11/18/97
M. CHARLES BAKST:
'Teach-in' update: Two ambassadors mull Vietnam War
As a Brown senior
32 years ago, I could not have imagined a scene I saw there yesterday.
In the school's guest house for VIPs, America's ambassador to Vietnam
prepared tea for Vietnam's ambassador to the United States.
These days, of course, when you say Vietnam, you're talking about
the unified North-South Communist country whose capital is Hanoi.
I went to meet ambassadors Douglas "Pete" Peterson and
Le Van Bang because on Nov. 10, 1965, I joined more than 1,000 others
at a Brown "teach-in" where a host of speakers debated
the deepening war in which U.S. forces fought alongside those of
South Vietnam against the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, their
South Vietnamese sympathizers.
In November 1965, Peterson, now 62, was an Air Force captain in
Florida, headed soon for war. On a '66 bombing mission, he was shot
down over North Vietnam. He spent the next 6 1/2 years amid torture
and isolation as a POW.
Le Van Bang was born in '47. We would say he's 50, but in Vietnam
you are deemed 1 at birth, so he thinks of himself as 51.
In November 1965, he was a high school student north of Hanoi.
I showed the ambassadors an old news story about the teach-in, which
was held in Alumnae Hall -- indeed the same room in which later
yesterday the two men addressed Professor Charles Neu's Vietnam
War history class. At the teach-in, Professor Lyman Kirkpatrick,
top speaker for U.S. policy in Vietnam, said, "We are now at
the Gettysburg of the Cold War, the high tide of Communist aggression.
The real issue is not just Vietnam; it is the entire future of the
war between the free nations and the Communist nations. . . . Do
we fall back to the Philippines or Hawaii or even Lexington or Concord?
We have to stand somewhere."
This was the so-called Domino Theory. Had Peterson believed that?
"Yes, I did," he told me.
Le said it looked different in North Vietnam, where the view was
"we have to defend our country," fight to reunite it and
ensure its independence.
Kirkpatrick's teach-in rival, Professor Klaus Epstein, said the
United States was in a "hopeless war" backing "an
unpopular reactionary regime," while the Viet Cong was associated
with "social revolution."
This would become the theme of countless demonstrations across the
United States. Le, seeing them on TV in North Vietnam, thought,
"They are right. . . . They are patriotic." POW Peterson
was incommunicado. Whenever his captors told him about the demonstrations,
"I would just be in heavy denial."
He still will not call the war a mistake. He said it showed a U.S.
willingness to keep commitments. But, "With the knowledge that
I have that policymakers did not have at the time they were making
decisions, I would have arrived at different decisions."
When he was shot down, he threw away a gun. He said that amid his
later torture he'd regret not having killed himself. But he didn't
want to dwell on it. This did not surprise me. Sen. Jack Reed, who
served in the House with him when Peterson became a Florida congressman,
calls him a "remarkable hero" without "an ounce"
of bitterness.
Peterson said that when he was freed in 1973, he decided that if
he remained bitter about Vietnam he would never be able to do anything
else. So, he said, "I checked my hate at the gate."
Now he works in Hanoi. He's even been to the site where he was shot
down. He said it was a "super" form of closure. "I
went back and actually met the two older gentlemen that captured
me, and I met their extended families and went into their homes
for tea and met the entire village. . . . These people were incredibly
friendly. . . . It helped me understand better that there was no
animosity."
Indeed, said America's ambassador to Vietnam, here we were in Providence,
he and his friend, Vietnam's ambassador to the United States, having
tea together.
M. Charles Bakst is The Providence Journal's political columnist.
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