Trial's End

The hand-picked members of Bertrand Russell's "International War Crimes Tribunal" were all dolled up for their denunciation scene. French Novelist Simone de Beauvoir glittered in a silver lame blouse, while Playwright Peter Weiss, who had worn a corduroy jacket all week, donned a grey, striped business suit for the occasion. But all the pomp and ceremony could not add one bit of suspense to the peacenik extravaganza—or respectability to the "verdict." After nine days of canned and Kafkaesque testimony by Russell's loyal witnesses, Tribunal President Jean-Paul Sartre declared that the U.S. had been found guilty of a vast catalogue of "war crimes" in Viet Nam, including "massive, systematic and deliberate" bombing of civilian targets in the North. Thus he and Russell all but assured themselves of a place in sophistory.

Two American radio executives who were allowed to witness some of the ritual that took place in a Stockholm amphitheater—before being physically ousted—described the proceedings as "irresponsible exercises in frivolity and personal and international theatrics." Gordon McLendon, 45, owner of stations in several U.S. cities, and Donald Burden, 38, president of Star Stations of Omaha, charged that the heavy publicity accorded the trial in many European and Asian newspapers would contribute immeasurably to world misunderstanding of the war and give Ho Chi Minh a mistaken idea of world support. The tribunal, said McLendon, was "a kangaroo court conducted by Communists for Communists." A measure of the witnesses' integrity was that three of them accused the U.S. of purposely bombing a leper colony 37 times.

In retrospect, the trial probably did the U.S. some good. Paris' L'Aurore dismissed it as "a circus." Le Figaro Litteraire accused Sartre of "childish ness." London's Observer said that the trial gave an excuse "to those who want to avoid thinking seriously about Viet Nam." It did more than that. It finally exposed the extreme critics of the U.S. position in Viet Nam for what they are —cynical and ridiculous.