They Marched Into Sunlight (13 page)

O
N THE
S
UNDAY MORNING
of March 12, 1967, E. N. Brandt, director of public relations for the Dow Chemical Company, left his office in Midland, Michigan, the small town where the homegrown corporation was based, and caught a United Airlines flight that would carry him east for a meeting the next morning with officials at the defense department. This was Brandt’s first trip to Washington and not one that he had expected to make. When he first suggested that the company meet with the military brass to present a list of concerns, he thought the mission would be appropriate for his boss, president Herbert Dow Doan, grandson of the company’s founder. Doan instead simply told Brandt in his characteristically informal fashion that it sounded good, go ahead and do it.

Dow Chemical was not one of the big boys of the military-industrial complex—it ranked seventy-fifth that year in the dollar volume of its defense contracts—and its top executives in Midland were conservative Republicans, but the company nonetheless was on especially friendly terms with the Johnson administration. Directing its Washington office was A. P. (Dutch) Beutel, a legendary character known as the founding father of the Texas chemical industry. Beutel walked with a slight limp and his wrinkled, wind-burned face looked like a Lone Star topo-graphic map delineating every river from the Red to the Rio Grande. He was a man who seemed to have the true measure of Texas, and something more: he was an old crony of LBJ’s going back to 1950, when he was setting up Dow’s Gulf Coast operation in Freeport. The easy relationship between Dow and the White House was now reflected in things as large as engineering contracts with the new space center in Houston and as small as the Styrofoam coffee cup holders bearing the presidential seal that Jimmy Phillips of the Freeport plant would send up as gifts to President Johnson and longtime aides Jack Valenti and Walter Jenkins. Johnson’s Hill Country ranch along the Pedernales had even experimented with a defoliant Dow developed for use in Vietnam. The Texas connection served Dow well, and when word came from Michigan that the company wanted a Pentagon audience, Dutch Beutel had no trouble making the arrangements.

The public relations agenda that Ned Brandt took to Washington was at once understandable and implausible. Dow believed that the military should absolve it of responsibility for something it produced, or at least deflect the increasingly harsh criticism coming the company’s way. Along with its industrial and consumer products, most notably Saran Wrap, Dow also manufactured napalm, which when packaged into a bomb became a fearsome weapon of jellied fire that sucked the oxygen out of the air and clung unmercifully to human flesh as it burned at two thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

Napalm was cheap and easy to make. The latest variation of the hellish concoction, known as napalm B, was 25 percent gasoline, 25 percent benzene, and 50 percent polystyrene mixed together in what the industry dismissively called “bathtub chemistry.” Dow had begun producing napalm B at a plant in Torrance, California, in the summer of 1965 (three years after the U.S. Air Force, in its “advisory” role, began dropping napalm bombs in Vietnam), and within a year of getting the contract, it stood alone as the military’s sole supplier. The weapon and the chemical company thus became inextricably linked in the public mind just as napalm was emerging as the most provocative symbol of modern warfare, with press reports and photographs chronicling its horrible effects on civilians in Vietnam and the nightly news regularly jolting viewers as violent splashes of napalm exploded in the jungles on the small screen.

Dow in turn became the most visible target of American antiwar protests, especially at colleges and universities where its corporate recruiters conducted placement interviews with seniors. The student demonstrations against Dow began in October 1966 at Wayne State University in Detroit and the University of California in Berkeley, and in the five months from then until the day Brandt left for Washington, there were forty-three anti-Dow protests staged around the country, from San José State to Wisconsin to Brooklyn College. The chant “Down with Dow!” and picketing placard “Dow Shalt Not Kill” were entering the protest lexicon alongside the napalm-inspired “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

In the middle of that stretch Brandt and his associates realized the severity of their public relations dilemma. “I would hate for Dow to come out of Viet Nam with the ‘Merchants of Death’ label that was pinned on du Pont after the first World War; and yet, unless we come to grips with this problem, it is likely to happen,” warned one Dow official in a red-flag memorandum that circulated in the company’s executive offices in December 1966. The danger, according to the memo, was that Dow was being used as “a pawn in the propaganda battle of those who are for and against the war. We are being kicked around, and we are not being portrayed with sympathy in the press. Enduring this sort of treatment with silence will not cause our enemies to forget about us; it will instead encourage them to whack us some more.”

Before then, as Brandt once explained, Dow’s response to the protests had been to “as tactfully as possible…try to minimize its connection with napalm.” When queried by the press or public, company officials were instructed to read a simple statement:

The Dow Chemical Company endorses the right of any American to protest legally and peacefully an action with which he does not agree.

Our position on the manufacture of napalm is that we are a supplier of goods to the Defense Department and not a policy maker. We do not and should not try to decide military strategy or policy.

Simple good citizenship requires that we supply our government and our military with those goods which they feel they need whenever we have the technology and capability and have been chosen by the government as a supplier.

We will do our best, as we always have, to try to produce what our Defense Department and our soldiers need in any war situation. Purely aside from our duty to do this, we will feel deeply gratified if what we are able to provide helps to protect our fighting men or to speed the day when fighting will end.

The more Dow emerged as the corporate symbol of the war, the less adequate that response alone seemed, with its subdued and somewhat evasive tone. Brandt’s office quietly began developing a large-scale public relations strategy, preparing to make the case publicly concerning both napalm’s use in Vietnam and Dow’s corporate philosophy. At the same time it hoped to shift the heat whenever possible to the Pentagon, and that is the part of the mission that sent Brandt to Washington. The word around Midland headquarters was that the military was getting away with something;
they
were the ones using the napalm; why weren’t protesters picketing
them
? What Dow executives found most exasperating was that the Pentagon seemed to like it that way, even if it was unfair.

The very morning that Brandt traveled to Washington, an article appeared in the
New York Times
that could not have pleased him more had he written it himself. The author was Dr. Howard A. Rusk, a world-renowned medical rehabilitation expert who also served as a part-time columnist for the newspaper. Under a Saigon dateline, Rusk reported that he had spent the previous week on what he called “an intensive tour” of twenty civilian hospitals in South Vietnam and had seen “not a single case of burns due to napalm.” In addition, of the scores of doctors he interviewed during his trip, “many had not seen a single case of burns due to napalm and others had seen but a single case.” Far more prevalent, these doctors told Rusk, were burns from the use of kerosene in stoves and accidents involving land mines placed by the Viet Cong. His reporting led Rusk to the conclusion that “the picture that has been painted by some in the United States of large numbers of children burned by napalm in Vietnam is grossly exaggerated.”

Rusk’s dispatch came as a direct challenge to a report that had appeared in
Ramparts
magazine a few months earlier asserting that at least a million Vietnamese children had become casualties of the war, many of them victims of American napalm. The
Ramparts
piece, accompanied by harrowing color photographs of disfigured young napalm victims, served as a powerful rallying tool for campus protests against Dow. (And in fact, according to David J. Garrow’s book on Martin Luther King Jr.,
Bearing the Cross,
the photographs so upset the civil rights leader that they helped push Vietnam to the forefront of his moral agenda. On January 14, 1967, King was at a restaurant in the Miami airport on his way to Jamaica when he leafed through the magazine and caught sight of the pictures, which left him nauseated and energized. As Garrow told the story, when an associate asked King why he was not eating, he replied that “nothing will ever taste good to me until I do everything I can to end the war.”) The author of the
Ramparts
text was William F. Pepper, a political scientist and human rights activist who had spent six weeks in Vietnam as a freelance journalist visiting orphanages and interviewing government health officials. His report was passionate. “For countless thousands of children in Vietnam, breathing is quickened by terror and pain, and tiny bodies learn more about death every day,” it began. The statistics he used were extrapolations. He said that his conclusion of a million child casualties was reached by starting with a base estimate that 415,000 civilians already had been killed in the war. Since slightly less than half of all Vietnamese were children, he figured that the number of children killed would be more than a quarter million. He then multiplied that figure by three since military statistics generally figure three times as many wounded as killed.

There were methodological flaws in both Pepper’s point and Rusk’s counterpoint. Pepper’s base number of 415,000 civilian deaths by the end of 1966 was a guess, not a fact. The number of civilian deaths during the entire war, which lasted another six years, has never been resolved. Most estimates placed the number between 300,000 and a half million. Vietnam war expert A. J. Langguth, writing of the situation at the time of the Paris Peace Talks in 1973, six years after Pepper’s article, said that the total number of civilians killed or wounded during the entire war to that point, North and South, men, women, and children, “may have run to a million.” One analysis of civilian casualties—conducted by American doctors opposed to the war—later found 800 “in all the hospital beds in Vietnam” during a survey period in 1967. Pepper’s assumption that slightly less than half the casualties would be children, based on their percentage of the population, was also problematic. According to statistics kept by hospitals in the Mekong Delta, where the fighting was heavy, there were 284 children among 1,141 civilian casualties admitted in January 1967, or about one-fourth of the total.

Rusk, for his part, had close connections to the military and was not an impartial observer. He based his conclusions solely on brief observations and interviews at hospitals, which could not present the full picture in a war-torn country where many civilian casualties never went to hospitals. One British physician who had been dealing with the civilian casualty issue for three years by 1967 estimated in a discussion with Jonathan Schell of
The New Yorker
that only two of ten casualties were being taken to hospitals. According to this account, there was an average of thirty war casualties a day, and ten percent of them, or three a day, came from burns. Also Rusk offered no data to support the final assertion of his article, true or not, that American-caused civilian casualties were “unpreventable in this type of conflict and…not nearly so great as the killing and wounding of civilians by the Vietcong.”

Somewhere between the two conflicting reports rested the reality of what napalm was doing in Vietnam. Long before Pepper and Rusk visited and long after they left, respected American journalists based in Saigon filed scores of reports on what they saw and heard in the field, which tended to fall between Rusk and Pepper statistically but closer to Pepper anecdotally. For those opposed to the war, one account of the horrors of napalm could be enough.

Why would they target Dow Chemical? The answer might be found in reports like one filed by
New York Times
correspondent Charles Mohr describing a peasant woman he encountered in a Mekong village who “had both arms burned off by napalm and her eyelids burned so badly that she cannot close them.” Or an article in the January 1967
Ladies’ Home Journal
by veteran war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who visited the provincial hospital at Qui Nhon and “saw for the first time what napalm does.”

At a cot by the door Gellhorn encountered a four-year-old boy. “Napalm had burned his face and back and one hand. The burned skin looked like swollen, raw meat; the fingers of his hand were stretched out, burned rigid. A scrap of cheesecloth covered him, for weight is intolerable, but so is air.” Gellhorn also encountered a woman from New Jersey who had adopted three Vietnamese children. “Before I went to Saigon, I had heard and read that napalm melts the flesh, and I thought that’s nonsense, because I can put a roast in the oven and the fat will melt but the meat stays there,” the woman said. “Well, I went and saw these children burned by napalm, and it is absolutely true. The chemical reaction of this napalm does melt the flesh, and the flesh runs right down their faces onto their chests and it sits there and it grows there…. These children can’t turn their head, they were so thick with flesh.”

To the soldiers in Vietnam, there was no such thing as a benign way to kill, or to die, or to be wounded, yet napalm still evoked a special realm of dread. Only nine days before Brandt made his pilgrimage to Washington, an army historian interviewed Lieutenant Colonel Alvin R. Hylton, the chemical officer for the First Infantry Division. Hylton talked extensively about the use of CS gas, a tear gas, in Vietnam and said he thought his unit should be allowed to use other forms of gases as well. “There are all sorts of gases you could use here which would be more humane, for example, than burning a man up with a flame thrower that throws napalm on him.”