Revisiting Vietnam, Remembering Masekela, Reconsidering Harding
This Week — The Tet Offensive -with Fredrik Logevall, Mark Bowden and Duong Van Mai Elliot. Listen today at 2 pm or anytime on our website.
This week’s show was the first in our planned series about 1968. The lopsided battle in Vietnam that took the Americans by surprise and changed the course of the war was also the trigger to a year like no other. As Chris said on the show, “it felt more like a deepening-darkening of the American brand, a starker face to face with who we were becoming.”
The best part of our jobs is the homework — the research and prep we do each week for the show. This week we watched and re-watched Ken Burns’ Vietnam series (and read the debates about it because you couldn’t avoid them); I watched Peter Davis’ anti-war documentary again- Hearts and Minds and Tom Herman’s fantastic documentary — Dateline Saigon — about the journalists who covered the war (David Halberstam is one of the heroes of the doc; we talked about him a lot this week: WWDHD? We did a radio program the week of Halberstam’s death in with three journalists who were at dinner with him just before the car accident in which he was killed in 2007).
And speaking of important journalists and thinkers, Chris dug up a special issue of the New York Review of Books from June, 1975 called “The Meaning of Vietnam,” that featured writers like Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer, whose words seem so prescient now. Chris read these bits on the air:
Nothing is worse for a private person than to have seen in a moment of clarity the error of his ways and then failed to alter them; the last state of the man is worse than the first.- Mary McCarthy
Our real question is not geopolitical at all. It is whether America can improve, whether we can come to grips with industrial pollution, and the psychic pollution of high-rise and suburban real-estate overdevelopment, with automobiles and freeways, with the voids of synthetics, with the buildings of the last twenty years which have to be the worst architecture in the history of the world, with the packaging of food — it may yet prove the most unhealthy food in the history of the world — with the shriek-zones of electronics and media glut, and all of our lack of participatory democracy,…We have not even spoken of the lack of solution to civil rights, sexual rights, and the fast disappearing sense in every American of a neighborhood or any other root. We’re bombed on future shock.- Norman Mailer
I have seen future shock and it is us….
Conor dug up Lydon’s Dateline Saigon, a six part series Chris wrote for the Boston Globe in 1968, and Chris shared pieces his hero I.F. Stone wrote about the war.
Chris Lydon on the grim joys of I. F. Stone’s Weekly: “It is no longer necessary to argue the mendacity of our leaders and the incompetence of our military,” I. F. Stone wrote in his Weekly on the Tet humiliation 50 years ago. “The world’s biggest intelligence apparatus was caught by surprise… We still don’t know what hit us.” As always Izzy Stone’s peculiar voice drew on brave, brazen non-conformity, an easy command of history, a cheeky wit, and moral intensity — all sharpened to a deadly point against the official idiocy of body-count victories. LBJ had actually bragged after Tet that he must have won some sort of contest with Ho Chi Minh because “we killed 20-thousand and lost 400.” I. F. Stone answered: “It is as if they mistake the art of warfare for the demolition and extermination business. [North Vietnam’s General] Giap is proving that superior military and political skill can win over vastly superior firepower, i.e. brain power over bulk. This is what did in the dinosaur.”
The vast harvest of Izzy Stone’s research and writing is wonderfully available online at I. F. Stone’s Weekly, from 1953 to 1971.
I’m tickled to discover also a note I posted a decade ago about Izzy: In the genius-proof genre of deadline journalism, he was my brilliant exception. “He knew very, very confidently that he was writing for all time. He was a mid-century leftist, yes, in the time of the Cold War, McCarthyism and the Civil Rights Movement, but he was self-consciously a humanist and a dissenter in a much longer tradition going back to Athens as well as the Bible. He was aiming in every Weekly, every book review, every profile, for the high pitch of other artists he admired: Andre Gide, Henry James, Mozart, Freud. And his friend Albert Einstein.”
MM: I devoured these. I. F. Stones’ Weekly is a marvel to behold now. Read the back issues here and behold a real Washington newsletter — that spoke truth to power in a forceful, independent voice (for twenty cents a week and no ads to boot!). Read it and weep Mike Allen and all you politicos in the beltway.
More shows remembering 1968 are coming. Share your own ideas and memories. Our friend Dave Faneuf, who is the on-air announcer at WBUR when we record our show (and who’s saved the day for us more than once), told me that he remembers vividly being in his mother’s kitchen when the local radio station in Lowell, Massachusetts read his draft number live on the air — 321! No Vietnam for Dave!
RIP Bra Hugh Masekela
Zach Goldhammer: Hugh Masekela—the legendary South African trumpet player who passed away this week—was also a part of the soundtrack of 1968. His recording of “Grazing in the Grass” was one the year’s biggest hits, eventually taking the #1 spot on the US Billboard charts that year. Along with Booker T. & the M.G.’s “Green Onions,” it’s one of the catchiest and most instantly recognizable ’60s instrumental tracks (the Friends of Distinction’s vocal version of the song would also become a major hit the following year).
But Hugh Masekela was much more than a one-hit-wonder. Long before he came to the states, he had been recognized as a prodigy in South Africa. Along with the pianist Dollar Brand (later known as Abdullah Ibrahim), Masekela helped define the distinctive sound of South African jazz. Yet much of his career was spent away from his homeland. He left the country in 1960 after the bloody Sharpeville massacre and the Apartheid government’s ban on the increasingly militant ANC party. In the U.S., he befriended another activist-musician, Harry Belafonte, and (briefly) married the star singer and fellow South African ex-pat, Miriam Makeba. Making his way to New York, he would study many of the jazz greats still performing in local clubs: Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis, among others. Like Davis, Masekela would slowly drift away from straight-ahead jazz and emerge as a crossover artist on the R&B scene, leading to his breakout performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 (for more on that shining moment in American music, listen to our Otis Redding show).
My favorite Masekela album collects his music during this transitional period. Hugh Masekela Presents the CHISA Years: 1965–1975 is an incredible album from start to finish—documenting the huge range of afrocentric fusion styles which Masekela experimented with on his own self-funded New York record label, CHISA (which was later distributed by Motown Records after the success of “Grazing in the Grass”). The songs featuring the exiled South African singer Letta Mbulu are particularly stunning. Though the album is advertised as a collection of “rare and unreleased” tracks, it’s not just a record for Masekela completists and collectors. This was the first Masekela record I ever heard, after a friend bought the CD while we were studying abroad in Cape Town in 2011. It led me down a deep rabbit hole of trying to learn about the roots of all kinds of different South African musical styles which crop up in these recordings: mbaqanga, isicathamiya, marabi, etc. Seven years later, this is still the record I keep coming back to when I try to remember that time and that country.
Even if you have no interest in jazz or South African music history, give The CHISA Years a listen. The whole thing is available here on Spotify—you won’t regret a minute of listening to it.
Don’t Miss:
The Harvard Film archive is showing the films of Fred Wiseman, Agnes Varda and Wim Wenders this month and next in connection with their Norton lectures at Harvard.
More Misc.
Neil Gaiman on Ursela Le Guin. Patricia Lockwood on Joan Didion. Franklin Foer on Paul Manafort. Shuja Haider defends “postmodernism,” contra Jordan Peterson. Mike Konczal defends the term “neoliberalism,” contra Daniel Rodgers. Why High Maintenance is still the best TV representation of NYC. Why Phantom Thread is the best food movie in ages. Rising Chicago rap star Vic Mensa discusses what it’s like to grow up “five blocks from the projects and five blocks from Obama’s house" in an intimate interview with WBEZ’s Sound Opinions. The consistently great Citations Needed podcast highlights alternative media outlets (and gives Open Source a shout-out at ~6min)
Radio great Barrett Golding remembers radio great Joe Frank. Zadie Smith answers questions from readers and famous fans. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie slams racist questions from a French interviewer. NYT celebrates the enduring power of “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” and NYC celebrates Otis himself (and again, so do we).
Listen: I Tonya
MM: I’m hooked on the NYT’s daily podcast, “The Daily.” An episode this week with former olympic skater Tonya Harding is 30 minutes of what people in public radio call “a driveway moment.” Turns out Tonya’s side of the story didn’t get through that horrifying media crush in the 90’s. It’s not what you thought, and if you got suckered (as I did), it makes you feel really baaad.
(Editor’s Note: ZG recommends the Tonya Harding movie instead of the podcast, but Mary refuses to go see it! Don’t make the same mistake … it’s a great film & Allison Janney absolutely deserves her Oscar nom.)
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Til next week,
The OS Olympians
