Roe v Wade - 27 January 1973

It must be a very strange thing to be a Vietnamese of, say, 22 or 3, and be asked to believe that life as you’d known it from babyhood stopped this weekend.

Life or death, the human condition, whatever you care to call it.

Even the middle-aged and the old must scarcely believe it, and the military on both sides – on all sides, I should say – will be duly sceptical, for nobody except North Vietnam is jubilant. Her chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho, said, “It is a very great victory for the Vietnamese people.”

And if you qualify that to read for the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong and the Soviet Union, he’s undoubtedly right. All that President Thieu could do was to make the kind of chin-up speech that leaders do who are unsure of their jobs and fear the worst. He broadcast for 40 minutes to the people of South Vietnam and tried to tell them not that they’d won, but that they had nobly withstood a kind of Leningrad.

“After eighteen years of savage fighting,” he said, “the Communists have been forced to stop the conflict. Our people have truly destroyed the Communist troops that have come from the north and we have valiantly fought the forces that are in the South. The Communists have been forced to recognise two Vietnams.”

Well, have they? President Nixon said the settlement has “the full support of President Thieu and his government”, which could be an interesting play on words. Apparently there was not much else that Thieu could do.

In the first agreement, which nearly came off in October, Thieu absolutely refused to leave his own government to whatever fate the North Vietnamese might decide. He wanted it put down on paper that North Vietnam would let Thieu and his government stay in power until an election.

This, it seems, is something that the North Vietnamese absolutely refused to do. Hence, President Nixon’s supporters say, the sudden outburst of bombing in North Vietnam. And if this was the reason for it, no wonder Mr Nixon gave no explanation to the Congress or the people beyond the dogged assurance of the Pentagon press officer that the bombing was restricted to military targets.

We know, of course, that whether on orders or by accident, the bombing did some ruinous damage inside Hanoi. And it’s arguable that Mr Nixon acted, after being confronted in miniature with Mr Truman’s problem, over the use of the first atomic bomb. That’s to say the enemy said no, no ceasefire, as the Japanese said no, no surrender. The alternatives with Japan were to continue the air and ground war and maybe lose half a million or one or two million men by invading the Japanese islands, or bomb the Japanese into surrender with that new and terrible weapon. And, to put it bloodlessly, it worked. Mr Nixon evidently decided to bomb North Vietnam back to the negotiating table and it worked.

He must have recalled the equally interminable and wearisome negotiations with the Chinese and the North Koreans 20 years ago. President Eisenhower, like Mr Nixon, came into the White House on a promise to end the war. Eisenhower eventually came to the end of his patience with the Communists’ Chinese torture form of negotiation, which we have seen in a politer but no less tedious form at the United Nations: a form of nitpicking, t-crossing, hair-splitting examination of every word and letter, performed with tireless, poker-faced patience, interrupted at long intervals by outbursts of righteous indignation and walkouts.

Well after months and months, Eisenhower threatened the Communists with the use of tactical atomic weapons and they came back to the table and signed. And so now have the North Vietnamese, having promised to respect the South Vietnamese people’s right to self-determination while leaving President Thieu in office.

Now this has been said in other countries before, and once, having been said, it has been ignored or violated. The North Vietnamese, we are told, are now seeking to set up their own capital in the south, which does not bode well for President Thieu’s self-determination or his survival.

While Le Duc Tho was hailing what he called “a moment of joy” and President Nixon was telling us that President Thieu “gives everything his full support”, President Thieu himself was telling his people, “This is only a ceasefire agreement, not more or less. In the days to come, we’ll see if the Communists will observe the agreement.”

His scepticism is surely well founded – not merely on the fact that he’s the head of a government from which the United States will now withdraw all its armed support. He would simply have to be, like a friend of mine, a man who has made a hobby of reading signed Communist agreements from Yalta to Korea.

And even if the Communists proceed in their usual manner, first to promise free elections and self-determination and then to go ahead on the assumption that no such promise has been given even if the usual script is followed, the Vietnam agreement expects an awful lot of goodwill on the part of two commissions it has set up.

The first is the International Commission, which is meant to supervise the release of prisoners, troop withdrawals, and elections. This commission has a force (so-called) of only eleven hundred and sixty men, with troops from four nations – Canada, Hungary, Indonesia and Poland. One, you might say from our side, and three from theirs. Then there is to be a joint military commission to investigate and report violations of the prisoner exchange, the troop withdrawals and the elections, and this commission consists of forces from the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the Vietcong. So that is a standoff of two from each side.

I don’t know precisely how many free elections have ever been held in countries occupied by the Communists since the Second World War, but the answer depends on what you mean by free. In all the Communist elections I can recall, the people are free to give 99.9 per cent of their votes to one man. It is true that 18 years ago in south-east Asia, the United States jibbed at holding free elections from the fear that the Communists would win them, and this may have been a first-class political error but the fear was well taken.

I should hate to be a reporter with those eleven hundred and sixty men scattered all over Vietnam trying, or pretending, to say whose forces jumped on a village after the ceasefire, who crossed the demilitarised zone and why, how many troops and whose have retreated into Laos and what are they up to, whether the mayor of this town and his buddies are truly North Vietnamese regulars or South Vietnamese who decided to see the light and switch sides as a patrol of Indonesian, Hungarian and Polish troops approaches.

I shouldn’t care to be a North Vietnamese on the military commission, conscientiously reporting to the international commission violations committed by the North Vietnamese. In other words, what’s required of these two commissions is a scrupulous and high-minded performance of their duty worthy of the Supreme Court and eleven of the twelve disciples. In the hope that they will so perform, let us pray.

Talking of the Supreme Court, last week it brought great grief to the leaders of the Catholic Church and great joy to a lot of other people with a sweeping decision which overruled the laws of every state that prohibits or restricts the right of any woman to have an abortion during the first three months of pregnancy.

Since the whole controversy started about who owns a woman’s body, who has the right to stifle a new life, whether or not a beginning foetus is indeed a life at all, since then 46 states have passed laws of varying degrees of permissiveness and prohibition.

Many state legislatures, only just assembled for a new session, were drafting bills either to prohibit abortion at different stages of pregnancy or to permit it, or to set up all sorts of restrictions that would allow abortion but prevent some big city becoming a free abortion bill or – and this is a problem in most big cities – straining the regular medical services with queues of women asking for, or getting, abortion on demand. The New York State Legislature was priming itself for another big debate to abolish or rewrite its permissive abortion law which passed last year by only one vote.

Well the Supreme Court has now frustrated or squashed these plans, bills and debates, and it laid down a very precise definition, extending through the nine months of pregnancy, of a woman’s constitutional rights in the matter of having a baby or not having a baby.

From now on, no state may interfere in the first three months with the judgement of a woman and her doctor as to whether she shall be aborted. During the next six months of pregnancy, a state has the right to interfere but only to guarantee the woman’s physical or mental health by setting standards, licensing and such, for the people who perform the abortion. In the last ten weeks, when a foetus is normally self-sustaining – that’s to say has become a life that would survive normally – a state may prohibit abortion unless there is a proved hazard to the health or life of the mother.

If this is a judgement of what is loosely called Mr Nixon’s new conservative court – and three of Mr Nixon’s nominees voted for it, while Mr Nixon himself has steadily expressed his antagonism to voluntary abortion – then it’s a judgement that’s going to take a long time to overturn.

Yet again we have seen men appointed to the court to express the strength of the president’s convictions and they have seen themselves independent for life of the president and the voters and of wage slavery and have expressed their own convictions.

And now what have we left for Lyndon Johnson, who dropped dead on Monday? What can I say that I have not said many times about a president whose stature I believe was crippled by Vietnam and whose humanity was soured by his country manners?

He carried the social revolution of Franklin Roosevelt beyond Roosevelt’s imagining. He took the promises that John Kennedy bravely recited and turned them into 95 laws. He redeemed the mediocre second term of Eisenhower by forcing through the Congress the first civil rights bill in a hundred years.

And once in the White House, he remained one powerful and salty Southerner, absolutely converted to the vision of black people eating, riding, voting, schooling, working, teaching, living as they had never done before.

He brought on the racial turmoil by showing the shameful gap between America’s preaching and America’s practice, and history will raise him, I believe, far above our present judgement of him.

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