By 1968, Zinn had already developed a national reputation on the Left for his support of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the South and his 1967 book on the Vietnam War, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. While teaching a seminar at Boston University, Zinn was interrupted by someone who told him that there was an urgent phone call from David Dellinger, a founder of the magazine Liberation and one of the leaders of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
Dellinger traveled to Hanoi in 1966 and had just received a message from the North Vietnamese government that it had decided to release three American pilots in conjunction with the Tet holiday. The telegram asked Dellinger to send “a responsible representative” to Hanoi to bring the three prisoners back to the United States. Zinn later joked, “Did Berrigan and I, both half-responsible, add up to what was wanted?”
Berrigan and Zinn met in New York with Dellinger and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leader Tom Hayden, another renowned peace activist who had helped facilitate the release of three US pilots the previous fall. The historian and the priest began their twenty-eight-hour trip from John F. Kennedy Airport to North Vietnam. The two rejected several offers from the State Department to stamp their passports and thereby legalize their visit.
“We didn’t want official approval for our trip from the government we were fiercely opposing for its actions in Vietnam,” Zinn recounted in his memoir.
While they were waiting in Thailand, a reporter asked Berrigan if they planned to push the North Vietnamese to release more Americans. “No, we are going there to make a gesture of mercy against the war, a symbolic gesture for all who are suffering on both sides, not just the Americans,” Berrigan said.
After a weeklong delay caused by the ongoing Tet Offensive, Zinn and Berrigan flew from Vientiane, Laos, to Hanoi on February 9, 1968. Zinn’s notebooks capture the trip’s logistical challenges and notes from their conversations with North Vietnamese leaders, including the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s (DRV) prime minister Pham Van Dong and colonel Ha Van Lau. The prime minister encouraged Zinn to compare the treatment of prisoners in South Vietnam to their treatment of the US pilots and told the two peace activists, “We think alike: patriots, democrats, revolutionaries.”
Zinn described him as a man of “oceanic calm” and jotted down that the premier told them, “You are more American than anyone. We are more Vietnamese than anyone.”
