National Archive Conference on Vietnam and the presidency
National Archives and Presidential Libraries to Host Historic Two-Day Conference on Vietnam and the Presidency
http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2006/nr06-54.html
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2006/01/10/
jfk_library_to_host_talks_on_vietnam/
Hi all,
I'm drafting a letter from me to the organizers of the JFK Center conference to make some constructive suggestions for recognizing the participation and views of Vietnamese people in the war there.
I'm dropping my concern with the participation of the military and the anti-war movement, as those cases reflect my own point of view rather than the bald facts.
I'll copy the letter to the scholars attending whose e-addresses I can track down easily: Herring, Young, Kaiser and so on.
Please take a look at this and make any suggestions:
Dear Organizers,
I am writing to point out that your conference program includes no Vietnamese as speakers, and does not address the Vietnamese participation in the Viet Nam war.
This stark absence has been widely remarked by scholars and members of the public. I offer you some suggesitons for speakers who would include Vietnamese realities in a discussion of the US Presidency and the Viet Nam war.
An obvious avenue will be to include members of the governments in Saigon allied to the US Presidency. Here in the United States we have such former Republic of Viet Nam executives as General Ky, and former representatives of that nation to ours such as Bui Diem.
Another avenue will be to include speakers from the Ha Noi government, shrewd observers of the US Presidency. The former Ha Noi speechwriter Bui Tin, the man who accepted the surrender of the Republic of Viet Nam, is now a dissdent in Paris, easily reached.
A third avenue will be to ask Gerald Ford, the US president now absent from your program, to speak on his actions welcoming the exiles from Saigon in 1975 to our country. Many of President Ford's administraiton took part in this effort and are available to speak, as are the Vietnamese community leaders who worked with them.
Those are my suggestions, and of course they all might not work out practically. I suggest them to get you started. You will find many Americans, Vietnamese and others, eager to assist you in including the people of Viet Nam and Vietnamese American citizens in a landmark discussion of the US Presidency and the Viet Nam War.
Sincerely
Dan
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 07:46:40 -0500
From: "Dan Duffy" <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] The American War in Vietnam Redux - Sans Vietnamese
Dan Duffy wrote:
Some more positive suggestions for the JFK Center conference on the US Presidency and the WN war:
Bui Tin on "Did the Ngo Family Kill JFK?"
Tom Hayden on "How I Defeated LBJ"
William Calley on "RN and the Troops"
OK, I can't help joking to distance myself from these painful topics, but surely an Americanist historian or a US journalist could easily think of famous people to talk about the Presidents and the war in ways that include the antiwar movement, Vietnamese people, and soldiers.
Dan
From: "Markus Taussig" <markustaussig@mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] The American War in Vietnam Redux - letter draft
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 08:50:52 -0500
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dan,
I think that's a very nice letter. Would it perhaps make sense to add a second sentence to your opening paragraph that read something like the following?
"By Vietnamese people, I mean to refer you to the relevant overlapping groups of former political allies and adversaries and present-day US citizens that intensively interacted with the US presidents of the time."
I'm just thinking something along those lines might help discourage any inclination the JFK folks might have to say that this conference is about the US not the Vietnamese perspective.
Markus
From: "Shawn McHale" <mchale@gwu.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 12:50:53 -0200
Subject: Re: [Vsg] The American War in Vietnam Redux - letter draft
Dan, Quang, et al.,
I am of two minds about your complaints about the conference. On the one hand, I see no reason why Presidential Libraries can't -- in a conference on "Vietnam and the Presidency" -- restrict their conference to historians of the American experience in Vietnam as well as to American participants. If the issues to be addressed are the American decision-making process, that is a reasonable choice.
The problem is that conferences by diplomatic historians tend, overwhelmingly, to exclude the Vietnamese and international perspectives. The problem is not this one conference. It is a blindness to non-American perspectives, a blindness that has, thankfully, been eroding in the past decade.
I think a better way of framing the critique would be in terms of a "missed opportunity." Why? First of all, some historians of American foreign relations are quite fond of talking about "missed opportunities" in the past: for example, the historians who like to argue that JF Kennedy had not been assassinated, the US would not have intervened in 1965, and so on. One can appropriate the language of these historians here. But what missed opportunity am I talking about? An opportunity missed to go beyond approaches that do not fundamentally engage international perspectives, and to bring pre-1960 history into the discussion.
I have written "international" perspectives because I think that a variety of international perspectives should be engaged, not just the Vietnamese. Given the focus on the presidency and decision-making, quite relevant would be Mark Lawrence's work (see his book Assuming the
Burden, on how the US got involved in Vietnam in the first place (a book that mines American, French, and British archives); Mark Bradley's book; perhaps Fred Logevall's current work on the First Indochina War; Luu Doan Huynh's articles; and the work of Ang Cheng Guan, Phillip Catton, as well as Ed Miller's. I could go on, but I won't. If you wanted participants from the Vietnamese side, yes, a Bui Diem or a Bui Tin or many others would be fabulous.
In the end, I'd suggest that the Presidential Libraries have missed an opportunity -- and that perhaps they should plan another conference in the future that perhaps gives a better sense of the field TODAY.
My two cents' worth
Shawn McHale
From: "Dan Duffy" <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] The American War in Vietnam Redux - Sans Vietnamese Thanks, Markus for solid suggestion for a clarifying sentence.
Thanks Shawn for suggesting a larger view of the situation that opens up prospects for progress in the field in a wider way than my own bluntly anti-racist perspective does.
I'm afraid I haven't read much scholarship on the war in about ten years and cannot range around the authors Shawn suggests.
Let me sleep on it over the long weekend and see if I can assimilate his idea in my letter, using the "missed opportunity" phrase if I may.
With best wishes for the MLK holiday -
Dan
From: Chung Nguyen <Chung.Nguyen@umb.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Jan 13, 2006 10:40 AM
Subject: RE: [Vsg] The American War in Vietnam Redux - letter draft
Let me just add my two cents to this. The additions of a few token VNese, either from the South or the North, might enliven the discussion a bit, but I doubt very much there would be anything new. After all, their views are all well known, from various platforms amply provided during the last 10 or 20 years. What we have would be again, going in circles around a well defined and/or well camouflaged box.
What would really be interesting is to invite the participation of groups that were marginalized or silenced during the war - those who saw very clearly the disatrous consequences of the policies of the time and were working against all the powers-that-be in hope of finding a peaceful solution (the Third Force, the Buddhists, the Dissident Catholics, etc.).
But they would call into question the legitimacy of the conference organizers, the whole structure of state power, and would be of no interests to anyone who has any say in paying for the conference.
So, for that reason, such a conference would never be held.
Nguyen Ba Chung
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 11:32:57 -0800 (PST)
From: "Tai VanTa" <taivanta@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] The American War in Vietnam Redux - letter draft
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>, "Dan Duffy" <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
CC: "Gregory Hung Nguyen" <gnhung@yahoo.com>
Dear Dan Duffy and other friends,
I hope my letter would not be too long to add to this chain of emails. It serves the purpose of clarifying the debate.
May I suggest to you ,Dan and THE VSG, that the Vietnamese voice to suggest to the conference organizer is Dr. Nguyen Tien Hung, economics professor at Howard University (in D.C.)and former advisor and Minister of Planning of President Nguyen Van Thieu. He
wrote the book THE PALACE FILE (with co-writer Jerold Schecter),1986, which discusses in detail the relationship of the American president with a foreign ally--which shows that Presidenbt Nixon has forgotten the basic constitutional process of Senate's advice
and consent, in waging war and in negotiating for peace, and he, probably through the instigation of Kissinger,has kept the Congress in the dark about the secret commitments in many letters of President Nixon to President Thieu (about massive retaliation in
support of South Vietnam if attacked after the 1973 Paris Cease Fire Agreement--which commitments were hidden, and so, later ignored by Congress when Dr. Hung appeared in Washington ,D.C. and approached the Senators in April 1975, on behalf of President THieu).
When Dr. Nguyen tien Hung interviewd President Ford in 1985 for the book, President Ford said something like this: "There is no doubt that these are absolute comitments". Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger (Dr. Hung's professor at the University of Virginia)
said to Dr. Hung : "I believe President Ford was misled about the existence of these [Nixon] letters.
Congress did not know anything about these letters when it voted against further aid for Vietnam after 1973"(Congress considered Vietnam being already in peacetime; no more aid would be justified).
Secreatry of State George Schultz wrote Dr. Hung that he would put his book in the small library of the Secretary at Foggy Bottom so that his successors would read it. In 1988, the New York Times chose The PALACE FILE as one of the books to be read by Presidential candidates and presidents in an article entitled: "Read and Run: A cram Course for the Presidency".
It would be interesting to see Dr. Nguyen Tien Hung face to face with Kissinger in this Conference.
If the Nixon Library cancelled a plananed conference on Nixon and Vietnam, for fear of criticism directed at Nixon, this bipartisan conference at the JFK Library sponsored by all the presidential libraries should hear at least one Vietnamese voice (either as a
presenter or a discussant, which is more easy to add now, if the organizers are using the argument of ""fully booked"), to show some respect and appreciation for the former allies of the United States, who are now citizens in this country.
I love the friendly approach of president Kennedy to foreign people who are friends ("support any friend")--and I hope that approach would be followed in this conference at his Library--because I was just a 22 year-old-student who was invited in a group of 15
foreign students into the White House to meet him and he singled me out to say something about Vietnam.
Tai Van Ta
Subject: RE: [Vsg] The American War in Vietnam Redux - letter draft
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 12:56:09 -0800
From: "Nguyen Qui Duc" <DNguyen@KQED.org>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dan, --
As I've mentioned to you - when I first raised the issue among friends and colleagues, I also narrowly focused on the lack of Vietnamese perspective/participation and didn't even mention Cambodia and Laos. I've corrected that in the commentary that was aired last night on KQED's Pacific Time. But I agree with Shawn and others who have suggested approaching conference organizers and participants that there should be an international presence.
Of course "they" might feel that such an international perspective would serve to put America and the Washington officials, so amply represented, on trial. Scholars like you can help frame that issue in any letter you send to them so that it would be constructive.
I contacted the press officer, and others. Among Vietnamese Americans, there is also an effort to draft letters, write to the press, etc. Some of the emails back and forth have been forwarded to conference participants.
All in all thank you for raising your concerns.
duc
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 09:48:47 -0500
From: "Diane Fox (dnfox)" <dnfox@hamilton.edu>
Subject: Re: RE: [Vsg] The American War in Vietnam Redux - Chung's idea
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Great idea Chung--and yes, it seems to me too that what we need is to
get out of the same old going in circles!
Maybe those conference organizers wouldn't pay for such a thing--but
it certainly seems very much worth doing, somewhere, somehow. If some
others on this list think so too, maybe we could work on just such a
thing???
Sorry to be late to this...
Diane
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:15:25 -0800 (PST)
From: "Stephen Denney" <sdenney@OCF.Berkeley.EDU>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: RE: [Vsg] The American War in Vietnam Redux - Chung's idea
It would be nice indeed to have a conference featuring those who saw very clearly the disatrous consequences of
the policies of the time and were working against all the powers- that-be in hope of finding a peaceful solution (the Third Force, the Buddhists, the Dissident Catholics, etc.).
Perhaps some dissidents from the north could be included in this
conference, for example, dissidents at the time of the war, such as
Nguyen
Chi Thien, or former DRV officials such as Bui Tin.
- Steve Denney
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Date: Feb 2, 2006 4:35 AM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] The American War in Vietnam Redux - Chung's idea
Hi all,
I got a letter back from the JFK library. Bland nothings: the
conference is about library stuff and can't accomodate all views thank
you very much for writing.
Still, they wrote back. It obviously hadn't occured to anyone at JFK
that there were Vietnamese people in the Viet Nam war, and now it has.
Theirs is the first reply I can think of to my nastygrams on this topic.
I'm still waiting to hear back from Amy Goodman, the radio journalist,
who I wrote to about the same time as to JFK, after she attributed "The
Sound of the Violin at My Lai" to the actor Mike Boehm rather than to
the director Tran Van Thuy, on Amy's "War and Peace Report" story about
the life of Hugh Thompson.
But Deborah Leff at JFK wrote back. So, if Diane and Chung and Stephen
want to propose another event to JFK, maybe she'll listen.