Bertrand Russell and Me: On Being Radicalized by the Vietnam War
The most hidden of hidden histories are the events that shaped us into who we are.
“Never underestimate the evil of which men of power are capable.” — Bertrand Russell
My first political act was writing a letter to President Lyndon Johnson, asking him to end the war in Vietnam. It was the winter of 1965-66. I was eleven years old and in the sixth grade. It was the beginning of a slow and awkward political awakening.
I was reminded of this period of my life when I recently obtained a copy of Bertrand Russell’s 1967 book, War Crimes in Vietnam. Russell was my first, improbable introduction to the world of antiwar politics. While definitely not initially a progressive himself, Russell ultimately became a penetrating critic of U.S. and Western imperialism, particularly on the question of the Vietnam War. He led a broad coalition of writers, philosophers, artists, trade unionists, attorneys, civil rights activists, scientists and mathematicians, and various leftist intellectuals out of the headquarters of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in London and Paris.
At the time, I lived in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley and was a paper boy for the local newspaper, the “Valley News and Valley Green Sheet,” so called because the outermost pages of the paper (and its sports section) were printed on green newsprint. I knew very little about current events beyond what I read in the newspapers or heard on the nightly NBC Huntley-Brinkley news program. My other interests at the time were comic books, comedy record albums, and slot cars.
Yet I had shown a certain precocity in relation to politics. I chalk this up to being nine years old when JFK was assassinated. I remember being interested in watching the 1964 political conventions on television. I must have been one of the few kids my age who spent part of their summer vacation watching NBC reporter John Chancellor get arrested on the floor of the GOP convention that year. It spurred an excitement inside me I had never felt before.
In the meantime, I hated delivering newspapers. It was an exploitative job, wherein I had to wake up around 5:30 in the morning, fold a bundle of papers left on our front lawn, and then deliver them via bicycle each morning, seven days a week. The only way I could get paid was to periodically go to each house on my paper route and ask people for “subscriptions” to what otherwise was a free newspaper. Very few were willing to shell out for such a deal. I hardly made any money. I felt very disgruntled, but my father believed I was gaining “character” and learning discipline. A year later, my father left the family when my parents divorced.
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But I did read the papers I delivered, sitting out on the curbside on dark mornings, flashlight out, or on orange-tinted summer dawns. Of course, I read the comics first, then the headlines. The articles were mostly recapitulated wire service reports, and the occasional feature story.
Much like Bertrand Russell himself, I learned about the Vietnam War first by reading about it in the newspaper. As Russell related in the chapter on the “Press and Vietnam” in his Vietnam War Crimes book, “It is from Western newspapers that I derived my earliest understandings of the involvement of the United States [in Vietnam], and it is from these same reports that I first became aware of the barbarous nature of the war.”
I don’t remember what specifically I read in the Valley Green Sheet, or heard on the nightly news that would have motivated me to write a letter to LBJ. But it might have been something similar to what Russell recounted in his book:
In an article [in the New York Times] which appeared on July 25, 1962, Mr Bigart stated: “American advisers have seen Viet Cong prisoners summarily shot. They have encountered charred bodies of women and children in villages destroyed by napalm bombs.” Indeed, the use of chemicals in the Vietnam war had been reported in the New York Times as early as January 1, 1962. On January 26, 1962, the New York Times went so far as to refer to the use of chemicals as a “crop-killing program,” in the manioc and rice fields of South Vietnam.
Reading this passage now, in the shadow of the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza-Palestine, and fifty years since the U.S. left Vietnam in humbling defeat, I was surprised to see how early the papers had reported the atrocities of the U.S. colonial war in Vietnam. 1962 was well before LBJ flooded Southeast Asia with hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops.
Yet, as Russell put it, “The informed press knew that there was something seriously wrong about the war, but restricted themselves to pedestrian comments and peripheral criticisms.” Russell concluded there were three rules to always remember when reading newspapers: 1) “Read between the lines.” 2) “Never underestimate the evil of which men of power are capable.” And 3) “Know the jargon of ‘terrorists’ versus ‘police actions,’ and translate whenever necessary.”
Now these were not lessons that an American preteen were likely to know in the mid-1960s. I wish I could remember what led me to identify with what in 1965 and 1966 was still a small minority of people against the war. In fact, I didn’t personally know one other person at the time who was against the Vietnam War.
Somewhere along the line, I heard about Bertrand Russell and his opposition to the war, though most likely that came a year later when Russell was in the midst of running the International War Crimes Tribunal. Possibly I had heard of Russell first because of his activism around nuclear disarmament, which was a much bigger issue in the 1960s than it is today. You can read about the War Crimes Tribunal Russell founded here, here, and here. Also of interest, though obviously biased, is a 1967 report on Russell and the founding of the Tribunal by the Air Force’s Rand Corporation.
In 1965-66, I knew precious little about all this. In my family, politics were never discussed. The only newspaper in the house was the Valley News and Green Sheet. The only books in the house were a few Readers Digest condensed novels, a copy of The Carpetbaggers, and my dog-eared copy of Old Yeller, which I had shoplifted from a nearby grocery store. (I had been caught stealing it too, and let go by the manager, along with the book, with the admonition to tell “my friends” that the next time I or they were so caught, we were going to juvenile hall. In fact, I never stole again.)
But I know I did read the news stories in the local paper, and I hadn’t liked what I was reading about this war in Vietnam. One day, during a particularly rainy winter Saturday in Los Angeles, I sat down to write a letter to President Lyndon Johnson, The White House, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. From memory I recall that I asked Johnson why we were in Vietnam. I pointed out that people were dying, and told him I thought the war should be stopped. We, meaning America, should be for peace. The letter was not long or necessarily well-reasoned, but I’d like to think it showed some of my schoolboy passion.
Inklings of a Radical Awakening
I hadn’t expected any reply, and when some weeks later a large manila envelope addressed to me arrived from The White House, I was very excited. Had the President actually replied to me? Like most moments of imagined political victory, I was quickly disappointed. The envelope contained a letter on White House letterhead signed by the President (xeroxed) thanking me for my interest in the President and his family!? Accompanying the letter was a brochure of photos of the First Family: Lyndon with world leaders, the family gathered for a Texas barbeque, the President looking solemn in the Oval Office. For some reason, I particularly remember a full-page photo of an uncommonly stern-looking Lady Bird Johnson, smiling grimly.
In my naïveté, I was stunned at how the President had misread, or rather “shined on” my epistle to him. I quickly understood that he didn’t care about the feelings of little people like me about the war. While my youthful vanity may have been pricked, as I continued to read and listen to more about that terrible war, I became more and more radicalized in relation to it. Five years later I would engage in a one-person sit-in at my high school on Vietnam “moratorium day.” As much as college campuses then were full of protests against the war, such actions had not filtered down to the high school level by 1970, or at least not at my high school.
This radical awakening — how well I remember telling my family, “radical” means getting to the “root of the problem,” and how unimpressed they were with my logic — would take years to mature. I was still surrounded by apolitical or conservative, and even racist, family members and their milieu. I had not yet discovered Marxist literature. Still, this nascent radicalism convinced me that after I graduated high school, I would go to college at Berkeley. And later I did.
Being Jewish and nearing the age of Bar Mitzvah, I was sent to “Jewish school” at a local temple, where I was taught Hebrew along with the history of the Jewish people. I was taught that Israel had been a vacant wilderness until the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust showed up and made it into a verdant paradise. Even so, and perhaps because of what I had heard about Vietnam, I wasn’t buying it. I was repelled by the supposed joy over Israel’s military conquests in 1967. I couldn’t reconcile cheering war, not when I was embracing antiwar politics as a core value. But this nascent anti-Zionism also took some years, and further education, to fully mature.
These memories are literally a lifetime in the past now. As I near turning 70, I realize that I won’t be in this world forever. Indeed, being one of a small number of people to have survived both a heart attack and pancreatic cancer, I well understand that my place on this planet is tenuous. Hopefully I still have some years to go. One thinks of one’s legacy. I wonder if Russell, too, didn’t think of his legacy when at age 90 he took up his campaign against the Vietnam War.
I am reminded of how Voltaire took up a public campaign against the use of torture when he was 68 years old, fighting to overturn the legal-ecclesiastical judgment against Jean Calas. Calas was a French Protestant accused of killing his own son to prevent the latter’s supposed conversion to Catholicism. He was tortured to confess and broken upon the wheel. Voltaire took up his case, and then other human rights cases as well. Like Russell, it was in his old age that Voltaire turned to fight the injustices of his society.
I am a product of the protest movement against the Vietnam War, which was itself inspired by and interacted with the great civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The anti-Vietnam War protest movement also profited from the rebirth of the Communist left, which had been left practically for dead in the ashes of the McCarthyite persecutions. The history of that period is rich with lessons, many of them tragic. A lot has been written about that time, but I think the lessons have been largely forgotten, or died with those who have passed from the scene.
Today, another movement is being born, or that’s what it feels like. Vaguely anti-imperialist, and definitely anti-Zionist, I hope it is not too late to defeat the exploiters and warmongers who survived the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. Under the misleadership of American politicians, right-wing trade unionists, careerist academics, militarists, spooks and billionaires, they have followed up their genocide in Vietnam with wars in the Middle East and Europe. These U.S. reactionaries currently are backing the Zionists’ genocide against the Palestinians, who are fighting for national independence and against ethnic cleansing.
Now, as in the past, it can feel like the powers with the bombs and all the wealth have all the leverage, and we have none. That’s how it felt decades ago, too, but today Vietnam is free. Someday Palestine will be free. Someday, fears of nuclear annihilation will be but a terrible memory.
Bertrand Russell concluded his introduction to War Crimes in Vietnam with a quote by playwright Peter Weiss:
The tenancy of the rich nations is infected with the stench of carrion. The progress that politicians in these countries speak about with voices drowned in tears looks more and more like progress in the elimination of human life. America, that country that shelters many true democrats, appears to the people that strive for freedom and independence as the inheritor of Guernica, Lidice and Maidenek…. The workers in countries in the West with their gigantic union organizations are silent…. They remain silent, although they are the only ones that could, through a common proclamation, prevent the blood bath. Appeals by students, scientists, artists, and writers have until now been of limited effect. But if millions of workers at last rose to speak and emphatically with all the means at their command demanded that the American acts of war immediately be discontinued, it would be difficult for Johnson and his government to continue the murdering.
I think something similar is needed to stop Israel’s genocide.
Really great piece