Read-in' on Vietnam
Stu,--Eyre and Spottiswoode's first Read-in Viet- nam seems to have made its point. The Daily Worker criticises it for containing too much pro- American material, Quoodle in the Spectator (Octo- ber 8) complains that it contains too little. Both seem to have turned only to the case with which they disagree, or perhaps only to the index of sources?).
Certainly there are 'copious quotations from Critics of US policy' but there are, too, copious quotations from its defenders. Did Quoodle not read this defence, the ten pages devoted to the two cele- brated US white papers, the speeches of President Johnson, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk and Am- bassador Lodge; or the authoritative writing of the professors of the official Michigan State University Group which was in Vietnam from 1954-61?
Did he not read the passages from the leading American academic experts on Vietnam who de- fended Johnson's policy in the American Teach-ins, or the equally sympathetic Europeans. Gerard Ton- gas, the Daily Telegraph's Denis Warner (five ex- tracts) and former Foreign Office official Donald Lancaster (five extracts)?
All these go unmentioned by Quoodle. Instead he takes as a criterion for bias the non-inclusion of Messrs. Honey and Crozier. If this criterion is just then we arc indeed guilty, but their works, hard though we tried, yielded nothing which added significantly to the extracts mentioned above. The aim of the Read-in was to present both sides not argued by all those who have ever argued, but by those who present the arguments and facts most lucidly and with most authority.
As for John Gittings, the extract by him on China (and he is Chatham House's Chinese authority) was followed immediately by a passage giving an alterna- tive point of view by a well-known pro-American, uuY Wint.
• Quoodle talks of bias. If the cap fits let him wear It. For it is precisely the kind of misrepresentation contained in his comments which has made the events of the Vietnam war so difficult to follow.
RODIN MURRAY
153 Portland Road, WI/
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