Vietdamned: How the World’s Greatest Minds Put America on Trial

by Clive Webb

the conclusion of many trials. But this verdict was unusual, delivered by jury comprising of the greatest minds of the twentieth Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin and Stokely Carmichael, and over a dozen international luminaries - all presided over by the legendary philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell. The defendant was unusual as the United States government.

In Vietdamned, award-winning historian Clive Webb reveals the extraordinary, little-known history of the 1967 Russell Tribunal and its attempt to hold the US government to account for the atrocities it committed during the Vietnam War. What they revealed shocked the world. In a revolutionary decade where public intellectuals wielded a celebrity since unheard of, these writers and philosophers put their careers and reputations at stake - and faced fierce opposition from the media, governments, and the even the CIA.

Both a vivid group biography and a compendious account of this unprecedented event, Vietdamned is a story of the power (and limits) of celebrity, government abuse and cover-ups, and is the first global history of the anti-war movement.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War

310 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 6, 2025

About the author

Clive Webb is Professor of Modern American History at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. He specialises in the history of race and ethnic relations in the United States and also, in recent years, the United Kingdom. Outside of the classroom, he spends as much time as possible roaming the Sussex countryside.

Reviews

[History Today]

In 1966 and 1967 a group of left-wing intellectuals and radical activists, recruited by the nonagenarian philosopher Bertrand Russell, constituted themselves into a self-proclaimed ‘tribunal’ to try the United States of America for its conduct in Vietnam. After holding hearings in Sweden and in Denmark, they convicted the US of waging an illegal war of aggression against Vietnam, of war crimes and, most sensationally, of ‘genocide against the people of Vietnam’.

Then, nothing much happened. The verdicts were welcomed by those who were already convinced of America’s immorality in Indochina and mocked by everyone else, before being forgotten entirely. Even though the American public’s mood eventually soured on the war, the Russell Tribunal had little to do with it. Today, its main legacy lies in the numerous copycat tribunals it has inspired, staffed by cranks, convened in cavernous public buildings, rendering verdicts that, just like the Russell Tribunal’s condemnations of US policy in Vietnam, were never in doubt.

As Clive Webb candidly admits in Vietdamned: How the World’s Greatest Minds Put America on Trial, posterity has been unkind not only to the Tribunal, but to the force behind it. One of Lord Russell’s biographers described his involvement with the venture, as well as his anti-Vietnam War activism more broadly, as ‘a quite colossal vanity’, designed to prove to himself that he still mattered to the world even as his body was failing. In Vietdamned, Webb aims to rescue the Tribunal from the contemptuous footnotes of history, and Russell’s last decade from the embarrassment of his biographers.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Yuan Yi Zhu is Assistant Professor of International Relations and International Law at Leiden University.

[Jason Rashid · Rating 4 out of 5]

very informative and interesting, Webb obviously has sympathies with the tribunal but it's an ultimately honest and balanced book about what happened