Volume 1 - Issue 13

Volwne one, nwnber thirteen I May 12, 1968

"No one bas been insulted, and no governments have fallen as result of mY drawings. Too bad!" David Levine

21 The New Journal! May 12, 1968

3

At home with David Levine

by Jonathan Aaron 5 Advertisements for a dwarf alter ego

by Leo Braudy 6 What can honky do?

by Joseph LaPalombara 8 The inimitable Mr. Mus

by Daniel Y ergin 9 The unaccountable Mr. Ho

by Paul Mus 10 An outsider at someone else's feast

by Betty Jean Lifton 14 Tonight, Estelle, you are a star

by Susan Braudy In Comment: Hubert's supporters make an unfashionable debut and an uptight Democratic machine slips into action.

Humphrey Winter, 1968, was the season of feverish political activity at Yale and other colleges. Students traveled to New Hampshire and points west for McCarthy and clustered around televisions to see Bobby jump in, to watch Rocky bow out (temporarily) and to hear Chet, Dave and Walter tell it like it was.

By Saturday, April27, the season was over. On that day the announcement that Hubert Humphrey, Vice-President ofthe United States, wished to be promoted was easily upstaged here by the Cross Campus Controversy and the Rites of Spring.

Perhaps the indifference stemmed from Hubert's being a little out of step with recent events. With thousands of college students anxious and angry about a brutal war far away, three weeks after the death Martin Luther King and the ensuing violence, the Vice-President proclaimed that "1968 should be ... a time of great confidence and above all ... a time for public happiness in this nation."

Or perhaps Humphrey's rhetoric is too uncomfortably familiar. Indeed, he looks and sounds very much like his most notable mixed blessing, his patron and albatross, Lyndon Johnson.

The cosmic agenda-"these priorities of freedom, country and party have guided me ..." is Johnson's: "Throughout my entire public career I have followed the personal philosophy that I am a free man, an American, a public servant and a member of my party, in that order ...."

The exuberant tone-"the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose, the politics of joy"-recalls 1964: ''We're for a lot of things and agin' mighty few"-as if the bloody four years since had never happened.

Even the central purpose of the VicePresident's campaign, "the unity of our people," is strangely reminiscent. Democrats are asked to support him because he alone can hold together, for one more lap, the traditional elements of the Democratic coalition. Under his banner northern blacks and southern whites, "intellectuals," labor unions and maybe even a few businessmen can congregate; and that is "the way politics ought to be in America."

A group of Yale students who do support him have organized themselves into "Yale for HHH." Admitting that his candidacy is "not fashionable" and that since he bas not formally entered any primaries, there isn't much students can do for him, the group plans to provide information about the Vice-President and prepare for a possible fall contest between

him and either Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, either one a match which they feel would prompt wide support for Humphrey at Yale.

As an initial project, the group distributed leaflets chiefl.y devoted to describing Humphrey's legislative record prior to 1961. The leaflet asserts that "this country needs a series of major reforms and reallocations almost immediately." While he has made no proposals recently about how to achieve those goals, a spokesman for the group is confident that Hubert Humphrey will step forward with relevant ideas before long: "He always has in the past~" Michael Mandelbaum

Machine On Monday, Aprill5, I entered St. Michael's Hall, the polling place for New Haven's Second Ward. I intended to vote for Adam Parry and Billie Salter, the Reform candidates for Democratic committeemen in my ward. What followed was not the simple minute in the voting booth, but a two-hour nightmare with Kafkaesque characters and special effects

by Boss Tweed. .

I called out my name loudly to a very bored poll-watcher until he eventually found it among the hazy purple lines of the "supplementary list" of registrantsa convenient roll of students who registered during the McCarthy campaign.

"Well, I'll have to challenge you," he yawned. I asked for an explanation, but the forlorn look on the face of a Reform poll-watcher told me that I was asking too much. A pencil directed me to another table, where the almighty moderator reigned.

"Why can't I vote?" I asked a short man who looked frightened in spite of his authoritarian manners. "Ya gotta have an affidavit," answered Albert Annunziata, lawyer for the city of New Haven, machine-tender for a day and "acting" moderator when the real moderator was out of the room. My relationship with Mr. Annunziata was destined to be brief and ugly.

I told him that it would be impossible to get an affidavit, since City Hall had already closed, but he was unimpressed.

He mumbled a few words and then told me to get out. I told Annunziata that he was out of his mind if he thought he could prevent me from voting, and I remember that I made some unfortunate remarks about Ross Barnett and AI Capone.

"Sheriff," Annunziata said, "take care of this guy." Before I could say anything, I was being pushed out of the room by a squat man in a gold sport coat-the sheriff. I later learned that in the course of the day more than thirty people had been evicted by Annunziata's enforcers.

But I returned, armed this time with an affidavit supplied by a law student. I managed to confront Robert Adelman, the "real' moderator, who immediately rejected my pink registration slip. After a few minutes of intense discussion, he blandly said that I could vote. The evervigilant Annunziata protested, but to no avail. As I left the room there was a long line of students waiting to vote. At eight o'clock, when the polls closed, twenty still stood in the darkened corridors of St. Michael's.

Testimony offered in a Superior Court bearing afterward confirmed the worst fears of the voters who witnessed the events of April 15. Annunziata, Adelman

and their assistants challenged every single voter whose name appeared on the supplementary list and forced nearly all of them to leave the polling place to find new "evidence" of residency. When checkers for the Reform slate challenged a few voters on the permanent list, the moderator approved them immediately.

Annunziata, in spite of his lowly status as a machine tender, wielded dictatorial power over a system elaborately designed to insure democracy. Not only were the sheriffs at his beck and call, but moderator Adelman, who was supposed to have supreme authority over all disputes, acted as his lackey. Paula Busch testifyed before the Superior Court hearing that she heard Annunziata say to Adelman: "You're letting these people vote. You shouldn't.

The worst thing I ever did was give you this job. You ought to take a walk." Mr. Adelman took a number of walks during the day, and so did A.nnu~iata, whose excursions often led him into the voting booth-a criminal offense. On one memorable occasion both Adelman and Annunziata were absent, making it possible for John Santagata, the Machine candidate, to act as moderator.

The voting rights of many graduate students have been suspended for some time-not by statute but by a registrar's "ruling" which prohibits anyone living in university housing from registering in New Haven. But the obstructionism practiced in the Second Ward has been the most blatant example of discrimination against students witnessed thus far. In fact, the Democratic officials may be subject to prosecution under the Civil Rights Act of 1965 for systematically discriminating against a certain class of people.

Lawyers retained by Arthur Barbieri's town committee have already stated that students are "transients'~ and should not be allowed to vote. In the first day of the hearing at Superior Court, Hartford attorney Alexander Goldfarb convinced the court that the relevant election law (which he drafted) does not offer legal relief for citizens who have been deprived of the right to vote. In other words, even if the aggrieved voters win their case, the court has ruled that it cannot order a new election. Goldfarb has argued further that the twenty disfranchised students have no grounds for complaint because, due to the registrar's blunders, all of the voters enrolled since October are ineligible. The judge who is hearing the case noted that Goldfarb's argument is of "some substance."

The Machine is frightened by the sixteen hundred new voters who registered during the McCarthy campaign. Arthur Barbieri's April 15 experiment in disfranchising these students yielded some tangible results. In addition to the twenty students who were kept waiting until the polls closed, an undetermined number of challenged voters did not return to the polls. Billie Salter, the Reform candidate for committeewoman, lost by eighteen votes. Attempts to disfranchise new voters will continue unless sufficient protest is raised in the press and at City Hall. Thus far the New Haven papers and news broadcasters have ignored the bearing or slanted their reports, and Mayor Lee has been compliantly silent about the whole affair.

Further legal action will be taken. Contributions will be accepted by Maynard Mack, Jr., 131 Dwight Street.

James R. Green

Volume one, number thirteen May 12, 1968 Editors: Jeffrey Pollock Jonathan Lear Business Manager: Jean-Pierre Jordan Executive Editor: Herman Hong Advertising Manager: Jeffrey Denner Photography Editor: Peter M.C. Choy Associate Editors: Lawrence Lasker -Susan Braudy Designers: Ronald Gross Bruce Mcintosh Copy Editor: Paul Bennett Circulation Manager: Jonathan Hoffman Contributing Editors: Jonathan Aaron Mopsy S. Kennedy Michael Lerner Michael Mandelbaum Steven Weisman Daniel H. Yergin Staff: John Boak, Joseph Finke, Jennifer Josephy, Christopher Little, Jonathan Marks, Barney Rubin, James Scherer, Warner Wada, Michael Waltuch Advertising: Joe Am bash, Bill Gerber, Jeffrey Harrison, Jon Hoffman, John Jeffries, Chris Moffit, Howie Newman, Will Rhodes, Edmund ·Robinson, Roger Sametz, Sam Sutherland, Steve Weise, Jeff Wheelright, Rick Wilson THIRD CLASS PERMIT: Third Class postage PAID in New· Haven, Conn. The New Journal is published by The New Journal, 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. 06520, and is printed at The Carl Purington Rollins Printing-Office of the Yale University Press in New Haven. Published bi-weekly during the academic year and distributed by qualified controlled circulation to the Yale Community.

For all others, subscriptions are $4.50 per year, newsstand copies 50¢.

The New Journal ©copyright 1968 by 1be New Journal at Yale, Inc., a non-profit corporation.

Letters welcome. Unsolicited manuscripts should be accompanied by a stamped, self· addressed envelope. Opinions expressed in articles are not necessarily those of The New Journal.

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Credits: Peter M.C. Choy: pages 6, 8 Henry Grossman: page 12 Jonathan Lear: page 14 David Levine: Cover, page 3 Copyright © 1966

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3 I The New Journal! May 12, 1968

At home with David Levine

by Jonathan Aaron David Levine, the painter and caricaturist, lives near Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza, ¡ where, if you don't know your Brooklyn, you are astonished by the sunlight that is unimpeded by tall buildings or soot. The Plaza Parkway moves around a small etoile, at the center of of which is an arch of triumph honoring the Union Army.

Levine's house is one of the many brownstones that line the nearby side-streets.

On an oval brass plate the name Levine was etched in a worn, elegant script.

Levine answered the door and led me into his quietly lit livingroom, where there was just light enough to see the parquet of the floor. The house was spacious, though not unusually large. It was a place for elegant loafing, perhaps.

We stopped for a moment in his thirdfloor study. By a window overlooking the street was a heavy desk covered with photographs of Bobby Kennedy. Like so many hostile Indians, the photographs encircled a half-finished caricature.

Small pen-and-ink drawings covered the mantelpiece. Over it hung a large, active painting of an aerial view of London.

"It may be by Turner," said Levine, "but I haven't found out for sure yet. It was in his studio when he died. But the sky isn't his," he explained, "it's been painted over."

On the fourth floor was the large, sunny studio where Levine paints. Like his study one floor below, it was practically unfurnished, save for some chairs, a couple of tables and some unfinished oils. The broad wall facing the stairway was covered with small oils and watercolors. You had the impression that in order for Levine either to paint or draw, he had to be as free from the clutter of daily objects as possible.

These days Levine is probably the most famous caricaturist of political and literary persons in the country. For several years his acerbic visual commentaries have been appearing in Esquire and The New York Review of Books, as well as in other publications such as Look, Atlas and The Washington Post. His drawings are so surgically precise, so uncompromisingly iconoclastic, that it's a surprise to find that Levine is not a withered troll mysteriously chastised years ago by the gods, not a Loki with a poison pen, but an urbane, smiling, good-looking man of forty-two who is first and foremost a successful representational painter, and a caricaturist, as it turns out, strictly by accident.

His black hair and prominent nose give him a slightly Latin look, and seeing him in the street, you might thing he was Spanish if you didn't know he was Jewish. He looks a little like the retired Argentine auto-racing champion, Juan Fangio. He isn't stout, but he gives an impression of solidity, of good-humored yet wary contentment.

We sat down and began to talk into a small tape recorder that whistled and squawked. He spoke briefly of growing up in Brooklyn, of going to Erasmus High School and then to the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. His father was until recently a dress manufacturer in the Jonathan Aaron is a-graduate student in English. This is his second appearance in The New Journal.

garment district, and it is to this part of his past that Levine returns constantly in his painting.

The world of the garment workers is dying, he feels, and despite his faint tone of self-mockery, he spoke with a sense of mission ~bout preserving details of the garment industry in his painting. He gestured toward a large, unfinished oil, called "The Presser," on an easel in the middle of the room. The painting showed a thin, elderly man at an ironing board. He was naked to the waist, suspenders fallen along his rather baggy trousers, and his back was turned to you. He conveyed age, dignity, loneliness and grace.

Levine is also preoccupied with Coney Island, another dying world, and he pointed to the small water-colors on the wall near him. They were scenes of ghostly roller-coasters, of empty boardwalk shops, whose signs and marquees speak to few people any more.

"I follow a very traditional kind of painting," he said, "simply because I want to talk to an audience which hangs its own mental hat on verisimilitude." He particularly admires Degas and ToulouseLautrec, and he speaks almost lovingly of Eakins. He describes his own painting not with the glib precision of someone who has decided what his problems should sound like to admirers, but with a bemused, sometimes hesitant informality that makes clear his continual search for a better understanding of even the most familiar issues. He seems a man bored by few things in life.

"I'm interested in a broadly understood statement which makes somebody say, 'Well, that's a pretty corny statement; that doesn't mean anything to me,' or else, 'Oh, that touches on something.'

"I'd like, for instance, to establish something about the beach-I paint the beach a lot. If people can no longer come to a beach without seeing through my eyes to some degree, then I have touched on something.''

He finds in beach crowds "a whole visible expression of society." His paintings, even those in which no human being is visible, are about people. "I try to select things which I look on as healthy-for instance, people in the [garment] shops....

In our society a man produces something which is a contribution, but which is never thought of as a contribution; it's just a job .... He has no societal role. Take 'The Presser.' When people in the garment industry see this, it makes them think: 'Oh. There are very few of them left.' As soon as I pointed it up, they may be able then to go and look on other jobs and say, 'Look: those four women tined up working, look at the sense of rhythm there. I saw it in a painting.' There's an innate beauty in just living which you can sharpen and make more perceptible for people."

Levine keeps painting and cartooning separate, but not entirely from choice.

"I don't think painting bas to do with direct, topical, political themes. That tends to have been the weakest aspect of painting in the thirties. Men tended to make political caricatures and mistook them for paintings of a social nature. I am very happy to have this [caricaturing] as an outlet, because I am a very politicaloriented person." He smiled and explained, "My mother is a Stalinist, and my aunt is a Maoist, and between the two of them they call me a Trotskyite."

Levine started drawing occasional caricatures for Esquire seven or eight years

ago at the prompting of Clay Felker, then articles editor of the magazine. For Levine it was strictly a lark, but when TheNew York Review of Books began to run his drawings regularly in 1963, he found himself at the start of a career that nowadays leaves him less than half of his time for painting. He follows a flexible but demanding schedule. "I do¡about ten drawings a month for The New York Review, one drawing a month for The Washington Post, two drawings a month for Look magazine, six or seven drawings a month for Esquire, and whatever else comes through."

He has always drawn cartoons, and as a boy be wanted to become a comic-book illustrator. Enthusiastically, he remembers a favorite boyhood magazine, Will Eisner's The Spirit, but he points out quickly that comic book illustrating was "a dead end."

The only artist who successfully escaped the comics was Levine's close friend Jules Peiffer, who illustrated a strip called "Clifford" in the back pages of The Spirit.

It was here that Levine discovered Peiffer's work, long before Peiffer got his first real break after giving away cartoons to The Village Voice.

Yet the comic book, Levine believes, never really had a chance. Irresponsible entrepreneurs used it for commercial purposes that had nothing to do with its artistic potential.

We returned to the subject of his caricatures. Asked if be had a favorite target, Levine thought for a moment and replied, grinning again over folded bands, "Him Who Is In Power." He elaborated. "There was a time in my more 'participant-left' days when I would have been protective of left-wing people, but that's not what I would do today. I think that bureaucrats and politicians and power-wielders, on any side, in any government, just simply have to be constantly criticized in order to keep them straight." Levine would, he admitted frankly, "go after anybody that they [his editors] will ask for"-a statement which possibly contradicts his belief that drawing is "a highly personalized expression" of belief. At the same time, however, caricaturing seems to be a supra-personal activity for him, as it was for Thomas Nast or Honore Daumier.

When drawing a caricature, Levine works from photographs, which he collects by the dozens. "Most of the planning," he said, "goes into selecting the photograph, and the rendering in pen and ink. The penciling, which comes first, goes very ¡ quickly. I did a drawing of Jules Peiffer last night for Ramparts in about an hour and a half." He concentrates on the head of his subject and on physical idiosyncrasies ("long fingers, clubby-looking hands"; remember the nose of LBJ) or on characteristic clothing ("Harold Wilson's collars").

In his drawing, Levine pushes the believable as far as it wilt go before it plunges into an abyss of overstatement. "If my caricatures become too brutal in their chopping-up of somebody's appearance," he remarked, "you lose the point of what I have to say."

He added that, on the other hand, some caricatures are blunted by the very persons or ideologies they are out to expose.

"There is a built-in contradiction in caricature," he said. For example, "A so-called socially involved artist will make up some horrendous work about the condition of man, only to find it's being purchased as a lovely decoration for somebody's living room. There is a tendency in car-

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icature," he went on, "to make cute and likeable the very thing that you are attacking. Therefore, the implications of its being an attack only come across to those who already see it as one before you make the drawing."

His main problem as an artist, he said, is "just getting to do the things I want to do." Every caricature, he believes, is simultaneously a public and a private statement: public in that it has to do with problems of verisimilitude and private in that it conveys a personal attitude. His painting, however, does not contain this duality, and this is his dilemma. "I cannot make a bridge, as Lautrec did, between caricature and painting. I can't seem to bring them into the same world. I think I would be even more able to communicate all sorts of things if I could ever bring them together."

Our morning had all but vanished. Levine had talked a lot, and he sounded slightly hoarse. As we stood up and stretched, he mentioned the New York art world he is far from in the sunny reaches of Brooklyn.

He has nothing but contempt for the universe of flashy Manhattan galleries.

"Today," he said, his voice rising slightly, "anyone can accomplish anything in a . standardless art world, which has been reduced to that by the marketing idealnever mind what the art is; is it saleable?"

H is anti-establishment views run deep. He is irritated by the hypocritically obliging response of critics to the.spasmodic changes in popular taste. " I think that the

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE :

trade in art," said Levine, "has absolutely fulfilled the critique which Marx made on the role of the bourgeoisie in art; he said something about when you can reduce everything to money you will have made equal a Rembrandt and so many pounds of horse manure."

We took a few turns around the studio, Levine quietly commenting on the small paintings on the walls. Each made a direct, concise statement, often so well that you felt as if you had been poked lightly in the stomach. You felt that each was helping you to know more clearly something you were already d imly aware of. All the same, there was nothing you could say.

We went down to the third floor and entered his study again. Levine walked to his desk and looked at the makings of his caricature of Bobby Kennedy. "It's for The Washington Post," he said. ''The problem is, how do I do him?" Levine had been rendering the senator as a groundhog; one paw was raised, testing the air.

"Weasels steal eggs," Levine m used, "so maybe I'll make him into a weasel." This was a few days after Kennedy had declared himself a presidential candidate.

The only time the relaxation left Levine's voice that morning was when he looked now at the photos of his subject which littered the desk. He stared at them, seeming to see them for the first time, and momentarily he was outraged. "An incredible opportunist!" he said curtly.

"He has no ideals and no morals. H e's doing the same things now he's always

done." Asked about Nixon, he laughed and said with mock fatigue, "Words fail me."

His wife and two children were out, so he was going to meet a friend for lunch.

We went to the ball and put on our coats.

A high, rambunctious wind kicked at us as we stepped outside. The sunlight was still full, but the air had gotten colder.

Levine had neglected to put on an overcoat, and his well-cut tweed jacket winged on either side of him as he hunched into the gale. Nevertheless, he walked part way to the subway station, talking of Eakins and the artistry of the Grand Arrny Plaza's arch of triumph.

Finally we shook hands. He clapped me on the shoulder, dismissed my thanks, turned and moved away. The wind seemed ¡to follow him back up the street, and be walked stiffly, buffeted, a man whose fondest ambition it is "to be unseeded and yet win at Wimbledon."

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S I The New Journal I May 12, 1968

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by Leo Braudy "The Steps of the Pentagon," Harper's, March,l968 "The Battle of the Pentagon," Commentary, April,l968 Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal-Moby-Dick Through the work of Norman Mailer, undulating rhythmically like the stripes in an American fiag, run the white river of magic and the red river of history. Magic until now bas been in the ascendent, the incantatory exorcisms of An American Dream and Why Are We In Vietnam?

But the latter also foretells "The Steps of the Pentagon" and "The Battle of the Pentagon" in that curious and complex interconnection that makes Mailer's work so endlessly rich in new perspectives and revisitings. The magical aromas of An American Dream, that denial of mechanism and technology in the praise of individual vitality, diffuse their fume through Why Are We In Vietnam? But while Stephen Richards Rojack, the hero of An American Dream, can retreat to barbarous Guatemala, D.J., the hero of Why Are We In Vietnam?, must finally go to "civilized" Vietnam, must emerge from his resonant consciousness to meet the cruder realities of war and time, out of his knowledge of human loss in the passage to manhood to confront the perpetrators of those bankrupt values.

Confrontation is the essence of these two new works by Mailer, published by New American Library as The Armies of Night. In ''The Steps of the Pentagon" (much the better of the two) he constructs the most elaborate of those stand-ins for himself with which he has manipulated the outrage of readers ever since the nice, talented, sweet Jewish boy who wrote The Naked and the Dead fell into disrepair. In his journalism be frequently cast himself as a character to gain perspective from the impersonal third person "one." Monstrous egotism, complained the bridegrooms of objectivity, who saw the basis of their insidious bias being slowly eroded. But "one" remained and spawned his epigoni; bred on Mailer's pieces about the ClayListon fight and the 1964 Republican Convention, who could really call Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe the Fathers of the New Journalism?

But Mailer moves on. For each occasion a new and apt style, sometimes more successful, sometimes less. But each time he attempts what most contemporary writers with any pretence to stature do not: to grapple with new events and new ideas and to forge a new method to deal with them. In "The Steps of the Pentagon" he once again molds a new and appropriate style, sounding new themes, elaborating old ones.

The peculiar triumph of "The Steps of the Pentagon" is Mailer's ability to make "Mailer"- "Lyndon Johnson's dwarf alter ego"- an appropriate figure to place at the center of events, although in actual importance he is only on the periphery. "Mailer" is immediately "your protagonist," a being whom the narrator can manipulate for his own ends. He is not unlike one of those passive heroes who occupy the centers of novels by Sir Walter Scott, unimportant in the streams of public uo Braudy is an instructor in English.

history, a kind of a glass through which the "great" events can be seen in some perspective, to be either accepted or rejected. Like these characters, "Mailer" is frequently a comic butt. He is accorded various epithets-"the Beast," "the Existentialist," "the Ruminant," "the Participant." In the early parts of the piece, Mailer also participates in mockepic exploits like his account of Thursday night in the Ambassador theater (the secJion that he re.ad to an audience here at the Law School).

Old Mailer-mockers are used to this self-display. But Mailer, like Falstaff, abides our questions. Whatever we can say about him he has already said better about himself. The figure of "Mailer" is entirely appropriate for the occasion; Mailer says that he is "a comic hero" and there is need "that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions."

And what if he actually is this way? Does the work succeed as literature? Has this staging of the self been transmuted into art? "Write about what you know," advise the sages; and if Mailer can thereby write ¡ about himself with that incessantly saving self-consciousness, why complain? By centering a work that deals with a historical event around a character much like himself, Mailer the narrator gives us a simultaneous sense of the event in both prospect and retrospect, in the contingencies and comic inanities of the moment and with the full weight of interpretive and abstract pronouncements.

When Mailer threatens to be overabstract or "Mailer" threatens to be petty and egotistical, his opposite number restores the balance. In himself be compounds the comic exuberance of Falstaff with the shrewd political sense of Prince Hal. "Everyman his own historian," said Carl Becker. But he had not seen Mailer walking chunkily suave in the Washington sun.

For those who might still protest, it must be said that this work is no transcript.

"Mailer" is frequently ignorant, while Mailer is all-knowing. Mailer includes documents that deserve preservation, while "Mailer" crumples them up and tosses them into the nearest wastepaper basket or gutter. Mike Holahan, Peter Rose, Dave Thorburn and I walked with Mailer from the First United Congregational Church of Christ to the C hurch of the Reformation, but no " Holahan," "Rose," "Thorburn" or " Braudy" appears (although John Boyles, Gordon Rogoff and of course the Rev. Coffin are heavily represented). The twohour walk is quenched in a dependent clause: " ... and then walked a greater distance to the second church...."

Further treatment is irrelevant. Mailer has his esthetic ends in view, even if "Mailer" does not know them.

Now that I have introduced a personal note of my own into the pseudo-objectivity of a book review, let me say that for someone who was present those days, the great achievement of "The Steps of the Pentagon" and its "comic hero" is its ability to convey the sense that we all must have felt of being present at an important historical moment, yet still bound by our immediate selves, without perspective, without a larger, more comprehensive judgment. Here was the problem of the act itself: to make such a private commitment to what we believed moral and just, and yet to be so uncertain of its public effects, its larger mean~g. ~ere does the individual intersect wtth hiStory?

How does he dare to lie athwart its necessitous and plodding rampage? The two Mailers offer some answer to this question because they embody a literary technique passionately wed to the uncertainties of the situation itself. The "Mailer" who occupies the center of our vision is as stumbling apd imperceptive, as niggardly and self-dramatizing, in his worst and best moments, as ourselves. But he does act. And the grandeur of his act is enhanced by the humanity, the frailty he asserts while he acts. In some basic way that William Wordsworth would have appreciated, "Mailer" focuses our fragmented sense of ourselves before implacable history and bridges the human gap between our principles and our actions, our high-minded idealism and our actual egoism. The poet, the writer, is more intense but still palpably a man.

"The Steps of the Pentagon" puts the individual into history, faces his confusion with its immensity. Yet there is another kind of history that stands behind Mailer's work, a history that he hopes can be realized to purge the more malevolent and impersonal history the events of that weekend in October tried to stop. This history is a history of the mind, of the makers of American literature. Behind the public history of October 20-22, Mailer frequently projects a diorama of the Civil War, the shadow of its bloody battles shrouding the events of those days in giant images from Matthew Brady photographs, looming over the not very distant vista of Bull Run. But behind the private history of "Norman Mailer" caught up in these events broods another American history, a histpry that celebrates individual power and creativity, the history of the Transcendentalist, of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and later of Fitzgerald, Wolfe and Hemingway, invoked as a counterpoint - a better self - to the grotesque that America bad become. The figure of Robert Lowell bodies the presence of that lost New England cultural heritage, that dammed-up integrity; and perhaps one source of Mailer's third person may be The Education of Henry Adams. All of Mailer's remarks fit into such a framework of value. One history may confuse and thwart the individual; the other can redeem him. Even such seemingly incidental remarks as Mailer's condemnation of LSD are absorbed into this vision: the drug is bad because it "rips holes in the past," and Mailer fears that the past will too readily be consumed by the present.

"The Steps of the Pentagon" is a moving and brilliant piece of writing. ''The Battle of the Pentagon" is much less successful.

It is a thorough account of both the preparations for the March of October 22 and the March itself that concentrates primarily on the efforts of Dave Dellinger to balance the demands of established peace groups on one side and Californiaoriented militants on the other. Passing from "Mailer," the amateur actor in the play of history, we have come to Dellinger, the professional, who must frequently compromise his own fervent principles in order to placate one faction or another.

"The Battle of the Pentagon" minutely catches the bone-crushing demands on Dellinger's time and diplomatic skills in the radical arena. But the prose is stolid and unusually lusterless. The tone is objective; passive verbs have taken over even from the impersonal "one."

What bas happened? Aside from the continued on page I 4

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I

61 The New Journal I May 12, 1968

8

What can honky do? ) il5vbA

by Joseph LaPalombara

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The group we expect to see on center stage this summer has been carefully delineated by the President's Cohimissio~ on Civil Disorders. Young people fiftee,n to nineteen years old constitute ob.Iy a' small minority of any American city; but as the 1 events Of Memphis illustrate, they ~an quickly turn peacefill demonstrations into violence artd chaos and the mood of the countr~ into one of fear and demand•for order. History wiU demonstrate that" ~ clamorous' public demands for law and order are often invitlitions to a drastic J constriction of human freedoms.

•1 These young,people of the dation's racial ghettos combine the resentment and anta~onisrrl of the acutely deprived with the cynicism and open hostility that people under thirty typically feel toward existing institutions and mores. Unless we find effective ways of responding-to ~ese youths, no program we can design to ameliorate our domestic illness will prove · very salutary. ' I cannot predict with confidence how students of the Enlightenment will assess a macabre national calc'ulus where the life of a Martin Luther King equals the pas-.. sage of an open-housing law. .Although it appears that we may permit violence itself' to remain the primary stimulus to corrective action, 1 will suggest an emergency program for our cities' youth. But in discussing the necessary role of Black Power (the hope of some) and White Power (an oppressive reality for many) in such a program, I am impelled to respond to the signals I get from Black Power spokesmen.

First; I fully agree with Stokely Carmichael,' who holds that it is fatuous for whites and self-defeating for black Americans to expect that a racist America will solve its problems if everyone plays by white rules. I am fundamentally guided

by Barrington Moore's suggestion that since white Americans don't believe in their 6wn rules anyway, we must view with "relentless skepticism" all suggestions that anything is better than violence.

Second, I am a white racist in a racist America, in both senses of racism that Carmichael and Hamilton identify in Black Power (pp. 3-6). I have personally inflicted violence on black Americans. As a child of a Negro-Italian-Jewish ghetto I participated in frequent (though rarely fatal) skirmishes, the "rumbles" of the depression years. When Italians and Jews were not fighting each other, they were attacking, or being attacked by, the common "enemy." Some of my gleefully or angrily burled bricks found their target.

I am also a racist in the second sense suggested by Carmichael and Hamilton.

I have personally been guilty of what they call "institutional racism" by continuing to support or acquiesce to a number of American political, industrial and commercial organizations that tend to perpetuate a subjugated status for black Americans. Like Other white liberals I have tried to expiate this guilt by sending money to jailed civil rights workers in Mississippi or by marching in Alabama.

My first reactions to Black Power were patronizing. How, I thought, can anyone hope to organize a political movement if Joseph LaPalombara is a professor of political science.

he has not carefully spelled out an ideology? When black Americans spoke to me of violence, I wanted to know the ends for which they expected violence to function. I thought that as long as I did not in fact exclude violence as a political instrument, I could establish a dialogue, could participate not only in clarifying but (alas!) perhaps in helping to shape the thinking and the strategy of Black Power advocates. It took time and a number of frank exchanges to show me that I. too, was asking black Americans to play the political power game by white American ,rules. There was no difference at all be- · tween my asking Black Power advocates or leaders to tell me what their i~eology might be and the harassed and confused New Haven business community's asking "the leaders of the Black Boycott to tell them specifically what they wanted.

In my frank exchanges, I dipped into history, drawing the obvious analogy between the anti-ideological posture of Black Power advocates, white American drop-outs, hippies and New Leftists on the one hand, and the nihilist movements that engulfed the 'European continent between the wars on the other. Whatever the merits of that analogy, I missed the point that it was my white America I wished to preserve for political degeneration and that for most black Americans it made little difference where nihilistic behavior might lead on a continuum of freedom or slavery, democracy or totalitarianism. The first white American who seems to me to understand this fully and perhaps to provide a compelling rationale for nonideological violent behavior is Norman Mailer. What he tells us in his brilliant article "The Steps of the Pentagon" is that after violence our society will not be what it was before violence. I am persuaded that for many of the people of our black ghettos that assurance is enough: preaching about the "insanity" of burning their own rat-infested firetraps will find fewer and fewer black listeners.

For some time I was also uncritically in favor of accelerated occupational integration, busing, open housing, liberalized admission policies in higher education and so forth. It was difficult to agree with black Americans who opposed the bleeding-off of leadership from the ghettos, the creation of a spurious black middle class or elite, the increasingly forced implementa· tion of equal opportunity policies. I still favor much of this, but I must recognize that such advocacy is inconsistent with the first sociology I learned twenty-five years ago. That sociology taught me that America bas two stratification systems and that whatever may be the number of "life chances" society awards the Negro, he never gets out of the black stratification system and into the white system because white Americans will not permit this. The "assimilation hypothesis" was and remains wishful and erroneous.

Where, then, do I differ with some of the Black Power leaders?

First, notwithstanding the history of slavery and of the years since "emancipation," I fear that many black leaders grossly underestimate white America's capacity for violent and repressive reaction. These leaders seem much more adept at estimating how much resistance to their strategies they are bound to find in the black ghettos. Their strategies seem appropriate when the revolutionary group intends to wrest total power and bas some prospect of doing so. When Stokely Carmichael writes about black Africans

-7 I The New Journal I May 12, 1968

For teachers and students storming the citadels of the Union of South Africa, such an assumptio'! makes sense. In the United States such an assumption, I believe, i~seJf-defeating for the cause of Black Power. White America will neither grant total power nor even, as Carmichael has claimed, turn over the control of our major cities exclusively to black Americans, even where the latter constitute a numerical majority, While Black Power spokesmen have some capacity for triggering violence, they have very little apparent ability to control or direct it. Lenin, a successful revolutionist, had a profound understanding of the tendency of violence to achieve a momentum of its own, frighteningly free from the control of those who set it in motion.

It seems to me crucial for Black Power advocates to worry about this problem.

At the risk of offending those Black Power spokesmen who insist on borrowing nothingfrom European history, I would argue that Lenin's What Is To Be Done? might be fruitful reading. Certainly much more fruitful than Frantz Fanon, who may have much that is relevant to say to oppressed majorities in the Third World but precious little for black Americans confronted by a white power structure.

Black Power leaders also severely misinterpret the nature of the power structure in America's major cities. It is now a cliche to read that Harlem, Roxbury and Watts are simply "colonial" areas exploited by the white power-holders. But the exploitation of blacks, politically and economically, is also a collusion between the "white power structure" and some "black brothers." The notion that all black Americans are brothers and therefore dedicated to revolutionary change is absolutely fatal for a program designed to inculcate a sense of political selfsufficiency. There are two goals in conflict here. To achieve a sense of identity and self-respect in opposition to the "hooky" community requires, I think, the concept that all black Americans are brothers; to achieve revolutionary change requires that Black Power leaders consider which black Americans-in Harlem, Roxbury, Watts or South ChicagQ-\'Ihould be "taken out of play."

The sense of helpless dependency must be ended. This requires not merely hostility toward ameliorative programs conceived and administered by whites but also a bard-nosed look at what in the black community itself plays into the bands of a white-determined racism. I find the Black Power literature singularly lacking in such calculations.

Although many whites and most "Great Society" advocates like to think that financial efforts to alleviate social and economic distress have been massive, the President's Commission on Civil Disorders notes that they have barely. scratched the surface. "For the Negro family in the urban ghetto," tbe Commission notes, "the future seems to lead only to a dead-end .... New methods of escape must be found for the majority of today's poor" (p. 282).

To meet the emergency, existing governmental machinery will not suffice, and new arrangements must be tried. In its broad outlines, my proposal involves an immediate general appropriation of two billion dollars. The funds would be p rimarily earmarked for cities with a high-riot-potential profile. Most of the cities where Negroes constitute more than ten percent of the population would fall

into this category. Almost all of the thirty largest cities would qualify.

The funds would be used to create jobs for the-underemployed and unemployed young, male Negroes of the ghettos. The projects providing such employment opportunities would be cQosen by the young people themselves in conjunction with older leadership in the ghettos. As much as possible, federal funds would be channeled through an emergency administration-perhaps a Department of National Urban Survival--directly to those at the urban level who would spenp (not "administer'') such funds. This pattern would involve not merely reaching around state governments, which the national government is already quite expert at doing, but circumventing existing local governmental units as well.

Community..development and antipoverty agencies should probabty continue to function, but only with the understanding that they are not in any way to interfere with the emergency NUS program. It would be the responsibility of other agencies concerned with the general problem not to have their programs delay, water down, divert or subvert the NUS end-in-view. "Co-ordination" is a typical subverting or at least delaying word and must be shunned.

Whites would have as little as possib~e to do with this program. This means that ghetto-wide or ghetto-neighborhood organizations (public corporations if necessary) would receive funds, perhaps on the basis of a simple head count or the ratio of persons to units of living space or the mean number of rat bites per month over the last five years. The data are easily at hand; no further investigation or research is needed to discover "relevant" criteria.

How would the funds be used? Frankly, I don't know. The general guideline is that use is to be determined indigenously, as I indicated above. My assumption is that no one knows better than ghetto residents what has high priority, what they want and what they do not want. At all cost, what "they" need must not be determined by what "we" think is best, or feasible.

Some neighborhood groups may want to renovate existing residential structures.

If doing so requires that slumlords be dispossessed, I would argue that eminent domain has in our history been used for less worthy and less humane causes. If another group wants to demolish dangerous, rat-infested tenements, local authorities should seek to facilitate this.

Would the money be "spent well"?

From one or more vantage points, probably not. Americans who have been deprived in every sense of that word may be expected to Jack myriad technical, occupational, administrative and related skills. There would without doubt be waste, inefficiency, errors that would look silly and avoidable to "reasonable" men.

In some cases there would also be venality, corruption or downright exploitation of black by black. Why should it be different in an America where the gap between what we preach and what we do is agonizingly apparent even to tt.e most illiterate child of the ghetto?

Consider, too, how strikingly selective we are about identifying and condemning what we call waste and inefficiency. Three airplanes scarcely off the drawing boards are sent to Vietnam for "tests," and in the space of a few weeks the country is out about 25 million dollars. If our newspapers are correct, we are as a nation curcontinued on page 14

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8 I The New Journal I May 12, 1968

The inimitable Mr. Mus: His own story "Southeast Asian studies was such a quiet field twenty years ago," Paul Mus says gently but with no lack of irony. A very large man without being tall, slightly stooped, he speaks English slowly, distinctly and with a heavy French accent. Mus, professor of civilizations ¡of Southern Asia at Yale, was one of the leading figures in the study twenty years ago, and today-when the field is very noisy-he's only more important.

The irony results, in part, from the fact that while the fielclmay have been very quiet twenty years ago, Southeast Asia itself was not. There was a war going on then, and Mus was there, an important government official, political advisor to two governor-generals and twice the French emissary to llo Chi Minh.

But Mus was a dissenter. He did not believe colonialism would or should survive.

He believed in Vietnamese nationalism, that the Vietnamese should run their own country.

"When I went back to Saigon with General LeClerc in October, 1945,'' he says, "the French there said the Vietnamese are like sparrows, they wiiJ disperse like sparrows. That was the opinion.

But the French ignored the record of the Vietnamese battalions in the French Army, where they put on a very credible fight against the Germans. The Vietnamese stood by their machine guns, something very few French did."

Mus remember that fact; but then, be knew Vietnam better than most. In 1907, when he was five, his family took him to Hanoi, where his father opened the first high school for Vietnamese. Mus grew up and received much of his education there, and then he went on to obtain graduate degrees at the University of Paris. He returned to Indochina and continued his career as scholar and educator there from 1927 through 1940. In that year, with the outbeak of the Second World War, he went to Paris, became one of the first academics to join the Free French, was commissioned a lieutenant in the French Army and became a machine gunner in charge of Sengalese troops. For a while he was also in charge of education in French Africa.

In late 1942, he joined the Allied forces and was sent to India, where he served on the staff of jungle warfare schools.

As DeGaulle's emissary in January, 1945, Mus parachuted into Indochina to contact underground forces. Forced to flee from Hanoi and travel by himself from village to village, Mus traversed 150 miles of Japanese"Controlled areas until he reached refuge in China.

After the war he returned to Vietnam to act as a political advisor to two governorgenerals, but in both cases his advicefreedom for the Vietnamese within the French Union-was largely ignored.

During these years in Vietnam, Mus met Ho Chi Minh twice, first in Hanoi in December, 1945, when be was sent simply to establish contacts.

They met again in 1947. Ho had asked the French for a suspension of hostilities so that negotiations could begin. "He believed we would give peace,'' says Mus, "but the French government had changed, and the new government didn't want peace. We rejected the offer, and I was sent out not to discuss but to tell him what were our conditions. There was to

be complete freedom for French forces to go anywhere in Vietnam, and the Vietnamese army was to be put in camps.

These were the people who were never beaten, the ones who went on to win at Dien Bien Phu-these the French wanted to put in camps."

To reach Ho's guerrila outpost, Mus traveled for two nights through rice fields.

"Ho was a very cautious fellow, but also curiously outspoken. This bas not been stressed enough since. At some times he was like a great actor who knows be has to live what he says.

"He said to me, 'Our only strength is that the capitalists will not be able to put the land in their pockets and get away with it. All else they can do; that they cannot.'"

Mus' own dissatisfactions with French policy began in the aftermath of the coup against the French in Hanoi on December 19, 1946. The French regained control from the Vietnamese rebels in a few days, but then reports, unchallenged by the French government, began to circulate that 350 French people had been massacred, some cut into pieces, and that children had been crucified.

Mus investigated the story; many of his former classmates from the lycee in Hanoi were among the most important police informers. He also checked death certificates. He found that the actual number of French slain was 53, and that atrocity reports were--except perhaps in three cases--totaiJy unfounded.

He came back to France to debunk those stories, for he knew bow dangerous they were, bow they could transform events into a holy war. Mus now says, "If the Vietnamese were so treated by the French in 80 years of rule that they would crucify French children, then this would actually have been a terrible argument against the war. But in a climate of hatred, someone who says the fellow on the other side isn't so bad is not well liked."

Mus, by then director of the French School of Overseas Administration, was eventually forced to resign. He returned to academic life.

He came to this country in 1950 to find a teaching job and through the efforts of John Embree and Frank Edgerton. two Asian scholars at Yale, was persuaded to join the faculty here. He's been teaching here since, although he also keeps an appointment at the College de France, the most distinguished institution of its kind in France.

Mus has written an enormously important monograph on Buddhist culture and has just finished a major book dealing with classical Cambodia. "In his specialty, the culture history of Southeast Asia, he's one of the greatest men in the world," says Harry Benda, associate chairman of the Council on Southeast Asian Studies. But continued on page 14

9J The New Journal! May 12, 1968

The Unaccountable Mr. Ho: What now?

by Paul Mus

Yale University recently had the benefit of a documented and provocative lecture by the eminent British expert on Southeast Asian policy, Mr. Dennis J. Duncanson.

Mr. Duncanson, the author of Government and Revolution in Vietnam, is highly qualified to approach first hand what he defined as the "three enigmas" still confronting us in Vietnam, especially in the masterful and elusive personality of the President of the Democratic Republic, Ho Chi Minh. .

Mr. Duncanson is quite familiar with the problems of British Malaya, the one and only communist "unrest" that has been handled efficiently. He spent five years with the British mission headed by Sir Robert Thompson in Saigon.

He had contact with President Diem, of whom he says, "As many of his compatriots might admit today, if in the East one dared to speak one's mind about faJien politicians, he was the embodiment of his country's soul, for good no Jess than for bad."

Of the three "enigmas" in Vietnam, two are classical items in the field-the relationship between the DRV (North Vietnam) and Southern guerrillas, and the DRY's dependence upon Peking. In both cases, interpretative speculation has proved so deceptive that even a close perusal of the facts available does not appear, after so many years, to leave us much the wiser. The major difficulty, as Mr. Duncanson sees it, is that the answer to both questions hinges on the one to be given to what he considers the third and major riddle: Is President Ho's charismatic personality relying on a deep nationalistic urge and commitment of the Vietnamese people?

As a matter of fact, such a trend has generally been considered the dominant Jesson of Vietnam's whole history, dramatically illustrated and confirmed by present events. In his book, however, Mr. Duncanson deliberately rejects such views.

The emancipation of the first Vietnamese states from Chinese rule in the tenth century is usually explained in modem history as a nationalist uprising against an early type of colonial rule; but a closer look at the events attending the collapse of the Tang dynasty does not bear out this explanation, nor is it compatible with the subsequent course of Sino-Vietnamese relations. It was the Thais of Nam Chao who evicted the Chinese from effective control of Tonkin in 863, not any popular uprising of the Vietnamese .... Vietnam became independent because China, in a state of anarchy, abandoned it.

Mr. Duncanson's iconoclastic historical dispositions do not prepare him to accept another commonplace assertion, that the Vietnamese people have very commendably resisted, in spite of immediate contact and even after a thousand-yearlong annexation, the weird assimilative power of their immense and justly prestigious neighbor. For China combined in her own inimitable "cosmic" culture much of what was the essence of Greek, Roman and to some degree Western medieval civilization--enough at least to convert and lead a continent. The C hinese world was a continent, as its counterpart, the Indian world.

It is a fact that the Vietnamese have stopped Chinese culture along a line reaching from Moncay to Lao Kay, compelling it to build there not China but Vietnam.

They have found a way to absorb Chinese culture instead of being asborbed

by it. The key to this unparalleled achievement was apparently that they never resorted to the usual weapon of the weak, ethnic hatred against the their conqueror.

However, Government and Revolution in Vietnam would tell us quite another story: The evidence is against the modem Vietnamese complaint that China would at aU times have liked to swallow up Tonkin and was only prevented by the patristic ardour and the valour of the people. Without exception, Chinese interventions after Vietnam became independent had as their object the restoration of Vietnamese princes deposed by their subjects, and the issue of legitimacy can be traced as a Chinese concern right through to the modem period. Even the action of the Yung Lo Emperor in 1407 was clearly intended to take a disorderly vassal state in hand when its ruler appealed for help and to put it firmly in order once for all.

Our academic circles, with their traditions and possible prejudices, will admire the extensive and deep erudition displayed along these dense, certainly controversial but stimulating pages.

The embarrassment begins when against a background of generally perceptive historical appraisals, the reader is faced with the trite statement, endlessly repeated in this country from the highest government circles to the lowest level of our press, that the communist enterprise in Vietnam, "far from having been founded spontaneously by local men converted to Marxism through intellectual curiosity and conviction, was from the outset a subversive movement introduced into Vietnam by the Communist International, out of considerations that hold no interest for the Vietnamese people." Did this clicM have to be reproduced here, without mention or attempted refutation of most obvious local facts and factors allegeable against it? From the same viewpoint it is disquieting that as crucial a development in Vietnamese history as the foundation and confirmation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, should be inscribed under the chapter heading "The Anarchy of Ho Chi Minh."

Remarkably accurate and discerning in the collection and computation of details and at the same time apt to the broadest historical envisioning, Mr. Duncanson seems to suffer from a periodic colorblindness: whenever the picture turns red, the lines, to his otherwise clear-sighted eye, become confused.

Against the consensus of Vietnamese and Western historians that the Vietnamese have had to vindicate themselves as a nation against steady Chinese attempts to englobe them, it is a rather poor case, though cleverly pleaded, to postulate that (l) far from trying to rip back the selfrule the Vietnamese had achieved under somewhat distant and general Chinese

suzerainty, the Chinese never took arms against their vassal and once protectorate, and (2) the Chinese instead tried to restore "Vietnamese princes deposed by their subjects," a policy which, to all Western standards, would amount to a recognition of the country's independent status, as established in 972.

Modem events help us to understand the policy that integrates a territory, as far as materially possible, in a broader system.

First a monopoly of "protection against hostile neighbors" is extended through the use of a "Chief of State by appointment."

A model of this may be seen in the "Emperor" Bao Dai during the first Indochinese war. Such a policy does not go far, it must be noted, when it meets with antagonism or fretfulness in the country.

From the first Chinese conquest of 111 B.C. to the "liberation" of 939, who would seriously contest that sporadic insurrections, latent unrest and in several instances prolonged and effective guerrila warfare have manifested themselves in Chiao Chih (the ancient Chinese name for Tonkin) every time the political and military domination of the Chinese was impaired by troubles at home or divisions of the Empire? And this has had an unmistakable, though specifically Asian, "national" accent. Shall we then follow Mr. Duncanson in reading the long and consistent sequence of events as just a token of the local population's restlessness and endemic anarchy? Is it only on this that Ho ("the unaccountable Mr. Ho," as a British colleague in the middle forties in Calcutta described him) has built his "charismatic" personality? If such were the case, how long could one expect that the present suspension of "all internal conflict" in the DRV may endure?

But Jet us not miss so completely the explicit and bloody lessons of history, past and present! The anarchy of Ho Chi Minh? Against this very human and understandable temptation to fall back, for lack of better comfort, on that kind of complacent thinking, the best antidote will be found in Pike's encyclopedic (and truly fundamental, on all points of fact) Vietcong, the Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (though the present writer would not endorse all the political suggestions of this straightforward and highly informative book).

Pike gives an impartial demonstration of the fact that this undoubtedly "Communist-led" organization owes its successes and its ascendency in South Vietnam to its high level of efficiency and administrative competence. This tipped the balance against the Saigon government and its kaleidoscopic display of military hats.

The last and deplorable episodes of the once-lively intercourse between the French and Vietnamese, from Dien Bien

Phu to Geneva, show how far on the road of deception and destruction a people who styled itself without wincing "the most intelligent on earth," has been dragged by its unintelligence of the local situation.

No doubt, in the case of Mr. Duncanson, the word that will come to the reader's mind will be, quite to the contrary, "intelligence," and intelligence harnessed to political intents. Yet it is to be feared that, half way between government and re volution , "intelligence," receiving, as is natural, its passwords from the former, may take from the latter, or from its costly aftermath, precisely too professional an evaluation, as dependent on manipulations rather than on a definite and straightforward policy. The American public, to whom the last word should fall by right (and who seem to be increasingly awakening to this constitutional fact), when confronted by a book of that quality and at the same time learning the mark of such an inspiration, should reap the full benefit of a patient and direct digest, while remaining aware of the preconceived ideas along which the computation has been organized in somewhat dismaying coincidence with the most unproductive lines followed by the present Administration's policy.

Bearing these remarks in mind, a reader feeling the need to reassess President Ho Chi Minh's personality in terms of his full historical stature, past and present, will find valuable Jean Lacouture's Ho Chi Minh, a Political Biography, in its forthcoming English translation (Random House). Ho is presented neither as an infatuated doctrinarian nor as an impenitent anarchist. He is even less a prospective or even possible Tito (in the highly mythical sense usually attached to that name). Instead Ho is an authentic Marxist, aware of the necessity of local accommodation and, precisely in this, a genuine patriot.

All this establishes Ho on both accounts as a valid interlocutor for this great nation.

That is, however, if America gets beyond a hopefully superannuated short-sightedness and does not give up its own ideals and traditions of fair play as the hour of destiny draws close. The time has come to give up instead the inspiration behind a statement made by no less respectable an authority than Dean Acheson. No matter what Parliament may think of it, Acheson said not so long ago, the point is to get what you want. This is not the sort of guidance the world has been accustomed to receiving .from the US since the days of Benjamin Franklin's famous mission to a Paris pregnant with its own revolution.

Sixteen years ago in the concluding pages of a sociological evaluation of the first Vietnamese war (the Franco-Vietnamese War), the present writer suggested that the Marxist-Leninist thesis that would continued on page 15

10 I The New Journal I May 12, 1968

An outsider at someone else's feast

by Betty Jean Lifton After the signing of the Geneva Agreement in 1954, only a few American correspondents remained in Hanoi to witness the Vietminh takeover. We were staying at our own risk, according to our consulate. B'ut we stayed because we knew that in watching the French officially evacuate the pleasure-loving city that had been their colonial base fot seventy ye~s to the communist guerrilla forces of Ho Chi Minh, we were viewing an historic event. How historic it was and how our own country's destiny would be tragically tied up with North Vietnam a decade later, we could not then understand.

It keeps coming back, that cold, raindrenched day of the takeover: October 9, 1954. The ironic picture of the modern French mechanized army rumbling out, sector by sector, and being replaced by short young Vietminh troops in faded green fatigues and rubber-soled canvas shoes. The Vietminh,like an ominous shadow, trail just a few hundred yards behind the French, keeping a respectful distance until that final moment when they envelop everything.

They were emerging from the jungles and the mountains for the first time since the fighting broke out in Hanoi, December 19, 1946. They allowed us to inspect them as if they were no more than camping equipment on display, each man a packaged unit of tin cup, mosquito netting, rice ration, aluminum fork and spoon, wooden-stick grenades, short bayonet, entrenching tools and rice bowl.

The citizens of Hanoi, under a Frenchimposed daytime curfew, remained behind their shuttered windows. For the past few days they had been busy whitewashing walls with signs like: "Go South For lndepedence," taking down pictures of ex-Emperor Bao Dai and shopping in the market place for red and gold material to make the Vietminh flag.

The stores once filled with French perfume and lingerie, the bars and cabarets, the restaurants with their bouillabaisse and coq au vin were boarded up: their owners had already fled south. All that had been French seemed about to pass with these long convoys of white men, not a few of whom must have loved this city as their own, At five in the afternoon the last French jeep rolled over the Doumer Bridge on its way to Haiphong, the port city that' did not have to be evacuated until May. In 1897 the French had built this steel bridge over the Red River to connect Hanoi with the adjacent rice delta. The Vietnamese had protested then that such a construction would anger the Red River dragon. But the French had laughed and gone on with their work in the turbulent rapids. Their success increased French prestige and lessened the dragon's. Now with this last jeep it seemed that the dragon was having its revenge.

Auhe Vietminb took this fia.al sector, Betty lMn Lifton covered the end of the Korean War and wa.r a correspondent in Vietnam in 1954. She has contributed tQ The New York Times Magazine, Mademoiselle and The Asahi Evening News of Tokyo. She is the wife of Robert Jay Lifton, professor of psychiatry. This is her second appearance in The New Journal.

the people poured enthusiastically out into the streets to welcome them, throwing flowers, waving the Vietminh flag with its gold star rising on a red background. But the troops did not relax. Although there were many local boys among them, they kept their discipline and ranks, and did not mix with the crowds.

Later I was to hear fro.m a Vietname$e college student about his cousin, w~o had marched into Hanoi that day. The cousin was only 16 years old wben he left Hanoi to join the resistance. His parents had not known until the French withdrawal whether he was alive or dead. Overcome with happiness, they had planned a family reunion in his honor.

"No," be objected firmly. "It is not patriotic for you to have a party. You must not spend money on celebrations until we have liberated all of Vietnam. For eight years I have lived on nothing but rice and salt-rice and salt twjce a day-and this is all I will eat until Vietnam is united."

His parents were burt and confused; they considered themselves patriots. Had they not given this son to the Vietminh?

But they were also Vietnamese, and traditions of family loyalty and filial piety go deep in Indochina. This valiant soldier for whom they had waited with such longing had finally returned-but he was no longer theirs. He spouted words of ideology they could not understand. He preferred sleeping in the barracks to spending even one night in his own bed.

"And yet my cousin is more nationalist than communist," the college student had said. "He was only fighting to free Vietnam from French colonialism. We hate the French." The student paused as if considering for a moment and added: "And if you won't be insulted, we bate America, . too, for helping them. Americans are even more foreign to us than the French. If you had ever lived under foreign occupation, you would know what it is to hate."

That first night all of Hanoi was garlanded in flowers and flags. Ho Chi Minh and his top officials had not yet entered the city. The advance guard was to prepare the people for life under the new regime, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. As if they had been rehearsing this moment for years in the jungles, they swung into immediate action. They organized Hanoi into neighborhood groups and urged everyone to attend the first of the many meetings that characterize a new communist state.

The foreign press spent part of the evening at the Metropole Hotel as guests of the Indian, Canadian and Polish members of the International Control Commission.

But while the champagne was bubbling in our glasses, we were thinking about those meetings from which we, unlike the Russian, C hinese and other communist correspondents, were barred.

"The sessions are so dull," a young Vietnamese woman I shall call Trac was to confide in me the folfowing week. "The canbo (as the cadres are called) keep repeating things about French colonialism and American warmongering until you almost fall asleep. Sometimes they go on until after midnight. Only the children seem to like them because they get to dance and stay up late.''

Trac was from a wealthy family. Her hair was carefully waved and her lovely silk gown, with its high Chinese collar and long slit skirt falling over satin trousers, was made of imported French

material. Most of her relatives and friends had left the North. "My uncles were expecting large shipments from France and had to go south to wait for them. Otherwise they would lose a great deal of mon"ey.

But some went because they had heard the Vietminh kill the rich and are good only to the working classes. They were afraid."

Trac had stayed on because her father was ill and did not want to leave the city of his ancestors. One brother had gone south; another was with the Vietininh. ''The Vietminh will probably be good to us until the elections," she sald. "After that . . . well, I don't know."

With the departure of the French army, we had to leave our fon:ner press billets and find other accommodations. The one large hotel, the Metropole; was occupied by the Control Commission. A few of us were lucky enough to get rooms m a former brothel across the street~ the Coq D'or; the only remaining tenants after the girls had fted were the rats and cockroaches. My room was bare except for a bed in the center and the mosquito netting which hung down from a bamboo rod on the ceiling, but it had the virtue of overlooking the Metropole, which was to become an important source of information.

The morning after the takeover 1 could hear voices through the shutters of my window. Looking out I saw more Vietminh soldiers, thousands of them, still streaming in from the outlying villages, singing their victory songs. For a moment I felt alien in this jubilant city, an outsider at someone else's feast.

I walked the streets of Hanoi that first day with Kien, a Vietnamese boy who was serving as interpreter for the Control Commission. The French garrison town of yesterday seemed to have .disappeared.

Hanoi had a festival atmosphere. Victory arches rose from the intersections, and huge banners proclaimed ''Ten Thousand Years for Ho Chi Minh" and "Unbreakable Is the Friendship Between China and Hanoi." The tree-lined boulevards (which the French so fondly laid out in their colonial towns as if to create a little piece of home) were now being cleared for the afternoon victory parade.

The park in the center of town was filled with young promenaders, girls with their hair hanging long and sleek down their backs, boys sporting Vietminh buttons and scarves. They cheered wildly as their infantrymen passed by, each soldier carrying flowers in one hand, a rifle in the other.

Mothers held their babies up to seeWe bought some newspapers after the parade and sat in the warm sun at one of the little tables along the lake. People passing by whispered, "Look, there's a Russian woman.''

My interpreter had learned his English working for the British Information Office while his older brother was fighting in the Vietminh army. He told me that the people of Vietnam are nationalist in their feelings, care little about communism and are wary of China. 'We have always hated the Chinese," he said. "It was from this very lake that our great warrior Le Loi drew the sword with which he defeated China almost 600 years ago.

Before that we fought China for over a thousand years."

Yet Kien spoke in a mixture of Western and communist idiom. "Did you notke how kind the police are today?" he asked.

"They have all been brainwashed by the canbo in a three-month coarse in the

111 The New Journal I May 12, 1968

villages." He explained that the word for bramwashing in Vietnamese is "chinbhuan" (pronounced "ching-wan").

"Chinh" means correct, "huan" means to pull in a good way. "Brainwashing must be a good thing if police go in corrupt and come out honest," said K.ien.

His face darkened as he read me the Chinese and Soviet press releases in the newspaper. Russia's five~year plan was described, reforms in China were praised.

The editorial columns informed the people that everyone must be prepared to endure hardships for the next few years until after the elections in 1956. There would be longer working hours, possibly a rice shortage, many sacrifices until after the elections. The period after the elections (which were never to be) loomed like a utopia when the 13 million people of the North would be united in blissful harmony witli the 11 million people of the South.

"Does it really matter if there are elections?" Kien bitterly interjected. "Under either side the Vietnamese people wiJI not know independence. H the North wins, we will be domin&.ted by Chinese and Russian infiuence. If the South wins, we'll still have the French with American io.ftuence." He added with an ironic smile: "Do you understand that this is the tragedy of my people? No matter what happens, we will not have independence."

There was one young person who was clearly not confused in those early days in Hanoi. That was the young female canbo assigned to the Control Commission's transportation division in front of the Metropole Hotel DeeMed in a shapeless ru:my tunic just like the men's, she wore her hair pulled back severely into two braids; her broad face was well scrubbed and devoid of make-up. 'Women in every respect are now equal to men," the new constitution read, and "Pigtails," as we called her among ourselves, seemed to illustrate this with the brisk efficiency with which she translated instructions from English and French for the Vietnamese drivers.

However, Pigtails obviously had other tasks, too. One afternoon she stopped Trac on the street with the cryptic remark: "I understand an American lady has been to your home." Trac bad never seen Pigtails before and was shaken by this encounter.

"It isn't that you know they are following you," she complained to me. "It's just that they always seem to know what you are doing." After that, Trac was always "too busy" to see me.

To my surprise, Pigtails agreed to an interview at the hotel. She arrived accompanied by a male canbo in a battle helmet, who was armed with a pad and pencil.

Since he was not introduced, I also pretended he was not there; but he wrote copious notes, and I had the feeling he was getting the better story.

Pigtails told me bow she had joined the Vietminh in 1945 when it was a coalition party headed by the nationalist and communist hero, Ho Chi Minh. She fled Hanoi with the troops when negotiations with the French over independence broke down the following year.

It was a bard life in the villages at first, but she helped organize literacy courses for the peasants and studied medicine in a small hospital unit. To become a canbo she trained intermittently in three-month courses in Marxist history and revolutionary techniques and then helped set up such resistance activities as Foster Mothers for the Wounded, Cultural Corps entertainers for the troops, factory workers and

supply runners. She married another canbo during this time but saw him only twice a year because he was working with the racial minorities in the mountains.

They-had two small children whom she left in a village to be cared for.

"When Vietnam is free and united there will be time again for family life," she said.

"Now we women must give our entire energies to the resistance."

What had given Pigtails her early political fervor? She remembered her father, a government clerk in Saigon, continually dreaming of Vietnam as an independent country again and brooding over the heavy taxes inflicted on the peasants, the lack of educational programs, the constant draining of his country's resources into the coffers of a foreign power. Even after his early death, when her mother had taken her to Jive with relatives in Hanoi, she never forgot her father's vision. At the close of World War ll, she felt be would have wanted her to give her services to the government that Ho Chi Minh bad just set up in Hanoi --one that stressed national unity and co-operation with the West.

"When the Western powers did not honor the Atlantic Charter and allowed the French to continue colonizing us, my friends and I moved closer to the communist wing of the Vietminh. We became convinced that the communist program offered the last hope for strong and unified action against the French."

Pigtails asked me if American women had fought in Korea. She was curious to know if they had the same revolutionary zeal as she to fight and die for their country. "I am sure American women are very nice,'' she said, "but it is too bad your country does not understand the Vietnamese people. You are sending money to South Vietnam to build up an army, but they will never know independence with the corrupt government. The way your country acts, we think you want war."

Like on welcome guests who are neither encouraged nor completely rebUlfedrequests for interviews with Ho Chi Minh and other government leaders were merely ignored-we roamed the streets of Hanoi for our material. Sometimes I would stop in at the walled compound of Jean Sainteny, that controversial Frenchman whose car bad entered Hanoi over the Doumer Bridge at the same time his countrymen were pulling out.

Sainteny had been sent by MendesFrance on an unofficial economic mission to explore the possibility of coexistence with this new regime, a quest that was looked on with deep suspicion by the French, Americans and Vietnamese in ttle South. "Americans misunderstand my purpose," Sainteny told me. "Our mission is not communist. In fact, the Vietminb think we're right-wing capitalists. We believe that if there is a chance of keeping North Vietnam within the Western bloc through trade agreements, we want to try it."

But the drama of Sainteny's story lay more in the past than in the present. At the end of World War II be was the Hiih Commissioner of North Vietnam. Although strongly hostile to America's ideals of liberating tbe colonies then, he was wise enough to J'ealize that France could retain her control only if she gave Vietnam independence within the French Union.

At the time, Ho Cbi Minh was willing to make this compromise, and an agreement to this effect was actually signed by the

two men. However, when the French colons tried to undermine it by setting up a separate state in the South, the Vietminh felt betrayed; and after a few skirmishes they rose up in Hanoi that fateful December 19. Sainteny was wounded and almost lost his life.

Now once again the fates had thrown Sainteny and Ho Chi Minh together, but their roles were reversed. The French colonial whom Ho bad bad to beg for in~ dependence nQW could only hope to make the North a kind of Yugoslavia. And Ho was in a position to dictate the terms of any arrangement he might care to make with France.

Sainteny did not have to wait long for an audience with Ho. "It was as if I had seen him only eight days ago instead of eight years," Sainteny told me after their first meeting. "He was very natural and direct. We did not talk about the war at all.

I was amazed at his lack of hostility."

Sainteny did succeed in arranging a trade agreement, but his mission was to fail within a few years. Too much that was irrevocable had already passed between the two sides.

The night the clocks were changed to Peking time I was having dinner at the Sainteny compound. We did not take the change seriously, and it was a few minutes past the 11 p.m. curfew when one of the members of the mission drove me back to the Coq D'or. We were given an impressive demonstration of the thoroughness of the Vietminh security system.

Every few streets sentries stepped out from the shadows and then, seeing we were foreign, motioned us on. But when we came to the section of town where the old prison was located, four guards jumped out and rushed the car with bayonets. We skidded to a stop immediately.

We frantically shoved identification

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cards through the window, but they weren't interested. They knew that foreigners were no more authorized than Vietnamese to be out after curfew. One of them yanked the car door open roughly and, pointing with his bayonet, signaled my companion to get out and go with him.

The Frenchman had just been tellin& Me how he had been a paratrooper with the Free French and had learned not to fear death. But his face was drained of color when that door opened and he was forced out.

"Stay here," he whispered. "Don't move from this spot."

I had no intention of going anywhere.

I remained sitting in the dark, desertc!d street with the cordon of soldiers surrounding the car.

By the dim street light I could see ttiat they were young. These were ~t boys who belonged in the fields harvesting the rice. They looked at me defiantly. None of us existed as individuals. They were communist& fighting their revolutioo, and I was the imperialist foreign invader'. I felt both frightened and a little sad.

Ten minutes later my companion r-. tUrned, still at the point of a bayoner.. & got into the car quickly and drove otf.

"That fool almost killed me," he muttered under his breath. "He kept jabbing me ill the ribs with that damned thing while we were walking to the prison. Luckily there was an officer who spoke French and told him to release me. It's these dumb peasants you have to watch out for. All they know is tiahting and killing."

There were no patrols around the Metropole. Inside, some Canadians and Indians had formed a barbershop quartet and were working on "Auld Lana Syne...

I could hear them singing as I walked up the dart stairs of the Coq D'or and looa after I had turned off the light.

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A Yale Institution for Upperclassmen

121 The New Journal I May 12, 1968

~'Tonight,

Estelle, you are a star," said someone, "the bar-mitzvah girl."

by Susan Braudy

Three weeks ago, Estelle Parsons was bouncing down 47th Street to the Barrymore Theater in New York wearing bright orange tights, an orange sweater and a short tweed skirt. She exuded the chunky sexuality of a junior league tennis player.

Blanche Barrow, whose preacher'sdaughter plainness reminded you of dusty streets and dried-up lives, seemed far away.

Estelle had just won an Oscar for her supporting role as Clyde's sister-in-law Blanche in Bonnie and Clyde. But in a week she'd still be out of a job. Tennessee Williams's new play, Seven Descents of Myrtle, with Estelle in her first starring Broadway role, was about to fold, panned by the critics.

Four autograph hunters, on the lookout for Blanche, passed Estelle by. She shook her head. "One woman waited for me by the stage door for two days but couldn't recognize me. Finally I went up to her. She was so happy. It was awful ; her nose was running from the cold. Who needs a name on a scrap of paper?"

Estelle is hard to type-cast. Yale people remember her as the pathetic nurse and doughnut-sir! in We Bombed in New Haven, who worried as much about making lousy doughnuts as she d id about not getting a husband.

Estelle can play women of any age, comic and tragic, plain and fancy, though always strongly emotional. And Estelle is an emotional woman. Her moods flash sultry humor, whining impatience and quick anger. But when she acts-and she hasn't taken a vacation in ten yearsthese moods yield to a tight and deep control.

Arthur Penn, director of Bonnie and Clyde, calls Estelle the epitome of the courageous actress who will try anything for a good characterization. "She offers a rich assortment of delectables, and all the director has to do is selt:ct those he likes best."

Estelle's concentration and drive have paid off. Now at 40 and looking 30, she is finally making it big in a career less ambitious women give up at 25. In Seven Descents, Estelle fully realized one of Tennessee Williams's complex females, the sort that made stars of Jessica Tandy, Maureen Stapleton, Kim Hunter and Geraldine Page. As Myrtle, Estelle turned in a virtuoso performance as a newlymarried ex-carnival girl, down on her luck but not on her charm. In weatherbeaten pink boas, she combined the innocence of a puppy with the pizzazz of a carnie kewpie doll.

Once again Estelle repeated her habit of getting rave reviews in folding plays.

Before Seven Descents came back to New York after Philadelphia previews, critics were agreeing that Estelle had scored a personal triumph but the play would probably fold.

In Philadelphia, right before the first paid preview, Estelle was sitting in her bare dressing room, staring over a table littered with makeup into a dusty mirror.

Susan Braudy is a regular contributor to The New Journal

Her eyes were puffy, and her cheeks looked almost pouchy.

"I had a nightmare about my character, Myrtle, last night. It was awful." She abruptly began teasing the front of her hair. "I had my hair dyed apricot for the play. I want the roots to show, but the audience won't be able to see them for a few weeks; that is; if we run that long.

"Myrtle's roots show because she's a bad imitation of a Hollywood movie star.

But when she figures out she's not going to make her show-biz dream, she latches onto this Southern gentleman to try out another dream, the happy-marriage dream."

She began slapping white powder on her face and neck. "David Merrick was in here and kept staring at that movie magazine." She pointed to a pink magazine with "Mia and Frank/ How Marriage Destroyed Their Love" on the cover. "I guess he was wondering if I go in for movie magazines, but I cho~ it as a prop for Myrtle."

Estelle was now clipping a rhinestone cluster into the front of her hair. "Opening a play is awful. You keep asking, Why, what am I doing here? You have to be masochistic. This part is such a terrible responsibility. I'm hardly off-stage at all.

You know something," she said in a voice low and almost without emphasis, "this is the worst moment of my life."

Almost from the start of rehearsals Estelle could remember problems and disagreements. The press reported that David Merrick, the show's producer, had wanted cuts in the third act and a title change. Williams bad wanted to stick with the original title, Kingdom of Earth, and neither Williams nor director Jose Quintero wanted to make cuts until after a few Philadelphia performances.

Harry Guardino, Brian Bedford and Estelle came to rehearsal in the Hotel · Claridge ballroom in New York one day to bear Quintero announce that he was leaving the show. He then left the ballroom followed by Tennessee Williams. ''That day was the most wearing of all.

When I got home that night I was more exhausted than I bad ever been after any rehearsal."

The next day Quintero was back. Apparently a compromise had been made.

The title was changed, but cuts were put off until after the Philadelphia try-outs, which were delayed a week.

Estelle turned back to the mirror.

"Here's a telegram from my parents wishing me luck. They never wanted me in the theater, and they were probably right."

The telegram leaned against the mirror behind Twiggy eyelashes and a jar of Hollywood cold cream. "But you better go now," she said. "I have to change."

She began putting shiny orange lipstick on her mouth, deliberately smearing it well beyond her lip line.

Ten minutes later Estelle, now Myrtle, bounced onto the stage, carrying battered luggage and her pink movie magazine.

"Woo, woo, that wind is penetratin'," she howled happily, "shahrp as a butchah's knife."

Twelve butchah's knives, two weeks and 180 miles later, Estelle took her openingnight curtain calls and returned to her dressing room in the Barrymore theater on Broadway. The mirror-lined dressing room smelled like a greenhouse. Orangepink camellias from Mobile filled both sinks. "They won't keep, no stoppers in the sink," she said, nervously turning on the spigots again and again.

Queuing at the door were a host of wellwishers including Joanne Woodward, who wore a blue McCarthy button on a gold dress. Photographers began snapping pictures of the two women, who played together in the film Now I Lay Me Down, Paul Newman's directorial debut, which will open in September.

When everybody left, Estelle pulled off her eyelashes and sat down. "I'm glad it's over. Imagine playing five more times this week. But on to the Sardi's ordeal." Her voice cracked with fatigue, but she was grinning her wide grin. "I guess tonight's the night you always dream·of as an actress."

At Sardi's Estelle sat with a group of old friends, most of them not in theater, who spoke little about the play. They assumed that the Philadelphia raves for her performance would continue ·in New York.

"Tonight, Estelle, you are a star," said one, "the Bar M itzvah girl." And theater talk quickly yielded to McCarthy versus Kennedy.

But Estelle wasn't in the discussion. Her mind seemed to be still on the play. The argument barely stopped to note that an eleven-o'clock reviewer had praised Estelle's acting but bad knocked the play.

David Merrick's office had promised a cast party upstairs at Sardi's. But when everyone had finished their canneloni and fruit cup, they discovered Williams and Merrick had slipped away and so bad the party; and so, it was beginning to seem, had hopes for the play's long run.

Estelle's family goes back to the Mayflower. Her grandfather, Starr Parsons, taught Latin at Harvard; her father, Eben, is a Massachusetts lawyer. She is also descended from Effie Bickford, a soubrette of the 1880's who is considered the family's black sheep. · Estelle made her stage debut at four as Little Bo Peep shrieking and shrieking for her lost sheep on a revolving birthday cake. "And I've had shrieking parts ever since." Warner Brothers enhanced her shrieks in Bonnie and Clyde by instructing exhibitors to turn the soundtrack way up.

Mter boarding school ("a Quaker school for gracious living") Estelle graduated from Connecticut College in 1949 and then went to Boston University Law School for a year.

"I was always more interested in show biz than io a law career. I was always trying to quit college and take agents up oo offers to go to New York and sing with bands. But my parents said it wasn't the life for me."

Finally Estelle escaped. In 1950 she turned down the chance to transfer to Harvard Law School and landed a job as weather-girl on Dave Garroway's Today Show.

In 1955 Estelle, by then producer-commentator, left her $800-a-week job with Garroway to study acting. "In ten years," she declared then, "I intend to be one of the world's best actresses."

In the following years she played featured roles in Broadway musicals like Happy Hunting, starring Ethel Merman•. in 1957. She studied at Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, then played the lead in Mrs. Dally Has a Lover, winning a Theater World Award; she picked up two "Obies," played the prostitutes in Edward Albee's Malcolm in 1965 and played Galileo's daughter in the Lincoln Center Galileo in 1967.

At the end of 1966, after working with Arthur Penn in the first Berkshire SUJDJller

13 I The New Journal! May 12, 1968

Festival, she made Bonnie and Clyde, her first film. Last summer she played a schoolteacher with a lesbian attraction to Joanne Woodward in Now I Lay Me Down.

Last fall, still fifteen pounds overweight from Now I Lay Me Down ("They paid a doctor, not me but a doctor, to make sure I lost that weight"), she joined the Yale Repertory Company to play the pathetically funny Red Cross girl in Joseph Heller's We Bombed inNew Haven.

At the cast party for We Bombed she stood amidst Yale faculty in her lucky purple chiffon dress, talking to Mr. and Mrs. Paul Newman and looking like nothing more than a faculty wife, with station wagons, Conn College and horse shows in her background. But the focus shifted when Estelle and Joanne Woodward began dutifully kissing each other goodbye.

Suddenly Paul Newman dropped to his haunches. And while his wife and Estelle dissolved in giggles, he sighted them through an imaginary camera.

"Roll 'em," he shouted. "Make that kiss on the lips, girls, a little warmer, a little bigger, on the lips."

Estelle says she lost money doing the Heller play. Those days she didn't commute between her sprawling west side apartment and New Haven; she stayed over in an English professor's office in Branford College to save hotel bills.

"There's no money in serious theater. I'm always broke."

While she stayed in New Haven, a Columbia Teachers' College student stayed with her twelve-year-old twin daughters, Abbie and Martha Gehman.

Estelle was married to Richard Gehman, a writer, in 1953 and divorced in 1958.

"Like Myrtle," Estelle says, "every girl has a dre~m in her heart of settling down with a man to whom she is strongly attracted. But if you can't do it, you can't do it."

"I'm an actress and a mother. I'm a loner," she told me as we sat down at a luncheonette near the Barrymore a week before the Academy Awards ceremony.

"I don't go out much, so I don't see many movies and shows. People say my work is original because I never see anybody else work."

Estelle took off her coat, being careful not to crush an old-fashioned orchid corsage that Jose Quintero had given her.

"When I'm in New York, I get up, make breakfast for the kids, pack school lunches and then go back to bed for an hour. Then I drag myself to work."

"I'll have one of those big cookies over there," Estelle said with a cherubic smile.

"I'm really not interesting enough to write about. All I do is work. Maybe you should announce my engagement to David Merrick. That's a good rumor. He's sending me to the Academy Awards ceremony.

Of course I had to promise to mention him if I won."

She sighed, "Who needs an Academy Award anyway? Not me. I don't have the time or money to campaign for it. First you throw away $5,000 on a press agent, then once you win, you don't get work again for two years."

Does she feel like a star? "Acting is my work. I can't help it if my name goes below or above a title. I just keep doing each part. There's nothing to strive for if you decide you're a star who has reached the heavens.

"I don't like to admit it to myself, but

I must be very ambitious, or else I never

would have gone through all this with the kids and everything."

She played with her fork. "Sometimes I think that nobody with brains goes into acting. I guess I'm an emotional, not a cerebral, actress. Emotional actors need psychiatry. You have to know yourself to throw yourself into roles. You can't be blocked. Sometimes I wish I was a writer working in privacy. It's tough to work always in a group with other emotional, egotistical people."

What are her plans? "Well, I'm going to make another movie with Faye Dunaway, where I play the head of a modeling agency. I want to work with Arthur Penn again this summer in the Berkshire Theater. I guess it all depends on what happens to Myrtle, but the way things are looking, I'll probably be free."

Estelle bad finished her big cookie and coffee and insisted on paying the biJI. A quarter fell off the table and rolled under the jukebox. Suddenly she was on her knees, then Oat on the floor, groping under the blaring jukebox.

"How would this sound, Estelle?" I leaned over to ask. "Estelle Parsons, star of stage and screen, is now appearing under a jukebox, doing her famous findthe-quarter act."

"No, no," came her muffled shriek, "star of stage, screen and television. For God's sakes, don't forget television. I really make my living doing commercials like that Excedrin one that cures the flu-bug."

II II

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continued from page 5 thematic consideration mentioned above, I would hazard two suggestions. Perhaps the piece is a joke on Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary. Who knows whether Podhoretz or Willie Morris of Harper's jumped in there first with the offer? But the Harper's piece is brilliant, while the Commentary piece is just that: filled with the plodding details and more plodding socio-political meditation that frequently characterize Commentary writing. Here is the March cut and dried for the purposes of political argumentation, with the glimmer of true prophetic power only toward the weary end.

My second suggestion is more disturbing. Perhaps Mailer's critics have been getting to him. He must rewrite the events in an objective ~ood to show he can do it, to show that the "Mailer" of the Harper's piece was a persona- get it?that had thematic and stylistic relevance.

If this last is true, too bad. Bring back the Mailer who makes no apologies. Bring back the Mailer who irritates. Bring back the Mailer who appals.

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continued from page 7 rently spending about $300,000 for every Vietcong our overkill strategy succeeds in eliminating. If we spend one-tenth that much to make a potential rioter better able to direct his energies and his frustrations to what he thinks are constructive activities, the program will be very cheap at the price.

Simple arithmetic will show, however, ·that the program I am proposing doesn't come near that figure but represents, rather, an investment of about $2,000 for each young person who would be covered by the program this summer.

Are there problems of conceptualization, organization, law, administration, public opinion and politics apparent in my proposal? Hundreds of them! My intention is not so much to offer a neatly packaged program as it is to urge us to think about managing crises outside the conceptual, organizational and value categories that are in considerable measure · the very conditions that hobble us, even when our intentions are unimpeachable.

I am trying to respond in spirit to the President's Commission's urgent appeal that we "mount programs on a scale equal to the dimensions of the problem" and that we "aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future .... " Obviously what I am suggesting is only a first step--a timorous step that New Haven itself may have taken in its recent decision (subject to HUD approval) to turn over to neighborhOOd groups funds appropriated under the "Model Cities" program. But there is evidence of indecision, bureaucratic delay and diffidence on the part of some white leaders. In New Haven, as elsewhere, it will be extremely difficult to turn an appraisal of the gravity of our situation into a courageous and massive attempt to create a new framework, indeed a new psychological mood, for responding to an unprecedented national emergency.

Does the white community, then, have more to do here than merely to provide funds? I believe that we white Americans must be available as a possible resource

to be used by black Americans when they, not we, think it is necessary or desirable.

If the spirit in which the NUS program is launched is the right one, some cooperation and collaboration is inevitable, but I should not require it or-in some areas where Black Power "ideology" is very strong--expect it.

Above all, white participation must not be one of forbearance or benevolent and paternalistic charity. When the Stokely Carmichaels and Rap Browns insisted that racism here is primarily, perhaps exclusively, white, many of us demurred. That indictment now has the endorsement of a distinguished President's Commission.

Its recommendations will represent nothing more typical of the "American way" if they are adopted on the assumption that we can buy our way out of this crisis. Racism is what really defines the magnitude of the crisis, and its effects can be overcome only through programs which give blacks the opportunity to build the dignity and sense of self-reliance that white America has denied its black citizens.

Mus continued from page 8 Benda adds, "He's a universalist, in spite of being a magnificent scholar. There's nothing he's not interested in, to know, to read."

Mus has also written on contemporary events. After leaving the French government, be wrote a major book, not yet fully translated into English, called Vietnam: Sociologie d'Une Guerre.

Of Ho, Mus now says, "At the time of the Great Leap Forward in China, North Vietnam tried the same, to industrialize, and it failed. During that period Ho was eclipsed, for he was against the idea. But he accepted it so as not to jeopardize his leadership. The man showed moderation with great strength of purpose. He might be a good man. I'm not a Marxist and I don't try to sell Ho, but for some reason he might be better able than anyone else to organize something there."

Mus does not think Paris is necessarily a good place to carry on negotiations.

"I'm not so pleased by the selection of Paris. There's a violent movement there against United States policies. The French don't know about the incredible reaction of so many Americans, how well informed they are in the coverage of the war. It's not impossible that the Vietnamese k.n ow this and are using it as a weapon. After all, it's peaceful here in this country, but right now tons of bombs are falling on Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese might want to capitalize on the antagonism in France."

Mus has spent much of his life in Vietnam and devoted his scholarship to it.

The years of war there, he says, "are a very heartbreaking thing. How lovable that country is, unassuming, courageous.

They're capable of great solidarity and are very intelligent. A very gifted people.

"I regret very much that General Westmoreland said South Vietnam should pull up its sleeves and fight on. When you are 200 million people with the greatest army, air force and navy the world has ever seen, you don't say that of a country of 15 million. The young in the United States • will not accept that attitude, and the world will not accept it. But as Reischauer, the former US ambassador to Tokyo, has written, this country is haunted by the notion that the Communists are all seven feet tall."

15 I The New Journal I May 12, 1968

Ho continued from page 9 be the most difficult to "sell" to the Asians, especially to those in areas still imbued with classical Chinese thinking, would be that history is fast moving toward its end, as predicted by Marx.

This end was to come when the overindustrialized and mercilessly exploited proletariat of Western Europe and England seized power. Such exploited classes would have "nothing to lose." The capitalistic exploiters would become, by the very process of their appropriations, less and less numerous, until they were ready to be wiped out by the laboring classes. Those classes would be rid of aU the mystifications, such as religion, patriotism and other indoctrinations, and thus aware both of the exploiters' schemes and of their fragility. History would be done: no more conquests, encroachments or conflicts-wherefore? Scientific exploitation of nature, without exploitation of man by man, would insure satisfaction of all human needs. The incitation to work would be found in the worker's enlightened care for his own health.

However, successive disappointmentsthe 1848 revolutions over all Western Europe, the Parisian Commune of 1871made necessary some adjustment of the Marxist system. The general line remained that the proletariat in its accomplishment will become the model and yardstick of all authentic progress. In the meantime, though, this "measure of all things" will

be given by an anticipation, in a preview form: the Communist Party, rid even now of all mystification thanks to its familiarity with the correct doctrine.

Where in this process, with the polemics, does the impact of Ho Chi Minh's personality fit, and where did he establish his "charisma"?

"An Asian," writes Lacouture "is made by what he has done." This, by the way, is a flash of light on what is simply and directly human underneath the general belief of these peoples in transmigration, even in those who have renounced the myth. Ho Chi Minh is what he has confronted; his reactions have formed an unusual and at the same time informative experience between two universes.

In 1917 and in the next few years, in war-torn France and in the convulsions of an uneasy peace, the young Vietnamese revolutionary found his contacts with the Western European Marxists deeply dissatisfying. In their eyes, the fight of the colonized peoples was far down on the list, far from the priority assigned to their problems-strategically but effectively-by Lenin. This helped to make Ho a fervent disciple. In any event, in his first encounter with theorization "by the book," Ho felt he was representing a deep and unheard call of human nature. The call was that of history, as it was going on unobserved by the theoreticians. Apparently Ho has never forgotten this lesson, even when Lenin had furnished him better guidance in that direction.

How far does this take us beyond the

myth of a monolithic, adamuntine Marxism and from the appended domino theory? That will be ascertained in the course of the prospective negotiations.

But in that decisive experience, on which so many crucial things hang, we risk finding no worse an enemy than the wrong image we have been building or which has been built for us of Ho, our interlocutor.

Let us see him as he has so many reasons to see himself: history alive, vindicating its right to be so unquestionably oriented by a theory, but ¡disposing of the theory when new situations so demanded.

The final issue thus appears to be whether or not some prospective community of interest and undertaking is possible between us, as once the possibility of any accomodation or formula of coexistence between the Moslem world and Christendom was debated.

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Yale Film Festival

Three public screenings of the best and most recent works of experimental cinema, selected from over 200 titles May 10,11 and 12,1968. Friday Saturday and Sunday.

8 pm at the Law School Auditorum, Wall and High Streets. $1.00 general admission.

Tickets available at the door or through advance sale at Yale Co-op and the Yale Audio-Visual Center at 59 High Street.