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Tag: Vietnam War

Black Like Whom? Mystery Man, John Howard Griffin

David Martin

In our 2018 book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, we identified John Howard Griffin as one of four key people responsible for cementing in the public mind the belief that the great Catholic monk and public intellectual, Thomas Merton, had died from accidental electrocution.  The other three were Merton’s abbot at the Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey, Flavian Burns, Merton’s secretary there, Brother Patrick Hart, and Merton’s authorized biographer, Michael Mott.  For the recently published Thomas Merton’s Betrayers: The Case against Abbot James Fox and Author John Howard Griffin, we have delved more deeply into Griffin’s background. The Texas-born journalist and author John Howard Griffin, is known almost exclusively for his 1961 book, Black Like Me.  It is…

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The Thomas Merton Autopsy that Wasn’t

David Martin

Did the prominent monk, writer, social critic, and opponent of the American role in the Vietnam War, Thomas Merton, strangely succumb to a faulty fan while attending a monastic conference in Bangkok, Thailand?  That’s what Associated Press reporter, John T. Wheeler, reported with a dateline of Bangkok on the day of the death, December 10, 1968.  One can read that same characterization of the event even today on the web site of Merton’s home Abbey of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky. Thailand was in the thick of the Vietnam War theater of operations at the time.  Some 80% of the air attacks on North Vietnam and virtually all of those on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos originated there.  America’s…

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Finding David: An American Wife Betrayed by Her Government

David Martin

Joseph Stalin supposedly once said, “The death of one man is a tragedy.  The death of millions is a statistic.” A great deal has been written about the shameless and utterly unforgivable abandonment of American POWs in the wake of the Vietnam War—although, thanks to the American news media, few people are aware of it—but, up to now, no writing that we are aware of quite captures the tragedy and, yes, the outrage of this cold and heartless policy so much as Carol Hrdlicka’s recent book, Finding David: An American Wife Betrayed by Her Government. The book is an autobiography, taking us to Carol’s early years growing up in the Mountain West, being swept off her feet as a 16…

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