 50th anniversary of the April 4th speech of 1967 by Martin Luther King this year. And I'm tempted to say that it's still going on, the same kind of protest, exactly as then is needed for the same reasons. I want to recommend to you, look up, I'm going to urge you to Google a few things because I only have a few minutes here. I would have loved to hear more of Adam on those pictures and so forth, but I don't have too much time. I want to refer you to Google and Wikipedia and whatnot. By the way, I just wanted to look up the birthday of Martin Luther King. He's two years older than I am. He'd be 88 now. And do we need him now? We don't have a Martin Luther King and he's never been more needed, but he wouldn't have to change that speech very much. As a matter of fact, right now, I was about to say another one to look up on your Google is Tavis Smiley's two-part series first appeared in 2010 and then repeated in 2013. You can see transcripts of it and also watch it. An amazing thing on this speech. And he mentions in the course of many interviews, which I was looking at today, which I urge you to look at, Tavis Smiley on the 1967 speech. And he says, substitute for the word Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. He mentions a number of others. Well, actually, for a reason I'm about to give, you can't do that throughout the speech exactly. But the main points of it, absolutely. The reason you can't do it throughout the speech is that he has a remarkable presentation in that speech for April 1967 of how we had gotten into the war and how long we'd been fighting it, supporting the French from the very beginning in their violent attempt to reconquer a colony that had declared its independence in 1945. Now, if I know where I was in April 1967, there's a lot of people here I can see who remember 1967. I can remember days and months of that year better than I can remember last week, actually, at 86 or last month. But probably April doesn't stand out for you particularly. I know I had hepatitis in Saigon at that point, got it first in Bangkok on leave. And I was actually, you know, I won't go into the history. It's extremely interesting to think what I was thinking and what I was doing in April of 1967. But that was two years after I'd been in Vietnam. I was for getting out. I knew by that time how, as the war is now called by most people, not all unwinnable, that we were in a stalemate, that we were killing people to no end, and that we should stop doing that. But what I did not know was the history that he presents in that speech. Now, when I read it many years later, I would say, I don't think I saw it for a long time. When I read it, I was, by that time, astonished to read it for two reasons. First of all, I knew how accurate it was, remarkably accurate, because I had read all of that in the top secret volume of the Pentagon Papers, which I didn't bother to read until 1969, because it dealt with a period that I thought was a French war, and I had little less to learn from that than the later periods, and actually was reading that history that transformed my own relation to the war, which was already like that of many people, for our getting out. But the transformation took this form. When I read the history that is in King's speech, if you read it, and I'm sure all of you have read it at some point, but it bears rereading and rereading and bringing it up to date as you reread it. Jackie was just telling me they read it aloud every year in Oakland. I've read it many times, but I still see many new things in it through the lens of the present, which is so much like the past. But what I read when I finally got around to reading that first volume, which I had to believe, because it was the Pentagon Papers, it was sufficiently good enough, and it was a top secret government document. It was confirming everything that I would have found very hard to understand or believe in as late as 1967, let alone 1965 when I went to Vietnam. I've often said, I don't think I ever knew a colleague in the government who could have passed a first midterm exam in a freshman course on Vietnam history. They simply ignorant of it, and I remained ignorant of it in Vietnam, essentially. But the essence was, as King brings out so clearly, that our war had been from the beginning, an American war which did not start in 1965 or 1961 or 1956. It started in 45 and 46 in support of a French counter-revolutionary, counter-independence struggle, and as he makes very clear, we were on the side of fighting the independence of Vietnam, and we were fighting it with the help of Vietnamese who were used to fighting, working for foreigners on a foreign with foreign uniforms and foreign money in their pockets and whatnot, because they had fought for the French, and many of them earlier had been under the Japanese and whatnot. I don't know if you go back to the Chinese because a little ways, just as by the way, just from that knowledge, I have very little doubt that the Afghans that we are fighting on our side now, the officers in particular, speak English. But I'll bet they also speak Russian. I'll bet they're bilingual. I would bet, I absolutely do not know this, but I would bet strongly that the Afghans who appeal to us are the people who are used to working for foreigners and work very well with them and learn their language. How many Afghans speak English, by the way? By the way, I'm not going to ask you, even this audience, what are the two main languages of Afghanistan? How many people here think you know what are the two main, just let me see hands. I see three, four, five, six hands. Just two, let's just pick one. What are the two main languages? Dari and Pashtun. Very good, Dari and Pashtun. What impresses me though, try that one on your friends, little piece of trivia, because we've been fighting now for, what is it, 16 years, is that right? In a country where unlike Vietnam where we didn't speak the language, but we knew what language we didn't speak, we're in a country now where very few Americans could identify either one of the two languages, Dari and Pashtun, he just said, that we don't know. We don't know what phrase book to get for, but we're trying to decide who governs them, who shall live, who shall die in that country. And that was what Martin Luther King was saying here. We were the foreigners who should get out, as he said in 1967. I couldn't have identified at that time a single American protester who was, let's say, above the age of 25 or something, or who was not like my friend Abby Hoffman or some other, essentially marginalized, radical, yippy type, who was calling for getting out in 1967. And that's what King was doing, which he knew would cost him heavily with the media, but he didn't foresee just how heavily, as you'll see from the Tavis Smiley account. And how are we doing on time? I know I'm going over here. How much time? It's okay. He knew he'd have trouble and almost not one person, with one exception, James Bevel, who was working both in the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, very strange combination, I mean, unusual combination, which Martin Luther King aspired to make common, but failed on the whole, as he would say. And with the exception of Bevel, virtually all of his aides who were as conscientious as he was, and I'm sure as anti-war as he was, said, don't make this speech, because they foresaw what went beyond even what they foresaw, what he foresaw. 168 major papers, I wouldn't have said there were 168 major papers, but in 1967 there used to be, 168 denounced him, that he was speaking communist propaganda. And indeed, it would have sounded like the Hanoi version of the thing if you read it today. And it happened to be right. Were communist leaders liars for sure? Did they keep secrets for sure? Propagandists? Absolutely. They happened to be right, what they were saying about what was happening in their country and what the history of it was, which we didn't know. So he was denounced. It did cost the civil rights movement because it cost him a lot of prestige. The Post and the Times were both saying afterwards, you're finished, slight peripheries, but you'll quickly see that's not much. He said, you've lost your credibility. This is the voice of Hanoi. You're a communist propagandist and so forth. Incidentally, the main thing, the main person that the FBI and even RFK had to go along with this in 1963, that they were worried about as an advisor, big advisor to King was Stanley Levison, who had been a Communist Party member and as they knew had left the party, but the FBI didn't believe that. So he was the one they were mainly focusing on. You have to wiretap this guy, and Bobby Kennedy signed a temporary order, which didn't turn out to be temporary, for wiretapping because of Stanley Levison. Stanley Levison advised against giving this speech. I'm sure if he knew the history, agreed with it. The speech, when I read it, finally, after reading the Pentagon Papers, I said Martin Luther King didn't know this history. Where did this come from? Almost no American that I knew did. Well, it was a historian named Vincent Harding that he turned over the speech to after, and I just learned this from Wikipedia. First, it was written, the first draft, he was determined to give it, though everybody wanted him not to, because he would lose so much support in the midst of a war, and 1967 was the midst of a war in terms of support. It was before the Tet Offensive, it was after a big buildup. We had, I forget exact number, I guess, let me see. I think we probably had about 400,000 troops there. It was to go up to 550 the next year. But about 400,000 troops who were in the midst of it, the war had popular support. I was coming back with a very heretical doctrine saying, stalemate, that word was taboo, and I don't mean by a unwritten norm, by a written norm in the government. It came down from LBJ, stalemate will not be used by anybody, even to denounce it, just don't say it, even if you're condemning somebody else for saying it. I was saying stalemate, stalemate, and it's gonna stay a stalemate, and so forth. Okay, so he's saying, get out, I repeat. I know if no one, I think Howard Zinn, probably Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn wrote a book, a small book pamphlet, that year on how the president should and could denounce a departure from Vietnam. But you know, Howard, Martin Luther King was not Howard Zinn. There was nobody like King or anybody who was saying that. Out, get out. Let the NLF participate in the government. They are supported by a substantial number of people and they must be part of the government, not excluded as they were from elections that year. In 67, there was an election that ended up with Nguyen Van Thu. I came back, okay, I'll just give one bit of history, I came back from Vietnam with the chance to speak to insiders and I was an FSR1, I had written for speeches for McNamara, I said to McNamara, in these coming elections, do not back key, do not back to you, back a huge number of Vietnamese who will be willing to negotiate with the NLF and to accept, have them accept a party. That's the key to this war. And McNamara will tell you, said to me, I agree with you. But that's Dean Rusk's business, these elections. I can't get involved in the Defense Department. He was trying to, and I said, he said, I have other things I'm trying to do. And I said, you're trying to keep a lid on the bombing in North Vietnam? He said, yes, absolutely. Another part of the story, but what the position he was taking then about no increase in bombing led the Joint Chiefs of Staff to spend a night without sleep as they debated whether or not to resign en masse in August of 1967. And I'll say one other bit of very inside history. When I first thought, did this actually speak, did this act accomplish anything? It hurt the civil rights movement because it hurt its leaders, his credibility considerably. Did it do anything for the war? Budget went on, troops kept going over, the bombing continued, the Tet offensive was later, et cetera. Just as, by the way, a year after the Pentagon Papers in 71, the heaviest bombing of the war occurred in 72. So like that I would have said, well, it accomplished nothing. Martin Luther King's speech accomplished anything. I'll tell you a very inside piece of information here, which I need to check out further. I know that Westmoreland in West, in April, same month as the speech, was asking for 206,000 more troops in addition to the 500,000 that were scheduled. The same number that he later asked for again after the Tet offensive and was turned back at that point. This was the first time that LBJ turned down Westmoreland's request for more troops, even secretly, but alone privately. He always lobald what had been asked for. But he said, I am giving Westmoreland all he asked for in May. Lie. Westmoreland had asked for 206,000. He gave him 40,000, with the intention of building up enough to invade North Vietnam. Minutes ago, I was just, I'm a little behind on finishing this speech, I read the words, which would not have leaped out at me before. There are even rumors now of an invasion, a land invasion of North Vietnam. Now, I was in Vietnam. I didn't hear anything like that in Vietnam. I don't know if there's a person in the country, except somebody, he must have read some news story on it or something. That was absolutely right. Westmoreland was in fact looking ahead to the invasion of North Vietnam with those extra 100,000, 200,000 troops. I'm going to ask the person who was, what happened in front of me, who was deeply involved in the decision making at that time and was writing drafts for McNamara to get us out at that point, which led to McNamara being fired in the fall. I will bet that in fact, whether Moret knows it or not, that the focus that Martin Luther King was putting on this, not only on April 4th, but on two weeks later on his speech, in the possibility of running for president, which continued for months now, as a result of that speech, he was being asked to run for president, and that would have been number one, two, and three in Lyndon Johnson's mind about Martin Luther King and he could not let that happen. He could not let that happen. I would say that Martin Luther King's chance of, if he had pursued that, and he finally gave it up because he wanted to speak as an outsider, a prophet, instead of running for president, if he had run for president, he wouldn't have had more chance of getting through that election on his feet than George Wallace did in 1972. And not possible. The idea was he would run with Spock as the vice president. Okay, he may have kept those 200,000 troops with that, otherwise apparently useless speech. But finally, the point he's making is, he said it's not just Vietnam, remarkably. In fact, I was just reading it. He said, we have special forces right now in Peru. And I'm reading it and I said, really? That's to me, 67. How did he know that? And he says Guatemala. Then he says Venezuela. We're in Venezuela. Now I have to tell you, I still haven't learned those particular little episodes. I will conclude with this thought about the history that he presented. When I, first of all, when I read that history, which I might or might not have believed in 67, because I hadn't read the Pentagon Papers yet, it would have sent me to read that earlier than I did, two years earlier. I said, gee, could that be true? What he's saying here? It would have had a bigger checkpoint. I finally did read it. I said to myself, this was not what Carter called it and Reagan called it, a noble cause that was mishandled and went bad and overdone and so forth. There's nothing noble about this cause. Reinstalling French colonial government in Indochina was wrong from the start for Americans. Not clearly illegal by the UN, by the way, which makes quite a bit of tolerance for colonial administration and even reconquering lands. But that didn't make it legitimate for Americans. That meant that the Vietnamese we were killing from the beginning with our weapons, with our money, with our napalm, and eventually directly were murdered. They were being killed without a justifiable cause of any kind. It was unjustified homicide. And to me as a non-lawyer, that's murder, even if it is warfare and so forth. Lawyers can argue about that. But I said, no, what I'm part of here is not just an error and as Martin Luther King showed, which I didn't know till later, it was not an aberration. That's the worst of it, as he put it. Counter-revolution is the name of our policy. Counter-independence and nationalism in the third world, even democracy, is against us. We're against that. That's us. That's who we were. And that's who we are. And he said in this speech, he quoted Langston Hughes and he said, America was never America to me, said Langston Hughes, but I take this oath. America will be. And I read that, I've read that before. In fact, I recently quoted it in the draft that I'm writing right now. I said, will be, but that's the kind of faith that I actually lack. You know, this will happen by this time, 50 years later. But Martin Luther King said, for those of us who are determined that it will be that, here is what we have to do. And that's what I say. America is not America as a counter-revolutionary, counter-independence in practice, in behavior, just as we were a slave nation, yes. But that can change, and it must change, and I am determined that America will be what it said in the Declaration of Independence and it doesn't only apply to men, and it doesn't only apply to white men, et cetera. You know, that can change. And evolve. And when King talked about the need for a revolution in our values and our institutions, yes. The need is there for exactly the same reasons. We're with exactly the same thing right now that we were doing then. It hasn't changed, in fact, but it must change. Thank you.