Read the whole thing, but here are the parts relevant to Kerry:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fred-branfman/on-john-mccain-and-tom-br_b_103193.html A Review of "Boom!: Voices of the Sixties - Personal Reflections on the 60s and Today", by Tom Brokaw, Random House
(The Author: Fred Branfman exposed the U.S. Secret Air War in Laos while living there from 1967-71, developed solar, educational, and Information Age initiatives for the Governor or California and national policy-makers, and has since 1990 been on a spiritual and psychological journey described at www.trulyalive.org. He can be reached at fredbranfman@aol.com.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others in that I shot in free-fire zones, fired .50-caliber machine bullets, used harass-and-interdiction fire, joined in search-and-destroy missions, and burned villages. All of these acts are contrary to the laws of the Geneva Convention, and all were ordered as written, established policies from the top down, AND THE MEN WHO ORDERED THIS ARE WAR CRIMINALS." (Emphasis added)
n John Kerry, Meet The Press, April 1971
Tom Brokaw's new book bills itself as a "a virtual reunion of a cross section of the Sixties crowd, in an effort to discover what we might learn from each other, forty years later." The next 623 pages primarily consist of interviews with more than 80, mostly successful, veterans of the sixties dealing with the issues of Vietnam, civil rights, women's liberation and electoral politics. Other than Vietnam, his material is relatively unobjectionable, since America has made some progress - though not as much as he suggests - in its domestic arena. The personal stories of women leaders and courageous African-Americans, who rose from the barricades of the civil rights movement to prominence today are particularly inspiring.
One reads the Vietnam war sections of Tom Brokaw's book, a compendium of American conventional wisdom on the Sixties, with a growing sense of amazement, disbelief and, ultimately, profound sadness. For Brokaw has, incredibly, managed to write a lengthy book about the Sixties that barely mentions the central event which produced it.
Is it really possible for America to have killed hundreds of thousands of Indochinese peasants and still, 30 years later, to act as if it never happened?
...
Democratic Party activist and businessman Sam Brown is cited twice in the book, seminal '60s figures like Tom Hayden and Ramparts editor Robert Scheer are ignored. Senator James Webb's portrayal of the war as solely a military battle, and of antiwar protestors as cowardly and unpatriotic, receives 5 or 6 times as much space as anyone else interviewed. The experiences of anti-draft leaders like David Harris, who courageously went to jail out of moral opposition to the war, and people like former volunteer chief Don Luce, who risked his life for years to bring the suffering of the Vietnamese people to public attention, including exposing the Tiger Cages and other torture of tens of thousands of political prisoners, are not included.
Veterans like Bob Kerrey, Colin Powell, Wayne Downing and John McCain, who do not mention U.S. murder of civilians, are interviewed at length. The views of equally well-known veterans who bravely exposed and opposed the murder - like John Kerry, Bobby Muller (whose organization won a Nobel Prize for the landmines treaty) and Ron Kovic (author of Born On The Fourth of July), are written out of Brokaw's history. Pentagon Papers author Les Gelb is interviewed, his co-author Dan Ellsberg - without whom we would never have known of the deceit and crimes the Papers revealed - is not even mentioned. War opponents like George McGovern, Gary Hart and Bill Clinton are only quoted about the war's aftermath - not the crimes that led them to oppose it.
...
Brokaw's refusal to even interview John Kerry about his charge that U.S. leaders were war criminals, the issue that goes to the heart of what triggered the 60s upheavals, is particularly symbolic. If a hero like Kerry had the enormous courage to tell the truth, jeopardizing his political career and potentially angering millions of Americans and fellow vets, why is a Tom Brokaw so afraid today to even raise the issue? Only he can answer that question, but nothing more reveals his book's failure as history or even an honest forum for discussing the real issues of the Sixties.
Now to be fair, we don't know whether Brokaw wanted to interview Kerry but was unable to (maybe he was working on the book in '04 when Kerry was running for president), but I still like the way this writer portrays Kerry. It also is disturbing what he is saying: that we are slowly erasing our own history. Part of me, however, says we are only temporarily forgetting it. This has commonly occurred throughout history -- depending on the mood of the country, certain aspects of historic events are remembered or pushed to the side. So it will be with the anti-war movement in the '60s.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
