Benjamin Spock |
May 3, 1972
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Benjamin Spock
Pediatrician; Author, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care; 1972 Presidential Candidate, People's Party
To put you in the mood that I want you to be in, I don't want you to think that I'm going to try to convert you to radicalism because I think that this is not a fruitful kind of an audience to preach radical doctrines to. I want you to just be willing to listen without bristling to hear why we have a People's Party as well as in California, a Peace and Freedom Party. And all I'm going to do to induce you to listen, without bristling and maybe with a little sympathy, is I'm going to put it in the form of how I was radicalized.
As you can imagine from my dress and my personal appearance, I was not born a radical. I was born a Republican in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1903 and I cast my first vote for Calvin Coolidge. There must be a few people here who remember Cal Coolidge. And it wasn't until I transferred in the middle of medical school to Columbia, as far as I know, that I ever spoke to a Democrat let alone a Socialist.
I argued with everybody for five years in trying to reassess my political position and finally ended up a New Deal Democrat, which I would remain today, I think, if it hadn't been for my experiences in the antiwar movement in the last few years. I joined SANE on the basis of a very limited issue. I thought we had to have a test ban treaty, otherwise, more and more children would die of cancer and leukemia or be born with mental and physical defects as a result of radiation from fallout. Then they made me co-chairman within a year, not because I'd become an expert, but because it was assumed that I had an influence with the mother vote in the United States.
Then the next step, which I'm a little ashamed to admit, was I campaigned actively for Lyndon Johnson in the '64 campaign. You remember Barry Goldwater said the way to end the unpleasantness in Vietnam is to bomb them into submission. And there's a certain consistency to Barry Goldwater because that's what he's saying today too. There was no consistency in Lyndon Johnson. He said absolutely no escalation, no sending Americans to fight in an Asian war. I had no basis for believing that he was a faithless scoundrel. And so when I was asked whether I would campaign, I said, "Yes. Yes as a citizen, yes as a pediatrician, yes, as a spokesman for the peace movement."
I did enough so that he called me up two days after the election to thank me. And then he said in this voice that sounded so humble, "Dr. Spock, I hope I prove worthy of your trust." And I was so embarrassed to have the President of the United States hoping to be worthy of my trust that I said, "Oh, President Johnson, I know you'll be worthy of my trust." And it was only three months later that he betrayed all of the millions of Americans who voted for him as the peace candidate by escalating and starting the build-up that eventually was half a million American fighting men. I was anxious, I was furious, I sent him angry letters and I would keep getting replies from presidential assistants. I might say as an aside, when I send letters to Nixon, which I do every week at times like this, they don't even bother to give me a reply from an assistant of any kind.
I said in this letter to Johnson, "I demand an answer from you so that I'll know that you know what I think of what you're doing, leading the American people astray." And that got an answer from the old buzzard. It was a short note and it only took up one of the ten points that I raised, but I knew that he'd read my letter. I quadrupled my antiwar activities. Two years later, he was still escalating and I was one of the faculty people who composed and began circulating in universities around the United States, the document called "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" in which we said, belatedly we wanted to take a moral stand beside the young men who believe that it's wrong to kill and be killed in a war that you consider a crime against the peace, a crime against humanity and a war crime. We said they're right according to the Nuremberg Principle, and we want to stand by them morally and we want to offer to raise money for their legal defense.
My wife Jane, who is always the realist, said, "Are you sure you won't get into trouble with the federal government for circulating this letter?" And, I said, "There's not the slightest chance in the world. They wouldn't be so foolish as to go after an old man like me." Six months later she was surprised, I was surprised, and she's never had the same confidence in my political judgment, when I found myself indicted by the federal government for conspiracy to counsel, aid and abet the resistance of the draft. The Attorney General at the time, Ramsey Clark, who claims that the initiative was all his, has on two occasions in the past six months, when he's given me peace awards said, "You were right, I was wrong." That's some satisfaction even though it comes years after the fact.
I was tried with the "Boston 5," so-called. We were convicted, we were sentenced to two years in jail and a $5,000 fine. And we appealed and, fortunately, the Court of Appeals said that was not a conspiracy. I, in simplifying their judgment, would interpret it to mean that that was citizens of a democracy exercising their First Amendment rights. It wasn't expressed as clearly and as simply as that. My remarks about our administrations and government under Johnson, under Nixon, will be mainly critical from now on. But I want you to remember that I admitted at this point that there are still courts in the United States that know what the United States Constitution is about and know what democracy is meant to be.
Meanwhile, of course, it was becoming clearer and clearer to me that the United States was never invited into Vietnam, we went there as a response to no treaty obligation. Eisenhower expressed very clearly why we're involved in Vietnam a year before the French collapse, a year before the United States tried to take over where the French left off. You know, from the end of World War II, '46, until 1954, the Vietnamese were trying to gain independence. The French first offered them independence then went back on the promise, landed troops instead, and for eight years, the French fought them in a bloody war trying to re-impose colonial control. And the United States paid 80 percent of the bills of the French during that period, the military bills of the French. Eisenhower was trying to explain in '53 why we were paying the bills of the French. And he said, "It's not that we love the French so much." He says, "It's all about tin and tungsten and other valuable materials in that part of the world." We want to control them, that's the main reason why we got into Vietnam. Also, because our Defense Department wanted a good, strong base in Southeast Asia in case we went to war sometime with Communist China.
I became more aware that the President had broken his promise to obey the Constitution when he mounted a full-scale war without a declaration from Congress. He always said the Tonkin Gulf resolution is the equivalent. It took the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a couple of years or more to dig out the records of the Navy Department to find what really went on in the Tonkin Gulf. And they found that the truth was the exact opposite of what Lyndon Johnson told the Congress of the United States.
He told them there's been unprovoked attack on the naval forces of the U.S. by the naval forces of North Vietnam. He asked authorization to repel such aggression in the future. Congress gave it to him. The records show that the U.S. Navy trained and equipped the Saigon naval force and was cooperating with it in an unprovoked attack on naval, harbor installations in North Vietnam and this is what provoked the retaliation, though the retaliation was mild. Then when the Pentagon Papers came out last summer, they showed the whole damned thing was planned months ahead of time, that in the Security Council, they were discussing the likelihood that they would want to bomb North Vietnam with which we were not at war at all at that time. And that what they needed was an excuse to sell this to Congress and to the American people and the Tonkin Gulf episode was exactly that. It was an excuse, it was a provocation on our part with which Johnson then went to Congress and perpetuated a fraud on Congress and a fraud on the American people. And, I'd realized that when our forces were unable to make any progress basically because all the Vietnamese with any guts and patriotism were on the other side, then our nation took to wholesale violations of the laws of warfare. We've been destroying, poisoning crops to try to starve the people into submission and we've been destroying dwellings wholesale in North and South Vietnam.
Neutral observers say there's hardly a building still standing in North Vietnam, hardly a city that we haven't turned into rubble. And we've been removing civilians from their homes and putting them behind barbed wire far away in what amount to concentration camps. Every one of these acts is specifically forbidden by international law to which the United States has subscribed its signature. In other words, this isn't a slightly dirty war. It isn't a slightly immoral war. It's one of the dirtiest wars that's ever been fought and it's been carried out by a consistent policy of brazen lying to the American people by the administration who is still involved in that war. And I would say that it's at its most dangerous state right now. Our commitment is just as great. The President says we can never allow the Communists to come into South Vietnam and take over, but meanwhile, under pressure from the American people, he's withdrawn our ground forces. So our commitment is as great as ever, but we don't have the basis for supporting our commitment and something is going to happen in the next few weeks. And I'm terrified with a President who thinks that saving face is the most important thing ultimately.
Well, having had my eyes opened by the war in Vietnam, and then I look back at American foreign policy in general and I see it differently than I used to see it. For over a hundred years the United States government has been taking advantage of other countries when it thought it could get away with it. We provoked the war with Mexico in 1848 and we got 40 percent of the territory of Mexico. And Abraham Lincoln was one of the few politicians at the time that said, this was an ignoble war and we shouldn't have done this. And, in the 20th century, as you probably know, we've intervened three more times in Mexico, usually at the behest of our oil interests. We've intervened three times in Nicaragua, we've intervened twice in the Dominican Republic, the last time under Lyndon Johnson.
A brazen example was our intervention in Guatemala during the Eisenhower administration. A man named Arbenz was elected, a socialist was elected President of Guatemala in a democratic election and there aren't too many democratic elections in Latin America. His promise was that he would break up the huge landed estates amongst the wretchedly poor peasants who worked the land. The only trouble was the United Fruit Company is the biggest landowner in Guatemala and they went to Eisenhower and said, "Don't let them do that." So Eisenhower commissioned the CIA to go down there with arms and money to arrange for a military revolt, which was arranged and overthrew the popularly elected government. You don't have to take my word for it. The Eisenhower administration quietly boasted about the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy. That we don't mess around, we get results when we decide that a foreign regime is not compatible with the wishes of our industry.
If you think that stopped under Eisenhower, I will remind you recent revelations came up about IT&T that not long ago IT&T first went to the State Department to see whether the State Department couldn't do something about keeping Allende from being elected President of Chile. He was elected and then IT&T came back for another conference to say, "Isn't there something our government can do to topple Allende from the presidency?" It's still going on.
The United States, since World War II, and it's over 25 years now, has maintained over 2,000 major military bases on foreign soil and 30 foreign countries. I used to think at the end of World War I that's for the defense of the United States and the defense of our allies, maybe there was some justification for that. I don't believe it anymore. That isn't necessary to defend the United States. This is part of the United States government's attempt to control as much of the world as possible.
The United States, through foreign aid, has been able to influence government policies in most of the countries to which we gave our aid. Our government forbade them to vote for China's entrance into the U.N. and more seriously, our government forbade them from having any commercial dealings with Communist China, hoping to strangle that country economically. And our government has prevented such governments as the Wilson regime in England - a majority of those members of Parliament were indignant about what we were doing in Vietnam and wanted their government under Wilson to disassociate itself from the Untied States - and they weren't allowed to do so because Lyndon Johnson was threatening to stop our aid if they did any such thing. Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson was telling the American people again and again that our allies are right with us, that they back us even when they aren't sending any troops.
And, even more remarkable, Madam Gandhi and her government in India, as Indians much more sympathetic with the Vietnamese in a country that's very sensitive about colonialism, they were never able to protest openly against our policy in Vietnam. Well, having come to realize how aggressive our country is - usually at the behest of our industries, the same thing was done in Cuba, by the way - then I'm able to look, I think, more realistically, at the failures of domestic policy in the United States.
We have, at the present time, 30 million Americans living below the poverty level. This is absolutely unnecessary, I realize now, in the richest country the world has ever known. Countries far poorer than ours, like the Scandinavian countries, long ago abolished poverty. They said it isn't decent. If you can afford to, support those who can't fend for themselves. It isn't decent to not do it. It isn't decent in the United States.
We could have the best medical care in the world, and we don't. We have for the well-to-do, good medical care, for a majority of our people, variable mediocre medical care, and, for millions of Americans, there's no medical care whatsoever, and for an even larger proportion, there's no dental care whatsoever. This is unnecessary. We've got the money; we've got the technical ability; we've got the finest medical scientists in the world. It's a manifestation of the fact that the country is not run primarily for the benefit of the people. The politicians would like to do it for the benefit of the people, but their first obligation is always to the people who pay their election bills, and by and large, that's industry as I'm sure you know.
Another IT&T thing recently came out about how IT&T wanted to swallow that plump fire insurance company in Hartford, and the Attorney General's Office, the Department of Justice, first said, "No, no, that wouldn't be right." And then they changed their mind and said it was all right. And, at the same time, IT&T made a contribution of $400,000 to the Republican Party.
One more example, pollution. I realize now there have been anti-pollution laws on the books for decades, and they've never been enforced. And the reason that they aren't enforced is because industry is the polluter and it's industry that pays the election bills of the officials who would do the enforcement. Now after I've blamed industrialists for interference in the affairs of other nations and for interfering with the achievement of a good life in the United States, you may think that I hate and despise industrialists. Actually, some of my very best friends are industrialists. And, I'm sure a fair number of you are industrialists. It isn't that industrialists are vicious. They're just as nice to their families as anybody else. It's that they see the motive of industry exclusively on maximal profit. And this is what's ruining the United States that could be heaven on earth at the present time, and instead we're lousing up the whole damn system. As Charles Reich in The Greening of America pointed out, even the captains of industry don't have discretion. Once anybody invents a snowmobile, then every industry that could make snowmobiles has to make them. Otherwise at the stockholders meetings, the stockholders raise hell. "Why didn't you make those increased profits that the other companies made with snowmobiles?"
The whole damn thing is a juggernaut out of control. It just goes stumbling and bumbling down the road, polluting the country, involving us in the affairs of other nations, keeping up the huge loopholes for the very wealthy and making the poor pay for the war in Vietnam. You think that's an exaggeration? Under Johnson, under Nixon, it's been said, the American people will not stand for an increase in the income taxes, therefore we've got to cut down on unnecessary expenses. You know what's been cut down on? Medical research, that means cut down on faculties of medical schools. Funds for education, in general, have been cut down. This administration even tried to cut out free lunches for hungry school children. People all over America on welfare are having their welfare payments cut. And, in some states they've thrown everybody off welfare at a time when the cost of living is spiraling upward. There was an interesting article in the New York Times magazine section just two weeks ago, using figures from the Brookings Institution, showing that since the income tax law was passed - which was meant to be a progressive tax getting steeper and steeper in rate, depending on people's income - loopholes have been bored in that consistently and are still being created and enlarged. Such things as the oil depletion allowance and other depletion allowances and such matters as the fact that municipal bonds are not subject to income tax.
Brookings Institution figures show that those exceptions for the very wealthy now amount to 70 billion dollars a year that the rich are excused from. You know, you read in your papers every year that there's somewhere between 50 and 100 individuals whose incomes are a million dollars a year and they pay no income tax or almost no income tax. This is what we're talking about in the People's Party. So we say the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are beholden to industry. They always will be. And, the American people are fooled when they think that if you can just get McGovern instead of Humphrey, or if you can get a Democrat instead of a Republican, this will be the end of our problems.
I say, and we say, all history shows it doesn't matter what the personality or the personal aspirations of the president, the country goes along the same way involving itself in wars, maintaining economic injustice. People's Party is made up of local groups such as Peace and Freedom in California, the New Party in Florida and in Arizona, the DC Statehood Party in Washington that our vice-presidential candidate, a black radical educator from Washington, D.C., named Julius Hobson is a member of. They got together and said let's run a national campaign. Not because we think the national campaign is most important, we say the only possible way of building strongly and permanently a new movement, independent of industry, is to involve people at the local level, finding out what people need like, I just saw a couple of days ago the free clinic that was organized by the Peace and Freedom Party in Long Beach, California. Finding out what people need in every locality, helping the people find ways of achieving what they want or being clearer about why they're denied it. This is sometimes called "community organizing" and then, at election time, "working for candidates." So we say the local candidates will always be more important than the national. Then why are we in the national election? We say we've got to call attention to our party in this presidential year so that in those parts of the United States where there's no independent politics, maybe we'll inspire people to start building from the grassroots there.
Let me tick off a few of the platform planks, these will be in very abbreviated form: Immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from all over the world, not just from Southeast Asia; minimal family allowance for those who can't provide for themselves of $6,500 a year for a family of four; free good quality medical care for all the American people as a right; an end to sexism in all its forms; an end to racism in all its forms. Let me, I'll have to go a little more into detail about our economic plank that says this present system by which industry is motivated exclusively by the quest for maximal profits - though it may have helped a great deal to develop, to industrialize our country so rapidly and so successfully - now it's clearly passed its usefulness. It is keeping us from achieving the ideal society that we should have. We say industry must produce to improve the quality of life for all our people. And, the quality of life includes environment and it also includes working conditions.
We say this will not be achieved until the boards of directors of industry are composed of consumer representatives, worker representatives and government representatives. And, we differ from other radical groups, I think, in saying, we're not talking about a huge bureaucracy in Washington, which however well intentioned, is going to try to decide what the American people want and how it should be created. That industry must be broken down again into small local units, and each local unit should have a board of governors composed of consumers and workers. This is so that consumers can have the feeling that they don't have now of being able to go directly to the producer and say, "Not that stuff, more of this is what we want." And, even more importantly, this is so that workers will not have the feeling that they do now, especially workers on the assembly line, of being helpless automatons, cogs, depersonalized cogs in a machine.
I've talked lately to assembly line workers, and they say, "It's hell. It's absolutely dehumanizing to work under a speed-up with that noise, and, be bossed around, and be treated as if you had nothing to offer aside from this hardly better than mechanical skill." So that at least indirectly they'll have some sense of being able to create, this is what human beings are and how they differ from other species. We like to create things. And, in simpler days we were creative in our regular occupations. Now, our regular occupations in so many cases are so totally uncreative that we have to turn to woodcarving or folk dancing or something else. I'm all for these other forms of creativity, but I'm saying our work, our jobs ought to be creative.
One more plank. What's the theme that goes through our platform? People must regain control of the institutions that control their lives. People must not only control the productive process, people must control the police in their neighborhood. It shouldn't be possible for a police department, miles away, to send into the ghetto or into the barrio, white police with prejudices against the people to harass and humiliate them in every neighborhood. There shouldn't be ghettos, but as long as there are, the people in the ghetto should choose their own police so that the police are sympathetic to the aspirations of the people and treat them like human beings.
People should control their own health facilities. We shouldn't have just huge clinics that take two bus rides for those who haven't got a car. We should have friendly, small clinics for nine-tenths of people's complaints. And, if there's a snippy nurse or an arrogant doctor, the people of the neighborhood should be able to say, "Let's fire that nurse" or "Let's fire that doctor and get somebody who treats us like human beings." Middle class people forget how totally deprived of the right to be treated as human beings poor people are when they go to places like a clinic.
Well, I think I've told you enough to give you an idea of how my feelings have changed. As a matter of fact, my personality has changed. I used to be a hemmer and a hawer. I used to say, "On the one hand, on the other hand." I don't bother with "on the other hand." I consider it carefully, but if I think it amounts to nothing but a hill of beans, I don't waste my time talking about it. But I'm sure I've irritated or raised questions in the minds of many of you. I'd like to get to some questions and answers. And, I'd like to start first with some very critical ones. You're entitled to be as arrogant as I am.
Generously funded by:
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers