Charles Bell

I 'joined' the antiwar movement, in a very minor way, after my return from Vietnam, where I had spent a year as part of the U.S. civilian establishment. I was ambivalent about the war. I was ambivalent, in fact, about the Cold War. In general, I thought (and think) the U.S. was choosing its allies (or creating them) from among the worst elements of their respective societies -- and thus forcing the best elements into the arms of its opponents. In the specific case of Vietnam, I thought the U.S. had made a terrible mistake in 1946 when it turned its back on Ho Chi Min's friendly approaches, and opted to back the French as they retook their imperial possession from Japan. We sponsored the Paris accord of 1954 under which the French withdrew -- but, as Dwight Eisenhower frankly admitted later, we scuttled the accord's provision for all-Vietnam elections because we knew that Ho would win. In the light of this history I thought we came to Vietnam with less-than-clean hands. Nothing I saw there changed my mind. I never heard accounts of massacres by our side (the My Lai story surfaced after I left), but the little I saw of the U.S. soldiers made me certain that they were doing terrible things to innocent people. (So, no doubt, was the enemy. But they wouldn't have done so had we not been there -- so, in a sense, even enemy atrocities were our fault!)

The antiwar movement seemed to me to be a long overdue questioning of the U.S.'s myths about itself. I was happy to join the movement (specifically, to work in the McCarthy campaign) when I returned to the U.S. But I was not an advocate of 'overthrowing' the U.S. Government or of any sort of violent revolution. The history of violent revolutions is not an encouraging one. (The "American Revolution" was not a revolution at all. It was an anti-colonial war.) I do not choose to speculate in tumbrils. But I hoped the U.S. public would finally learn what its government has done and was doing in their name, and that they would rise up and stop it. The history of the last three decades has shown that that hope was, at best, premature.

While I was in Vietnam I generally avoided the company of my fellow civilians and rigorously avoided that of the military; whenever possible, I hung around with members of the press corps, with whom I felt more congenial. An old acquaintance from college days came through town on a temporary press pass; he had dreamed up a project of following a particular group of Army draftees through basic training and then into combat. (He wrote a series of articles for Esquire, I believe, which subsequently became a book called 'M'. (For M Company, the unit to which his group belonged)) Once during his visit we went together to a French restaurant in company with one of our college classmates, a young man I had never met who my journalist friend told me held a very high position in the U.S. civilian side of the war machine ("rank equivalent to a lieutenant general," my friend said). The young man impressed me as we talked at dinner. His comments showed a keen intelligence and a deep understanding of the positions of the respective forces in the conflict. A question formed in my mind and kept growing larger (but I thought it best not to ask at this first meeting with a Lt.Gen.-equivalent on 'our side'): 'What is a bright fellow like you doing in a place like this?' Our acquaintance never ripened, so I did not get to ask the question. I don't suppose I thought of him again until three years or so later. I was back in the U.S.; Nixon was President, and he was turning his government upside down to find out who leaked the Pentagon Papers. A radio news broadcast mentioned that three men were among the most likely suspects: a general, a colonel, and a civilian aide in the Defense Department, who was mentioned by name. And that is when I realized what that bright young man, Daniel Ellsberg, had done with his experience in Vietnam.