A Week of Friendship

Pham Van Dong, the prime minister of North Vietnam, has been a revolutionary for half a century. He helped Ho Chi Minh organize revolutionary groups in the 1930s. These small organizations later blossomed into the Viet Minh, which liberated half of Vietnam from French control in 1954.

During the long struggle for liberation, Dong, like the other early revolutionaries, divided his time between jungle hideouts and colonial jails.

Dong was interviewed in 1967 by Felix Greene, the British filmmaker who produced Inside North Vietnam, which was shown several times this week as part of Vietnam America Friendship Week. Dong seemed youthful and confident as he affirmed his country's determination to continue the fight against the American government.

Six years later, Dong looked haggard and much older. Interviewed last February by the French producers of The Price of Peace, the continuing American war had left its mark on his deeply lined face. However, he still predicted victory for the cause of Vietnamese independence and reunification.

Most of Vietnam, like Dong, has been irrevocably altered by almost a decade of American war. From the one-person bomb shelters that dot the North Vietnamese landscape to the teeming refugee slums in the South, the Vietnamese are constantly reminded that American laid a mailed fist across their country.

Vietnam-America Friendship Week was intended to deepen the Harvard community's understanding of the Indochina conflict. The Week, organized by students in the New American Movement and the Harvard Student Coalition, was endorsed by a group of 30 faculty members.

The Week was highlighted by two teach-ins. At the first, Frances Fitz-Gerald '62, author of Fire in the Lake, explained that the political struggle in South Vietnam will continue even though the shooting war has--at least temporarily--ground to a halt.

Antiwar activist Tom Hayden told another teach-in that some returning American POWs were forming "a fascist nucleus," providing President Nixon with his first organized pro-war support in a long time.

It will end today with a drive intended to collect funds for Medical Aid to Indochina.