Memo on Noam Chomsky Lyrics

FM: Director CIA
TO: Director FBI
BT

[Redacted]

SUBJECT: Intended Travel to North Vietnam of US Nationals

1. [Redacted] FNU Kirkpatrick and FNU Pfeiffer are planning to depart from the United States for North Vietnam between 29 May and 15 June 1970, possibly on 1 June or 8 June. Kirkpatrick and Pfeiffer may be accompanied by either Jonathan Mirsky or Harvard professor Mark Petashney or both. It was also reported that one Meacham was making arrangements for the trip with North Vietnamese representatives in Paris, France. With the endorsement of Noam Chomsky and Cora Weiss, Meacham proposed to the North Vietnamese that Petashney make the trip. (Comment: We believe that Meacham is identical with Stewart Meacham of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Kirkpatrick and Pfeiffer may be indentical with Kenneth A. Kirkpatrick, associated with the AFSC in Seattle, Washington, and Egbert Wheeler Pfeiffer, Professor at the University of Montana, respectively. Petashney is probably identical with Mark Steven Ptashne, a professor of biochemistry at Harvard who traveled to the Havana Cultural Congress in January 1968.)

2. We would appreciate any information that your bureau can supply which would confirm this information, help identify the participants, and provide additional details regarding the itinearary [sic] of the trip.

GP-1
BT

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About

Genius Annotation

MIT professor Noam Chomsky, when he wasn’t revolutionizing linguistics, was a powerful anti-war, anti-imperialist voice on the US left during the Vietnam War.

The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction – all of us who would have remained silent had stability and order been secured.

The memo is dated June, 1970. Chomsky had just two months earlier visited communist North Vietnam, then at war with South Vietnam and the United States. Chomsky’s account would appear in the August 1970 New York Review of Books.

See the documents here.

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