Howard Zinn, historian and activist, died on January 27, 2010, at the age of eighty-seven. Here he speaks at a rally in Copley Square in Boston on September 23, 2001.

Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010

Long Live Zinn

Much will and should be written about Howard Zinn's contributions to the world: how his A People's History of the United States changed how many of us understand America and, like all great histories, shed the great light of truth upon our present, explaining what cannot be understood by official propaganda; how he played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement during tough years when he, like so many others, took enormous physical risks for simply wanting justice; how thousands of people's lives were politically transformed by their encounters with him.

And the personal remembrances of Howard the human being will be no less moving and true. I first met him forty-two years ago, when he and Dan Berrigan passed through Laos on the way to pick up U.S. POWs in Hanoi, and I was struck by his genuine delight in meeting the rice farmers in the village where I was living. Howard was by far the most honest, human, open, kind, generous, gracious, humorous, and charming of all the political people I've met. He looked you in the eyes. He listened. He reacted appropriately to what you were saying. Looking back on his life, he was as open and honest about his regrets and satisfactions as anyone I have ever met.

But to me there is an even more important aspect of his life—an aspect like that of his friend and colleague Noam Chomsky—that transcends the personal.

To many of us, "Zinn" and "Chomsky" have not only been admirable human beings. They have also been something far more, something difficult to put into words, something perhaps even risky to try to capture—but something that, nonetheless, one feels driven to express at a moment like this.

Many of us were upended on the deepest possible level during the 1960s. Growing up in the aftermath of the "Good War," many of us were the children or grandchildren of immigrants who believed deeply in the America to which they owed their very lives. As a result, we had a profound faith in America's goodness and decency. And when we saw both our leaders and an entire older generation not only betray but also spit upon and destroy these values in what was then known as Indochina, we were undone. When we saw them mercilessly, pitilessly, amorally, criminally, deceitfully, and undemocratically murder millions of innocent civilians week after week, month after month, year after year for over a decade—each week a lifetime of agony—we were thrown into an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual abyss, from which we have never really fully emerged. Our moral universe—the basic set of understandings needed to remain human—was shattered.

It was during those morally chaotic years that Zinn and Chomsky became more than people to many of us. As elders who did not sell out, who acted as well as taught, who did not compromise, who did not abandon genuine American values and ideals, who did not lose their passion for social justice, who did not fail to side with the poor and downtrodden and victimized, and who above all spoke the truth, they became some of our most important symbolic figures. Even if we did not always agree with a particular position they took, they came to represent something far higher.

Zinn and Chomsky represented a tradition and state of being that meant we were not entirely on our own. Their names became beacons of:

• The deepest possible compassion. At any given moment the world is divided into those who hear the screams of innocent victims and those who do not. Most of us, certainly myself, go in and out of hearing the screams. We fight one injustice but ignore another. Zinn and Chomsky represented a state of being in which one consistently hears the screams, from Vietnam to the inner city, from East Timor to Haiti. It is a state of total openness to the pain of the world.
• Intellectual clarity. Both men have told their truths to millions, never compromising for the sake of political expediency as so many of their contemporaries have. Many of us were terminally confused by the conflict between America's image and reality. Zinn and Chomsky provided explanations and understandings that helped keep us sane.
• Moral courage. Going far beyond mere speechmaking and writing, Zinn risked arrest or bodily injury many times while opposing segregation and the war. Chomsky took similar risks as a leader of the draft resistance movement. Both men's names have come to stand for committed intellectuals who do not compromise—intellectuals who align their bodies and actions with their minds and thoughts.
• Passion for social justice. Unlike younger liberal historians such as Michael Lind, who argues that our murder of millions of innocents in Indochina is irrelevant to judging the war since we also killed civilians in World War II, Zinn and Chomsky stand for passionate opposition to the injustice and criminality of murdering civilians—a passion that was kindled for Howard in World War II when, as a bombardier, he realized that he was often bombing the innocent in violation of the laws of war, not out of military necessity but out of inertia and indifference.
• Integrity, authenticity, and wholeness. Zinn and Chomsky have come to represent the idea of practicing what one preaches. I have never seen either act out of character. Back in 1968, as Howard and Dan Berrigan were on their way to Hanoi to escort U.S. POWs home, I asked him, "What political system do you believe in?" He smiled in his wry way, grinned his wide grin, and answered in that soft, Brooklyn-tinged voice of his: "I guess the closest is the kind of anarcho-syndicalism they had in the Spanish Civil War." As we talked, I understood that he knew too much to put faith in any government, Right or Left, and that "anarcho-syndicalism" was a way of saying he remained idealistic that humans could at least theoretically live sanely. But he never fell into the trap that many of us have of projecting our ideals onto the fallible humans who hold power in any system, Left or Right, and are inevitably corrupted by it.

The integrity conveyed by the words "Zinn" and "Chomsky" is, in the end, impossible to pin down. These leaders were cut from a different, older, deeper cloth. Their roots lie in an earlier time when those fighting for peace and social justice did so because of who they were, not because they sought personal power or to realize fantasies of "revolution." I asked Howard last January why he continued to fight, write, and speak for peace and social justice when it all seemed so hopeless. His answer was simple: "I couldn't live with myself if I didn't."

Zinn and Chomsky have come to represent a kind of moral center in my life—a compass, a guiding star. This or that politician in whom I had believed might turn out to have feet of clay. I might betray my own ideals. I might drop out for a while, become despairing. But knowing that Zinn and Chomsky have fought consistently for their ideas without getting corrupted by the temptations of power has reassured me that integrity is possible.

The symbolic weight that I have assigned to my idealized concepts of "Zinn" and "Chomsky" has sometimes made me feel conflicted about the actual men. When I went into electoral politics in the 1980s, I worried that they would see my choice as morally or intellectually compromised, so I tended to avoid them. I also sometimes saw them as naive. When I talked to Howard shortly after John Kerry was nominated for president, he forcefully argued that Kerry had better run against the Iraq war if he wanted to win. My internal reaction was something along the lines of, "Oh, there he is, good old Howard, a naive romantic to the end. No one can hope to win the presidency without supporting the Iraq war." I did not foresee that Barack Obama would win the presidency largely for opposing the Iraq war at a time when conventional wisdom held that supporting the war was necessary to win.

As the horrors of the Bush years wore on, and now as the disappointment of Obama's first year has kicked in, I have found myself increasingly embracing what Zinn and Chomsky have taught and embodied: the ideas they represent are serving even more as a lodestone to me in these years than they did in my youth.

Howard's death is thus a shock that transcends the shock of losing a friend or even a loved one. The personal memories come tumbling out. I remember watching a theatrical presentation with him in a cave north of Hanoi as Nixon got elected in November 1972, marveling at the morale of the Vietnamese compared to the despair we felt at the prospect of four more years of killing. I remember spending the night in adjoining jail cells during the Redress demonstration, being so buoyed in the morning by his cheerfulness, smiles, and wry but never cynical humor. I remember marching together in a small march in Lexington, Massachusetts, and then hearing him speak with deep knowledge and feeling about how the ideals of the American Revolution, as contrasted with its reality, required us to oppose the Vietnam war. I remember forty years of emails, phone conversations, and visits in which Howard was always gracious, always committed, always kind, always interested, and always interesting.

My only consolation in this moment is knowing that though Howard Zinn the man has died, the idea of "Zinn"—all that he represents—has not. I know that many of us will continue to be sustained in the difficult years to come by the answers we will receive when we ask ourselves: What would Howard think and how would he see it? What would Howard say? How would Howard feel? And, most importantly: What would Howard do?

Zinn has died. Long live "Zinn."

Fred Branfman, after four decades of psychological, spiritual, and political work on behalf of the environment, information revolution, and peace, focuses today on cultivating a "life-affirming death awareness," as described on www.trulyalive.org. Email: fredbranfman@aol.com.