HOW COMMUNISTS VIEWED JOHN KERRY IN 1971

by Steve Beren, September 30, 2004 [excerpts]

....When I attended City College of New York (CCNY) from 1968 to 1970, I was a member of the Young Socialist Alliance (youth group of the Socialist Workers Party) and was active in the campus chapter of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam....

During the antiwar movement, the SWP played a significant role in establishing antiwar committees on the campuses, and in organizing major antiwar demonstrations, such as the April 24, 1971 protest march on Washington. John Kerry's testimony before the Senate in 1971 took place only days before the April 24 protest, and was part of the drama and publicity for the march, which attracted perhaps a million people.

From the point of view of the communists in the SWP, antiwar activity in the 1960s and 1970s was seen as part of a broader radicalization of sections of the American population, especially young people. The antiwar movement was seen as potentially playing a pivotal role in society and politics, helping to deepen the radicalization, providing opportunities to win people over to socialist ideas, and eventually to turn America from a "capitalist, imperialist power" to a revolutionized "workers state" that would pursue socialist policies.

The SWP considered it vitally important to attract trade union officials, liberal congressmen, ministers - and best of all - returning Vietnam vets who opposed the war. Such people, put forward as public leaders of the antiwar movement, were seen as effective in winning people over to the antiwar movement. Although such forces did not favor the communist goals of the SWP and other radical groups, the SWP felt that anything that built the antiwar movement directly aided our fellow communists in Vietnam and Cambodia, increasing the chances that they could be victorious.

Some of these liberal forces sometimes clashed with the SWP over antiwar movement policy. For example, while the SWP favored unconditional, immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, most liberal antiwar activists and leaders favored a phased, gradual withdrawal over a period of time. This was the debate between "out now!" and "set the date for withdrawal." The SWP, where possible sought to promote those antiwar groups and individuals who favored immediate withdrawal.

During the Vietnam war, both the Johnson administration and the Nixon administration tried to bring to light the atrocities being committed by the communists, and warned that a communist victory would lead to a bloodbath. Today, of course, there can be no doubt that a bloodbath indeed took place with the victory of the communists in Vietnam and Cambodia. But during the war, the antiwar movement countered this by successfully promoting the idea that it was the American forces that were committing atrocities. We in the SWP labeled predictions of a "communist bloodbath" as just "imperialist propaganda," and tried to bolster those antiwar activists who were susceptible to the counter-argument. That took some heat off our Vietnamese communist buddies, making their struggle that much easier.

At the time of the 1971 protests, Intercontinental Press (IP) was a weekly magazine published in New York and edited by Joseph Hansen, like [1968 SWP presidential candidate] Fred Halstead a central leader of the SWP. IP had a small circulation, perhaps numbering no more than a few thousand worldwide, primarily revolutionary activists and supporters in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

In its May 3, 1971 issue, IP carried an article by Allen Myers entitled "800,000 Say, 'Out Now!' - April 24 Shows Growing Power of Antiwar Forces." Myers made special mention of the role of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and John Kerry:

The enormous mass of demonstrators marched in full awareness that they were acting as representatives of the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the American people....

John Kerry, chairman of VVAW, was loudly applauded at the April 24 rally when he denounced 'a government more worried about the legality of where we sleep than the legality of where we drop bombs'. -- pages 395-396, Intercontinental Press, May 3, 1971

The mention of "the legality of where we sleep" referred to the fact that some Nixon administration officials had objected to the VVAW protestors camping out on the White House mall the night before the rally.

The eventual withdrawal of the U.S. from Vietnam was seen by the SWP as a great defeat for "U.S. imperialism," and SWP members took some pride in their role in this "success." Fred Halstead, who was (as I mentioned before) the SWP 1968 presidential candidate, was also the central leader of the SWP's antiwar work. After the victory of the Vietnamese communists in 1975, Halstead began to write a book chronicling the Vietnam protest movement from the point of view of the effort by communists to build and influence it.

The 759-page volume was finally published in 1978 (and still available from Amazon!), and while Halstead probably overstates the influence of the SWP, the book is noteworthy and interesting in many respects - not the least of which are the passages in Halstead's book referring to John Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony:

Some of the vets testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, bitterly denouncing the war and the atrocities being committed by American forces. The televised hearing was memorable for the impassioned testimony of VVAW member John Kerry, a former navy lieutenant, who said the men did not want Vietnam to be just "a filthy obscene memory" but "mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning." Kerry also answered the proponents of setting some distant date for withdrawal by pointing out that Vietnamese and U.S. GIs were being killed every day: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" -- page 606, "Out Now: A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War," by Fred Halstead, Monad Press (1978)

And Kerry was no mere "messenger," simply gathering and reporting the accounts of others. He was a central leader and strategist. As Halstead notes on page 610 of his book, Kerry was the "best-known figure" in the VVAW....