Bill Clinton’s
Early Activism from Fulbright to Moscow
Original FReeper research | 08/22/2007 |By Fedora
Summary
 |
| (h/t Ellis Baxter) |
During
the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s student protests and Moscow trip generated
much controversy, but few answers. While Clinton’s government files from that
era seemingly remain unavailable even today, there is at least more information
available than in 1992. The public record reveals that Clinton’s social network
and views on Vietnam were influenced by a pattern of contact between Communist
agents and sympathizers and Clinton’s academic and political associates. This
pattern is documented here through an analysis of Clinton’s antiwar activity up
through the time he left Oxford in 1970. Included are quotations from a June 9,
1969 profile of Clinton by the Frederick, Maryland Post which
does not seem to have been previously cited elsewhere.
As a
Georgetown junior, Clinton inherited his antiwar orientation from his part-time
employer, Senator J. William Fulbright. Fulbright’s views on Vietnam had in
turn been influenced by scholar Bernard Fall. Fall had an academic background
at institutions linked to Chinese Communist apologist Owen Lattimore. He had
recently co-authored a book on Vietnam with Marcus Raskin, cofounder of the
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which disseminated Marxist propaganda aimed
to sway Fulbright and other decision-makers. Fulbright’s office was also in
regular contact with Igor Bubnov, a KGB operative on Capitol Hill. President
Johnson had ordered the FBI to monitor Fulbright and his staff for suspected
Communist contact at the time Clinton went to work for Fulbright.
Clinton
remained relatively quiet about his war views during his first year as a grad
student at Oxford from fall 1968 to spring 1969. He took an activist turn in
summer 1969 while seeking to avoid being drafted. During summer vacation, he
worked with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee (VMC), a US antiwar group which
was helping a Communist-dominated coalition called the New Mobe organize fall
protests.
Upon
Clinton’s return to Oxford that fall, he and his friend Richard Stearns helped
a British VMC counterpart called Group 68 organize Americans in England for
Moratorium protest events. (A supplementary background profile of Group 68
follows the body of the article, exploring the group’s links to a British
antiwar network centered around Bertrand Russell and Russell’s associate Tariq
Ali. Russell’s network helped the North Vietnamese and Soviets disseminate
anti-US propaganda through channels such as the International War Crimes
Tribunal, sponsored by the Soviet front the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam.)
Over
winter vacation of 1969-1970, Clinton toured Moscow, where he had been preceded
by his roommate Strobe Talbott. Talbott was then translating the memoirs of
former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, which had been leaked to him by Victor
Louis, a KGB disinformation agent and talent spotter. Clinton and Talbott’s
other roommate Frank Aller was doing similar work on the unpublished notes of
Edgar Snow, an academic associate of Lattimore.
The
conclusion suggests possible directions for further research, considering where
additional information on Clinton’s early activity might be found in government
files and other sources.
Before
Oxford: Clinton, Fulbright, and the Legacy of Owen Lattimore
The story
of how Bill Clinton became an antiwar activist begins when he was a Georgetown
undergraduate working part-time for Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright.
Fulbright, who chaired the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was a leading
critic of President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Over the course of
Clinton’s junior and senior years, his views on Vietnam turned antiwar under
the influence of Fulbright and his staff. As Washington Post writer
David Maraniss quoted Clinton:
When I
went to work for [Fulbright] I was basically for the war, or at least I was not
against it. As a matter of fact, I had a long debate I remember about whether I
ought to drop out of school, whether even undergraduate deferments were all
right, whether anybody ought to have a deferment when there was a war on. These
were discussions with people who worked for Fulbright, who were on the staff.
The older ones encouraged me to at least make a study of it, make up my own
mind. . .And I sort of wound up turning against the war the way Fulbright did,
after a thorough study of it.
Tracing
the origin of Fulbright’s antiwar views reveals an intriguing ancestry for
Clinton’s views. Fulbright had not initially opposed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution, which was originally viewed as a measured, flexible alternative to
full-scale escalation in Vietnam. But after a major increase in US ground
deployment in summer 1965, and after Fulbright’s relationship with President
Johnson became strained over Dominican Republic policy that September, he began
questioning Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Pentagon Papers, a set of classified
military documents on the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy.)
Fulbright’s
reading on Vietnam was guided by a mentor Lowenstein had introduced him to in
fall 1965, Howard University Professor of International Relations Bernard Fall.
Fall was a specialist in so-called “Asian nationalism”, which is what the
antiwar movement preferred to call what less sympathetic critics might
characterize as Marxist-inspired insurgencies against Western-friendly
governments. Fall, along with Cornell’s Indonesian nationalism specialist
George McTurnan Kahin, led a chorus of academic antiwar activists insisting
that the Vietcong’s guerrilla war was motivated by nationalism, not Marxism.
This argument aimed to undermine the Johnson administration’s position citing
Cold War containment policy as grounds for US intervention in Vietnam.
Fall and
Kahin had both emerged from a group of Asian nationalist specialists who
congregated in the late 1940s and early 1950’s at Johns Hopkins University, a
major Asian studies center. Johns Hopkins’ Asian studies program had been
influenced by pro-Chinese Communist propaganda channeled through a
Soviet-infiltrated think tank called the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). Read More at Free Republic
