Mary McCarthy

Miss McCarthy has indicated that if she is in Hanoi at the end of March she will attend the conference.

Until recently, Mary McCarthy was chiefly famous for her formerly much-banned novel The Group.

Vietnam, published last year, makes no pretence of objectivity. At the outset the writer states that her visit to Vietnam in February 1967 was to seek what was damaging to America.

The book has gained wide acceptance among the American left. In it all her fellow-countrymen are portrayed either as thugs, or as deepening the Vietnamese people's agony while they naively talk of winning hearts and minds.

The Viet Cong, whose atrocities might have minimised American "crimes", are not described.