My Life So Far (56 page)

I vividly recall the day Tom sat on the edge of our bed while I cut off his long braid. The event had a ceremonial, rite-of-passage quality: We were leaving behind our counterculture trappings and reentering the mainstream; it wouldn’t do if the way we looked turned people off to what we were saying. So I trimmed Tom’s hair, bought him a suit and tie, exchanged his rubber sandals for brown leather, and got myself a couple of wrinkle-proof conservative outfits.

The tour began on Labor Day at the Ohio State Fair, emblematic of our desire to appeal to Middle Americans. The 1972 tour was the most fulfilling experience of my life up to then. I was living full out, every neuron fired up, every bit of energy being tapped. I wasn’t just speaking; I was watching and listening and learning every day, committing every ounce of everything I had to what I believed in, and doing it with someone I loved and admired, alongside scores of kindred spirits. Many of the people who were involved in the IPC tour became important influences in my life, and I want to name them: besides my roommates Carol and Jack (more about them later), there were Karen Nussbaum, Ira Arlook, Helen Williams, Jay Westbrook, Anne Froines, Shari Whitehead Lawson, Sam Hurst, Paul Ryder, Larry Levin, and Fred Branfman. I could write a whole chapter on each of them, but the book would be too long. They were my family in many ways and my role models. At last I had the political home I’d been missing. I no longer had to be the Lone Ranger.

For the most part we were received enthusiastically by huge crowds. I relied heavily on quotes from the Pentagon Papers, thinking that citing the government’s own words would help people accept the truth. It was then that I first discovered it isn’t enough to give the facts. Some people resist believing anything that might shatter their belief in their government—no matter how far from reality their misplaced belief takes them, no matter how many young lives might be squandered. This mass denial was painfully demonstrated again in our 2004 elections.

Occasionally in interviews I would be questioned about the right of celebrities to speak out and contradict officialdom. I believe in a democracy. Everyone should be able to question and dissent. When the public is being lied to, how else can the truth be known? I think it is because celebrities command a wider audience when they speak that they are attacked and infantilized so often by the Right: “Who do these stars think they are?” We’re involved citizens who love our country and want to voice views that might otherwise not be heard. What are involved, informed citizens to
do
when presidents, vice presidents, and secretaries of state give the public falsified evidence to justify war?

Singing with Holly Near (on left) and a local organizer during the first IPC national tour.

During the entire tour we had only one day off, which Tom and I spent in bed and talking. I remember it well, because of all the questions Tom asked me about myself—about my mother, my father, what I thought about movies, how I thought being a celebrity had affected me. After five months we were still getting to know each other, but no one I had been emotionally involved with before had ever asked me these questions so intently. It made me realize how doggedly I had plowed through life, and with little introspection. In the midst of our grueling schedule, we were trying to get pregnant. It happened one cold October night somewhere near Buffalo, New York. As had been the case with Vanessa’s conception, I knew immediately that
it
had happened.

During the tour Vanessa was living with her father in Paris. I had a perpetual knot in my stomach about her and would call two or three times a week to see how she was and let her know I was thinking about her. But in my heart I knew this long-distance stuff didn’t hack it. It was what my father had done with my brother and me: absentee worrying in the hope that it would be interpreted as love. Was I shirking a more important duty than ending the war? Was this a ghost that would come to haunt me? (Yes.) At least my instincts about Vadim had been right. He was a good father to our daughter; he was assuming the role mothers usually play. But I would be criticized in ways fathers rarely are when they’re away!

I have scattered visceral memories of the tour. In a drafty gymnasium somewhere in the Midwest, a young Vietnam veteran told the high school audience that he had personally raped and killed Vietnamese women. I could see him shaking as he spoke. The audience disbelief was palpable: How could this man, who seemed just like them, have done these things? Someone yelled at him to shut up. He stopped, looked around the gym, and then said quietly, “Listen, I have to live with this the rest of my life. The least you can do is know that it happened.”

Sometimes things got rough. In Kensington, a working-class section of Philadelphia, a hundred angry men stormed the police barricade and attacked me, pulling out chunks of my hair. One man told an Associated Press reporter, “She should be content to stay home and be a housewife.”

Slowly, as I gained confidence, I was learning to speak more personally. I remember the first time I spoke of my journey, from
Barbarella
in 1968 to becoming an activist; of how empty my life had felt back then, that I hadn’t thought a woman could change anything—except table settings or diapers. My message: “There was a time not so long ago when I didn’t know where Vietnam was and I didn’t want to believe what I was hearing about the war. Now I am a different person, and if I can change, so can you.”

I could sense myself connecting with people better. This was a lesson that would serve me well in the future—once I had fully learned it. It took a while. Oddly, I had a hard time being personal in my speeches when Tom was present. His brilliance as a speaker intimidated me, and I worried that I wouldn’t be “political” enough. Over his decades of activism Tom had grasped the big picture, one that allowed him to place the Vietnam War in the context of U.S. history and global history.

But it was
his
big picture.

Was there a big picture—a unifying narrative—that
I
could embrace as a woman? Not knowing the answer, I took shelter in Tom’s narrative, which was compelling and enlightening. It would take me thirty years and then some to discover my own, gender-grounded narrative.

I
n spite of everything, Nixon won reelection in 1972 in a landslide. Ultraconservative presidential candidate George Wallace dropped from the race when he was shot and Nixon inherited his supporters. Right before the elections, Henry Kissinger had given his infamous “peace is at hand” speech, claiming that a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese had been reached in Paris. The war-weary American public fell for it. Our ally in South Vietnam, President Nguyen Van Thieu, hadn’t agreed to the terms of the peace agreement, but the American people were never told that.

Nixon and Kissinger weren’t the first to deceive the American public about the war. Lyndon Johnson, needing to escalate the war to avoid losing it (true for Nixon as well), had claimed that North Vietnamese boats had fired on U.S. ships in an unprovoked attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. Thus he got Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which allowed him to begin bombing North Vietnam. It turned out the Tonkin Gulf incident was a hoax.*
 
⁹
This terrible deceit aimed at justifying war has, I believe, been surpassed only by what the Bush II administration did to get Congress to authorize sending troops into Iraq.

Then came the final hoax of 1972: Despite Congress’s clear mandate to end the war and Kissinger’s pre-election promise of “peace at hand,” saturation bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong began on December 17 and lasted into the first week of the new year. The North Vietnamese mounted an air defense that cost us heavily. It left ninety-nine airmen missing and thirty-one new POWs.

Feeling sickened and powerless, Tom and I went to a screening of
Last Tango in Paris
but had to walk out in the middle: With the bombing on our minds, anal copulation with butter didn’t sit well.

Why
would five administrations, Democratic
and
Republican,
knowing
(according to the Pentagon Papers) that we couldn’t win militarily (short of annihilation),
knowing
they would have to keep escalating to avoid losing
—why
would they choose to postpone failure regardless of how many lives that cost?

Partly it was to get elected. President Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger in November 1961 that if the United States ever went into war in Vietnam, we’d lose just like the French. But Kennedy was afraid the right wing would defeat him in the next election if he withdrew.

Mostly I believe it has to do with the perceived loss of manhood, the fear of being seen as soft—on anything, and especially Communism (or terrorism or whatever else seems to threaten). It is relevant to consider the views of Daniel Ellsberg, who has perhaps studied United States policy in Vietnam in more depth and for a longer time than most Americans.

“My best guess,” Ellsberg said to
Salon
on November 19, 2002, “is that Lyndon Johnson psychologically did not want to be called weak on Communism. As he put it to Doris Kearns, he said he would be called an ‘unmanly man’ if he got out of Vietnam, a weakling, an appeaser. . . . Many Americans have died in the last fifty years, and maybe ten times as many Asians, because American politicians feared to be called unmanly.”

Unfortunately, there are some so wedded to the notion of American omnipotence (manhood) that they claim the right to destroy any regime they don’t like, scoff at the United Nations, and consider it, as reported recently in
The New York Times,
“reflexive submission” to adhere to international law. In his book
War and Gender,
Joshua Goldstein, a professor of international relations at American University, writes: “As war is gendered masculine, so peace is gendered feminine. Thus the manhood of men who oppose war becomes vulnerable to shaming.” They are labeled wimps, pussies, or girlie men. (Beware of men who use words that relate pejoratively to females when describing the “other side.”) For them, national omnipotence and their own potency are joined. They’d rather disappear from public life than be blamed for pulling out. The most dangerous leaders are those (usually, but not always, men) who were bullied and shamed by their parents (usually, but not always their fathers). War and the perpetuation of social inequities will be their way of proving themselves qualified to belong to the “manhood” club, which sees strength (violence, homophobia) and hierarchy (racism, misogyny, power
over
) as their ticket in. It is up to women—and men of conscience—to define a
democratic manhood
less susceptible to shaming because its virility is not dependent on dominance.

This has never been as apparent as during the last few years. Look at George W. Bush’s macho posturing in relation to war, his “Bring it on” rhetoric, and his “Are you man enough?” challenge to John Kerry. Then there’s Dick Cheney’s implication that supporting the UN made Kerry effeminate or army lieutenant general William Boykin’s “I knew that my God was bigger than his.” The patriarchal mine’s-bigger-than-yours paradigm and drive for control has the entire world tilted in dangerous imbalance, damaging not only individual women, men, and children, but entire peoples. In
Revolution from Within
Gloria Steinem wrote that we need to change patriarchal institutions “if we are to stop producing leaders whose unexamined early lives are then played out on a national and international stage.” This is one reason why today, in my third act, I am committed to helping educate boys and girls against these arbitrary and destructive, violence-producing gender roles.

History shows us that nothing—no nation, no individual—remains number one forever. So remaining strong but also humble and empathic on your way up ensures that you will set a good example and not be a lonely ruin when you come down. A soft landing among friends is always preferable to a crash in hostile territory.

Enough of the Lone Ranger, in all his forms—even my own.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN