> Every moment spent focusing on some real or imaginary crime by particular
> individuals simply adds to the clutter. Both a focus on My Lai _and_
> conspiricism re the Kennedy assassination contribute to hiding the huge
> crime the u.s. committed in Viet Nam. Leftists need to focus on creating
> knowledge of that crime, not information about particular villains (real
> or imaginary).
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I don't know how you can separate "knowledge of these crimes" from "their
particular villains, real or imaginary", but, leaving that aside, it seems
we have a very different appreciation of the significance of these issues,
and how the left should have related to them at the time.
You somehow think talking about My Lai "contributed to hiding" the truth about the US's "huge crime" in Vietnam; I recall it quite the other way: that it greatly illuminated the atrocities being perpetrated against Vietnamese civilians, particularly for mainstream Americans who did not yet fully understand the brutal and unjust nature of the war as others of us did.
You would have ignored the widespread speculation that the Kennedy assassination couldn't have been the work of a lone gunman, as well as the later investigation by a House subcommittee which lent weight to that speculation. I can't say whether or who or how many other figures were involved, but I do think there were enough holes in the official theory to encourage further investigation - especially when such inquiry tended to shake blind popular confidence in the system and its leaders rather than, as you suggest, to reinforce it.
You're in effect saying that if you were then editing a left paper, you'd have remained silent about My Lai and the Kennedy assassination. Or, worse, you'd have condemned the "focus" on these events by both the mainstream and other left-wing press as constituting noisy "clutter", a diversion from...exactly what? Higher level discussion of revolutionary tactics and strategy? The more subtle danger posed by that wing of the ruling class represented by the Kennedys? I'd be interested to know what you think should have taken precedence ahead of what many of us understood at the time, instinctively or otherwise, as rare and welcome opportunities to try to engage and influence larger numbers of of our peers and others whose interest in politics was undeniably stimulated by these events, and to do so in a way which was attentive to their developing consciousness.