Brooke's forgotten flip-flop on Vietnam

NO DOUBT it slipped the senator's mind. Otherwise he surely would have mentioned the phone call in the chapter on Vietnam in his new memoir "Bridging the Divide: My Life" by former US senator Edward W. Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican.

What also seemed to have slipped Brooke's mind is how he changed his position on the war -- visiting South Vietnam as a dove and returning as a hawk. In his memoir, Brooke says he was "never a hawk" on the war. The facts do not back him up. I know. I was with him.

Brooke, a US senator for a mere two months, and the first African-American popularly elected to that body, decided to make a fact-finding mission to South Vietnam in March 1967. Elected as a peace candidate, he wanted to see the war first hand.

As a State House reporter for the now defunct Boston Herald Traveler who had covered Brooke as attorney general, I decided that I too wanted to see the war first hand. The paper agreed. The senator was not thrilled.

We toured battlefields, watched fire fights and airstrikes, cruised the Mekong Delta, ate and sweated with the troops, and visited the wounded. Brooke was briefed by a lot of hawkish generals and seemed to eat the stuff up. I spent time with soldiers and reporters who painted a grimmer picture than the one Brooke got. It was pretty awful stuff. Brooke also wanted to meet in Hanoi with North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. So he went to Cambodia to arrange the meeting with Viet Cong agents. I was left in Saigon.

Then came a phone call from the paper. The city editor told me that Hal Clancy, the publisher, wanted me to catch up with Brooke and deliver a message. I was incredulous. I explained in rather undignified language how there was a war going on and that getting from Saigon to Cambodia was a little more difficult than getting from the South End to South Boston. Still, Clancy was sort of the General George S. Patton of the newspaper business, so you generally tended to do what he told you to do, or died trying.

"What's the message?" I asked.

"Hal Clancy wants you to tell Brooke to keep June 16 open," the city editor said.

"Why?" I shouted into the phone.

"Because his daughter is graduating from Worcester Assumption and he wants Brooke to speak at the graduation," he said.

I was stunned. In the middle of a war Hal Clancy wanted me to catch up with Brooke and deliver this crazy, stupid message. What was even crazier and more stupid was that I agreed to do it.

I hitched a ride to Tan Son Nhut Airport and bribed my way on to an Air South Vietnam plane that was headed for Bangkok with a stop at Phnom Penh, Cambodia. As luck would have it Brooke's mission to Hanoi failed and he got on the plane when it landed in Phnom Penh. He saw me.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"Hal Clancy wanted me to catch up with you and deliver a message," I said. He looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Perhaps I had. "What's the message?" he asked.

"Hal Clancy wants you to keep June 16 open," I said. "He wants you to speak at Worcester Assumption, where his daughter is graduating."

He gave me a very strange look and said, "They called you in Saigon to have you catch up with me here and deliver that message? In the middle of a war? That's crazy."

"I know it's crazy," I said. "What's even crazier is that I did it."

Brooke made his maiden speech on the war in the Senate at the end of March. He had come out in support of the war although he opposed further escalation. Brooke said his "position is that we have got to give those young men who are fighting and dying for us all the support, military support, that we can give them. "

President Lyndon Johnson thanked him for his support. Massachusetts anti war activists accused Brooke of "betrayal." Brooke overnight became a national figure.

And on June 16 Brooke spoke at Worcester Assumption.

All politics is local.

Peter Lucas is a former Boston political reporter and columnist.