> The
> people are in trailer parks and ghettoes and tract housing,
> not with those sitting around in universities and distant
> countries despising their experience of loss and betrayal for
> fun and profit.
But this is bizarre. If you wish to find members of The League and other organizations pushing the POW/MIA issue, you will find rather more of them in the Social Register or Winetka than in trailer parks or tract housing. Consider the following passage from H.Bruce Franklin, _MIA, or Mythmaking in America_, and then decide who is echoing the bourgeois point of view.
****** The "Go Public" Campaign
The Nixon administration's "go public" campaign, designed explicitly to "marshall public opinion" for "the prompt release of all American prisoners of war," was initiated on March 1,1969, and officially launched on May 9 in a press conference held by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. It was immediately and enthusiastically promoted by the media, which, and the relatively restrain language of The New York Times editorial staff, denounced "the Communist side" as "inhuman," asserted that "at least half of the 1,300 Americans missing in action in Vietnam are believed to be alive," and insisted that "the prisoner-of-war question is a humanitarian, not a political issue."
By the fall, the POW/MIA campaign was already receiving media attention and exerting political influence far out of proportion to its small number of participants, especially in comparison with the millions taking part in the anti-war movement. The campaign was promoted by a medley of astute publicity schemes staged by the Nixon White House, POW family organizations, Congress, and Texas multimillionaire . At Ross Perot (a director of the Richard M. Nixon foundation).
In September and October, the national media spotlighted three small delegations of wives and parents of missing man who flew to Paris to demand meetings with the negotiators from the DRV and NLF. On Nov. 6, Congress unanimously passed and President Nixon signed a bill declaring Nov. 9 a national day of prayer for U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam. Right on schedule, United We Stand, an organization formed and chaired by H. Ross Perot, on Nov. 9 ran full-page advertisements featuring the picture of two small children praying "bring out Daddy home safe, sound and soon." Headlined The Majority Speaks: Release the Prisoners, the ads demanded that the "North Vietnamese and Viet Cong... Release the prisoners now." On Nov. 13 and 14, the House Subcommittee on National Security Policy of the Committee on Foreign Affairs held hearings to denounce "the ruthlessness and cruelty of North Vietnam" and to provide a pep rally for a congressional resolution demanding the release of American POWS; not one person to dissenting view was alive to testify. In mid-December, the resolution, which had previously received unanimous endorsement from the Senate, passed the House by a vote of 405-0 and was immediately exploited by U.S. negotiators in Paris. A few days later, Perot had 152 wives and children flown to Paris, while his chartered jetliner laden with Christmas presents for the POWs and filled with reporters aborted its mission in the capital of Laos, where it was used to stage a major media event.
During the campaigns formative first few months in 1969, Richard G. Capen, Laird's assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, and other officials from the State and Defense Department's had visited forty-five sites to conduct unpublicized meetings with families of the missing man, thus shrewdly building foundations among those who could most readily win heartfelt support from the American people. "We brought them together for the first time," Capen later boasted of this whirlwind national trip to organize the families.
The most productive meeting was arranged at the Coronado Naval Officers' Club near San Diego, where on March 26 the State and Defense departments' representatives conferred with selected wives from the Los Angeles area and a San Diego area group of wives organized by Sybil Stockdale, whose husband was the highest-ranking naval officer imprisoned in Vietnam and who herself had been working closely with naval intelligence since May 1966. By June, Stockdale had made herself the national coordinator of an organization she christened the National League of Families of American Prisoners in Southeast Asia, linking groups of POW wives from several parts of the country. The following month she and several other selected POW family members huddled with Secretary of Defense Laird, and in December she and four other POW wives met with President Nixon, who pledged in the joint press conference that "this Government would do everything that it possibly can to separate out the prisoner issue and have it handled as it should be, as a separate issue on a humane basis."
In the spring of 1970, Sybil Stockdale received a phone call from Republican Senator Robert Dole, who asked whether she could "deliver 1,000 family members" to a POW/MIA "extravaganza" he was planning for May 1 in Constitution Hall if he were to arrange government transportation for them. Dole pledged to orchestrate political support, putting Vice President Spiro Agnew and a bipartisan lineup of senators and representatives on the stage, and having Democratic Representative Clement Zablocki turn his Subcommittee on National Security Policy into a publicity forum just prior to the event. Dole, Stockdale, and Perot collaborated in organizing the festivities, aided by a host of senators and representatives including such prominent Democrats as Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Senator Edmund Muskie.
The Zablocki committee's hearings, held from April 29 through May 6, heard South Carolina Representative Mandel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, explain how Congress would assist in making sure that "the issue of POW's will be the prime discussion having priority over all other discussions" at the Paris peace negotiations. The first two days of hearings were devoted mainly to doing publicity work for Senator Dole's May 1 POW/MIA rally, as exemplified by this exchange:
TV ARRANGEMENTS FOR RALLY
MR. ZABLOCKI. Just a final question, Senator Dole. What arrangements are being made for a national television coverage, which could be used, then, worldwide?
SENATOR DOLE. We are contacting the networks, and there will be press conferences Friday with Mrs. Stockdale and Mr. Perot and others. I will be on the "Today Show" tomorrow with reference to this program.... We have talked to Peter Kenney at NBC, he is working on it; we have talked to Mr. Galbraith of CBS, and ABC has been most helpful, and generally they are coming around.
The real stars of the Zablocki show with selected POW wives, especially Sybil Stockdale. Needless to say, the rally itself was a smashing success.
The following day, Stockdale presided in Washington over the constitutional convention that transformed the network into the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. Its structure and bylaws have been defined three days earlier by Stockdale, a handful of wives chosen by her, an attorney Charles Havens, with whom she had worked when he was on the Office of International Security Affairs. Within three weeks of its incorporation, the National League IRS tax-exempt status as a "non-partisan, humanitarian" organization, free long-distance WATS telephone service prevented by the White House, and office space donated by the Reserve Officers Association.
>From them until now, the National League of Families would play changing
but always crucial roles and dramatization and evolution of the POW
issue. Almost all its principal organizers and activists were wives or
parents of career officers, not draftees, mainly because the vast
majority of missing and captured men were flight officers, and the
politics of the organization were dominated by their outlook, especially
during the war. Receiving in its early years direct and indirect
material support from the White House, the Department of Defense, and
the Republican National Committee, the League (as it is known to
activists in the movement) would have dramatically shifting relations
with the government until it became, in the 1980s, the main official
liaison between the Department of Defense and the American public on
all, POW/MIA matters, a function it still serves today.
In promoting the National League of Families was not the only accomplishment ofthe Zablocki committee. It gave Perot a podium from which to instruct media about its duties in the POW/MIA campaign and a lengthy lecture presented by this exchange:
MR. ZABLOCKI: Mr. Perot, I am sure you are aware that we have with us to do the sum of a final survey liaison man of communication, newspapers, radio and TV....Do you have a word for them?
MR. PEROT. I sure do.
pp. 49-53 *********
Please note that the New York Times was a major disseminator of this vile deception. Do you really consider Ross Perot a spokesman for trailer park and tract housing dwellers?
Carrol