Test Case

April 29, 1967

          Thank god Max spent the night here.  Chico ran my doorbell at five-thirty this morning and told us that Manfred had been picked up by the police.  They had both spent the night in an abandoned car on the quais of the Seine.  No, they weren’t alone, a Frenchman had been with them whose name they didn’t know, but who was the one who had told them about the car.

          --What happened was, said Chico, their connection for the night never turned up.  Connection?  For a place to sleep, said Chico, don’t worry, Manfred’s clean now.  I hoped so, I said, seeing where he had ended up tonight.  Yes, Buster got set and left them about midnight.  Yes, they met the Frenchman in the cafe, and he told them he knew of a car where they could sleep, and they all three slept in it.  No, he didn’t think the Frenchman was a spy.  No, the police just seemed to be making an ordinary identity check around five o’clock this morning and woke them up and asked for their papers.  Yes, the Frenchman showed them his identity card and it seemed to be in order and he went away.  No, the only identity he himself had was this; Chico showed me a written permission from his father to spend three years in the Metropole.  His father apparently works for the Lamentin Hospital in Martinique.  I asked Chico if his father was a doctor, and he said, no, he was night watchman.  Yes, the cop told him to wait and then asked Manfred for his papers.  They seemed to be so astounded at what Manfred said that they forgot about Chico, and so he walked away and came here.  Yes, there were two cops.  No, they actually didn’t let him go, but since they were both talking to Manfred, he sort of quietly took himself off.  What about Manfred?  Manfred said he was an American deserter and--yes, that’s right, an American deserter--and he asked for political asylum in France.  Yes, he said it in English and then repeated it in French.  Yes, Manfred spoke French pretty well now.  “Je suis déserteur americain et je veux l’asile politique en France.”

          Who would have thought that of Manfred?

          In the meantime Max had gotten up and wound his way into the entrance where Chico and I were still standing.  We had automatically started talking in French, since obviously the time for games was over.

          --What did the flics do with Manfred?

          --They took him to the police station, I guess.

          --Which police station?

          --I don’t know.

          --Where was the car you slept in?

          --Along the Seine.

          --Yes, but where?

          --Somewhere near Saint Michel.  We walked down the Boulevard Saint Michel to get to it before going down to the quais.

          --Did you walk far?

          --No.  Not far from Saint Michel.

          --If it’s at Saint Michel, then it’s the Fifth Arrondissement Police station, said Max.  I’ll get DeChatou on this immediately.

          I objected that it was only six in the morning.

          --My god, am I the only one who realizes what this means?

          No.  DeChatou realized what it meant and got over to the Fifth Arrondissement Police station immediately.

April 30 :

I got this from Max who got it from DeChatou, but since it is key information on how to deal with the French police, and possibly all police in a fairly democratic country, I will write what I remember:  DeChatou is a Protestant lawyer whom I first saw at the last phoneless friends meeting.  I don’t think he is part of that “underground communist front organization,” as Max described it.  I had come in the middle of his report on how to co-ordinate the deserter movement with the Vietnam Assises, and the grande  marche on the Prefecture if no test case could be found.  Well, now we had a test case.  We also had a Communist Party lawyer in Nicole Dreyfus, but a respectable--as applied by Max to me and my fur coat--Protestant lawyer, descendant of the Huguenots, probably was the better choice to get support from the De Gaulle government.  Physically DeChatou was the opposite of De Gaulle, short, thin and sandy-haired.

He arrived at the Fifth Arrondissement police station on the corner across from the Pantheon, probably around six forty-five and said he was there to see his client, Manfred Armfield.  The officer at the desk said there was no Manfred Armfield.  He had a good chance of getting away with it, because how could Manfred have called a lawyer since he had been in the hands of the police since five o’clock?  On the other hand, DeChatou was not just anybody but a respectable somebody, and that he somehow knew about Manfred’s arrest indicated he had very good connections in the police. The policemen who made the arrest were obviously not going to mention Chico, whom they should have hauled in also, and but had forgotten in the surprise of Manfred’s declaration.  Certainly the police had not yet received any orders from on high.  In fact, the station heads might still be considering whether to alert their superiors about Manfred’s unusual status, or just treat him as a normal vagrant.  My own hypothesis is that it probably would depend to what extent they could intimidate Manfred into letting himself be treated as ordinary.  This still left them with the problem of where to expel him to.  In the meantime, they were submitting Manfred to standard procedure.  That is, to move the suspect, or lawbreaker, which is what Manfred actually was without any papers, somewhere else.  DeChatou knew that no one was held at the Fifth for long, so he kept his eyes open as he was leaving the little building and caught Manfred’s guards as they were piling him into a Black Maria.  His guards, like the desk sergeant (probably), did not dare to rough up DeChatou when he took Manfred’s arm and led him back inside the police station and got himself recognized in whatever legal fashion was necessary as Manfred’s lawyer.  The desk sergeant made a few calls and realizing that Manfred was no ordinary prisoner, transferred him to the Conciergerie on the Ile de la Cité where Marie Antoinette had preceded him by some one hundred and fifty years.  Actually not that long ago.

April 30

Aiders and abettors:

D’Artois de la Grange:  one of his minor activities is that of editor of Evénements, an intellectual literary magazine approved by the pf’s for deserter interviews--unlike the Saturday Evening Post or the London Times which they do not approve and where Max had already let Manfred and Buster be interviewed.  D’Artois is an old Gaullist from the Resistance and has the ear of De Gaulle.  Like Max, he speaks of himself in the third person, says, “D’Artois can do this, D’Artois cannot do that.”  I wonder if De Gaulle talks that way too.  Through DeChatou, who is now our main informant, we have learnt that the Fifth Arrondissement cop who arrested Manfred has his “ear burning” as a result.  De G. told D’A. who told De C. who told us that De G. is “highly displeased” that Manfred was arrested because this last landed the government with the problem of American deserters.  About time too.

Jacques Pétion is a deputy and the mayor of Martinique.  He has his own political party in Fort de France.  He also knows Chico’s father but did not offer to get Chico off his French military service.  Nor to get him a real ID so he can live in˛the Hexagon and not Martinique.  Since Pétion is black, or a metisse as they say in Martinique, he was approached from the black solidarity angle.  He has told De C. that he will try to get the ear of Gorz on the subject.  Gorz is Minister of Information and a personal friend of Pétion.

Claude Bourdet is head of the PAW, Pacifists against Atomic Warfare, a non-aligned group of people against Atomic Warfare.  He is a Municipal Counselor, whatever that entrails, a Reform Leftist, non-Communist but works in coalitions with the Communists.

Abbé Glanzberg is very important.  Where and with whom I have no idea.  A sort of super Rangoon, maybe?  According to De Gaulle, there is a cordon sanitaire around him.  But he has been contacted.  His ear has been had, I suppose.  To do what has not been specified to us.

All these important people are ready, each in his own way, to support Manfred, the American deserter from the Vietnam War.

May 9

    The two young filmmakers have just contacted us.  They are very unhappy.  France Soir was interested in doing something with their film (a newspaper handling a film?) but now there is supposed to be no publicity on the subject until the government has reached a decision.  If the government feels its hand is being forced, it may get mad and throw Manfred out.  This info comes from DeChatou via D’Artois, and we pass it down to the two filmmakers.  Movie people?  If they were Establishment Press, they would just go ahead and sell their film, but they are leftists and think that the necessity to get asylum for deserters has priority.

    In the meantime, no one knows where Manfred is.  De C. is told he will be released, then that he is released, but no one has seen him.  We do the bistros around the Boul’ Mich’ but no Manfred.  The police are lying and have “lost” him; in other words, hidden him somewhere until there is enough pressure from some quarter to produce him.

    It seems that D’Artois is mad because he is not used to being lied to by the police.  So is De Chatou.  They are all pressuring the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who has the say, versus the Minister of the Interior, who has Manfred.  So far Interior is in control.

    Suppositions (organized in Roman numeral I, capital A, Arabic 1 etc.) after Chatou’s model:

I. Precedents: last Saturday, two deserters were picked up in Switzerland by the Swiss police.  The people looking after them were told they would be released Monday, but when they came to the police station Monday morning, the police said the deserters had already been released and walked off.  So far, no one has seen them again.

II.  Manfred has been released and is in hiding but does not want to contact us.

    A) pro: he has made some sort of deal--given our names to French police and US officials--and cannot face us.

    B) con: If he did make a deal, it would have included sending him back to the States; they don’t want a permanent vagrant on the streets of Paris,  As far as giving our names goes, they must have all our names by this time, just from tapping my phone.

III.  Manfred has been pushed off a bridge with cement on his feet--wearing cement shoes like the detective stories say--by the French Secret police.   A poor third, I think.  There are no precedents for this in the Vietnam War--at least in Europe.  Max says this was a frequently used technique in the Algerian War to disperse of annoying Arab militants after questioning.  And in 1966, Ben Barka was kidnapped at the Drugstore on Saint Germain des Près and eventually found buried in a garden in Fontainebleau, like Cavaradossi’s friend in Tosca.

May 10

    Immediate positive result of all the pressure following Manfred’s disappearance is that suddenly the lid can be taken off the publicity blackout.  As long as everyone wants the ear of the Foreign Office, we were forced to obey its dictum about no publicity.  Right in with the line of the phoneless friends.  But now that Manfred is actually in the hands of the Interior, and is potentially a test case, we can go ahead and do what we want.  This was “implied” by D’Artois to De Chatou because no one has the ear of Interior, or is even trying for it.  Foreign Office has abdicated all responsibility; Manfred is “lost,” and we can alert the press.  The phoneless friends have the ear of someone on the Monde, so last night there was a short article there, and someone else has the ear of the Herald Tribune, not Max this time, so this morning there was an article there as well.  This afternoon Manfred was “found” in the Santé prison.  Instant results.

May 11

    De Chatou has not been able to see Manfred yet but has gotten information that he was interrogated by the US military and did not tell them anything but his name, rank, and serial number.  Good for Manfred.

May 12

    De C. has finally gotten through to Manfred.  He brought us a letter from the prison where Manfred writes he was never in Vietnam, that when he and Buster split from Mannheim, they decided one of them had better say he’s been to Vietnam so they’d stand a better chance of getting help.  Manfred was the oldest, nineteen, and so he was elected.  Once they got out of Amsterdam, they intended to drop the story. but then they found out they were going to Paris and that the political situation there was tough, and so they decided to keep it up.  He also thanks Chico for coming and telling us he had been arrested.

Max maintains that he would have known Manfred couldn’t have been in ‘Nam if he’d known Manfred was only nineteen.  Manfred had told us he was twenty-two.  He certainly constructed a good story for us.  Most interesting part in the film interview is where Manfred tells about his Vietnam friend and his feelings.  No one really believed that Buster was airborne, but we did believe Manfred had been to Vietnam.  I feel sorry for the filmmakers.  Now that they can try to sell their film, half of it turns out not to be true.  They talked about cutting it, but cutting takes time and money and, of course, the film is less interesting if Manfred wasn’t in Vietnam.  At least to the French political people who are the ones most likely to buy it.  So we have all sworn secrecy, and they are going to try and sell the film as it is.  If truth outs, we can say, says Max, that we made a composite story out of various stories told by people in Manfred’s unit.

May 14

    Met Simon Regnier of the Million at a vernissage on the Boulevard Saint Germain.  Brought him up to date on recent events.  Asked him what his relation to the phoneless friends is.  He said they had requested someone from the Million Campaign to come to their last meeting, and since he is the secretary, he went.  Same thing with De C.  They wanted information from a lawyer and invited him.  I suppose they didn’t ask Nicole Dreyfus because she is a real open Communist and so should not be confounded with the “underground front organization of the Party.”  Very funny.  S.R. says they have very good connections in the French government and confirmed what Max told me about their hook-up with the French CP.  Having heard about Communist Front organizations back in the McCarthy period, I am interested such things actually exist. Their whole technique of playing off various government members against each other may be helpful to us at present, but I can hardly think they menace anything.  Manfred is a much greater menace to the US and French establishment, and he certainly wasn’t maneuvered by anyone.  Until he got picked u by the police, the phoneless friends would have been delighted to bury him in the provinces for the rest of the war.  Figuratively speaking, not like Ben Barka.  But Barka was killed by the OAS, not the French police.

May 15

    Out to the farm to see Buster and Chico.  They were sent back there the morning Manfred was picked up.  Buster is very sorry he wasn’t the one to be arrested.  “For once I do something right,” he said.  “And Manfred gets all the credit.”

    The owners of the farm are very nervous and are treating Buster and Chico like pariahs.  Buster says he has tried to explain things, but his French isn’t so good, and Chico has returned to his character of Puerto Rican and doesn’t speak at all.  As a general rule, he doesn’t trust whitey.  Fortunately he made an exception for us.  Probably Manfred is being such a good political militant because he distrusts the US Army as a white institution. 

    Max calms down the gentlemen farmers who sound a little ashamed and aggressive, say we should have called them instead of letting them hear the news about Manfred on the radio.  We say our phone is tapped, and they accept that, though of course we could have gone to a pay phone.  I asked Max later why we didn’t.  He said they could have refused to keep Buster and Chico and asked us to come and get them, and it would have been difficult to refuse.  He did not think they were going to panic to the point of putting the boys out in the middle of the farmlands--if only because they knew Buster would have walked over to the village and told everyone who he was.

We told Buster about Manfred’s letter and asked if it was true.  He acted surprised and said he thought Manfred had actually been to Vietnam.  I don’t think he knows what else to say and is sticking to the story until he squares it with Manfred.  A good reflex if ever he gets picked up by the police.  It does not matter much, at present.

Max has also decided that Chico must be separated from our boys.  As a Martiniquan insoumis, he can only do them harm.  Max asked me to tell him.  He says everyone resents what he says anyway, and I will do it more tactfully.  So I tell Chico and he understands very well.  We decided to stake him to one hundred francs getaway money and drove him into town with us that evening.  Buster wouldn’t stay alone at the farm, and so he came too.  We decided to leave him with Nguyen until after Manfred’s trial, if there is one.

May 16

    First sign of Foreign Affairs making a point against Interior: there will be a trial.  De Chatou says we still should not think the cause is won.  Either Manfred will be let loose with some sort of papers, or the decision will be deferred, and he will be put back in jail. In that event, we will have a press conference.

Who we?

The notables who had already given attestations of support for Manfred, approving his action in deserting:  they are Kasslich, a Nobel Prize in Physics; De Cloud, a famous, not yet Nobel, mathematician; Igdal Vidal, a philosopher of history; Jean Paul Sartre, philosopher and political writer.

I thought D’Artois and Pétion and Abbé Glanzberg with his cordon sanitaire would give attestations, but it seems not.  There are intellectuals who attest, and intellectuals who don’t but are used for other, deeper purposes--like having De Gaulle’s ear.  Sounds like a bull fight.  Except in the real world, the Vietnamese, not De Gaulle are the bull.  Some sadistic US soldiers cut VC ears as souvenirs.

I should not be sarcastic about the intellectuals, since none of us are coming to Manfred’s trial either.  Because, dixit Max, we are necessary for the deeper purposes of the deserter movement.  And Max is a foreigner and has to be careful; Austrian or Hungarian or something like that. We are both married to French people, but whereas I can claim French nationality because of my marriage, he cannot.  For once a woman has a better deal. I must go see about registering myself as French.  Up until now, as an American, I have never worried much about anything.  I don’t know any Americans who have been expelled from France--so maybe Manfred won’t be either.  Still, we seem to be looking after ourselves at the expense of solidarity with Manfred.  Reminds me somehow of the phoneless friends.

    David, the Quaker CO from the film, is coming in for the trial.  So is George, a Church of the Brethren CO from the Compagnons Batisseurs. And Piam’s draft resister friend, John, has turned up from Zagreb.

May 17

    Baby A, the very first deserter, has also come into Paris for Manfred’s trial.  Actually, he was never far away.  The phoneless friends had told him not to contact us anymore.  But he heard about Manfred on the radio and decided to come in all by himself.  I have never seen him.  Max is delighted the pf’s are stuck with him, in a manner of speaking, because he left wherever they had put him when he heard about Manfred’s trial, got to Paris, and missed his rendezvous with whomever had been delegated to pick him up.  Maybe he was afraid he would be sent back to the country, a quite well founded fear.  He called the Quaker Center instead and they called me; not surprisingly since we two have the only open phones in the whole lot.  The problem is to keep him away from the trial.  Apparently he is capable of getting up and wanting to testify and is enough to turn anyone off American deserters.

    So I told Tony Clay at the Quaker Center to hold onto him, and got onto Max who got onto the Benjamins.  I haven’t said much about Benjamin who is a young American professor, probably a Maoist because he often quotes Mao on contradictions.  Maybe I am reading too much into that.  He said he became a Marxist after editing an anthology of science fiction.   Marx described a possible world based on scientific principals which, at that time, were realisable only in fiction; so is Marxism is an attempt to make science fiction reality?  The Benjamins gave Baby A some supper but consider him too weird to be left alone with their three children.

They called John from Zagreb who went over and picked up Baby A and took him to the Flore for coffee.  Walt Whitman, the owner of a bookstore, keeps one or two sofas and broken down cots for passing tourists.  So John took him down to Shakespeare & Co. for the night and came back to us a bit shaken by two hours of Baby A.  In an outflow of other eccentric information, he had told John he was a third generation communist but his parents voted for Goldwater because they knew Kennedy would be assassinated.

There was a demonstration today against De Gaulle’s assumption of full powers, considered as a gratuitous, if temporary, end of parliamentary power politics.  Max went to the demonstration and saw the boy from the phoneless friends whom I had met at the first meeting.  Max bawled him out for letting Baby A come into Paris and then not meeting him.  Boris, I think his alias is, said he cannot take care of Baby A anymore because his mother objects--Boris mother, of course.  Baby A was living there at one point and she said he brought loose women up to his room.  At least he has a sex life.  I remember the first time I heard of him was at an Executive committee meeting of PACS, with Max talking about Sandy’s “problem.”  Turned out he was hard up because the provo girls had given out, and the French militant women did not.  Anyway, Boris had admitted that Baby A was their responsibility and said Pastor Rangoon would take him if worse came to worst.

    --Worse will undoubtedly come to worst if he’s left to his own devices at Shakespeare & Co., said Max.

    John went down to see the next day and Baby A had left.  I guess he’s back with Boris’ poor mother.

May 18

    George the Brethren, or Brother more exactly, hitchhiked in from Chambery where the Batisseurs are now working.  He is all ready to pose as a deserter at a press conference if Manfred is expelled.  So, with two real deserters, two CO’s, and a draft resister, this will make quite a respectable showing. 

    General discussion over whether it might not be better to let them appear as what they really are, especially as they all have different positions on antiwar action.  Of course, the two CO’s had it all set up for them.  I knew you had to be born a Quaker or in the Church of the Brethren for that particular solution to work, and that is why I had asked David at the film interview whether or not Manfred could have gotten exemption as a conscientious objector.  I wanted to bring out that he could not have.  Manfred was actually a draft resister until they caught up with him and gave him a jail or army choice.  Like Buster.  If you’re black and/or working class, you can find yourself, as the boys say, in a jail or army situation.  If you’re lower middle or middle class in certain states like Pennsylvania or Ohio, and you’re lucky, you may be born with Quaker, Brethren, or Mennonite parents and be able to apply for CO.  And if you have  two years of college, and your parents have money, you can go study in Yugoslavia like John.

.Max plumped for presenting them all as deserters.

    --You CO’s and draft resisters have it easy, he said.  Okay, so you have to work hard, but you don’t have to shoot anybody, and you’re not going to get shot at.  I know you are all backing Manfred.  That’s why you’re here.  If there is a press conference, it will be because De Gaulle has decided to expel him.  You may all get picked up and be expelled too, after the press conference.  But it will mean a lot more--as far as getting the news out--if you are expelled as deserters than if you are perfectly safe and legal conscientious objectors.

    --But they can easily find out we are not deserters, said David.

As a Quaker, he probably objects to lying.

    --The French don’t know the difference anyway, said Max.  Most of the time they call them all insoumis.  Unsubmissive.

I  said I did not think De Gaulle would even expel deserters.  It would really be a backdown before the US.  It did not go along with his telling the US Army to leave France.

    --The important thing about a press conference is that it can be a means of pressure on the government.  It will inform the public that there were--how many of you?--Buster, George, David, John and, god help us, Baby A--at a press conference.  Five deserters who represent many others remaining underground for security reasons.  Sure there’ll be a rectification afterwards, but no one ever sees rectifications.

    --If we’re already expelled when we have the press conference, said David, then how can we pressure the government?  They will already have made their decision by expelling us.

    --We’ll see, said Max.  Wait till we see what happens at the trial.

    While this discussion was going on, there was a general strike in Paris and other French cities against De Gaulle’s assuming full powers of government.  There was a vote in Parliament and the Gaullists won--by a narrow margin but a victory nevertheless.  Thanks to the Giscard people, right wing conservatives who voted with the Gaullists.  After the vote they said they would never vote with the Gaullists again.  Parliamentary government indeed!  What is a Parliament worth that would deliberately vote to limit, practically annihilate, its own governing body and give it to a general?

May 20 

Last minute news of sparring between Couve de Murville, the Foreign Minister, and Fouchet, Minister of the Interior.  Found this out through the Protestant Mafia, of which Couve de M. and De Chatou are members, although on opposite sides of the present power structure.  Interior is now willing to send Manfred to the border of his choice instead of turning him back to the US Army.  This last solution was definitely thrown out a few days ago when the US Embassy had the brilliant idea of sending two JAG lawyers from Mannheim to assume Manfred’s defense.  No, said Manfred.

   

May 21

    Manfred is standing as solid as rock in all this.  We are really surprised.  It turns out that the offer of the JAG lawyer was only the last in a series of not so mirabolific offers.  Such as the appearance of an unidentified American official at the Santé, where Manfred has been moved from the Conciergerie, who threatened that if Manfred did not go back of his own free will, they would drag him back in chains.  This actually was before De Chatou had found Manfred again.  With the appearance of a French lawyer, the chains and the American official evaporated.  The French government seems to turn people over to their own governments only when they can do so undercover.  Once an individual becomes exposed, his “democratic rights” are respected.  First function of a lawyer is to expose and, if possible, publicize his client’s plight.  Which, of course, De Chatou, with our help, did.

The evaporated US official resurrected himself into life again at the American Embassy and explained that Manfred was not susceptible to threats.  They, whoever “they” actually were, must have discovered that the official lacked clout and so replaced him with Manfred’s Staff Sergeant.  This one was too corporal to be transported from Mannheim, although Max remarked that the sergeant would undoubtedly have appreciated a weekend in Paris at Army expense.  The Army only had him telephone from Coleman Barracks to the Santé where he told Manfred over the phone to get his black ass back to Germany.  I guess he was black too.  Obviously he was not very persuasive.

Menaces having failed, the Army tried the carrot.  If Manfred would only give himself up to the US military, the US military would send him back to the States with a 212 and a BCD.  Bad Conduct Discharge equals no bennies, problems getting a job. Article 212 of the UCMJ is applied to those “unfit for military service” and is a catchall covering everything from homosexuality to political militancy to just plain trouble-making.  The only worse discharge is a DD, a dishonorable, which carried heavy penalties such as an interdiction to own property, including a car or passport, and remains valid for life.  Therefore a BCD is the Army’s idea of a carrot.  Plus no jail.  Since Manfred considers he was right and they were wrong, he refuses and goes on asking for political asylum in France.

May 22

    On Manfred’s trial:  All the false babies are in Paris and attend the trial:  John from Yugo, George from the Batisseurs, David from the Youth Center.  The real babies, Buster and Baby A, are not to show themselves until the press conference, if we have to have one.  Max is afraid that if they appear at the trial, and we lose, they may be kept there. 

At the trial, De Chatou reads out the attestations from Kasslich, Du Cloud, Igdal Vidal and Jean Paul Sartre, all approving Manfred’s reason for deserting, i.e. not to go to Vietnam.  George has also written an attestation saying that Manfred worked with him ten days at the Compagnons Batisseurs and earned fifteen francs.  Therefore he was not a vagabond.  But it was not read out; either because it was considered unimportant once the intellectuals had written their support, or it was decided not to involve the Compagnon Batisseurs who might eventually be used to take care of more deserters.

The charge against Manfred is vagabondage because he had no money on him when he was picked up.  The fifteen francs he earned do not matter.  According to French law, you have to have a minimum of five francs on you at all times.  Naturally he no longer had the twenty-five francs we had given him earlier in the evening.  It seems the government wanted to find a non-political charge against Manfred in order to get off the hook on the question of asylum for deserters.  Max says he would have been booked on a non-political charge even if he had been the ideal test case deserter everyone had been waiting for.  Manfred getting arrested at five in the morning was the most dramatic publicity, and also protected him from getting kidnapped or expelled on the quiet;  also, thanks to Chico coming to us instead of just going off and taking care of himself.

De Chatou says it is a good sign, this vagabondage charge, because it enables the government to avoid a confrontation with the Americans on the whole question of asylum for the deserters.  I suppose the point is to get asylum, not to have a political confrontation with the government.  In our own little microcosm, we have one problem similar to the Vietnamese: how to save face for the other side.

May 23

    Translated from the Monde, Dim. 21, Lun. 22 Mai 1967: The young black American deserter, Manfred Jackson, condemned Thursday by the 23rd Correctional Chamber of the Seine to ten days of prison for vagrancy was liberated Saturday morning.  The young man was given a temporary residence permit valid 1 until May 29th.  During these nine days he must try to find work.  If he obtains a job, the authorities will deliver a permit giving him the status of a foreign worker resident in France.  On Monday his lawyers intend to depose an official demand for the right of political asylum.

    The residence papers Manfred received consist of a Recipissé  for a carte de séjour, a piece of cheap paper with the holder’s picture on it, giving him or her the right to live in France for three months.  Manfred’s first recipissé, the one mentioned in the Monde, was for a week only and had no photo.  An actual carte de séjour is made of solid cardboard with several renewal flaps and is seldom issued for less than a year.  Legally, any foreigner not requiring a visa has the right to stay in France three months from the date of entry, which date must be stamped on his passport.  Residents of cheap hotels, liable to police inspection day and night, do well to have a recipissé.

May 30

    So, we won.  Manfred was released on Saturday, had lunch at a good restaurant with the two lawyers and Max to celebrate, and Max took him off to be lodged with Pasteur Rangoon.  The phoneless friends are now acting as if the whole thing had been their idea from the beginning.

But they are willing to take care of Manfred and Buster, which will take the load off us.  We’re not worried about the boys.  If they don’t like it with the phoneless friends, they’ll leave.