Tom Hayden, who cheered for a communist military victory in Vietnam, is calling attention to Senator Hillary Clinton’s old ties to communists. But Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, formerly of the Washington Post, wonders if Hillary’s comments on Senator Barack Obama’s ties to communist terrorist Bill Ayers constitute McCarthyism.
Bernstein, now an election analyst for CNN, has reason to be concerned about where all of this may lead. His parents were members of the Communist Party USA, and he says in his book about them, Loyalties, “I am proud of the choices they made.”
The Hayden and Bernstein pieces have to be understood in the context of the Democratic Party being on the verge of nominating a “working class hero” as their presidential candidate who does not attract many votes from the working class. And that is why Senator Clinton sees an opening and believes she can still seize the nomination. But she’s got some skeletons in her closet, too.
The basic message of Hayden and Bernstein seems to be that the Democrats should abandon the practice of linking either presidential candidate to communists because they are both tainted. But we’re just beginning to get to the heart of the issue. Do we have candidates that are in any way linked or sympathetic to the greatest killing machine in the history of planet earth? The Black Book of Communism puts the death toll from communism at about 100 million. A memorial to the victims of communism has been erected in Washington, D.C.
On one of the major issues of our time, have these candidates been right or wrong?
We know where Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright stands. We know that his charge that the U.S. created AIDS was based on Soviet disinformation. But he also had this to say in his National Press Club speech: “Our congregation stood in solidarity with the peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua, while our government, through Ollie North and the Iran-Contra scandal, was supporting the Contras, who were killing the peasants and the Miskito Indians in those two countries.”
In fact, Ollie North, a member of the staff of the National Security Council, was implementing a policy of the Reagan Administration to thwart a communist takeover of Central America. Some of the Miskito Indians were actually helping in the fight against the Soviet- and Cuban-backed Communist Sandinistas.
Whose side was Obama on during the fight for Central America?
Hayden’s Pro-Communist Record
One can understand why Hayden, a member of “Progressives for Obama,” takes offense. Hayden and Ayers were key members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the violence-prone group that laid siege to college campuses in the 1960s. One of their main goals was making sure the communists conquered South Vietnam. Ayers, of course, would go on to plant bombs as a member of the SDS-spawned Weather Underground communist terrorist group. Hayden would win notoriety as Jane Fonda’s husband and become a politician.
“Progressives for Obama” is quite a collection. A quick review discloses two names from the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an off-shoot of the old Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA). They include Carl Davidson, formerly of SDS, and Jim Campbell. Two other names come from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose Chicago branch has backed Obama from the start. They are Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West. West showed up at Jeremiah Wright’s National Press Club speech to cheer and whistle.
Hayden is almost as controversial as Ayers, a self-described communist. A leader of protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, Hayden wrote a June 4, 1968, “Dear Col. Lao” letter that ended, “Good fortune! Victory!” This was a letter to a North Vietnamese official. So here we have someone who was cheering for the communist enemy killing Americans. They openly displayed flags of the Viet Cong, the organization sponsored by the regime in Hanoi, North Vietnam, also known as the National Liberation Front.
Hayden, in brief, played a pivotal role in America’s Vietnam defeat and the deaths of millions.
Hayden’s letter to Col. Lao was designed to introduce him to Robert Greenblatt, the coordinator of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. The MOBE was run by a group that included members of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers World Party, the SDS, and other such organizations.
Is this the kind of “patriotism” that Obama approves? What does Senator Clinton think of an Obama supporter who worked for an enemy victory in Vietnam?
It is apparently acceptable to somebody because Hayden’s website boasts that he has received awards from such groups as the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the Rainforest Action Network, and Paw-PAC (animal welfare).
Isn’t it interesting how someone who became a cheerleader for the communists now gets awards for protecting trees and animals?
By contrast, the book, A Viet Cong Memoir, includes a note of apology “to my betrayed comrades, who believed they were sacrificing themselves for a humane liberation of their people.” One of the authors, Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the Viet Cong, escaped the communist takeover in a boat. He was one of hundreds of thousands of “boat people.”
Hayden’s failure to apologize indicates he’s a true believer. And he’s enthusiastic about Obama.
Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. This article is excerpted from a report that he amassed for
AIM.
