The Legacy of the Russell Tribunal

Abstract

Reviews 183 c:\users\ken\documents\type3402\rj 3402 050 red.docx 2015-02-04 9:19 PM THE LEGACY OF THE RUSSELL TRIBUNAL Stefan Andersson stefankarlandersson@live.com Michael Uhl. Vietnam Awakening: My Journey from Combat to the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry on U.S.War Crimes inVietnam. Jefferson, nc and London : McFarland, 2007. Pp. vii, 255. isbn: 978-0-7864-3074-1. us$28.45. n the introduction to The Vietnam War on Campus (2001), Marc Jason Gilbert writes: … though critics of the anti-war movement on campus remain loath to admit it, at the forefront of the allegedly elitist, ignorant, draft-evading, placard-carrying (and perhaps card-carrying) campus protesters were soldier-turned-scholar members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (vvaw). These students knew the war as intimately as did any Pentagon pundit. They were also aware that other veterans had concluded that the limits on American foreign policymaking imposed by the demonstrations of their compatriots at home were undermining the war in which they had fought. They were, however, not only willing, but often eager to lead their fellow students in what they saw as an effort to save their nation’s honor and to prevent the further loss of life in Southeast Asia. (P. xiii) Michael Uhl is an example of such a student. His book was written to satisfy, in part, the requirements of a doctoral program at the graduate school of the Union Institute. It consists of two major parts, the first covering Uhl’s background, growing up in a middle-class family on Long Island, and the f= 184 Reviews c:\users\ken\documents\type3402\rj 3402 050 red.docx 2015-02-04 9:19 PM circumstances that led him to join the Counterintelligence Corps in Vietnam, and a second in which he chronicles through contiguous episodes his postwar years as a “front line activist in the anti-Vietnam War veterans’ movement” (p. 2). In this review I will limit myself to Uhl’s experiences as a former gi and graduate student looking for ways to express his protests. This led him to Jeremy Rifkin, Tod Ensign1 and the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry into United States War Crimes in Indochina (cci), which had been created by Bertrand Russell’s private secretary and head of the brpf in New York, Ralph Schoenman, in November 1969 in connection with the news about the My Lai Massacre, which had taken place in March in 1968. After the session of the iwct in Stockholm in May 1967, Schoenman went to Bolivia to be present at the trial of Régis Debray. When he tried to join the second session in Roskilde in November, American secret diplomacy was one step ahead of him. After several failed attempts to get into Denmark, he had to return to the us.2 This marked the beginning of the end of Schoenman’s relationship with the brpf, the iwct and Bertrand and Edith Russell. Back in the office on Fifth Avenue, he continued to handle the brpf correspondence . He succeeded in returning to the uk for a short time during the summer of 1968 and visited a surprised and concerned Russell in Wales, before he was deported. He returned to the New York brpf office. When the truth about the My Lai Massacre was revealed, Schoenman reacted immediately and started to organize the National Committee for a cci and look for former gis prepared to testify on war crimes, just as at the second session of the iwct in Roskilde.3 In “Organizing Veterans through War Crimes Documentation”, Ensign writes: While the Russell Tribunal hearings were known within the American peace movement, two more years passed before anyone began documenting u.s. war 1 Tod Ensign died in May 2014. I visited him at the Citizen Soldiers’ office in New York in June 2012 and had two long, exciting sittings with him when he told me stories about Schoenman, the cci, the failed cooperation with Jane Fonda, Mark Lane and the vvaw, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk and much else, not all of it fit to print. He gave me a copy of G.I. Guinea Pigs (1980), which he...