Peace Corps

First off, let's be clear about something: It's easy to be against the war now; everyone is against it. Three and four years into Vietnam, more than half the country was for it—probably 60 percent. Right now no one with any sense in America thinks this war was a smart idea. Figuring out how to get out has been a moral and pragmatic nightmare.

The point Ken Brociner makes below is true: pro-Israel libs don't want any part of the left's anti-Israel rhetoric. He proves my point. The traditional left is divided. On the one side are Dem. liberals who say Israel is not the issue. On the other are lefties like myself who says, It's pointless to talk about this war unless you talk about the role of the Israeli Occupation. We each represent real blocs. And we're at loggerheads. You couldn't build a movement (when it mattered most in '02-03) with such profound disagreement between essential constituencies over a central issue

Two of my Jewish heroes during Vietnam were Norman Mailer for his book Why Are We In Vietnam, and David Halberstam for his book The Best and the Brightest. Neither a radical (ala Mark Rudd, in my last post). But both of them were concerned with a very important question; How did we get into this mess? Who were the idiots who thought this was a good idea? It wasn't hard for liberal Jews to enter into this analysis, because they were critiquing Establishment gentiles.

The problem this time around is that the same sort of analysis leaves many Jews deeply conflicted. Lefty progressives like myself are saying, It's the occupation, stupid, and Clintonite liberal Jews (Moveon.org) are saying, That has nothing to do with it! One commenter points at Dan Fleshler's piece in which Fleshler (a noble guy who has put in years working for the likes of Americans for Peace Now while I was sitting on my hands) describes the effort to pin the blame on this war on Jewish neocons as a conspiracy theory. He would seem to regard the neocons as a bunch of adjutants who were merely carrying out the wishes of a tunnel-vision President and evil vice-president. I disagree: I think high-placed advisers have real power. JFK mentioned Peace Corps in campaign speeches, sure, but it took a dozen committed idealists and intellectuals to get the executive order on his desk in 1961 and then build Peace Corps—guys who wear laurels to this day for their work. A dozen committed, brilliant (and twisted) intellectuals in high positions built the Iraq war. Many of them Jewish Likudniks. Ideas have influence.

I don't think that you can understand this war, and where America went wrong, without understanding the roles of: Israel's policy in the Occupied Territories, U.S. support for that policy, the strength of the Israel lobby, and the historic rise of the neoconservatives to real advisory power over 30 years. We were attacked on 9/11 in part because of our support for a (hateful) Occupation, and we invaded Iraq partly because of the neocons' foolish idea that you can remake Arab dictatorships as democracies—and forget about Israel's apartheid-style Occupation of Palestinian territories. These claims captured the Clintonite liberals: Ken Pollack stated emphatically that the "troubles" in Israel/Palestine had nothing to do with the strategic wisdom of going into Iraq; the issues were not linked. His advice re Iraq turns out to be brutally misguided, and we have to consider that he couldn't even utter the word "occupation" in his book. Just "troubles" in Israel/Palestine. The fact that Brookings' Saban Center where he works is underwritten by an Israeli is not a conspiracy theory; it is a fact of American public life. Pro-Israel money has transformed the culture of the thinktanks. Walt and Mearsheimer have written about this, Anatol Lieven, formerly of Carnegie, has spoken about it. Blankfort says that the Democratic party gets 60 percent of its money from Jews (which is consistent with the Washington Post's estimate of over half), which makes Jewish money a Matterhorn in the American political landscape. Last summer when Ned Lamont beat Lieberman, a lot of those big Jewish givers told the JTA or the Forward that they would stick with Lieberman no matter what, because of Israel. Didn't trust leftish-lib Lamont.

Jewish liberals tend to find this type of analysis upsetting and scary. They don't want to go there. Myself, I am motivated by the moral horror of Iraq: foolish ideas have turned it into a charnel house in which good people are terrified day and night and anyone who can has left. Like Lieven and Mearsheimer, I didn't go near this stuff till 9/11 happened. But back then Clintonite liberals were running around saying, "Our Israel policy has nothing to do with the attacks." This was foolish and defensive. Now that I've gone and seen what the Occupation is doing to Arabs—thanks to great Israelis like Yehuda Shaul and Elik Alhanan—I understand the rage it has generated across the Arab world. And as an American I say: we Americans have to address our part in that. I do so as a lefty Jew, and there are plenty of lefty Jews in the discussion. We're making an alliance with Protestant liberals, like the Presbyterian church, like Jimmy Carter. Do we think that if the Occupation ended tomorrow, the problems in the Middle East would end? Hell no. But ending the Occupation is an essential step in guiding the Islamic world toward (inevitable) reformation.

My liberal critics are right when they say I've been too blanket. I ought to acknowledge that moveon.org, the Reform rabbis and others are doing important work when they maintain pressure on Bush and other war-supporters, to the point where they at last come out of their bunker and admit what a mistake they made. Such an admission might help bring about a resolution to Iraq's horrors. But let's unpack the ideology that generated Iraq. By refusing to include the Occupation in thier analysis, liberal Jews are reducing their understanding to the crude idea that It's the evil oil companies and cowboy George, and deluding themselves about how the world works.

Deborah Gardner

Let's add one thing to Gerald Ford's legacy: the greatest scandal in Peace Corps history, the freeing of a murderer to save the image of the agency, and to try to preserve Pres. Ford's reelection hopes in '76.

Ford never learned of the scandal, that's what his office told me when I was writing a book about it a few years back. Henry Kissinger, his Secretary of State, also said in 2002 that he had no memory of the case. But Ford's midlevel political appointees handled the matter, suppressing it and botching any idea of justice.

The murder took place three weeks before the presidential election—on Oct. 14, 1976 on a Martha's Vineyard-sized island in the South Pacific, Tongatapu in the Kingdom of Tonga. A Peace Corps volunteer named Dennis Priven, then 24, from Brooklyn, murdered a fellow volunteer, Deborah Gardner, 23, of Tacoma, WA., by stabbing her repeatedly in her hut that night. An introverted high school chemistry teacher, Priven had been stalking Gardner, a biology teacher, for weeks. She had rejected his advances. On October 16, her body left the island. Two days after that her funeral took place in Tacoma—with no media attention.

Ford's appointees at Peace Corps and State had bottled the case up. The director of the Peace Corps, a former Ford crony in the House, moderate Oregon Republican John Dellenback, went campaigning for Ford right after the murder happened, and made sure that no one heard about it. Dellenback had led prayer breakfasts on the Hill to help the government heal after Watergate, but he did nothing for Deborah Gardner. Peace Corps violated its own rules on publicity, making sure not to release news of the murder for 19 days, till November 2—the afternoon of the general election. The story was buried in the newspapers.

Peace Corps and State then threw the American gov't behind Priven, discouraging the Gardner family from taking any role in the case. "Once out, all out," political appointees warned Deb Gardner's mother—a not so subtle suggestion that if the case was aired, her daughter's privacy would be thoroughly compromised. The U.S. paid for Priven's defense, and paid for a psychiatrist to come out from Hawaii to examine and then testify for the disturbed young man, all in an effort to spare him the outcome that any Tongan would have experienced: the gallows.

The Tongan government and prosecutors were pursuing Gardner's interests, but those officials felt totally manipulated by Ford appointees who converged on the island. It was a tiny country of 100,000 people and no traffic lights, and it turned to New Zealand for what limited assistance it got in the case. Priven was found not guilty by reason of insanity in December 1976, and Ford's appointees, including the Ambassador to New Zealand and Tonga, Armistead Selden, another former congressional buddy, and the charge d'affaires, Robert Flanegin, then went to work to get Priven released.

The Americans promised to put Priven away back here. But these promises meant nothing. Priven came back to Washington in January 1977, days before Jimmy Carter's inauguration, and though Peace Corps mounted a flimsy effort to keep him in Sibley Hospital, Priven declined the offer and within days returned to Brooklyn—a free man just three months after he had stabbed a fellow volunteer 22 times. Not a word in the press. A few years later, he was working for Social Security as a computer dude.

Yes, Gerald Ford was a moderate Republican steward who helped heal the nation after Watergate—fair enough. But he was also a nincompoop on foreign relations who issued vaguely-spiritual bromides while watching out keenly for his own political ambitions. Those presidential attributes, reflected in his appointees, allowed the Peace Corps murderer to slip between the cracks...

[Photo by Frank W. Bevacqua]

Having spent months in Tonga, I'm not entirely surprised by the latest videos of Nuku'alofa in flames. It's a sleepy South Pacific capital, and there's always a lot of feeling rumbling underneath the placidity.

My main Tonga interest is the Peace Corps murder of 1976, and there's news: the publication of former Peace Corps volunteer Jan Worth's novel Night Blind, which chronicles a young volunteer's response to the murder, in fictionalized terms. I 'm excited because the historical case has never got the attention it deserves and Worth's book will bring more light on a gross injustice. And Night Blind is a beautiful book. It deals with issues of 70s sexuality in spiritual, non-nostalgic ways, and tells a great story while it's at it.

The story involves the awakening of young Charlotte Thornton as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga, and the backdrop is the murder of volunteer Melanie Porter, allegedly by Mort Friedman. The tale is inspired by the murder of Deb Gardner (by Brooklynite Dennis Priven) in 1976.

Frank Bevacqua, a good friend of Gardner's, says that Worth's description of the way the murder affected her is "hauntingly well done and will probably conjure eerily similar feelings to any reader who was there at the time." (Not that it heals the wound for him. "It's been thirty years, but closure comes about in very personal ways over any period of time that it may take.")  read more »

Those of us who love a tiny Polynesian nation in the South Pacific are distressed by the reports out of Tonga of anti-royalist riots that have left at least six dead and destroyed the downtown of Nuku'alofa, the capital of the country.

The best pictures of the riots' aftermath are on Matangi Tonga. My friend the former Peace Corps Volunteer Emile Hons has been working the international phone lines and reports that 80 percent of the downtown is destroyed. The old Tungi Arcade, gone. The Pacific Royale hotel, gone. The Indian department stores—gone. And of course Shoreline, the modern communications company started by the King-designate when he was Crown Prince—ratted and burned. By one account, many of the Chinese immigrants to the country—they bought their passports in a royal scandal some years back—are hunkered in the Chinese Embassy, waiting out the troubles.

Hons tells me that woodframed historic structures, the Royal Palace, the Nuku'alofa Club, and the Parliament House, have survived the riots. These sites will surely be the focus of the Aussie and N.Z. troops that arrived over the weekend, restoring order.

The riots are a paradigm shift for the Friendly Islands. They reflect a long-traditional people's impatience with a feudal structure of government and a Parliament dominated by noblemen. Or as former Peace Corps Volunteer Bob Forbes says:

I think the biggest burden is now on the shoulders of [future King] Siaosi Tupou V and especially the nobles in Parliament, who have the power to slowly change things.

Maybe not so slowly. The democracy movement has been around for many years now, with few real reforms to show for its efforts. Its time has come at last. The Tongans are a creative and (ordinarily) gentle people. I'm pulling for their leaders to wake up and grasp the moment.

Thirty years ago tomorrow Deborah Ann Gardner, a 23-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer from Washington state serving on a remote island in the South Pacific, was murdered by a man who had become obsessed with her, a fellow volunteer, Dennis Priven, 24, who turned himself into the police three hours after stabbing Gardner 22 times in her hut. Three months passed and then Priven was freed from the custody of Tongan authorities, who wanted to hang him, through the tender offices of the State Department and the Peace Corps. In Jan. 1977, Priven came back to Brooklyn a free man and went to work for Social Security before long, becoming a computer guy. His incarceration had lasted three months, in Polynesia. I exposed this case in a book called American Taboo two years back. At that point he was living in his late parents' former apartment in Sheepshead Bay, lonely and bizarre. Notwithstanding its repeated recent claims that it was going to investigate the case, the Peace Corps has never come to terms with the coverup it initiated, which involved smearing Deb Gardner, trying to blame a Tongan for the murder, and giving a gold star, Completion of Service, to a scary guy it had failed to screen and then allowed to go free on the streets of New York. Nor has it ever apologized to Deb Gardner's parents.  read more »

I'll have more to say tomorrow.

The King of Tonga has died in New Zealand, according to Matangi Tonga. He was 88, and survived numerous rumors of his death. Aioue!

Will HRH the Crown Prince Tupouto'a succeed him? And will anything be done about the case the late King helped the American government cover up 30 years ago—the murder of Peace Corps Volunteer Deborah Gardner, 23, by fellow Peace Corps Volunteer Dennis Priven, who was soon released and set free in Brooklyn?

The King of Tonga turned 88 today. Four years ago the New Zealand papers had him dying, still he keeps going.

I bring him up because I wrote a book about the murder of a Peace Corps volunteer by another Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga in 1976, a murder the King helped the U.S. cover up, and because of a Tonga-inspired conversation at dinner last night.

We were talking about religion. I lived in Tonga off and on for six months, and every Sunday I went to the Anglican church, St. Paul's in Nuku'alofa, with my Tongan family, to be a part of the community and to sing hymns and I suppose pray too, and Sela Tu'inukuafe would always motion for me to take communion. Now and then I did. I probably took communion five times. I liked it. I liked the procession, the kneeling, the velvet, the waiting, the hand of the priest, the sunlight in the northeastern window there, and the humility and solemnity and specialness of the moment. The light always felt exalted then. And no I'm not talking about the blood and the body of Christ, or my sins.

My wife, who has fallen away from Episcopalian upbringing in much the way I've fallen away from my Jewishness, says this would shock the religious. A Jewish friend also found it upsetting. But a fallen-away Lutheran said that her religious mother would be accepting of it. She would say that God's grace and love are available to everyone, you only have to open yourself to them. I liked that explanation.

A story for the new year.On a Saturday night before Christmas on the Pacific island where I've been  read more »