Hayden Sees Continued Antiwar Role

The antiwar movement must still play a crucial role in educating Americans about Vietnam antiwar activists Lom Hayden and Jane Fonda said here Friday night.

Hayden said that despite the peace accord signed in Paris Saturday, the struggle in Vietnam was not over and opponents of the war should continue to oppose U.S. and to the Saigon government and any U.S. violations of the accord's provisions.

"The peace agreement is part of an upward spiral of the struggle of the Vietnamese, but that struggle is not over," Hayden said. "That is why our role is still crucial."

Fonda told the audience of about 500 in Sanders Theater that the role of the antiwar movement would be primarily educational. "As long as we don't know who the Vietnamese are, as long as we don't see their faces, we are doomed to retain the thorn of Vietnam in our side," she said.

Hayden co lounded the Students for a Democratic Society in 1962 and helped organize the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, for which he was prosecuted by the Federal Government Speaking without notes, he reviewed the history of the Vietnam War and called the peace agreement a turning point in the conflict.

Hayden claimed that the 1972 spring offensive of the North Vietnamese had forced the U.S. to come to terms.

The North Vietnamese compromise in the accord--especially its agreement to separate the political and military settlements--represents a traditional Vietnamese face-saving gesture toward a defeated foreign power, Hayden said.

Hayden said that what he termed the failure of President Nixon's Christmas humbing of the North forced the U.S. to agree to the three key goals of the Vietnamese negotiators: full recognition of Vietnamese sovereignty, a full withdrawal of American troops, and U.S. respect for the Provisional Revolutionary Government