Introduction

Traveling to Hanoi during the U.S. war in Vietnam was a long and dangerous undertaking. Cora Weiss—a Jewish middle-class housewife, a mother of three young children, and a peace activist—recalled that in 1969, when she embarked on her first journey to North Vietnam, “you couldn’t pick up your telephone and call the travel agent and say, ‘Book me to Hanoi.’ ”1 To arrive in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, she first departed New York City for Copenhagen, Denmark, then boarded another flight to Bangkok, Thailand, where she then waited for a third plane to take her to Hanoi. There were no guarantees of how long the delay would last. Only three flights per week were scheduled between Thailand and North Vietnam, and the planes were small: “We’re talking about nine, twelve, or eighteen seats.”2 So the travelers from the West, which included United Nations personnel as well as international diplomats, passed the time trying to adjust to the time, climate, and cultural differences between North America or Europe and Southeast Asia.

Those lucky enough to obtain a seat to Hanoi embarked on an even more perilous stage in their journey. Weiss described the planes as “tiny old pieces of equipment which took off by the grace of God.”3 The International Control Commission, a neutral body that observed the war, operated these flights. Consequently, “when the plane went in, it was a signal to the fighters on the ground [as well as those in the air] to stop their fire and create a corridor, a safe corridor.”4 Even so, the possibility of being shot down was very real. On the plane, Weiss thought of her “three little babies at home” and wondered whether she would see them again.5 Other travelers recalled landing in blackout conditions, without lights even for the runway.

After surviving the harrowing ride, there was still the risk of being injured or killed by American bombers. On another of her five trips to North Vietnam, Weiss and her fellow travelers immediately sought refuge in a shelter. These bomb shelters were located at the airport, throughout Hanoi, and in other parts of North Vietnam because of the likelihood and frequency of attacks. Over the course of the war, American pilots dropped more than three times the amount of bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs used during World War II. Weiss recalled:

There could be days when there were none; when there were no sirens and then there could be days when it lasted for, I don’t know, an hour. . . . I just remember jumping into a hole in the sidewalk and the water is up to your hips and there are undoubtedly lots of leeches in the water and then you pull a concrete manhole cover over your head and you suffer from claustrophobia. You don’t give a . . . about the bomb because you can’t . . . you can’t bear suffocating in this hole.6

This book tells the story of international journeys made by significant yet underrecognized historical figures. These men and women of varying ages, races, sexual identities, class backgrounds, and religious faiths held diverse political views. Nevertheless, they all believed that the U.S. war in Vietnam, one of the longest wars in American history and the first one that the country “lost,” was immoral and unjustified. In times of military conflict, heightened nationalism is the norm. Powerful institutions, like the government and the media, work together to promote a culture of hyperpatriotism. The subjects of my study questioned their expected obligations and instead imagined themselves as “internationalists,” as members of communities that transcended national boundaries. They felt compelled to travel to a land at war with their own country. And they believed that their personal journeys could change the political imaginaries of other members of the American citizenry and even alter U.S. policies in Southeast Asia.

Benedict Anderson famously proposed that the nation is an “imagined community.” It is imagined, because “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact . . . will never know most of their fellow-members . . . yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”7 The intensity of nationalist communion was particularly acute during the U.S. war in Vietnam. Most Americans could not even locate the Southeast Asian country on a map, and few had any personal connections to Vietnamese people and culture. It was a foreign, faraway land, populated by people whose Asianness marked them as racial inferiors.

Furthermore, the decision to fight a “hot” war in Vietnam occurred in the context of the Cold War. Following World War II, the United States and its allies engaged in a protracted series of military, political, economic, and ideological conflicts with the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and other socialist powers. The Cold War took place on the global stage, with each side seeking to develop alliances to contain its opponent. The United States regarded itself as a proponent of individualism, democracy, and capitalism. Its Cold War enemies, in contrast, represented godless totalitarianism. Perceiving Vietnamese opponents of the United States as part of an international communist conspiracy further intensified the divide that most Americans drew between deserving insiders and inhuman outsiders.

The travelers in this story were not all ready-made critics of their own government and society. Living in the midst of war, both hot and cold, these individuals evolved in their political beliefs and came to perceive themselves as members of international communities that collectively challenged American policies in Southeast Asia. This book posits that the physical journeys that these individuals made, the face-to-face contacts that they established with people outside of the United States, inspired their political imagination and expanded their sense of communion beyond the confines of the nation and its allies. Government-issued reports and the mainstream media encouraged racial, cultural, and political distance between most Americans and their Cold War enemies. Increasingly suspicious of these sources, skeptics of U.S. policies sought alternative information. Traveling abroad allowed American activists to engage in dialogue, to acknowledge the humanity of their country’s foes, and to witness the conditions of war. These journeys were often physically and psychologically arduous but almost always intellectually and emotionally transformative.

Furthermore, the fruits of these encounters were circulated within activist circles and mainstream society. Travelers shared their experiences through articles, books, reports, letters, interviews, speeches, short stories, poetry, photographs, film, and artwork. Travelers’ reflections appeared in the mainstream media and the underground press. The latter publications, many of them fly-by-night, were created, produced, and disseminated by activists. These newspapers and journals included local, regional, national, and international news. In fact, an “underground press syndicate” was formed to facilitate the circulation of knowledge among these publications, which were based in the United States and abroad.8 Consequently, activist newspapers tended to print and reprint similar reports, essays, images, fiction, and poetry. Through repetition, the underground media fostered a common political language and a sense of simultaneity for their readers. Cumulatively, the accounts of activist travelers fostered a global public sphere of civic debate about the morality of the U.S. war in Vietnam. They encouraged their readers to regard themselves as members of a shared international community who owed humanitarian responsibility to one another.

In forming an internationalist consciousness, American activists both challenged and reinscribed Western perceptions of Asia. The political travelers who journeyed abroad earnestly wanted to learn and expose the “truth” about the U.S. war in Vietnam. At the same time, their perceptions of Asian people and places were refracted through idealized projections of the decolonizing Third World. I propose the concept of radical orientalism to capture how some American activists romanticized and identified with revolutionary Asian nations and political figures.

Cultural theorist Edward Said conceptualized orientalism as a system of knowledge that the West developed about the East.9 This way of seeing and understanding the “Orient” emerged as Occidental imperial powers engaged in colonization. Within this framework, the East historically serves as a contrasting and not coincidentally inferior image to the West. While the Occident is associated with modernity, science, and masculinity, the Orient is perceived as tradition-bound, fanatical, and feminine. This polarization not only constructed an image of the East in the Western imagination but also served to define the West. The Occident became the opposite of the Orient.

American Studies scholar Christina Klein has revised Said’s thesis in her study of a specifically American form of orientalism during the early Cold War era.10 She argues that during this time period, middlebrow culture in the United States, examples of which include Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals or the Reader’s Digest, actually emphasized the similarities between the East and the West. This tendency to minimize duality was part of a broader geopolitical project. The United States became the foremost economic, political, and military power following World War II. However, the country sought to distance itself from European imperialism. Instead, Americans claimed their mission as one of democratizing and saving the world from communist tyranny. To enlist domestic support in this global project and to encourage mainstream Americans to feel a sense of connection with Asian countries and peoples as potential Cold War allies of the United States, the mass media emphasized bridging East-West divides. This sense of commonality, however, did not imply an absence of hierarchy. With greater access to material resources and technology, as well as a claim to democratic exceptionalism, Americans presumed the responsibility of saving worthwhile Asian charges. The imperialist intent persisted but was masked by benevolence. Furthermore, even as some Asian people and lands became objects of rescue and uplift through modernization policies, Asian countries became the site of both covert and overt warfare. As Jodi Kim and others point out, in the midst of such destructive conflict, it was difficult for most Americans to distinguish between their Asian friends and their Asian foes.11

The activists who questioned the United States’ global policies wanted to name American imperialism. These critics distanced themselves from what they perceived as the militaristic, materialistic, and racist values of mainstream society. Instead, they wanted to identify with Asian people and societies resisting colonialism (or formal control by another country) and neocolonialism (or indirect control). Consequently, these individuals ironically followed an orientalist tradition of perceiving a dichotomy between the East and the West, specifically between decolonizing Asia and imperial America. The radicalness of their orientalism stemmed from how they inverted and subverted previous hierarchies: American travelers idealized the East and denigrated the West. They turned to Asian countries and peoples for political, personal, and, at times, religious inspiration. Radical critics therefore replicated an orientalist logic that cultural theorist Edward Said identified, whereby the decolonizing East helped to define the identities and goals of activists in the West.

In addition to the hierarchical inversion, radical orientalism differed from dominant forms of orientalism in that Asian individuals actively shaped Western understandings of Asia. In Said’s critique of Occidental representations of the Orient, the East is inert and silent; instead, the West speaks for the East. The perceptions of Western antiwar travelers, however, were not just projected onto Asia. Asian individuals and political organizations cultivated connections with U.S. activists of diverse backgrounds and interpreted decolonizing Asia for these visitors. In other words, the East and the West worked together to foster a radical orientalist sensibility. These idealized portrayals of decolonizing Asia were not necessarily accurate or complete depictions of these dynamic societies undergoing complex political, military, and social changes. However, by serving as a source for alternative values, revolutionary Asia assisted American activists in imagining new political possibilities.

In addition to foregrounding the relationship between travel and internationalism as well as introducing the concept of radical orientalism, I also explore how men and women of varying racial and ethnic backgrounds worked together and separately to critique American foreign policies in Asia. The U.S. antiwar movement against the Vietnam War is commonly understood as dominated by men, particularly white men. Historically, military service constituted a culturally authorized avenue for fulfilling masculine obligations of citizenship to the nation.12 Consequently, male antiwar protesters of varying racial backgrounds played a significant symbolic role in criticizing their own country by refusing to join or support the armed forces. However, rejecting the military did not necessarily mean renouncing masculine privilege. In fact, feminist scholars trace the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s in part as a reaction to the chauvinism of male antiwar activists.13 Even so, American women of diverse backgrounds did not abandon peace activism. They also traveled internationally and engaged in political dialogue, particularly with their female counterparts in decolonizing Asian countries. Together, these women attempted to create an international peace movement based on a global sense of sisterhood.

The belief that women everywhere might share similar experiences and hence might embrace common political goals is a powerful yet also heavily criticized idea. Female activists, particularly white, middle-to-upper-class women from the West, have historically used the call for international sisterhood to promote their own political engagement across social, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries.14 Examples include worldwide campaigns to abolish slavery, eliminate prostitution, and advocate for peace. Critics of the concept of global sisterhood have countered that it also represents a form of “women’s orientalism” and feminist colonialism.15 That is, elite Western women tended to conceive of marginalized women in their own societies as well as non-Western women as victims of patriarchy in need of rescue by their more enlightened sisters. This emphasis on the degradation of nonwhite, working-class, and non-Western women depicts these women’s communities and cultural practices as inherently and irredeemably backward. In contrast, middle-class and elite Western society becomes the source of gender enlightenment. This dichotomization leaves little room for the agency of marginalized women. The condemnation of allegedly less enlightened societies also does not account for Western collusion in global female oppression. In sum, critics of the “politics of rescue” approach charge that the call of international sisterhood masks cultural, class, and racial hierarchies in the name of female universalism.

During the U.S. war in Vietnam, the politics of rescue persisted to some degree. However, women of varying racial backgrounds from the West also exhibited a deep sense of admiration for their Asian “sisters.” Through travel and correspondence, they learned to regard Third World female liberation fighters as models of revolutionary womanhood. These idealized depictions exemplified a radical orientalist sensibility. The emphasis on Vietnamese female warriors countered classical orientalist depictions of exotic, sexualized, and victimized Asian women. Nevertheless, these radical portrayals served an orientalist purpose. The dichotomy between the revolutionary hope of the East and the entrenched sexism of the West helped American women of varying backgrounds to redefine their own identities and political goals.

This exploration of internationalism, orientalism, and feminism contributes to our understanding of social activism during the “long 1960s” in three ways. First, the political journeys of U.S. activists provide an opportunity to frame the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s in an international context. Scholars, most notably Mary Hershberger, have examined the journeys of peace activists to North Vietnam and other parts of the world.16 This book builds on her study in order to highlight the travels of U.S. protesters not only to Hanoi but also to South Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, Canada, and Europe. This global circulation of people and ideas shaped the American political imaginary during the era of the Cold War and decolonization.

Within this expanded geopolitical framework, I also examine the initiative of Asian representatives in establishing contacts with American activists. Asian opponents of the U.S. government cultivated relationships with members of the U.S. citizenry as part of their strategy to end the war. In Guerrilla Diplomacy, historian Robert K. Brigham analyzes the foreign relation efforts of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam as an overlooked yet integral component of their overall plans to win the war.17 Similarly, William J. Duiker argues that the international diplomacy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam contributed to the success of the North Vietnamese.18 My book elaborates on these insights by examining how Vietnamese individuals seriously engaged in political dialogue with nonstate actors from the United States. These Americans, for the most part, did not have the formal authority of government officials. However, they represented significant social, political, and/or religious organizations and movements, or they had the ability to mobilize these sectors of American civil society. In other words, Vietnamese antiwar activists regarded American travelers as “citizen diplomats” who had the potential to significantly shape the political discourse in the United States and the decisions of American policymakers.19

Second, I offer insight into how individuals of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds developed political partnerships with one another. My reexamination of the historical record challenges the predominant image of the antiwar cause as a “white” movement, and I go beyond the usual black-white paradigm for understanding American race relations. The decades of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s witnessed the emergence of a variety of racial liberation movements, including Asian American, Chicano/a, Latino/a, and indigenous peoples. In addition, the racial category of “white” encompassed a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds. The antiwar movement fostered multiracial and multiethnic coalitions between these groups and individuals.

Looking at the heterogeneity of the antiwar movement offers the opportunity to reinterpret the long 1960s. Early scholarship tends to celebrate the civil rights and the predominantly white student movements through the middle of the decade as the “good sixties.” These same works portray the end of the decade as the “bad sixties,” a period characterized by violence, fragmentation, and decline as racial, gender, and sexual separatist movements emerged.20 By utilizing a case study approach that focuses on previously understudied individuals, events, and political relationships, I highlight a broader range of historical actors who engaged in the antiwar movement. For the early period of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, I foreground African American and Vietnamese Buddhist advocates who shaped the broader American peace movement. These international, interracial, and interfaith partnerships provide an opportunity to consider the racial triangulation of black, white, and Asian political activism.21

For the latter part of the 1960s and early 1970s, I focus on the rise of identity-based liberation movements and illuminate how political fragmentation coexisted with fermentation. Recent studies by Max Elbaum, Daryl Maeda, Lorena Oropeza, Laura Pulido, and Cynthia Young point to the rich coalition-building efforts as a “Third World Left” emerged.22 This formation developed mainly among people of color in the United States who built alliances with one another and turned to socialist movements in the Third World for political role models. The process of forming coalitions across various boundaries was a difficult one. Nevertheless, the global Third World played a significant role in inspiring the political imagination of American activists who connected domestic aspirations for social justice with global critiques of imperialism.

Finally, in this book I contribute to the growing understanding of how gender shapes the conduct of war, the performance of international diplomacy, and engagement in political activism.23 As historian Joan Scott argues, “gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.”24 Gender, the socially constructed roles associated with biological sex, is almost always linked to differential access to political, economic, cultural, and social resources. Furthermore, conceptions of ideal versus deficient forms of manhood and womanhood, normative versus deviant sexuality, and recognized versus illegitimate forms of family mark certain people, desires, behaviors, and relationships as acceptable while designating others as outside the pale.

In order to understand how gender was significant for the political journeys of U.S. antiwar activists, I explore the ways in which men and women had differential access to travel and also experienced their trips differently. I examine how intimate interactions, including romantic and sexual encounters, affected relationships among American activists and with their Asian hosts. Moreover, concepts of gender served as powerful metaphors to understand the relationship between nations and between people from diverse backgrounds. Discussions concerning gender roles, sexuality, and family at times facilitated and at other times obstructed the imagining of international political communities. In other words, the personal and the intimate held global political significance.

To illuminate how travel shaped politics, how decolonizing Asia inspired activists in the West, and how men and women of varying backgrounds and convictions engaged in the antiwar movement, I tell the story of three different sets of journeys. Rather than providing a comprehensive overview, I utilize a case study approach to emphasize the experiential nature of political encounters and personal transformation. Each topic illuminates important yet largely overlooked historical actors and events, which in turn shed light on broader dynamics within the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the first three chapters I introduce Robert S. Browne. An African American economist who was stationed in Southeast Asia from 1955 to 1961 as a U.S. aid adviser, Browne subsequently became one of the earliest critics of American foreign policy in that region of the world. Despite his visibility in and important contributions to the early phase of the American peace movement, Browne has received little historical attention. Examining his life and activism sheds light on African American engagement in international affairs in the context of the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the era of global decolonization. Furthermore, Browne played a central role in facilitating political alliances among peace activists of varying generations, races, and religions. In particular, he emphasized the need to include and respect Vietnamese voices in U.S. policy debates. To do so, Browne utilized his personal life, particularly his Afro-Vietnamese family, to frame his political message. In addition, he partnered with Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh to advocate for a “third solution,” a peaceful resolution that would allow South Vietnam to make decisions independent of Washington, DC, and Hanoi. As an expression of their commitment to pacifism, Browne and Hanh made journeys for peace.

In the second three chapters I examine the U.S. People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation. Led by Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver, this eleven-person group toured North Korea, North Vietnam, and socialist China in the summer of 1970. The delegation had representatives from a cross-section of political movements that emerged by the end of the 1960s, including the black power, antiwar, women’s liberation, alternative media, and, very significantly, the Asian American movements. In contrast to Robert Browne, who advocated radical views but did so within the existing political system, members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation embraced the goal of revolution. Invested in anticolonial and socialist politics, they embarked on a journey for liberation.

In the final three chapters I analyze the Indochinese Women’s Conferences, which were held in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada, in the spring of 1971. Some Americans had previously traveled to Hanoi and other parts of the world to meet with Vietnamese revolutionaries. In fact, female activists were among the earliest travelers and played significant roles in organizing the peace movement. However, the conferences provided an unprecedented opportunity for large numbers of North American women to encounter female leaders from Southeast Asia. Conference participants came from diverse backgrounds and held different political beliefs and goals. Their collective gathering offers insight into the difficult yet empowering process of creating an international women’s peace movement. Together, they made journeys for global sisterhood.

These journeys for peace, liberation, and sisterhood facilitated inspirational and contentious dialogues. Traveling internationally fostered the expansion of political communion but also reinforced essentialist understandings of racial, national, and gender difference. There is a tension between radical orientalism, which posits a binary sense of opposition between the Orient and the Occident, and internationalism, which emphasizes the possibility of genuine dialogue and collective identification among people across various borders. However, I believe this tension was a productive and generative one that allowed American activists to develop a sense of social responsibility and mutuality with those from the East. Understanding these rich and complex relationships illuminates the difficult work of crossing borders and reimagining political possibilities.