Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars Vol 2 Issue 2

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CONTENTS
Vol. 2, No. 2: January-March 1970
Alfred W. McCoy and Angus McDonald - Pan Am Makes the
Going Great
Carl Riskin - Chinas Economic Growth: Leap or Creep?
Portfolio of Drawings from the National Liberation Front
Herbert P. Bix - The Security Treaty System and the Japanese
Military Industrial Complex
Orville Schell - Melby: The Mandate of Heaven
Edward Friedman - Extremists are Extremely Extreme
Ngo Vinh Long - Leaf Abscission?
BCAS/Critical AsianStudies
www.bcasnet.org
CCAS Statement of Purpose
Critical Asian Studies continues to be inspired by the statement of purpose
formulated in 1969 by its parent organization, the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979,
but the BCAS board decided in 1993 that the CCAS Statement of Purpose
should be published in our journal at least once a year.
We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of
the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of
our profession with regard to that policy. Those in the field of
Asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their
research and the political posture of their profession. We are
concerned about the present unwillingness of specialists to speak
out against the implications of an Asian policy committed to en-
suring American domination of much of Asia. We reject the le-
gitimacy of this aim, and attempt to change this policy. We
recognize that the present structure of the profession has often
perverted scholarship and alienated many people in the field.
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars seeks to develop a
humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies
and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront
such problems as poverty, oppression, and imperialism. We real-
ize that to be students of other peoples, we must first understand
our relations to them.
CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the prevailing trends in
scholarship on Asia, which too often spring from a parochial
cultural perspective and serve selfish interests and expansion-
ism. Our organization is designed to function as a catalyst, a
communications network for both Asian and Western scholars, a
provider of central resources for local chapters, and a commu-
nity for the development of anti-imperialist research.
Passed, 2830 March 1969
Boston, Massachusetts
DRAWINGS FRoM THE NATIONAL FRONT. FOR THE .LIBERATION' OF SOUTH VIET HAM
The drawings reproduced on ..pages 25 through 29 were done ,
by artists of the Natioual. Front for .the Liberation of .
South Viet! NaIll. They are, from a. collectionof13S prints .'
available in three folios under the title Miln!!!! Viit NaIll:
.Dit Nl1lfc. Con Ngdai (South Viet Ham: Country and .people)
. Liberation Publishing House. 1967. An exhibition baaed on
selections from this collection is available to. interested
persons or organizationsthl:tlU8h the CCAS chapter of Cornell
University. . ..'
--navid Matt
BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
. January 1970 I Volume 2; Nuniber 2
contents
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Alfred W. McCoy &:
Angus McDonald
Car/Riskin
HerberJ P. Six
Orville Schell
Edward Friedman
Nga VUrh Long
Editor
Stafffor this Issue
Editorial BOIU'rl
SubS!;riptions
Co"espondence
Communications
Pan Am Makes the Going Great
China's Economic Growth: Leap or Creep?
Portfolio of Drawings from the National Liberation Front
The Security Treaty System and the Japanese
Military.;fndustriaJ Complex
Melby: 1be Mandate of Heaven
Extremists Are Extremely Extreme
Leaf Abscission'"?
Note on the Contributors
JamesSanfonl
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Chuck Hayford, Nancy Hodes, Tom Lifson
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Jon Livingston, Jim Morrell
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Kathleen Gough Abede, Nina Adams, Herbert Bix,
Noam Chomsky, Bob Clark, John Dower, Edward
friedman, LeighKapn, Maurice MeiSl1el',
Jonathan Mirsky, Ray Moore, Gary Porter.
franz Schunnann, Mark Selden, Jon Ungar,
Marilyn Young
$4 for one year, 52 introductory student rate
1737 Cambridae Street, Room 30S
Cambridge, Mass. 02138
Copyright C> 1970 by the
Published quarterly - October.
January, April, and July - by the Committee of
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Com:emed Asian Scholars. National
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Coordinators: Jim Peck & Orville Schell
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Communications
The Joint Statement of Two Peoples
Across the Pacific
We, citizens of Japan and citizens
of the United States, denounce the
results of this week's negotiations
between the prime minister of Japan
and the president of the United States
as they are expressed in the joint com
munique issued from the White House
earlier today.
It is clear that the negotiations
regarding Okinawa have not been con
ducted in the interests of the people
of Okinawa, mainland Japan, and the
rest of Asia, but rather in the inter
ests of perpetuating and extending
American military presence in that
part of the world. The communique
reveals an intent to bolster the Amer
ican security system in Japan, and the
economic and political controls that
go along with it. It also insures
that the people of Okinawa and mainland
Japan, after many years of vigorous
protest, will continue to see their
homeland used as a staging area for
military campaigns like the War in
Vietnam.
Okinawa has been a military colony
of the United States since the end
of World War II. With almost total
disregard for the dignity and live
lihood of the people, the American
command has militarized their island
and enjoyed free use of the bases
there for operations throughout the
Pacific. The people of Okinawa
have been exploited economically,
politically, and cuLturally by a
system which is, at its core, both
racist and undemocratic. They live
in constant danger from the existence
of American military facilities, which
include both nuclear stockpiles and
chemical and biological weapons.
The agreement reached today (Novem
ber 21, 1969) in the joint communique
clearly violates the consistent demand
of the people 0 f Ok inawa and mainland
Japan for immediate and unconditional
reversion to Japanese administration.
By transferring legal title of Okinawa
to Japan while leaving the military
capacity of U.S. bases substantially
intact, both governments hope to mute
opposition to the entire security sys
tem represented by the U.S.-Japan
Security Treaty. On the other hand,
today's agreement, by allowing for
special arrangements regarding nuclear
weapons and prior consultation vis
a-vis the bases in Okinawa, establishes
the possibility that the same conditons
might later be applied to the bases
in mainland Japan. The apparent "Japan
ization" of Okinawa, in this sense,
will in fact lay the basis for the
"Okinawanization" of Japan.
The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty,
which provides for the stationing of
over one hundred American military
facilities in mainland Japan, infringes
on Japanese sovereignty, jeopardizes
the life and property of the people,
and implicates Japan in U.S. military
operations throughout Asia. Its effect
is to increase the insecurity of Japan
by setting that country's interests
over against those of their Asian neigh
bors. It forms the basis of cooperative
neocolonial exploitation of other Asian
countries by the U.S. and Japan. In
addition, the military alliance based
on the Security Treaty, accompanied by
the strengthening of the military
forces of Japan, will be a direct threat
to the independence of other Asian
countries. A majority of the Japanese
people oppose the treaty, and masses
of them are actively struggling to
block its renewal next June.
We therefore urge both the American
and Japanese peoples to make known
3
their opposition to the deal which
has just been negotiated in Washington.
We call for support of the demands of
the people of Okinawa and mainland
Japan for immediate and unconditional
reversion, and for an end to the Secu
rity Treaty. We call upon both govern
ments to undertake the rapid dismantling
of the U.S. military in all parts of
Japan, in accordance with Japan's
"Peace Constitution." We believe
this would lead to the recovery
of full independence for Japan and
would end present domination
and prevent future Japanese domination
of East Asia, especially Korea and Taiwan.
Signed:
Stewart Meacham, Co-Chairman, New
Mobilization Committee to End
the War in Vietnam
Howard Zinn, Professor, Boston
University
Noam Chomsky, Professor, MIT
Franz Schurmann, Professor, U.C.,
Berkeley
Ernest Young, Professor, University
of Michigan
Makoto Oda, Chairman of Beheiren,
Japan
Orville Schell and James Peck,
national coordinators, Committee
of Concerned Asian Scholars
Anti others
Washington, D.C., 11/21/69.
Saving Face the American Way
As an Asian and as an American, I
find the war and the stereotypes
it thrives on deeply disturbing.
Ironically, stereotypes that have
been perpetuated about Asians seem
to apply more to Americans.
We have accused A$ians of being
overly concerned about saving face-
which among other things involves
resolving a situation without undue
embarrassment. To an Asian, saving
face means preventing humiliation
to one's opponent as well as to one
self. When the opponent loses face
an Asian also considers himself dis
credited. To an American, saving
face seems to mean avoiding humilia
tion for oneself at all costs regard
less of. the cost to one's opponent.
We miss many signals because of this
lack of sensitivity. For example,
the current lull in the fighting in
Viet Nam has been interpreted by
astute observers as a signal for
serious negotiations. But instead
of picking up on this possibility,
our reaction has been to demand that
the Vietnamese admit that they have
stopped fighting. By insisting that
a person say "uncle" without giving
allowance for the delicacy 0 f the
situation, we risk more than humilia
tion.
We charge that Asians value life
less than we do. But there are facts
that suggest we don't value life as
much as we say we do. As one indi
cator of the concern for life, consider
rates for infant mortality. Infant
mortality rates reflect such conditions .,..
as availability of nutrients to infants
and to mothers, access to services
such as medical help, and the morale
and concern of the general public.
The startling fact is that the infant
mortality rate in Viet Nam is identical
to that in Mississippi--36 per 1,000.
But what is more alarming is that the
infant mortality rate for non-white
people in Mississippi is nearly 50
per cent higher than that in Viet
Nam. In fact, the infant mortality
rate for non-whites in the entire
U.S. is comparable to that of Viet
Nam, a country that is undergoing
destruction and total war. But it
isn't just Mississippi and related
southern states that have higher
rates of death occurring to non-white
infants. Included also are states
such as Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts,
New York, Pennsylvania. Our country
is supposedly at peace, yet if one
looks at these figures and especially
4
those pertaining to the non-white
minority, it's hard not to wonder
whether the minority population may
not be experiencing a state of siege
and oppression comparable to
in Viet Nam.
We stereotype the Asians as being
inscrutable and devious, and accuse
them of interfering in the internal
affairs of our country. Calling a
telegram from Hanoi on a day of mora
torium an interference in our internal
affairs is a bit far-fetched, in
contrast to have done to
physically annihilate their villages
and towns. Which is interference-
sending a telegram or dropping bombs
day in and day out for a thousand
days?
If being inscrutable means masking
our intentions, then we disguise our
actions by words such as "advisor",
fighting war to prevent war", and
"democracy." But words cannot hide
our confusion and our calculated
intent to destroy. "Vietnamization"
is another inscrutable term which
only reflects how Americanized the
entire Viet Nam war effort has been.
We assure ourselves that the u.s.
goes only to the aid of people who
ask for our help and where freedom
is in danger. But whose freedom and
what kind of aid are we talking about?
And how free are we to even talk?
Some- of our leaders have said those
who speak out in a time of national
crisis such as this abusing the
privileges of democracy. But the sad
record shows that the democratic
process was by-passed in getting
us into this war in the f1rst place.
As for battles in the name of freedom,
there are struggles for freedom ana
self-determination going on in South
Africa, Rhodesia, Angola, and Mozam
bique--why are we there? How
much of our non-involvement is related
to the fact that the freedom-fighters
are black and the oppressors white?
And as for Viet Nam, hasn't it ever
occurred to those who fight in the
name of freedom that we may be fighting
on the wrong side?
Our attempts at explaining how we
can get out of Viet Nam ar e just
as inscrutable. In a recent New
York Times interview, President
explained t:hat "the way to avoid being
involved in wars in Asia is to con
tinue to play a significant role in
Asia." Translated, this means "we
get out by staying in."
What kind of people and nation
have we allowed ourselves to become?
What we have to Asians-
low for life, overconcern
with saving face, being devious--really
apply to us. This hurts because for a
people who have prided themselves for
being frank, it says that we're not
leveling with ourselves.
Isao Fujimoto
University of California,
Davis
December 17, 1969
J
5
Pan Am Makes the Going Great
Al.FRED W. McCOY-& ANGtlS McDONALD
The great Boeing 707/32lC cargo jet
rolled off the runway toward the unload
ing ramp of Travis Air Force Baee. Turn
ed and stopped by the white-overalled
technician waving a long, orange-coned
flashlight, its doors rolled open to
reveal the lightweight load it had
brought on its return from the distant
battlefield: one hundred and sixty-
eight plastic-wrapped, aluminum-boxed
bundles, the bodies of American soldiers
killed in Vietnam. Another Pan American
World Airways all-cargo charter was ready
for unloading.
This jet is only one of nineteen Pan
Am Jet Clippers fly full time from
the American mainland to Vietnam and re
turn. America's largest international
airline is the only American carrier with
scheduled service to Vietnam, and its
President, Najeeb Halaby, estimates that
a total of some 60 pieces of Pan Am's
equipment fly in and out 0 f th e war zone
regularly.
In 1968 Pan Am was paid $99.8 million
for its charters to Vietnam: a sum large
enough to account for 12% of Pan Am's
total revenues, enable its Pacific oper
ations to 50% of Pan Am's total
profit, and make it the leading air
transporter of men and material to
Vietnam.
The public is only vaguely aware of
the important role of the civilian air
lines in prolonging American involvement
in Vietnam. Pan American has pioneered
procedures which enable a military field
commander to receive a high priority
item from the States only 72 hours after
requesting it; the Military Air Trans
port Service (MATS) and the civilian
airlines cooperate closely to link the
battlefield with the supply line. On a
psychological level, the flexibility
and comfort of civilian jet transpor
tation enables the military to break
down G.I. resistance to combat service.
John Bartholomew, passenger officer at
Travis AFB, noted that during the
Korean War troops sent out on ships had
8 days during which to question their
motives and build up anxiety. "This
way they are in Vietnam within 16 to 22
hours, before they even have a chance
to think about it. Besides, it's a lot
more comfortable to fly. It's a great
way to go !"
Homeward-bound soldiers receive a
letter from Gen. Creighton W. Abrams
reminding them of the pleasant moments
they have spent in "one of 10 exciting
fun capitals of Asia and the Pacific" on
the Pan Am-initiated Rest and Recreation
(R & R) program. R &R is designed- to
improve morale by giving G.I.'s a break
in the middle of their combat tour.
Why has Pan Am taken the trouble to
pioneer the integration of civilian and
military air transport and to develop
the Rest and Recreation program? Why
does Pan Am consistently style itself
"The Department of Defense's major civil
commercial airlines partner"? The answer
to these questions lies in the nature
of the various interests which have all
ied themsleves with Pan Am throughout I
its 42-year history, and the relation
ships that these groups and Pan Am have
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fostered with the U.S. government.
Pan Am was founded in the 1920's by
a coalition of wealthy young Yale grad
uates enraptured with the .glamour of
flying, American investors interested in
Latin America, and major aircraft manu
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facturers. In this period Pan Am used
its mail contracts with the Post Office
Department to destroy potential compet
itors and its with the
State Department to win air rights in
Latin America and Asia. This coalition
remained intact until the end of Worrd
War II, when domestic competitors began
applying political pressure to break up
Pan Am's monopoly in international air
travel. Pan Am countered by allying
with conservative Congressmen who felt
that a single carrier was the best means
to a strong competitive position in
international civil aviation. To streng
then itself against foreign competition,
Pan Am joined with the aeronautics
manufacturers and the conservatives to
urge an aggressive stance in post-war
diplomacy and commercial
When Pan Am's efforts to restrain
domestic competitors met narrow defeat,
and its position as the aggressive arbi
ter of American international aviation
policy was eroded by its new civilian
competitors and an expanding Air Force,
Pan Am's alliances and politics took on
a more limited, covert nature. In the
1950's Pan Am eliminated most Of its
ties with aeronautics manufacturers,
retaining only those with Boeing. Its
financial allies were narrowed to a few
major banks, and it restrained its gov
ernment influence to building close ties
the Air Force and the Pentagon.
These ties led ultimately to Pan Am's
reliance on military contracts and a
major role in the Vietnam War.
The Early Years
The key figure in the formation and
development of Pan American World Air
ways is Juan Terry Trippe, the son of a
New York stockbroker. Experience in the
World War I Navy Flying Corps and later
in the Yale Flying Club gave him a
taste for the excitement of flying that
made his initial encounter with Wall
Street seem dull. After a year of stocks
and bonds, Juan quit the brokerage
business to begin a series of unsuccess
ful airlines ventures with Corneliue
Vanderbilt Whitney (Yale '22). Despite
successive financial failures, these
experiments led them to realize the poten
tial of the multi-engine, long-distance
aircraft for trans-oceanic travel and
to envision a New York-Florida route
ultimately linking with a trans-Caribbean
and La tin American network.
In 1927 Trippe and Whitney began to
realize their vision. Scurrying around
the New York financial district, they
forged an alliance with financiers such
as W. Averell Harriman, John, Hay Whitney,
William S. Rockefeller, William Vander
bilt, and Robert Lehman (of Lehman Bros.
Investment Bankers and the United Fruit
Co. h who wanted cOIlUJlunications for
their growing interests in Latin America,
and with aircraft manufacturers such as
Sherman A. Fairchild and Keyes
(of Curtis Aircraft) who needed an outlet
of growth for their infan,t industry.
Trippe's idea was that Pan Am would be
the community instrument to unite all
American aviation interests for inter
national expansion, eliminating divisive
competition, much as J.P'. Morgan had
consolidated the railways and steel
companies several decades before.
William A. Boeing and
founder of Boeing Aircraft), who joined
the club in 1929 and was later a Director,
stated Pan Am's purpose quite clearly
before Senator Hugo Black's subcoIlUJlittee
in 1934:
It was a period when foreign com
panies were operating in South
America under concessions and if Pan
American did not go in there and
have whole-hearted support of the
whole group, it was felt that the
foreign companies would get the
better of us there.
After Trippe consolidated most of New
York's potential airline capital behind
his company and convinced the Cuban dict
ator Machado to give him exclusive landing
rights in Cuba, Pan Am's rise was meteoric.
In 1928 Trippe "made a'personal alliance
with the House of Morgan, taking the
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daughter of a partner, the late Edward
R. Stettinius, as his bride" (Fortune,
April, 1931), gaining an
entree into the State Department
through his brother-in-law, Edward R.
Stettinius Jr. Of equal significance,
Trippe managed to convince Postmaster
General Walter Folger Brown (under Hoo
ver, 192-8-32) that Pan Am .should be
"America' s-chosen instrument" in inter
national air travel. Pan Am's rivals
were foreign carriers, not other
American corporations.
In a day when commercial
and freight were incapable of generating
anything but spectacular losses for the
airlines, possession of the airmail con
tract and its subsidy was the sine qua
non of commercial Despite
Congressional instruction to stimulate
competition, the Postmaster General had
such enormous discretion in his awards
that Hoover's Postmaster Brown was known
as I1Tsar of t.he Airways." He was an
invaluable. ally to a man with plans on
the scale of Trippe's. When Pan Am
moved into the Caribbean in 1928 and
onto the east coast of South America
in 1930, Brown withheld the mail con
tract from Pan Am's comp.etitors and
forced t.hem t-o sellout to Pan Am at a
fraction of their original in vestment.
WillIe the Post Department was
instrumental in quashing Pan Am's Ameri
can competition and giving it subsidies
4 and 5 times as high as those for other
domestic carriers, t he State Department
was very helpful in frustrating the
resistance of foreign governments,
especially in Peru and Colombia.
In 1928 a French company was negotia
ting with the Peruvian government for
the right to establish an airline in
competition with the hitherto unchallen
ged economic might of the W.R. Grace
Shipping Company and its related firms.
The State Department advised Pan Am to
move quickly, and Pan Am's hastily dis
patched representative soon convinced
the Peruvian government that Pan Am
could compete more effectively with
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Grace than any other line. The Peruvian
government was using the old Chinese
strategy of playing the imperialists off
against each other. However, as the
.struggle began to take shape, W.R. Grace
and Juan Trippe realized that it would
be foolish to engage in wasteful competi
tion, since there was no essential con
flictin their shipping and airline
enterprises. In February, 1929, each
company put up $500,000 for a 50% owner
ship in Pan American-Grace Airways
(later Panagra).
The Colombians still resented the
American seizure of the Panamanian
isthmus under Teddy Roosevelt and wanted
to foster aColombian-owned international
airline. Effectively combining threats
and bribes, Pan Am bought the Colombian
company an4 presented its government
with a Colombian-American bilateral air
pact which had been hastily written one
afternoon by Juan Trippe and a helpful
State Depart-ment official. Soon Bogota
was just another stop in Fan Am's
growing system.
In three years Pan Am built a vast
network of airlines encompassing all of
Latin America, purchased vast amounts
of expensive equipment, and won a monopoly
over American international aviation.
It also began to money. By 1932
Pan Am was in the black by $700,000, and
in 1934, when the depression had most
domestic airlines on the verge of bank
ruptcy, Pan Am made a $1.1 million profit.
Its Latin American operations were
returning an enormous 31% profit on its
investment and supplying the wherewithal
for Pan Am's push into the Atlantic
and Pacific.
Unfortunately for Pan Am, such spec
tacular success did not long go unnoticed.
Pan Am's liberties with government funds,
such as air mailing bricks around the
Caribbean, were brought to public atten
tion when Trippe's Republican friends
were replaced by the Democratic New
Dealers. Disturbed by reports of Pan
Am's excesses, Senator Hugo Black opened
Congressional hearings on all airmail
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contracts, and Postmaster General James
Farley was preparing to demolish Pan Am
when the Roosevelt administration
changed its mind.
Strong American financial control and
frequent military intervention had built
up tremendous hostility toward the U.S.
in Latin America. To resolve this prob
lem, Roosevelt replaced direct political
control with the indirect economic mani
pulation of the "Good Neighbor Policyt
which has marked U.S.-Latin American
policies ever since. Indirect controls
necessitated a much more sophisticated
and dexterous manipulation, possible
only through an efficient communicat
ions network. As Fortune put it (April,
1936):
If you want to sell shoes in Equa
dor or Brazil or Uruguay, Pan Ameri
can will collect data for you on
prices, competitors, politics,
.and shoe consumption, will offer
suggestions as to the best way
to exploit the market, and hold
your hand when you get into
trouble.
The Imperialist attitude, the
world view of things, is no arti
ficial creation on the part ot
Pan American's management. It
rises realistically enough from
the fact that Pan Am's business
is entirely foreign
This is what gave Mr. Farley pause,
this is what stopped Senators
Black and McKellar from hauling
Pan American onto the carpet for
an investigation of its contracts
..The U.S. simply could not
afford to attack an org anization
which had come to represent the
North American continent, which in
a great measure created new inter
American relationships, and whose
prestige was inextricably--some
times intangibly--bound up with
U.S. trade.
When the investigations were over,
every American airline lost it s airmail
contracts and had to be reorganized-
except Pan which quietly accepted a
10% reduction of its rates.
Having established a monopoly over
American aviation in Latin Pan
Am turned to China and the Pacific. In
1933 Pan Am purchased 45% of China Nat
ional Airways Corporation from Curtis
Wright Aircraft Corp. and became resp
onsible for the management and growth
of the major airline for Chiang Kai
shek's Nationalist government. Pan Am
greatly improved CNAC's abysmal service
and by 1938 had firmly secured the
Chinese market for American aeronautics
manufacturers.
Pan Am then began construction on its
trans-Pacific route to integrate its
Chinese network into its growing inter
national system. Since 1932, Pan Am had
been conducting route surveys with the
assistance of the U.S. Navy, discovering
the existence of two islands the United
States was not even sure it owned:
Midway and Wake. Pan Am was given land
ing rights in Hawaii, the Philippines,
and Guam, but when the British BOAC
(then Imperial Airways) applied for
landing rights, aur future allies were
denied them for "reasons 0;: military
security."
Indeed, the U.S. Navy was helping
Pan Am for just this reason. In the
Five Power Washington Treaty of 1922,
the United States and Great Britain
traded their promise to cease building
new fortifications in the Western Pacific
for a Japanese agreement to limit its
construction of battleships. It would
have been a violation of the treaty far
the U.S. Navy to construct airfields on
these islands, but Pan Am was not so
restricted.
On November 22, 1935, the first
transpacific flight took off from San
Francisco Bay, bringing China and the
Philippines within a few days of the
U.S. and marking the last major achieve
ment in Pan-Am's pre-war expansion.
9
The War and the Post-War World
World War II shattered the former
limits on American aviation. National
and colonial boundaries closed to Pan
Am before the war were erased in its
aftermath. Pan Am built 53 air bases in
Latin America and around the world. It
expanded the number of people on its
payroll from 4400 to more than 80,000.
In 1943 alone it earned $126 million for
its war services, doing more than 50%
of all military transport flying.
But its very success--and the huge
development of airpower during the war-
threatened Pan Am's position. While
before the war only a handful of air
craft had flown both ways across the
Atlantic, -during the war -more than
1.5 million men flew from America to
London. European governments saw the
potential of airpower for domination
and control in the post-war world, and
would no longer be ineffective compet
itors with Pan Am. American domestic
airlines were gaining international
experience ~ o r the first time, and would
demand a share of international air
travel's post-war growth and profit.
To counter both these challenges to its
position as the world's largest inter
national airline, Pan Am allied itself
with isolationist-turned-expansionist
Congressmen to urge a single American
international airline, and with the
rapidly expanding aircraft industry to
urge a militant conquest of international
civil aviation.
Juan Trippe proposed to make Pan Am
the core of a "national flag airline"
which would take aggressively to the
airways, dominating them with technical
achievement and capital investment.
Among his spokesmen in government were
Rep. Clare Booth Luce (R., Conn.) and
Sen. Patrick McCarran (D., Nev.), author
of the 1938 Civil Aeronautics Act and
later close ally of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
The spectacular war time growth of
the aircraft industry from less than 1%
of the Gross National Income in 1939 to
10% in 1945 presented a major peacetime
conversion problem for the industry and
the national economy. America's cont
inental boundaries could no longer absorb
this enormous production, and the indus
try's acknowledged organ, American Avia
tion, announced its enthusiastic support
of Pan Am's interna.tional program (March 1,
1943):
The United States should become
imperialist in the Pacific--openly
and aggressively. Not only should
we take over every Japanese manda
ted island, but we should assume
complete control over every other
island now nominally 'owned' by
another nation as far south as New
Zealand and the East Indies. There
should be no exceptions, for he who
insists on compromise in the Pacific
bas no understanding of airpower or
the ramifications of world air com
merce
There is nothing basically wrong
with a benevolent imperialism such
as the United States could provide.
There is nothing basically wrong
with an imperialism that raises
standards of living, creates new
opportunities, and brings a better
way of life to more and more people.
If we think enough of our way of
living to fight for it and wreck our
economy in helping others fight for
it, why should we apologize and shy
away from extending that way of life
to other and larger areas?
In 1943 these ideas look concrete form
when McCarran and other Senators of like
persuasion--Bilbo, McClellan, Pepper, and
Brewster--introduced the so-called "All
American Flag Line Bill," proposing to
make Pan Am the single instrument of Amer
ican post-war international aviation.
Al though the bill was eventually tabled,
the British were badly frightened. Early
in the war, Roosevelt and Churchill had
agreed that Britain would concentrate
on the production of smaller fighter air
craft, and America on bombers and trans
ports.. The ready convertability of
these large American planes into instru
10
ments of civil air power so concerned
the British that in 1943 they began
decreasing their rate of fighter product
ion to start tooling up for transport
aircraft.
By early November, 1944, the problem
had become so divisive that it was
necessary to hold an international avia
tion conference of 50 non-Axis nations
in Chicago to wrangle over post-war air
rights. The major obstacle to agreement
was the nascent BOAC-Pan Am rivalry and
a general fear that Pan Am would flood
the airways and destroy all foreign
competition. Heading the American dele
gation was Anglophile Adolph Berle,
Undersecretary of State. For months Pan
Am opposed his attempts ta pacify the
British or compromise, but fate finally
intervened: in the middle of the confer
ence, Secretary of State Cordell Hull
became ill, and upon his retirement was
replaced by Juan Trippe's brother-in
law, Edward Stettinius Jr. Stettinius
immediately fired Berle as Undersecre
tary, destroying Berle's prestige and
guaranteeing the failure of the con
ference.
The one result of Chicago was the
creation of the International Air Trans
port Association, whose bylaws provided
that all international air pact shad
to be unanimously agreed upon by all
participants. In October, 1945, Pan Am
tried to sabotage even that by announ
cing a drastic cut in fares, from $572,
New York-London, to $275. Pan Am could
not fly at those rates for long, but
no foreign or domestic competitor could
fly at all. In 1957 Rep. Cellar's anti
trust subcommittee heard testimony that
Pan Am had used every means to deny
Braniff landing facilities in Latin
Aaerica. On several occasions in the
late 40's and early 50's Pan Am blacked
out entire airports--including terminal
lights--when competitors' aircraft appr
oached for emergency landings.
International harmony had been so badly
....ged by 1946 that a second conference
was called in Bermuda. This time Pan
.Aa was defeated by the united force of
the other 17 American lines and all
major foreign carriers who combined to
create a series of fairly strong inter
national air agreements.
Similarly, during the Civil Aeronau
tics Board (CAB) international route
hearings of 1946-47, the united lobbying
efforts of the same 17 domestic airlines
were required to overcome Pan Am's
resistance, and Pan Am's monopoly on
American international air travel was
finally broken. Trans World Airlines
and American Overseas Airlines (later
absorbed by Pan Am) got European routes,
Braniff was given a competing route in
Latin America, and Northwest Orient
Airlines got a valuable route to Japan
via Alaska. Pan Am's dominant position
was gradually being eroded as her Amer
ican and European competitors grew in
strength.
The Pacific and Vietnam
WitaPan Am's Atlantic operations
quickly declining in importaace and pro
fit, and growth in Latin America stag
nating, Pan Am found that its last major
area of untapped potential was the Pacific.:
During the Korean War, the promise of
the Pacific was clearly revealed, and
Pan Am began to plan for long-range jet
aircraft, which were most profitable over
the long Pacific distances.
Pan Am's changing regional focus re
quired a different political strategy.
In pre-war Latin America, U.s. foreign
relations were the responsibility of
the State Department, and aggressive
American corporations with the right
connections were given strong diplomatic
support. But the post-war Pacific was
the property of the organization which
had captured it, the American Armed
Forces. Since diplomatic prior
ities in the region were strategic and
the bulk of potential air transport was
related to military operations, Pan Am
woald have to integrate itself with the
military to reap the benefits of Pacific
air travel
11
1
I
I
I
j
During the Korean War, Pan Am carried
114,000 military personnel and 31 million
pounds of cargo and mail between the West
Coast and Japan. But the end of the
Korean War brought problems, for traffic
which had been expanding at the rate of
about 16.6% per annum during 1950-53
slowed to half that, and planes flew with
fewer paying passengers. Capacity had
outrun demand for services, and Pan Am
for the first time turned to the mili
tary for help in tiding it 0 ver the
crisis. According to FredericK C.
Thayer's Air Transport Policy and
National Security (1965), Pan Am pushed
hard against allowing the Air Force's
Mil1tary Air Transport Service (MATS,
later MAC) to carry non-strategic,
routine passengers and cargo, attacking
the MATS competition as "government
socialism." At first when Pan Am asked
for the right to carry enough cargo to
fill its half-empty jets, the Air Force
refused, stating that the civil carr
iers would have to become more fully
integrated with MATS before it could
weaken its own airlift capacity. Later
the Air Force softened its position,
and by 1958 Pan Am was doing an irreg
ular business with military dependents.
Pan Am made a few gestures about
strengthening its commitment to the
Air Force's Civil Reserve Air Fleet.
(CRAF), but soon the passenger market
revived and these proposals lapsed.
Pan Am began to add other military
.strings to its corporate bow. Since
1953 Pan American World Airways' Aero
Space Division has been the prime con
tractor for the guided missile range
at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida
(now Cape Kennedy), where it manages all
base maintenance and personnel facil
ities and the Atlantic Missile Testing ..
Bange. Soon after the contract was
negotiated with the government, Pan Am
hired Asst. Secretary of. Defense Roger
Lewis, who bad participated in the
contract negotiations and authorization,
-as a member of the board and Executive
Vice President for Administration.
Missiles and lIlilitarycbarters were
not Pan Am's only labors for the mili
tary. Some 600 of its employees have been
engaged in systems work for the Atomic
Energy Project Rover at
Jackass Flats, Nevada. Others worked at
Fort MacGregor, Texas, on telemetry and
radar communications for anti-aircraft
drones. Another 256 employees worked at
the Upper Atmosphere Experiment site at
Fort Churchill, Canada, and an undeter
mined number were employed at the obscure
"electronic weapons testing station" at
Fort Huachuca, Arizona. According to an
unnamed army officer quoted in the Wall
Street Journal (March 18, 1960), "Here
technicians and soldiers will be testing
the nuclear age communications-electronics
systems for the silent war--the war of
radio, of infra-red to see targets in
the dark, of automation and machines to
gather combat intelligence."
While military contracts were able
to satisfy Pan Am.in the early 50's, by
1957 Pan Am's directors had committed the
company to a vast outlay: of capital for
the purchase of a fleet of Boeing 707
jets large enough to replace all of its
piston planes on major routes and to
expand its passenger capacity far beyond
the projected growth of international
civil air travel. This brought about a
crisis, for with an oversized fleet new
jets would be flying at a fraction of
their capacity, and the company would
be in danger of collapse by the early
1960's. Why didn't Pan Am introduce the
jets gradually and get full return on
its investment in piston aircraft? Why
did Pan Am greatly over-expand its capa
city and seriously risk financial coll
apse?
It seems likely that it was more than
a managerial miscalculation, because
Pan Am is repeating this pattern almost
exactly with the purchase of its new
monster, the Boeing 747. The 747 is
faster and will once again inflate Pan
Am's total capacity far beyond the
portions of the air travel market. Why.
In order to answer this question, one
bas to look behind Pan Am's projections
12
for Pacific air travel and examine the
relationship between Pan Am, the major
investment banks, and the aircraft
manufacturers.
Pan Am has a uniquely advantageous
credit arrangement with 38 banks across
the country, headed by First National
City Bank and Chase Manhattan. These
two banks have large holdings in both
Pan Am and Boeing. Chase Manhattan Bank
owns 6.7% of Pan Am's stock and 8.7% of
Boeing's stock (5.0% is considered a
potentially controlling interest under
pending U.S. legislation). First Nat
ional City Bank has a similar relation
ship with the two companies, for one of
its officers is on Boeing's board, and
First National City's chairman, James S.
Rockefeller, has been on Pan Am's board
since 1953.
These banks are more than neutral
investors seeking profitable holdings.
In many cases they stimulate the purchase
of aircraft that the airlines industry
cannot afford, and sometimes even wind
up Jwning aircraft and leasing them to
the airlines. Both banks make sure that
Pan Am's $350 million "slush fund" is
always filled. Recently they arranged
the loan for Pan Am's $525 million
deposit on twenty-five 747's which
enabled Boeing to start production.
Encouragment from banking interests
and a ready consumer in Pan Am help to
explain Boeing's production of the
streamlined 747. By 1965 Boeing had
saturated its domestic and international
markets with the 707 and 727, and it
seemed inevitable that the company's
fortunes would begin to decline long
before replacement orders for new 707's
and 727's started coming in the mid
1970's. The only possible solution to
such a problem was to design a new and
more efficient jet and introduce it into
the market in a way that would force all
the airlines to buy whole fleets of new
models long before their old jets had
become obsolete.
In 1965 Pan Am announced that by
introducing the 747 on all its routes,
it could reduce its costs by 30% and
pass on the savings to its customers.
Faced with the spectre of having to com
pete with lower rates, all of Pan Am's
international competitors scrambled to
place large orders for 747's. Conven
iently, all of Pan Am's American-flag
international competitors have domestic
routes as well, so that eventually even
the entirely domestic airlines will be
forced to buy the 747 to remain
"competitive. "
Not only wealthy American and Euro
pean airlines, but also the capital
starved Third World nations, have been
forced to engage in the wasteful compe
tition. are an integral part of
the national development image fostered
by the World Bank, AID, and the State Dep
artment, and Pan Am has had a key role in
encouraging unnecessary capital expend
iture in this area. Pan Am paternalist
ically trains personnel for feeder lines
of developing countries, not only in
Latin America (where a 1954 investiga
tion revealed it owned substantial stock
in eleven "independent" airways) and in
pre-war China, but also in the Middle
East (Middle East Airlines) and the
Philippines (it sold its 480,000 shares
in Philippines Airlines to Rubicon, a
Philippine corporation, in 1968).
Recently AID has called on Pan Am to
help it build shiny international air
lines for Pakistan, Thailand, Afghanistan,
and Vietnam through a technical assist
ance program oriented to American-built
. equipment. In Afghanistan Pan Am has
acquired 49% of Ariana Afghan's stock. and
two of its directors are on Ariana's board.
Most of these international airlines are
government-owned and many, especially
the transcontinental lines which are
forced to purchase expensive 707's to
remain competitive and which often fly
at 10% capacity, lose vast sums of money.
But having committed themselves to air
line transportation, these nations will
now have to purchase the newer 747's if
their international airlines are to sur
vive. The bitterness of these nations
13
is evident. A-t the recent Stanford
International Air Transport Conference
an officer of Air Pakistan strongly
attacked the enormous waste and reck
lessness of the ]47 program.
The disposal of a company's _s'econd
hand air-craft: once it has decided to
reequip presents quite a problem. Most
companies trade in their second-hand
aircraft on new jets (except Pan Am,
which usually sells to Third World nat
ions or the CIA's Air America). Gener
ally, the manufacturers then sell these
old aircraft to subsidiary non-scheduled
airlines such as World Airways and Over
seas National (General Dynamics), which
the control through a tan
gled maze of financial connections.
Since almost all of the non-scheduled
airlines depend upon the military for
80-90% of their business, they frequent
ly delay purchase of their aircraft until
the manufacturer has arranged a lucrative
military contract to fill it. This tri
angular was endangered in
the early 1960's when insufficient mili
tary activity brought the non-scbeduled
airlines to the point of collapse; but
with the war in Vietnam, these airlines
and their circle of manufacturers and
financiers have prospered.
In 1957 Pan Am lent money to the
manufacturers and made the same sweeping
purchase with the same inevitable re
sults. All the other airlines were
forced to replace their entire fleets
and dispose of outdated aircraft, and
Pan Am was faced with a devastating
surplus of passenger capacity far beyond
the most optimistic for
civilian passenger growth.
It was obvious to Pan Am and all
industry observers that the only poss
ible source of passengers and freight
capable of filling such a huge capacity
and promising a guaranteed source of
growth was the U.S. Air Force. Pan Am's
formal relationship with the Air Force
Military Air Transport Service was the
Civil Reserve Air Fleet, but this had
existed only on paper since its incep
tion in 1950. CRAF was essentially a
doomsday scheme devised by Air Force
planners supply a post-nuclear-war
invasion of foreign countries or larger
scale conventional engagements.
It was under the auspices of these
weak links that Pan Am had applied for
a share in military trafffc in 1954.
General Curtis LeMay and others had opp
osed any weakening of the Air Force
transport capacity until the civil
carriers secured "no-strike" union
agreements for military duty, increased
their cargo --capacity, and proved their
military abilities. Pan Am alone among
civilian carriers began meeting these
from 1956-58, when it conducted
a series of 5 major "War Games" sessions
with SAC and MATS, and increased its
cargo capacity based on military spec
ifications. Today Pan Am's "Air Pak"
cargo loading system is essentially the
Air Force's 463L system. Without heavy
Air Force use of Pan Am's all-cargo jets,
such a large volume of international all
cargo service would be impossible in
today's market.
Although these war games reduced the
hostility of the Air Force, the MATS
empire builders were still too jealous
of their aircraft simply to turn
things over to Pan Am. Pan Am once
again found it necessary to organize
politically to gain its objectives. In
violation of the anti-trust laws, Pan
Am organized all the international car
riers in January, 1958, to win the right
to fly military personnel and to adapt
their jet fleets to military needs.
airlines brought their case to the
CAB, -the Air Transport Association, and
a House subcommittee, and in every case
won a favorable response. But the Air
Force refused to budge.
The a.irlines managed to raise the
issue into such a heated government con
troversy that L. Mendell Rivers of the
House Armed Services Committee, in the
spring of 1960, felt called upon to settle
the matter by convening a special Cong
ressional subcommittee to resolve the
14
conflict. Juan Trippe told Mr. Rivers
of Pan Am's desperate situation:
As a result of the technological
impact of the efficient passenger
jet, thousands of skilled person
nel will be displaced if govern
ment traffic to their designated
areas is thus siphoned away (by
MATS). Mr. Chairman, our own
company alone expects to have to
release some 300 pilots during the
next 6 months if traffic--other
than normal civil traffic--doesn't
become available to the scheduled
airlines ...Unless our overseas
flag lines receive real assistance
from all branches of government,
the alternative is subsidy.
As grave as the situation was, there
was hope. With the help of George
Meany and the AFL-CIO, Pan Am was able
to announce its dedication to counter
insurgency warfare. Trippe continued:
Just the other day at a formal
dinner here in Washington I had
the pleasure of talking with Pres
ident Meany of the AFL-CIO .
Mr. Meany said that we could
count on his personal support.
He went on to say that any of my
associates in the air transpor
tation industry could approach
him personally, and he would seek
to help .. Today, Mr. Chairman,
these new labor agreements have
permitted us to offer our equip
ment and personnel to the military
not only in wartime but also in
periods of "brushfires," with the
assurance that the military can
count on us at all times .
With the cooperation of Mr. Rivers,
Pan Am was integrated into the Air Force
team, and the Air Force agreed to retire
most of its own transport in favor of
civilian carriers, awarding supplemen
tal contracts for military charter in
proportion to the commitment of a
particular airline to CRAF--and giving
preference to the airline whose regular
routes were in the vicinity of a mili
tary charter route. In exchange for
retiring all but a "hard core" of its
own transports, the Air Force received
a commitment from the participating
airlines that they would order new
all-cargo jets.
Pan Am boasts that its reduced mili
tary rates for cargo and passengers are
a self-sacrificing service to the nation.
This simply is not true--the military
offers unique advantages for the airlines.
The carriers get stable, guaranteed con
tracts with a consumer who always pays
on time, and no expensive terminal fac
ilities, downtown ticket offices, or
vast advertising campaigns are necessary.
Pan Am pays no landing fees when it
works for the military; its planes fly
at 100% capacity, while civil inter
national flights average about 50%.
Indeed, one purpose of this program has
been to provide profits to subsidize
the expansion and development of
America's civil international airlines.
Pan Am was intended to be the primary
beneficiary of these arrangements. In
1961, out of the total CRAF fleet Pan
Am had committed 71% and was thereby
entitled to receive 71% of all military
charter contracts.
In 1961 America began its first active
combat-support role in Southeast Asia
when 500 marines and their helicopters
were transported to Udorn Base in Thai
land to provide transportation for the
Royal Laotian Army. Since Pan Am was
the sole American airline to fly to
Thailand, it began airlifting cargo
and civilian personnel related to the
operation. In May of 1961 the cease
fire in Laos heralded an increased
commitment to Thailand and South Viet
nam. Later in the year Vice President
Lyndon B. Johnson and General Maxwell
Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, separately visited Saigon and
announced America's commitment to the
"freedom and independence" of the Diem
regime. Pan Am received its new a11
15
cargo 707's from Boeing, and in the year
ending June 30, 1962, the total charter
cargo load of Pan Am's Pacific Division
--the best public indicator of the
line's service to the military--increa
sed 450% over the previous year to
4,918,000 ton miles.
In November of 1962 American troops
dropped their role as pure" advisors"
and the Military Assistance Comm and
Vietnam was established. And it came
just in time for Pan Am. In 1961,
because of excess jet capacity and
strong competition, Pan Am's Atlantic
service ran at a loss. But the growing
Pacific revenues were large enough to
yield an overall 6.3% profit--its first
year in the black since 1956.
Pan Am began to reinforce its Pacific
holdings. In 1961 Juan Trippe's son,
Charles, became director of the Southeast
Asian Division of Pan Am's subsidiary
Intercontinental Pan Am began
to dot the South Pacific and Southeast
Asia with luxury hotels, some, such as
the Karachi International, built with
AID or State Department counterpart
funds. By 1965 Charles Trippe had com
pleted or was constructing hotels in
Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, New Zea
land, Pago Pago, Hong Kong, and Samoa.
Pan Am is thus an innkeeper in many
of the "exciting fun capitals of Asia
and the Pacific" to which it ferries its
R &R passengers. These hotels repre
sent a novel form of exploitation--while
the tourists are drawn to these cities
by their interest in Asian cultures,
most of the money they spend can be
safely returned to America, as long as
they stay at an Intercontinental Hotel.
.In the military buildup for Laos and
Vietnam the CRAF structure was not
called into action. Instead the govern
ment used charter contracts awarded on
the basis of military expecience and
CRAF cOJlDDi tment. Pan Am' s planning was
rewarded: from 1960 to 1963 its Pacific
Division charter revenues soared almost
300% (from $12.6 million to $35.6 mill
ion), and in 1964 Pan Am reinforced its
position by hiring General Laurence S.
Kuter as a vice president. Kuter had
been the commander of MATS, commander
of the Air Force in the Pacific, Comm
ander-in-Chief of NORAD, and a leading
advocate of military intervention in
Southeast Asia.
But with the assasination of Pres
ident Kennedy in November, 1963, White
House loyalties changed dramatically.
The Eastern financial and business
circles which Kennedy had favored were
pushed aside for the Texas and Calif
ornia crowd. The new in-group was made
up of LBJ's buddies, such as Robert Six,
President of Continental Airlines and
a collector of Oriental art, and James
Ling of the Houston conglomerate Ling
Tempco-Vought, owner of Braniff Airlines
of Dallas. In early 1964 the CIA picked
up Continental Airlines for work in
Southeast Asia to supplement its own
airline, Air America, whose facilities
were being strained by the sudden escal
ation in Vietnam. In 1965 Continental
took away Pan Am's government charter
business for Micronesia, and was in a
position to unseat Pan Am in the Central
and South Pacific. Robert Six hired
Pierre Salinger to manage publicity for
Continental's international division;
he hired former governor of Guam, Charl
ton Skinner, to ease things with the
natives; and he hired LBJ's former
chief-of-protocol to manage Washington.
The results were predictable. In
1962 Continental's charter operations
flew fewer than 4 million passenger
miles. By 1965 military escalation
pushed its charter mileage up to 253
million passenger miles, and in 1966
alone it jumped 390%, exceeding even
its regularly scheduled operations. Its
charter freight division also showed
enormous gains associated with the war,
rising from nothing in 1962 to 93 million
ton miles in 1967.
Braniff's rise was somewhat less
but still significant. Its
operations rose from just over
half a billion passenger miles in 1963,
16
to over a billion in 1967. In 1968 its
charter operations doubled again to
2 billion passenger miles, more than
twice the mileage of its regularly
scheduled operations.
Other airlines did well during the
war's early years too. TWA's charters
rose 650% in 1964, and 50% in 1965.
Northwest, Pan Am's weak competitor in
the Northern Pacific, increased its
annual charter operations from 61 mil
lion passenger miles in 1962 to 1.1
billion for 1967.
But for Pan Am, LBJ's escalation of the
war was a disaster. In the year follow
ing Kennedy's death, its Pacific charters
grew at a slower rate than its scheduled,
civilian operations. In the fiscal year
1965, while Continental's Pacific char
ters increased 25 times, Pan Am's drop
ped 33% from the previous year, and Pan
Am finally lost its position as the
leading charter airline in the Pacific.
The only airline with a scheduled stop
in Saigon, the airline that was depend
ing on its Pacific profits to pay for
its new .iets, now found its Pacific
growth rate falling off.
This alone might have been tolerable,
but the Civil Aeronautics Board was
re-opening the Airlines Route Case, and
Pan Am was vulnerable. The CAB was
legally required to conduct a periodic
review of all airlines operations, and
either to confirm the present route
structure and airlines allocations or
to expand the route structure and rediv
ide it among the competing applicants.
The CAB's judgements were made on the
rather vague criteria of the ability of
the present airlines and air routes to
meet "customer needs," and t he ability
of new route applicants to offer immed
iate, experienced service. Generally,
the vast expense of training experien
ced pilots and crews and building the
necessary hangars, terminals, and repair
facilities for fmmediate service on
routes they might win was so high that
few airlines could afford the
risk.
In the Pacific, however, the risks
were worth taking. Inflated fares over
the Pacific (13.5 per passenger mile,
San Francisco to Tokyo, vs. 7.4 per
mile, New York to London}, long distan
ces, and oligopoly had brough enormous
rewards to America's two .Pacific carriers.
Pan Am's relatively limited number of
Pacific flights gave it 50% of its total
profits, and Northwest Orient's Pacific
revenues overcame its domestic losses
to make it the most profitable American
airline.
Eager for the rewards of the Pacific
bonanza, Continental, Braniff, and TWA
were accumulating experience in trans
Pacific flying, building facilities, and
becoming familiar with the Pacific mar
ket--all at military expense on c o s t ~ l u s
contracts. And since the largest cust
omer in the Pacific was the U.S. mili
tary, these airlines could argue as well
as Pan Am that they were servicing
"customer need." The competition for
new routes was so fierce that Pan Am's
old central and south Pacific monopoly
would inevitably be broken; unless Pan
Am could get some of the new routes it
wanted, it would hold much the same
position it held in the Atlantic, the
leading airline in a glutted low-profit
market.
Juan Trippe hired Najeeb Halaby to
save the day. Najeeb Elias Halaby (Yale
Law '40), test pilot of the first Lock
heed jet, was chief of the Intelligence
Division for the Department of State and
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Inter
national Security Affairs during the early
years of the Cold War (1945-53). Balaby
concentrated his activities on military
work, such as founding the Air Force's
Aerospace Corp., until 1960 when he
stepped into politics by becoming the
manager of the Kennedy campaign for Los
Angeles. He was appointed Administrator
of the Federal Aviation Administration
(1961-65), where he became the prime
architect of the super-sonic transport.
In 1965 Juan Trippe made him a member
of Pan Am's board of directors, heir
apparent, and senior vice president.
17
Halaby a simple strategy: if
others could get into the charter busi
ness through the White House, he could
get his company into it through the
The crucial question was
what the military needed that Pan Am,
and no one else, could give? The answer
was R &R (rest and recreation). Busi
ness Week reported it this way:
While in Vietnam several years ago
(late 1965) he [Halaby] found that
troop morale was low because of a
lack of adequate recreation fac
Ilities. He proposed that Pan Am
use the piston planes it was phas
ingout of the Berlin air corridor
to ferry men from Saigon to Hong
Kong. R &R began in March, 1966.
In the first three months the
flights cost the Defense Depart
ment token $3, and Pan American
Airways $2,400,000.
"There' sna doubt that our earnings
could have been higher if we hadn't done
this," a Pan American spokesman
disingenuously noting that the planes
could have been used elsewhere. "But
think of all the young friends we're
making for Pan American." Pan Am put
13 obsolete planes on the R &R run,
and Week pointed out:
Important as these friends may
become later as customers, the
airline is probably gaining a more
immediate advantage Pan Am's
contribution to the Vietnamese
war effort undoubtedly will be
I
weighed [in parcelling out new and
expanded routes in the Pacific].
r Pan Am's R &R program has helped
the generals to continue the war by
I
making the year-long tour of duty a
more bearable experience for the Amer
ican G.I. It has saved old aircraft
from the scrap heap and put them to
work in the national interest. And in
the interest of Pan Am, in the first few
months of R &R service there was a
perceptible turnabout in Pan Am's Pac
ific charters (a turnabout only partly
due to the R &R flights themselves).
Within a year Pan Am's "service to the
nation" was up a measurable 358% and
once again it was the largest charter
operator in the Pacific.
The return of these charters was far
more important than their monetary val
ue, for they demonstrated Pentagon con
fidence in Pan Am's ab"ility to meet its
"customer needs" and Pentagon support
for its bid for new air routes. When
the long-anticipated Pacific Route
Hearings were finally called in 1967,
Pan Am got its coveted long-distance
great circle route from New York to
Tokyo and another from San Francisco/L.A.
to Tokyo, parallel to Northwest's old
route from Seattle via the great circle.
In no area was Pan Am's run to be dupl
icated by more than one airline, and no
airline accumulated anything approaching
Pan Am's total routage.
To be sure, Pan Am was not the only
beneficiary. The Civil Aeronautics
Board--with a majority of Qemocratic
appointees--proffered generous favors to
the Democratic lines, Continental and
Braniff. When the decision was passed
on to President Johnson, he insisted that
Continental and Braniff get Eastern's
routes in the Pacific but did not touch
Pan Am. Subsequent maneuvering under
Nixon has also left Pan Am safe. Clear
ly a near-monopoly has been transformed
into an oligopoly. But Pan Am will
manage as long as the market in the
Pacific continues to grow.
Predictions of Pacific market expan
sion depend on a rate of growth even
higher than that in the past. Although
the as yet undeveloped tourist industry
will become more important as additional
luxury hotels are constructed, even this
important source of passengers will not
be sufficient. Government, military,
and business personnel must continue to
travel in increasing numbers to fill Pan
Am's largantuan 747's.
Certainly intra-Asian travel will not
keep Pan American growing As Asian
18
nations develop to the point where they
can finance domestically owned national
airlines, their governments take steps
to guarantee them markets. Currency
problems and the balance of payments
make it imperative for the Japanese
government and business to force its
travelers to fly Japan Air Lines. The
same holds true in Australia, the Phil
ippines and India. In Vietnam Pan Am
is trying to guard against this poss
ibility by ingratiating itself with the
Thieu-Ky regime. The two lu xury 727' s
it has leased to Air Vietnam are pri
marily for the use of President Thieu
and his cabinet. Pan Am also has plans
to build Intercontinental Hotels in Sai
gon after the war. But it seems
unlikely that these gifts can
the force of growing Asian economic
nationalism. It 'is also unlikely that
any potential opening of China will
offer hope. Nixon's relaxation of the
trade boycott will promote a certain
amount of curious tourist travel to
Hong Kong, helping Pan Am, but no fore
seeable relaxation of tensions would let
Pan Am duplicate its service to Moscow
with to Peking.
In order for Pan Am to maintain its
strength, America must continue its
focus on Asia, American resources must
pour into the area, and government off
icials and soldiers must fly in ever
increasing numbers. Pan Am needs the
spectre of Communism and the looming
image of a China to draw
American interest and sovernment trav
elers.
Conclusion
A close review of Pan Am's recent
history leads one to question the con
sequences of its role in American foreign
policy. In the past the company's compe
titive practices and foreign relations
in Latin America have merited two major
Congressional reviews which have reveal
ed testimony of a highly controversial
nature but resulted in no legal action.
However, in Vietnam and t he Pacific,
Pan Am's eagerness to improve the tactics
of military intervention for the sake
of filling its over-expanded jet fleet,
and its close cooperation with the
military effort in Vietnam to insure its
Pacific expansion are actions which raise
serious questions about America's abil
ity to base its military withdrawal on
purely political criteria. The problem
with subcontracting the war to private
corporations is that their profit struc
tures become dependent upon the contin
uance of the conflict and they resist
any sudden change in policy which pru
dent political judgement may require.
There is a grave danger that Pan Am's
dependence on its Pacific expansion is
making it a major barrier to- speedy
withdrawal from Vietnam and an advocate
of future interventions in the name of
"freedom. "
--This article was prepared with
the cooperation af CCAS members
Ray Grantham, James Burnham,
Cathleen McCoy, and Leonard
Adams.
19
China's Economic Growth:
Leap or Creep?
COMMENTS ON SOME RECENT PEKINOLOGICAL REVISIONISM
CARL RISKIN
The field of Chinese Economic Studies
has reached a new low -- in estimates
of China's recent economic growth, that
is. Manipulating growth rates is
an old and honored art form, many of
whose techniques, fashioned in ex
periments on the Soviet Union over
the past four or five decades, have
been exercised with relish on the
slim volume of numbers which the
Chinese have released to the world.
The smaller the body of raw data, the
more and stronger the assumptions
that have to be made to calculate a
growth rate, and in the case of China
we have assumptions of herculean pro
portions. Drawing conclusions and
comparisons from such exercises is
a hazardous enterprise. Alexander
Eckstein said of one such c ompar
ison, which sought to demonstrate
that the Chinese suffered a lower
standard of living in 1957 than in
1933, that it "is essentia1:ty like
a pyrami.d, based on a series of
assumptions each of which can be
challenged. Thus, if anyone of
the assumptions is invalidated the
whole structure collapses like a
house of cards."l
But a collapsing house of cards
can be easily rebuilt. The favorite
deck is the First Five Year Plan
(FFYP) period (1953-57), for which
the cards are felt to be most re
liable, and are certainly most nu
merous. Starting with the highest.
available growth rates now include:
a of the official
rate, it at 9 percent per
annum; C.M. Li's reconstruction
of 8.8 percent; Hoilister's esti
mate of 8.6 percent; the Liu-
Yeh "adjusted estimate" with
"corrections for reliability", of
6 percent; and an estimate from Wu et
a1 of 5.6 percent.
2
Some of these estimates have been
criticized for depending upon assump
tions which uniformly militate against
a high growth rate. 3. Nevertheless,
even the lowest of them constitutes
a highly respectable performaftce on
the part 0 f a country beginning from
a backward economic base as did China
in the early 1950's.
Now, however, China's FFYP period
performance has been re-evaluated in
a manner which fundamentally threatens
its respectable image. Since most
Western economists who watch China
feel that the FFYF period encompassed
the years of most successful and sus
tained growth in the short history
of the People's Republic, an attack on
the growth record of this period would
raise basic questions about whether any
substantial economic development has
occurred in China since 1949. Those
convinced of the ineptitude of Communist
systems would be rid of an embarrassing
counter-example. Moreover, the econo
mics of the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural Revolution would seem more
comprehensible against a background of
prior failure.
The new estimate comes in the form
of a Rand Corporatton Memorandum by
Frederick M. Cone. The following para
graphs are not an attempt to review Cone's
worK as a whole, but only to evaluate
the accuracy an d logic of his estimate
of the Chinese growth rate.
In certain respects, it has been
20
discovered, the industrial structures
of many countries fall into a fairly
regular pattern depending upon
level of economic development. Thus
there is a range of values, in inter
national experience, for the pro
portion of a country's national in
come which originates in agriculture.
At which end of the range a given
country finds itself depends a good
deal upon how "developed" that c oun
try is, measured in terms of per
capita income.
5
But it would be
surprising to find a country whose
industrial structure not only did
not conform closely to expectations
based u ~ o n its level of develop
ment, but took on values far from
those of any other country in our
experience. This is wha-t Cone
claims to have found in China.
Specifically, the ratio of
product per worker in manufac
turing, mining and construction
(the M sector) to that in Ag
riculture (the A sector) ranges
internationally from slightly
over one, to a high of 2.7 for
the Soviet Union after World War 11.
6
But for China during the FFYP peribd,
according to Cone, product per worker
in the M sector was eighteen times that
in the A sector !
This aberration Cone takes as
evidence of grossly inflated prices in
the Chinese M sector, which causes the
output of the M sector to be exaggerated
relative to that of the rest of the
economy. Now it happens that the most
rapidly growing part of the Chinese
economy in the 1950's was precisely
the M sector. If its importance in the
whole economy is exaggerated, then the
growth rate of the whole eco nomy (which
is but an average of the growth rates
of the different parts) will seem to be
much higher than it "actuallyH was. This
is the charge Cone brings against previous
to China other eountries' ratios
of product per worker in the M
sector to that in the A sector. This
enables him to deflate the size of
Chinese industrial output, reduce
its importance in the economy, and
thus lower the overall rate of growth.
Both the Soviet Union and India are
pressed into service to this end.
The Soviet ratio yields an average
Chinese growth rate during 1952-57 of
3.5 percent per year, while the
Indian ratio yields one of 3 percent,
significantly lower than the rate of
growth of the Indian economy during the
1950's. Since in the course of his
exercise CGne makes several assumptions
which he believes favor the case for a
high Chinese growth rate. he regards
these results as maximum estimates.
But even if one is willing to be ~ e n e
rous and accept them, Cone is still
able to flourish the growth rates of 44
countries, of which only 11 were lower
than China's during 1952-57. To rub
salt in the wound, these 11 were mostly
advanced countries which did not even
have to grow fast. Thus, China did es
pecially badly in comparison with other
underdeveloped countries! This analy
sis sees the much-vaunted "Chinese
model" of development as nothing but a
paper dragon.
There are SOme strong theoretical
objections to Cone's methods, however.
They pertain particularly to the com
parison with the Soviet Union. An
essential part of the development prob
lem of countries like China in the
1950's is that their rate of develop
ment is substantially lower than that
of the advanced countries in their pre
industia1 phases. Moreover,
the developed countries of today,
in their pre-industrial phases,
represented small population
groups None of the coun
tries in this group had appre
estimates of Chinese growth(Cone, pp.37-39).
ciably more than 30 million
people before the process of
To eliminate the over-pricing
industrialization had begun. 7
phenomenon, Cone simply applies
21
Given these differences, not only is
there no reason to expect that the
inter-sectoral productivity ratios in
contemporary China should look anything
like those of "advanced" countries, but
there is little basis of comparison
with the same countries in their "pre
industrial" periods or with curren tly
underdeveloped countries with small
populations. Yet, with the exception
of Brazil, all of the 44 countries men
tioned above with which Cone compares
China fall into one of these categories.8
The reason for objecting to such com
parisons is that when modern industry
is introduced into a country with as
low a per capita income as China's in
the 1950's, the difference between la-:
bor productivity in that industry and
labor productivity in traditional agri
culture is likely to be very large -
much larger than in an advanced country,
an advanced country a hundred years ago,
or a poor country with a small ratio of
population to arable land. Generally
speaking, "the underdeveloped coun
tries are farther behind the developed
countries in product per worker in
agriculture than they are in product
per worker in the non-agricultural
sectors.,,9 And since, as Kuznets
shows, an "agricultural revolution"
or marked increase in output per worker
in agriculture seelUS to have been a
precondition of develop
ment in today's advancl'd countries,lO
this contrast also hol.ds as between
poor countries today and advanced coun
tries in the early stages of their in
dustrializaion. ll
Still, while my argument might jus
tify expecting some difference between
the M:A ratios of China and, say, the
Soviet Union, a difference of the magni
tude of 6-to-l, such as Cone claims to
have found, is too high to justify on
such grounds. Here we must not e that
the same exercise has been carried out
by T.C. Liu (whose previous labors had
brought the Chinese growth rate down by
one-third
12
) with no such startling
results.
13
Liu's calculations Put the ratio
of product per worker in China's M sec
tor to product per worker in her A sec
tor at about 3.5, or only 30 percent
higher (rather than six times higher)
than that of the Soviet Union. More
over, this is an average figure for
the FFYP period. For 1952, the year
before the start of the plan, China's
ratio turns out to be only 2.8
14
or
about the same as the Soviet ratio.
Clearly there is no case to be made
here for massive overpricing of indus
trial goods in China relative to the
Soviet Union.
The difference between the two esti
mates stems from the proper inclusion
by Liu in China's M sector of many low
productivity workers in traditional
activities. Cone simply leaves them
out. Nor is Liu puzzled by the fact
that the M:A ratio for the FFYP period
in China is high relative to those of
other countries. He points out that
"much greater knowledge and training
are required of workers" in nonagricul
tural activities than in "the primitive
agricultural sector" in China, which
would explain such a difference.
15
Moreover, the picture he paints -- of
increasing output in Chinese industry
due to the introduction of new machin
ery and equipment but few new.workers,
while labor productivity in agriculture
remained very low -- is consistent both
with our knowledge of Chinese develop
ment strategy at that time, and with
commonly held views regarding the nature
of the development problem in the mid
twentieth century.
The application of Indian structural
f
ratios to China is less questionamle in
I
theory, since both are heavily populated
countries beginning their development
programs from roughly similar levels of
,
I
backwardness. But problems of defini
tion, coverage and comparability loom
I
large in Cone's analysis. To mention
just 50me of the more glaring problems,
the Iadian figures for output are from f
the 1948-53,16 before indus
tril'dization had started in earnest,
t
22
while China's are from 1952-51, when
industry was growing rapidly. The fig
ures for China omit an important part
of the construction industry (work bri
gades). Agricultural output for India
includes farmers' processing (storing,
processing and transporting) of
but apparently excludes such process
ing for China. Perhaps most seriously,
Indian labor force figures are limited
to self-supporting persons, excluding
earning dependents and persons whose
industry and status were unclassifiable.
Most likely for this reason, the Indian
labor force to which Cone's calculations
apply constitutes only 29 percent of
the total Indian population, whereas
the Chinese labor force used makes up
45 percent of her population.
17
It is
not permissible to reduce the Chinese
structure to the Indian until the sets
of statistics used are at least broadly
comparable both in definition and in
coverage.
Cone's analysis, then, does not jus
tify a drastic revision of our evalua
tion of China's economic growth in the
1950's. But a certain malaise lingers
from this discussion. After all, if
there is so much uncertainty about the
comparability of data from different
countries, how much significance can
be attached to international compari
sons based upon growth rates? More
over, it is almost certainly true that
China's method of financing her budget
by relying heavily upon state enter
prise profits rather than taxes, toge
ther with certain peculiarities in her
method of calculating constant prices,18
have given rise to some artificial
inflation of her industrial production
statistics in the 1950's.19 The point
is that this is largely a tempest in a
teapot. It concerns the paper appear
ance of what the Chinese have done -
not even whether they have actually
produced so many tons of steel and so
many bushels of grain over a given
iod of time, but how to value them. 0
While accurate and standard systems
of evaluation are doubtless important
for some purposes (such as making inter
national comparisons), and while it is
important to defend the Chinese growth
record of the 1950's, creditable or not
(and it was), from unfounded assaults,
let us not be under the illusion that
we are discussing important factors in
economic development. Especially in
the short run, growth rates, even if com
pletely accurate and standardized for all
countries, mean very little. It is
quite possible for a small country to
generate impressive growth rates partly
on the basis of mushrooming bordellos
and American bases, or for the "green
revolution" in India to take forms
which promise growing class stratifica
t.ion in the countryside and the increased
prospect of yrowth-disrupting rural
revolution. 2
The real question regarding China's
growth potential is whether Chinese com
munism free of foreign domination and
the worst internally-generated barriers
to economic development can evolve a
social system under which the population
will willingly make heavy sacrifices
over an extended period of time for
material results largely in the future.
22
In another recent book on the Chinese
economy, an industrial management
specialist at D.C.L.A. examines in
detail China's response to this question
and leaves little room for doubt that
whatever the vagaries of the growth rate
mongers, in the things that count for the
future the Chinese have already compiled
an impressive record.
23
FOOTNOTES
1. Eckstein, Alexander, 1967. Testi
mony before the Joint Economic Committee
of Congress, in Mainland China in the
World Econemy,<p.S. Government Printing
Office) p. 212.
2. Liu, T. C. and K. C. Yeh, 1965, The
Economy of the Chinese Mainland, 1933
1959,(Princeton) p. 22, Li, Choh-ming,
1959, Economic Development of Communist
China,(Berke1ey) p. 106; Hollister, Wil
liam W., 1958, China's National
23
Product and Social Accounts, 1950-1957,
(Glencoe, Illinois), p.2; Liu-Yeh, ibid.,
p. 213; Wu, Y.L., .F.P. Hoeber, and
M. Rockwell, 1963, The Economic Poten
tial of Communist China, Vol 1,(Menlo
Park,-California) p. 241. A
of these different estimates can be
found in Liu, T. C., 1968, "Quantitative
Trends in the Economy," in Economic
Trends in Communist China, Eckstein,
Galensoo-and Chen, ed.,(Chicago) pp.
95-119.
3. See for eKample a review of Liu
Yeh by Dernberger: Dernberger, Robert
F., Journal of Political Vol
73, No.4, (Augus t, 1965). Gurley has
criticized the Liu-Yeh estimates in
an unpublished paper., as has Richman,
Riclunan, Barry .M., 1969, Industrial'
Society in Communist ghina, (New York)
Chapter 7. An exchange on this issue
between several participants can be
found in Ho and Tsou, Ho Ping-ti, and
Tang Tsou, 1968, China in Crisis, Vol.
I, Book 2,(Chicag9-'-- .
4. "Chinese Industrial Growth: Over
all level of Investment and its
to General Growth Rate, It Memorandum
RM-5841-PR!ISA, May 1969. This is the
third of a series of memoranda dealing
with the economy of China and is to some
degree based upon the other two. These
are "Chinese Industrial Growth: Brief
Studies of Selected Investment Areas,"
RM-5625-PR!ISA, November 1968; and
"Chinese Industria'! Growth: Investment
Outlays, 1952-1957," RM-S662-PR!ISA,
November 1968.
5. The pioneer at this sort of inves
tigation is Simon Kuznets. A conven
ient introduction to it and its findings
is to be found in Kuznets, 1959, Six
Lectures on Economic Growth, (Glencoe,
Illinois) , Lecture III.
6. Kuznets, 1963, "A Comparative Ap
praisal," Ch. VIII of Bergson and Kuz
nets, ed., Economic Trends in the Soviet
Union (Cambridge, Mass .), p. 34a.
7. Kuznets, 1963, "Underdeveloped
Countries and the Pre-Industrial Phase
in the Advanced Countries," in Agarwala
and Singh, The Economics of Underdevelop
ment, (New York), p. 147
8. Kuznets, "A Comparative Appraisal,"
Table VIII. 4, p. 340.
9. Kuznets, Six Lectures on Economic
Growth, p. 54.
10. Ibid., pp. 59-60.
11. It is noteworthy that Cone dis
cusses this objection in an Appendix de
signed to justify applying "other country"
weights to an underdeveloped country.
But in the simple model'he presents to
clinch his point " he assumes that there
are no significant producti\f'ity diffe
rences between the countries concerned,
thus assuming away the problem. See
Appendix C, pp.
Liu-Yeh, The Economy of the
Chinese Mainland 1933-1959, p. 213.
13. Liu, T.C., "Quantitative Trends
in the Economy," pp. 123-::j.28.
1968, "Economic De
velopmen . 1949
1965," in ed., China in
Crisis, Vol. on'e. -Boe< two (Chicago;,
pp. 626, 627,
14. Liu, T.C., "Quantitative Trends
in the Economy," p. 124.
15. Ibid., p. 127.
16. Not 1950-58, as Cone's Table 12,
p. 45, incorrectly states. See Cone's
source:' . Kuzne t s, Simon, 1957. "Quant i
tative Aspects of the Economic Growth
of Nations, II," in Economic Development
and Cultural Change, July, 1957. Appen
dix Table 1, pp. 62ff.
17. India's population and labor
force statistics are taken from the Uni
ted Nations Demographic Yearbook, 1955.
The industrial distribution of labor
force is on p. 536. Chinese population
24
is from Hou, Chi-ming, 1968, "Man
power, Employment and Unemployment,1t in
Eckstein, Ga1enson and Liu, ed., Eco
nomic Trends in Communist Ch ina, (Chicago)
p. 332; and employment distribution from
Liu-Yeh, The Efonomy of the Chinese Main
land 1933-1959, Table II, p. 69.
18. Li, Economic Development of Com
munist China, ch. II.
Chao, Kang, 1965,. The Rate and
Pattern of Industrial Growth in-comm;nrst
China, (Ann Arbor, Michigan) ch. III.
19. It is also true that rates
for other countries are affected by mono
poly pricing praetices in in dustry, which
raise industrial output values above
their "true" factor cost level.
20. The difference between the offi
cial Chinese government statistics and
those of both T.C. Liu CODe, on the
other hand, does contain an important
"real" element.
.21. Frankel, Francine R., 1969,
"India's New of Agricultural
Development: Political Costs of Agra
rian Modernization," Journal of Asian
Studies, August, 1969-.--- -- --
. 22. This is an oversimple formu
lation, since improved health and sani
tation, access to literacy, and assurance
against starvation are-certainly substan
tial material improvements brought about
in the last twenty years.
23. Sec Barry M. Richman, Industrial
Society in Communist China. Ceuain de
ficiencies in Richman's understanding
and handling of "Maoist ideology" detract
little from his illumination of the links
between soeial and political changes and
industrial development in China.
ICDp
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Inter:ation.ale le..D6sarmement et la Paix
Internatlonale KonfoderatlOn fur Abr-ustung und Frieden
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30
The Security Treaty System andthe
Japanese Military-Industrial Complex
HERBERT P. BIX
INTRODUCTION
Recently much discussion has focused
on the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, first
signed in September, 1951, renewed in a
more equitable form in 1960, and up for
renewal again in 1970. Much less
attention has been paid the U.S.-Japan
military-economic relationship shaped
largely by adminstrative agreements that
followed in the wake of the first Secu
rity Treaty. This article deals with
that military-economic relationship and
other aspects of recent U.S.-Japanese
relations relevant to the discussion of
contemporary American imperialism in
Asia.
I will try to show thatarglBDents in
support of the U.S.-Japan military
alliance fail to recognize that Japan
has already rearmed on a scale sufficienL
to pose a threat to her neighbors.
Far from deterring this development,
the U.S.-Japan alliance system has
actually facilitated it. Japan's re
armament, moreover, has been accompa
nied by the re-emergence of a military
industrial nexus which is becoming
increasingly interrelated with the
American military-industrial complex.
The attempt by Japan's conservative
rulers to legitimize and promote that
complex and define a new foreign policy
role for the Seventies poses the greatest
danger that postwar Japanese democracy
has yet had to face.
Apologists far the Security Treaty
have dowoplayed the long-standing
American policy of pressuring Japan to
rearm and assume a policeman's
role in Asia, and its political and
economic consequences for Japanese
society. They have been equally un
critical of American "cultural" activities
in behalf of conservative Japanese union
ists and anti-Marxist intellectuals. Yet
ever since Occupation authorities defined
a Itstable
lt
Japan as one in which Japanese
labor was politically neutralized, policy
makers in both countries have tended to
regard the Socialist and Communist-led
labor movement and the Marxist intellectuals
who support it as common internal enemies,
despite the fact that they have been the
staunchest defenders of democratic liber
ties in Japan.
In the last part of the article I
question the realism of this policy stance.
I suggest that the American policy of
weakening and discrediting the forces
on the left in Japan has simply been the
reverse side of the policy of spurring on
Japanese rearmament.
Part I Japan's Present Military Posture
Japan has rearmed and already possesses
formidable military strength. A bare
listing of facts about her Self-Defense
Forces indicates why Japan is now rated
6th or 7th in the world in terms of actual
military power.
The Ground Self-Defense Force (G.S.D.F.)
is expected to have 180,000 men 1971
with a volunteer reserve of over 30,000.
1
While small, this army has a high propor
tion of officers and non-coms and could
easily be expanded to millions if the
Constitutionwere revised and a Conscrip
tion law enacted.
2
Under the present
Third Five Year Plan the G.S.D.F. has
been equipped with Japanese-made small
arms, anti-tank rockets, and heavy tanks.
For anti-aircraft defenses it has auto
rna tic, radar-:-guided, 35 mm. Swiss-<iesigned
31
guns and several battalions of HAWK mis
siles. Its air support component is
also being -augmented with 60 Hughe-s
reconnaissance and command helicopters
and 106 Japanese-manufactured Bell
Iroquis troop-carrying helicopters.
Japan's Maritime Self-Defense
Force (M.S.D.F.) is the third most
powerful navy in the Pacific after
those of the U.S. and the Soviet
Union. According to the latest Jane's
figures, it has 9 diesel-powered sub
marines, 26 destroyers'including one
guided missile type, 16 frigates, 20
fast patrol vessels and 155 assorted
support ships, motor torpedo boats,
landing ships, and service craft. It
also has an air component of 190 fighter
aircraft and 50 helicopters.
3
This
naval arsenal will soon be beefed up
and a naval reserve force started.
M.S.D.F. contingency planning for the
1970's is said to call for the deployment
of ships and aircraft to Singapore "to
protect Japanese shipping in the event of
serious trouble in Hong Kong. "4 The
cruise of a Japanese flotilla squadron
through the strategic Malacca Straits,
between Malaysia and Sumatra, and its
participation in naval maneuvers with
Australian and Malaysian warships during
the summer of 1969, was probably correctly
judged as the "prelude to a future: .
Japanese naval presence in Southeast
Asia. itS
The Air Force (A.S.D.F.),
with 1,530 aircraft, was recently rated
by !!! Force magazine as the most
powerful in Asia after the U.S. and
Russia.
6
It has 200 Fl04J's, 300 F86D
and F86F fighters, Nike-Ajax(surface
to-air) missiles, 400 jet trainers, and
30 large Sikorsky helicopters. The
Nike-Hercules missiles which she is now
manufacturing provide Japan with an
for a missile-type nuclear delivery
system.
7
"This however, will not be
the first or only nuclear
system Japan possesses. The
Japanese-manufactured EIKO (Fl04J)
presently in service, can carry a
nuclear bomb anywhere within a 700-mile
radius .
ft8
In the 1970's Japan will
acquire a third nuclear delivery option
as the F4E a long-range fighter
bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons,
becomes the mainstay of the A.S.D.F. It
is interesting to note that the Japanese
government in 1960
. held that the A.S.D.F. could
not be equipped with any kind
of bomber aircraft; later it said
that Japan could not possess
fighter bombers with long flying
range but could have such an air
craft whose cruising range was
short; now the A.S.D.F. is in the
process of acquiring a fighter
bomber with a radius of 3,700
kilomet res . 9
On the assumption that "offense is the
best defense," her officers speak of
building a 5,000 plane'airforce, such
as Japan had during World War II.
Needless to say, this military capa
bility does not even begin to suggest Ja
pan's economic potential for waging conve n
tional'war. That is to be seen in the
fact that Japan has the third largest
GNP in the wor11: l45'billion in 1968
and expected to reach from 500 to
billion by the end of the Seventies.
Moreover, it is the second largest steel
producer in the world. Economically
and militarily Japan is a giant among
nations. Compared with two of her
hypothetical adversaries--North Korea
and China--she is not only a giant but
an increasingly ominous threat in her
own right. In the late Forties and Fifties
China and North Korea viewed the American
domination of Japan as a serious threat
to their own security; today they have
good reason to place increasing stress
on Japan itself and not just the U.S.
presence there.
In sea power, Japan has a striking
advantage. North Korea's navy consists
of 2 submarines, 10 fleet minesweepers,
and 109 assorted types of coastal patrol
boats. The Chinese, although possessing
a large number of ships dating from World
32
War II, have no surface fleet worthy
of the name. They do have an underseas
fleet of 33 diesel-powered submarines
incl uding one Soviet "G" class sub
with ballistic missile tubes. So far
as is known the latter has never been
ocean-tested.
On paper North Korea and China
appear to have adequate air forces.
North Korea has S90 aircraft. China,
responsible for defending vast stretches
of land and sea borders, is estimated
to have 2,500 combat aircraft. But
most of these are "early model MIG-ISs
and MIG-17s, with a lesser number of
MIG-19s and HIG-2ls." China's present
bomber capability consists of 12 copies
of our old B29 and about 150 Il-28
lfght bombers. "Its missile program is
lagging. There are no signs of prepa
rations 'for deploying medium range
missiles' nor of preparations for the
oceanic testing ICBMs require."ll
These facts show that neither China
nor North Korea is capable. let alone
shows intention, of threatening Japan or
its Pacific shipping lanes. On the other
hand, from their point of view there is
an objective basis for viewing
military build-up with horror. To the
Chinese and North Koreans Japan's defense
plans are an unsettling factor,not a
stabilizing one, in the Asian balance of
power. More disturbing to them is the
fact that at least since 1965, Japan's
naval and air self-defense forces have
been conducting joint maneuvers with
South Korean, Nationalist Chinese, and
Seventh Fleet forces, all of which are
coordinated with overall U.S. strategic
planning for Asia.
Chinese and North Korean fears of Ja
pan have been reinforced by the growth of
Japanese nationalism in the Sixties and
by periodic glimpses of the thinking of
the new Japanese military establishment.
On 1, 1962, for example the Tokyo
Shimbun reported an alleged U.S.-Japan
plan for Japanese-South Korean military
cooperation. The plan called for 1) the
permanent stationing in Seoul of a
Japanese Self-Defense Force official
and "short term exchanges of military
personnel"-; 2) repairing and out
fitting of South Korean military
aircraft and ships in Japan; 3.) linking
of the Japanese air defense system with
the Taiwanese and South Korean air
defense systems flso that combined air
action \V'ill be possible", and 4) Japanese
and South Korean naval cooperation in
blockading the Tsushima Straits in the
event of an emergency.12 Three years
later, on June 22. 1965, a Japan-South
Korea "nonnalization" treaty was signed,
marking significant Japanese involvement
in the anti-communist military set-up
in South Korea. During the last stages
of negotiations for this- oppo
sition members of the South Korean
national assembly charged the Japanese
with conducting the talks on the basis
of a secret U.S.-Japan understanding
that called for, among other things ..
equipping South Korean forces with
Japanese, rather than American-manufac
tured weapons and munitions. Since
that treaty was signed, South Korean
pilots have been receiv.ing
flight training in Japan, and Japanese
soldiers are being taught Korean at
various Self-Defense Force schools such
as the one at Maizuru.
13
An equally ominous disclosure of the
thinking of the Japanese military estab
lishment was the celebrated Three Arrows
Incident. The "Three Arrows Studylt
tMitsuya Kenkyu} consisted of top-secret
operations plans drawn up by the Japan
Defense Agency between February and June,
1963, upon prodding from the Pentagon.
14
That was the year Ngo Diem was over
thrown (in November}, and it is likely
that the Pentagon had made preparations
prior to the overthrow for a major
escalation of the in Vietnam,
which took into account the possibility
of the Chineae or North KGre-ans opening
a second front in the Far East to- relieve
pressure on the Vietnamese. Thus the
Japanese Defense Agency formulated plans
to meet the contingency of a renewed war
in KOrea. This study was the largest
project of its kind the Defense. Agency
33
had ever -undertaken.
The of the Three Arrows was
revealed on February 10, 1965 (three
days after the began its three year
long bombing of North Vietnam), when.a
Socialist representative in the Diet
charged "that the Japanese military were
planning a coup andre-establish
ment of an authoritarian type of . .govern
ment.-
II
As reported in the Japanese
press and summarized.in an article by.
Matsueda and C.E. More.., the plans
contained the following points:
1. Japan will be an
the United States Far Eastern
strategy and as will 'serve as
the base for U.S. operations.
1. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces
(S.D.F.) will train wiLh U.S.,
South Korean, and FODll0:San troops.
3. In case of another crisis, the
S.D.F:. will fulfUl de'fensive
ments _hieb include block
ade eastern of China and
suppo!CftingU. S. offrensive action by
serdng as a resenwe force in
lCorea and Mancimria..
4. Dur_ the emer.,aency period, aiD.
actiV:i.tywill _ c.conducted 011 ,a lhasiLs
:of tDtal mobilimttion. Necessaqr
to coatrol and
indUS!br,y, COlIIIIlgnticaions, traDiliqlfi)!I'ta
tioll.ii.nformat:ialm!media and a1l.lI. eco-:
nomic activity. ifmcl.uding the ail1Lo
catioa cof civi1:i1an:and m ilitalV
materitaU" alld -pr.il.lIes, banks aDd
finaacia[ will be
estabU.hed.15
All to
ta.estigate weakened
c.id.1ian contDl over the :military raised
by dae Three Alrrows Study were rebuffed.
The Sato govermment not only appointed
a foaaer chief of tbe Defense Agency to
bead subcommittee to investigate the
affair. but also .anctioned the Defense
Agency's -refusal to turn over key -d ocu
ments to the subcommittee.
Most American commentators on U.S.
'Japanese -relations minimize Japan's
military strength by emphasizing, usually
with -tUsapproval, the low (less tban one
per cent) ratio of iter defense appro
priations to her Gross National Product
as compared with other countries. Japan's
enormous GNP, its rapid increase over
the past decade, and the "special pro
curements" of-the U.s. military in Japan,
such eomparisons in terms
of percentage or GNP misleading. A
glance at the trend of Japan's defense
budget rev-eals just bow seriaus her
leaders have been about defense. The
rate of increase of Japan's defense
expenditure went from 453 billion yen
during the First Defense Plan (1957
1960) .to 1,180 billion yen during the
Second. Since 1960, in fact, Japan has
increased-ber defense spending faster
than any in the world with
the possible of the U.S.1
6
II TbeJapanese Military
. Industrial Complex
Japan's modern defense industry was
Tevived on a small scale as a repair
industry for the Occupation Forces within
a few years after the end of World War II.
But for pEactical purposes the origins of
the Japanese complex
can be dated from the start of the Korean
War, when General MacArthur reluctantly
ordered the illegal rearmament of Japan
i.nthe guise of an expansion of the
National Police Reserve. At the same
time, the American government initiated
a "special procurements" program to meet
the needs of its Japan-based Eighth
Army and Fifth Air Force. Within one
'Year, special procurements income from
construction of bases and the purchase
of war materials had started Japan on
the road to economic recovery and a more
favorable balance of payments.
Two facts about the procure
ments program need to be emphasized.
One is that it did not end with the
Korean War. Between 1951 and 1960,
special procurements amounted to over
34
six billion dollars, an average
of 600 million dollars annually.
Even as late as 1958-59 they
were "sufficient to pay for
about 14 per cent af (Japanese)
imports, II an important boon
for a country with a chronic
balance of payments problem.
17
Just as special procurements
played a crucial role in Japan's
economic recovery in the Fifties,
war procurements connected with
the Vietnam War have contributed
to Japan's fantastically high
growth rate in the late Sixties.
In 1965-66, Japan's GNP "rose
2.7 per cent; in 1966-61,
in comparison. it rose by 7 .5
per cent
lll8
In that year,
direct U.S. contracts
alone with Japanese firms came
to approximately 505 million
dollars, "which equaled nearly
half that year's budget alloca
tion for defense," while other
indirect Vietnam War-related
contracts for the delivery
of goods to the U.S., South
Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, and
the Philippines were worth
1.2 billion dollars to Japanese
industry.19 American war spend
ing, in short, has been an
factor in revitaliz
ing Japanese capitalism just
as it has been in sustaining
a prosperous American capital
ism.
The second fact to be noted
about special procurements i s
that they started Japanese
industry towards a military
industrial complex. According
a recent study Japanese
government-business relations
by Yale University's Chitoshi
Yanaga, by January, 1951,
eight months prior to the end
of the Occupation and the
signing of the first Security
Treaty, "72 per cent of (Japan's]
production capacity was directly
engaged in the manufacture 0 f
weapons."
20
A survey by the
Ministry-of InternatianalTrade
and Industry in the autumn of
1952 disclosed over. 160 companies
making weapons and munitions
and over 30 aircraft manufac
turing concerns. Not surpris
ingly, SCAP's General Order
Number prohibiting the
manufacture of weapons,_ was
abolished in March of 1952.
21
As Japan's involvement in
production
during 1952, conservative forces
began to differ over how to
meet the economic crisis that
was anticipated with the ending
of the Korean War. Represen
tatives of the shipbuilding,
fishing, and textile industries
wanted to re-establish economic
and political relations with
the Soviet Union and the People's
Republic of China. Tbe more
influential segments of the
ruling class, however, regarded:
the defense sector even at this
early date as crucial to Japan's
continued economic growth.
They argued that Japan could
best weather the decline in
Korean War spending by strength
ening ecOnomic ties with the
U.S. and deve1pping defense
production after regaining
independence. In response to
pressure 0 f this sort, the
Japanese government adopted
its first postwar rearmament
policy Dn November 10. 1952.
Two days later. nas the first
formal step toward underwriting
Japanese rearmament," the U.S.
signed a lend-lease agreement
with Japan.
22
The key agreement of the
period of the first American
military alliance with Japan
was the U.S.-Japan Mutual
DefensaAssistance Agreement
(MDA), signed by the Yoshida
government on March 8, 19-54,
after a year of lengthy nego
tiating. Yoshida himself,
1
35
it should be noted, had desired the
rearmament of Japan to follow rather
than the completion of
economic reconstruction, and therefore
disagreed with Dulles over the "speed
at vhleh rea"I'lD8Jl'ent should proceed.
On the basis "Of the MDA, Japan's
modern armed forces were organiz"ed:
laws were enacted setting up the
Japan Defense Agency (JDA) , equivalent
to a ministry of war in all but name,
and the Self-Defense Forces; the police
system was r.ecentralized to bolster
internal security; a Defense Secrets
Protection Law was enacted; and other
laws were passed to consolidate the
defense industry.23 Underlying the
however, was a U.S.-Japanese
understanding on matters that were
other than military in
The MDA was negotiated during a
time of profound crisis and
in American policy toward As i.a. 2 .
The French were on the verge of defeat
in Indo-China and the American objective
was to prevent that region from falling
into the hands of the communists,
i.e., genuinely nationalist forces
who would not be subservient to the
interests of American capitalism.
Such an eventuality, by cutting South
east Asia off from the world capitalist
market, would not only deprive the
American empire of vast" raw material
resources, but" also force newly inde
pendent Japan to normalize relations
with her natural trading partners,
her communist neighbors. The American
sponsored rearmament of Japan was
thus paralleled by the economic objec
tive of fitting Japanese exports into
the agricultural economies of South
east Asia.
25
Consequently, while "the"
Self-Defense Forces were being reor
ganized and with American
weapons, the "Society for Asian Eco
nomic Cooperation (Asia Society)
was launched under the aegis of the
Foreign Office" to facilitate Japan's
penetration of Southeast
Asia.
The significance of the stepped
up American efforts after 1954 to aid
Japanese trade expansion in Southeast
Asia becomes still clearer when it is
remembered that since the end of 1947
the U.S. had been seeking to control I
the worldwide flow of trade in accordance
4
with its own political criteria of
I
anti-communism. 27 This American-initiated
economic warfare against the communist
bloc developed from the export licensing
regulations of December 31, 1947 and
January IS, 1948, through the Marshall
Aid Law, to the February 28, 1949
Export Control Act which is still in
force. It was strengthened in 1950-
both before and immediately after the
outbreak of the Korean War--and rational
ized the next year in the form of the
"Cannon Amendment" and the Batle
Act. Internationally, it was administered
through a highly secret organization
based in Paris known as"CG-Cocom"
or simply Cocom. "The original members
of both CG (the Consultative Group)
and Cocom (the Coordinating Committee)
were England, France, Italy, the Nether
lands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the
U.S . In early 1950 Norway,
Canada and West Germany joined. ,,28
In October, 1950, when MacArthur launched
a counter-invasion of North Korea,
SCAP embargoed all Japanese trade with
China, then at a postwar peak of
$35,760,000, or 3.3 per cent of Occupied
Japan's total foreign trade.
29
Two
later, in September, 1952, Japan
became" a member of both Cocom and a
special China Committee ("Chincom")
which was appointed that month to
administer the embargo against Chinese
trade.
Although it has not yet been confirmed,
there may have been, as a British
diplomat has charged, a secret agreement
attached to the U.S.-Japan peace treaty
which actually stipulated that Japan
would continue to adhere to the
regula
tions against China. 0 Assuming this
is true, Japan's conservative leaders
probably were motivated less by "giri"
16
(sense of debt) to their American
conquerors than by promises of substan
tial compensations in Southeast Asia
for not trading with China on any mean
ingful scale. It is unlikely that
they wanted to "punish" the Chinese
leaders, or cause economic pain and
suffering to the Chinese people, or
force internal policy changes in China
--the three reasons originally cited
by American leaders for their actions
against China.
Yet Japan always applied the trade
controls more strictly than the West
European Cocom partners. In
mid-l954, when the Cocom embargo lists
were first revised, precipitating a
rapid rise in East-West trade the fol
lowing year,31 Japan backed the
refusal to include China in the revi
sion. In 1957, when Britain attempted
to force a relaxation of the embargo
against China, again the U.S. refused
to it and again Japan supported
her. Why?
One explanation lies in t he fact that
after 1954 the U.S. pressured other
nations in its to
open up markets for Japan uin return
for increased opportunities in the
American market." "At a closed regional
meeting of American ambassadors in
Asia in early March [1955], Secretary
of State Dulles outlined American
diplomatic strategy, a major goal of
which was to develop markets for Japan
in Southeast Asia in order to counter
act Communist trade efforts and to pro
mote trade between Japan and SOutheast
Asian countries. "33 Dulles must also
have been aware of the pressure at
that time within Japan for in
creased trade with the People's Repub
lic of China.
Yet at the very time Dulles was
pushing U.S.-Japanese economic coopera
tion in Southeast Asia there appeared"
rivalry between the two nations".
An early U.S. proposal in 1955 brought
the ambiguities of the trade relation
ship to the surface. According to:
Robert A. Scalapino, the United" States
offered Japan an arrangement
for triangular trade whereby
America would have sold surplus
farm products in Japan, for
yen, the proceeds would have
been used to buy Japanese machin
ery and equipment to be given-
by us to Southeast Asia. Japan
rejected the at least
temporarily, because she feared
its effects upon her own trade
with Southeast Asia and also
. because the proposal required
that ninety per cent of the
purchase price of each shipment
would have to be deposited at
the time of authorization and at
least fifty per cent of the car
goes would have to ge carried
in Ameriean ships.3
Although this proposal was rejected
for the-reasons Scalapino cited, by
the late Sixties large-scale trade
between Japan, the United
and Southeast Asia had become a reality_
But rather than working cooperatively
to expl&it Southeast Asia, the two
military allies today find themselves
in competition there .
In contrast to these economic devel
opments,. the tempo of Japanese rearma
ment has never proceeded as fast as
American anticipated or
desired. One reason for this has been
the e ffecdveness of the left-led
opposition, based on e01llllUtment to the
of the Constitution and
reflecting the genuine sentiments of
a large minority of the Japanese people.
Perhaps an even more important reason
has been the split within- conservative
ruling. circles over the speed with
which rearmament should proceed.
The exit of the cantankerous Yoshida
the end of 1954, the bribery scandal
involving the 1.iberal Partyt"s Secretary
General, Sato Eisaku., and. the growing
strength of the socialist oPposition,35
all testified to the conservativest"
difficulty with the rearmament question
'-.
.H
(as well as the problem of creating
a stable political climate for business
ex pans ion)
Neither Yoshida nor his successor,
Hatoyama Iehiro, responded satisfac
torily to American pressure.for rapid
rearmament or were wholeheartedly de
voted to American anti-communist plan
ning for Asia. While Hatoyama sought
to the Constition to expedite
a "well-balanced" rearmament program,
he also pushed ahead with plans to im
prove relations with the Soviet Union
and the People's Republic of China.
On the rearmament q.uestion, moreover,
"the Hatoyama govermnent insisted that
it had to hold its defense budget for
fiscal 1956 to $388 million, or only
$20 million more than in fiscal 1955."
According to Scalapino, the United
States "considered this far too low
and sought to use various forms of
persuasion to get it raised " When
Hatoyama refused to budge; the American
government increased its contribution of
weapons and materials to the JDA to
million for 1957, or "thirteen times the
previous amount in an to spur
on Japan." 36 .
Hatoyama's diplomacy, consequently,
was no more acceptable to the men
behind rearmament and "defense pro
ductionpressure --which first emerged
during the Korean his overall
policies were to American policy planners.
The former saw the solution to their
difficulties in a merger of the two
conservative parties. By the end of
1955 the leaders of Japan's monopoly
corporations, working through powerful
business organizations such a s the
Federation of- Economic Organizations
(Keidanren), had succeeded in creating
the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
This event marked. the clear ascendancy
of organized monopoly-capitalism over
Japanese political life, as well as a
trend towards ever closer American
Japanese military and economic
cooperation.
Not until the advent of Kishi Nobu
suke, "former economic czar of Manchu
kuo y architect of prewar Japan's New
Economic Order, Minister of Trade and
Industry and Vice Munitions Minister
in the Tojo Ca\)'inet, n31 did the- U. S.
at last find its man in Tokyo. Kishi,
f
an uncompromising anti-communist, was
Japan's prime minister from 1957 until
after the second military alliance was
concluded with the U.S. in September,
1960. During his foundations
were laid for the growth of a mllitary
industrial complex. tightly bound to
American defense industry, closer ties
wi th Taiwan, and the Japanese economic
advance into Southeast Asia. We will
now examine the first of these develop
ments. Several features- of the military
industrial nexus that emerged in the
Sixties under Kishi's successors, Ikeda
and Sato. deserve particular attention.
1. There is a very tight relation
ship between American and Japanese
defense industries. The following is a
list of Japanese companies which are
leading defense contractors, as well
as leaders in sueh fast-growing indus
tries as heavy eleetronics,
and
Table 1: 1969 JDA Defense Contractors
Ranking Company
(by size of.
contract)
1 Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
2 Mitsubishi Electric
3 Tokyo Shibaura Electric
4 Japan Aircraft Manufactur
ing
5 Japan Steel
6 Ishikawajima-Har1ma Heavy
Indus-tries
7 Kawasaki
8 Nippon Electric
9 Shinmeiwa Kogyo
10 Komatsu Manufacturing
11 Fuji Heavy Industries
12 Daikin Kogyo
13 Hitachi Ltd.
14 lsuzu Motor
15 Fujitsu
f
!
38
Banking Company
(by size of
contract)
16 Kitsubishi Shipbuilding
and Engineering
17 Oki Electric
18 Itochu
19 Sumitomo Shoji
20 Kitsubishi Shoj i
21 Nippon Oil
22 Showa Koseihin
23 Howa Kogyo
24 NissanMotors
25 Nippon Aviotronics (joint
venture of Nippon Elec
tric and Hughes Aircraft)
Kawasaki Dockyard
Maizuru Heavy Industries
Nissho-Iwai"
Sumitomo Seimitsu
Marubeni-Iida
Nippon Kokan
Japan Radio
(from the Oriental Economist,
1969; Mainichi Shimbunshahen, Ampo
to !bei Seisan--Nihon no Heiwa to
Anzen [Tokyo, 1969])
Most of these top Japanese defense
contractors are tied to the top 100
American defense contractors (see
note 38) by licensing agreements and
joint ventures. General Electric,
for example, America's fourth largest
manufacturer and its number two defense
contractor, has licensing agreements with
about 65 Japanese companies as well as a
10 per cent position in Tokyo Shibaura
Electric, Japan's number three defense
contractor. G.E., interestingly enough,
is a frequent sponsor of academic
gatherings and "scholarly" publications
on Asia which support the Security Treaty
system.
2. The major Japanese defense firms
presently have a low ratio of defense
output to total manufacturing output.
But there are indications that this is
now changing. Mitsubishi Heavy Indus
tries, Japan's number one defense
contractor and its largest manufactur- _
ing concern, for example,
10 per cent of its output to arms and
almost 30 per cent to motor vehicles.
This giant and other leading defense
contractors are tending to move into
defense production. As competition
increases in consumer goods markets
with the influx of foreign goods and
the liberalization of investment
tunities for foreign firms, many Japan
ese industrialists are being tempted
into the military hardware market
where the state is the only buyer and
foreign competition is less keen.
After its recent tie-up with Chrysler
Motors, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
separated out its automotive operations
and announced-its intention to plunge
more heavily into defense production.
39
The president of the number two defense
contractor, Mitsubishi Electric Company,
at the time of his appointment as
chairman of the Japan Weapons Industry
Association in May,1969, stated that
he wanted to see Japan's defense expend":'
itures raised to 4 per cent of GNP.
The direction these leaders have taken
is sure to be followed by the entire
defense industry. One can see here
how American business and government
pressure on Japan for liberalization
of investment terms is being met in
Japan by increased investment in defense
production.
3. In the process of nurturing
the Japanese military-industrial complex,
the u.S. government has frequently acted
as broker for "private" American defense
contractors. Thus in 1967 the American
ambassador to Japan, U. Alexis Johnson,
is alleged to have personally called
on the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Ushiba, to ask for the use of G.E.
engines in building the TX !O.e., the
F4E Phantom fighter) plane. But
the mote common means of facilitating
link-ups between the two military
industrial complexes are governmental
bilateral agreemen_ts and memoranda,
such as the November 1962 Data Ex
change Agreement and the June,1968
on Military Research and
39
Table 2: U.S. planes, helicopters, and en&ines,manufactured in Japan from
195.4 to 1966
Aircraft &
Japanese companies Engine system u. S. comyanies
Beech
Fuji Heavy Industries Cessna
Bell
Kawasaki Aircraft
Boeing
/- 33A.
V - 7 Lockheed I
.s6 '-i------------.--_-.-_...J
1

Mitsubiahi Heavy Industry North America
$"-". 3

SH
- Sikorsky
IShin Meiwa Heavy Industry' I-_____ ____ft Grumman J
T- 5' I 3'-11
IIshikawajima-Harima
I
t General Electric
Source: G.R. Ball and R.E.
Johnson, Transfers of U.S.
Aerospace Technology to Japan,
the Rand Corporation(July, 1968)
P-387S, p.13
Note: I have added dotted lines to
indicate technical tie ups initiated
after 1966.
J
40
Development" concluded between the
Japan Defense Agency and the Pentagon.
The July, 1969 U.-S.-.Japan Aerospace
Cooperation Agreement is another example
of this kind. Valued by Business Week
l3, 1969) as being worth at least
$200 to $300 million to American defense
contractors, it paves the way for
American aerospace industry assistance
in the Seventies in the development
of Japanese Q and N series launch vehi
cies--ICBM-type rockets which could be
armed with nuclear tips rather than
space research satellites.
4. Symptomatic of the growth of
the Japanese mili-tary-industriai COlIl
pli'!X is a growing ten-dency for public life
to be corrupted by collusion bet;we'en
private industry and the military.
This is-due in 'large measure to the faet
that defense contractors,
like their u.s. counterparts, have to
operate in a market: characterized by
a long (five to eight years) product
cycle. In such a situation. it
becomes imperative for them to insure
the effectiveness of their long-range
planning for weapons systems designs.
legal barriers
against it, a familiar-symbiosis be
tween "private" industry and the mili.
tary re-emerged in the Sixties. The
trend was dramatically illustrated
during the Defense Secrets Scandal of
1967-1968 when it was learned that "265
Self-Defense Agency officials who bad
retired between 1962 and 1967 joined
industries doing .defense work." In
the first two months of 1969 no less
than 22 such officials left the Agency
to find employment in the defense in
dustry.4l
5. Significant direct interconnec
tions between the military establish
ment and the universities have not yet
materialized in Japan. But indirect
university cooperation with the mili
tary through research projects com
missioned by private industry is on the
increase. On May 6 and 7, 1969, the
results of a 1967 Board of Audit inves
tigation into the research status of
twelve leading universities revealed
that they had fa1led to report to the
Ministry of Education 279 research
project, many of them
related, having a total value of 103
million yen. Tokyo University headed
the iist with 8l
2
i1lega11y commissioned
research items. As early as Sept- .
ember, 1959, however, there were indi
cations that military-related research
was being conducted in the universities.
At that time the "Nine Faculties Student
Self-Government Association" of Tokyo
University presented a report to the
university administration charging that
cer.tain facul'ties were cooperati.ng
with the Defense Agency's weapons develop
ment research programs. With the
candor that bas since come to
ter.iEe !lIlost university administrations
siImilLariy under fire from students, the
char.geswer:e later categroriica!lly denied.43
An interesting sid'elight 'on Japanese
univ.ersity involvement in miilitary
research and developmeIlt"however in
direct" is that its benefiits have not: lbeen
limited only to the Defense Agency.
In 195'9 the U. S. Army establlished an
office in to identify when
place under Japanese
scientists whose work might ocntribute
to U.S. military objectives.
44
By 1967,
when this sort of Pentagon "peace fare"
activity was first disclosed by Senator
Fulbright, the Army Research Office
in Tokyo was monitoring contracts and
grants with nine Japanese universities
and a number of private research
institutes. The amount being funded
for such research was small, however,
totaling only $107,34B. Since that
time, according to the Pentagon's
John H. Foster,Jr., "the actual number
[of contracts and grants] has decreased
by approximately 20% " but the
"funding level... has remained a t a
fairly constant level." 45
6. As the Japanese military-indus
trial complex enters the stage of
self-sustaining growth during the 1970s,
it is safe to predict that retention
of the Security Treaty will not be nec
41
essary for either side. What is much
more difficult to predict is wh ether a
revived Japanese imperialism can remain
integrated in the American imperial
system. For the present, we should
note that the strongest pressure for
revision of the anti-war constitution,
expanded defense production, 1 iberaliza
tion of investment terms, overseas
deployment of the Defense Forces, and
strengthening of the Security Treaty
comes from the leaders of heavy industry,
finance, trade and commerce--the class
of monopoly capitalists. For reasons
of their own there are also a number
of Japanese urealist,t intellectuals who
espouse these same goals. To para
phrase Hobson one might say that imper
ialism and militarism, while irrational
from the standpoint of the Japanese na
tion as a whole, today seem increasingly
rational for certain classes and- groups
within Japan. The views of such groups
present a way of examining the rationale
behind the current defense fever. What
do business groups perceive to the
major benefits of defense spending and
bow will the anticipated higher level
of defense spending in the Seventies
affect Japan's future relationship with
the U.S.?
Unlike American policy makers,
Japanese business groups are ambivalent
about future close collaboration with
the United States. This ambivalence is
reflected in a number of considerations
which point to a drive for increased
arms spending. The first major consi
deration is the propensity of Keidanren
and the other maJor business organiza
tions to view economic success in terms
of maintaining Japan's share of world
markets. Building a bigger war economy
is thought to be a sure way of keeping
up-to-date, the only way Japan can be
assured of retaining and expanding her
overseas markets against competition
from the U.S. and other advanced econo
mies. Such an argument suggests future
conflicts of interest be-tween Japan and
the U.S.
The second consideration accounting
for the current arms boom is the belief
of many Japanese monopolists that untold
fortunes are to be made from exporting
arms to Southeast Asia, South Korea,
and Taiwan. This vision of the profita
bility of merchandising death makes the
Nixon administration's regional security
schemes tantalizing to these monopolists.
This line highlights the benefits to be
gained from Japanese-American political
collaboration.
Although they do not articulate it
in toe defense boom rationale, Japanese
monopolists may also expect that the
enormous profits they are enjoying from
the Vietnam War and from new markets
the War opened up- for them in the U.S.
and Southeast Asia will decline in the
Seventies, at the same time that compe
tition at home and abroad from foreign
multinational corporations begins to
intensify. Expanding the domestic and
overseas defense markets is their way
of weathering the crisis while maintain
ing high productivity and a rising GNP.
7. Many of these arguments may con
verge on the issue of the nuclear non
proliferation treaty which the Japanese
government has not yet signed and which
many leaders of defense industries
oppose. It has been estimated that
by 1975 Japan, long a candidate for the
nuclear club, tlwill have generated
enough plutonium in her power reactors
to produce 600 to 700 atomic bombs of
the 20 kiloton variety. ,,46 Yet if
Japan did acquire nuclear weapons
sibly to deter it result
in an irrevocable reduction of security
for every nation in Asia. China,
already threatened by the U.-S. and
Soviet nuclear arsenal, would be squeezed
still further by Japan. while India,
which fought China in 1962 and has no
mutual defense treaty with a superpower,
would-have all the more reason for
acquiring nuclear weapons. 47
*
The developments we have been consi
dering have a number of implications
42
for the Japanese people which ought
to be spelled out. Just as there
can be no question as to American
efforts over the years to sp ur on
Japanese rearmament, so today there
can be no question as to the result:
the existence in Japan of a locked
in demand for an armaments economy.
This stems largely from the fact that
the highly sophisticat-d technologv
of modern space and weapons systems and
the job skills associated with such pro
duction are not readily transferable to
civilian consumer production. The major
steps to creating that demand were the
Korean War weapons production boom,
the 1951 military alliance with the
U.S., the 1954 Mutual Defense Agree
ment, and the decision of the Kishi
government to build a modern aerospace
industry under the co-production for
mula (Le., joint arms
production) in 1957. The existence
in Japan of a military-industrial
complex raises but leaves unanswered
the question: will it go on expanding
until it is used?
Equally disquieting are the long
term effects of these material develop
ments on Japanese national conscious
ness. Having embarked on a large-scale
defense build-up, the Japanese state
is increasingly forced to create a
political climate--meaning a comolex
of public images, attitudes, and values
--supportive of its goals, while resist
ing and deprecating, ,; the same time,
efforts by the opposition to thwart
those goa'ls. Because it feels the
need to legitimate its actions in the
military and foreign policy spheres,
the Japanes& state has begun to move
in the direction of reviving some
of its pre-war ideological features:
history education in the public schools
has once again been tied to moral
education; the mythical date f or the
creation of the Japanese nation (Kigen
setsu) was officialy reestablished in
1966; and a new university control
law which virtually destroys univer
sity autonomy was passed in August,
1969. In the offing is legislation
place Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto
resting place of Japan's war dead,
under state management, an action which
is tantamount to restoring the connec
tion between Shrine Shinto and the
state. This is in direct contravention
of Article 20 of the Japanese Consti
tution which stipulates that "No reli
gious organization shall receive any
privilege from the State, nor exercise
any political authority... The State
and its organs shall refrain from reli
gious eduction or any other religious
activity ....
During the past fifteen years Japan
ese educational policy has moved steadily
to the right. In 1956-57 the Ministry
of Education inaugurated a nationwide
teacher evaluation system, the effect
of which has since been to inhibit
freedom of expression for primary and
secondary school teachers. In 1958
it made the use of its study-guide
outline mandatory in public school
teaching. The study-guide outline
together with the "officially approved
textbook" gives the state its two most
effective devices for molding new
generations of Japanese to be less
critical of war--the Ministry of Educa
tion even advises teachers not to paint
too dark a picture of war--and more
imbued with a gense of obligation
to the state.
4
a
With these developments in mind
let us turn to examine briefly the
support role for U.S. foreign policy
that private American citizens and
institutions have played in postwar
Japan.
Part III The Labor and Cultural Front
Stimulating Japanese rearmament has
not been the only goal of U.S.-Japan
policy during the past two decades.
Another part of that policy has been
enlisting the support of American labor
leaders to strengthen the hand of
conservative Japanese unionists, with
the aim of maintaining the internal
status quo in Japan.
43
Viewed historically, the American
labor movement acquired a vested interest
in American capitalism long before it
was given the opportunity to act over
seas as a "support institution" for
American foreign policy. Th e AFL, for
example, quite early shied away from
a social justice orientation to union
ism in favor of a business union approach.
By the 1920s it was espousing a philo
sophy of labor-management cooperation.
49
The CIO, despite the fact that initially
it grew out of a more radical"milieu,
pursued the same path and was even faster
in making its accommodation with manage
ment. By the time World War II came
along both major labor federations had
been taken into the economy of the
large corporations as junior partners.
The American labor movement had
among its ton generals during the pre
war period men like George Meany,
David Dubinsky, and Matthew Woll.
Conservative on domestic matters.
such labor representatives more often
than not supported chauvinistic policies
abroad as well. In the 1930's, for
instance, Woll, an AFL vice president.
"was prominent in pushing 'lab or pan
Americanism'--the cultivation of labor
leaders throughout the hemisphere who
would applaud U.S. incursions, including
the various dispatches of marines .. "
"Dubinsky and Woll", according to
Michael Myerson's recent study of the
International Ladies Garment Workers
Union, "formed a core of anti-communist
militancy in the AFL (and later the
AFL-CIO).,,50 During World War II tbeYt
together with the embittered ex-communist,
Jay had founded the American
Labor Conference on International Af
fairs (ALCIA) as a vehicle for their own
reactionary brand of unionism.
In the postwar period a rabid anti
communism, closely linked with support
of American overseas business interest,
came to shape the activities of the
international labor set. In 1952
Reader's Digest published an account
of the exploits of Irving Brown. the
AFL's chief European representative.
which gave the American public its
first knowledge of labor's role in the
Cold War. It described how Brown split
the trade union movement in France,
West Germany, and Italy, organized
goon squads to wrest control of the
European waterfront from Communist
dominated unions, and allegedly made
it impossible for any trade union
in Western Europe to "pull a major
strike for political reasons and make
it stick."
In all, Irving Brown today
has his finger in more than 100
individual projects which keep
him working 16 to 18 hours a
day, seven days a week. In the
past seven years, he has traveled
more than 500.000 miles in 26
countries. He gets back to the
United States about twice a year
to report to the AFL Executive
Council and to confer with Jay
Lovestone, executive secretary
of the AFL Free Trade Union
Committee. Lovestone . has
overall supervision of Brown's
work and the similar work being
done by AFL representatives in
Japan, Indonesia. and
South America. 1
In the early cold war years American
labor leaders were busy trying to destroy
the newly unified (October, 1945) inter
national labor movement represented by the
I
World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU),
and create in its place a new anti
communist labor international;52 at
I
the same time. they were also carrying
the cold war to Asia where occupied
and isolated Japan was a key battlefield.
In January, 1947. General MacArthur
took two actions designed to weaken
the Japanese labor movement. He issued
f
for political and ideological reasons
a ban against a proposed general strike
,
of government employees for February 1,
1947, and he wrote a letter to Matthew
Woll to get his organization's help
in countering the leftist trend in the
Japanese labor movement. On Woll's
I
44
recommendation, James -Killen, "a top
official of the International Brother
hood of Pulp, Sulphite, and Paper
Mill Workers", was sent to Japan and
appointedchie of SCAP's (Supreme
Commander Allied Powers) labor division.
Under Killen's direction ''.democra tiza
tion leagues" were set up as anti-com
munist cells within Japanese unions ami
an intensive effort was made to split
the newly formed "National Liaison
Council of Labor Unions" (Zenroren).
On July 22, 1948 the govern
ment, in response to an open from
General MacArthur to Prime Mini.ster
Ashida, issued an ordinance i'denying
government workers not only the right
to strike but also the right of col
lective bargaining." This drastic
and unexpected action led Killen and
several of associates to resign
their posts. .
AFL cooperation with the Occupation
book a different form.AFL agents
working through SCAP put all of their
efforts into getting Japanese unions to
affiliate the AFL and CIA-inspired
anti-communist international labor
federation that was then taking shape
in Western Europe. In late 1949 and
early 1950, SCAP stepped up its anti
communist witch hunt, purging all com
munist leaders from the unions. An a11
out effort was made with strong AFL
backing to organized labor under
the control of the right-wing "so"cialists
lt
through a new national labor center
called Sohyo.
The program of SOhyo pro
posed to eliminate Communist
influence in the unions, to
concentrate upon economic ques
tions to the exclusion of poli
tics, and to affiliate the J apan
ese labor movement to the
ICFTU. rival international to the
WFTU. But failed to
achieve .any of these reactionary
objectives. Instead, in 1952
it rejected with the
ICFTU and it prompt!l came under
left leadership.....
From the end of the Occupation
until the 1960 mass struggle against
renewal of the Security Treaty, the
American effort on the labor front
was conSistently law-keyed, and, with
but one exceptian. rela.tively ineffec
tive. In 1952 Richard Deverall was
sent ta Japan by Jay Lovestone--the
type that Isaac Deutscher once described
as a "Stalinist in reverse"--ta do there
what Irving Brown had dane in Europe.
Although it is not certain, Deverall
may have helped launch the second .
"democratization" movement, known as
Minroren, which first appeared that
summer and culminated in 1954 in the
farmation of tlleright-wing
Trade Union .or Zenro.
5
The
issue on which this split occurred
was SOhyo's opposition to u.s. policy
and its refusal to en bloc
. with the ICFTU, which was then coming
increasingly under AFL and CIO contSgl
and supporting Japanese rearmament.
Nevertheless, with the one key excep
tion of Zenro, Japanese labar responded
more to its own internal dynamics in
this period thar, to outside American
interference. Labor was not yet recog
nized as a high priority front in the
American quest for world hegemony.
By the late Fifties, however, as
the Soviet Union and .the United States
approached a balance of nuclear pawer,
American global policy began ta grope
towa-rd "a different kind of attempt
to contain Communism and revolutionary
instability. .. In "his brilliant essay
on "The CuI tura1 Cold War" Christopher
Lasch explains that at this time
official having
taken over essential features
of the rightist wor19 view,
belatedly dissociated itself
from the cruder and blatantly
reactionary type of anti
communism,and now pursued the
same anti-communist policies
in the name of anti-imperialism
and progressive change. Once
again, the Kennedy administration
contributed deCisively ta the
45
change of style, placing more
emphasis on "counterinsurgency"
than on military alliances, ad
vocating an "Alliance for Pro
gress
U
, de-emphasizing military
aid in favor of "development",
refraining from attacks on neu
tralism, and presenting itself
as the champion of democratic
revolu
5
ion in the undeveloped
world. 7
The new liberal style in U.S.-Japan
policy was forecast in a 1959 foreign
policy study prepared by a private San
Francisco research firm for the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. Known
as the Conlon Report, the section deal
ing with Japan was written by Robert
A. Scalapino, a prominent liberal
scholar in the field of Japanese studies,
who was later to become even more pro
minent for his defense of the Johnson
administration's Vietnam policies and
for authoring the 1967 Tuxedo-Freedom
House Statement on American policy
for Asia. The problem, Scalapino
argued, was that
In the mid-20th century, it is
no longer sufficient to do business
merely with the government in power.
Success, perhaps survival, depends
upon "doing business" with as
many of the people within a society
as can be reached. This is a
multifaceted problem 0 f images,
contacts, and approaches, and
despite our endeavors, we are
still far from successful in Japan.
As a result, the American-Japanese
alliance is still relatively
shallow; it does not have the kind
of intellectual, political, and
cultural roots needed to sustain
it in an era of perils.
58
The situation, dire as it was, could
be improved, according to. Scalapino,.
provided that the United States imple
mented in Japan the. concept of "diplo
macy in depth. " This would entail
strengthening certain !mazes the
United States.
First, the Hnited States should
be displayed correctly as a
dynamic, changing society where
the common man has had his great
est 20th century victories.
Seeond, it is entirely proper to
emphasize America as a society
of material prosperity, scien
tific prowess, and military
power. But it is important
to highlight the creative work
going on in American art, litera
ture, music, and in the social
sciences Means also need to
be found to dramatize our intense
desire for and human progress
everywhere.
The main thrust of Scalapino's argu
ment, however, was that "diplomacy in
depth" was "a task not merely for
government, but for foundations, uni
versities, business, and unions as well."
Could a more ingenious formula for
interference in another country's
internal affairs ever have been con
ceived?
Scalapino's progressive-sounding
recommendations obviously fitted in
with the new Kennedy administration's
evolving "peace strategy" for the
Third WOrld. If universities, founda
tions, and labor unions could be made
to redouble their efforts overseas
on behalf of freedom and anti-communism-
in practice the two were regarded as
synonymous--then surely it was in the
national interest to encourage them to
do so. The same message with less
liberal rhetoric was sounded by the
Assistant Secretary of Labor, George
C. Lodge, when, in an article in Foreign
Affairs (July, 1959) he declared
We would be seriously deluding
if we did not- recog
nize that the Communists have
increased their influence in
the labor movements of Asia,
Africa, and Latin America.
The. day has long since gone when
relations with other countries
can be effectively carried on
46
solely in the traditional
"diplomatic" way at the
usual "diplomatic" 1evels.
60
Lodge \"as concerned with wha t he
believed to be a new communist attempt
--it is interesting how conveniently
timed these new communist offenses
always are--to subvert independent
lahor movements, and the problem of
America's poor image in foreign lands
{for example, the erroneous notion
-that the U.S. was a "capitalist na
tion,,).61 Young Lodge seemed to be
calling for a new anti-communist crusade
through the government's newly expanded
labor attache and labor exchange pro
grams. In 1960 the Asia Foundation,
an offspring of the right-wing Free
Asia Committee and since 1954 a "non
political" foundation with close ties
to the CIA, promoted the first American
labor exchange program in Japan. Two
years later the P.S.-Japanese Conference
on Cultural Educational Exchange
was set up. The need of the U.S.
Japan mili tary-corporate all iance for
-uthekind of intellectual, political
and cultural roots needed to sustain
-it in an era pf perils" was beginning
to be met: the Security Treat_y was
evolving into a security system.
In the early Sixties. American labor
leade-rsattempted on three significant
fronts to undermi.ne the, left ....wing
'Japanese unions. The AFL'""CIO_Interna
tionar.:AffairsJ.)epartment launched a ,
fronfal snack 'on Sahya for its neutral':'
ism'in-international- Through
'Harry Pollack, a_Lovl-!Slone":approved
"labor-attache" who took up his post
-in the American Embassy in April, 1961;
new efforts were made to strengthen
the right-wing
In November, i964, Zenro and Sodomei
merged- to form a new national labor
federation,DomeiKaigL-It is quite
likely that officials played
. 8 role in abetting thts merger.Third,
s general appeal was made t o Japanese
laborunionsregudless of their. poli
tical orientation to -abstain from'
-_pOlitical str4gg1es.Thelabor _ex
change program conceived by the Asia
Foundation and funded by the State
Department brought some 880 Japanese
labor leaders to the U.S. between
1962 and 1965. Upon returning home
they were organized into groups by the
American embassy and consulates and
allegedly encouraged by American
officials and unionists to resist
any proposals to struggle against the
Security Treaty. Efforts were also
made to utilize the right-wing leader
ship of Domei Kaigi to help organize
the labor movement in Southeast Asia,
a tactic which one Japanese student
of the labor movement likened to the
American military stratgy of using
Asians to fight Asians.
If strengthening the right-wing
Japanese labor unions was the reverse
side of the American policy of
ing Japan to rearm, mention must also
be made of a more subtle American
to influence Japanese intellectuals.
Since American cultural imperialism
in Japan has received
little attention in the U.S., I can
only cite a few examples. One example
'of the, American cultural effort. c en
-tering on Japanese intellectuals,
was an article by Ambassador, Reischauer
in 1961issue of the
Japanese-language magazine Jiyu
dom), entitled "TheProbleni of the
. Reise_hauer
the attack on Japanese
intellectuals by taking, them to task
for their jmpracticality. latk of
realism, and conunitment to the Marxist
. tradi t ion in -sc holarship, thereby
implying, no doubt ,that they take as
models some of the:actlvist scholais
then in the Kennedy administration.
Reischauer's theory of modernization was
offered asa more realist model of'
social change than the Marxist model
and was later given wide publicity
by the American Embassy and the U.S.LA
in Japanese universities. high schools .
andi n the press.
One further example of the political
purposes informing much. though ce-rtainb
47
not all, of American cultural acti
vities in Japan was provided in 1962,
when the role of the Ford, Asia, and
Rockefeller Foundations as "support
institutions" for U.S. foreign policy
was widely discussed in the pages of
the historical journal Rekishi Hyoron.
Suzuki Ryo and others in the August
and September issues called attention
to the Southeast Asia Research Center
which Kyoto University had announced
was going to be set up. The idea for
such a Center had originated with J.
S. Rverton, a Ford Foundation official
in 1958, the year before he was ap
pointed U.S. ambassador to Burma.
Suzuki's analysis of the prospectus
for the Center disclosed that its
purposes were remarkably congruent
with U.S. foreign policy needs at that
time. The Center, which was to be
funded chiefly by the Ford Foundation,
was to limit its research activities
to Malaya and Burma, two areas not
adequately covered by U.S. counterpart
research institutes. Burma, moreover,
was a country where the Ford and
Asia Foundations, after having invested
large sums of money for educational
and research purposes, had just two
months earlier, on April 18, 1962, been
declared persona non grata by Prime
Minister Ne Win as part of his cam
paign to drive out the CIA.
These examples merely suggest the
manner in which American imperialism
works itself out in practice in a
single country. Certainly more
research needs to be done on this
subject before the extent of reaction
ary American influence on-postwar Japan
can be gauged.
Part IV Conclusion
Most American commentators on
U.S.-Japanese relations regard the
military alliance with Japan as an
wise, mutually beneficial,
and necessary measure. They believe
that the Japanese have prospered under
it and have not had to rearm signi
ficantly. Today, they argue, the
Security Treaty is actually a bless.
ing in disguise, for it functions as
a restraint on Japanese rearmament
and an incentive for Japan's conserva
tive rulers to steer a moderate course,
allowing them to avoid a reactionary
policy that would silence domestic
critics on the left.
Few of the problems T have mentioned
receive attention from American scholars
on Japan. Most are pro-Security Treaty
"realists" and have little serious fault
to find with the American poltcy--past
and present--of pressliring Japan to
assume more "responsibilities" within
the American imperial system. h'hen
GeorgetmV'O Vniversity' s Center for
Strategic Studies mobilized a group
of Japan experts in 1968 to discuss
U.S.-Japanese political relations, they
recommended to government policy-makers
that
The seriousness of the threat
posed by the recent revival
of isolationist sentiment in the
United States should be made
clear to the Japanese ..The result
might be a somewhat more coopera
tive disposition on the part of
the Japanese Government toward
greater participation in the
developmental and se curity
in East and Southeast Asia.
When Edwin O. Reischauer, the former
ambassador to Japan, took up "the
defense question" in his book Beyond
The United States and Asia,
he was abl;-to ignore entirely the
long-term American effort to control
the flow of trade in Asia and to open
up Southeast Asia a market for
Japanese 5 Reischauer's
case Japanese neutralism and
for continuation of the military alliance
with the U.S. also ignores both the
increasingly offensive nature of that
alliance as well as the domestic con
sequences fer Japan of an expanding
,
r
48
military-industrial complex. It concen
trates instead on the "problem of stability
in East Asia and the security of sea
lanes, both of which are vital to Japan. ,,66
In effect, the liberal ap ologia for
the Security Treaty corresponds to the
Japanese conservatives' vision of Japan's
future role in Asia, and resembles the
role advanced for Japan by American right
wing think-tanks. While Reischauer
argues that "a much broader international
approach to the problem of Asian security
would seem feasible and if it were
achieved it would give us much firmer
international footing in the event that
we were again forced to use military
power to halt aggression," others speak
more candidly about coaxing Japan into
assuming the leadership of some future
Asian-Pacific Defense and Development
Community. On the eve of its renewal
even the liberals' case for the Security
Treaty turns out to be merely a genteel
version of the "let Asians fight Asians"
formula.
Orthodox discussion of the Security
Treaty system fails to appreciate that
Japanese opposition is in many respects
a justifiable resistance to the revival
of Japanese imperialism. Yet until a
new generation of Japanese--unencumbered
by the experience of defeat--move into
positions of power, it will be diffi
cult to determine the direction that
imperialism will take.
FOOTNOTES
In writing this essay I benefited from
the helpful criticism of Noam Chomsky,
John Dower, and James Peck.
1. Brigadier F.W. Speed, "Japan's
Self-Defense Forces," The Ar my Quarterly
and Defense Journal (April, 1969).
2. Wilfred G. Burchett, Again Korea
(New York: International Publishers), 16.
3. Jane's Fighting Ships 1968-69, 164.
4. The Oriental Economist (June,
1969)-:---10.
5. Albert Axe1bank, "Maritime Self-
Defense", in The Far Eastern Economic
Review (February 27, 1969).
6. U.S. News and World Report {Octo
ber 27, 1969).
7. The Christian Science Monitor
(Sept. 13,1969). "The third defense
build-up plan calls for 311 Nike
Hercules and HAWKS manufactured in
Japan."
8. Frank Kowalski, Jr., The Rearma
ment of Japan (The SimulPress, Inc.,
Japan, 1969).
9. Speed, Q. cit., 30.
10. The Oriental Economist (May,
1969); Ne,y York Times, December 7,1969.
11. I.F. Stone's Weekly, (Oct. 6,
1969); Institute for Strategic Studies,
The Military Balance 1968-1969 , 11;
~ e ' s Fighting Ships 1968-69.
12. Kaoru Murakami, "Dangerous
Aspects of the Japan-South Korea Treaty
Talks, " in Journal 0 f Social and
Political Ideas in Japan, vol. IV, no. 1
(April, 1966), 58-59.
13. Asahi Shimbun, Feb. 28, 1965.
Hatada Shigeo, "Nikkan Joyaku no Seiji
teki Gunjiteki Shiten," in Nikkan Mon
dai (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, Dec., 1968), 118.
14. For more information on the Pen
tagon's role in instigating the Mitsuya
plans see Yoshihara KOichiro, Nanajunen
Ampo to Nihon no Gunjiryoku (Tokyo:
Nihon-hyoronsha, 1969), 183-185.
15. T. Matsueda and G.E. Moore,
"Japan's Shifting Attitudes Toward the
Military: Mitsuya Kenkyu and the Self
Defense Force," in Asian Survey, no.
9 (Sept., 1967), 614.
16. Tetsuo Izu, "Facts About the
49
Japanese Type of Industrial-Military
Complex, " in Japan Socialist Review,
no. 170 (Jan. 1, 1969), 33.
It can be pointed out that for
a peace-time defense budget. the
rate of growth of Japan's mili
tary spending is far higher than
that of other developed countries.
The spending involved by the
current Third Defense Plan (FY
1967 through FY 1971) is double
that of the Second Plan. while
it is certaia that the amount
for the Fourth Plan will be
more than double that of the
Third. Japans indus
try is at the threshold Gf an
era of srowtb, and it is widely
expected that there will be
soaring progress under the
Fourth and Fifth Defense Plans.
The Oriental Economist.
vol. 37, no. 704 (June,
1969), 10.
17. G.C. Allen, A Short Economic
History of Modern Japa'ii"J:867-l937, With
Supplementary Chapter on Economic
Recovery and Expansion 1945-1960 (New
York: Frederick A. PTaeaer. 1966). 173,
214.
VALUE OF FOREIGN TRADE, AMERICAN AID
AND SPECIAL PROCUREMENT t 1945-1960
(in million U.S. dollars)
Exports ImJXlrts Aid Procurement
(C.o.b.). (d.!.)
Sept. J945--J)cc. 19t,6 103 306 J93
1947 174 404
1948 258 6S4 461
19':9 SJO 90S S3S
1950 820 974 361 149
1951 1.355 IS95 164 591
1952 1.273 2.o.:!S 824
J953 1.275 2,410 809
1954 1.629 2.399 596
1955 2,011 2.471 557
]956 2,501 3,230 595
1957 2,858 4,284 549
1958 3,033 482
]959 3,456 3,599 458
1960 4,055 549
Source: Ministry of Finance and
Economic Planning Agency. Procurement
includes Allied military expenditure
dollars and yen purchases for
Joint Defence Account. expenditure of
Allied soldiers and civilian officials
in Japan, and payme nts in respect of
certain off-shore procurement contracts.
G.C. Allen, 2!?. cit., 214.
18. Peter Wiley, "Vietnam and the
Pacific Rim Strat;egy," in Leviathan
(June, 1969), 7.
19. D. "Anatomy of the
Japanese Miracle," in New Times, no.
36 (Sept. 11, 1968), 20-.- -:-
The Japan Quarterly gives estimates
of direct and indirect Vietnam special
procurements as $450 million and
$1000 million respectively for 1966-67.
It cited two factors to account for
"the increase in normal exports--i.e.
indirect procurement--due to the Vietnam
war."
The first factor here is that
the upswing in the American
economy, which began at the
time President Kennedy assumed
office, was accelerated by the
Vietnam War. By now, the
economy has become overheated,
so that America's supply margin
has decreased both at home and
abroad. with the resu-1t that
Japanese exports have increased
to fill the gap.
Secondly, the U. S. Government .
makes a point of ordering
special procurement goods :ro.m
countries such as Smith Korea.
the Philippines, and Taiwan
which. are cooperating in the
Vietnam War, and these countries
are passing OD to Japan orders
for the raw materials and semi
finished products necessary to
produce these goods. It is
generally agreed that indirect
procurement, represented by these
50
two sources ... is far greater than
direct procurement.
The article goe.s on to cite the govern
ment's differing evaluation of the role
of Vietnam special procurements.
"Vietnam Special Procurement and
the Economy," in Japan Quar terly,
vol. XIV, no. 1 (Jan. - March,
1967), 14.
20. Takahashi Ryozo, "SOei Seisan
Keikaku no Zembo," in Chuo Koron (April,
1953), 78, as quoted in Chitoshi Yanaga,
llusiness Japanese Politics (l\e\v
Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 255.
Al though the original source was un
available t'o me, Professor Yanaga has
indicated in a private conversation
that the figure of 72 per cent seems
entirely reasonable in the light of
other evidence on this period.
21. Yoshihara Koichiro, ..
22. Yanaga, 257.
23. Yoshihara Koichir(;, .. ,
320-321.
24. Un this point see Gabriel Kolko,
The Roots i American Policy-
An of .and Purpose (Boston:
lleacon Press, 1969), 96-103.
25. We should not lose sight of the
irony of this development: at the same
time that America was making plans to
expand its hegemony in Southeast Asia,
it was forced to restrict it in the
interest of creating room there for a
revival of Japanese capitalism. This
contradiction was implicit in the very
conception of rebuilding Japan as a
bastion against her ConmlUnist neighbors.
Hampering the industrialization of China
and North Korea by denying them a market
place connection with an already indus
trialized Japan, and creating a market
for the output 'of Japanese in dustries
in an anti-Communist Southeast Asia were
simply two sides of a single strategy.
The tenacity of some U.S. government
officials in pursuing the war against
the Vietnamese people is directly
related to this strategic conception
of Asia as a market outlet f or Japan.
26. cit., 262-264.
27. Gunnar Adler-Karlsson,
Western Economic \.Jarfare 1947-1967,
ACase Study in Foreign Economic
Policy (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wik
sell, 1968), 5, 23, 25, 202.
28. Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, ibid.
29. Nainichi Shimbunsha hen,
Ampo !.9.. Keizai-Nihon n'o Heiwa !E.
Anzen (Tokyo: !-Iainichi Shimbunsha,
1969), 70 .. By 1965 Sino-Japanese
trade still accounted for only 2.8
per cent of Japan's total world trade.
A. Halpern, "China and Japan," in
Tang 1'sou, ed., China in Crisis-
China's PoliciesinAsia and America's
Alternative (Chicago: University of .
Chicago Press, 1968), 443.
30. Adler Karlsson,
51, 28. Adler-Karlsson adds, "It is
also a fact that the Japanese trade
with China and its conformance 'vith
the U.S. embargo policy is still, in
1967, regularly discussed in a special
U.S.-Japanese Joint EconomicCornmittee."
31. On the question of the effec
tiveness of the embargo, see Frederick
L. Pryor, The Communis t Fo reign Trade
Press, 1963).
32. !-Iainichi Shimbunsha hen, ...
cit., 106.
33. Yanaga, . cit., 226.
The Eisenhower-Dulles years also marked
a high tide in American opposition to
"neutralism." On June 9, 1956, Dulles
denounced neutralism, saying that it
"pretends that a nation can best gain
safety for itself by being indifferent
to the fate of others. This has become
an obsolete conception, and, except un
under very exceptional circumstances,
51
it is an immoral and short-sighted
conception." Quoted in Raymond F.
Betts, Europe Overseas: Phases of
Imperialism (New York: Basic Books,
1968), 176.
34. Robert A. Scalapino, "The U.S.
and Japan," in The United States and
the Far East (The American Assembly,
Graduate School of Business, Columbia
University, 1956), 64.
35. cit., 133. The
Socialists obtained 32.9 per cent of
the popular vote in 1958; 36.4 per cent
in 1960.
36. Scalapino, . cit., 70.
37. John G. Roberts, "To Arms,
Dear Friends," in The Far Eastern
Economic Review, 27
August 2, 1969), 287.
38.
Fiscal 1969 American Companies
Defense Dept. with ties to Japanese
Ranking by defense industry
size of con
tracts
1 Lockheed
2 G.E.
3 General Dynamics
4 McDonnell Douglas
9 Boeing
11 Ratheon
12 Sperry Rand
14 Hughes Aircraf t
15 Westinghouse Electric
International
17 Grumman Aircraft
18 Honeywell
19 Ford Motor Co.
21 Litton Industries
23 R.C.A.
24 Standard Oil (N.J.)
27 I.B.M.
31 E.I. DuPont de Nemours
44 Collins Radio
45 Kaiser Industries
Bell
!l:orth Amt!rican
Av iat ion
Sikorsky
Phillips Petroleum
Union Carbide
Dow Chern i ca 1
Monsanto
Hercules Powder Co.
This list is incomplete
39. cit., 287.
According to Roberts, "the business mag
nates who have been pressing for easier
entry of foreign investment into the
motor industry have now almost unani
mously begun to call for of
the defense programme." (288)
40. Tetsuo Izu, 9...2.. cit:. , 41.
41. 289; George
Thayer, The \.,rar Business York:
Simon and Schuster, 1969), 317-318.
42. :Iainichi Shimbunsha hen, Ampo
to Boei Seisan-Nihon no Heit.la to Anzen
(Tokyo: Shimbunsha,1969)-,-
104-105.
43. Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 22, 1959.
44. Clarence H. Danhoff, Government
Contracting and Technological Change
(Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.,
1968), 369.
45. From a copy of a letter from
John S. Foster, Jr. to Senator J.W.
Fulbright, dated August 20, 1969.
46. cit., 280.
47. Mason Wi1lrich, Non-Prolifera
tion Treaty: Framework for Nuclear Arms
Control (Charlottesville, Va.: The
Michie Company, 1969), 43, 181.
48. Co-production on a large scale
was first adopted in 1957 as a means
of circumventing the anti-militarist
feelings of the Japanese people. The
first defense plan had called for
52
equipping the new air force with Fl04J
fighters. As a Rand Corporation study
of the Japanese aerospace industry
stated it,
The Japanese Government [and the
U.S. Government] desired an
increase in the capabilities
of Japanese self-defense forces.
This was--and is--an extremely
touchy political issue in
Japan. Co-production.. was part
of a package that made the
Government's defense policies
politically acceptable to the
Japanese. The fact that the
Japanese regard the Fl04Js
produced in Japan as Japanese-
not U.S.--airplanes explains many
of the political benefits of
co-production.
G.R. Hall and R.E. Johnson,
Tranasfers of U.S. Aerospace
Technology to Japan (July,
1968), 77, P-3875. The
underlining is mine.
48a. "Kyokasho Kentei Sosho (Tokyo
Chisai Minji Nibu) Genkokugawa. Saiga
Junbi Shomen (Yo shi)" [Summary of the
Concluding statement of the Textbook
Trial -- Defense Counsel for the Plain
tiff], in Rekishigaku Kenkyu, no. 354
(Noy., 1969), 58-59.
49. William Appleman Williams, The
Countours of American History (Chicago:
Quadrangle Paperback, 1966), 431.
50. Michael Meyerson, "The ILGWU:
Fighting for Lower Wages," in Ramparts,
vol. 8, no. 4 (Oct., 1969),55.
In 1967, the first CIA operative to
offer direct testimony of CIA ties to
front groups, Thomas W. Braden, revealed
that "He gave Irving Brown of the American
Federation of Labor $15,000 to bribe
do.ckers in France to unload American
supplies (i.e. arms). He says he shelled
out $2 million annually to the AFL's Jay
Lovestone, who used it to split the
French and Italian labor movements. On
one he gave Victor Reuther of
the United Auto Workers $50,'000 in $50
bills to buy off West German labor."
Quoted from Andrew Kopkind in I.F.
Stone's Weekly, May 15, 1967.
51. Donald Robinson, "Mr. Brown
vs. Generalissimo Stalin," in
Readers Digest (Sept., 1952), 116.
52. William Z. Foster, An Outline
History of the World Trade Union Move
ment (NewYork: International Publishers,
1956), 456. For an account of the split
from a non-Connnunist point of vi'ew, but
in my opinion equally as unflattering
to the AFL leaders see Lewis L. Lorwin,
The International Labor Movement -
Mstory, Policies,();rtlook (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1953), 214-237.
53. JeromeB. Cohen, Jppan's Economy
in War and Reconstruction (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1949),
439; Aoyama Ichiro, "Amerika Teikoku
shugi no kyoryokusha -- AFL-CIO kanbu"
(Cooperators with American imperialism
the AFL-CIO leaders), in Zenei (Van
guard), (May, 1963), is
the organ of the Japan Communist Party.
I am indebted to Mr. Aoyama's well
documented article for awakening me to
the problem of American labor unions
in Japan.
See also Miriam S. Farley, Aspects
of Japan's Labor Problems (New York:
The John Day Co., 1950),191-192. The
SCAP ban against the government em
strike of Feb. 1, 1947, was
not prompted primarily by the need to
counteract any econmmic loss to Japan
from strikes.SCAP's own figures show
that except for the month of October,
1946, the number of man-days lost
through strikes from January, 19.46, to
June, 1948, was never more than one per
cent of total man-days available.
54. William Z. Foster, cit., 487.
55. See Robert A. Scalapino, "Japan,"
in Walter Galenson, ed., Labor and Econo-.
mic Development (John Wiley&Sons ,--
53
1959), 132. Scalapino's account of
postwar Japanese labor fails to mention
Deverall's role. But George C. Lodge,
in his Spearheads of Democracy -- Labor
in the Developing Countries (Har per &
Row for the Council of Foreign Rela
tions, 1962), does credit Deverall for
doing good work for "freedom" in Indo
nesia and Japan.
56. Certain union federations within
are affiliated with the ICFTU, al
though officially Sohyo adheres to a
neutralist stance vis-a-vis both the WFTU
and the ICFTU.
57. Christopher Lasch, "The Cultural
Cold War," in The Nation (Sept. 11,
1967)" 203.
58. The Conlon Associates Report
(V.S. Government Printing Office, Nov.,
1959), 96.
59. Ibid.
60. George C. Lodge, "Labor's Role
in Newly Developing Countries," in
Foreign Affairs (July, 1959).
61. Ibid., 668.
62. See Chitoshi Yanaga, cit.,272.
63. Aoyama Ichiro., cit.
64. The Center for Strategic Studies,
United States-Japanese Political Rela
tions: The Critical Issues Affecting
AS'ia's Future, Georgetown University,
f
Washington, D.C., Special Report Series:
no. 7 (May, 1968), 1). The participants
in this diseussion were Robert E. Ward,
director of the Center for Japanese
Studies at the University of Michigan;
Lt. General Paul W. Caraway, former
High Commissioner for the Ryukyu Islands
from 1961-1965; Warren S. Hunsberger,
Professor of Economics at the American
University; Raymond A. Kathe, Vice
President of the First National City
Bank of New York; Frank N. Trager;
Richard L. Walker, author of The China
Danger (1966); and Takehiko Y oshihashi.
65. Edwin O. Reischauer, Beyond
Vietnam: The United States and Asia
(New York: Vintage Books, 1967}, 130.
In Japan's pro-Western
economic orientation Rei schauer writes,
The United States provides
close to 30 per cent of its total..
export market as well as imports
Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand account for about 12 per
cent of Jpaan' s imports and
together with Western Europe
take about 18 per cent of her
exports. By contrast, trade
with all the Communist coun
tries amounts to only about
6 or 7 per cent of Japan's total
trade. Communist nations by
nature are not great traders-
not the sort of trading partners
Japan needs because of its own
meager geographic base.
66. Ibid., 132.
54
Melby:
The Mandate of Heaven
()R I'/UJ SCIII:/J
Until recently young scholars have
been content to study China in a vacuum
while ignoring the background and the
climate in which the whole study of mo
dern China grew up in this country.
China was just another dusty attic avai
lable for scholarly rummaging. There
was data for all. Few stopped to exa
mine the people who were doing the rum
maging, by whom they'were being educa
ted, and the ends to which their work
was put. Even fewer cared to remind
their classes, or themselves, that the
work being done and the ideas being set
forth were largely the products of men
who had either survived or missed a
purge. With rare exceptions several
kinds of "China specialists" survived;
the cold warriors who believed in the
international communist conspiracy,
and those who retreated into a kind of
academic senility or liberal limbo land
where value-free truth was found equi
distant between any two current extremes.
The purge was, of course, carried out
during the early fifties in the State
Department, where almost every man who
had been intimately connected with China
and China policy was blackballed or
shunted away from Far Eastern affairs.
China had been "lost" to the Communists,
and the red-baiters in Washington were
out to get anyone and everyone who had
shown any understanding of the Chinese
Communist movement or any dislike of the
Nationalist regime. In a few short
years men such as John Davies, John Ser
vice, John Carter Vincent, and John Mel
by were faced with vague charges of dis
loyalty and treason and were profes
sionally ruined. _Reactionary Republi
can Senators such ,as William Knowland
and Styles Bridges, and Congressman
Walter Judd made unfounded allegations
to the State Department about these men.
They were able effectively to by-pass
all due process simply by making charges
which many victims either did not want
to or could not afford to fight. Many
bachelors were accused of homosexual ac
tivity and many married men were charged
with conjugal disloyalty. Scott Mc
Loed, a friend of McCarthy and a Dulles
appointee to the position of State De
partment Chief of Personnel and Securi
ty, would call a man in at 4:3D in the
afternoon, tell him the anonymous char
ges which had been levelled against
him, and suggest that he resign right
then and there. Many gave up on the
spot, recognizing full well that their
reputations would be destroyed if they
tried to fight the charges either through
the State Department Loyalty Security
Board or later in court. A few did
try to fight the charges, but it took
years, and even if they were finally
cleared at the top, as was John Service
by the Supreme Court in 1957, they re
mained professionally ruined: par iahs in
the government if they chose to remain.
If they left, they invariably had dif
ficult times finding respectable employ
ment of any kind.
John Melby was the principal editor
of the China White Paper. He apparent
ly wrote most of the introductions and
chose many of the selections for it.
He had gone to China, from Moscow, late
in 1945, and left in 1949. He was the
only Foreign Service officer to my know
ledge who stayed in China throughout
the whole Post-war/Civil' War period,
after which time he eventually returned
to Washington. His association with
the White Paper opened him to attack
from Walter Judd who went after most
of those involved in its editing. Melby
55
was finally fired, after the original
charges had been dropped and after nu
merous hearings for not being "suffi
ciently forthright" about personal
matters. He was finally given a clear
ance by the Civil Service Commission in
the late Fifties. By that time it was
too late to erase the damage done to
him professionally, and no doubt
personally.
Of course, Melby was just o n ~ of many.
Their ruination would have been an out
rage if it had done no more than hurt
their own immediate lives. Unfortunate
ly it also deprived this country of the
understanding and expertise of an un
usually perceptive and well-trained
group of men who, by and large, had been
able to see the China problem through
the opaqueness of ideology, the China
Lobby, and red scares characteristic of
the Cold War. Their destruction left
both Government policy and the study
of Asia to the timid scholars and good
Germans in the State Department who had
difficulty disentangling their fears
from reality. A few brave scholars
persevered. But there was a limit to
what they could think, say, and write
in the lean years that followed the
Republican ascendancy in the early
Fifties.
With the publication of books such as
John Melby's Mandate of Heaven, one gets
the feeling that at last the ice is be
ginning to break. There is a surprising
laek of rancor in this book Which in
cludes Melby's diary laced with recita
tive sections. largely culled from the
White Paper. The diary section was no
doubt combed out somewhat, so as not to
step on too many toes that are still
alive.
Throughout the book there is a sea
soning of rather humorous and revealing
quotes which give some insight into the
human qualities of the men who peopled
this period of Chinese history. For in
stance, Melby reports in November, 1946,
that Wang Ping-nan, then a press officer
of the Communist delegation in Chungking
and more recently Ambassador to Poland,
told him, "It's all right for the U.S.
to arm the Kuomintang because as fast
as they get it we take it away from
them." (p. 36) If this was not abso
lutely true in the winter of 1946, it
certainly was a prophetic remark.
Through Melby's eyes one also gets
a relatively complete picture of Gen
eral George Marshall. At one point
Melby describes him as a man who sees
the "situation in terms of things and
personalities, rather than as ideas and
conceptions." (p. 85) Earlier he
writes, "I get the impression of a man
who is a really great soldier and a great
man in the sense of being truly humble
and unimpressed with himself, bot whose
outlook and experience have the limita
tions of a professional soldier. He .
learns fast, but has little sense of
history as a starting paint. His con
versation never goes beyond the scope
of his experlenee; he s ~ s a movie
every night he is home, and reads
cheap fiction endlessly." (p .6-9) One
is reminded of Ike, and yet forced to
conclude that in Harshall there was
a great deal more.
In 1947 Helby writes,
Sometimes Marshall reacts
as though he were s-lowly
coming to the reluctant and
rather sickening conclusion
that there is only one answer
left and that is to pull the
props and turn the country
over to civil war. As he put
it once, '1 don't see any other
way of arousing the conscious
ness of political realities,
of eliminating the reactionary
groups, of convincing these
fine talking liberals around
here that they will get
just what is coming to them
unless they are prepared to
56
take to the barricades in
defense of what they say
they believe. There is a
risk of what the Communists
might do, but right now it
does not seem that they could
or would do much militarily,
and in any event as things
are going now the KMT will
lose in the end. So perhaps
it's not a risk after all.
(p.90)
Here Marshall almost sounds like "the
revolutionary that he was not. In any
event, it seems clear that he had at
least one foot on the ground. It is
hard to envision Henry Cabot Lodge or
Ellsworth Bunker making a statement to
day about Vietnam which would be nearly
as close to reality.
The Mandate of Heaven is more than
a potpourri of anecdotes and quotes, as
one gets seyeral definite, more general
impressions from it. One is struck by
the apparent absence of concern among
Embassy officials over the possibility
of Russian involvement with the Chinese
Communists. This issue, of course,
later turned out to be the biggest
red herring ~ f all. Melby was appa
rently sent especially from Moscow to
check out the degree to which Moscow
was invested in China. As he says in
the preface, "My job was to keep track
of what the Russians were up to in
China But it was professionally
rather nominal since it developed
that they were really not up to much
of anything beyond the usual diplo
matic routine and formalities." Ftom
here on all one reads about is a few
vodka parties and dull receptions at
the Soviet Embassy. Sometimes he makes
such off-handed cominents as, "And
Yenan is quietly bitter at the absence
of real Russian support, although I
personally cannot conceive that Mos
cow would no"t do something if they
were in real danger of annihilation-
which at the moment they are not. II
(p.67) This was writ ten in January.
1946. In March, 1947. he wri"tes from
Nanking, "Such a towering amount of ver
biage is bandied about on the subject
of Russian objectives and activities
in China that it is curious no one ever
thinks of Nanking-Moscow relations
which as far as anyone can judge, are
correct, even easy, with a minimum of
problems under discussion seriously."
(p. 194)
What emerges from Melby's book, as
it does from the White Paper, is the
sense that the major Soviet activity in
China was limited to the looting of Man
churia, which of course deprived the
Communists of more than it did the Na
tionalists. One wonders if this point
really needs to be hammered home much
further, but one is reminded of Stalin's
famous remark to Kardelj in 1948!
After tbe .war we invited the
Chinese comrades to come to
Moscow and we discussed the
situation in China. We told
them bluntly that we considered
the development of the uprising
in China had no prospects, that
the Chinese comrades should
seek a modus vivendi with Cniang
Kai-shek, that they should join
the Chiang Kai-shek government
and dissolve their army. The
Chinese comrades agreed here
in Moscow with the views of
the Soviet comrades, but went
back to China and acted quite
'otherwise. They mustered
their forces, organized their
armies, and now, as we see,
they are beating Chiang Kai
shek1s army. Now, in the case
of China, we admit we were wrong.
Another point Melby makes is that the
Communists were relatively willing to
negotiate some coalition government
immediately after the war. No doubt
this was a reflection of their own sense
of weakness (Chiang had 32 American
trained and equipped divisions) and
recognition that they could not depend'
on Stalin. Hadntt Stalin called Mao a
"radish communist" (red on the outside
57
and white on the inside)? The whole
Marshall Missisn comes through as a
painfully frustrating task of trying
to make Chiang see reality. Chiang,
of course, insisted that before the
Communists could participate in the
Government, they had to disband
their army. But he was not willing to
give Chou En-lai, the chief Communist
negotiator, sufficient guarantees of
their legal politi-cal status in the
Soviet areas. Behind Chiang's intran
sigence lay the powerful Ch'en Bro
thers' clique which was doing every
thing to prevent successful negotia
tions and to get back to "bandit ex
termination." And- behind the whole
Nationalist cause lay the u.S. which
was committed to the Nationalists as an
old World War II ally and to air-lifting
Nationalist troops into Manchuria. Mar
shall made the unfortunate error'of
lending his private plane to
oversee the operation. It was acts such
as these which made the Communists think
they saw the gloved hand beneath the
veneer of America's self-proclaimed neu
trality.
By spring of 1946, after
succeeded in arranging a temporary
cease-fire, the Communists began to
change their tune. Not only had they
begun to doubt that Marshall could or
would control Chiang (Chou was rebuffed
when he suggested that Marshall force
Chiang's hand by stopping logistical
support in moving Nationalist troops),
but they had been growing both stronger
and more successful, while Chiang was
becoming weaker and more over-extended.
It was at this point that the Communists
stiffened their terms for settlement.
As Melby says, "The KMT could have had
peace in Manchuria (in 1946) and
threw away the opportunity." (p.llO)
From here on peace was impossible.
With or without Russian support, the Red
ADmY no longer felt the need to compro
mise. Chiang had missed his chance to
save anything, and now was destined to
lose it all.
In the following years the Communist
attack against the U.S. increased in
vehemence, which was not so much a re
flection of our actual involvement, but
of the Communists' perception of it.
And, after all, we did have a naval base
at Tsingtao, we had turned over all the
surplus war supplies in the Philippines
to Chiang, and Chiang's troops were
shooting at the Red Army with American
guns even if we claimed to be neutral
and even if Marshall had clamped a tem
porary arms embargo on the Nationalist
Government. Finally one is forced to
conclude that the U.S. was infinitely
more "involved" in the Chinese Civil
War than the Russians, whom Chiang
had to ask to overstay their designated
period of occupation in Manchuria un
til he could get his troops up there
in planes.
When we contemplate the genocidal
consequences of our even deeper in
volvement in Vietnam, we can only be
glad that demobilization prevented
anyone from seriously considering
sending in American The Chinese
Civil War was essentially an internal
conflict generated by powerful social
forces within China. And as in Vietnam
it seems clear that foreign involvement
of any kind can do little more than in
terrupt the process of social and poli
tical change. This seems to be the
lesson of the Civil War: not that we in
tervened or extended a helping hand in
a clumsy way, but that we intervened at
all in a process which had a logic of
its own.
Melby's book is really a chronicle
of the marginality of our efforts in
China. At the end of World War II, the
Communists seemed to believe that some
good (from their point of view) might
come out of our good offices. Relations
between Marshall and Chou were very cor
dial, according to Melby. Yenan's
attacks on the U.S. were muted. By the
end of the Civil War, with the China Aid
Act on the record, relations were at an
impasse. We were stuck with a pathetic
19th-century warlord on Taiwan and the
hostility of many Chinese on the mainland.
58
and suffered the pain of red-baiting
and reaction inside the U.S. Even Ameri
cans at home recognized the depth of our
involvement. Some thought it too much
and some too little. But still we held
ourselves responsible and punished our
own for not exercising a control over
others which was never really possible.
In so doing we expunged from positions
of future influence the few who under
stood what was happening in China. This
was the most crippling legacy of all.
Indeed, the most striking feature of
Melby's fascinating book is its straight
forwardness. Like so many of the re
ports in the White Paper and the U.S.
Department of War Report on the Chinese
Movement, The Mandate of
Heaven was written before the fall.
Melby makes no attempt to gloss over
the corruption and hopelessness of
Chiang's regime. Like the Stilwell
Papers, the reports of Service and Davies
from Yenan, and the reports of military
observers like Riggs from Manchuria and
Barrett from Yenan, Melby writes it
straight. So critical is he at times
that one forgets he actually worked for
the U.S. Government, from whom we are
more recently accustomed to getting
nothing but polemics, specious self de
fense, and lies. There is a refreshing
quality to Melby's writing, even if at
times he is somewhat flip, e.g., in
speaking of the Governor of Jehol as
"smooth and tough" he says, "It gives
you an inkling of what these people
will be when they get rid of their
worms and have enough to eat." (p. 175)
One senses that Foreign Service Offi
cers writing in China during the For
ties could never have even dreamed of
a McCarthy era in which each word
written or spoken had to be first
measured against its reaction. They
wrote about what they saw with an al
most naive zeal and honesty. There
were pressures, to be sure, but
nothing like the threat of being branded
a communist and destroyed. That all
came in the late Forties and Fifties.
And with it both the Government and the
scholarly world seemed to lose the
courage and the ability to speak about
Asia and China with directness and hones
ty. We lost a group of men who were
ruined precisely because they possessed
these virtues. The interim has been a
bleak one.
I
59 1
i
Extremists Are Extremely Extrelne
A YIEW OF CHINESE FOREIGN POLICY
DURING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
EDWARD FRIEDMAN
China's foreign policy during the
Cultural Revolution is usually treated
as a non-event. Melvin Gurtov in his
careful and extremely useful chronolo
gical account of China's foreign policy
at this time (RAND, RM-5934-PR) still
deems it "an aberrant episode" (VII, 83).
He describes it as the manifestation of
a power struggle between extreme young
zealots and implacable older powerholders.
"Substantive policy views" are almost
beside the point (76). Far Eastern
Economic Review (1968 Year Book) also
characterizes Cultural Revolution foreign
policy as one of "excesses" and "'extreme'
behavior," giving anti-foreignism as its
content. Anti-foreignism is seen as a
deeply felt belief that an attempt to
borrow from foreigners has resulted in
"manipulation and exploitation" by
foreigners. Yung Ho, writing for the
Union Research Institue's (URI) Commu
nist China 1967, finds the essence of
Mao's thought to be opposition to "any
thing foreign," c'.Od China's attempt at
"propagating Mao-Tse-tung's thought
abroad" to be an aggressive policy "even
worse than Hitler's rule," one which
inevitably produced setbacks which further
isolate China (326-327).
The Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER)
further suggests that those experienced
in diplomacy were less given to anti
foreign outbursts, but that because
Peking's Red Guards were powerful, the
Foreign Ministry professionals "could
not risk Red Guards accusing them of
'softness' towards foreigners." However,
this may miss the point. The older pro
fessionals -- themselves victims of humi
liation at the hands of foreigners -- may
too have delighted in the revenge of the
younger amateurs. The Foreign Ministry
may not have wanted to prevent much of
what the young people did: it is
possible that the- young "carried out
the policies of their extremist elders
to the extreme."
The important question is, what
policies? For many Western analysts,
form and power are far more crucial
than content and policy. About what,
then, were the extremists extreme?
If we take seriously the Chinese de
scriptions of their own actions rather
than write them off as "jargon" (Gur
tov, 3), we may gain insight into some
of the powerful motivations and group
forces instigating those actions.
Why, for example, do the Chinese in
sist on a "tit for tat struggle"
when confronted by insults from forei8n
states which they cannot return in kind?
Perhaps, as do many present-day American
blacks, the Chinese feel themselves to
be a group which has finally stood up.
They insist that black is beautiful or
that (the) red (book) is beautiful.
Sensitive to the degradations of the past,
they now proudly insist on the right
to self-defense. These experiences
and emotions are not the monopoly of
the young. Nonetheless, the young tend
to view elders who have learned to
survive in the alien world of the op
pressors as Uncle Toms rather than
Uncle Hos. Since the issue is no
l o ~ g e r kowtowing to imposed injustices,
one should not be surprised to discover
reparations or blood debts for past
crimes. China Quarterly's Chronicle
and Documentation of China's foreign
relations furnishes some data for such
an explanation of so-called Chinese
anti-foreignism.
The theme that justice can be done
for the Han people was established in
60
the solution of January, 1967.
Chinese had been killed, and
jailed in demonstrations there at the
end of 1966. Afterwards the Portuguese
regime on Macao wisely admitted its
guilt, apologized to the families of the
dead and and paid monetary com
pensation for its error. To young
Chinese demanding justice fbrtheir
people, this may well have suggested a
model for the foreign policy of the
Cultural Revolution.
Other public insults to Chinese abroad
triggered strong reactions in China. In
January, 1967, when Russian police re
pulsed Chinese students at Lenin's mauso
leum and Stalin's tomb, Jen-min
accused the Russians of fascist atroci
ties comparable. to those "committed by
the Czar, by Hitler, and by the Ku Klux
Klan." (.fq, 1130, 241). Events in Indo
nesia at that time constituted the main
example of what could happen to Chinese
in foreign pogroms. Indonesian soldiers
had illegally searched and questioned
Chinese diplomats J and "even pushed and
struck Chinese Commercial Attach: Li
Ching-tang, behaving in a most uncivi
lized way" (.fq, 1125, 120). Soon China
had to protest undiplomatic attacks on
its embassy, consuls, news offices, and
residences, on overseas Chinese schools,
shops, offices and homes. Even the
right-wing URI writers note how Indo
nesia consciously and intentionally in
sulted and humiliated China. Scores of
thousands of Chinese were assaulted,
tortued, detained, expelled and murdered.
Against "outrageous" acts of "looting,
burning, raping and killing at will,"
(URI, 254), China retaliated. Her re
sponse essentially was not against the
counter-revolutionary coup in Indonesia
but against the "racist persecution of
Chinese nationals" (CQ, 1127, 222).
"China should have cut her diplomatic
ties" with Indonesia (URI, 307). If even
anti-Communist Chinese exiles, outraged
by Indonesian atrocities, demanded a
stronger response than the Peking
government's, one can suspect the depth
of feeling of the youngpatriots in China.
The insecure position of Chinese
.people in Southeast Asia is well-
known. Sun Yat-sen expressed the
fears of many Chinese half a century
ago when he spoke of the racial ex
tinction threatening the Chinese and
made analogies between the Han and the
Jewish peoples. In 1960, 95,000
Chinese had evacuated from Indo
nesia. By 1967 not only was the per
secution of Chinese in Southeast Asia
just as real as it had been in Sun
Yat-sen's time, but in addition, the
two nuclear super-powers had joined
hands. surrounded China with nuclear
missiles and pledged to prevent her
from becoming a nuclear power and from
intervening in the affairs of neigh
boring nations. China was helpless in
aiding its in Asian countries.
Nuclear holocaust was around the corner.
Mass racial slaughter was a reality in
Indonesia.
Chinese fears may seem ridiculous to
non-Chinese brought up to think in terms
of Chinese hordes and the yellow peril.
How can the most populous nation expe
rience anxiety over racial extinction?
The situation is similar to the experience
of blacks in America. Whites see blacks
spreading everywhere, and find a need
to stop welfare payments or to push
birth control in order to end the racial
menace. But blacks with a historical
consciousness formed of lynchings, rape,
and humiliat.ions fear that the white man
is out to castrate black men and kill
off the race. Black self-defense, con
versely, is apprehended by whites as
aggression, terror, and anarchy.
The need here is not to catalogue
the alleged anti-foreign acts of the
Chinese in 1967, but to note that they
were almost always in response to direct
insults to the Chinese people and their
proud living heritage, Mao, the man who
led them to stand up. The foreign policy
of the Cultural Revolution was more an
expression of authentic nationalism than
it was calculated manipulation. America
escaped the attacks to which Britain was
I
61
exposed because America lacked a colony
adjacent to China full of Chinese to
humiliate. Cambodia was spared attack
because revolution and not the f ate of
Chinese nationals was at issue. Burma,
where police let Burmese beat up Chinese
and where a Chinese representative was
killed, could not so easily avoid the
pent-up wrath and deep-felt indignation
of the Chinese.
In view of the causes an d consequences
of the demand for self-defense and jus
tice, it was natural that much of the
Cultural Revolution attack on the Chinese
Foreign Ministry centered on its Overseas
Chinese Affairs Commission (Gurtov, 24),
and on the people responsible for those
affairs, such as Liao Cheng - chih. It
seems that such officials had decided
earlier that it was best to keep 'over
seas Chinese out of the open politics of
their countries of residence, a nd out
of Chinese foreign affairs. During the
Korean War, for example, it was feared
that overseas Chinese participation in
the "resist America, aid Korea" drive
would "prove detrimental to their 'long
term existence'" (URI), 245). Despite
this policy, in 1959 the Indonesian
army moved against local Chinese. En
raged, Chinese leaders reportedly threa
tened the Indonesian government. Per
sistent remonstrance from Peking, how
ever, would have made "the Chinese in
Indonesia seem even more foreign and
vulnerable than before, and would have
undercut Peking-Djakarta ties. Conse
quently Peking had to abandon "its more
narrow, nationalistic interest in and
attachment to the overseas Chinese"
(D. Mozingo, Sino-Indonesia Rela tions,
RAND, 1965, 22-29). But by 1967, when
Chinese in Indonesia were being slaugh
tered despite Peking's conciliatory
policies, past compromises and accomo
dations appeared as capitulation and
appeasement. Liao Cheng-chih was criti
cized for not having met the murderers
with a mass self-defense struggle (URI,
247). Commission were charged
with having tried "to extinguish the
fiery fire of revolution among the
turned overseas Chinese" (URI, 250).
Action against the Foreign Ministry
and the Commission was launched by
previously submerged and uncoordinated
groups which were able to surface and
act together during the Cultural Revo
lution. Wang Li, who allegedly helped
to organize the attacks on the Foreign
Ministry (Gurtov, 17, 65-66), had for
a decade been identified with the notion
that only by more actively working for
the overthrow of bad regimes in South
east Asia could the problems of the
Chinese be solved. In mid-1967, China
for t he first time committed herself to
the cause of in Burma and
Indonesia.
Some Red Guards and other groups who
assailed the so-called traitorous
policies of the Overseas Chinese Affairs
Commission have been identified as mem
bers of returned overseas Chinese or
ganizations (URI, 244; Gurtov, 21).
Given a heroes' welcome, they could draw
upon a public following. When the
dtaffaires ad interim was forced out of
Indonesia at the end of April, 1967, he
returned to such a reception, and to the
intoxicating atmosphere of the Cultural
Revolution in which groups openly
pressed their demands on the government.
In these circumstances, the
apparently was able to work with Wang
Li and others in semi-open politics, to
change Chinese foreign policy by changing
the policy-makers.
The beatings, burnings and humilia
tions in Peking at this time cannot be
regarded as an aberration. Americans
have seen East Europeans and anti
Communists bomb and raid embassies, beat
up officials and much more. Such deeds
are the virtually inevitable conse
quence of the rapidly changing, national
istic world in which we live. In China,
at first, a cautious Foreign Ministry
had avoided this kind of outburst by
diverting popular energies into more
productive channels. Later, in the open
atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution,
some repressed portions of the Chinese
people implemented their beliefs. Even
orders from Mao and Chou could not halt
62
these genuine, popular outbursts.
What has been described as extremism
in China, then, would be better depicted
as a normal occurrence in our 20th cen
tury world. Calling the
extremists does not help to understand
them. Instead, it diverts attention
from the actual groups and causes in
volved. Politicians in Southeast Asia
are still calling upon racist, anti
Chinese feelings to mobilize popular
sentiment. The powers around China are
still so strongly organized against her
that extraordinary constraints are placed
on what China's leaders can do to help
Chinese abroad. While nuclear devasta
tion threatens at home and pogroms 100m
abroad, many Chinese will continue to
protest the inability of their leaders
to protect kith and k in. They will
press their leaders for policy changes-
but changes will be ineffective in the
current international environment. For
the truth is that the Chinese cannot yet
quite stand up straight. Inj ustices are
deeply felt, and se1f-defense and justice
are called for. In the Cultural Revolu
tion some groups of Chinese tried to
force Peking to live up to those values
and demands. They failed not because
what they did was extreme, but because
too much of the world is organized to
keep the "uppity" Chinese in their place.
ANNOUNCES
IN FORTHCOMING ISSUES:
SAUL LANDAU - An Interview with Fidel Castro
JAMES O'CONNOR - The Fiscal Crisis of the State
MARTIN SKLAR - Disaccuft'luiation andTwentieth
Century America
JAMES PETRAS - Robert Dahl
DAVID EAKINS- Corporate Liberal Policy-Making
JAN HALLIDAY - Japan and American Imperialism
ROBERT FITCH and MARY OPPENHEIMER - Finance
Capital and the Corporation
and Further explorations of Ecology
Revolutionary Youth Movement II
The Underground Press
Consumption and WO.....s Liberation
The WorK',. Class High School
SOCIALIST REVOLUTION

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63
IILeaf Abscission"?
NGO VlNll LONG
[This is a slightly revised version of
an article from the English language
edition of BAo GA November,
a monthly publication by a group
of Vietnamese students in the United
States. For more information about the
write to BIlo 76a
Pleasant Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02139]
"Leaf abscission" is a term used by
American military men to designate their
chemical war in Viet Nam. The term,
like its sister word "defoliation," is
meant to suggest that the dumping of
herbicides and other chemicals over a
tiny piece of land that has also been
the victim of the most intense bombing
in world historyl has helped to thin out
a few troublesome trees and shrubs while
causing no significant damage to any
thing else at all. On the contrary,
the use of herbicides and other chem
icals sprayed by the American military
in Viet Nam has already caused untold
misery to thousands of innocent
civilians.
From late 1959 till early 1963 the
author of this article was involved in
making detailed military maps (scale 1/
of the whole of South Viet Nam,
and thus had occasion to be, at one time
or another, in virtually every hamlet
and village in the country. It was
also in 1959 that the Diem regime began
putting into effect its "pacification"
program. As for the Vietnamese major
ity living in the plains, by February,
1959, "relocation of families within
communities had begun and, in contrast
to land development and refugee acti
vities, these relocations were often
forced.,,2 The restructured villages,
surrounded by moats and barbed wire,
were euphemistically known as "agrovilles."
(In Vietnamese they were called khu
mat, a term coined from Chinese roots
and which was presumably supposed to
carry a graceful connotation, although
it literally means something like "com
pacted area" or "concentration zone.")
People were taken from their plots of
ground, where their their rice
fields, their ancestral
were located, and moved to totally
unsuitable areas where they could be
"protected.,,3 As for the ethnic minor
ities living in the mountains (often
referred to in Western writings as
"montagnards"), the Diem regime forced
them down into the lowlands and into
concentration-camp-like compounds where
they were to call themselves by the new
name of Viet Nam "New Vietnamese")
and like the Vietnamese
majority--a "cultural revolution" of
sorts! In both cases, the houses and
fields of those who had been relocated
were burnt, in order to deny their use
to the Viet Congo (As early as 1956,
Diem was already making extravagant use
of the term ''Viet Cong," which literally
means "VietnameseC01lDllunists," meaning
anybody who opposed him.)
By 1961, when the American defoliation
program had begun against jungle growth
along highways, railways, and in places
considered to be Viet Cong areas, the
Diem regime was not long in finding new
uses for the chemicals: Seymour M.
Hersh, in an article entitled "Our
Chemical War" published in the New York
Review of Books on April 25, 1968,
quoted Newsweek in saying that by the
end of 1961, American special
warfare troops had begun teaching Viet
namese fliers how to spray "Co1lDllunist
held areas with a chemical that turns
f
!
64
the rice-fields yellow, killing any
crop being grown in rebel strong
holds." What Newsweek failed to say is
that the Diem regime in fact began put
ting this training into practice before
the end of the same year. The "rebel
strongholds" referred to by Newsweek were
more often than not, as the writer has
witnessed personally, simply communities
in sparsely populated areas isolated
from effective government control. For
this reason the Diem government felt it
had to resort to killing their crops as
a means of driving the population more
quickly into the new and overly ambitious
"strategic hamlets" (! chiln
which had replaced the abortive "agro
villes" early in the year. It was easier
to order fliers to spray crops from the
air than to send ground soldiers into
the villages to force the people out by
setting fire to their fields and houses.
It had "been discovered that
soldiers, on .coming face t-o face with
the misery and tearful entreaties of the
dispossessed, were very often inclined
to resist orders. The combined effects
of regrouping the population in totally
unsuitable areas and of killing their
crops brought hunger and starvation to
thousands of people. 4
The misery inflicted upon thousands
of people through the killing of their
crops to force them into the "strategic
hamlets" and the repression of Buddhists
and students, among other factors, led
to the downfall of the Diem regime. In
an attempt to stabilize the situation,
the U.S. government began sending its
troops into South Viet Nam. But even
before the collapse of the Diem govern
ment, the U. S. military had already
taken over the task of spraying crops
in what they referred to as "Viet Cong
territory. "5 In September, 1963, Rufus
Philipps reported to the President of
the United States, "giving [him] the es
timates of USOM Rural Affairs that the
Delta was falling under Viet Cong control
in areas where pacification was suppo
sedly The Delta is the whole
land mas"s south and southwest of Saigon
where most of the crops in the country
were planted. "Viet Cong territory,"
as defined by the Americans, therefore
comprised a very sizable part of the
food-producing area of the country!
Beginning in 1965, the American
military initiated still another ver
sion of "pacification" by sending the
Marines to "secure villages" and to
root out ''Viet Cong infrastructures. "7
After two years of continuous
a New York Times report of August 7,
1967,cited official United States data
on the loyalties of the hamlets, stating
that the number of hamlets under total
Saigon government control was a mere
168, while the number of those totally
controlled by the Viet Cong was 3978.
The rest of the hamlets were listed as .
"contested." To win the contest, or as
the new name for the
gram put it: to be successful in t'The
War to. Win the Hearts and Minds of the
.People," the U.S. military was finding
new ways to "pacify" the villages. nne
way was to send out American troops
With bulldozers and bombers to raze the
villages to the ground, and subsequently
to transport the inhabitants to the so
called "camps for refugees fleeing from
C01lDDunism
ll
in and around the larger
towns and cities where they could be
"protected." (See two excellent books
on this subject by Jonathan Schell: The
Village of Ben Sue, and The Military
Half). Another way was the intensified
chemicals, much in the same way
Diem had used them before. In his arti
cle cited above, Seymour M. Hersh writes:
But by early 1967, Presidential
advisers had a different reason
for using herbicides, one that
wasn't directly linked to
cutting off Viet Cong food sup
plies. The rationale was pre
sented to a group of scientists
who met in February with Donald
Hornig, President Johnson's
chief scientific adviser, to
protest the use of anticrop che
micals. According to one
scientist who attended the ses
sion, Hornig explained that the
6S
anticropprogram was aimed
chiefly at moving the peeple.
The source quoted Hornig a s
explaining that when the
United States found a Viet
Cong supporting area, it was
faced with the alternatives
of either bombing, bulldozing,
and attacking it or dropping
leaflets telling the people
to move because the herbicides
were coming. As Hornig expressed
it, "it's all geared to moving
people."
Mr. Hersh further states that the
Pentagon used 60 million dollars'
worth of defoliants and herbicides,
or 12 million gallons, in Viet Nam
in 1967 which was enough to cover
"nearly'half of the arable land in
South Viet Nam." He also writes that,
since Pentagon officials were arguing
that the herbicides were more
effective in killing crops than in
stripping foliage,
by the end of 1966 more than
half of the C-123 missions
were admittedly directed at
crops, and it is probable that
any effort at a trebling of
capability in 1967 was aimed
not at the jungles of South
Viet Nam but at its arable crop
land.
In a study of American anticrop and
defoliation methods, Y6ichi Fukushima"
head of the Agronomy Section of the
Japan Science Council, claims that
American chemical attacks by 1967
had ruined more than million
acres (or one-half) of the arable
land in South Viet Nam, and were
a direct cause of death for nearly
1000 peasants and more than 13,000
head of livestock. The impact of
the US anticrop program upon those
peasants who escaped being taken to
the "camps for refugees fleeing from
Communism" is not known. As for the
"refugees,1t their situation was (and
is) so bad that the editorial staffs
of Saigon newspapers, in spite of
the harsh government censorship,
compelled to run long articles on the
misery endured by these people. For in
Viet Nam peo-ple say that "you can't
cover an elephant's mouth with a
basket.
1t
Certain facts are so well
known that they simply cannot be
hidden from view. Thus, even
(a Saigon daily newspaper which was
specifically created to justify the
"pacificatj.on" program [of which the
defoliation program is a part] and
whose editor and staff were members
and leaders of Rural Development
Cadre Teams sponsored by the joint
cooperation_of the CIA andthe USOM)
had this to say on December 10, 1967 ,
in a long article entitled "Looking
at the Faces of the Two QuAng
Provinces in War, Hunger, Misery, and
Corruption":
This is a free area--free for
depravity, corruption, irrespon
sibility,cowardice, obsequious
ness, and loss of human dignity.
What the devil is dignity when
people sit there waiting to be
thrown a few hundred piasters
and allotted a few dozen kilos
of rice a month? I believe
that even if a certain Communist
had in his pockets several dozen
"open-arms program" passes,
after seeing the kind of humiliated
life in a refugee camp he would run
away without daring to look back.
But we seem to like this, and the
Americans also like us to perform
these kinds of activities so that
they can have a lot of big statis
tics to present to both their
houses of Congress. The Americans
like to count, count people's heads,
count square and cubic meters, and
count the money they throw out.
They think that the more they can
count, the better is the proof of
their success, the proof of their
humanitarianism, and the proof of
their legitimacy in this war
How high a figure has the number
of refugees who have to suffer and
66
stay hungry reached? Many
stastistics proudly present
the number two million.
--- [emphasis added]
If the number two million only
to the situation in 1967, then how
many more people have been victimized
since then?
In an article entitled "Military
Uses of Herbicides in Vietnam" pub
lished in the British journal New
Scientist on June 13, 1968, Arthur
Galston, Professor of Biology at
Yale University and President of the
Botanical Society of America, wrote!
The Air Force is preparing
to spray about ten million
gallons of herbicides over
South Vietnam in the year
beginning July 1968 . It
is estimated that this will
be enough to treat almost
four million acres, of which
about one-third will be crop
land.
Professor Galston went on to say:
With respect to the deli
berate killing of crops in
order to deprive the Viet Cong
military of food, it can only
be remarked that whenever star
vation is used as a weapon
against an entire civilian pop
ulation, the main sufferers
are inevitably the aged, the
infirm, pregnant women, and
children under five years old.
The fighting man almost always
gets enough food to sustain
himself. Thus in using hunger
as a weapon we are attacking
the part of South Vietnamese
society which is least involved
in military operations and
whom we would least wish to
injure.
In the June 29, 1966 issue of
Christian two Harvard physi
cians, Dr. Jean Mayer, Professor of
Nutrition, and Dr. Victor W. Sidel,
warned that the US anticrop program
in Vietnam; like that of every food
blockade or like some of the famines
that they have witnessed, would create
a process which begins with the
from starvation of small children first,
then older children, and then the elder
ly. In the case of South Vietnam, as
rightly noted in a report by the ]Os
ton-based Physicians for Social Respon
sibility, dated January 1967, malnutri
tion, even before the anticrop program,
was already.!. problem, and
beri-beri, night blindness, anemia,
decayed or poor teeth, endemic goiter
and other' nutritional diseases were
found to be widespread in the country.
How high is the percentage of people
affected by the above diseases now,
after the US military has effectively
destroyed perhaps half or more of the
arable land in South Vietnam? Nobody
knows the exact figure.
Besides hunger and starvation and
their accompanying effects, have the
chemicals used by the American military
in Vietnam caused any direct harm,
immediate or eventual, either animal
or human life? At least three basic
types of chemicals have been in use:
1) Agent Orange, a 50-50 mixture of
two defoliants, 2,4,5-T (trichloro
phenoxyacetic acid) and 2,4-D (dichlo
rophenoxyacetic acid); 2) Agent Blue,
a neutralized cacodylic acid; and 3)
Agent White, also known as Tordon 101, a
weaker mixture of "unknown chemicals."B
First of all, according to a report
of the National Institute of Environ
mental Health Science, September 1969,
which contains data collected by the
Bionetics Research Laboratory of Litton
Industries (under contract for the
National Cancer Institute) during the
period 1965-1968 on the effects of
pesticides, both 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D have
been shown in tests on mice to produce
significant increases in the incidence
of malformation in fetuses and also in
the incidence of cancer. The worst of
the two is 2,4,5-T, which repeatedly
produced test results of 100% in the
proportion of abnormal litters.
67
In Vietnam there has for a long time
been talk linking an apparent alarming
rise in the incidence of birth deformi
ties to the chemicals sprayed. by the
Americans there. The Americans and the
Saigon regime have repeatedly denied
that the chemicals they use could cause
any harm whatever to animal or human
life. Last sutmner, several Saigon
newspapers, in defiance of the strict
censorship and the possibility of having
their offices closed down, printed
stories and pictures of horribly deformed
babies born in villages that had been
"defoliated." For example, Tin SAng,
in its June 26, 1969 issue, printed an
interview with an old woman who reported
that her newly pregnant daughter was
caught in a chemical strike, and fainted.
with blood coming out of her mouth and
nostrils, and- later from the vulva.
She was taken to a hospital where she
was later delivered of a deformed fetus.
~ . . .
Dong Nai, another Saigon newspaper,
printed on the same day a long article
entitled "The Disease of Women Pro
ducing Stillborn Fetuses," which they
said was a new phenomenon which was
causing the Itnoisiest discussion" in
the country. Next to the article is a
photograph of a dead deformed baby with
a face like that of a duck and the sec
tion around the stomach shrunken and
twisted. The same newspaper, on the
following day, reported a case of a
woman giving birth, in Long An Hospital
in Tan An District, to a deformed baby
with two heads, three'arms and 20
fingers. Just above the article, the
paper carries a picture of another de
formed baby with a head that resembles
that of a poodle or a sheep. Still
another Saigon newspaper, Tia Sang, on
June 26, 1969, printed a picture of a
baby with three legs, a head squeezed
in close to the legs, and two arms wrap
ped around a big bag that replaced the
lower section of the face. Under the
picture there is a separate report of
the deformed baby mentioned above with
two heads, three arms, and 20 fingers.
The Saigon government's counter
argument was that the birth defects were
caused by what it called "Okina\ra
bacteria." But many Vietnamese and
American scientists who have seen the
kinds of birth deformities in Viet Nam
either in person or in pictures disagree
with this argument. They say that
venereal diseases call only cause warps
in the bones and skin boils on new-born
infants, and nat such complete change in
bodily structures. Even in an interview
reported in the Saigon Army Ne,,",spaper,
Tien T u y ~ n , Dr. Pham Tu Ch{nh, director
of the Hung Vudng Government Obstetrics
Clinic, asserted that the cases of
birth deformities that were callsing ron
cern in the country definitely could not
have been caused by venereal diseases.
9
In the rural areas, where most such
known cases of deformed fetuses have
occurred, there is an extreme shortage
of trained medical personnel or of pro
fessional obstetric services, at least
in those areas not held by the iI.'1F. Thus
it is difficult to compile accurate sta
tistics concerning this phenomenon.
When the report of the National In
stitute of Environmental Health Sciences
and the news of birth deformities in
Viet Nam came to the attention of some
American scientists, they went to Wa
shington to try to persuade the U.S.
Government to curb the use of the harm
ful chemicals. On October 31, 1969,
the Washington Post, in an article en
titled "New Curbs Won't Affect Defolia
tion in Viet Nam," reported:
New White House restricitons on
the use of a powerful herbicide
will not affect its military
usefulness in Vietnam, the De
fense Department said yesterday.
The Pentagon statement said no
change would be made in
policy governing military use of
the defoliant 2,4,5-T because
the Defense Department feels
its present policy conforms to the
new presidential directive.
Four days later, in an article entitled
68
"Spray Earth Policy" in the New York
Post, November 4, 1969, Frank Mankie
wicz and Tom Braden had this to say:
Those who are concerned over
a possible massacre -- even of
women and children -- in South
Vietnam when U.S. troops de
part might consider the fact
that we now spray throughout
South Vietnam enormous amounts
of an anticrop chemical which
has been known for three
years to cause deformed births
in test animals -- at a rate
of 100 per cent.
At least four newspapers in South
Vietnam printed stories -- and
pictures -- last summer of de
formed babies born in villages
sprayed with the chemical
(called 2,4,5T), and news
papers were promptly
down by the Thieu government
for "interfering with the war
effort. "
Use of the chemical, described
by our government as "probably
dangerous," is now banned in
"populated areas" and on or
near food products in the Uni
ted States, but the Pentagon
announced last week that it
would continue to use it in
Vietnam, where Army Service
Manuals set its appropriate
use against food supplies.
In addition, it is widely used
in areas where the population
captures its drinking water
from rain, by the use of roof
gutters and barrels, and where
wells are sunk into soil satu
rated with the chemical.
Just how high an "offensive
potential" this chemical war
fare had was not really known
until 1966 when, for the first
time, the National Institute
of Health commissioned tests
on pregnant animals. The
study showed that severe
malformation of offspring
occurred in rats at the rate
of 39 per cent lO .. when
they were given a small dose
[of 2,4,5T]. \fuen this dose
was increased to the level a
Vietnamese woman might con
sume in a few days in her
drinking water, the percentage of
of fetal malformation rose to
90 and beyond.
Whether the rate of human mal
formation frOm contact with
this chemical is greater or
less than with rats is, of
course, unknown.
It was this that prompted the
finding that 2,4,5T ,,,as
seriously hazardous and "pro
bably dangerous" and caused
its removal from the domestic
market in the United States.
The President's science advi
ser, Dr. Lee du Bridge, perhaps
adumbrating the Pentagon's
refusal to cut down its use
against Asians, said only that
the rate of fetal malformation
was "greater than expected."ll
Not since the Romans
salted the land after destroying
Carthage has a nation taken pains
to visit the war on future gene
rations.
As for Agent Blue, the Merck Index
of Chemicals and Drugs says that it is
an organic arsenical acid composed of
S4.29 percent arsenic. Arthur W. Gal
ston, the Yale biologist mentioned
lier, in an article in the August-Septem
ber, 1967, issue of Science and Citizen,
WT9te that the lethal dose of the above
compound in dogs is one gram per kilogram;
body weight, when administered beneath
the skin. He added that if the same
toxicity held for man, then about 70
grams, or slightly over two ounces, would
kill the average ISO-pound man. In the
Noavelle
Des ))escouvel"te, latUs par
de! Vais Allfricaibs .Aux
COtes ItlCOI1IlUes cle fAcie Swl
Ed a:IeC let Pats Ac1jacell"ts
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70
article already quoted, Seymour M.
Hersh pointed out that in cases of
"emergency," which he learned were not
infrequent (especially when American
pilots are exposed to heavy ground
fire), the high-pressure spray nozzles
of a plane on a spraying mission can
eject the entire 1000-gallon cargo in
just 30 seconds. In such cases, who
knows what might happen to the people
below!
In the already quoted study prepared
by Yoichi Fukushima, there is a testi
mony by Cao Van a doctor, which
included a description of a chemical
attack near Saigon on October 3, 1964,
in which nearly 2500 acres of crop
producing land, a large number of live
stock, and more than 1000 inhabitants
were affected:
. . They had only breathed
in the polluted air or the
poison had touched their skin.
At first, they felt sick and
had some diarrhea; then they
began to feel it hard to
breathe and they had low
blood pressure; some serious
cases had trouble with their
optic nerves and went blind.
Pregnant women gave birth to
stillborn or premature chil
dren. Most of the affected
cattle died from serious
diarrhea, and river fish
floated on the surface of the
water belly up, soon after the
chemicals were spread.
At a press conference in New York on
April 3, 1969, E.W. Pfeiffer, Professor
of Zoology at the University of Montana,
and G.H. Orians, occupying the same
position at the University of Washing
ton, after returning from an official
mission to Viet Nam to investigate the
effects of the U.s. defoliation program,
reported that while traveling in an armed
naval vessel along a 65-mile strip of
waterway linking Saigon with the sea,
they observed that the mangroves on both
sides had been denuded, that scarcely
any living creatures were to be seen,
and that bird lif2 had apparently been
greatly reduced.
The dumping of herbicides and other
chemicals in Viet Nam, besides causing
harm to people, animals and crops, as
we have seen, could also trigger Change,'
in ecology that, according to the belie
of many scientists, may permanently re
duce the once-fertile fields in Viet
Nam to dust bowls. Laterization, a pro
cess which occurs in tropical regions ,
when the organic material and chemicalsi
that normally enrich the soil are washej
away because of lack of protective
growth, thus resulting in a reddish
which hardens irreversibly into a brick1
like consistency upon exposure to sun
light, has begun in some areas in Viet
t
There is some evidence that even if
the spraying were to be stopped now, th.
process of laterization would likely
continue for some time in the future.
Fred H. Tschirley, assistant chief of
the Crops Protection Research Division
of the U.s. Department of Agriculture
and former adviser to the U.S. Depart
ment of State, in an article entitled
"Defoliation in Vietnam"13 in the Feb
ruary 21 issue of Science, wrote:
Strips of mangrove on both sides I
of the Ong Doc River, sprayed witl
Orange in 1962, were of particu
lar in. terest. The treated striPS(!
were still plainly visible.
Thus, one must assume that the
trees were not simply defoliated,!
but were killed .. 20 years may:
be a reasonable estimate of the" f
time needed for this forest to
return to its original condition.,
Also, agent Blue (an arsenic compound)
does not disintegrate or decompose in
the soil but will keep on killing vege-,
tation and soil microorganisms for a
long time. Furthermore, as Representa
tive McCarthy of New York pointed out
in his book The Ultimate Folly, the her
bicides used in Vietnam are made ten ,
71
times more potent than their normal
dose, while the spray nozzles used to
administer them have not been altered,
resulting in a heavy overdose for the
trees and vegetation sprayed.
As if all the above were not enough,
some in the American military would
"escalate" the anticrop war to new pro
portions. Professor Arthur W. Galston,
in his article "Military Uses of Herbi
cides in Viet Nam" already cited,. re
ported that some U.S. military men and
their advisers would very much like to
spread an especially virulent strain of
the rice-blast fungus developed at Fort
Detrick, Maryland, "in the Vietnam
theatre of war."
The U.S. government has again and
again tried to tell the American people
th.at it is in Viet Nam to protect free
dom, democracy, and the right of self
determination for the Vietnamese. But
the Vietnamese people understand very
well what the U.S. government is in Viet
Nam for.
An open letter of September 23, 1967
to President Johnson from the Student
Unions of Tho University,
University, Saigon University, and
Dalat University (representing most of
the university students in the country)
begins with these words:
The American intervention in the
Vietnamese internal situation
since af ter the Geneva Acc ord
in 1954 has made the Vietnamese
people regard the United States
as replacing the French colo
nizers. The American policy,
instead of helping the_Viet
namese people, only pushes them
into a destructive and b100dy
war
At the beginning of this year, Pro
fessor Ly Trung of the University
of Saigon, an ardent Catholic intel
lectual, was compelled to say the follow
ing words in a speech entitled "Why Do
I Want Peace," delivered before the Sai
gon Student Union:
Being a Vietnamese I can no
longer stand the sight of
foreigners arrogantly destroying
my country through the use
of the most modern and most
terrible means, and through
the use of the slogan "In
protecting the Freedom" of
the South Vietnamese popu
lation, a kind of freedom
that the South Vietnamese popu
lation has had to throw up and
vomit continuously during the
last ten years or so without
being able to swallow it
successfully.
Apart from the "vocal minority,"
many other Vietnamese, perhaps
finding it difficult to make public
their views in so many words, choose
to express themselves by continuing
to fight.
Already, the war in Viet Nam has
been the longest war in United States
history, except perhaps, depending on
just how one marks its duration, Am
erica's own War of Independence.
FOOTNOTES
1. According to an article en
titled "Ravaging Vietnam," which
appeared in The Nation, April 21, 1969,
B-52 bombing had by 1968 produced
an estimated 2.Ji craters of
approximately jb feet in depth and
45 feet in diameter. Filled with
water, these are said to be ideal
breeding grounds for malarial mos
quitoes.
2. W. A. Nighswonger, Rural Pa
cification in Viet Nam, Praeger, New
York, 1966,p.46:-
3. Nguyen Nhan, "Policy of
Key Rural Agrovilles," in Asian Culture,
Vol. 3, July-December 1961, No. 3-4, p.
32; also Nighswonger, loco cit.
72
4. During my map surveying expedition,
I witnessed countless heart-breaking
incidents. Here are but a few: In a
village of central Viet Nam one day I
saw .a group of children chasing
after 4ne anothertGward an open fire
which the corvee laborers {who
had been recruited to build the fence
and the moats the village)
-had made from uprooted grass. One boy
threw a handful of sOmething into the
fire; the rest waited. As I'was ap
proaching them -aut of curiosity, one
boy used a stick to get the things
out of the fire and the r-est swarmed
ov.er him, snatching them -up. The
"things" were baby rats! In near
frenzy, the children began to pursue
again, some tossed the
hot rats between their two hands,
others gulped them down An
other time, as I was approaching a
village I saw a woman working in a
rice-field with a small baby tied to
her back by a piece of cloth, and a
boy about four years old standing
in the glaring sun at the border
the field and yelling out to her (his
mother, I guessed). The baby cried.
The woman switched the baby around
to let it suck at her breast. The
baby sucked as hard as it could
but was not able to draw any milk
and began crying again. The wo
man looked around as if to see
whether I was watching. When I
pretended that I was. looking in the
direction of the boy, she spat into
the mouth of the child in an a t-
tempt to silence it.
Hunger struck most of the stra
tegic hamlets I visited. In the
village of Karom in central Viet
Nam, 200 persons, mostly children,
died in a singly month. Many people
had not eaten anything decent in
months, and as a result, their anal
muscles had become that
every time thay ate or drank some
thing, it would pass right through
them in not more than a few-min
utes.
5. Seymour M. Hersh. "Our Chemical .
War," The New York Review of Books,
April 25, 1968,-PP:- 1-2 of the-article.
6. cit., p. 64.
7. Ibid., pp. 114-1.15.
8. Hersh, loco cit.
/I ,.,
9. Tien Tuyen, July 4, 1969.
10. This was the proportion of ab
normal fetuses per litter when the
dosage of 2,4,5-T given was 113 mg.
per kg. of body weight, administered
subcutaneously in a solution of dime
thylsulfoxide. When the same dosages
were given the mice orally in a honey
solution, the proportion of abnormal
fetuses per litter was an even higher
54 per cent.
II. In the recent controversy over
the use of cyclamates as food additives
in the United States, it is to be noted
that the Food and Drug Administration
deemed the compound to be harmful to
humans when maximum concentrations which
might be consumed were only 1/50 those
concentrations which snowed negative
results in experiments with laboratory
test animals.
12. The Nation, April 21, 1969.
I
f/ .
I
f
73
r
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS .
AL McCOY, a graduate student at Yale, and ANGUS McDONALD, at
Berkeley, were leaders of the "Pan Am'Project" at Berkeley
this summer which resulted1n the article in this issue.
CARL RISKIN did his doctoral work at Berkeley in economic.
and now teaches at Columbia where he is a leader of the
eeAS chapter. HERB BIX makes his third contribution to the
Bulletin in this issue. He is finishing his doctoral work
in moden Japanese history at Harvard. ORVILLE SCHELL, one
of'our CeAS coordinators, writes frequently for periodicals
and !sco-editor of a sourcebook on modern Chinese history
. ED FRIEDMAN is co-editor of America's Asia, a collection cf'
radical essays to be' published by Pantheon. He studied his
tory at Harvard and now teaches at the University of Wiscon
sin. NGO LONG,"a graduate student at Harvard, edits ThHi
Bao publication for Vietnamese students in the
United States.
AMPO
AReporttrom The Japanese New Lett
AMPO is produced'byBeihe1ren (The Japan "Peace for Vietnam!" COIIIIII
ittee)and-Gaikokujin'Beiheiren, its affiliate organization fc"r foreign
in ,Japan.: AMPO is a movement publication designed to over
come the fact,that the Japanese Left, one of the most arUculate and
active movements in the worl9, is covered .by a blanket of silence in all
languages but Japanese.
. .'
Address: 'AMPO, Ishii Building
Payment --Check to Ampo-aha

Subscriptions -- 6 months
,_ Shinjuku-ku,
Overseas airmail $6
Tokyo, Japan
Japan ordinary -- l500
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people - 600
It is our specific hope t.hat this magazine will contribute to
unifiedactton in.l970 against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, which
is an enemy of the people' of both, countries, and 0 f the 'people of
all Asia.
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