Viet-Report

“… At one or another antiwar meeting in Manhattan, I encountered Carol Brightman and John McDermott, who were starting up a new magazine designed to fuel the anti-war teach-ins on college campuses.  We hit it off and I signed on as Associate Editor of the magazine.  I had a day job — more of the welfare department statistical work, if I remember — but I spent all my free time working on the magazine.  Brightman, who founded it, called it Viet-Report. Brightman and McDermott were both tall, blonde, well-groomed — not at all the cartoon stereotype of the beatnik antiwar activist.  Brightman, the chief editor, had a B.A. from Vassar and an M.A. from the University of Chicago — not exactly radical hotbeds, either of them.  John was a bit older and was developing into a perpetual graduate student at Columbia in philosophy; he looked very scholarly and smoked a pipe.  But such were the times that both of them, and many others like them, stepped off the academic career ladder that they might otherwise have been pursuing, and threw themselves body and soul into a venture that offered no pay, no credit hours, no prospects of future advancement — but that was infinitely more urgent and important. The business plan of the magazine was to produce informational articles about the Vietnam war, to print it in an inexpensive format, and to distribute it in bulk to antiwar groups on college campuses for them to hand out in connection with campus antiwar teach-ins.  Teach-ins were a hybrid of instruction and demonstration.  Staged in a public area of campus, they would begin with lectures and speeches, including questions and discussions, and might then develop into a march, a sit-in, an occupation of a campus building, or some other direct action.  Some of the teach-ins were small, with only dozens attending; others involved thousands of students. Since none of the magazine staff were paid and we printed on the cheapest newsprint bound with staples, expenses were low.  We were able to sell it for six cents a copy for quantities of over one thousand.  The University Committee to Protest the War in Vietnam — a multi-campus coalition mostly of faculty — put up some startup funds, and there were donations by a handful of individuals including the pediatrician Benjamin Spock. …”
Martin Nicolaus
UCONN: Viet Report
NY Times: Carol Brightman, 80, Dies; Profiled a Notable Writer and a Notable Band
The Venceremos Brigade at 50: Challenging Empire, Uplifting Solidarity Since 1969