really informative and i'm so glad you're all here with this very distinguished panel. i direct the leadership, ethics and practice initiative here at the elliott school. the goal of this initiative sponsored by our dean is to give greater profile to the topics of leadership and ethics and their practical application in the education of our students both graduate and undergraduate, and this initiative brings practitioners to the school to learn about ethical and leadership challenges those practitioners face and how they addressed them and we also do the same bringing scholars to the school to address these very same topics. i would also like to mention this morning that we're being filmed by c-span history, so we are fortunate to have these proceedings recorded. so back to today's topic, young people both in and out of uniform faced huge questions during the vietnam war. would they take a stand? how would they put their values into practice? how would they come together to make a difference? their story is an important one for all young people at the school and of course an important story indeed for all of us today. for this reason, the leadership, ethics and practice initiative is delighted to be a cosponsor for this week's events, waging peace in vietnam, and it has been a fabulous week with many really moving events throughout and before we go further, please join me in acknowledging the leadership and hard work of the l.a. school. now i would like to introduce ron carver who i'm quite sure that many of you in the audience know quite well. he curated the waging peace exhibit now on display on the second floor of the l.a. school as well as the companion book launched earlier this week. just briefly to his history and person, he became a civil rights activist in atlanta and rural mississippi the day after he graduated high school, which is extraordinary. he has been an activist for peace and social justice all his life. ladies and gentlemen, mr. ron carver. >> thank you. it's great to be here with you. a lot of longtime peace activists and a bunch of young peace, human rights, social justice activist students, thank you for coming and joining us. so three years ago i was in vietnam for my first time, documenting photographically project renew what you will hear more about in this afternoon's session created by chuck searcy a vietnam veteran and his vietnamese colleagues. that was back in 2001. it continues through today clearing unexploded ordinance, 30% of the bombs dropped in southeast asia never exploded and they are a legacy that is continuing to do harm today. at that point, the war remnants museum in chi minh city, when they heard that i had been a civilian activist assisting the u.s. soldiers who opposed the war in vietnam, helping to set up coffee houses, helping them get their underground newspapers written by and for gis, published so they could then subversively sneak them back under the military bases and tell their fellow soldiers what's really going on in vietnam and what they can do to help stop the war. the director of the museum asked if i would be willing to curate for her this exhibit which is now in the second floor of the george washington university's elliott school. i knew from 50 years before that, howard levy, the doctor who was sentenced to three years in jail for refusing to train green berets. i knew still susan will be speaking about agent orange and what veterans are doing to deal with that terrible legacy, so i said yes. not having any idea that it would occupy my life for the next three years. but i'm pleased that exhibit opened in chi minh city at the museum march 2018. and this exhibit here today is a duplicate which is now touring universities in north america. why are we doing this? because we say, modestly, only because we want to change the way the history of the war in vietnam is being taught. most people know about the peace movement in america. there was great opposition and while there should be, to the war in vietnam. it's great people learn and reject wars like the vietnam war, but very few people know about the u.s. soldiers and veterans who opposed the war, often at great sacrifice, often years in jail, and we have stories of soldiers in vietnam who opposed the war and were shot and killed, and we have here with us today a soldier who opposed the war, was not shot and killed obviously but spent time in the stockade, william short, who helped us immensely in the creation of the exhibit. a lot of the portraits there are his from a book that he and his wife lois seidenberg put together. called a matter of conscience and that's why we recognize him on the cover of our book. and i'm very pleased today because though this is the sixth location for the tour of this exhibit, this is the first time that our coeditors martha doherty and david sortright, all three of our coeditors are here at the same time and you will be hearing shortly from david. i want to leave it at that with just one other quick mention. the exhibit in the book and the book also get many contributions. you will see inside an entire addition of 16 pages of these underground papers written by and for soldiers while they are still active duty. i see these as the social media of the day, 50 years ago, way before computers, let alone youtube and face time and all of that sort of thing. but these are the ways that the u.s. soldiers communicated with the others on their bases, and so they would often print up and distribute at night, at great peril, thousands of copies of each individual paper. how many papers? there were close to 300 different papers put out by soldiers, sailors and folks in the air force bases throughout the united states in germany and in asia. some even on the ships, the aircraft carriers going to vietnam. this is the way in almost real-time that communicated with each other. they told the stories of what time was actually like in vietnam, why they felt so betrayed and so enraged by what they found which is very different from what they thought they went over there. and through these they helped plan and plot and carry out the building of a movement so robust that they helped to end the war in vietnam. so this is what this is about. very pleased. i want now to say a few things about this week. we've had a great week here. we have had a piece, poetry open mic. we have had three great movies, documentary movies. -- and we have bill prince's "the boys who said no". a fine cut because that film isn't quite completed yet. and today of course we have a great forum. this morning we have two academic panels, one on the history of efforts to bring peace and an end to the war and then a next panel is on teaching viet nam. and we have great scholars in both of these. in the afternoon we have two panels on the legacies of the war, what veterans and others are doing to respond to them. we have one on the unexploded ordinance and the other on the continuing problems of agent orange, and then this evening at 6:00, where's my prop, we have a candlelight march -- burned a hole in my jacket. we have a candlelight march from here, three blocks to the white house. and we arranged it that way, asked them to move the white house close enough so that even those of us who are a little creaky can make it. and we have a couple of folks who have some major disabilities and they have committed to joining us so we ask that you do, too. when we arrive at the white house we are going to read off as they did 50 years ago the names of american war dead but we are going to alternate those names with the names of vietnamese innocent civilians who were killed during the war. and we will start out with the names of not one, but nine massacres, which -- all nine of them ended up with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of innocent people being killed. so with that, i want to introduce the moderator of the next panel. where is my -- here we are -- which is a professor from gwu here. let me see and see if i can handle his name, mike mochizuki. he holds the japan u.s. relations chair in memory of gaston seeker at gw and received his phd in political science from harvard. but there's something else that isn't listed in this set of biographies that you should know about mike. something that happened 601 months ago. quick mathematics, that's 50 years and one month ago in october of 1969 when he was a student at brown university and helped organize a moratorium, teach-in there at brown and it also doesn't mention that he was the conscientious objector to the war. so we are very pleased that mike has agreed to be the moderator for this part of the program. thank you very much. >> thank you very much for that kind introduction. welcome everyone and i want to congratulate the organizers of this week's events for putting on just a superb program. this is especially meaningful for me personally. if it wasn't for the experience 50 years ago i probably never would have become a scholar of asian studies, so i want to thank linda for asking me to moderate this panel. we have an absolutely stellar panel to examine th ediplomatic and peace movement initiative to bring an end to the viet name war. the biographical statements are available in the program so let me just, for the interest of time, quickly identify the members of the panel. starting to me immediate left is professor david courtwright who is the director of international peace studies at the institute at the university of notre dame. dr. john provosts who is a fellow and directs the vietnam project at the national security archive housed at george washington university. the dr. sophie quinn who is at temple university and is a fellow at the center on vietnamese philosophy and culture. professor jim hershberg is a professor of history and international errors at george washington university and the author of the book miracle. before i turn things over to professor cortright i would like to ask professor littlemen to speak. >> each speaker has 10 minutes. in the interest of moving along and promoting discussion. thank you. we will flash signs to the speaker. >> good morning. good to see you. i will try to be disciplined but the army didn't do such a good job training me in that regard. it is so wonderful that you are here and so important and necessary that we gather this week to commemorate the antiwar movement. which reached a peak in this city a couple blocks away. my mission is to shed some light on the critical elements of that that movement. the dissent and resistance that spread among active-duty soldiers and recent veterans. i want to begin by dispelling core myths about the war that are still pervasive in our culture. we're told that veterans who returned from vietnam were spat upon, disrespected by antiwar activists, by a society indifferent to thei sacrifices, but a sociologist in his important book found there was no contemporary evidence to confirm this. he meticulously researched the newspapers, the news of those days found no evidence and you would think something like that we knew that the peace activists welcomed us. and supported us. invited us to march and all of their reveries rallies, and you can see the pictures of the beautiful exhibit that ron curated and created with barbara and several of us, you can see us in the front of these marches, unmistakable in our short hair, though at leas we hard some hair then and those silly g.i.s for peace hats that we -- war. we were part of the movement because the movement was part of america. another pernicious myth is that the vietnam war have been won. that victory was supposedly within reach. the infamous light at the end of the tunnel. if only we had just continued the fight. but we must ask, who exactly would have done the fighting? where were the troops who were willing to fight on to some illusory victory? we know that by 1968 when the great valley occurred, the u.s. armed forces were in an advanced state of institutional decay. and this was before nixon began his troop withdrawals. my thesis is that the troops are withdrawn because the army needed to save itself and in order to prevent the total collapse of the armed forces. there are two quotes in the literature that make this point. one is pretty well-known. the other is not. in the june 1971 issue of the armed forces journal, not exactly a pacifist rag, there was an article by retired colonel handle called the collapse of the armed forces and he said, "the morale, discipline and battle worthiness of the u.s. armed forces are with a few salient exceptions lower and worse than at any time in the century and possibly the history of the united states." a year later there was an article in the preeminent foreign policy magazine in the united states foreign affairs, by the military sociologist morris janowitz. very distinguished. i studied him in graduate school. and he wrote, the military establishment and especially its ground forces are experiencing a profound crisis in legitimacy. leading to a loss of command and operational effectiveness. in every part of the military in those days, fighting an unpopular unwinnable war led to broad opposition and social disruption. the g.i. movement is something that we're talking about this week and it's beautifully depicted in the exhibit. there were the underground newpapers, soldiers participated in rallies, petitions, and various forms of public opposition. many of us were at the rally 50 years ago. there are at least a couple hundred active-duty soldiers there. and the week before i was proud to be part of a petition of 1365 active-duty service members from all over the world. it was a full-page ad in the new york times. my article last week in the new york times actually displayed an image of that petition. so this is just one example of the widespread opposition. there was also the g.i. resistance, those who refused orders, who engaged in various forms of noncooperation in the military to undermine the war. in 1970, the army was well aware of how widespread the dissent was. they asked, have you participated in a dissent kind of activity. read an underground newspaper, gone to a protest or demonstration. one quarter of the soldiers they surveyed said yes. then they asked a different question. have you engaged in acts of disobedience, of sabotage or insubordination. again, one quarter of them said yes. so it's quite clear that at least a quarter of the military was participating in antiwar activity. and the historian richard mosier makes the observation that this level of opposition to the war in the military was equivalent to the proportion of activists in society among young people and in the rural and very conservative communities where most of our bases were located the proportion of antiwar activism was greater on the military base than in the community. that was certainly the case for me when i was working with gis for peace in rural and conservative el paso, most activity was on the base. so this was a very widespread movement. the armed forces experience the highest rate of unauthorized absence in the army in 1971 17% went awol at one point or another and 7% were deserters. mosher analyze these figures and he makes another really interesting observation that this massive level of absence deprived the military of about one million person-years of work, of service, and this clearly had a way of forcibly curtailing military capabilities. throughout the military, african-american groups where the most antiwar and often the most rebellious. there were major racial uprisings throughout the military in those days, which is depicted in the exhibit. travis air force base, the major location for sending troops over and coming back, experienced what was called the largest mass rebellion in the history of the air force when 600 troops engaged in a fight that disrupted operations there for several days. most importantly what happened within vietnam itself or what i call a quasi-mutiny occurred, the grunts cease-fire. throughout the military there was widespread orders. i found some really interesting evidence years after i wrote soldiers in revolt. he casually mentioned that in the first cap division in 1970, there were 35 recorded incidents of combat refusal. that means it's serious enough that it come to the books and was reported up the chain of command. so i did a little math, there were five other combat divisions in the wat and combat went on for several years. so it's certainly safe to say there were hundreds of acts of combat refusal which is really just a polite word for mutiny. so it's obvious the armed forces were not able to sustain combat at that level. the war makers tried to continue the bombing. the accelerated trooper thralls they intensified bombing thinking they could compensate for the lack of willing firepower on the ground with an inferno of fire and destruction from the air. but they failed to calculate for the consciences of the soldiers and junior offivers and the g.i. rebellion spread. dozens of antiwar newspapers and resistance groups emerged and there was a major racial uprising on the uss kitty hawk and very importantly sabotage began to spread especially in the navy. those entering your officers who were called upon to upright the air were literally threw a wrench into the works. and this reached its peak in july 1972 when two aircraft carriers were put out of commission by sabotage, and in the air force officers began to speak out and they joined the lawsuit that congresswoman elizabeth holtzman filed challenging the very constitutionality of the war. so let me conclude by saying how important this meeting is again but also just making an interesting observation about one of the placards that was very widely carried back in the days of the antiwar movement and that many carried in the rally 50 years ago. what if they gave a war and nobody came? but i kind of like to change it a bit. what if they waged an unjust war and soldiers said no and joined the peace movement? that's what happened. and in combination with a massive antiwar movement we helped to bring an end to this horrible savage war in vietnam. thank you. >> dr. prados. >> good morning. thank you all for coming. all of us i think at this table have stories that we could tell you about the antiwar movement and david has done a great job starting us off. i was asked specifically to talk about why was the war not winnable. i'm going to do that i want to put in a footnote to what david was just telling you. some years ago i had the occasion to speak to an audience actually bigger than this one which contained a lot of former military officers and because of their age and seniority and whatnot, a lot of them were former battalion commanders in vietnam and i asked for a show of hands from this group, batallion commanders specifically, asking them did you trust your troops to go out on operations when you were command in vietnam? the results were very interesting and broke down exactly along the lines that he was talking about. that those who had led troops in vietnam during the early uses of war, very confident, good troops, and those who were commanders in the field in the period starting in 1969 and going on to the end, half of the people who had commanded battalions in vietnam did not trust their gis to go out in the field with them. ok. let me talk about what i'm here for. the war in vietnam was not winnable. it wasn't winnable for a number of reasons, a host of them, even, starting with presidents of the united states. presidents of the united states conditioned the circumstances under which u.s. armies went into the field. they made a series of decisions that set the boundaries and the framework for what we could do in vietnam. lyndon johnson's basic decision to not have a national debate over whether there should be a declaration of war and to conduct a war essentially off the budget in order to supposedly avoid controversy actually created controversy in my opinion and fueled a situation where the war was continuing under circumstances that sharpened u.s. economic and political divisions to the point that later on in the 1960s and going into the 1970s, you had major constraints on the actions of presidents. by 1968, in the election in which richard nixon was elected, it was no longer possible for an american seeking political office to argue openly that they favored seeking victory in vietnam. you had to be elected, say that you were in favor of negotiations and getting out of the war. government lying and surveillance of the society as the antiwar movement grew set the government on a collision course with the american polity. the growing antiwar movement epitomized by the march on november 15, 1969 where i was present as a matter of fact, tied the hands of american leaders. to the extent that when richard nixon took office his secret plan to end the war was actually to win it did he was no longer able to pursue that without simultaneously beginning to with draw american forces from vietnam thus reducing the combat power that might theoretically have won the war. you've all probably heard a lot about americans not understanding vietnam. but it's also true vietnamese did not understand the united states. so the south vietnamese leaders all made promises to americans that they never had any intention of keeping. and did not understand that when they did that they were lessening their political currency in washington. ok? then there was a vietnam data problem. you say they don't understand us and we don't understand them. well, all this occurs in a situation in which actually, to a large degree, vietnam was the most-analyzed war in american history. there were so many analyses, so many people picking up so much data, but the data was flawed. that wasn't understood. the number of soldiers did not equal the amount of military power. the order of battle was something different than the actual distribution of force in the country. the body count was a ridiculous notion. the number or tonnage of bombs dropped really didn't matter. the data problem never went away and it underlay all of the analyses and the analyses fueled the decisions. so you have to ask, where the decisions any good? >> another problem was the misfit of objectives and goals. for the north vietnamese and vietnamese, they had a dream. they were going to reunify vietnam. that dream was complete dedication. it was for them a total war. the united states, vietnam was a limited war on the periphery of the cold war. our dedication to the war in no way matched the vietnamese determination to win. the idea that americans could surge into vietnam and when the war by so-called decisive intervention never was possible because the south vietnamese railroad and port and railroad situations would not sustain an american buildup that was that quick. the amount of american forces surging into vietnam was probably as decisive as possible and those problems were not solved until 1968 when you had the tet offensive and these other factors that i was talking about begin to apply. the american idea of winning the war also presumed that there was a winning strategy. actually no name strategy for the vietnam conflict was ever proposed. the idea that just bombing or having lots of troops were just doing pacification, all those things existed amid a milieu of cultural, political economic and other factors that constrained the possibilities and potential for those strategies. the strategies never matched the situation where they needed to be applied. another point is the united states intervention in vietnam took place within global political context. not just the vietnamese revolution but in fact there was a global anticolonial movement starting in 1945 that swept the world and converted dozens of former colonies into new countries. the vietnamese revolution was in that flow. the united states intervention was like king cnute standing in front of the sea and demanding that the waves stop. vietnam histories have also failed to appreciate the full impact of the antiwar movement. in particular the fall 1967 march on the pentagon where it became clear that the americans opposed to the vietnam war really were a major political force in the country and on that i will stop and give it over to sophie. (applause) >> thank you. >> hello. i'm really happy to be here and happy to see so many familiar faces. changed over time but still familiar. i'm here to not just plug my book on the third force in the vietnam war. here it is. it is subtitled the elusive search for peace 1954 to 1975. my angle is to talk about this book and the voices of the south vietnamese people in particular who were often ignored in our rush to wage a high-tech intervention in vietnam. so i'm going to try to summarize my book in five points of my arguments about vietnamese efforts at peacemaking, why they failed and why they never stopped. my first point is that the long american war was not inevitable. the line that we often hear that there was no other road to take may be defensible for the vietnamese side, for the communist side as it was after all their country and their revolution. but for the united states many exit points existed and they have been gone over by other scholars including fred logeval who made the point very clearly that the u.s. war was a war of choice. some of the exit points if you could just tick off on one hand, people tend to say no, no, the north vietnamese weren't ready at that point. but there's plenty of evidence that their southern partners, the national liberation front, were always ready to talk. the final statement of the geneva conference in 1954 outlined a process that an apple discussions between the two parts of vietnam and this continued to be the basic formula that proponents of peace within south vietnam promoted. they wanted to rid themselves of a military government and establish some sort of coalition between the communists, the center, the left and anyone who was interested in avoiding a major war. these discussions often focused on mutualism in 1963. the u.s. was so afraid of the administration's tendency towards political conflict as opposed to military conflict that they overthrew them in a coup. there were other discussions of neutral is him, even a united states senator submitted a memo to the johnson administration outlining how volute neutral solution might work but of course the u.s. refusal to accept a coalition government in the south and the refusal to accept the idea of neutralism as basically being procommunist meant that these opportunities were always closed off. my second point is that the indochina wars lasted altogether roughly 45 years if you take the point from the end of the second world war to the end of the war over cambodia which was coming to a close in 1990. that's a very long time and over that time the point i want to make is that the political configurations on all sides evolved. the people we started out fighting changed their complexion over time. and in particular some of the sides changed dramatically. there were different ideologies in the soviet union that changed between 1964, 1965 after the fall of -- the chinese communist party was all over the map in these years and of course once mao zedong and the cultural revolution became a fact of life it became a strong influence on viet nam but wasn't the only influence. the communist parties involved were far from monolithic. the u.s. hard-line towards the nationalist communist in vietnam in fact in my opinion pushed their party towards a much more rigid stance and undercut those who had worked for compromise, solutions or coalitions in the past. some of the leaders including who became the leader of the communist party in hanoi in 1960 said that there was a chance of forming a coalition government in the south which could rid the southern part of vietnam of their military government and eventually open negotiations with hanoi. the other point of view in hanoi was expressed in the parties theoretical journal in july 1964 and this is the one that u.s. policymakers often heard because at times it was expressed quite decisively, and this was that the revolution can and should be settled only by the use of revolutionary acts and the force of the masses to defeat enemy force. it absolutely cannot be settled by treatises and accords. it is impossible to count on talks and negotiations with the imperialists as advocated by the modern revisionists. these were members of the communist party at vietnam influenced by ideas that the struggle between the west and the communist would could be resolved peacefully. my third point centers on the people of south vietnam. the republic of vietnam as it was known should have been trusted to decide their own clinical future. the united states, unfortunately, had a tendency to take the "we know best" line and to treat south vietnamese politicians as children. but as it happens data treat south get me's politicians as children. vietnamese in both sides of the country had a wide expanse of the wider world, had traveled abroad, had earned phds in paris. many were skilled lawyers and medical people. if we'd paid more attention to the voices of these resistors within south vietnam, we would've become aware that these people had at best a lukewarm attitude toward the u.s. takeover of their war effort. this was not a widely popular this was not a why the popular event in south vietnam. they did not choose to become a ground zero in the cold war in southeast asia. as we now know, this cold war was waged, the hot war in vietnam, rather, was waged with high-tech weapons and heavy element of air war. the people of south vietnam found themselves subject to tactical airstrikes, free fire zones. the bombing of the south is something that isn't always widely acknowledged and yet it went on actually longer than the bombing of hanoi. ok. i could give you many examples of selfie it means resistance to u.s. policy and the sorts of movements that developed. but i think we'll have to leave that for questions, if we have time. the fourth point i want to make and this is also related to the point some of the other panelist made, is that the united states made a unilateral decision to make a stand in vietnam against asian communism. they chose south vietnam as the point where they thought they could stop what they saw as the spreading tide of red over the map of asia. i think john mcnaughton's famous analysis of u.s. motivation for entering the war -- he was the deputy secretary of state at the time -- his analysis was printed in the pentagon papers and has since become well-known. i think it is worth remembering what he had to say in march of 1965. his plan of action described u.s. aims as, to avoid 70% to avoid a u.s. he militating 70% to avoid a human leading defeat to our reputation as a guarantor, 20% to keep vietnam and adjacent territory from chinese hands, meaning probably laos and thailand and cambodia, and 10% to permit people of south vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life. death thailand and cambodia thailand and cambodia. so the idea that we were fighting a popular war on behalf of a beleaguered people in south vietnam is not completely true. it excused the facts on the ground. my final point has i think been made by david very well, which is that in the end the war was a great tragedy for all involved. in the u.s. in vietnam, north, south, communist, non-communist, and even for our allies such as the south koreans. and yet, we in this country continue to argue about the lessons of the vietnam war, which i find incredible. but revisions revisionist historians have long attempted to establish that we gave up too soon and that the war was being won by 1972. this is the paradigm of triumph forsaken, which is the title of the famous book by one of these revisionists. as we know from the facts presented here about the g.i. movement, this idea that we might have about the g.i. movement, this idea that we might have won the war, our forces in vietnam was no longer a force that was willing to win the war or to fight. they had seen that it was not popular with the be enemies people and with the vietnamese people and they wanted it to end, so that's my five points for you. (applause) >> thank you, sophia. now i turn to jim. >> thanks, mike. and thank you to the organizers, linda and others, for inviting me to such a great event. and also for awakening. 50-year-old memories. in the fall of 1969 i was a nine-year-old twerp growing up in a suburb of new york city in northern new jersey. i was also a news junkie. i regarded every day's new york times as a personal letter to me. i was already strongly against the war. and i could not take time out from third-grade to journey down to washington for the march 50 years ago today. however, the highlight of the 1960's for me occurred at the time of the first moratorium day, a month earlier. on october 15, i marched against the war in ridgewood, new jersey, a republican suburb. and then october 16, the next day, i was at shea stadium when the mets won the world series. and these two events were not entirely unrelated. you'll remember october 15 was the game of day for that the mets won, 2-1. and the pitcher was tom seaver. and he had told the media he believed the war in vietnam was wrong. he believed it was a guerrilla war and it was time to get out. he endorsed the idea of an advertisement that would say if the mets can win the pennant, we can get out of vietnam, more or less. and i did not discover until a couple of days ago something that i am not sure i caught at the time, but it reflects the atmosphere of that era. the chicago eight, and it was still chicago eight, bobbe seale was not bound, gagged and evicted make in chicago seven into the fall. bobby seale they sent a telegram to tom siebert in the fifth game and they sad, "we want you to know of our continued support to the new york mets to the battle against the aggressors from the amerikan league." and that is amerikan with a'k'. "we in chicago also find ourselves locked in a struggle with a team of outside agitators known as the washington kangaroos. our trial now taking place on the center court of the chicago federal building, has been termed the world series of injustice. in this series we, like you, are the underdog, so from us eight underdogs which included abbie hoffman, jerry rubin, tom hayden and others -- from us eight underdogs to you underdogs and to all the underdogs of the world struggling against oppression, we offer our support. up against the centerfield wall, baltimore. power to the new york mets! " i want to use the remaining time -- one example of antiwear heroism is my uncle kenny. on october 15, he turned down tickets to the press pass to shea stadium for game four to march against the war or attend the event you mentioned. on game five he was at shea stadium with me when the mets won the world series. he was also with me when we saw the nationals win the world series 50 years later it so it is funny how history can turn around. in my remaining 22 seconds, let me tell you about three issues connected to the antiwar movement and the war. they relate to something mike did mention, since 1991i have been closely associated with the group at the woodrow wilson center called the cold war international history project, whose aim is to get beyond the washington centric version of history that most americans have known. of the cold war, which is 99% based on american english language sources. and to try to move toward incorporating communist and other side sources. in the case of the vietnam war, that include the enemies sources, but also other actors in the international history of war, soviet, chinese and others. and let me briefly mention three issues that night be interesting, and suggestions for further reading and, of course i will be happy to deal at greater length in the queue at a. q&a. one is, since the panel is about diplomatic initiatives, is did any of these diplomatic initiatives have any chance of success? there were hundreds of attempts after the war as blighted in 19 city five1965, until the begin of the paris talks in 1968-1969 to broker peace talks between washington and hanoi. i want to hold up because i do not have time to really whole nine or pages, my book is called marigold, the last chance for peace. this deals with what i regard as perhaps the most serious of these opportunities. this was an effort by the government of communist poland in 19 66 in collaboration with nato's italy, to broker the opening of peace talks and wage a formula for a settlement to end the war and to reach a formula for a settlement to end the war. it was not this is really a good chance for peace but it should have led to the opening of direct talks between washington and hanoi at the end of 1966. those talks may well have broken down. it does not mean the war would have ended. but if lyndon johnson would have entered peace talks in 1967, this would've completely changed the political dynamic that led to the rise of an antiwar candidate, of eugene mccarthy entering the race and the new hampshire primary and robert kennedy entering their waste the race. peace talks would have led to a different trajectory even if it did not and the war. this is based prime early on communist archives from poland, former soviet union, hungarian archives, vietnamese sources, and it does suggest there may well have been missed opportunities to either end the war sooner or open peace talks years sooner. and of course, hundreds of thousands of lives sooner, than actually happened. so my research does suggest that peace talks should have started earlier. a second question, and this relates to a colleague's book that i would recommend him a has to do with what was the impact of the moratorium movement? of the antiwar movement in late 1969? research has very strongly demonstrated, and this is also since don-unlike soviet meet was too shy to hold up his own book-john has written many books on the war and he also writes about the story. in the fall of 1969 richard nixon with henry kissinger strongly desired to try and escalatory program in vietnam connected to the so-called madman theory. nixon believed dwight eisenhower ended the korean war in 1953 by conveying a nuclear threat to the communists by conveying a nuclear threat to the communists. that was, historians have shown, probably a misconception. it was stalin's death not any threat from eisenhower that really led to the end of fighting in korea. but nixon believed that madman theory and hints of s collation could signal to the soviets that they would copper my's and and compromise and end the war. this book by william burr of the national security archive called nixon's nuclear spectre showed the moratorium movement in the fall of 1969 was crucial in causing nixon to abandon a massive escalation that might have including nuclear weapons to try to interdict the chi minh trail. the marches did have impact on policy. third, i want to raise a question that john and i discussed at a has struck a meeting years back, and this is john and i discussed at a historical meeting years back. could the war have been ended in1969 on the same terms? four years earlier than the peace accords of paris, so-called, in january, 1973? there, the jury is still out. clearly, north vietnam eight concessions in terms of allowing the saigon government which it had not accepted earlier. there's an ongoing controversy on whether the efficacy of nixon's strangler diplomacy of getting moscow and beijing to pressure hanoi to moderate its terms might have had impact. nixon's triangular diplomacy. the slew of russian and chinese and much less vietnamese evidence that has emerged is that while there might have been pressure to moderate terms, it was with the understanding that this was just to get the americans out, and allow the process of leading to hanoi's eventual unification of vietnam under its eventual control, would civilly play with simply take place later. the history of the war still being written, and from a u.s. perspective, very much rewritten. i urge you all to consult some of that literature. i'll be glad to talk with you and thank you ray much. thank you very much. >> thank you. we have had a very rich set of presentations. david has told us about the critical role that soldiers have played in the movement for peace, even engaging in sabotage efforts to lay off close to the u.s. military effort to lay obstacles to the u.s. military effort. john explained why the war was not inevitable and focused on the play cult constraints on the leadership the political constraints on the leaderships. also he showed how flawed data led to flawed analysis and flawed decision-making. sophia - john talked about the war was unwinnable. and sophia explained why the war was not inevitable and identified exit points and missed opportunities. jim focused on one of those missed opportunities, operation marigold and brought us full circle to tell us how that moratorium movement actually mattered in constraining the nixon administration. so we have 15 minutes for questions and answers. i would like to take groups of three questions and have the panelists answer those questions. be brief in your question. first identify yourself, then to whom you would like to direct the question. >> is there microphone? >> i do not have scholarly qualifications on this topic except that i am vietnamese, and lived through the war before i came here in 1969 and got myself immersed into the peace movement. first to professor sophie quinn-judge. what to make of the statement, in south vietnam at the time, the official line was always, the communists are an implacable foe. they are not to be trusted. and the only good communist is a dead communist. so any of their overtures to peace, neutrality, negotiations are just a fake, to their eventual victory? that statement seems to give credence to that view and also i am puzzled that he would make such a statement and what is the audience that he intended? because the north vietnamese were quite skillful at working with the peace movements worldwide, and especially in the u.s., and they were always putting themselves forward as, we do not want this war, which is true. we do not necessarily want complete victory, we want peace. so i would like you to explore that further. my second question is two professor john prados. i wish you would elaborate on your point that the leaders of south vietnam had made many promises that they didn't keep, and loss credence with the u.s. government? thank you. >> ok, so the gentlemen there. >> thank you. i am doug hofstetter and wanted to respond to jim hershberger's questions about whether or not the war could have ended earlier. i was a part of the national student association delegation that traveled to saigon and hanoi, to negotiate the people's peace treaty in late 1970. if you go back and look at the terms we negotiated with the saigon student union, the vietnamese student union in the north and the vietnamese student union and the north and the national student union in liberated areas in the south, is not that different from what kissinger came up with two years later. so actually, the people's peace treaty, basically laid out that the war should end. the american troops could come home. prisoner should be released. and the vietnamese should solve problems between themselves. and we brought it back and took it to american colleges and universities in the spring of 1971 and there were hundreds of american colleges and universities that passed it and two years later because of your came up with the same thing. >> ok, and the gentleman right on this side. i'm going to go for different sections of the room. >> thanks. my name is james williamson. i want to urge everyone in the room to consider visiting kent state in this coming spring and especially for the 50th anniversary of the protest and the shootings there next may 4. when we talk about was this were winnable, we should not lose sight of the fact that we should not have wanted to win this war. it was a wrong war from the very beginning. i do not think that john believes differently, but -- and i want to invoke george mcgovern, for policy wonks in the room, who said the biggest single failure of american foreign policy was the failure to understand third world revolutionary movements. three pieces. what about the role of george ball? could we have a little more of an assessment of the role of mr. henry kissinger, who has been wined and dined by people probably at this institution, by the clintons, bite drew faust at harvard university by drew faust at harvard university. does he really deserve to be wined and dined? and finally, john because you have done such great work on the cia, i do not know why william bill colby appeared in a dream of mine last night, i am not sure what to make of that. but can you talk about the role of the cia both on the ground in operation phoenix and in the information aspect of things or disinformation or misinformation? >> ok so i would like to turn to the panelists to appeal to any of those questions, starting with sophie and then john and jim. >> all right. i do not think i was clear when i read out that statement from the hanoi theoretical journal about why the revolution must win a violent victory and why peace talks and negotiations with the imperialists are not worth the time. that was not a statement by le y un. that was an anonymous author writing in the journal in 1964, which expressed one point of view coming from hanoi. we have records of statements by le yuen that say something quite different. he was known as an advocate of the southern evolution but he was also consistent in lobbying for coalition governments, and may at one time have been fairly hard line on his feelings about the saigon government which he felt was a puppet government that should be destroyed but he at the same time also spoke up about the need for peace governance in the south. he was some but he said even in his 1968 statement before the hanoi central committee in january, before the tet offensive, that his goal, or he saw the goal of the tet offensive as to create a new front that would spring to life out of the uprising. the new front will gather together all the people who have not joined the lack national liberation front because they see it as commonest. the imperialists would see that this is not a communist government. we will bring all the personalities close to the french into this government, even those who have worked with the americans for a long time. if they are not dangerous, we can also include them. we are strong. we will confuse the other side. we will divide them. there will be a new front with a new name and a different flag. in the north there will be one government and in the south there will be two governments, the liberation front and the new front. they will be three but one like the earth with the sky. take that as you will. it could be entirely hypocritical, time serving, or a search for a stopgap solution that would've put an end to the bombing and the destruction of all parts of vietnam. that's it's one of the viewpoints expressed coming from hanoi over the years. i'm just trying to make the point that hanoi was not one monolithic block. does this answer your question? ok. >> ok. i think there's a lot to talk about here. let me just say quickly about the cia, actually, my next book which is being line editing now is all about the cia's vietnam war. so you'll find a lot of stuff, but colby was, i would say, a figure who early on got the idea of pacification and wanted to make it about pacification and wanted to make it about pacification and heres is just one of these strategies that did not quite fit on the higher level of cia's information to american presidents. the agency did well in terms of morning presidents that there was a chinese angle and there was a russian angle and there was a danger of intervention by hanoi's allies. they did less well on interpreting south vietnamese politics. and they did moderately, some well, some not so well, on interpreting the military balance and the actual situation of the war. george ball was a hero to my mind, in terms of opposing american intervention. henry kissinger was a knave. kissinger's participation in american policymaking was one of the most dangerous things that occurred during the nixon years. i believe nixon and kissinger actually helped extend the war more than they did stop it, and this goes to the point of whether we should abandon the war at all. unfortunately, american history is problematic. you know, i had a kind of a controversy going for several years among american historians, was vietnam part of a revolution? there's a tendency among american historians to view vietnam as another battle of the cold war. and it wasn't just another battle of the cold war. it was a revolution. and the united states, as i try to indicate with my mentioning of knute trying to hold the sea back, the u.s. was completely misplaced trying to get in the way of the vietnamese revolution. to the point about south vietnamese not understanding the united states, i mentioned the promises made, but there's more than that. it was that saigon governments didn't appreciate america, the sensibility of america, american politics. just to take the most glaring example of kissinger and nixon finally negotiate something that will seal the american withdrawal and get the americans out. they take the draft agreement to saigon. and nguyen van thieu, president of south vietnam at this point thinks that with american politics as they are and with the disposition of the united states as it is, they have the capability to stand back and reject an agreement that does not force north vietnam to withdraw its armies from south vietnam. naughtily that, reject a coalition government with the national liberation front and essentially create a victory out of the situation that they were in, in 1972. those things were simply not possible in the situation that existed for saigon and for thieu at that time. if you look at south enemies efforts in the united states, they never really engaged the american polity. they didn't try and convince americans. they were not sending representatives out to american college campuses, for example, to give talks about how our cause is just or whatever they would have wanted to talk about. they did not make an effort to understand the united states. that, i think, undercut their goals. ok? >> jim? >> just very quickly, picking up on something that john was just talking about in terms of whether or not the war was doomed and on the wrong side from the beginning, it's very interesting to go back to the immediate aftermath of world war two when, for several years, much of this u.s. government and certainly much of the state department, agreed with the impulse of franklin roosevelt, that the situation and what was then still technically french indochina should be mostly viewed through the lens of an anticolonial struggle. but with the victory of mao zedong and the communists in china in 1949, that's completely swung to the idea that no, this is just another front in the cold war. what is fascinating is that for several years, essentially, u.s. documents talked about independence efforts against the french in indochina and independence efforts against the dutch in what was then the netherlands east indies in against sukarno. as if the europeans on the wrong side of history and we have to ease the passage out. then in 1949-1950, we still supported easing sukarno we started viewing the french effort as part of the cold war. we don't like colonialism but it's better than communism. to jump 20 years, what is missed in most histories of the world is the fear of the domino theory in the early 1960's. the biggest domino everyone was afraid of in washington was indonesia, because sukarno was seen as playing footsie with the communists, with the chinese. in the fall of 1965 there is a coup and counter coup and military takeover in indonesia. the domino falls in the pro-american direction. but by then we're so committed in vietnam that nobody reassesses the stakes. like hey, they do we don't have to worry about indonesia anymore, maybe viet nam doesn't matter as much and we can treat it as the civil was that is was. on the question of the peace treaty negotiated in december, 1970, i'm not familiar with every detail but my sense is that neither in washington nor in hanoi was there a willingness to make the kind of concessions in terms of north vietnam, i think they still officially recognized the provisional revolutionary government led by madame din as the sole legitimate government for saigon. and in the u.s. there was still an insistence that all the people of the people's army had to leave south vietnam, all "foreign" forces. of course to north vietnam, they were not foreign forces. this was a civil war. this was part of the american cognitive dissonance. this was the u.s. intervening in the civil war. in terms of what was the real policies of the two sides, i would defer to john and urge you to look at the secret dialogue, the records of which are very much available from about the americans and now the north vietnamese between kissinger and li duc thuyh already taking place. robert brigham has a book about kissinger and the vietnam war. bob brigham is one of the few scholars fluent in vietnamese. and like nguyen and hanoi's work looks at it from a balanced perspective from both washington and hanoi so i would encourange you to dig into the weeds about what the two sides were really telling each other, as opposed to what they might agree in flowery language for purposes of international propaganda. >> we are at 10:30. do we have time for a couple more questions do we have time for a couple more questions? >> no. >> ok. >> sorry, we have to move along and there will be other opportunities for questions and answers. people want to take a break and we have to be back here to begin at 10:45. so thank you very much. >> please join me in thanking the department. >> it is my pleasure to introduce our two keynote speakers. but i want to take a moment to mention a couple of additional people who are here. there are three who came from vietnam who will be participating this afternoon and i think that for a number of reasons i want to introduce them, but including,