The Zinn Reader (51 page)

But we have seen that Congress has never had the boldness to challenge a president's call for war. So much for those checks and balances that, we learned in school, would save us from one-man rule. It turns out that the much-praised "proper channels" are not channels at all, but mazes, into which we are invited, like experimental animals, to get lost.

The concentration of dictatorial power in the hands of the president, in regard to military actions, was underlined when Secretary of State Dean Rusk testified before Congress in 1962. He was explaining the attempt to invade Cuba the year before, an action planned secretly by the CIA and the White House without the involvement of Congress. You shouldn't get upset over being ignored on this, Rusk assured Congress, because it's been done lots of times. He then gave them a list compiled by the State Department called "Instances of the Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798-1945," describing 127 military actions by the United States, carried out by presidential order. A small sample of that list includes (in the language of the State Department):

1852-53—Argentine—Marines were landed and maintained in Buenos Aires to protect American interests during a revolution.

1854— Nicaragua—San Juan del Norte [Greytown] was destroyed to avenge an insult to the American Minister to Nicaragua.

1855— Uruguay—U.S. and European naval forces landed to protect American interests during an attempted revolution in Montevideo.

When U.S. troops were finally withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973, over 50,000 American men were dead after a war begun by the president, aided by a submissive Congress and a hands-off Supreme Court. Now Congress, mustering a bit of courage, passed a War Powers Act, intended to limit the power of the president in sending the American military into warlike situations. The act declared, among other provisions, "The President, in every possible instance, shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances."

This War Powers Act has been ignored again and again, by various presidents. President Ford invaded a Cambodian island and bombed a Cambodian town in the spring of 1975 after the crew of an American merchant ship, the
Mayaguez,
was detained, but not harmed, by Cambodian authorities. According to the War Powers Act, Ford should have consulted with Congress. Senator Mike Mansfield, the Democratic leader of the Senate, said "I was not consulted, but notified after the fact."

President Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1982 sent troops into a dangerous situation in Lebanon, again without following the requirements of the War Powers Act, and soon after that over 200 marines were killed in Lebanon by a bomb that exploded in their barracks. In the spring of 1983, Reagan sent U.S. forces to invade the Caribbean island of Grenada, again only notifying Congress, not consulting them. And in 1986, U.S. planes bombed the capital of Libya, again without consulting Congress. In 1989, President Bush launched an invasion of Panama (he called it Operation Just Cause), again without consulting Congress.

We have been speaking of open military actions undertaken by the president, uncontrolled by Congress. But the absence of democracy in foreign policy is even more obvious when you consider how much is done secretly by the president and his advisers, behind the backs of the American public, as well as behind the backs of their elected representatives.

The list of secret actions includes the CIA's overthrow of the government of Iran in 1953, restoring the Shah to the throne; the 1954 invasion of Guatemala and the ousting of its democratically elected president; the invasion of Cuba in 1961; and the wide range of covert operations in Indochina in the 1950s and 1960s, including the secret bombing of Cambodia. More recently, we find the series of attempts to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua by arming a counterrevolutionary force (the "contras") across the border in Honduras, and mining Nicaragua's harbors, as well as the secret transfer of arms to the contras in violation of a law passed by Congress.

When the "Iran-Contra" scandal became public in 1986-1987, President Reagan feigned innocence—the doctrine of "plausible denial" again. With astounding hypocrisy, Reagan said in his State of the Union Address at the beginning of 1987 (the bicentennial of the Constitution), "In those other constitutions, the government tells the people what they are allowed to do. In our Constitution, we the people tell the government what it can do and that it can do only those things listed in that document and no other."

These actions (the word
covert
is used officially, perhaps it sounds more respectable than secret) are fundamentally undemocratic; they take place behind the backs of the American people. The people who carry them out are, therefore, not accountable to any democratic process. The government has bypassed its own channels. For the citizens to stop this, civil disobedience may be needed.

Is Civil Disobedience Always Right?

There is a common argument against civil disobedience that goes like this: If I approve your act of civil disobedience, am I not honor bound to approve
anyone's
civil disobedience? If I approve Martin Luther King's violations of law, must I not also approve the Ku Klux Klan's illegal activities?

This argument comes from a mistaken idea about civil disobedience. The violation of law for the purpose of committing an injustice (like the Governor of Alabama preventing a black student from entering a publie school or Colonel Oliver North buying arms for terrorists in Central America) is not defensible. Whether it was
legal (as
it was until 1954) or illegal (after 1954) to prevent black children from entering a school, it would still be wrong. The test of justification for an act is not its legality but its morality.

The principle I am suggesting for civil disobedience is not that we must tolerate all disobedience to law, but that we refuse an absolute
obedience
to law. The ultimate test is not law, but justice.

This troubles many people, because it gives them a heavy responsibility, to weigh social acts by their moral consequences. This can get complicated and requires a never-ending set of judgments about practices and policies. It is much easier to lie back and let the law make out moral judgments for us, whatever the law happens to say at the moment, whatever politicians have made into law on the basis of
their
interests, however the Supreme Court interprets the law at the moment. Yes, easier. But recall Jefferson's words: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

There is fear that this kind of citizens' judgments about when to obey and when to disobey the law will lead to terrible consequences. In the summer of 1968 four people who called for resistance to the draft as a way of halting the war in Vietnam—Dr. Benjamin Spock, Reverend William Sloane Coffin, writer Mitchell Goodman, and Harvard student Michael Ferber—were sentenced to prison by Judge Francis Ford in Boston, who said, "Where law and order stops, obviously anarchy begins."

That is the same basically conservative impulse that once saw minimum wage laws as leading to Bolshevism, or bus desegregation leading to intermarriage, or communism in Vietnam leading to world communism. It assumes that all actions in a given direction rush toward the extreme, as if all social change takes place at the top of a steep, smooth hill, where the first push ensures a plunge to the bottom.

In fact an act of civil disobedience, like any move for reform, is more like the first push
up
a hill. Society's tendency is to maintain what has been. Rebellion is only an occasional reaction to suffering in human history; we have infinitely more instances of submission to authority than we have examples of revolt. What we should be most concerned about is not some natural tendency toward violent uprising, but rather the inclination of people faced with an overwhelming environment of injustice to submit to it.

Historically, the most terrible things—war, genocide, and slavery—have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

Vietnam and Obedience

There are rare moments in the history of nations when citizens, their indignation overflowing, begin to refuse obedience to the authorities. Such a moment in the history of the United States was the war in Vietnam. When Americans saw their nation, which they had been taught to believe was civilized and humane, killing Vietnamese peasants with napalm, fragmentation bombs, and other horrible instruments of modern war, they refused to stay inside the polite and accepted channels of expression.

Most of the actions taken against the war were not acts of civil disobedience. They were not illegal, but extra-legal—outside the regular procedures of government: rallies, petitions, picketing, and lobbying. A national network of educational activities spontaneously grew: alternative newspapers, campus teach-ins, church gatherings, and community meetings.

When the supposed clash between U.S. naval vessels and North Vietnamese patrol boats took place in the Gulf of Tonkin during the summer of 1964, I was teaching in a Freedom School in Jackson, Mississippi. In August, the bodies of three missing civil rights workers, shot to death, were found near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and many of us working in the movement drove up to attend a memorial meeting held outdoors not far from where they had been killed.

At the meeting, one of the organizers of the Mississippi movement, Bob Moses, stood up to speak. He held aloft the morning newspaper from Jackson. The headline was "LBJ Says Shoot to Kill in Gulf of Tonkin." Moses spoke with a quiet bitterness (this is a rough recollection of his words): "The president wants to send soldiers to kill people on the other side of the world, people we know nothing about, while here in Mississippi he refuses to send anyone to protect black people against murderous violence."

That fall, as the U.S. involvement in Vietnam began to grow, I was starting to teach at Boston University and became immediately involved in the movement against the war. It was at first a puny movement, which seemed to have no hope of prevailing against the enormous power of the government. But as the war in Vietnam became more vicious and as it became clear that noncombatants were being killed in large numbers; that the Saigon government was corrupt, unpopular, and under the control of our own government; and that the American public was being told lies about the war by our highest officials, the movement grew with amazing speed.

In the spring of 1965,I and some others spoke against the war on the Boston Common to perhaps a hundred people. In October 1969 when antiwar meetings took place in hundreds of towns and cities around the country, there was another rally on the Boston Common, and 100,000 people were there. As the American involvement escalated—to 500,000 troops, to millions of tons of bombs dropped—the antiwar movement also escalated.

Young black civil rights workers connected with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were among the first to resist the war. In mid-1965 in McComb, Mississippi, young blacks who had just learned that a classmate of theirs was killed in Vietnam distributed a leaflet:

No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Viet Nam for the White man's freedom, until all the Negro people are free in Mississippi.

Negro boys should not honor the draft here in Mississippi. Mothers should encourage their sons not to go.

In the summer of 1966, six young black men, members of SNCC, invaded an induction center to protest the war. They were arrested and sentenced to prison. Julian Bond, another SNCC member, who had just been elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, spoke out against the war and the draft, and the House voted that he not be seated. (The Supreme Court later restored his seat, saying his First Amendment right to free speech had been violated.)

Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke out publicly against the war, ignoring the advice of some other civil rights leaders, who feared that criticism might weaken Johnson's program of domestic reform. King refused to be silenced:

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

Young men began to refuse to register for the draft or to refuse induction if called. Students signed petitions headed We Won't Go. Over a half million men, resisted the draft. About 200,000 were prosecuted, 3,000 became fugitives. There were too many cases to pursue and most were dropped. Finally, 8,750 men were convicted of draft evasion.

A student of mine, Philip Supina, wrote to his draft board in Tucson, Arizona, on May 1, 1968: "I am enclosing the order for me to report for my pre-induction physical exam for the armed forces. I have absolutely no intention to report for that exam, or for induction, or to aid in any way the American war effort against the people of Vietnam." He was sentenced to four years in prison.

In previous wars, there had been opposition within the armed forces, but the Vietnam War produced open protests and silent desertions on a scale never seen before. As early as June 1965, West Point graduate Richard Steinke refused to board an aircraft taking him to a remote Vietnamese village. He said, "The Vietnamese war is not worth a single American life."

There were many individual acts of disobedience. A black private in Oakland refused to board a troop plane to Vietnam. A navy nurse was court-martialed for marching in a peace demonstration while in uniform and for dropping antiwar leaflets from a plane onto navy installations. In Norfolk, Virginia, a sailor refused to train fighter pilots because he thought the war was immoral. An army lieutenant was arrested in Washington, D.C., in early 1968 for picketing the White House with a sign that said "120,000 American casualties—Why?" Two black marines were given prison sentences of six and ten years, respectively, for talking to other black marines against the war.