1 — Prologue
Page Two

Famous Long Ago
 

Our proposal began:
Most Americans, because of media coverage, are beginning to perceive the serious problems that exist within the military today.  These problems derive, not from “societal permissiveness,” or unruly youth unable to adapt to the rigors of military life, but from structural deficiencies endemic to the outmoded and anachronistic military system.  The U.S. military cannot maintain its effectiveness given the goals of American foreign policy and at the same time address itself to internal demands for an end to racism, “machismo,” and the creation of a democratic military.5

I love the part about a “democratic military.”  As if!  To animate this new assault on the Pentagon we promised to examine, not just the “patterns” of racism in the military, but issues like GI constitutional rights and privileges - essentially a critique of the military legal system embodied in its Uniform Code of Military Justice; rampant drug use among GIs and the military’s inadequate drug therapy programs; issues involving women in the military; indoctrination and brutality in basic training; and GI antiwar and racism-inspired rebellions on domestic and foreign U.S. bases.   Dellums wrote me in July approving the proposal, setting the date of the hearings for October 1971.6  It was a terrific proposal.  We’d all signed it, but I’m guessing Tod and I probably drafted most of it.  Problem was, it never took place, at least not the way we had planned it.

For the April war crimes hearings, CCI had furnished all the witnesses, and bankrolled the whole affair.7  All Dellums and the other members of Congress had to do was show up.  This time, however, Dellums altered the format by inviting the House Black Caucus to co-sponsor what Tod and I had envisioned as an activist-driven event.  Using a model we had already employed that summer when I accompanied Dellums unannounced to inspect stockade conditions at Ft. Dix, the idea was to designate a progressive congressman or woman who sympathized with the antiwar movement to appear without warning at one of a dozen military installations around the country, and interview pre-determined groups of disaffected African American soldiers and sailors about their racially-tinted grievances.

When the Black Caucus signed on, the base visitations still took place, but with the prior knowledge and cooperation of the command, and without the presence of the non-black congressional progressives who had predominated at the Dellums war crimes hearings.  CCI’s role was reduced to that of resource for activist contacts at the bases, and to providing a couple of witnesses for the formal hearing that would follow in Washington.  What we had conceived as a radical action to help mobilize and support the African American wing of the GI Resistance, to expose racist military practices, and to embarrass the Pentagon, became a conventional media tool for the Black Caucus to pursue a more mainstream agenda.  The armed services, after all, had become the nation’s largest equal opportunity employer.  The Black Caucus, quite legitimately, wanted to combat racism in the military to support the aspirations of blacks seeking service careers on a equal footing with whites.  Most members of the Caucus were machine Democrats, long in office, and not, by and large, in solidarity with the rebellion of blacks in uniform, nor with the Black Power movement generally.  They also did not overtly oppose American militarism, which was CCI’s agenda.

The actual hearings were eventually moved to November, and Tod would later write a member of Dellums’ staff, diplomatically, that the hearings “received coverage up here and around the country.”  Whatever its extent, the coverage was totally lacking in drama, and we knew quite well that it had been the work of Dellums staff to marginalize CCI’s role from the beginning.  There was a residue of resentment about our predominance in running the show for the April hearings; and now we were moving into what they perceived as an exclusively black issue.  His freshman year in Congress, Dellums had been a thorn to the Pentagon on the war crimes issue.  Removing the hearings on racism from the radical culture was perhaps a step for Dellums, as he prepared to settle into a long congressional tenure,  to make his peace with the military establishment en route to becoming chair of the House Armed Services Committee, when the Democrats came into the majority.8

*****

CCI was most intensely involved in the planning of these hearings on racism during the early fall of 1971. Jeremy and I were still living in the apartment in D.C. that CCI had rented the previous April during the build-up to the spring mobilization, while commuting frequently to meet with Tod in New York where I had kept my apartment in the East Village. With the inevitable letdown following the crescendo of CCI’s war crimes activities, each member of our threesome was anticipating a transition, and the strong possibility that we would all soon be going our separate ways. I myself, with both Tod’s and Jeremy’s encouragement, was thinking seriously of attending a Saul Alinsky organizers’ school in Detroit. After the roller coaster ride of the past three years, not least Vietnam, I craved a structure, and the institutional career model still dominated my consciousness. Whereas the life of the perpetually self-employed, which would, in fact, become my lot for the next forty years by default as much by choice, never entered my mind.

It must have also been in this transitional period that Tod drafted an earlier, equally ambitious and less obviously anti-military proposal to examine the “Sufficiency of Mental Therapy for Returning Vietnam Veterans,” and addressed it to the chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Tod cited the efforts of New York psychiatrist Chaim Shatan, who campaigned within the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to establish a diagnosis for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Shatan, through his own practice, had noted that “the mental problems experienced by many Vietnam veterans cannot be classified easily under the DSM II,” the APA’s standard diagnostic manual. “Along with Dr. Robert Jay Lifton of Yale,” Tod wrote, Shatan and other mental health professionals working throughout the Veterans Administration medical system “are attempting to define a new form of mental illness which they loosely term, post-Vietnam syndrome.” The witnesses offered for the hearings would be drawn from these advocate practitioners.

Tod’s document itemizes the symptoms that, even by 1971, underlay the negative stereotypes around which the national media and society in general had come to perceive the troubled community of Vietnam war veterans. But far from describing how these symptoms were manifest in the alienated or antisocial behaviors that so unsettled their fellow Americans, Tod’s proposal expressed how the veterans had experienced their wartime experiences from the inside: strong guilt feelings, feelings of having been scapegoated, ostracized and isolated by the nation at large, distrust of authority, especially toward members of the Establishment, and fear of never being able to feel love again.

The odd thing about this proposal is that I don’t recall having seen it at the time Tod must have written it, and only discovered a copy during my careful examination of the records on which this narrative is based.9 Given the prominence that PTSD - only recognized officially in 1980 - has since acquired as an inevitable cost of war, this document speaks with amazingly prophetic insight. The fact that I never knew of Tod’s proposal is evidence that he too was looking to the future on his own. [TK: Was this even submitted?].

As for Jeremy, only months earlier he had expressed a sincere interest in becoming a full time GI organizer. This choice seemed unlikely, but the appeal was understandable. The resistance to military authority by rank and file GIs on bases throughout the United States and overseas remained the most dynamic sector of the late antiwar movement. Activists and Pentagon analysts alike understood that the disintegration of American ground force capabilities, whether through acts of outright politicized or racially inspired rebellion, or from addiction to heavy drugs reported as widespread among the America’s remaining combat troops, played a strong part in undermining U.S. military objectives throughout Indochina, especially in those late stages of the war. Urban cats that we were and would remain, all three of us felt the opposing pull of being adrift in the provinces at the flashpoint of struggle with a grassroots G.I. project.10

Then suddenly Jeremy was on a different tack, one which, initially, did not signal an apparent shift in his ideological ballast but left no space for on-going advocacy on behalf of veterans and GIs. He had discovered that corporate groups were already lining up to organize and commercialize what would be the nation’s two hundredth anniversary in 1976. In response Jeremy and I held a press conference in Washington, D.C. in October 1971 calling for a counter bi-centennial celebration that would remind Americans of the nation’s revolutionary origins. The vehicle Jeremy would create for this intervention, initially with Tod’s and my collaboration, and to which he would devote the next four years, we named the People’s Bicentennial Commission.11

Several years later Jeremy would express in an interview for New Times magazine what by late 1971 had indeed become his growing alienation from the antiwar movement. “I think a lot of people dropped out... because they never developed an American identity. There was so much guilt by association with being white and middle-class. You had kids... calling themselves Americong, quoting simple passages from Mao that were intended for a peasant society... in China. It was an Alice in Wonderland fantasy land... the only way one can sustain oneself as a revolutionary is to develop an identity that’s based... on your own culture.” This was to be, as the interviewer noted, Jeremy’s “farewell to the militant Left.”12

The truth is that, like Jeremy, Tod and I had become equally allergic to a New Left tendency we contemptuously labeled “Third World worship. And we didn’t just look away from China. None of us believed that the Soviet Union, or any other realm of the industrialized socialist block offered a prescriptive model to cure what ailed the U.S. Yes, we freely spoke the rhetoric of revolution and socialism, but deep down each one of us was hooked on democracy. We were native sons. We wanted America to fulfill her promise, and had come to believe that no truly democratic society could be organized economically under capitalism. Internationally we wanted our government to stop interfering in the lives and interests of the rest of the world through its endless episodes of aggressive bullying or worse, to which we gave the name “imperialism.” We were young; we wanted utopia.

Jeremy’s new orientation toward honoring our homegrown radical heroes/heroines and traditions, which led him to abandon the Left, caused Tod and I to embrace that tradition more tightly, and wish to synthesize those native elements within it. It took approximately the next eight months for this emergent wedge to drive the split that eventually divided us. I remember vaguely that the immediate cause had something to do with money as these things often do. Jeremy had gotten a grant to support additional research on the counter bi-centennial idea from Carol Bernstein, one of the antiwar movement’s most generous guardian angels. A small publisher had also given Jeremy a book contract to edit an anthology that would feature a manifesto he’d been at work on that fall, “The Red, White and Blue Left,” to which Tod and I were both to contribute.13

The conflict arose from the fact that to this point we had worked collectively with all raised funds going into a common pool. I guess Tod had argued that we’d all been working to re-conceptualize the American radical past, but Jeremy wanted to use the grant and the book advance to actually ground his project organizationally. In the end Jeremy cut us in for a piece of the grant and the flap was resolved more or less amicably, though not with out some ill feelings on Tod’s part.

While Jeremy and I remained in reasonably close contact, he now went his own way, settling permanently in D.C. I had come to feel that I could never outgrow my relationship as Jeremy’s number one sidekick of the moment. Whereas I sensed that Tod was more open to full partnership, if for no other reason than he was less driven than Jeremy. Jeremy was all about work, twenty-four seven. Tod had a life outside the office. With his passion for travel to exotic places, if Tod was going to continue this work, he needed someone he could trust to guide the project of the moment whenever he had the urge to wander. Sometime in the fall of 1971, I moved back to New York.

At the same time, the PBC - the Peoples Bicentennial Commission - officially remained a joint project until well into the following year. Tod and I filed a monthly report to the D.C.-based funding agency managing our grant, against the expenses we incurred operating our office on the unfashionable lower end of Fifth Avenue. Each multi-paged report detailed the work performed in the prior month toward the advancement of PBC’s goals. There was instant interest in the PBC approach in numerous suburban communities around the metropolitan area. For a while, Tod and I did organize meetings in such places to promote the idea. But the funding also subsidized our planning and outreach around a whole new approach for opposing the on-going war, and before long, without friction or regret, CCI’s dissolution became complete. The overwrought, and very lefty-style essay Tod and I contributed to Jeremy’s anthology never appeared.