MAY 2

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The letter of William H. Overholt ('68) which appeared in the CRIMSON on Wed., Feb. 10, 1965, in response to a leaflet distributed by the May 2nd committee on Mon., Feb. 8, contains several false assertions. To begin with, the committee's leaflet stated that "... Eisenhower remarks in his memoirs that there was no Southeast Asian expert he knew who was not certain Ho Chi Minh would have won a general national election." Mr. Overholt read this as "none of our experts were certain that Ho Chi Minh would have won." We refer him to page 372 of Mandate for Change.

Mr. Overholt's other main assertions are 1) that the Viet Cong are "trained in and supplied from the North"; 2) that "the war in South Viet Nam is carefully controlled from Hanoi"; and 3) that (in the French-Indochinese War) the Vietminh engaged in "much senseless killing," "tortured brutally and killed" villagers, and, after victory, substituted worse oppression."

Mr. Overholt does not indicate the sources of his information; we invite him to do so. Meanwhile, we shall attempt to refute his assertions with the information at our disposal.

Sen. Wayne Morse has stated that (Con. Record-Aug. 5, 1964). "I have been briefed many times, as have other members of the Foreign Relations Committee and all this time witness after witness from the State Department and from the Pentagon have admitted under examination that they had no knowledge of any foreign troops in South Vietnam, from North vietnam, Red China, Cambodia, or anywhere else." Rather, "the sad fact is that the only foreign troops that have been in South Vietnam in any numbers have been American troops."

Similarly, the New York Herald Tribune reported on April 9, 1963, that Viet Cong from the North "number less than one per cent of the whole .... the war in South Vietnam is homegrown." And the New York Times reported on Jan.27, 1965, that the most up-to-date U.S. intelligence estimates admit that "before 1964, all the infiltrators...were South Vietnamese in origin."

As regards arms supplies, an official breakdown of a cross-section of arms taken from the Vietcong shows that ..."Only one in fifty came from the Communist bloc." (Baltimore Sun, Oct. 14, 1963.) Similarly, the Christian Science Monitor reported on Jan. 7, 1963, that "arms supplied to the Vietcong from outside the country have been negligible." The New York Times made a similar statement on Feb. 16, 1964: 'The bombing of North Vietnam could not halt the flow of supplies to the Viet Cong, particularly since most of their weapons are captured from the South Vietnamese Army."

As regards Hanoi's control of the Viet Cong, it has been persuasively argued by Philloppe Devillers (North Vietnam Today, P.J. Honey, ed.), by Oliver B. Clubb (The U.S. & the Sino-Soviet Bloc in Southeast Asia), and others that the North Vietnamese regime refused to support the struggle of the Viet Cong which began in 1957 in response to Diem's repressive policies, in particular, the bogus land reform. Thus, support was not forthcoming until 1960. Since, by this time, the U.S. had violated every principle of the 1954 Geneva Agreements, the limited support in the form of political cadres and a small trickle of supplies can only with extreme difficulty be defined as aggression.

Mr. Overholt's assertion that the Vietminh engaged in senseless killing and torture is not substantiated by any evidence. His claim that, after victory, the Vietminh "substituted worse oppression" is ludicrous. We refer him to a most unsympathetic observer, Joseph Alsop, who, in an article in the New Yorker Magazine, June 25, 1955, described a trip which he had taken through Vietminh controlled areas of South Vietnam. "I could hardly imagine," he wrote, "a communist government that was also a popular government and almost a democratic government." Harvard-Radcliffe May 2nd Committee