Vietnam Read-in, 1965
By John Gittings
The inspiration for a Read-in on Vietnam came from the Teach-in movement which began on US university campuses – the first was at the University of Michigan in March 1965 – and quickly spread to a number of British universities. The Teach-ins were intended as a different form of protest against the US military invasion of Vietnam, in which the official arguments and untruths would be exposed by an exploration of the real facts. They were not originally designed to present “both sides of the argument”, but to counter the official narrative which had dominated public discourse in the US. In the British context, it seemed preferable to set out “both sides”, partly because neither was so well known to the general public, but also to present a more academic approach: in any case it was felt that the weight of the facts was much greater on the anti-war side. The best publicised example was the Oxford Teach-in in June 1965 where the speakers defending the US intervention were led by the British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart and the US ex-ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge.
Vietnam: Read-in series
Briefing: Vietnam in Depth
Views No.9, 1965
Robin Murray and his team took this more nuanced teach-in approach further in the Read-in. In his editorial introduction, Robin wrote that:
“In altering the level and content of debate, the teach-ins [by this time they had been held in seven British universities] are successful. But sometimes the teach-in aspect has tended to be neglected. Protest has sometimes been put before education. More seriously the kind of information essential to a profitable teach-in has simply not been to hand, and participants have lacked the necessary material for discussion and understanding.”
The Read-in was designed to remedy this lack. The wide range of source material, from official statements, political commentaries and historical analyses, was assembled “not as an indictment of one side or the other, but to show what the evidence is and what the arguments are.” In the clearest example of this approach, the chapter titled “Who are the Aggressors?” contained passages from speeches by Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson, and a lengthy extract from the US White Paper of February 1965 called “Aggression from the North”. The contrary case was put with extracts from I F Stone, Wilfred Burchett, Jean Lacouture, and other critics, as well as a passage from a National Liberation Front statement.
Michael Wolfers, Geoffrey Robinson, Nicholas Bosanquet, Frances Murray, Robin Murray, John Gittings, Alexander Murray, London, 1965 ( L-R)
The publishers’ blurb on the back of the Read-in claimed that “the reader is left to make up his own mind where the truth lies: VIETNAM gives him the evidence in fuller and more coherent form than newspapers, magazines or television can hope to do.” In reality there were limits to this balanced approach, not least because the more than thirty members of the editorial team were opposed to the war. (The Guardian’s London Letter column noted that all of the team admitted to being “on the left”, though they claimed this only made them “lean over backwards to be fair”). Some limitation was admitted in the final summing-up, which stated that the Read-in approach – the presentation and refutation of a case – “could not have been maintained throughout the book.” Some matters were beyond dispute: the history of French rule, the development of American commitment, the failure of pacification in South Vietnam and the history of negotiations were matters of fact rather than of argument. The book’s summing-up pages concluded with the thought that the Vietnam War could even lead to a more general war: “Could the assassination of an American ambassador provide the Sarajevo of the third [world war]?”, its final sentence enquired.
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However the freshness of the Read-in approach attracted a fair amount of favourable comment. In the Oxford Mail, Evan Luard (St Antony’s College) said that the need to be fair and to present all sides made the narrative often laborious and woolly, but that nevertheless it was a worthwhile experiment putting across a considerable amount of information.
The volume was presented as “No. 1 in the Read-in Series”, and it was promised that “there will be other books of the same kind to follow”. There may have been commercial reasons on the part of the publishers as to why this was never carried through. Perhaps it was also an exercise hard to repeat because of the sheer amount of work involved. Robin’s enthusiasm and never-ceasing quest for detail carried it to completion, even when other members of the team – and the publishers too – may have tired.
June 2020
