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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Friday, April 26, 1968
Spock tells it like it was
Gasps of shock and surprise arose from the audience last Sunday night in Hoch Auditorium when Dr. Benjamin Spock traced the history of our involvement in Vietnam, slapping at the exploitation and ruthlessness displayed by American foreign policy makers in the mid-1950's.
The ignorance evidenced by supposedly knowledgeable university students regarding events which directly threaten many of their lives was maddening and frustrating.
Hell, we thought everybody knew!
Apparently too many members of a generation touted for its sophistication actually are blinded by textbooks and/or beer to what is going on around them.
Few of them realize that Ho Chi Minh and other known communists close to him were the undisputed leaders of the grass-roots revolution against the French in Indochina from 1946 to 1954. Few know that Ngo Dinh Diem, who was installed by the United States as ruler of the newly created zone of South Vietnam at Geneva in 1954, sat out the Indochinese war for independence in Japan and later in America where he picked up his political backing. This fact certainly could not have endeared him to the Vietnamese peasant majority who owed allegiance to Ho.
But because Ho was a communist, he clearly was unacceptable to the Eisenhower administration as ruler of Vietnam. There was no accommodating of communists in this McCarthy-ridden era. This happened despite Ho's immense popularity and the workable and equitable government he created to replace the rule of absentee French landlords.
Two significant passages reveal Ho's popularity and capability as a leader. One is by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was politically pressured into committing America to the support of the unpopular and despotic Diem. Eisenhower wrote in his book, "Mandate for Change":
"I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that, had elections been held at the time of the fighting, possible 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the
Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader . The mass of the population supported the enemy."
The other is by Joseph Alsop, oddly the leading journalistic supporter of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy, which appeared in the June 25, 1955, issue of The New Yorker:
"I would like to be able to report—I had hoped to be able to report—that on that long, slow canal trip to Vinh Binh (Mekong Delta), I saw all the signs of misery and oppression that have made my visits to East Germany like nightmare journeys to 1984. But it was not so.
"At first it was difficult for me, as it is for any Westerner, to conceive of a Communist government's genuinely 'serving the people.' I could hardly imagine a Communist government that was also a popular government and almost a democratic government.
These are shockers. Certainly "things have changed" since 1954, but the difference is not an essential one. Only the names have been changed from Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu to Thieu, Ky, and Loan and from Viet Minh to National Liberation Front.
Such documents put the issue of Vietnam into proper perspective. The war should not be discussed simply in terms of how pacification is progressing, who is winning, or what a more fruitful strategy for scoring a higher body count might be. The question should be an all-encompassing "Why?"
But for the student who, say, cannot list the four basic provisions of the Geneva Accords of 1954 regarding the two Vietnams, this generic "Why?" is meaningless. His ignorance is dangerous because he cannot begin to question the Johnson administration's contention that America is giving the South Vietnamese the opportunity of self-determination.
An educated elite being necessary for the survival of a republic, it is discouraging that the elite-to-be, the Classes of '68 to '71, are in such bad need of a primer course on Vietnam. It appears the only way they will get it is to administer it to themselves since illuminating speakers like Dr. Spock are so few.
- Don Walker
"Maybe it's your grip . . ."
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY kansan
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Published at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays and examination periods. Mail subscription rates: $6 a semester, 10 a year. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan. 66044. Accommodations, goods, services and employment advertised offered to all students without regard to color, creed or national origin. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.
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Letter to the editor
Of ROTC dogma
To the Editor:
Last week the Ad Hoc Committee to Ban ROTC from Campus requested the University Senate and the faculty of the College of liberal arts to have them reconsider allowing ROTC courses to receive credit toward undergraduate degrees.
"The role of the University must be one of leading society in creating social change. In addition to providing for the increasing enlightenment of its students, the University must, when it is necessary, take positive moral stances in directing the society towards progress and fulfillment. Most of all, the University must always honor its eternal commitment to maintain an open, nonrestrictive, reflective environment.
"We feel it is a sad commentary on the University that it allows War to be taught as a trade through the ROTC program. One of the sicknesses of our society is its affinity for violence. Allowing War to be taught as a trade in the unintellectual, unreflective, and restrictive environment of the ROTC curriculum is a part of this sickness.
"If ROTC courses teach things other than making War, they should be taught in other departments for obvious and compelling reasons. If ROTC courses teach History, then let it be taught through the History Department. If they teach leadership other than in War, it can be taught in Political Science (political leadership) or in Management Science (business leadership). ROTC courses, by their very structure, are inherently a violation of the role of the University. Clearly, the military can not and does not present War historically, morally, and philosophically in a free environment that would qualify it for University credit. Thus, the ROTC curriculum, because of its innate restrictiveness and dogma, represent a reality antithetical to the fundamental principles on which the University is based."
Robert Cherry
New York City graduate student Jay Barrish KU graduate Kansas City
... quotes ...
"We know too much for one man to know much."
"Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in this world must first come to pass in the heart of America."
J. Robert Oppenheimer
* * *
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Inaugural address, 1954
--explosive victory seems typical of Markham's phony-dangerous adventures:
"I never knew a girl who was ruined by a book."
"The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts."
James J. Walker
Mayor of New York
* * *
Heywood Broun
"The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children."
"Writing good editorials is chiefly telling people what they think, not what you think."
Clarence Darrow
Arthur Brisbane (1864-1936)
"At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world; when a man is seventy he still wants to reform the world but knows he can't."
—Clarence Darrow
Kansan book review
Markham's neo-Bond fails
By Scott Nunley
James Bond is back, in a figure of speech, lifelessly resurrected by British novelist Robert Markham.
007's body lives (and loves) like a Fu Manchu zombie—both gutless flesh and lustless heart—off on an impromptu adventure for which neither James nor the reader has much ardor.
Nouveau-Bondite Markham, the pen name of Kingsley Amis, does accomplish some infrequent touches that leave vague hopes for the future of M's oversexed, errant boy.
"Colonel Sun," the first of the post-Fleming Bonds, is even appearing in two condensed episodes in "True" magazine, in the April and May issues. Judging from "True's" past condensation policy, the fastest and bloodiest and sexiest portions have been retained.
Bond, attempting to rescue a kidnapped M, is dribbled into a molasses narrative that threatens (by no possible stretch of the imagination) to be "Serious as far as possible war." Balderdash! What Markham says of Bond seems evocative of the reader's response to the whole affair:
And that is disheartening, because these installments of "Colonel Sun" contain very meagre allotments of speed or gore or sensualism—all the things we miss.
"James Bond's head had been sunk in his hands since he had last spoken. He had seemed half asleep."
It is a rare moment in the first half of "Colonel Sun" when Bond awakens from this carelost stupor. The old Bond was a miasma of hang-ups who hurt (or exulted) deep into his guts. But the Markham-Bond can scarcely ponder a burning soulpang without becoming becalmed in stumbling clauses:
"Was this how James Bond would end, shot in the head and flung aside like a heap of unwanted clothing to smooth out a kink in somebody's plan?"
The kinks are groanfully obvious, but they do not permeate Markham's child's-play plans that so pitifully fail to tax the strengths of our superhero. Captured initially, held prisoner by four Red Chinese agents. Bond escapes in a leap and a "perfectly balanced four-point landing." The attitude of Our Side after a (sputteringly)
"Oh that was nothing at all . . . Child's play."
"What happened at your end. Niko?"
At his worst, Markham spouts trite romanticisms, such as, "But he heard the mental alarm bell that warns the experienced campaigner of duty left undone."
And his descriptions of Turkish coffee ("scalding") or of bedrooms ("with gay hand-painted furniture and brocade curtains") fall so shy of Fleming's masterfully-concrete exaggerations that Bond's entire world now seems to be suffering from pernicious anemia.
The dis-ease, however, may not be terminal. At scattered points, Markham's prose does rise into fresher images of motion:
"Now Bond acted. He leapt forward, flung his left arm round the man's face, covering the mouth. The knife thudded into the chest, once, twice, three times. Then trunk and limbs relaxed, warm blood flooded out on to Bond's left arm..."
Or Bond's unheroic posture may suddenly personalize him: "Knowing better than to poise himself for a dive, Bond vaulted the rail and fell anyhow into the sea."
Or a Markham seascape may occasionally become real:
"The dark indigo-blue sea slid past almost unwrinkled. A fishing boat with a chain of dinghies passed towards Piraeus between the 'Altair' and the coast, all the craft moving as smoothly as if they were running across ice."
Of course, we were prepared for Kingsley Amis to be granted the Fleming cloak of British empiricism. But Amis' recent thriller "The Anti-Death League" was so unlike Fleming in its successful style that old Ought-ought-seven would have appeared a very different figure, indeed. As "Markham." Amis is safe to be imitative.
The faster-paced, more-rousing torture-murder conclusion of "Colonel Sun," of course, apologizes for the earlier chapters. By formula, this sort of apology can be very easily cranked out—and it will never reimburse us for the loss of Ian Fleming.