William Worthy talking:
I guess that was the lesser part of it.(challenges in Cuba, around the fact that you lost your passport for traveling to and reporting from Cuba.) The federal indictment that followed in 1962, and the case dragged on for two years, was, of course, was much more serious than losing one’s passport. But, for some reason, which the ACLU which defended me and the whole legal community could never understand, the Justice Department Internal Security Division, which was very reactionary and if it is still in existence, I presume it hasn’t changed, indicted me not for going to Cuba, but for coming back. And so, I was prosecuted for the novel crime of coming home. And the 5th Circuit unanimously reversed that on the grounds that a citizen has an inherent right, an inherent constitutional right, to come home. And there had been so much embarrassment to the Kennedy administration from the case, that, althought the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department wanted to appeal to the Supreme Court, Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General, vetoed it. He and his brother were sick and tired of the case. They had had enough embarrassment over it.
after the Chinese revolution, 1949, the official line of the State Department was communism in China was a passing phase, and that anything that indicated recognition, journalistic interest or whatever would only delay that passing, and, so there was a ban on China. In fact there was a ban on the whole Soviet, communist bloc, but particularly China.
And, I had tried for about three years before I actually got the visa to get there. I accosted Chou En Lai, the prime minister at the first Asian-African Congress – Conference – in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1955. But, one Sunday morning at Adams House at Harvard, where I was a Neiman Fellow for the year, I came up from breakfast and saw a Western Union telegram under my door. I immediately knew what it was, instinctively, and a week later I was in China, to the great distress of the State Department.
The U.S. consulate in Hong Kong went into an almost terror-stricken episode, and Scott Nearing and his wife years later, several years later, were in Hong Kong with no any intention of going to China. They moved from one hotel to another, not leaving a forwarding address. And suddenly a loud knock on their door, and the chief security officer of the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong wanted, in fact, demanded to know, whether they had any intention of going into China. He said, “That guy Worthy almost caused me to lose my job.”
I think what probably happened, I went in on Christmas Eve, by pure chance, and I think they were all partying, and not patrolling the border. And this man caught hell.
Scott Nearing was, is that the author of “Dollar Diplomacy”
A little footnote to that remark. It was in my Bates College days, by pure chance at the college library, I came across his classic book, 1925, called “Dollar Diplomacy.” I have never gotten over the section on Haiti, where he disclosed that when the U.S. was pressing, around 1914, for more and more concessions from the Haitian government, and they declined to bow to that pressure, a contingent of U.S. military landed from a navy ship and marched to the National Bank, and took out, I think, about half a million dollars, which in those days, for a tiny country, was a lot of money, and put it back on the ship and took it to National City Bank in New York. It it’s known by every Haitian still as the great Yankee bank robbery. And that, really, turned me in an anti-imperialist direction, from which I have not veered ever since. It was one of the great shocks of my life, to read that.
I think one of the most discouraging things about this country is the lack of critical thinking by Americans. The educational system fails Americans miserably in any kind of analysis of what’s going on, and any government line which is echoed daily by the mass media becomes gospel in this country.
And anyone who knew anything about the abominable conditions under Chang Kai-shek in China could understand why there was a revolution. It didn’t necessarily mean that you shared their, all their political beliefs and orientation, but that the revolution was entirely understandable and justified. And, since the U.S. was in a nuclear mood and came close, in 1955, to actually using nuclear weapons on China, over those offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, it was important to get, even on a small scale from one person, something of a different perspective. And, I think that was both a journalist and an intellectual reason for challenging the travel ban.
this country has a political line, which, in general, the mass media follow rather uncritically, with exceptions. You will find that at any major network, newspaper, magazine that there are people who are trying to get some of the truth across on every opportunity, at every opportunity.
probably the most significant was the interview with the prime minister of China. I was at the cable office, I think it was on a Sunday, and he was getting ready to go on a trip somewhere to Europe, I think. I of course had requested an interview, and the people, I guess, from his office finally tracked me down that Sunday morning at the cable office, and rushed me to his residence.
I remember his asking me, ironically, and of course satirically, how far Long Island was from New York. And the parallel was, how far is, were these two off-shore islands, Quemoy and Matsu, from the Chinese mainland. The distance is approximately the same. And it pointed out the arrogance of the United States of wanting to bomb China with nuclear weapons because they claimed that those islands belonged to the departed and discredited Chiang Kai-shek government on what we called Formosa – I shouldn’t say we, what the official name for it was Formosa, but the rest of the world, even then, was calling Taiwan.
Let me just interject a little story which I think is of great historic interest. The Fellowship of Reconciliation across the river here, in Nyack, was, had their concerns verified when Prime Minister Nehru of India visited China, in 1955, and came back and disclosed that there were areas where there was famine. It was of course food, a total embargo with commerce with China at that time, and so they instituted a project, asking people, their members and others, to send little rice bags with a ticket, a little tag, to President Eisenhower, with the label, “If thine enemy hunger, feed him.” And , they had no idea what the reaction was. They found out later, indirectly, through, after Eisenhower went out of office, one of his aides, that this project had been discussed at cabinet meetings, and with the U.S. military which was pressing for a nuclear attack on China. And Eisenhower, not many people know this, I am pretty sure it is true, it came out of a…he had a Jehovah’s Witness mother who was opposed to his military career.
And he turned to the cabinet meeting with the cabinet meeting with the military officers high command sitting there, and said, ‘How many of these bags of rice have come in?’ The New York Times had run a big story, and there had been a lot of news follow up. And when he was told, I think 40- of 45,000 plus thousands of letters, he said, ‘If the American people want reconciliation with China, this is no time to be bombing it.’ And that was the end of that threat. A very interesting little side light to history.
you never would know it from the coverage of Iran after 1979 that the U.S. had been in bed with the vicious, corrupt, discredited Shah who was ousted, and Khomeini, great religious leader, scholar, who had been in exile for years, came back to a triumphant return. And the U.S. seemed determined under Carter and others to try to restore something of the status quo. They found – don’t hold me a 100 per cent to this, my memory – but there was some plot afoot to restore the Shah, and Iranian students, including some who had been trained at Berkeley and others, I think it was November 4th, 1980, 1979 or 1980, went over the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and immediately the CIA operatives inside began shredding documents but they didn’t have much time so it was an incomplete job. And they held the Embassy staff there for 444 days, which helped to lead to Carter’s defeat for re-election because of that unresolved crisis.
(It was also the birth of Nightline as a show on television.)
Ted Koppel owes that to those students. So an educator, I think he was named Norman Fora, came to me, I think the University of Indiana organized a group of about 50 Americans to go over during the crisis to get a different perspective. And I was allowed to go along with a young woman in Boston named Randy Goodman. And we got acquainted particularly with Jose INAUDIBLE one of the Berkeley-educated students who later became the Deputy Foreign Minister. Some of our stories came out then. They taped [?] the documents later at a time of a subsequent trip were the shredded documents which had been restored plus those that had not been restored, were published in Iran by the students in paperback form, and sold on news-stands and exported to other countries, but not to this country. Not by their design but by the U.S. design. And so Randy Goodman and Terry Taylor and I purchased at a news-stand in one city, and some others later, these paperbacks. We had two batches in all. When we came back through, not Logan, JFK airport in New York, we had one batch in our luggage which, no problem, we shipped the others with camera equipment and unaccompanied baggage to Boston, and that’s where customs spotted them and turned them over to the CIA and it resulted in the CIA and the government talking about indicting us for possession of classified documents. These were public things, distributed all over the world, nothing private about them any longer. And they seized them and the ACLU took up the case, and over a period of a year, we got the documents back, and they dropped all talk of prosecuting us, which had been ridiculous to begin with, and settled out of court for $16,000 in damages.
There’s no limit to absurdity in Washington. The reason that, for one of those references, [INAUDIBLE] willing to prosecute, it would have meant that a CIA official would have had to testify in open court at the trial. And of course that would have given my ACLU lawyer a chance to cross-examine, with all kinds of embarrassment. So some cooler heads did prevail in that. We never lost a wink of sleep over it. Even if they had prosecuted, they would have lost miserably in court, at least on appeal.
That these were authentic, yea. That all these evil things that were disclosed in the documents were there. All kinds of things to bring down the Khomeini government and to create disruption. The usual counter-revolutionary policies that the U.S. carries out after a revolution that they don’t agree with.
My passport by chance – let me see, I get the time table correctly – it was shortly after returning from China that my passport was due routinely to expire. There had been a lot of publicity, a lot of pressure on CBS not to carry my broadcast from China, pressure on the Baltimore [INAUDIBLE] to bring me home. None of which was successful. And the ACLU, which took up my case as soon as I got back, thought it would be publicly good – good public relations and politically and legally strategic to apply promptly for renewal of this expiring passport. So on that particular day the ACLU here in New York could find only one volunteer lawyer who was available, who just recently signed as a volunteer. So we were to meet up outside, what is it, 530 6th Avenue passport office, and that was my encounter with the then unknown William Kunstler.
In one of his books, he mentioned that I woke him and his wife up once on a Sunday morning, had to call him about something. We had good relations. Of course, you become quite close to somebody with whom you work over a period of years. Competent, spent time waiting in court rooms, writing his books, he told me.
Louis Lyons was the Nieman curator at the time, he came out of the Boston Globe. And that Sunday morning, when I went up to my Adam [INAUDIBLE] house and found the cable from China, authorizing the visa, I, of course, as a matter of courtesy, had to notify him. It was a week before Christmas. The semester had come to an end and nobody was due back until some time in January. But as a matter of courtesy of course I called him at home, and he kept it very quiet. You know it was necessary to say if I was going to be able to leave this country, let alone get into China, I had to keep the trip secret till I got there. And he came under quite a bit of pressure from conservative Harvard alumni and others, and probably the government, because of my status as a Nieman fellow but he was a man of principle. No radical by any means but a man who believed in the Bill of Rights and personal freedom. So he and two Niemans, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, and Hale Champion of the San Francisco Chronicle, on a cold February Sunday morning, went to Logan Airport to meet me. It was obviously a political and journalistic gesture, and it certainly helped to fend off those nutty people in Washington who were talking about prosecution.
in terms of public opinion, public relations, and journalistic support, I won the China passport case but legally lost it when a three-judge court, federal court in Washington rejected my application for a new passport. And they called me a blustering inquisitor. And said a few other negative things. I guess in an earlier period of American history, they wouldn’t have been so “discreet” they probably would have said, “uppity nigger” but blustering inquisitor was the acceptable phraseology in 1957. So Murrow did a broadcast every night after the news he would devote five minutes of commentary, did a very nice commentary, took up the phrase blustering inquisitor. And in effect said that if that decision were to be carried to its ultimate limits today, everybody in the country could be locked up and not allowed to leave anywhere. Sort of an Edward R. Murrow version of what Phil Ochs was saying.
Paul Robeson couldn’t even get into Canada. And what some of his supporters in Canada did at a famous concert, he sang on the American side of the border and they were a few feet away on the Canadian side. I kind of understand why people in Washington don’t get upset when they are ridiculed so effectively. He was a man famous all over the world, had been famous since at least the 1930s as an actor, a singer and yes, his views were leftist, but so what? Isn’t that what the Bill of Rights is supposed be all about? He was miserably hounded. One of things about middle-of-the-road people in this country, I think people on the left sometimes forget, from unexpected individuals, sometimes you get principled support. The publisher of the Baltimore Afro-American was Carl Murphy, a businessman who ran a prosperous paper but he stuck by Paul Robeson who wrote no wavering in the most difficult periods in the troubled times ahead it behooves those of us who want to see a less insane, less militaristic, less repressive society than this is and is becoming have got to realize that on basic issues such as this, political differences can and should be put aside to fend off the psychotic right-wing forces who are right now trying to repeal the whole New Deal, go back to the 19th century, bust unions, and do everything else to suppress the rising opposition to considerably intolerable conditions.
I’ll take you back to the turn of the century. A scholar, I forgot what university it was —- I think it was a Midwestern university and I wish I could think of its name—- wrote a book published in 1971 by Arno Press and the New York Times, of all times, called “The Black Press Views American Imperialism (1898-1900)”. It’s a very revealing book and you find these tiny papers in the deep South and other parts of the country, but in the repressive deep South with acute—intellectually acute, very well informed critiques of what the U.S. was doing in Cuba, in the Philippines and expanding its empire. I remember one—I think it was a religious publication, maybe, by A.M.E. Church or something— and the Bishop who published it said “Any Negro soldier who sails out on a U.S. ship to China to help put down this rebellion, should find the bottom of the sea before he gets there.” Militant, anti-imperialist orientation. That’s missing now.
I don’t know how it’s dropped out of the perspective but it very definitely has. I found out from the vice-president for economic affairs—he left a few years ago—at Howard that the reason the name “Maceo” was so common in families of color in the South at the turn of the century was that they were naming their sons after General Maceo of Cuba who was fighting both Spanish imperialism and U.S. imperialism. So, even in those benighted days, there was an awareness of what the U.S. was doing abroad which is so sadly missing today. A book published by the Brookings Institution in 1976 — the title will come to me in a minute — in an Appendix lists 215 U.S. military interventions around the world, all parts of the world from 1946, which was a year after World War 2 ended and 1975. Thirty years, an average of 7 a year. I think any person reading that list is going to be absolutely startled. The number of interventions alone, let alone the vast array of countries that felt the sting of American military intervention. “Force without War” is the title of the Brookings Institute book. I would urge anybody who wants to update himself or herself on the post-war U.S. military policy around the world to get that book from their own library or through an inter-library loan.
I got a little attack of diarrhea on the wrong day. I wasn’t able to go to a reception in Hanoi that Ho Chi Minh was giving, and so one of my lifetime regrets is that I did not meet that remarkable man through pure happenstance. In the lobby, I think it is, of Parker House Hotel in downtown Boston where Charles Dickens once stayed whiled he was lecturing — a famous hotel —- there’s a plaque, which indicates that they believe that Ho Chi Minh as an itinerant—-not itinerant, but a sailor on a French ship during his exile under French colonial rule stayed there, worked there as, I think, a bellboy. Whereas Malcolm X, where it is known definitely, that he worked there. And, I pictured in my mind because the Boston Globe use to be right around the corner on Washington Street from the Parker House Hotel. I pictured in my mind that say some socially-conscious Boston-Brahman type, somebody from that kind of strata, if they had got to know Ho Chi Minh as a bellboy in Parker House Hotel in Boston and took them around to the Boston Globe and said “this is a man who is one day going to become Prime Minister or President of this country that the U.S. is going to be involved in,” he would’ve —- rather politely or impolitely—-been escorted out of the building. Ridiculous! A bellboy going to become the president? Going to win a war against the United States? What kind of nonsense is this.
There’s a book by Ellen Hammer called “The Race for Indochina” [SIC: “The Race for Rangoon”] and she tells how after Ho Chi Minh collaborated with the U.S. in the ouster of the Japanese from Vietnam during World War 2. And, then the French colonialists came back and two planes carrying French military officers flews in on, I think, the same day to land back in this country freed of Japanese imperialism. And, those were American planes. And her sentence after that paragraph was “The French has returned to IndoChina.” So, the U.S. was playing the colonial game throughout World War 2, planning ahead to get rid of Japanese rival imperialism, to get rid of German imperialism, but to stall and improve on the U.S. position — and they collaborated. The American people slept for almost 20 years until, under Johnson, the Vietnam War escalated to ground troops and that’s when it was possible to get Americans to even think about this remote, unknown country, which brought the Johnson Administration down. He didn’t run for re-election. Dave Dellinger — many people listening to this program know that name, a great hero of the American peace movement — went to Vietnam around 1966 after the ground troops, half a million, had landed and met with Ho Chin Minh and the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese had been claiming to constantly be shooting down a lot of American planes, which for a peasant country seemed highly unlikely. So Dave Dellinger, in his usual cordial and pleasant way, challenged the authenticity of these official reports. And Ho Chi Minh gave him a classic answer. He said “Look, if my people ever caught me in a single lie, I would have to surrender to LBJ in 30 days.” Now, what if we had a president who felt that he had to tell us the truth otherwise his government would be brought down in 30 days. Wouldn’t this country be a helluva lot different from what it is today?
The U.S. basically has a counter-revolutionary policy line worldwide, and Cuba had been so much under U.S. domination for so long that there was not the slightest inclination in this country to accept the reality of a revolution that did not turn around and betray its own people, as quite a few revolutions in our times have done in other parts of the world. And, once it became clear starting with the Eisenhower Administration and continuing on into other presidencies, Kennedy and others, there had been an unrelenting attempt to discredit a government, which until the collapse of the Soviet Union was really delivering for its people. I understand that even President Clinton at a town meeting that he held in Buenos Aires several months ago did acknowledge that Cuba had a virtually ideal free healthcare system and free educational system. And, amazingly, Clinton referred to him as a “highly intelligent” man. It looks like some overtures are now being made, probably because of the Pope’s impending visit January 25th. The mass media personalities and those of lesser stature by and large do not understand let alone have any empathy for revolutionary struggles.
Given the proximity of Cuba to the United States, it’s hard for me as a result of half a dozen visits there since the revolution to imagine that anybody else of less oratorical powers of less intellectual brilliance could’ve kept that country alive without bowing to American domination with the CIA instituting all sorts of armed attacks within the country, off-shore attacks. As someone who reads Grandma International, the English-language paper out of Cuba, every week, there’s nothing egotistical about the man, which is one of the hazards of leadership. Certainly from Cuba I would dissent from the view that you just presented as, at least, a theoretical possibility. Byron—was it Byron who said “power corrupts” and all that? It’s true. With a very strong degree of self-assurance, it’s a temptation for those who’ve led a revolution to not give up power. Nelson Mandela who is a very close friend of Fidel and praised him just within the last couple of days has said that Cuba’s struggle is South Africa’s struggle, partly maybe because of health and partly because of his age, has decided to relinquish power. And, I think that his successors are going to have a very hard time with that recalcitrant white man that he attacked in a speech last week for trying to destabilize a country, create crime and restlessness. I think his success with less stature is going to have a much harder job.
in Cuba Fidel Castro has not had elections. Is he afraid he wouldn’t be re-elected?
Hell no. [laughs] The man still has tremendous popularity despite all the hardships that Cuba has gone through, particularly since 1991. James Rusten, I think it was, of the New York Times was asked by Kissinger because he was going to meet with Fidel to raise a possibility of at least some initial talks with the United States. So, when he came back and reported to Kissinger what had happened, he said “well, Fidel’s response was ‘as soon as the U.S. lifts the embargo’ and Kissinger said, ‘yeah, that’s exactly what I expected him to say.’” Fidel is not about to let the U.S. determine the lines of the Cuban revolution, its policy, its processes. I for one do not fault him for that. We see this new Prime Minister — or President, whatever his title is — who went through horrific experiences partly due to the U.S. support of these terribly corrupt and brutal generals, one of whom had crushed the Kanju Revolution and Uprising in 1980, I guess it was. The first thing he does when he gets elected last week is to reassure the Western capitalist countries that he’s going to support the IMF bail-out which, if you read between the lines, is a way of making sure that American investments are going to be protected in South Korea. That’s the danger of yielding to U.S. pressures and Fidel is not about to do that.
I just hope that listeners will look to some basic works. If you read Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudun”, came out in 1952, I think. It deals a lot with Cardinal Richelieu who had virtually dictatorial powers in France at the time he was the de facto ruler of considerable parts of Europe. It’s not a political book but it has tremendous political significance with a great appendix. If you read “New Men of Power” by Columbia University professor C Wright Mills, came out around 1947, a study of U.S. leaders you see him raising the important point way back then —- politically he asked, “Who will catch the American people when the economic system fails them?” The significance of that is that there’s tremendous dangers in this country from a highly well-financed Right. The American people have concerns about their over-extended credit cards; their mortgage payments getting down-sized and yet they don’t take time to do any basic reading to understand what this society is really all about. There’s all kinds of—-we do have still free libraries; we do still have free thinkers like Noam Chomsky and others whose works ought to be read religiously.
— source democracynow.org
William Worthy, a World War II conscientious objector and defiant international correspondent who traveled to Cuba, China and Iran, faced federal prosecution. has been around the world a number of times for more than half a century, going places the United States government is not very happy about, which has led to 8 arrests, 2 federal indictments, and among the places he has been, Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam, Cuba.