Veteran correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote from Asia (July 26, 1966) in The New York Times:
It is not only in the Communist world that opinion is aligned almost entirely against the American Vietnam policy. It is almost impossible to find any substantial public Asian support for it except within those nations benefiting directly from the huge United States investment, such as Thailand.
Asian opinion today seems to agree with what Harvard historian Edwin Reischauer wrote in 1954 in Wanted: An Asian Policy, that a policy based largely on stopping Communism is “a dangerous oversimplification of our Asian problem.”
There are American troops in Japan (under the much resented Security Treaty of 1960), and part of Japan’s territory, Okinawa, has been converted by the United States into one of the most powerful military bases in the world. (“Please tell your fellow Americans,” a Tokyo University sociologist said, “that the majority of Japanese do not think these military bases protect Japan’s security—in fact, they think these endanger our security.”) Nonetheless, the government of Premier Sato, while nodding and bowing to the United States State Department, keeps a wary eye on the Japanese public, knowing popular feeling. A high government official told several of us, off the record, that Japan would like to speak its mind on Vietnam to the United States but does not feel independently strong enough to do so.
Japan is something of an embarrassment to the United States government, because it was under America’s postwar tutelage that she put into her new Constitution the statement “… never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government.” Article 9 contains a silent reproach to what the United States is doing in Vietnam: “… the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.” It is the old human story, the little boy nurtured by his family on the Biblical exhortation Thou Shalt Not Kill, watching his father return, gun still smoking, from a mission of murder.
The Japanese are trying to speak to us, but we will not listen. In a short span of time they have been both Fish and Fisherman. We in the United States have never had to struggle at the end of the hook—and lose. We have no Hiroshima, no city of the blind and maimed, no professors still haggard from long terms in jail. Although on a number of occasions we have been a Fisherman, we have never been forced (as have the Japanese) to recognize our deeds, to bow, to apologize, to promise a life of peace. We have, in other words, never been caught.
Those countries who have been caught are now trying to speak to us. Not only Japan, but other friends and allies whose criticism cannot be easily dismissed as “Communist.” British public opinion, despite Prime Minister Wilson’s cautious approval, has been consistently critical of American policy. Konrad Adenauer, as ardent an anti-Communist as anyone in the American government, said to New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger (reported in his column of August 7, 1966): “I would get out of Vietnam. … This wouldn’t be the first war broken off in the middle. You can’t get out by going more strongly in. If I take a road and find myself going in the wrong direction, I see no purpose in continuing along it. I take another road.”
The European view was bluntly summarized by George Lichtheim, writing in Commentary, July 1966:
… the question (apparently taken seriously by some people in Washington) of why the West Europeans cannot be conscripted into a crusade to help an Oriental cardboard Mussolini in Saigon maintain his comic-opera regime a week or a month longer, has ceased even to be funny. There was a time when thinking people in London or Paris made an earnest attempt to decipher the mental processes of President Johnson and his advisers. That time is past. No one bothers any more to try to understand why the Americans are behaving as they do: it is accepted that they must, and will, learn from bitter experience, as others have done before them.
What Lichtheim says of European opinion is almost exactly what I found among the Japanese through only a brief, intense, impressionistic survey.
Such are some of the views from a distance. Now I want to take a look at another viewpoint, this one right in our midst—the viewpoint of the Negro American.
3. A View from Within: The Negro
THERE IS no one Negro view on Vietnam, any more than there is one white view on Vietnam. But there are such clear signs of hostility to United States policy in Vietnam among important sections of the Negro population that it may be useful for the rest of us to take notice and to inquire: Why?
The signs are unmistakable. They appear quickly, in the press or in personal encounter, then are scattered, gone—and perhaps all I am doing here is pulling some of them together to remind us of what I believe is a significant pattern of opinion.
A Negro field worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee told me last year in Mississippi: “You know, I just saw one of those Vietcong guerrillas on TV. He was dark-skinned, ragged, poor, and angry. I swear, he looked just like one of us.”
This was an individual reaction, but the Negro organizations have spoken. Of the five major civil rights groups, three (CORE, SNCC, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference) have all declared themselves strongly against U.S. policy in Vietnam, and indeed urged that the United States withdraw.
Never before in the history of this country have Negroes expressed such fierce opposition to the government’s foreign policy. And this in spite of the general Negro warmth toward the New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society. A columnist for the Amsterdam News, the most important newspaper in Harlem and one of the most influential newspapers in the Negro world, wrote on August 21, 1965:
President Johnson’s Great Society is bursting into full bloom. Never has so much been done for so many in so short a time. … But I, for one, have not said a word, and I know at least twenty others … men and women, white and colored … who have had the same impulse, but have found themselves unable to express words of praise. Because they catch in every throat.
All the accomplishments fade into insignificance. All the progress is shadowed just as all of it can be swiftly undone, by the horror, the spectre, the glaring immorality of Vietnam.
The statements of the more militant civil rights groups (SCLC, CORE, and SNCC) have been even stronger. In January 1966, SNCC said, in its first comment on the war, unanimously approved by its staff of over a hundred field workers:
We believe the United States government has been deceptive in its claim of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of colored people both in the United States and in other countries. … Our work in the South and in the North has taught us that the United States government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed United States citizens and is not prepared to end the rule of terror and suppression within its own borders.
Referring to the murder of Samuel Younge, a Negro student in Tuskegee, SNCC said:
Samuel Younge was murdered because United States law is not being enforced. Vietnamese are murdered because the United States is pursuing an aggressive policy in violation of international law. …
We maintain that our country’s cry of “preserve freedom in the world” is a hypocritical mask behind which it squashes liberation movements which are not bound, and refuse to be bound, by the expediencies of the United States cold war policies. …
We are therefore, in sympathy with and support the men in this country who are unwilling
