'Viet-Report' and the Lynd Mission

...In doing so, Viet-Report translated a sentence to read, "The relationship between the guerrillas and the people has been harmonious for a long time," which in the original read, "The relationship between the guerrillas and the people was harmonious for a long time" (L'Express, 19-25 April 1965, p. 21...

...This is the magazine that has attracted national attention because of its involvement with the mission to North Vietnam headed by U.S...

...Don't worry, we promised the super we'd pay for the damage...

...The chemistry of the reaction is mysterious...

...How DID Viet-Report get involved in the ApthekerLynd-Hayden voyage to Vietnam...

...The V-R version provided a quotable quote, short and concise enough to include in any one-sheet broadside, thus making it possible to ignore what Chaffard went on to say about the reasons why the "relationship between the guerrillas and the people" was no longer "harmonious...

...But, apparently anticipating the "clarification," Viet-Report declared in a press release that "careful study of NLF and DRV statements" reveals that the NLF would accept a "broadly based government in the South"-not a Communist-dominated regime but a "government of national reconciliation...

...So, he says, "if they lose the war of words" by appearing to moderate their position in public, "they've lost everything...

...When this "careful study" is stripped of all implications of access to secret documents and oracular interpretations of hints dropped in interviews of high North Vietnamese officials in Hanoi's Vietnam Courier, it boils down to one thing: acceptance at face value of the 1960 program of the NLF...

...Steven Kelman's last contribution to The New Leader was "SDS: Troubled Voice of the New Left...

...Out of the phone conversation came a consensus (the idea seems to have come to Lynd and Miss Brightman simultaneously) that Lynd make the trip as a reporter for the magazine "to clarify peace proposals which have been stated by the National Liberation Front and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam over the last few months...

...The editors seem to oppose both major lines of policy favored by those against the war...

...But she couldn't think of any, and McDermott replied to her query for specifics with the blunt...

...Viet-Report is staunchly opposed to U.S...

...Since then, it is claimed, the magazine has been self-sufficient...

...the Chinese have confined themselves to repayable loans and editorial solidarity...

...A few lines later in the same article, though, he laces into the Irving Howe-SANE position for believing that "the greatest need in Vietnam is to stop the bloodshed" by reminding such dupes of Johnsonism of the Vietnamese desire for "liberty or death...

...The editors of Viet-Report have not yet come up with a position of their own, though...

...The first issue came out last July...

...The press run for the three issues published thus far has ranged from a high of 80,000 to 40,000 for the current NovemberDecember number (the "monthly," according to the editors, having been forced twice to appear bimonthly "under a new and different lunar year...

...And even if it were possible, would Lynd be the man to bring it off...

...Communist party theoretician Herbert Aptheker, and including Yale University assistant professor Staughton Lynd and Tom Hayden, a "community organizer" loosely connected with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS...

...To hear her tell it, after attending a few teach-ins and protest meetings, she concluded that a clearing house for factual anti-war information was needed...

...Exactly what is the magazine's editorial line...

...To whose satisfaction can Lynd clarify this crucial question...

...No stormtrooper attacked the citadel, nor did CIA agents try to rifle its files...

...He can rise from professorial stolidity to indignant heights, as in a recent National Guardian piece: "We tried entering into dialogue with the Administration and we found that this meant accepting the Administration's premises: it meant talking for hour after hour without anyone saying that people were being killed in Vietnam...

...For Lynd's position on the war in Vietnam, true to his self-proclaimed role as "synthesizer" of Marxist and pacifist views, is a curious melange of morality and militance...

...What needs to be clarified, however, is whether the NLF will observe its "official program" once given a chance to carry it out...

...The North Vietnamese government, says McDermott, is "diplomatically isolated...

...The important fact, however, is that he thinks it's realistic...

...A young man working here last night," Miss Brightman explained, "found the building locked when he tried to leave...

...These people, says McDermott, are "too obsessed with antiCommunism," and this leads them to a simple wish for peace, without recognizing the political issues involved...

...Lynd's statements upon his return have not substantially altered this premission interpretation of Hanoi's intentions...

...Exactly what the issues are seems to be left for the reader to pick from the many offered him on the pages of the magazine...

...On the other hand, the Lynd "revolutionary" approach of support for the NLF and down-theline denunciation of "U.S...

...It does not take an expert in the art of decoding claimed "peace feelers"-an art in which proponents of the Hanoi-would-just-love-to-negotiate position are adept-to know that the NLF platform calls for a neutral South Vietnam, gradual reunification over a period of years, and a coalition government...

...Viet-Report has produced no evidence that Hanoi-NLF "moderation" differs from that of other Communist groups who have proposed coalition governments, only to tear up their "platform" once in power...

...They confine themselves to enigmatic policy judgments like "anti-Communism is not an issue in Vietnam" and immediate withdrawal of American troops is a "pseudo issue...

...Viet-Report can justify an onthe-spot report from Lynd on news value alone...

...They reject the SANE-New Republic-Irving Howe approach based on an immediate cease-fire, condemnation of both sides, and a solution by free elections...

...even the Third World has refused outright support...

...policy in Vietnam...

...When I commented to Miss Brightman that new magazines don't just happen, she replied "This one did...

...The Soviets are trying to "force a cease-fire" on them...

...But he would have received a most pedestrian explanation for it from Carol Brightman, young teaching assistant at New York University and editor of VietReport...

...When asked if she could find any positive aspects of American policy in Southeast Asia, Miss Brightman quickly answered, "Of course...

...Could Lynd, a "friendly" observer, be the catalyst to make them change their position...

...Lynd's bourgeois prejudices against killing may not have impressed Hanoi...

...Dirty War in Vietnam" and a small printed National Liberation Front (NLF) flag, complete with an untranslated message in Vietnamese...

...But Viet-Report has another argument to justify the usefulness of the mission-although it negates to an extent the magazine's contention that Lynd was not on a peace mission and that Hanoi's position is actually a moderate one...

...Lynd's whole parallel government idea may seem like Staughton in Wonderland...

...To be sure, the two-room New York office of Viet-Report (according to its own description "a monthly news magazine which publishes first-hand reports, depth analyses and important documents on the war in Vietnam") is strewn with an assortment of seemingly unsorted magazines, books and statements...

...Thus inspired, Miss Brightman single-handedly persuaded the now defunct Ad Hoc University Committee to End the War in Vietnam to grant $3,000 to publish Viet-Report...

...In the first issue, for example, they reprinted the third and fourth installments of an article by French journalist Georges Chaffard in the Paris newsweekly L'Express to counteract what they alleged to be a false impression created by Life magazine's reprint of the first part of this series...

...There are none...

...India has shifted from sympathy to antipathy...

...But in other instances the magazine has lived up to its claim of being factual in approach, relying primarily on the interpretation and selecting of facts -such as those presented in McDermott's three-part "depth analysis" of Vietnam history...

...Associate editor John McDermott, philosophy instructor at Long Island University and staff ideologue, summed up the magazine's raison d'etre with "People who want to talk about Vietnam should get some information...

...And, in this world of non-Euclidean politics, parallel governments do, in the end, meet...

...Ten thousand copies are said to be sold through newsstands or by subscription, while the rest is distributed in bulk to anti-war groups...

...If this is accepted, no "clarification" is needed...

...imperialism" is rejected as contrary to the Vietnamese people's desire for peace, and as too uncritical of the NLF...

...Italics mine...

...To get back into the office, he had to shatter the glass in the door to get to the lock from the inside...

...He approached Lynd, who is a member of the journal's advisory board, and Lynd called Viet-Report...

...and militancy joins disarray with posters like "Stop U.S...

...Lynd may insist that the NLF is independent of the North...

...On the one hand, he can state with Quaker fervor (as he did in last October's Toronto teach-in) that, "As a historian, I have no doubt that when the 21st century writes the history of Vietnam, they will call it sin...

...In other words, this was to be no peace mission, no unofficial feeler, nor a bit of political tourism ?  la Felix Greene...

...Ergo, runs the argument, since Hanoi's four points include settlement of South Vietnamese affairs "in accordance with" the NLF platform, they too favor a non-Communist government in the South...

...The story is that Aptheker was invited by Hanoi officials to visit North Vietnam and asked to bring with him two non-Communists...

...But in the light of Lynd's expressed views, it makes more sense to assume that he saw the mission as a first step toward a "parallel State Department" forming part of his proposed "parallel" government designed to force the "non-violent retirement" of the Johnson Administration...

...Yet when the time comes to "clarify" he went, just like the Other Government in Washington, to North Vietnamwhich does, demonstrations to the contrary notwithstanding, hold the key to peace...

...no funds have been solicited from organizations, and a mere $500 or so has come in through individual contributions...

...Those bogged down in the mire of journalistic finances will be refreshed or astounded by the story of the founding of Viet-Report-a story glibly fitting a Marxist textbook explanation of things starting because of "objective conditions...

...It might have liked the "liberty or death" refrain, especially since Lynd seems to mean by "liberty" what the NLF meansbut such a no-compromise stand represents the most extreme interpretation of the Hanoi position, exactly what Viet-Report hoped Lynd would prove Hanoi does not really believe...

...Aside from opposition to the war in Vietnam, it is hard to pin down...

...It views itself, however, as "not just a journal of opinion or a protest sheet" but as a source of-admittedly, anti-war-facts, and prides itself on offering an abundance of first-hand reports...

...The only stated purpose of the trip was to "bring back a document"-in Carol Brightman's words-of the North Vietnamese position, which will clarify supposed ambiguities and contradictions in Hanoi's statements...

...Looking further for some of the revolutionary-romantic ?©lan of days gone by, a recent visitor would also have been struck by a jagged, gaping hole in the shattered front door of the office...