Posted on 02/18/2004 3:54:31 PM PST by Hon
Please note that the following is an excerpt from a book called Winter Soldiers--but it is NOT the book authored by John Kerry, which is called "The Winter Soldiers."
This excerpt is taken from Chapter 4 "Left Face" pages 293-295. Also note that the "JK" quoted is not John Kerry, but John Kniffin.
[Begin excerpt]
Winter Soldiers - Richard Staciewicz
JOHN KNIFFEN, TERRY DuBOSE, SHELDON RAMSDELL, LINDA ALBAND, BARRY ROMO
In the fall of 1971, tensions over the direction in which the organization was heading, as it spread out into various community activities and took on a more consciously anti-imperialist position, were becoming more evident. In November, an emergency meeting of the steering committee was held in Kansas City. This meeting was a result of the growing friction among members of the steering committee, and between new members and the old leadership.
John Kniffin (JK): There was a schism going on then between Al Hubbard and John Kerry.
Terry DuBose (TJB): What they were trying to do was keep the credibility before the media, because the media was saying we weren't veterans. John Kerry felt like he had to tell the regional coordinators that Al Hubbard had not served in Vietnam and that he had not been an officer.
Sheldon Ramsdell (SR): John was also very anticommunist. He made it very clear one night in the office.
I do these photo spreads for the Liberation News Service.... I just give it away like to the New York Press Service, and so there was a spread on VVAW in the Daily World, an American communist newspaper, and my shit got in there. We pinned it up on the wall. At that same time, Al Hubbard received a peace award from the Soviets. John went off. He says, "That's a communist newspaper. Isn't that prize a communist prize that Al Hubbard got there?" He's got his feet up on the desk and he's a little nervous, which is making him rhink, “Maybe I should leave this radical organization." But we had no political philosophy; it was just a mixed bag of rednecks all the way to Maoists.
[Stacewicz:] What did you think of Kerry and his contributions to the organization?
SR: Kerry was to me a mainstream politician basically. He was kind of using us. I said, "Go for it you're welcome to take our venue and go for it.”
Linda Alband: lt was mutual use. There was a lot of validity that John brought to the organization: being a Yale graduate, his looks, and he had access to a lot of people we wouldn't necessarily get in [with]. lt was good for both him and the organization. I always heard all the guys that I worked with talking about him. It wasn't anything bitter. They didn't think he used anybody any more than he got used, so it was like this mutual proposition. No one resented that.
Barry Romo: We didn't dislike him. He's an equivocator. He's a liberal. He's a politician. He was liberal, he was rich, he was from Massachusetts, he talked like a Kennedy, he had people cleaning his house that could have been our parents.
JK: More and more enlisted people were coming in, and they were viewing John Kerry as some kind of elitist. It degenerated into a black-white thing and into an officer versus enlisted man kind of thing.
There was a sort of an elitism in that the national steering committee, and the regional coordinators were the only ones who could discuss this. Every¬one else had to go out, and they had a closed session. This kind of upset a lot of people. We're supposed to have this democratic organization and a bunch of kings say; "Go out in the livery and wait while we decide your fate."
The whole thing boiled down to: Where does the power of the organization lay? I had a mandate from Texas that we would fight for regional autonomy and a bottom-up power structure. The power of the organization lays with the membership. The power flows from the bottorn up, not the top down. From that point on, my mandate from Tom, Rick, and Jim - and Wayne and the rest - was that when I went to the steering committee, I didn't go by myself. We went as a delegation. If we voted on something, we would caucus and we would arbitrate, and then we would vote.
Another one of the issues was an accounting of where all the money was going in the organization. The national office had raised all this money, but they didn't seem to know where it went. We sort of felt that the role of the national office, since they were raising all this money, was to distribute it to chapters and to use it as seed money to get more chapters started, to get the organization built. They seemed to feel that we were responsible for raising our own money, and moreover that any dues money we raised should be forwarded to the national office to further enrich their coffers. It got to the point where I was so pissed off at the national office when I took over as regional coordinator that I had all these membership applications laying on my table and my cat pissed on them. I guess the righteous thing to do would have been to recopy them all, but I decided the hell with it; I just bundled them all up and shipped them to the national office.
TDR: The Kansas City meeting was the beginning of the end for me. After the Dewey Canyon III thing, the media attention became so intense [and] we were getting so many members that it got to the point where all we were doing was compiling a membership list. There was a practical discussion that developed in the organization about what was more important, using energy to build a membership or spending energy to do anything that would protest the war. It was turning into this bureaucracy of building membership lists and keeping records. It felt like we weren't protesting anymore.
That was also where there was actually some discussion of assassinating some senators during the Christmas holidays. They were people who I knew from the organization with hotheaded rhetoric.
They had a list of six senators ... Helms, John Tower, and I can't remember the others, who they wanted to assassinate when they adjourned for Christmas. They were the ones voting to fund the war. They approached me about assassinating John Tower because he was from Texas. The logic made a certain amount of sense because there's thousands of people dying in southeast Asia. We can shoot these six people and probably stop it. Some of us were willing to sabotage materials, but when it came to people ... I mean, there were a lot of angry people. They had been in Vietnam, they had lost friends. This had gone on for years; some of them had been protesting for five or six years. They were cynical, nihilistic, and some of them did talk real tough rhetoric, but nobody ever got shot by any of these people. It was just talk.
When I got back from that meeting, I couldn't get up the enthusiasm any more.
The meeting in Kansas City brought in a new steering committee. John Kerry, Craig Scott Moore, Mike Oliver, and Skip Roberts resigned from their leadership positions and were replaced by several new members. Al Hubbard and Joe Urgo remained in office and were joined by John Birch, Lenny Rotman, and Larry Rottman.
At the meeting, a motion was passed to change the structure of the executive committee, making it elective: the committee members would now be elected by regional coordinators. Also, the title of those who were elected to the committee was changed: they would now be called national coordinators. Furthermore, the term of a national coordinator would be limited to one year.
This meeting foreshadowed future tensions within VVAW As new members flooded in, the political direction of the organization changed. The new steering committee wanted to raise the stakes by confronting the United States government more directly: staging sit-ins and takeovers of national monuments and veterans administration Offices, as veterans across the nation had already begun to do. In that sense, they were in tune with the more radical members of the local chapters. They were not, however, aligned with any single political ideology, nor were they ready to let their plans be overruled by democratic processes within VVAW Some of the new leaders had been involved in VVAW activities for several years and had felt that they had a firm grasp on the role of the organization and its goals.
Despite these changes, many members of VVAW still distrusted the leadership. Eventually, new members would take over the national office through democratic processes. However, before that happened the new steering com¬mittee was able to coordinate one more national action: "Operation Peace on Earth."
Terry DuBose (TJB): What they were trying to do was keep the credibility before the media, because the media was saying we weren't veterans. John Kerry felt like he had to tell the regional coordinators that Al Hubbard had not served in Vietnam and that he had not been an officer.
So the media knew that some of the atrocity "witnesses" couldn't have seen what they claimed, and Kerry knew that Hubbard had not served.
Now I wonder when and how Kerry knew about Hubbard, his "Meet the Press" comrade.
Kerry ran for election to the U.S. House in 1972 during which he found it necessary to suppress reproduction of the cover picture appearing on his own book, The New Soldier. His political opponent pointed out that it depicted several unkempt youths crudely handling an upside down American flag to mock the famous photo of the U.S. Marines at Iwo Jima.
Briggs was a partner in a waterbed store at that time (1972) and Scott Camil had asked him to order slingshots for the the VVAW. They were to be used as a defense during planned demonstrations at the summer Republican Convention in Miami. Once this was discovered by the FBI, the VVAW was charged as a subversive organization and a threat to the U.S. government. Many came to the aid of the eight who were arraigned in Tallahassee and tried in Gainesville. Among them were folk singers Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs. A more famous supporter of the eight was paralyzed vietnam veteran, Ron Kovic, whose life was later dramatized in an Oliver Stone film, "Born on the Fourth of July". The eight contended that they wanted the slingshots to lessen the chances of violence against demonstrators as had happened at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. Eventually all eight were acquitted of the charges and were allowed to return to what was left of their lives after they had been made martyrs for the cause.
When reached for a comment, Scott Camil had this to say:
"The conspiracy was the government's doing. We didn't want to be the 'Gainesville Eight'. The government was lying about the war. The government tried to detract from the anti-war movement by saying that protesters were unwilling to serve--that they were unpatriotic. They couldn't say that about us (the VVAW). We felt that there was a demand for people to know the truth and then they would help us stop the war."
This strife was an indication of the times. The public had found its voice through not just the uninvolved protester, but also through those who had been a part of the carnage and hysteria that was Vietnam. There are many sites that express the views of those who were soldiers during the Vietnam War and historians who have collected pictures and facts from that period in America's history.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
