American Legion mobilized.
Huge, very costly advertisements were
placed in the papers. Spot announcements
came over radio and television. Stores
carried notices in their windows.
Some of the unions whose records
include very active cooperation with gov-
ernment witch-hunters in "cleaning out
the reds" in their own ranks, put strong
pressure on their members to make sure
they were seen in the ranks of the pa-
raders.
And once again, General Westmore-
land threw his weight into the scales, this
time with a stirring message from Saigon
on the eve of the operation.
With all this preparation, which
obviously involved some very large sums
of money, Johnson's lieutenants were able
to report a reasonable facsimile of pop-
ular support for his war in Vietnan.
The total number of misguided pa-
triots and professional paytrioteers was
around 50,000. This figure was stretched to a generous 70,000 by the New York Times.
Its report on the parade played up all the devices utilized by the sponsors to make the show look colorful -- the majorettes, uniforms, bands and flags. But it was obvious from its handling of the affair that the Times considered the demonstration to have little political weight.
This also seems to have been the estimate of both the Democratic and Republican professionals in New York.
New York's Mayor Lindsay, for instance, who has carefully refrained from any flag-waving in connection with the war in Vietnam, was conspicuously absent.
The truth is that the April 15 demonstration registered the real sentiments of the American people. They are wholly against the war. They want out, and the sooner the better.
Up to now, Johnson has obstinately sought to give the impression that it is quite useless to stage antiwar demonstrations. He will pay no attention to them.
His spokesmen have repeatedly’ said that antiwar demonstrations can only "prolong" the war. They claim that demonstrations merely encourage Hanoi; and, since Johnson will pay no heed to the wishes of the American people, that means prolonging the war.
They overlook an item. By his abuse of power, or exercise of powers that are not legally his under the U.S. constitution, Johnson can prolong the war. There is no doubt about it. But he will end up by considerably shortening the perspectives for the Democratic party remaining in power; in fact he can end up shortening the entire span of time which the twoparty system might still have before exhausting its possibilities.
Time is running out on Johnson. The April 15 antiwar demonstration and the April 29 and May 13 prowar demonstrations testify to this -- each in their own way.
FRENCH WORKERS ANSWER DE GAULLE WITH 24—-HOUR GENERAL STRIKE
By Pierre Frank
[The nationwide, 24-hour general strike in France May 17, appears to have been a very solid demonstration of the power that rests in the hands of the working class. The country's industries, offices, transport system and schools were completely paralyzed.
{A significant indication of the mood of the working class was a parade in Paris in which 150,000 demonstrators participated. They carried banners and placards opposing special powers deman-— ded by the de Gaulle regime and warning the government not to tamper with social security and other social benefits.
{The article below, written some days before the strike, indicates the political meaning of this new turn in the class struggle in France.]
* * x Paris
A 24-hour general strike has been scheduled in France for Wednesday May 17. To a certain degree people have become accustomed to work stoppages in France; but this time the demonstration is of exceptional amplitude and importance.
In practice all the unions have joined in it -- the Confédération Générale du Travail, Force Ouvriére, the Confédération Frangaise et Démocratique du Travail, and the Fédération de 1'Education Nationale. The Union Nationale des Etudiants de France joined in the action.
The exceptions: the Confédération Générale des Cadres, where the negative decision was carried by a single vote at the top level; and the Confédération Frangaise des Travailleurs Chrétiens, the rump organization which split away when the Christian unions decided to eliminate
reference to religious denomination and which has no support other than that accorded by the de Gaulle regime.
It is already certain that this strike will receive a much greater response than any of the preceding strikes. The mood in the plants leaves no doubt that the private and public sectors and the civil servants are all involved.
But the number supporting the action must be considered in conjunction with the fact that it is to the highest degree a political strike -- not only because a work stoppage of such size has political significance in any case but because of the reasons for the general downing of tools and the objectives.
The general elections were held
only two months ago. Parliament has just opened and begun to organize its commit~ tees. The administration has submitted a bill which it intends to railroad through on the basis of its hairline majority.
Under the proposed measure, parliament would give up its constitutional powers for six months in essential problems, authorizing the administration to legislate during this period by means of ordinances issued by the cabinet minis~ ters.
It was against this procedure, against this proposed law, that all the unions decided to call a general strike for May 17.
Thus it is no longer a case, as it so often was, of a strike for an increase in wages or other economic demands directed against the bosses or against the government due to the fact that it is also a very big boss. Nor is it a case of a general work stoppage of short duration such as took place during the Algerian war and which in fact supported the Gaullist regime against the partisans of "French Algeria." The May 17 strike is a strike against the government and even something more.
The procedure which the regime is seeking to have approved, that of full power to legislate by ordinances, does not have the excuse of an emergency situation despite the regime's declarations. It is a symptom of the incapacity of a regime of Bonapartist nature to function with a parliament in which it does not have a crushing and unconditional majority, as was the case in the preceding session of the National Assembly. We will return to this question after the strike when we assess its outcome. For the mo~ ment we will only point out that in suddenly exposing themselves by demanding passage of this measure, the Gaullist regime brought into focus for everyone to see a whole series of contradictions in French society, and showed -- of course not in the way it was done in Greece with a military coup d'état, but in a very specific way under present conditions in France -- the whole illusory and falla~ cious character of the parliamentary road, so dear to the old-line reformists and the most recent to join them, the leaders of the Communist parties.
They woke up on the morning of March 13 with a big parliamentary success. The Gaullist regime had only a slim majority in the National Assembly; and even within the Gaullist majority a faction had appeared, organized along independent lines (headed by the big bourgeois Giscard d'Estaing, former minister of finance), which openly proclaimed its desire to exert pressure "from within" on the regime. For parliament to be canceled out all that is required is that this faction bow to the government offensive in behalf of the projected law.
Since the social security structure is among the targets aimed at by the proposed law (although no one knows at all what the content of the ordinances will be), the "resistance" (in quotation marks) had to be immediately taken outside parliament. The unions most directly concerned with this point found themselves obliged to reply. After the electoral victory of the opposition and particularly in the climate of working-class discontent which became manifest in the preceding weeks through long, stubborn strikes, the unions decided on the May 17 strike.
In itself this reply was correct. But it was a reply decided on by leaderships that have not given up their reformist concepts by one iota, and that is where an error begins.
For these leaderships, the strike is a matter of meeting the pressure of the regime on the National Assembly by counterpressure from the unions (the day selected, May 17, is the day debate opens on the projected law) -- as if the Assenbly were a shaft that turned according to the intensity of pressures and counterpressures.
As a reply, May 17 must become the point of departure for a broader and broader struggle against the regime. The question that must be posed within the workers organizations and the vanguard militants is, "What do we do after May 17?"
Obviously a correct answer cannot be expected from the present leaderships. But this strike and its success can create more favorable conditions for the vanguard to act.
May 11, 1967
"LABOR LIEUTENANTS" OF THE CIA
By Les Evans
A former top official of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency created a furor in the world press May 7 by exposing ties between his counterrevolutionary outfit and top functionaries of the American labor movement. Close connections between the imperialist spy network and the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations [AFL-CIOy have long been suspected in radical circles but this confirmation by one of the architects of the cold-war marriage was a deadly blow to the bureaucratic misleaders of the U.S. labor federation.
The revelations were made by Thomas W. Braden, former assistant to CIA chief Allen Dulles, and director of the CIA's Division of International Organization from 1951 to 1954.
Writing in the Saturday Evening Post of May 20 (postdated), Braden, now editor of a California newspaper, made an impassioned defense of the network of secret subsidies and subversion he helped organize in the early tifties. In order to prove he was not alone in wanting to "help his country" he implicated his accomplices, many of them top labor bureaucrats.
AFI-CIO President George Meany's chief foreign policy adviser, Jay Lovestone; his assistant Irving Brown; and both Walter and Victor Reuther who head the 1,500,000-member United Automobile Workers union were all named.
Lovestone, once a leader of the American Communist party, has prostituted his knowledge of the left and labor movements in different countries for many years. Braden crossed his trail in 1947 when the Confédération Générale du Travail led a strike in Paris "which came very near to paralyzing the French economy "Into this crisis stepped Lovestone and his assistant, Irving Brown... they organized Force Ouvriére, a non- Communist union. When they ran out of money, they appealed to the CIA. Thus began the secret subsidy of free trade unions which soon spread to Italy. Without that subsidy, postwar history might have gone very differently."
This was at a time when Europe was emerging devasted from the war, when union leaders lacked the barest essentials to begin to reorganize. The funds for printing, salaries, offices -- this was an immense advantage to the handpicked anti-Communist union "leaders" selected for Lovestone's and the CIA's gratuities.
Lovestone was responsible for the disbursement of secret subsidies of "nearly two million dollars annually."
Irving Brown was given money by the CIA to break dock workers strikes in Marseilles and other ports directed against the unloading of American armaments after the war. Braden testifies that he personally gave Brown $15,000 under a "cover" name for this operation: "He needed it to pay off his strong-arm squads in Mediterranean ports, so that American supplies could be unloaded against the opposition of Communist dock workers."
Even the Reuther brothers came in for a drubbing. The Reuthers have been piously denouncing the AFL bureaucrats for accepting money from the CIA. Braden chides them for their modesty in not re~ vealing their own role in the same game:
"Victor Reuther ought to be ashamed of himself. At his request, I went to Detroit one morning and gave Walter $50,000 in $50 bills. Victor spent the money, mostly in West Germany, to bolster labor unions there.
The ex-CIA official also revealed that CIA agents played a big role in founding and operating the Europe-based Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the British literary magazine, Encounter.
Both the Congress of Cultural Freedom and Encounter have admitted accepting the CIA subsidy.
As might be expected, the response of U.S. labor officialdom to the disclosures has been somewhat less candid. The early American socialist Daniel De Leon called the trade-union bureaucrats the "labor lieutenants" of capital. They are not about to admit to being stooges for American imperialism and literally CIA agents -- if they can avoid it.
Victor Reuther, interviewed by the New York Times in Tokyo, May 7, denied the charges, calling them "incredible" and "ridiculous."
At the same time his brother Walter in Detroit was admitting that he received the $50,000 as Braden revealed.
On May 10 Victor Reuther changed his story and acknowledged that he and his brother had accepted the money and spent it to promote anti-Communist union activ-
ity in Europe. He defended himself by adding that Braden had also tried to recruit him as a full-time agent for the CIA. He refused saying that would be "improper."
AFL-CIO President George Meany denied that he or Jay Lovestone had ever received money from the CIA, calling the charge "a damn lie."
"As far as I know," Meany professed, "the A.F.L. during my term as secretary-treasurer and president, and the A.F.L.-C.1.0., during my term as president, has never received any C.I.A. money for any activity -- either directly or indirectly -- and that goes no matter what Mr. Braden might have said.
"Not one penny of C.I.A. money has ever come in to the A.F.L. or the A.F.L.- C.1.0. to my knowledge over the last 20 years, and I can say to you if it had come in I would know about it."
Meany abruptly terminated the news conference and walked out of the roon.
Newspaper columnist Drew Pearson last February raised the charge in his nationally syndicated column that the CIA had been pumping money into the AFL-CIO to influence foreign labor unions. At the time Meany accused Pearson of being a liar.
In the aftermath of Braden's revelations, Pearson commented drily on May 15: "The public can decide for itself, despite Meany's continued denials, who is the liar."
THE TESTIMONY OF DO VAN NGOC
[Continued from Page 529]
reached the bodies of all three of us, causing us very serious burns. Since we could no longer bear the heat, we jumped into a flooded rice field; then the flames were put out and the heat lessened, but when we emerged from the water, the flames broke out again on our bodies.
We asked for help. Then we were sent to a hospital for medical treatment. Then I felt a tremendous pain.
Now the burns are scarred, but I still have itching and burning sensations. On my right hand, the thumb is stuck to the other fingers; large scars remain on my stomach and my thighs.
That day the American bombs set fire to the homes of our family and our neighbours.
To my knowledge, apart from the three of us, Mr. Du's family, while having their meal, lost six of its eight members, burned by bombs.
NEW FACTS REVEALED ABOUT U.S. INVASION OF CUBA IN 1961
Brig. Gen. (Ret.) S.L.A. Marshall, a military affairs analyst, whose column is syndicated by the Times/Post Service, recently revealed fresh details about the CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba in 1962.
The information was given him, he says, by the late Luis Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua whom Gen. Marshall found to be a "warm, congenial man." Somoza asked Marshall to see him on February 2, 1962. The American military analyst reports Somoza's words as follows:
"I am as responsible for that disaster as is your President Kennedy. I mean I share the burden of guilt with hin. He made the main mistakes. My blunder is that I did not turn the whole thing off when I knew that we were going fatally wrong. I had the power. You see, I was coordinator from this end; the show was being staged from our soil. I am not a technician of war. But I know enough to see when technicians are either lacking or mistaken.
"During the time when we were building up to it, I took assurances from the wrong people -- your people -- CIA agents encharged to deal with me. I thought that on operational matters, they spoke for your Government. You had carriers off our coast, covering what we were doing. When I asked: 'Will they be prepared to support the invasion in an emergency?' I was told: 'Certainly.' And I believed it. I did not realize that this was not the White House speaking.
"I was in on the scheme from the beginning. There was need of a base from where we could stage the air strikes against Cuba in secret. You know Puerto Cabezas (population 500) on our east coast, having been there. That was the nerve center. I went to the people there 70 days before the show. I said: ‘Here is our chance to do something for democracy in America, but you will have to make
sacrifices.' They were willing. So for two months they were cut off from the world; no mail or freight moved in or out. No one could leave; security guards saw to that. One pregnant woman had to see a specialist in Managua. I sent him to her in my plane; that's how careful we were. We