Veteran Scholar - Famous Long Ago

I’m not suggesting that Tod and I had mindfully linked our Safe Return campaign to History with a capital ‘H’ or, as Karl Marx once described it, to “a conscious participation in the historical process.”¹ Our Marxism, like the New Left’s revolutionary zeal at its best, was always more pragmatic than scientific, guided by native instincts for turning the tables on the prevailing political culture, working its own methods against it. But if Marxian man was alienated from his true self, his social relations debased by the competition of the marketplace, then the counter-alienation Tod and I felt toward the charade of legitimacy in which society displayed itself was an affirmation that a more rational world was not beyond the powers of human potential. In the spirit of Marx we studied the past as a medium for motivating our actions in the present.

We were certainly aware that amnesties had their own history in the U.S., and had been granted on several occasions. The most sweeping being that which President Andrew Johnson proclaimed at the end of 1868, granting full pardons to those who had participated in “the late insurrection,” the American Civil War. It wouldn’t be enough to premise our appeal around the Vietnam War’s essential wrongness; we had to remind a skeptical media and a benumbed public that the granting of full amnesty to resisting rebels, far from unprecedented, had its own roots in the nation’s historical narrative.

That we would have taken a flier and traveled to Paris knowing that Safe Return’s first candidate to personify desertion as a legitimate act of resistance might not be willing to play the role we’d scripted for him was of small concern. It was emblematic of Tod’s and my improvisational style that we trusted in our abilities to make things happen. We didn’t imagine for a minute we’d go home empty handed. Neither did Jim Reston who hadn’t just tagged along for the ride. Still as we relaxed and conspired that first evening over our Vietnamese meal on the Rue des Ecole, not one of us could have anticipated what a hectic week lay ahead, nor how close we came to not achieving what we had set out to accomplish.

This is a tale that Jim Reston covers nicely in his book, and I have leaned on his account to refresh my own dimming recollections of the many details that stretched over the six days we would remain in Paris. What amuses in the reading today is that Reston’s eye, quite naturally the recording camera, views his own role at times more central to the evolving adventure than was perhaps the case, as if he were the prime mover behind this dramatic undertaking and not Safe Return. And yet Reston’s role was indisputably an active one. A conventional minded journalist might even argue that Reston had blown his objectivity when in fact his account is all the more vivid because he did not posture artificially as a disinterested reporter, but assumed a large measure of responsibility for the eventual outcome of his story. Besides, Reston writes in the first person crafting an eyewitness documentary where the narrator always gets star billing.²

Certainly it would have been in my mind, and in Tod’s, that Jim Reston’s participation would require as much management as Herndon’s. Reston had genteel liberal sensibilities; like many of his persuasion, his politics was radicalized by Vietnam, but he was not a radical. It wasn’t so much our politics that interested Reston, but our eccentric lifestyles and behavior patterned on characters less familiar to him from life than from literary works by, say, John Dos Passos; thus the reference he cites to begin his book on John Herndon. For our part we viewed Reston as someone who, in the coded idiom of the New Left, “had no politics,” no material or ideological stake in transforming the social arrangements which replicated the conditions in which most deserters like John Herndon were perpetually trapped. Such attitudinal rumblings, constantly whispered between Tod and I in snotty, knowing and mutually reinforcing asides, were never seriously aired during the Paris caper between the author and ourselves.

On the surface our relations with Reston were more than collegial, they were chummy. The generational solidarity we three shared was genuine, based on mutual disgust toward the Vietnam War and outrage at the injustice of casting military resisters as sacrificial goats to further distract the public from demanding accountability of the war’s architects and managers, a point on which Reston, to his credit, was uncompromisingly consistent. In truth, Reston’s top drawer manner notwithstanding, Tod and I had a lot more in common with him than we did with most GI resisters. And, of course, in the short run all three of us were flogging the same show, banking on a big splash for the Herndon case.

The next morning Jim Reston and Tod Ensign rode the Metro to the outskirts of Paris where the city’s underclass was warehoused over a drab landscape of high rise housing projects. They found John and his French girlfriend, Jeannette, in an unheated cold water flat near the top of their building’s rear stairwell. It was a dreary habitat, Spartan in the extreme, two small rooms with concrete floors and virtually no furniture beyond a bed, a kitchen table and a couple of chairs; the communal toilet was in the hallway. It was a cliche’ setting for an exile’s miserable existence, which no touch of literary or political romance could redeem. This was not ‘down and out in Paris,’ a self-inflicted interlude of voluntary poverty from which the protagonist might one day emerge with a best seller. In his struggle to survive the two and a half years since deserting his unit in Germany, this habitation a bon mache’ - cheap digs - was the dead end where John Herndon had finally come to ground. And even this was a gift, thanks to the young woman who’d taken him in and who now, she would soon confide, urgently wanted to escape his chronic drinking and abuse. It was Jeannette with her low wage job as a maid in a private school who qualified for this crummy housing, nonetheless prized by many impoverished Parisians for its subsidized rent, the equivalent at that time of twenty dollars a month.

John had expected the visit. Earlier that morning Jim Reston had sent him a pneumatique, that tres civilized gesture of Parisian sociability in the form of a small blue lettergram that sped around the city from one post office to another through a network of pneumatic tubes, and was then expeditiously delivered - as to Herndon that morning - by courier. John sat waiting in his kitchen, and responded stiffly when Tod began to question him on the state of the exile community and about whether he was ready to accompany us back to New York. John appeared to be taken off guard despite the fact that Safe Return’s proposal to bring him home and defend his actions publicly had been communicated directly two weeks before... the letter to which he had not responded. That offer suddenly materializing in the presence of these two imposing and articulate gents seemed to leave John speechless, a rare state for the normally garrulous man we would come to know much better over the next several days.

We would soon learn why John was so flustered in that introductory session with Tod and Jim Reston. Safe Return’s proposal may not have been the only one he was entertaining. What John volunteered to Reston during five solid hours of interviewing the following day was that a bit over a week earlier he had received a letter asking him to come to the American Embassy. It was signed, John said, by a Captain Friedberg who identified himself as a military attache. John was to bring the letter with him and return it to Friedberg, which John says he did at the start of their meeting. But Friedberg didn’t want to talk at the Embassy. He took John to a nearby café where he ordered a round of beers. Another man soon joined them whom John described to Reston as “CIA all the way.” John said that the men quizzed him about the American deserter community, and offered him money for information. Friedberg also let on that they already knew James Reston, Jr. was coming to Paris to meet with John, to which John says he responded, “Who?”

Reston would later write that, according to John “the second man... had said, ‘Look man, all bullshit aside, I could give you a couple of hundred francs beer money for the right answers.’ The man reached into his pocket and pulled out 300 francs. John got up and said, ‘Fuck you.’ He walked out, terminating the interview.” When John got home after the Embassy meeting, Tod’s letter, dated February 24, was waiting for him. It had been tampered with, John told us. There was tape on the back. It was at this point that John says he learned he might be the subject of a book.

The news of John’s meeting with Embassy officials was, as Reston put it, “electrifying.” We’d been counting on the element of surprise to spirit John out of France, and now, apparently, that game was up. Embassy spooks not only had prior notice of our arrival, but knew, at least in outline, details of our intended action. From the start the challenges confronting this escapade were daunting. To succeed we would have to pass John, who carried no passport and no military orders, through French customs, then board him on a Washington, D.C. bound U.S. air carrier without provoking interference from American authorities. It was a daring scheme and its execution, we understood in advance, could only be worked out on the ground in Paris. That’s why we had initially assumed our stay would be more than a week - not only to firm John up - but to mobilize support among French sympathizers and antiwar American expats who resided there.

The next few days, as far as remembering my own movements, are something of a blur, and Reston’s text doesn’t help much, sighting both Tod and I only erratically to pace his version of events. Reston’s principle subject was, quite rightly, John Herndon, and his book does sketch the biographic essentials on Herndon’s background, and provides some detail about John’s tour in Vietnam and on his intermittent wanderings as a political exile. In general, neither Tod nor I would ever have the time to probe more than superficially into the lives or military experiences of any subsequent client - with several important exception - a failing for which I could easily indict myself from the distance of nearly forty years. “Recant, recant,” abjures the memoirist who hopes his retrospective will rise above life’s everyday ordinariness and, by the final paragraph, reveal the threads of deeper themes that over a lifetime he’s taken such pains to hide, above all, from himself. Well, maybe not. But here I can at least come clean to the fact that I never really warmed to John Herndon for many reasons, some of them even justified.