Vol.64/No.14 April 10, 2000
25 and 50 years ago
April 11, 1975
Ten years ago this month Lyndon Johnson began the massive military escalation that ended with 540,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam.One U.S. official in Saigon at the time, reacting to the first manifestations of international condemnation of the U.S. aggression, boasted: "We have shown that we are strong enough to do what we want without having to take international opinion into account."
A decade later, it is precisely the deeply felt opposition to U.S. intervention in Indochina—shared by Americans and people throughout the world—that is blocking Washington from taking military action to crush the advancing rebel forces in Vietnam.
This month is also the tenth anniversary of the first nationwide demonstration in the United States against the Vietnam War, which was held in Washington, D.C., in April 1965. The public opinion that Johnson and his successors had so much contempt and hatred for, combined with the tenacity of the Vietnamese, eventually forced the U.S. rulers to bring the troops home from Vietnam.
Today as city after city falls to the liberation forces without a fight, the victories being won by the Vietnamese are victories for all humanity.
April 10, 1950
Any union leader who does not submit to the dictates of the U.S. State Department or who opposes the "cold war" policies of the Truman administration faces the threat of frame-up and imprisonment. That is the meaning of the conviction on the trumped up "perjury" charge of CIO Longshoremen's leader Harry Bridges in an 85-day trial before a federal court in San Francisco.And any lawyers who assume the defense of persons accused of being "Communists" and "subversives" do so at the risk of their own freedom. That is the meaning of the vindictive jail sentences for "contempt" imposed by the trial judge on Bridges' attorneys.
The witch-hunters who set out deliberately to "get" Bridges and then cooked up the charge that he lied in swearing that he had never been a member of the Communist Party when he got his naturalization papers in 1948, are saying that Bridges got a "fair" trial before a "jury of his peers."
The government's case was based entirely on the testimony of stoolpigeons, most of them sworn enemies of Bridges in the labor movement. One of them gave the frame-up away when he testified that in October 1948 he had been called into conference by the then Attorney General, Tom Clark, who told the witness that "they wanted to remove the influence of Mr. Bridges and others from the labor movement."
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