Jay Janson: Should Hillary Clinton welcome the endorsement of Bob Kerrey?
[Mr. Janson is a musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.]
Monday December 17, 2007, all day on TV, “Hillary Clinton has picked up the endorsement of Bob Kerrey, President of New School University, former Senator and Governor of Nebraska!” Long repeating interviews of Kerry on CNN etc. Huh?
Back track to spring of 2002, Bob Kerrey on "60 Minutes", ashen faced trying to defend himself, “They, [18 massacred girls and baby] were at the very least, at the very least, [Viet Cong] sympathizers.”
Let’s reread the May 9-15, 2001 issue of the Village Voice:
“The New School’s Kerrey Crisis” - An Antiwar Institution Agonizes Over a President Who Killed Unarmed Vietnamese Civilians”
“Last week, in front of the New School auditorium, they gathered a thousand strong. They came to hear from a man who had recently admitted to killing Vietnamese women and children 32 years earlier, a man who was now their New School president and Congressional Medal of Honor winner…
Bridget Francis, an education major, "He should be tried for what he did," she said. "It's disgusting that our government gave him an award for massacring large amounts of people. He shouldn't remain as president."
The accusation of atrocities threw the campus into turmoil over events that took place in a Vietnamese hamlet, 32 years ago and thousands of miles away.
"He's damaged goods," said Michael Hirsch, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology. "Do you want the leader of a hit squad with blood on his hands raising money for you?"
… Their president's involvement in wartime killings is particularly poignant for members of an institution born of antiwar sentiment. In 1917, two Columbia University professors came out against American involvement in World War I and were promptly fired. The academics formed alliances with other intellectuals — notably John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen — and in 1919, the New School for Social Research was born. From the start, the college was radical and anti-establishment; in the 1930s, the legendary "University in Exile" was created, the faculty made up of 167 scholars rescued from Hitler's Europe.
By the winter of 1969, about the time 25-year-old Lieutenant Bob Kerrey was shipping out for Vietnam, the school had firmly established a reputation as a hotbed of antiwar sentiment and radical politics. "I doubt there was a single member on the entire faculty who was in favor of the war in Vietnam," said a former student and antiwar activist.
Kerrey's time in Vietnam was brief. The squad leader, who has stated many times that he intended "to take Hanoi with a knife in my teeth," led his first real mission in February of 1969. His team of commandos raided the hamlet of Thanh Phong in an attempted “takeout" of a Vietcong leader." [they did manage to cut the throat of an old man, with Kerrey holding him down, while two women were shoot in his 'hooch'] "The Navy credited his squad with killing 21 enemy soldiers that night and awarded Kerrey the Bronze Star. Just three months after his arrival in Vietnam, Kerrey was back in the States, hailed as a war hero,.. In 1992, a disastrous run for the presidency." [Even In 2000, Bob would still be mentioned in media as ‘presidential timber’]
"Or so it seemed until the April 29 New York Times Magazine article by Gregory Vistica. Through extensive research and interviews, Vistica established that the 21 Vietcong soldiers reported killed on Kerrey's first mission were in fact approximately 18 women and children and one old man, all unarmed.
Gerhard Klann, one of Kerrey's squad members," [actually Kerrey’s ‘point man’] "says about a dozen of these women and children were rounded up and executed. At least one Vietnamese woman has supported Klann's version of events. Kerrey says the civilians were killed at a distance, in the dark of night, as his squad was returning enemy fire. "Kerrey's account is dubious at best," says the historian Adolph Reed, professor of political science at the New School. "It strains credibility to believe they fired wildly into the black night and killed everybody. Look at how the bodies were huddled together. I've supported efforts in the Midwest to track down Nazi war criminals. There is really no difference between what they did and what Kerrey did. The difference is the scale."
"This brought home what we've been studying. It's right in our midst—it's up for debate if the president of our university is a war criminal," said Safiya Martinez, a cultural studies major. "If he was a Libyan government agent who killed Americans, we'd be dying to put him on trial."
Kerrey, "The reconciliation of our peoples is the most important reconciliation of my life. Reconciliation is a difficult moral choice . . . it cannot be done without debate."
… several other faculty members interviewed, were incensed by the tone of the forum and its "let the healing begin talk." He sees the warm response as avoiding responsibility and cheapening Vietnamese lives. "What if the situation was reversed—if 30 years ago foreign combatants were creeping around the American countryside, slitting people's throats, do you think we'd be saying, 'Let bygones be bygones'?" asked a Prof. Reed.
Another professor, "what they really had was a fake conversation about Vietnam. Now they can sweep it under the rug again."
Many students, particularly the older, politically … active students at the graduate school, agree. Paul Simpson denounced the "pap and insincerity spewing out of [Kerrey's] mouth." Others were angry that Kerrey had brought “lackeys" to bolster his position. ("Three times Halberstam explained to us that the killings happened on a dark night," fumed one well-known professor who insisted on anonymity.)
At a raucous meeting of the graduate school student union, held just hours after Kerrey's presentation, speakers—some on the verge of tears—took turns denouncing Kerrey's performance, the board of trustees, and one another; about 40 percent of those in attendance voted in favor of a resolution calling for Kerrey's resignation. A second resolution was passed asking Kerrey to meet with the student union and provide detailed responses to what many said would be much tougher questions. Barring satisfactory answers, the student union pledged to call for Kerrey's resignation.
Twenty-four-year-old Adele Ray is a graduate student in the New School's communications department. Adele's mother is Vietnamese, her father a Vietnam veteran, and so she has closely followed the controversy on campus. She is troubled by the whole debate, she says, because "it's still all about us, everyone is talking about me, me, me—America, America. What about everyone else affected by this, what about the Vietnamese?"
Adele has been back to Vietnam with her family, seen the poverty and the damage, the people with missing limbs. She's listened to her brother and her mother talk about planes roaring over during Tet, the bombs falling, and the screams.”
(Copyright 2001 Village Voice)-------------------
What sticks out in this writer’s memory of Kerrey's pale downfallen face, was his almost pleading tone as he said in his own defense, “They [the 18 women and children massacred] were at the very least, at the very least, [Viet Cong*] sympathizers.”
*(People's Liberation Armed Forces of Vietnam labeled 'Viet Cong' [all Communists] by Ngo Dinh Diem, dictator of the US and French created 'nation' of ‘South Vietnam’ - and of course picked up by American media and military.)
This then is the nation of America today - an endorsement from a prominent American, whose prominence, for millions, is from his 'trial' on "60 minutes" and from his photo on the front pages of newspapers and covers of magazines as a pathetic victim of the desire for violence implanted in an ambitious young mind by the virulent and unceasing war promoting, war justifying, and war glorifying by corporate owned and military-industrial complex influenced US commercial entertainment/news media.
And if Senator Hillary becomes the Democratic candidate she may run against yet another example of America’s blind eye for its own terrorism; Senator John McCain, who bombed Hanoi twenty-three times, though he must have known that President Eisenhower wrote that Ho Chi Minh would have won by over 80% of the vote in the all Vietnam election that the Geneva accords signed by the defeated French called for - had Ike permitted that election. (In general, Americans, McCain included don’t feature democracy if the 'wrong side' is going to win.)
We are never told, and we wonder if McCain has ever asked, how many Vietnamese his bombs killed and maimed, especially now, when the U.S. has backed for World Trade Organization membership, that very same government that defeated the murderous efforts of six administrations from Truman to Ford, to overthrow it.
In 2004, many Americans had compassion for candidate John Kerrey, who said he killed a South Vietnamese on his reenlistment second tour of duty before realizing it was wrong.
More Americans love Muhammad Ali, who did have to go to Vietnam to know it was wrong. Ali never shamed himself or his country.
Did these three now highly placed Americans serve us when they killed in a war now excused as a mistake? They all had a fine college education, which must have included a history of colonialism and the brutality of French colonial subjugation of the Vietnamese. They must have known that Ho Chi Minh was decorated by our OSS as a dedicated ally of ours against the Japanese and Vichy French. They must have known that Truman, against Roosevelt's promise, had brought the French army back in US ships to fight an 8-year war against our former allies, the Vietnamese. All this, because Ho Chi Minh was a communist? Hardly! At that time, a top cabinet minister of our ally, the French government was also a communist, but that was acceptable.
Hearts go out to these famous American veterans, Kerrey, Kerry and McCain, more than to those French colonized Indochinese they killed. The dead Vietnamese - who died innocently in their own country, often in their own homes - they are free now. They are honored by their relatives. Any compassion from American media now for the Vietnamese would come horribly late and be suspect. Even the infamous My Lai Massacre saw only Lieutenant William Calley serve a mere 3½ years of house arrest in his quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Doubt either Hillary Clinton or John McCain could get an endorsement from Vietnamese survivors of what Vietnamese themselves more appropriately call “The American War”. Knowing these two senators’ hawkish stand on today’s American wars of occupation from watching them on CNN in Vietnam, the Vietnamese would more likely go for Gravel, Kucinich or Paul.
Well, who knows, maybe Bob Kerrey’s endorsement will do Hillary some good. In return she posted on her official Hillary Clinton For President web site, "I am deeply honored to have his support and counsel.” One hand washes the other. The last time Kerry popped up in the news was as a member of the 9/11 Commission. Huh?
‘Pretty much an expert on terrorism’ - the other members the Commission must have thought.
Suggestions:
Write to Senator Clinton. Tell her to ask Bob to pull the media into the dock with him.
Write to President Bob Kerrey c/o New School University 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY, 10011
Ask top university education authority Kerry to use his now well publicized ghastly but tragic mistake as an opening to drag the giant conglomerate owned entertainment/news industry, so beholden to the military-industrial complex, into the dock of war criminality for all the calculated manufacturing of public consent through fearful misrepresenting the history of colonialism and current events in-order to promote and justify homicide and war in third world nations.
Read entire article at Op Ed News
Monday December 17, 2007, all day on TV, “Hillary Clinton has picked up the endorsement of Bob Kerrey, President of New School University, former Senator and Governor of Nebraska!” Long repeating interviews of Kerry on CNN etc. Huh?
Back track to spring of 2002, Bob Kerrey on "60 Minutes", ashen faced trying to defend himself, “They, [18 massacred girls and baby] were at the very least, at the very least, [Viet Cong] sympathizers.”
Let’s reread the May 9-15, 2001 issue of the Village Voice:
“The New School’s Kerrey Crisis” - An Antiwar Institution Agonizes Over a President Who Killed Unarmed Vietnamese Civilians”
“Last week, in front of the New School auditorium, they gathered a thousand strong. They came to hear from a man who had recently admitted to killing Vietnamese women and children 32 years earlier, a man who was now their New School president and Congressional Medal of Honor winner…
Bridget Francis, an education major, "He should be tried for what he did," she said. "It's disgusting that our government gave him an award for massacring large amounts of people. He shouldn't remain as president."
The accusation of atrocities threw the campus into turmoil over events that took place in a Vietnamese hamlet, 32 years ago and thousands of miles away.
"He's damaged goods," said Michael Hirsch, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology. "Do you want the leader of a hit squad with blood on his hands raising money for you?"
… Their president's involvement in wartime killings is particularly poignant for members of an institution born of antiwar sentiment. In 1917, two Columbia University professors came out against American involvement in World War I and were promptly fired. The academics formed alliances with other intellectuals — notably John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen — and in 1919, the New School for Social Research was born. From the start, the college was radical and anti-establishment; in the 1930s, the legendary "University in Exile" was created, the faculty made up of 167 scholars rescued from Hitler's Europe.
By the winter of 1969, about the time 25-year-old Lieutenant Bob Kerrey was shipping out for Vietnam, the school had firmly established a reputation as a hotbed of antiwar sentiment and radical politics. "I doubt there was a single member on the entire faculty who was in favor of the war in Vietnam," said a former student and antiwar activist.
Kerrey's time in Vietnam was brief. The squad leader, who has stated many times that he intended "to take Hanoi with a knife in my teeth," led his first real mission in February of 1969. His team of commandos raided the hamlet of Thanh Phong in an attempted “takeout" of a Vietcong leader." [they did manage to cut the throat of an old man, with Kerrey holding him down, while two women were shoot in his 'hooch'] "The Navy credited his squad with killing 21 enemy soldiers that night and awarded Kerrey the Bronze Star. Just three months after his arrival in Vietnam, Kerrey was back in the States, hailed as a war hero,.. In 1992, a disastrous run for the presidency." [Even In 2000, Bob would still be mentioned in media as ‘presidential timber’]
"Or so it seemed until the April 29 New York Times Magazine article by Gregory Vistica. Through extensive research and interviews, Vistica established that the 21 Vietcong soldiers reported killed on Kerrey's first mission were in fact approximately 18 women and children and one old man, all unarmed.
Gerhard Klann, one of Kerrey's squad members," [actually Kerrey’s ‘point man’] "says about a dozen of these women and children were rounded up and executed. At least one Vietnamese woman has supported Klann's version of events. Kerrey says the civilians were killed at a distance, in the dark of night, as his squad was returning enemy fire. "Kerrey's account is dubious at best," says the historian Adolph Reed, professor of political science at the New School. "It strains credibility to believe they fired wildly into the black night and killed everybody. Look at how the bodies were huddled together. I've supported efforts in the Midwest to track down Nazi war criminals. There is really no difference between what they did and what Kerrey did. The difference is the scale."
"This brought home what we've been studying. It's right in our midst—it's up for debate if the president of our university is a war criminal," said Safiya Martinez, a cultural studies major. "If he was a Libyan government agent who killed Americans, we'd be dying to put him on trial."
Kerrey, "The reconciliation of our peoples is the most important reconciliation of my life. Reconciliation is a difficult moral choice . . . it cannot be done without debate."
… several other faculty members interviewed, were incensed by the tone of the forum and its "let the healing begin talk." He sees the warm response as avoiding responsibility and cheapening Vietnamese lives. "What if the situation was reversed—if 30 years ago foreign combatants were creeping around the American countryside, slitting people's throats, do you think we'd be saying, 'Let bygones be bygones'?" asked a Prof. Reed.
Another professor, "what they really had was a fake conversation about Vietnam. Now they can sweep it under the rug again."
Many students, particularly the older, politically … active students at the graduate school, agree. Paul Simpson denounced the "pap and insincerity spewing out of [Kerrey's] mouth." Others were angry that Kerrey had brought “lackeys" to bolster his position. ("Three times Halberstam explained to us that the killings happened on a dark night," fumed one well-known professor who insisted on anonymity.)
At a raucous meeting of the graduate school student union, held just hours after Kerrey's presentation, speakers—some on the verge of tears—took turns denouncing Kerrey's performance, the board of trustees, and one another; about 40 percent of those in attendance voted in favor of a resolution calling for Kerrey's resignation. A second resolution was passed asking Kerrey to meet with the student union and provide detailed responses to what many said would be much tougher questions. Barring satisfactory answers, the student union pledged to call for Kerrey's resignation.
Twenty-four-year-old Adele Ray is a graduate student in the New School's communications department. Adele's mother is Vietnamese, her father a Vietnam veteran, and so she has closely followed the controversy on campus. She is troubled by the whole debate, she says, because "it's still all about us, everyone is talking about me, me, me—America, America. What about everyone else affected by this, what about the Vietnamese?"
Adele has been back to Vietnam with her family, seen the poverty and the damage, the people with missing limbs. She's listened to her brother and her mother talk about planes roaring over during Tet, the bombs falling, and the screams.”
(Copyright 2001 Village Voice)-------------------
What sticks out in this writer’s memory of Kerrey's pale downfallen face, was his almost pleading tone as he said in his own defense, “They [the 18 women and children massacred] were at the very least, at the very least, [Viet Cong*] sympathizers.”
*(People's Liberation Armed Forces of Vietnam labeled 'Viet Cong' [all Communists] by Ngo Dinh Diem, dictator of the US and French created 'nation' of ‘South Vietnam’ - and of course picked up by American media and military.)
This then is the nation of America today - an endorsement from a prominent American, whose prominence, for millions, is from his 'trial' on "60 minutes" and from his photo on the front pages of newspapers and covers of magazines as a pathetic victim of the desire for violence implanted in an ambitious young mind by the virulent and unceasing war promoting, war justifying, and war glorifying by corporate owned and military-industrial complex influenced US commercial entertainment/news media.
And if Senator Hillary becomes the Democratic candidate she may run against yet another example of America’s blind eye for its own terrorism; Senator John McCain, who bombed Hanoi twenty-three times, though he must have known that President Eisenhower wrote that Ho Chi Minh would have won by over 80% of the vote in the all Vietnam election that the Geneva accords signed by the defeated French called for - had Ike permitted that election. (In general, Americans, McCain included don’t feature democracy if the 'wrong side' is going to win.)
We are never told, and we wonder if McCain has ever asked, how many Vietnamese his bombs killed and maimed, especially now, when the U.S. has backed for World Trade Organization membership, that very same government that defeated the murderous efforts of six administrations from Truman to Ford, to overthrow it.
In 2004, many Americans had compassion for candidate John Kerrey, who said he killed a South Vietnamese on his reenlistment second tour of duty before realizing it was wrong.
More Americans love Muhammad Ali, who did have to go to Vietnam to know it was wrong. Ali never shamed himself or his country.
Did these three now highly placed Americans serve us when they killed in a war now excused as a mistake? They all had a fine college education, which must have included a history of colonialism and the brutality of French colonial subjugation of the Vietnamese. They must have known that Ho Chi Minh was decorated by our OSS as a dedicated ally of ours against the Japanese and Vichy French. They must have known that Truman, against Roosevelt's promise, had brought the French army back in US ships to fight an 8-year war against our former allies, the Vietnamese. All this, because Ho Chi Minh was a communist? Hardly! At that time, a top cabinet minister of our ally, the French government was also a communist, but that was acceptable.
Hearts go out to these famous American veterans, Kerrey, Kerry and McCain, more than to those French colonized Indochinese they killed. The dead Vietnamese - who died innocently in their own country, often in their own homes - they are free now. They are honored by their relatives. Any compassion from American media now for the Vietnamese would come horribly late and be suspect. Even the infamous My Lai Massacre saw only Lieutenant William Calley serve a mere 3½ years of house arrest in his quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Doubt either Hillary Clinton or John McCain could get an endorsement from Vietnamese survivors of what Vietnamese themselves more appropriately call “The American War”. Knowing these two senators’ hawkish stand on today’s American wars of occupation from watching them on CNN in Vietnam, the Vietnamese would more likely go for Gravel, Kucinich or Paul.
Well, who knows, maybe Bob Kerrey’s endorsement will do Hillary some good. In return she posted on her official Hillary Clinton For President web site, "I am deeply honored to have his support and counsel.” One hand washes the other. The last time Kerry popped up in the news was as a member of the 9/11 Commission. Huh?
‘Pretty much an expert on terrorism’ - the other members the Commission must have thought.
Suggestions:
Write to Senator Clinton. Tell her to ask Bob to pull the media into the dock with him.
Write to President Bob Kerrey c/o New School University 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY, 10011
Ask top university education authority Kerry to use his now well publicized ghastly but tragic mistake as an opening to drag the giant conglomerate owned entertainment/news industry, so beholden to the military-industrial complex, into the dock of war criminality for all the calculated manufacturing of public consent through fearful misrepresenting the history of colonialism and current events in-order to promote and justify homicide and war in third world nations.