American Experiment (361 page)

The most dynamic force in this grid was busy mobilizing, recruiting, and deploying not in Indochina but in the United States, as antiwar protesters stepped up their demonstrations across the country. Far more ominous for the Administration, protest was now flaring in and around the armed services. More and more soldiers were going AWOL to avoid being sentenced to Vietnam; a few found temporary sanctuary in churches and movement dwellings. Service people were now joining peace marches as “GI coffeehouses” in Vietnam, elsewhere abroad, and back home helped to galvanize discontent at military bases. Draft resistance and evasion were widening. During the Vietnam era it was estimated that more than half a million men were draft offenders; of these over 200,000 were actually accused of draft offenses, 25,000 were indicted, almost 9,000 were convicted, and 4,000 were sentenced to prison, serving an average of eighteen months. Nearly half of the half million draft offenders had failed even to register for the draft; of these only a few were prosecuted. Some 40,000 presumed draft offenders and military deserters fled to Canada and other countries.

Protest took spectacular forms, as activists vied for headlines. In July
1969, five women, calling themselves Women Against Daddy Warbucks, darted into Manhattan draft board offices, stole dozens of draft files, and tore the “1” and the “A” from typewriters to exorcise the l-A denoting draft eligibles. Two days later they surfaced at Rockefeller Center to toss the confettied draft records into the teeth of the multinational corporations concentrated there. This climaxed a dozen nonviolent raids on draft boards and on Dow Chemical that had started two years earlier when Jesuit priest Philip Berrigan and two others poured their own blood (mixed with duck blood) on draft files in Baltimore as their way of combining Gandhi and guerrilla, thus pushing nonviolent direct action to its outer limit. Some months later the Catonsville Nine—Berrigan, his brother Daniel, also a Jesuit priest, and seven other radical Catholics—made a bonfire of draft files with homemade “napalm,” declaring, “We believe some property has no right to exist.” These activists, carefully avoiding harm to persons, calmly accepted the consequences, often jail.

In a relentless spiral, militant protest edged toward outright armed struggle, as New Left activists lost patience with nonviolence. Many SDSers felt frustrated with their failure to build a more radical movement, except at a few places like Stanford. With the infiltration of SDS by the Progressive Labor party, a self-styled Marxist-Leninist-Maoist cadre, SDS meetings became scenes of ideological forensics. Bitter quarrels and shouting matches erupted over the correct line—“vanguarditis,” Carl Oglesby called it—in recruiting and organizing. To counter the growing appeal of PL’s organizational vigor and anti-imperialist political dogma, the National Office won adoption of a proposal to forge a “Revolutionary Youth Movement” of the working class. Marxism became, wrote Jim Miller, “a weapon in an internal power struggle.”

This sectarian extremism culminated at the SDS convention in Chicago in June 1969. The National Office contingent handed delegates a long-winded RYM treatise entitled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”—a line from Bob Dylan—and setting forth what Kirkpatrick Sale described as “a peculiar mix of New Left attitudes clothed in Old Left arguments, the instincts of the sixties ground through a mill of the thirties, the liberating heritage of SDS dressed up in leaden boots from the past.” The assembly soon degenerated into mindless name-calling and slogan-shouting, enlivened by a few fistfights in the back. RYM leader Bernardine Dohrn, a brilliant young attorney who had worked with the National Lawyers Guild, led a walkout of a majority opposed to PL. When she returned later to the rump session with her forces and declared that all PL members were expelled from SDS, the RYM faction, several hundred strong, marched out into the Chicago night. Over the summer
RYM in turn split into two parts, one of which became “Weatherman,” pledged to urban guerrilla warfare in support of Third World revolution.

And so SDS died as a national entity. The “organized New Left disintegrated into warring factions over precisely the question of how to transcend the limits of student radicalism,” Richard Flacks, a leader of SDS in the early days, concluded. “The era of
campus
confrontation and
student
revolutionism has ended not because it failed, but because it reached the limit of its possibilities.”

Divided as they were, the protesters could hardly grasp their growing impact on the White House. Nixon was still groping for some kind of middle way even while the student-led demonstrations single-mindedly focused on ending the war, and even while Hanoi’s spokesmen made clear their absolute determination to win it. The White House was caught in a vise largely of its own making. It was trying to fend off protest at home, conduct air and ground attacks against North Vietnam, and “Vietnamize” the war even while the Saigon regime feared the departure of the Americans. In early summer 1969 the President decided to “go for broke” to end the war, according to his memoirs, “either by negotiated agreement or by an increased use of force.”

It must have been the first time in history that a war leader adjusted his war-and-peace scenario to the academic calendar. “Once the summer was over,” Nixon remembered, and the colleges as well as Congress returned from vacation in September, “a massive new antiwar tide would sweep the country during the fall and winter.” He decided to set November 1, 1969— the first anniversary of a bombing hall that LBJ had desperately gambled on during the final days of the 1968 election—as the deadline for an ultimatum to North Vietnam. He instructed Kissinger to draw up an operation—“Duck Hook” it was called—to force Hanoi to its knees. Soon the national security aide and his staff were working up such alternatives as massive carpet bombing of Hanoi and other cities, mining Haiphong harbor and inland waterways, bombing dikes on the Red River delta, even using tactical nuclear weapons to cut off supply routes from Russia and China. But Nixon had been right about the protesters. Four blocks from the White House another team of planners was hard at work organizing a huge Moratorium, a day of nationwide protest against the war.

The peace forces got there first. On October 15, another thunderous wave of protest rolled across the nation. Students, workers, homemakers, politicians, executives broke from their routines to join marches, rallies, vigils, teach-ins, doorbell ringings, and readings of the rolls of war dead.
Few campuses were untouched. At Whittier College, Nixon’s alma mater in California’s Orange County, the college president’s wife lit a “flame of life” to burn until the war ended. Women in Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the atomic bomb, blocked a bridge leading to war plants. At the county courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky, a large crowd listened quietly to the names of the state’s war dead; a woman walked up to the microphone and uttered a single name. “This is my son,” she said. “He was killed last week.”

Caught between Hanoi’s steadfast pursuit of victory and the protesters’ demand for peace, Nixon suddenly switched from his intended ultimatum to a speech in defense of Vietnamization. Delaying his address for two days so that it would not adversely affect a Republican candidate in a New Jersey state election, the President contended that a quick pullout from Vietnam would produce a bloodbath and a loss of confidence in American leadership at home and abroad. Vietnamization would mean peace with honor. He had seen in San Francisco, he said, demonstrators with signs reading: “Lose in Vietnam, bring the boys home.” Well, he would not allow a “vocal minority” to prevail over “the great silent majority.” It was Nixon at his most ambidextrous:

“Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”

The protesters would have none of it. They saw Vietnamization as Nixon’s “invisibility” stratagem to turn over the ground war to Saigon while he further expanded the air war, which was less accessible to the media. By reducing troops, draft calls, costs, and caskets returning from combat, he would make a pretense of winding down the war while in fact it would become more destructive than ever. In November the Moratorium and the Mobe’s successor coalition, the New Mobe, in uneasy alliance, led the most ambitious demonstration yet, blanketing the nation but concentrated in Washington. In long, dark robes tens of thousands of protesters walked silently in a “March Against Death” from Arlington National Cemetery to Capitol Hill. Each wearing a cardboard placard with the name of an American soldier killed or a Vietnamese village destroyed, they shouted out the names as they passed the White House. The next day eleven coffins bearing the placards headed a vast procession from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Over half a million people gathered there in the cold, setting a new turnout record.

By January 1970, the end of his first year in the White House, Nixon’s Vietnam policy was still wavering between attack and withdrawal. Given time—much time—he might have stayed atop his swaying tightrope
indefinitely. But the dynamics of war were not so easily balanced abroad and brokered at home. In March 1970, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s Chief of State, who had been walking his own tightrope in dealing with Hanoi, Peking, Washington, and Saigon and with ambitious subordinates in his capital at Phnom Penh, was deposed while on a trip to Europe. Whether or not Washington had any hand in the overthrow—and Kissinger hotly denied it—the new President, Lon Nol, was friendly to the Americans.

The coup upset a delicate balance. Hanoi’s forces had been taking advantage of long-established “sanctuaries” in Cambodia that protected their vital supply lines to the south, and Washington had been blasting these strong points. South Vietnamese certainly, and Americans probably, had been infiltrating across the South Vietnam border into Cambodia, for various reasons and with various covers. All parties concealed—or at least denied—their involvement. Now facing an unfriendly government in Phnom Penh, Hanoi’s forces in the sanctuary areas attacked farther west into Cambodia in order to avoid entrapment by U.S. and Saigon forces and strengthen their hand for future operations.

Whether this episode remained merely one more of the age-old shifts of power in the murky politics of Indochina depended on how the rival capitals responded. Commander-in-Chief Nixon was already poised for action. Hanoi’s “aggression” struck at all his vulnerabilities—his feeling that he had been playing the good guy in not escalating the war, his awareness that the fall election campaigns would be starting soon and the Administration had little to boast about, his fear of “losing” Cambodia, and above all his concern that Hanoi was strengthening its capacity to disrupt Vietnamization. Bypassing his Secretaries of State and Defense, who had expressed qualms about the idea, but with the solid support of Kissinger and some of the military, the President late in April resolved on a joint “incursion” by Americans and South Vietnamese against Hanoi’s sanctuaries.

“If, when the chips are down,” he said in announcing the invasion, “the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” Like so many of Washington’s much-touted operations in Vietnam, the Cambodia incursion gained mixed results at best. GIs and South Vietnamese forces captured large stocks of supplies and cleared a few square miles of jungle, but once again the elusive North Vietnamese troops and their headquarters personnel escaped the net.

Back home the reaction of the antiwar forces was not mixed. Furious
students protested on several hundred campuses, some of which were closed for months. Student outrage boiled over following press reports that Nixon during a visit to the Pentagon had said of other protesters, “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses.” At some universities students attacked or sacked ROTC buildings. After a weekend of turmoil at Kent State University in Ohio, during which the ROTC building was gutted, edgy National Guardsmen, ordered to disperse even peaceful assemblies, suddenly turned and fired on a crowd of demonstrating students. They killed two women and two men, two of them bystanders. Less noticed by a stunned nation was the even more arbitrary killing of two black students by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi. The Vietnam bloodbath had overflowed into the groves of academe.

Militarily, Cambodia left the war little changed. Washington pulled its troops back by the end of June; Hanoi, its timetable somewhat disrupted by the operation, restocked its supply depots and reestablished its sanctuaries. There followed a year of fight-talk-fight on both sides. Hanoi could not mount a decisive attack, nor could the Americans. Protests continued, fueled by a rising number of Vietnam veterans, some of whom at Christmastime 1971 occupied the Statue of Liberty as a war protest and hung the American flag upside down from Liberty’s crown. The Administration appeared physically as well as politically under siege, as demonstrators ringed the White House.

In his cell in the grim, fortresslike Latuna prison near El Paso, Texas, where he was doing two years for draft resistance, Randy Kehler opened his
New York Times
on a Sunday in mid-June 1971. Splashed across the front page was the first installment of the Pentagon’s own secret history of the Vietnam War, ordered by Defense Secretary McNamara in 1967 to uncover what had gone wrong. The forty-seven volumes of memos, cables, reports, and analysis documenting a pattern of governmental deception and confusion might never have seen the light of day without Kehler. For a few weeks publication of the Pentagon Papers in the
Times
and the Washington
Post
once again fired up the debate over Vietnam.

The man who leaked the secret history was forty-year-old Daniel Ellsberg. For years he had seemed the model young careerist on the rise. After a stint as a Marine infantry commander, he had spent years as a national security bureaucrat, a specialist in crisis decision making and nuclear command and control, a Pentagon functionary involved intimately in the early escalation of the Vietnam War, a “pacification” officer in South Vietnam, and an author of the Pentagon history. He returned from Vietnam
opposed to the war effort—at first not because it was wrong or immoral but because of its dishonesty, corruption, and futility. For two years he crusaded in the corridors of power, lobbying high officials like McNamara and Walt Rostow and advising presidential candidates in 1968, especially Robert Kennedy. Nothing seemed to work.