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reality was that the treaty permitted underground tests, and Kennedy had begun underground testing in Nevada shortly after the treaty went into effect. At this juncture, the group announced a change in strategic focus: fighting fallout shelters and drop drills in schools.
Then came a banal-sounding sentence that turned out to be prescient: “A committee was set up to study the Viet Nam situation.” That was September 1963, when 16,000 US troops were in Vietnam and Kennedy had not yet been assassinated. It was more than a year and a half before the first national anti-war demonstration, called by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Washington in April 1965.
The Vietnam War transformed Women Strike for Peace, as was evident by the time of the organization’s second anniversary in November 1963. That month, the LA chapter joined a demonstration at the Ambassador Hotel against Madame Nhu, the notorious wife of the head of the Saigon government; the march had the slogan “Stop Organized Slaughter in South Viet Nam.” L.A. WSP also promoted a speech on Vietnam at the Music Box Theater by I. F. Stone, the radical journalist with the famous newsletter.30
In March 1965, 200 WSP members, wearing black dresses and veils and carrying yellow roses, marched to the Western Union office downtown, where they sent a wire to Lady Bird Johnson: “We have appealed to your husband, our president, but he has not listened.” They asked her to intercede with him to “have Vietnam taken from the field of battle to the conference table.” They also wired the first lady a bouquet of yellow roses, which they said signified “life which we feel is being trampled on in Vietnam.” A month later L.A. WSP sent a delegation to the SDS-sponsored March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam, while members at home joined a vigil sponsored by the SDS chapter at USC. (The first chapter in the state, it had been organized by the remarkable Margaret Thorpe, a graduating senior and the daughter of a railroad worker from Arcadia. Over the next year she would become a familiar face on Channel Nine, robustly debating future Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher, as well as other members of Young Americans for Freedom.)
That spring, as Johnson unleashed B-52s against North Vietnam’s cities (“Operation Rolling Thunder”), Clarke, together with Lorraine Gordon, a leader of New York City WSP and coproprietor of the famed Village Vanguard jazz club, became the first members of the American peace movement to visit Hanoi. They had traveled to Moscow in May for the twentieth-anniversary celebration of the end of the war in Europe and took the opportunity to meet delegates from the Women’s Union of North Vietnam and from the National Liberation Front (NLF) in the South. The Vietnamese women already knew of WSP through the sacrifice of Detroit member Alice Hertz, who had set fire to herself in March to protest the carpet-bombing of the North.31 They urged the LA women to come see for themselves the destruction being wrought by the US Air Force. The two left immediately, flying from Moscow to Hanoi via Beijing. Historian Jon Coburn later called the trip “one of the most significant acts undertaken by WSPers during its history … [and] Clarke and Gordon demonstrated unique daring and courage in their expedition.”32
In Hanoi, as Clarke recalled in a 1995 interview, they were “startled” by the massive program to build air raid shelters for the population, and deeply moved by meeting children in a Hanoi hospital who had been napalmed by American planes.33 Their visit was unofficial, indeed secret, but they discussed with their hosts the possibility of a formal meeting between American and Vietnamese women in the near future. Pham Van Dong, the North’s Prime Minister, responded that it was too dangerous to bring delegates to Hanoi, suggesting Jakarta as a more suitable site.
Plans for the Jakarta meeting were publicized by L.A. WSP with appropriate fanfare. The announcement posed the question, “Why will American women go thousands of miles to meet Vietnamese women face to face?” The answer: “They go to give and receive hope and courage.” Mary Clarke headed the ten-woman delegation, which included Nanci Hollander of SDS, arriving in July for five days of talks with their nine Vietnamese counterparts, who were led by Nguyen Thi Binh—the stunning NLF leader who later became its chief negotiator. In the three months since the initial visit to Hanoi, 40,000 or so additional American troops had landed in the South, while the death toll from the bombing of the North had soared. The Vietnamese women not only described their experiences, but also gave WSPers a primer on how Washington and Saigon had caused the new war by abandoning the national elections promised by the 1954 Geneva Accords. Both sides considered the meeting an overwhelming success and arranged to maintain contact with one another—a relationship that eventually produced the joint Committee of Liaison, which organized contacts between American prisoners of war and their families back home.
The unprecedented meeting received much international applause. Stopping over in Tokyo on the way out, they were praised by peace groups and mainstream media for their audacity, while in Jakarta President Sukarno told them that Indonesia was honored to be the venue for “such a historic meeting.” In London on the way back, dissident Labour MPs brought them to the House of Commons for a discussion. However, when they got off the plane in Washington, they encountered a firestorm of criticism from both the press and the White House. The New York Times headline, true to form, read “10 Americans Join Vietnam Reds.” The article quoted the group’s official statement in Jakarta, which said the US was committing “military aggression” in Vietnam and “waging a cruel war against the Vietnamese people,” while using Vietnam as a “testing ground for new and more horrible weapons.” All of that was true, but the Times nevertheless reported that it “echoed Hanoi’s propaganda line.”34
In Washington the returning delegation asked to meet with the president, but the White House declined—with a written note. They did meet with members of Congress, which had recently passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving LBJ open-ended authority to make war. The group was struck by the fact that members of Congress “appeared to know so little about Vietnam.”35 They also met with White House officials, sharing with them the Vietnamese perspective on the war as a continuation of the struggle against French colonialism, and explaining that the Saigon government spoke only for the Catholic minority in the primarily Buddhist country. An aide to McGeorge Bundy (LBJ’s national security advisor) responded dismissively, telling them the only relevant issue was the Communist threat to Vietnam.36
After their return to L.A., Clarke and the other WSP leaders were “inundated with requests” to speak and received “fantastic, never before, coverage from the mass media”—including appearances on four TV shows and a dozen radio programs. They talked about their meeting with Vietnamese women at “churches, women’s clubs, colleges and universities, civil rights meetings, trade union meetings, teach-ins, and local demonstrations against the war,” including “many groups previously unreached by WSP.” The list included the first teach-in at UC San Diego, a talk at UC Santa Barbara and a debate at Long Beach State; appearances at many local Democratic Clubs as well as the state central committee of the Democratic Party; union groups, among them the American Federation of Teachers and the Garment Workers; and many Unitarian churches and Jewish groups.37
Clarke reported that the NLF women had “traveled on foot for two weeks through unsafe territory and across borders at night to catch a plane to Djakarta.” “Many” of the Vietnamese women “spoke or understood” English. “We listened to many personal stories of tragedy and death,” she reported. “The leader of the South Vietnamese delegation had spent 3 years in jail at the age of 18 under the French, and 1 year when Diem came to power.” They described what Americans called the “strategic hamlet” program of moving Vietnamese peasants out of their ancestral villages into what “they described as ‘concentration camps.’” As for the American argument that South Vietnam was a “victim” of “aggression from the North,” the American women were told that their South Vietnamese counterparts “came back to defend their country.” As for the American claims that bombing aimed at military targets, “the North Vietnamese women brought considerable evidence of repeated bombing and strafing of hospitals, schools, churches, markets, bus stations, fishing-boats and villages.”38
While they were winning national and international attention, WSP was also reasserting their distinctive twist on their status as women. The WSP version of “End the War Now” was “Bring the Boys Home for Dinner”—accompanied by a cookbook published