Saturday, June 29, 2024

A00026 - Doris Allen, Analyst Who Saw the Tet Offensive Coming

 

Doris Allen, Analyst Who Saw the Tet Offensive Coming, Is Dead at 97

Her warning of a big buildup of enemy troops poised to attack South Vietnam in 1968 was ignored, a major U.S. Army intelligence failure during the war.

Listen to this article · 7:45 min Learn more
Doris I. Allen is sitting at a desk in an office and is wearing her Army uniform and black rimmed glasses.
Doris I. Allen in an undated photograph. She joined the U.S. Army’s Women’s Army Corps in 1950 and was the first woman to attend its prisoner of war interrogation course before she served in Vietnam in 1967.Credit...via Christina Brown Fisher

Doris Allen, an Army intelligence analyst during the Vietnam War whose warning about the impending attacks in early 1968 by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces that became known as the Tet offensive was ignored by higher-ups, died on June 11 in Oakland, Calif. She was 97.

Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Amy Stork, chief of public affairs for the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence.

Specialist Allen, who enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Women’s Army Corps in 1950, volunteered to serve in Vietnam in 1967, hoping to use her intelligence training to save lives. She had been the first woman to attend the Army’s prisoner of war interrogation course and worked for two years as the strategic intelligence analyst for Latin American affairs at Fort Bragg, N.C., now Fort Liberty.

Working from the Army Operations Center in Long Binh, South Vietnam, Specialist Allen developed intelligence in late 1967 that detected a buildup of at least 50,000 enemy troops, perhaps reinforced by Chinese soldiers, who were preparing to attack South Vietnamese targets. And she pinpointed when the operation would start: Jan. 31, 1968.

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In an interview for the book “A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26 American Women Who Served in Vietnam” (1986), by Keith Walker, Specialist Allen recalled writing a report warning that “we’d better get our stuff together because this is what is facing us, this is going to happen and it’s going to happen on such and such a day, around such and such a time.”

She said she told an intelligence officer: “We need to disseminate this. It’s got to be told.”

But it wasn’t. She pushed for someone up the chain of command to take her report seriously, but no one did. On Jan. 30, 1968 — in line with what she predicted — the enemy surprised American and South Vietnamese military leaders with the size and scope of their attacks.

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Several bloodied and injured U.S. soldiers are being transported by an Army tank being used as a makeshift ambulance during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968.
Wounded U.S. soldiers aboard a makeshift ambulance weeks after the Tet Offensive started in Vietnam in 1968. Specialist Allen had warned the Army in late 1967 of a large-scale attack by the North on the South, even pinpointing when it would happen, but her intelligence went ignored.Credit...John Olson/Getty Images

U.S. and South Vietnamese forces sustained heavy losses early on before later repelling the attacks. It was a turning point in the war, further undermining American public support for it.

The Army’s refusal to take Specialist Allen’s analysis seriously suggested to her that she was viewed with prejudice, as a Black woman who was not an officer. She was one of about 700 women in the corps, known as WACs, serving in intelligence positions during the Vietnam era, and only 10 percent were Black.

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In 1991, she told Newsday, “My credibility was like nothing: woman — Black woman, at that.”

In 2012, she told an Army publication: “I just recently came up with the reason they didn’t believe me — they weren’t prepared for me. They didn’t know how to look beyond the WAC, Black woman in military intelligence. I can’t blame them. I don’t feel bitter.”

Lori S. Stewart, a civilian military intelligence historian for the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, said in an email that Specialist Allen’s analysis was not the only one that went unheeded.

“Both national and theater-level organizations believed an enemy offensive was likely sometime around the Tet holiday,” she wrote, but “too many conflicting reports and preconceptions led leaders to misread the enemy’s intentions.”

Regarding Specialist Allen, Mrs. Stewart added, “Like many other intelligence personnel in country, she was a diligent and observant intelligence analyst doing what she was supposed to do: evaluate the enemy’s intentions and capabilities.”

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Specialist Allen was inducted into the Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame in 2009.

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Specialist Allen, in civilian clothes, receiving a framed certificate from an officer in a full dress olive green uniform.
Specialist Allen was inducted into the Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame in 2009. Maj. Gen. John Custer, commanding general of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, presided over the ceremony.Credit...U.S Army

Doris Ilda Allen was born on May 9, 1927, in El Paso to Richard and Stella (Davis) Allen. Her mother was a cook, and her father was a barber.

Ms. Allen graduated from Tuskegee Institute (now University) in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education. She taught at a high school in Greenwood, Miss., and enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps the next year.

After basic training, she auditioned for the WAC Band, playing trumpet. But she and two other Black woman were told afterward by a chief warrant officer that “they couldn’t have any Negroes in the band,” she recalled in “A Piece of My Heart.”

She served in a number of roles over the next dozen or so years: as an entertainment specialist, organizing soldiers shows; the editor of the military newspaper for the Army occupation forces in Japan during the Korean War; a broadcast specialist at Camp Stoneman, Calif., where her commanding officer was her sister, Jewel; a public information officer in Japan; and an information specialist at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

In the early 1960s, Specialist Allen learned French at the Defense Language Institute and completed her training in the prisoner of war interrogation course at Fort Holabird, Md. She completed interrogation and intelligence analyst courses at Fort Bragg.

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After asking to go to South Vietnam, she arrived in October 1967 for the first of her three tours of duty there.

“I had so many skills, so much education and training being wasted in various posts around the country that I decided I wanted to make a difference in a high-action post like Vietnam,” she told Lavender Notes, a publication for older LGBTQ+ adults, in 2020.

She left no immediate survivors.

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Specialist Allen in Vietnam in an undated photo. She is wearing her Army uniform, a hat, black rimmed glasses and a watch.
Specialist Allen at the Women’s Army Corps barracks at Long Binh, Vietnam, in an undated photo. She left in 1970 after seeing a stolen enemy document with her name on a list of targets to kill.Credit...via Christina Brown Fisher

Specialist Allen’s Tet analysis was not the only warning of hers to go unheeded. She advised a colonel not to send a convoy to Song Be, in southern South Vietnam, because of a possible ambush, which occurred. Five flatbed trucks were blown up; three men were killed and 19 wounded.

But she was listened to when she warned in early 1969 that the North Vietnamese had placed scores of 122-millimeter rockets around the perimeter of the Long Binh operations center, northeast of Saigon, and that they were to be used in a major attack. She wrote a memo that led to an airstrike that destroyed the rockets.

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Later that year, Specialist Allen learned that the North Vietnamese were planning to use 83-millimeter chemical mortars. She wrote a report that saved as many as 100 Marines, who had been instructed in her memo to avoid any contact with the mortars when they fell in their area; they later exploded. A grateful colonel sent a memo suggesting that whoever had written the report deserved the Legion of Merit.

Specialist Allen did not receive that decoration but did earn a Bronze Star with two oak clusters, among many awards. She left South Vietnam in 1970 after seeing a stolen enemy document with her name on a list of targets to kill.

After serving 10 more years in the Army she retired as a chief warrant officer.

By then she had received her master’s degree in counseling from Ball State University in Indiana in 1977. After her military service, she worked with a private investigator, Bruce Haskett, whom she had met when they were in counterintelligence. She earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif., in 1986, and mentored young psychologists.

“She was incredibly savvy about people and had an innate ability to size people up quickly,” Mr. Haskett said in an interview. “She was the kind of person who could walk into a pit of vipers and have everybody eating out of her hands in 15 minutes.”

Thursday, June 27, 2024

A00025 - Nathan Hare, Founder of the First Black Studies Program

 

Nathan Hare, 91, Forceful Founder of First Black Studies Program, Dies

Seeking to bring the ideas of Black power into the classroom — and coining the term “ethnic studies” — he clashed with a university as well as allies on the left.

Listen to this article · 7:11 min Learn more
A close-up photo of Dr. Hare, shot in semi-profile from below, as he spoke into a microphone during a public event. He had a tightly cropped Afro haircut and wore a dress jacket, white shirt and dark tie.
Dr. Nathan Hare in 1969. He considered himself a Black nationalist as an academic and as a co-founder of the journal The Black Scholar. Credit...Bill Peters/The Denver Post, via Getty Images

Nathan Hare, a sociologist who helped lead a five-month strike by faculty members and students at what is now San Francisco State University, resulting in an agreement in 1969 to create the country’s first program in Black studies, with him as its director, died at a hospital in San Francisco on June 10. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by the poet and playwright Marvin X, a close friend of Dr. Hare’s.

A son of Oklahoma sharecroppers who was educated in the state’s segregated schools and later at the University of Chicago, Dr. Hare was a leading figure in bringing the ideas of Black power into academic circles, first at Howard University and then at San Francisco State College (now University), and later as a co-founder of The Black Scholar, a leading interdisciplinary journal.

He considered himself a Black nationalist, and in all three roles he clashed with both the establishment administrations and other factions on the political left, particularly Marxists.

Dr. Hare was forced out of his job at Howard in 1967 after a public fight with its president, who wanted to accept more white students. The next year, he arrived at San Francisco State, which already had courses in “minority studies,” and immediately began pushing for an interdisciplinary program dedicated to studying the Black experience.

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He also bristled at the term “minority studies” and pushed back at its use by coining the term “ethnic studies.”

The administration resisted, leading to a five-month strike in 1968 and ’69 by faculty members and students — who, Dr. Hare frequently pointed out, were mostly white, though their ranks also included future Black figures like the actor Danny Glover and the politician Ron Dellums.

Two presidents were forced to resign over the strife. A third, S. I. Hayakawa, when he was interim president, cracked down on the protesters by allowing the police to arrest hundreds of them. But in early 1969 he and the protest leaders reached an agreement that included the creation of a Black studies program, to be led by Dr. Hare. (Dr. Hayakawa was later made permanent president and served as a U.S. senator from California from 1977 to 1983.)

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A black and white photo in which four men are in a face-off onstage, with three of them, all Black, staring at Dr. Hayakawa, who is standing at a lectern topped by microphones.
Dr. Hare, left, confronted the San Francisco State College acting president, S.I. Hayakawa, onstage as he spoke to faculty members in 1968. After a period of campus strife, Dr. Hayakawa agreed to create a Black studies program.Credit...Bettman Archive, via Getty Images

The peace did not last long. After Dr. Hare insisted that the department was not a traditional academic unit but a revolutionary tool, Dr. Hayakawa fired him.

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Dr. Hare returned to campus that fall, asserting that he was the rightful department head; he even tried to hold his own classes. But the university eventually forced him out, and he left academia for good.

“Nathan was the agent who symbolized this great battlefront with the mainstream,” Abdul Alkalimat, a professor emeritus of African American studies and library science at the University of Illinois, said by phone. “And like the Marines, you take a hit, and you create the possibility of those who come after you.”

Later in 1969, Dr. Hare joined the poet Robert Chrisman and Allan Ross, a printer, to found The Black Scholar in Oakland (today it is published by Boston University). In interviews, he described it as a forum for connecting artists, activists and intellectuals with the emerging “ebony tower” of Black studies, feeding it ideas and arguments.

The journal quickly became one of the leading Black intellectual publications, with essays by thinkers like Amiri Baraka and Angela Davis. Dr. Alkalimat served on its board.

“The Black Scholar was the leading magazine of Black intellectual thought,” the poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, a frequent contributor, said in an interview. Part of its success, he said, was that “it didn’t come off like an academic journal.”

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Dr. Hare resigned in 1975, citing a turn toward Marxism by the rest of the journal’s leadership, at the expense of Black nationalism. “That majority is now Black Marxist, and I soon found my contribution sabotaged and almost liquidated,” he told The New York Times at the time.

Nathaniel Hare was born on April 9, 1933, in Slick, Okla., southwest of Tulsa, to Seddie and Tishia (Lee) Hare.

His parents separated when Nathan was young. During World War II, his mother moved him and his siblings to San Diego, where she worked as a janitor on a naval base and where Nathan developed an interest in boxing. When he expressed interest in going professional, his mother moved them back to Oklahoma.

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A black and white photo of two men sitting side by side on a couch with their legs crossed. Dr. Hare, on the left, is wearing a cream-colored jacket, dark tie and dark slacks; Ali is in a dark suit and tie.
Dr. Hare, left, met with the boxer Muhammad Ali in 1967 at Washington National Airport, where Ali spoke to reporters about refusing to serve in the Army. Dr. Hare was already known by then for supporting the ideas of Black power. As a youth he had ambitions of becoming a boxer.Credit...Bettman Archive, via Getty Images

Despite his continued interest in the pugilistic arts, he excelled in school and was accepted into Langston University, the only historically Black college in Oklahoma. He worked full time as a janitor to pay his way and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1955.

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Dr. Hare married a fellow Langston student, Julia Reed, in 1956. She died in 2019. He had no immediate survivors.

He went on to study sociology at the University of Chicago, receiving a master’s degree in 1957 and his doctorate in 1962.

He joined the faculty at Howard, in Washington, in 1961. The city was a center of civil rights activism, while many of his students, including the organizer Stokely Carmichael and the writer Claude Brown, were preparing to push the struggle in a radical, separatist direction.

Dr. Hare agreed with them, and soon found himself at odds with the university, which had prided itself as an engine of growth for the Black bourgeoisie. His first book, “Black Anglo-Saxons” (1965), was a searing critique of the Black middle class.

Things came to a boil in 1967, when Howard’s president, James Nabrit Jr., told The Washington Post that he aspired to boost the school’s white enrollment to well over half the student body.

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Dr. Hare wrote a cutting response that not only took Mr. Nabrit to task but also called for a new approach to Black higher education, one directed by Black faculty members and students. He also invited the boxer Muhammad Ali to speak on campus, a move opposed by Mr. Nabrit because of Ali’s antiwar stance.

Dr. Nabrit forced Dr. Hare to resign in 1967, after which San Francisco State offered him a position.

Following his departure from San Francisco State and The Black Scholar, Dr. Hare took up a career in clinical psychology, receiving a second doctorate from the California School of Professional Psychology in 1975.

Along with running a private psychology practice, Dr. Hare and his wife founded a research institution, the Black Think Tank, which published a series of books on Black life in America, several of which he wrote himself, including “The Endangered Black Family” (1984).

In 2019, Dr. Hare received a lifetime achievement honor from the American Book Awards, which cited “Black Anglo-Saxons” and “The Endangered Black Family” as keystone texts in the canon of Black studies.