They Marched Into Sunlight (52 page)

In their wish list they asked the president to let them unleash American military might in ten more ways, everything short of an invasion of North Vietnam: remove restrictions on the air campaign over the North, known as Rolling Thunder; mine the deepwater ports in the North; mine inland waterways and estuaries in the North above the twentieth parallel; conduct naval surface operations against targets north of the twentieth parallel; use sea-based surface-to-air missiles against northern aircraft; increase bombing along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and along Laotian waterways; eliminate the need to pretend they were striking South Vietnam when conducting B-52 strikes in Laos; increase the “exploitation force” in Laos; expand the secret military program in Cambodia, known as Operation Daniel Boone, from a reconnaissance mission to a sabotage and destruction mission; and expand covert operations in North Vietnam.

The second October 17 memo came from McGeorge Bundy, the former national security adviser who had left the administration to run the Ford Foundation. Along with McNamara, Bundy had been a central figure in the expansion of the war a few years earlier, providing the rationales for Johnson to launch the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign and to send U.S. ground troops to Vietnam. He was the quintessential representation of what writer David Halberstam would describe with the ironic phrase “the best and the brightest,” his arguments always nuanced and carefully calibrated, as though the war could be won by following a precise intellectual construct. A White House correspondent had spotted Bundy roaming the corridors that morning and had asked Press Secretary Christian about it at the eleven o’clock press briefing. “Mr. Bundy does come down from New York occasionally,” Christian said, adding that he did not know why Bundy was there that day. In fact Bundy was a houseguest at the White House residence and had been making the rounds—talking to McNamara, his brother William Bundy, CIA director Helms, Rostow, Clark Clifford, Vice President Humphrey, and “a knowledgeable junior interdepartmental staff team”—in preparation for the “Memorandum for the President” entitled “Vietnam—October 1967.”

“Basically, I think your policy is as right as ever and that the weight of the evidence from the field is encouraging,” Bundy began. “I also believe that we are in a long, slow business in which we cannot expect decisive results soon.”

Where the Joint Chiefs gave Johnson a to-do list, Bundy, noting that his “most important preliminary conclusions are negative,” proffered his own not-to-do list. It was neither militantly hawkish nor dovish but typically Bundyish. He said he was “strongly against” any unconditional pause in the bombing, any extended pause “for the sake of appearances,” any “major headline-making intensification of the bombing,” any large-scale reinforcement of troops for General Westmoreland beyond what had already been agreed to, any change in LBJ’s public posture, and any “elaborate effort to show by facts and figures that we are ‘winning.’” This seemed to be nothing more than a nuanced explication of the status quo, but Bundy ended with a series of recommendations for subtle action that nudged the argument further away from the wish list of the generals. He suggested, for example, that through “careful study” they could maintain continuous bombing in the North that avoided “startling targets” and “had the public effect of de-escalation without seriously lightening the burden on the North Vietnamese.” As to the battle in the South, he urged Johnson to “expand the visibility” of South Vietnamese military forces and to persuade the U.S. military command to place more emphasis on pacification programs. One way to do this, he said, was by rewarding officers involved in pacifying the hamlets as much as battalion commanders leading search-and-destroy missions.

While the Joint Chiefs and McGeorge Bundy were presenting their grand cases that day on what should and should not be done about Vietnam, LBJ arrived in the dining room preoccupied with two lesser documents, single pieces of paper that informed him of the real-life consequences of his decisions. He read both of these short notes before leaving his office for the war council lunch.

The first was from presidential aide Joseph Califano and came to Johnson’s desk at 12:50. Califano had just received an urgent call from Warren Christopher, a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department, concerning a mass demonstration under way outside the U.S. Army induction center in Oakland, California. The day before, at five in the morning, there had been a peaceful sit-in at the induction center, ending with the arrest of 123 demonstrators, including Joan Baez, the movement folk singer. It was the first act in a weeklong series of protests against the draft and the war machine that would roll across the country from the Bay Area to Madison to Washington. By Tuesday morning the crowd in Oakland had become larger and less passive, and the police had responded with clubs and gas, news that was swiftly relayed back to the president of the United States. In his note Califano informed his boss that the U.S. Attorney in Oakland had contacted the Department of Justice with word that “there are two to four thousand people outside the Induction Center milling around, that the situation is tense, and the police had to use mace, a debilitating chemical or gas, which makes an individual lethargic, in order to clear the streets immediately adjacent to the Induction Center.” The federal attorney, Califano added, was inside the building and “will keep us up-to-date.”

Johnson hungered for reports of this sort. He had become nearly as obsessed with the targets of protest as with the bombing targets around Hanoi. Since the beginning of October he had been receiving nightly memos laced with the latest intelligence on antiwar activities around the country, with a special focus on the huge national mobilization rally planned for Washington at the end of that week. Now, before heading down the hall and upstairs to the dining room for his Tuesday lunch, Johnson dictated his response to the news from Oakland: “Tell Joe to tell them to put their best men on it—be adequately firm—I want no pussy-footing on the part of the Department of Justice.”

The second note came from Arthur McCafferty, the briefing officer in the White House Situation Room, a windowless nerve center in the White House basement where the latest worldwide intelligence was monitored around the clock for the president and his national security staff. Every morning, apart from other intelligence, the Situation Room staff provided LBJ with a one-sheet summary of the previous day’s military actions in Vietnam. This included enemy and U.S. body counts, totaled by the day, week, year, two years, and duration of the war. Much like Califano’s update, McCafferty’s memo now provided Johnson with the latest urgent news. It reached the Oval Office at 1:15, and the president carried it, along with Califano’s note, into the Tuesday lunch. The latest accounts from the battlefields of war and peace.

Johnson sat down in his swivel chair and the meeting began. “It looks as though the news is all bad,” the president said.

He took out the two notes and read them. Califano’s first. Then McCafferty’s: “A battalion of US Army troops taking part in Operation Shenandoah II, 35 miles northwest of Saigon, fought a fierce four and a half hour battle yesterday in which heavy casualties were inflicted on both sides. Among the US killed was Col. Terry Allen, the battalion commander. US casualties in the engagement were 58 killed and 31 wounded compared with 67 enemy killed. The US battalion is still operational and is conducting a sweep of the battlefield area.”

Not accurate, but devastating nonetheless. No amount of pepper from the battery-powered grinder could make this taste better.

General Wheeler tried anyway, throwing more wildly false statistics at his commander in chief. The battalion “had about one hundred casualties out of a battalion of nine hundred,” Wheeler said. “Of course the battalion is still operational.”

I
T LOOKS AS THOUGH
the news is all bad, the president had said.

That afternoon in El Paso, Jean Ponder Allen was in the car with her live-in boyfriend, the rodeo clown, pulling into the driveway at the house on Timberwolf Drive. She saw a white government car come to a stop behind them. A man in uniform got out, and Jean immediately sensed what had brought him there. She turned to her boyfriend and said firmly, “Just leave!” He drove off and never returned, such was the depth of that relationship. The officer was nervous but tried to go ahead with his horrible assignment. He told Jean that her husband, Terry Allen Jr., was missing in action in Vietnam.

“He’s not missing in action, he’s dead!” she said.

“Ma’am, all I know…”

“Don’t tell me that. I know.”

“Ma’am…”

“For God’s sake, stop telling me he’s missing! I know he’s dead!”

Her husband was not missing, she was the one who was missing, emotionally, she thought. How could she possibly be allowed to grieve for a husband she had so publicly betrayed?

Another high-ranking officer was sent to General Allen’s house on Cumberland Circle. Their son was missing in action, Terry Sr. and Mary Fran were told. The old man was suffering from dementia, but he understood this news only too well. He sprang into action one last time. He called friends who knew people at the Pentagon and ordered them to find out what really happened to his dear Sonny.

Chapter 19

The Spectacle

J
IM
R
OWEN AND
S
USAN
M
C
G
OVERN
returned to Madison for the 1967 fall semester so late that they had no luck finding a place to rent near the university. They settled for a prefabricated garden apartment on Femrite Drive seven miles away in the town of Monona, a world apart from the sixties bohemia of the downtown off-campus streets. The Beltline was nearby, with its constant thrum of heavy traffic leading out to the interstate and beyond to nowhere, and the ambience was deathly dull. The lone signs of life within walking distance were a pizza parlor and a musty old go-go joint called the Satellite Lounge. For Rowen and McGovern, it was merely a place to sleep and to keep their dog, Schnapps, a mixed terrier that they had bought out of the window of Fur, Fin, and Feather on State Street.

They had been married almost two months, a merger of two families of the liberal Washington establishment, though such a description, while perhaps unavoidable, was not how the young couple defined themselves. Susan McGovern, the daughter of Eleanor and Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, was a senior in sociology. Jim Rowen, the son of Alice and Hobart Rowen, an economics writer at the
Washington Post,
was in his first year of graduate school in English. They were a compact and tight-wired pair who shared a love of books and movies and had two preoccupations: their studies and Vietnam. As “liberal Democratic kids, raised to be tolerant and respectful of other cultures,” the war to them seemed both unnecessary and indefensible. Whether the United States was fighting in Southeast Asia “on behalf of some half-baked imperialist extension of power or this outdated notion of anticommunism…it just seemed so ridiculous,” Rowen thought. On a date two years earlier, he and Susan had gone to see Bob Hope at Homecoming and had listened in disbelief as Hope interspersed his stand-up routine with an enunciation of the domino theory, saying “If we don’t stop them in Vietnam, we are going to be fighting them in the streets of Lodi”—a small farm town north of Madison.

When the audience applauded, Rowen looked at McGovern and thought,
We are in the wrong crowd.

Rowen’s first political stirrings, like those of many antiwar activists who came of age in the fifties and first half of the sixties, before Vietnam and the cultural revolution, involved civil rights. His parents had taught him to respect other races and to avoid or challenge people and institutions that did not. When he was ten and his elementary school in Bethesda was being integrated, a teacher screamed at Joe High, a black classmate Rowen had befriended, and the incident upset Rowen and helped fix his sense of self as “an enemy of people who treated blacks badly.” When a bowling alley in the community, Hiser Lanes, was reluctant to allow “negro” patrons, Rowen’s parents would not allow him to go there.

In the spring of 1963, a few months before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Rowen was finishing his senior year at Bethesda–Chevy Chase High School in suburban Washington, where he had joined a group of classmates in challenging the genteel racist order. As a self-described “goody two-shoes,” he belonged to the Junior Civitan Club, a service club for teenagers. They met every few weeks with their parent organization, the Civitan Club of Bethesda, whose motto was “Builders of Good Citizenship.” Rowen and some friends questioned why an outfit promoting good citizenship met at Kenwood Country Club, a racially segregated institution. When they had started raising the issue a year earlier, their adult sponsors ignored them or told them to mind their own business. But the young men refused to back down, and finally Rowen and fourteen others quit the club in protest and wrote a letter, published in the April 26, 1963,
Washington Post,
that denounced the adult Civitans for not living up to their motto and “violating a trust with the community of Bethesda.” Standing on principle was “heady stuff” for young Rowen; he felt morally virtuous, yet it was not without consequences. One childhood pal declared that the fuss would destroy the Junior Civitans and promised that if Rowen persisted, their friendship would end and he would never talk to Rowen again. And he never did. The activists from then on were regarded by former clubmates as “pariahs.” From that small incident Rowen learned a larger lesson on what can happen when you act on your beliefs.

The transition from civil rights to the antiwar movement seemed natural and seamless, but by 1967, with Vietnam now dominant, Rowen found that opposing the war intellectually was easier than figuring out how to respond to it physically. Along with many classmates, he spent a considerable amount of time during his senior year at the University of Wisconsin debating what to do if he got drafted, and he viewed the draft dilemma, among other things, as another manifestation of racism. He saw the war “as a reflection of domestic racism,” both in how “the draft was taking minority kids not in college” and in how “the government, in our name, was making war on Asians with dark skins, the endless talk about gooks and slopes, our technological military destruction of life and culture across Southeast Asia—it all went hand in hand.”