Teach-In Speakers Defend War on WGBH

The five speakers at Friday's aborted Counter Teach-In aired their planned statements over WGBH radio later that night.

"The Vietnamese as a people have to be carefully evaluated to know their role in the Vietnam war," Dolph Droge, White House adviser on Southeast Asian affairs, said.

Droge turned to history for the justification of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. He said the U.S. experience in Korea made involvement in Indochina in 1954 "logical and consistent."

Droge defended the partition of Vietnam, prohibited by the Geneva Convention, by the assertion that South Vietnam never signed the treaty and therefore is not bound by it.

"Ho Chi Minh and the French were the only signers of the Geneva Convention. South Vietnam never agreed to the Convention and rejected the idea that it should automatically fall under Communism," Droge said, defending partition of Vietnam.

"The South Vietnamese have a record for a great passion for regional diversity. United States policy is consistent with this," he added.

"We have won the war militarily many times over," Droge said, saying that-since Vietnamization will supposedly soon replace military action with political activity by Asian- antiwar activities are now unnecessary.

Unlike Droge, Dan Teodoru, Eastern Director for the National Student Coordinating Committee, urged continued heavy American military involvement in Southeast Asia. "We have to show that as a great power we are going to stop the Communist advance. That is the issue for the rest of the world and for America," he said.

Teodoru discounted questions of the morality of the war, preferring to consider its pragmatic aspects. "The rest of the world will see how the United States fulfills its commitments," he said. "They do not question the wisdom of the commitment. They recognize the mistakes of the U.S., but are more concerned with how it rectifies those mistakes in achieving its goal."

Anand Panyarachun, Thai Ambassador to Canada and to the United Nations, and Nguyen Hoan, political aide in the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington, emphasized their desires for peace and willingness to compromise. "We have done everything we can at Paris and have come out with so much good will and so much initiative," Hoan said.

"The Communists want us to give up everything, to put up with a coalition government. This is not going to happen," he added.

The cancellation of the teach-in was "a sad episode," Panyarachun said. "While we were being accused of being murderers, freedom of speech was murdered by a minority group."

"It was tragic that the flag of the Vietcong was flown in Sanders Theatre, for that flag represents the principles of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan to many South Vietnamese," Droge said.

According to I. Milton Sacks, professor of Government at Brandeis University, the right of free speech was jeopardized by a "group so far out of the way it doesn't even support the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front." Before leaving the teach-in Friday night, Sacks chanted "Sieg Heil" at the protestors.

The cancellation, Teodoru said, was an "indication of what the intellectual and academic strata have become."

"I have never seen such a bunch of nuts in my life. They didn't care for the facts. They were only interested in saying that Nixon's a liar," he said.