From Holocaust to Harvard: A Story of Escape, Forgiveness, and Freedom by John Stoessinger

Author:John Stoessinger [Stoessinger, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2014-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

1970–1975

In 1970, I was invited by Grinnell College to receive an honorary degree and to give the commencement address. I wondered whether the new president knew about the circumstances of my disappearance from the campus twenty years earlier. A great deal had changed at Grinnell since then, and Dr. Stevens had been dead ten years. Two days before commencement day, however, I received a call.

“We have a revolution here on campus,” Grinnell’s new president said apologetically. “It’s about Cambodia, and there will be no commencement this year.”

“Really?” I asked, not quite knowing what to say.

“We will mail you your degree,” the president added. “I am truly sorry.”

He sounded quite sincere and either did not know about my past or had written off the 1950 episode as belonging to another era. Two weeks later, my honorary doctorate arrived by registered mail, exactly like the undergraduate diploma twenty years before.

Life had settled down once more to a routine. I taught my classes, supervised papers that no one read, and tried to raise money for my anemic institute. I had even begun to work on a new book in my air-conditioned office. No one seemed to mind.

One day, U Thant summoned me to his office.

“Professor,” he said quietly, “how would you like to help me end the Vietnam War?”

“I would love to,” I blurted out. I told him that I strongly agreed with Hans Morgenthau’s position that the war was unwinnable for the United States.

U Thant nodded. “I would like you to ask President Lyndon Johnson and President Ho Chi Minh to come to my hometown of Rangoon, Burma, and negotiate a peace agreement.”

My enthusiasm for the UN was instantly reignited. “How?” I wanted to know.

“Ask them to stop the fighting and the dying and turn over the problem to the United Nations,” the secretary-general said simply. “And keep this to yourself,” he quickly added with a smile.

For the next two years, I worked hard to get the two war leaders to come to Rangoon. Several times, I secured their agreement, but invariably, as the meeting date approached, one of them would cancel. Ho Chi Minh would do so without explanation, but Johnson would declare publicly that he did not wish to be the first American president to lose a war. When U Thant’s term expired in 1971, nothing had been accomplished. He died not long thereafter of cancer, or perhaps of grief. I resigned from the United Nations in 1974, and the following year the North Vietnamese overran Saigon and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City.

At the war’s end, fifty-eight thousand Americans and three million Vietnamese had died. Some of my students were among the fallen. Consumed by grief and guilt, I began to work on a new book, Why Nations Go to War.

One day, on a speaking tour of Florida, I visited an acquaintance in Miami.

“I am expecting an overseas call from a business associate in London,” said Colonel Flynn. “She has a question about the United Nations; could you talk to her?”

“Why not?” I responded.

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