| Summary/Abstract |
For the five Vietnamese students who traveled the United States on a State Department tour in the fall of 1965, it must have been nerve-wracking, if not downright terrifying, to stand before a group of students at the University of California-Berkeley and plead the Republic of Vietnam’s case. At some stops on the trip, American antiwar student groups accused the Vietnamese delegates of being “stooges” of South Vietnam’s government. Other antiwar groups refused to meet with the delegation. A State Department evaluation of the tour concluded that while the students were more effective than Vietnamese or American government officials in conveying the political situation in South Vietnam to American students, the most receptive audiences consisted of those who already supported the U.S. alliance with South Vietnam. It was not as though most Americans were uninterested in the students’ perspectives; the State Department received more booking requests than the delegation could fill.1 Yet by speaking primarily to like-minded listeners, the Vietnamese students remained out of earshot of the skeptics and those who believed that Vietnamese who supported the Saigon government or opposed Hanoi and the National Liberation Front were puppets of the authorities or the Americans.
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