The Amateur
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

One of our favorite movies is the film Alfred Hitchcock made in 1940 called “Foreign Correspondent.” It’s about how civilization’s enemy in what became World War II sought to manipulate a peace movement dubbed “well-meaning amateurs” and through them, the press. We wouldn’t want to draw exact parallels to the Vietnam era – or our own wartime drama today – but we couldn’t help think of it as we read Thos. Lipscomb’s dispatch, issued on our Page 1 yesterday, on how the communists in Hanoi were viewing the activities of John Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Mr. Lipscomb, a seasoned freelance journalist, managed to uncover two documents of the Viet Cong that are now in the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University. They are from the spring and early summer of 1971, shortly after Mr. Kerry gave his infamous testimony to the Senate, calling his fellow GIs war criminals and belittling the idea of a communist threat.
One of the documents, which were captured from the enemy in Vietnam, shows a detailed knowledge of such Vietnam Veterans Against the War activities as the Dewey Canyon demonstration on the Mall in Washington in April 1971. It even mentions the ex-GIs returning their medals. Another communist document, called a circular, says that the “spontaneous antiwar movements in the US have received assistance and guidance from the friendly (VC/NVN) delegations at the Paris Peace Talks.”
The circular notes the seven-point peace proposal that the Viet Cong’s Madame Binh was flogging out of her redoubt in Paris, where communist diplomats received, among others, the young ex-lieutenant, Mr. Kerry. The communist circular in the Texas archive states, “The antiwar movements in the US are trying to find means to cooperate…They are also trying by all means to support the seven point peace proposal (of the PRG) [Viet Cong] and oppose the distorted interpretation made by the White House, the Pentagon and CIA.”
It may be that Mr. Kerry is going to lose the election next week, and all this will become academic. Or it may be that he’s going to win, and historians are going to start delving more deeply into this period for clues as to his emergence on the political stage. Our own view is that Mr. Kerry’s role in the movement advocating a retreat in Vietnam is just as important, even more important, than his role in the riverine war in the Delta, and that the line of inquiry Mr. Lipscomb has opened will have to be pursued for a full understanding of the man who seeks to lead our country.
Certainly, Mr. Kerry himself has placed Vietnam at the center of his campaign – not only by emphasizing it at the Democratic convention in Boston, but by pledging, as recently as this weekend, to “hunt down and capture or kill the terrorists” with the same energy that he put “into going after the Viet Cong.” Our favorite rejoinder to that boast came from Captainsquartersblog.com, which, commenting on Mr. Lipscomb’s dispatch, remarked, “The only conclusion that one can draw from the historical record is that John Kerry will chase them to Paris to negotiate our surrender on their terms.”