Tucker Carlson did not expect to be made fun of by Putin when he set out for Moscow. He’s a fan, after all. So when he was greeted with mockery (Is this interview serious? Putin asked) and then subjected to a tendentious history lesson that went on and on, all he could manage was an embarrassed guffaw. Carlson must have thought that he was doing Putin a favor, providing him with a direct line to the MAGA folks back home. Putin may have felt that he had more effective conduits available. In any case, Carlson had his own motives: part mischief-making, part self-promotion. Maybe he got what he wanted even if he was made to look like a fool. As for Putin, he seemed to enjoy baiting Carlson. Perhaps he was content to reinforce his strongman image, showing who was boss.
Carlson’s Russia jaunt was not without precedent. The chance to see the world from the other side, whatever the other side consists of, has appealed to others before. A veritable parade of Western sympathizers went to Hanoi in the midst of the Vietnam War. They weren’t bullied by their hosts. The Vietnamese, despite their long history of fending off successive waves of invaders over hundreds of years, seem to be universally imbued with a habit of courtesy and tact.
Still, there are parallels: just as Carlson was used by Putin, so were Western visitors manipulated by the North Vietnamese. Consider the case of two parties that made the trek to Hanoi. James Cameron led one in late fall 1965; Staughton Lynd, Thomas Hayden and Herbert Aptheker made up another over Christmas later that year. Cameron was a brilliant Scots-born foreign correspondent who’d covered wars and politics over three decades. Lynd and Hayden were young Americans, both active in the civil rights movement. All were sympathetic to the North Vietnamese. But there were differences.
The Sceptical Scot
Cameron had been applying to visit the North for some time, without really expecting his request to be granted; as a freelance journalist he saw it as a professional opportunity. When the visas came through he didn’t hesitate. In the English-speaking world (French journalists had preceded him) he had scored something of a scoop.
He viewed the war as “an offence to international decency both disgusting and absurd,” but as a correspondent who had knocked about Asia for years, he retained a sceptical cast of mind and a sense of humor. He regretted the austerity of life in Hanoi: there were few bars and the “peculiar awfulness of the local Lua Moi vodka” drove him, he said, “into a morose form of temperance.” One of his guides, a self-described “the-ist” (using the French for tea) called Cameron both a “tabac-ist” and an “alcool-ist.” Neither imputation did Cameron deny.
He was struck by the universal veneration of Norman Morrison, an American martyr to the anti-war cause, for whom songs were sung and posters hung all over the North. It was ironical, he wrote, that he had to explain to Western readers “that Norman Morrison was the young American who publicly committed suicide by burning himself to death outside the Pentagon in Washington in November 1965 as a protest against the United States policies in Vietnam. It was,” he added, “a tragic, moving, stupid, honourable, useless thing to do.”
Cameron was privileged in ways that many who followed him were not. His being allowed to film was exceptional, although closely monitored, and his request to visit Halong Bay was granted even though the area was subject to bombing by the Americans. Cameron appreciated his hosts’ trepidation:
I cannot for a moment imagine that anyone in North Vietnam would have felt personally bereaved at my disappearance, but I can understand that to have observed this dubious Westerner going to his maker under a stick of American high explosive would, at this juncture, have been an embarrassment … and a confounded nuisance.
Ho Chi Minh, as far as outside observers could tell, had stepped back from active involvement in day-to-day governance by the mid-1960s. There was even speculation that he was infirm or demented. In any event, Cameron was invited to interview, not Ho, but the prime minister, Pham Van Dong. There was a lot of talk at the time – it never really stopped until the end – about the conditions under which the belligerents would negotiate peace. Details were discussed but what it came down to, as far as Dong was concerned, was that the Americans had first to pull out. The National Liberation Front, that is, South Vietnamese troops fighting to liberate their half of the country, would chase them out if they didn’t leave of their own volition. No matter how long it took, the NLF would win.
(Officials in the North would not admit that North Vietnamese troops were engaged in the fighting in the South. They were but it was a point from which the communists did not deviate.)
Cameron was accorded another perk when Ho Chi Minh made an unexpected appearance during the audience with Dong:
I looked up and saw the president, Ho Chi Minh, coming through the door and padding noiselessly across the room in his sandals…. He wore a rather smart version of the official high-collar uniform, in fawn. He was laughing quite hard at my surprise.
Ho didn’t stay long, refused to be filmed (“I just don’t feel photogenic, that’s all”) and left all talk of politics to the prime minister. But he was neither infirm nor senile and apparently vastly amused.
Cameron was hustled hastily out of the country soon after this encounter. This was no more explained to him than the reason for the visa in the first place. His reports appeared in the Evening News in London and the New York Times. They caused something of a stir.
The American Activists
Because their book was co-authored by Lynd and Hayden, I’ll attribute it to “Lynden” in what follows.
Lynden took pains at the outset of their account to explain how they sought to identify and neutralize any bias that might otherwise have colored their impressions. That they opposed the war was a given, of course, but they intended, by taking scrupulous notes, to submit an objective report. The report belies the ambition. Time and again, they found themselves enjoying with their hosts an almost cloying communal euphoria. Consider, for example:
The Lynd half of Lynden had been a close friend of Norman Morrison. He joined in the veneration with which the Vietnamese held his memory.
After their North Vietnamese companions sang songs in praise of Morrison, Lynden taught them how to “make a human circle and sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’”
A guide, seeing that Lynden’s set of the Selected Works of Ho Chi Minh was missing two volumes, rushed home to fetch his own copies for him.
On leaving the Museum of the Revolution, the director made a gift to Lynden of “a little bronze arrow … thought to be one thousand years old, a reminder of the long Vietnamese tradition of battle against invading armies.”
Lynden noticed a photo taken at a demonstration at Berkeley hanging in a factory they visited. It showed Lynd speaking from the back of a truck. Lynd and the workers were thrilled.
Lynden was struck by the sight of peasants with rifles slung over their shoulders as they worked in the fields. A teenage girl, whose head barely came to their shoulders, solemnly assured them that if the American planes attacked her village, she would shoot them down. Lynden relayed without comment the briefing provided by officials:
How to shoot down an American plane with a rifle is simple. When an enemy plane comes diving toward you, there is a split-second moment when the plane’s rudder and stabilizer become invisible and the whole plane looks like a big round dot. This is the only chance you have to shoot down the plane, and it is of course the most dangerous moment when you are exposed to the enemy attack. Don’t shut your eyes. Pull the trigger.
Lynden got their audience with Pham Van Dong, just as Cameron had, and were on the receiving end of a virtually identical critique of the prospects for peace. They did not get to meet Ho Chi Minh.
The Looking Glass
It’s possible to make fun of Lynden. Like Tucker Carlson in Moscow, they were singularly susceptible to the other side’s propaganda. One has to wonder how many hours they spent poring over the missing volumes of Ho’s Selected Writings once the deficit had been rectified. Was it appropriate to accept the gift of a possibly quite valuable bronze arrow? Was it by accident that Lynd found his photo hanging on a factory wall? The times are different, of course, but Cameron – a professional at this sort of thing – was better equipped to resist such blandishments. He had made a point of paying for his accommodation, to preserve the form as well as the practice of independence. Lynden were Hanoi’s guests. Cameron also encountered a peasant girl with a rifle. Possibly the same girl. He had doubts: “The idea that an F-3B Phantom bomber flying at 1,500 m.p.h. can be vulnerable to a pretty little peasant girl with a musket is so implausible,” he wrote, “that serious Vietnamese dislike debating the subject.” He goes on to say that there might have been occasions, early in the “escalation,” when careless pilots flying spotter planes low over paddy fields were struck by rifle fire. And even later, “a very intrepid machine-gunner” might have had a chance against a bomber as it dove toward its target. He was being generous.
America was no more at war with North Vietnam than it is now with Russia. Granted that in the case of Vietnam this was a technicality. But Hanoi was inaccessible to Western observers throughout the war, unless a specific exception was made, and almost all journalists have fled Moscow since the arbitrary and despicable incarceration of Washington Post reporter Evan Gershkovich. Moscow is as much the other side as Hanoi was.
James Cameron, in his report broadcast on the BBC, spoke of his having passed through the looking glass in North Vietnam. The phrase was likely as hackneyed then as it is now but it’s still applicable. (Lewis Carroll was a genius.) What it suggests is not only that another world can be discovered on the other side, but also that what you may be seeing, after all, is your own image. Carlson, no less than the two Americans, revealed themselves in their journeys. Cameron understood perfectly what was going on.
Sources: James Cameron, Witness (London: Gollancz, 1966); Staughton Lynd, The Other Side (NY: New American Library, 1966). The image of James Cameron is from the BBC film, “Western Eyewitness in North Vietnam.”
Thank you for sharing your memories. Like you, I grew up with the Vietnam War - the remarkable photographs by some great photographers that appeared in Life magazine made a deep impression. Later, at university, I encountered so many Americans who had fled north to avoid the draft. Canada profited from that phenomenon! Interesting that the Vietnamese themselves seem to have put the war behind them. A resilient people who've been through a lot.
Vietnam has been a thing during most of my life it seems! It was somuch a part of my late teens, specifically, when my counterparts across the border were preparing to go....or head north! I had many friends who made that journey to Canada during university years! As a senior I finally made the journey to Hanoi and Halong and found a country where that war was no longer discussed! In fact I had to explain some of that history from the North American perspective to young tour guides! It was an eyeopener for me!