point for the passions ignited by the war, and he does not shy from describing them as propaganda in "Why Viet Nam Won the War."

Like the posters themselves, my journey backwards through the artifacts surrounding the war turned up astounding new insights and information. Poetry is ubiquitous in Vietnamese society and functions as a numinous refrain in the people's lives. In the trenches in the thick of war, Vietnamese soldiers wrote movingly of love, home, landscapes, and other poignant motifs. Recently collected in Poems from Captured Documents, the poems offer a tender interlude, an antidote to the terrifying realities of war.

At the time of the war, Cuba's successful revolution had fired the imagination of an entire generation. Posters of the revolutionary hero Ché Guevara graced the walls of college dormitories nationwide. David Kunzle, a professor of art history at UCLA and an expert on political graphics, points out in his essay "Cuba's Art of Solidarity" that the country's advances in literacy and other quality of life indicators presented an inspiring model to the rest of the world. If youth in America identified with Cuba's revolutionary struggle, the Cubans expressed overwhelming solidarity with the Vietnamese fight against the common enemy--U.S. imperialism--in hundreds of posters in every conceivable modernist style.

The Viet Nam War was a lighting rod for the social disaffection mirrored in the struggle of black Americans for equality and justice. In America, liberation and revolution became the watchwords of the decade, as resistance to the war made strange bedfellows of radical youth, hippies, musicians and artists, Labor, feminists, and politicos of every stripe--from the Black Panthers and the White Panthers to the Yippies and the Weatherman. The dismantling of cultural icons seen so clearly in the American posters was mirrored in the culture of rock and roll, fashion, and the street. "Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks," declared Bernadine Dohrn in the 1970 Communiqué #1 from the Weatherman Underground. Contradictions reigned supreme: Viet Nam veterans flashed peace signs, and Marxist heroes like Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro were almost as popular as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, or the Stones.

Decade of Protest frames an age of idealism and rage, of energy and optimism, activism and dissent. The posters are living expressions of a period that forever changed the way America views itself and its institutions--and ultimately its role on the world's stage. Now, thirty years later, instead of radical chic we have the radical right. The image of the great socialist revolution is tarnished, and the Left is in disarray. But for many, the dream of social and political justice has not died. Forged in the crucible of liberating social action, my compatriots and I were a microcosm of the creative, personal transformations taking place all over the country. We sensed the possible and plunged right in. Long before we really understood "the personal is political," we belonged to a culture that innocently believed it could change the world. Some may argue that the demonstrations and songs and teach-ins and love-ins and riots and concerts and speeches and posters did not alter the course of American foreign policy. We know better.

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