Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (39 page)

Actually, in his worst moods Nixon was precisely the unstable personality he wished the communists to think him to be. When he was under intense criticism, his lifelong demons—insecurity, resentment, and paranoia—took over. During the last days of his administration, when the pressures of Watergate became unbearable, his secretary of defense James Schlesinger was to become so alarmed about Nixon's mental condition that he issued global instructions in July 1974 to all military commanders to disregard any orders from the president that did not bear Schlesinger's countersignature.

But those days were still five years away on March 18, 1969, when Nixon launched the B-52 raids over Cambodia. They were shrouded in secrecy. When the press picked up rumors of the bombing raids, the administration self-righteously denied them. To cover up the raids, the administration falsified military records. On May 9, 1969, however, the
New York Times
broke the story. Nixon denied it, but he was enraged at what he considered the leaking of highly classified information and authorized illegal wiretaps on the telephones of journalists and suspected collaborators. Operation Menu continued until 1973, by which time 16,527 sorties of aircraft had dropped 383,851 tons of explosives on Cambodia.

Later in 1969 the administration escalated the bombing of Laos, which had begun in 1965. Communist guerrillas—the Pathet Lao—controlled most of northern Laos, receiving substantial aid from North Vietnam. Bombing raids over the Plain of Jars were designed to assist Royal Laotian forces. The United States and South Vietnamese did not have the personnel to intervene directly in the conflict, but Nixon was intent on making life more difficult for communists in northern Laos.

The death of Ho Chi Minh on September 2, 1969, left North Vietnam grief-stricken. Ho's will decreed that neither time nor money be wasted on an elaborate funeral, and the entire proceeding took only thirty-five minutes. Sitting on a raised platform, Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap wept openly. Westerners were accustomed to seeing unemotional, inscrutable communist leaders standing on the Kremlin balcony or in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It dawned on many observers at that moment what had been demonstrable for decades: that Ho was beloved by his people. His death made for a collective leadership that complicated the peace process. Pham Van Dong, Le Duan, and Vo Nguyen Giap dominated the North Vietnamese Politburo. As head of the Lao Dong party, Duan presided over domestic affairs. Pham Van Dong continued to exert leadership over foreign policy, and Vo Nguyen Giap oversaw defense matters. All matters of state policy needed approval by the triumvirate, a system guaranteed to be inflexible. An intense debate raged in Hanoi throughout the summer over how best to see the war to its end. Truong Chinh, a close friend of Ho Chi Minh and chief theoretician for the Lao Dong party, argued that time was on the side of the communists and that they should be very cautious. Political reality was forcing deescalation on the United States, and North Vietnam must avoid any military action that might give Nixon a battlefield victory. Instead North Vietnam should maintain the tactical initiative and prepare for a “long- drawn-out fight. ” Vo Nguyen Giap, anxious to deliver a deathblow to South Vietnam, was willing to go along with Truong Chinh's argument for a while, but within a year he would call for a new offensive against South Vietnam, which Truong Chinh thought grossly premature.

Policy quarrels roiled Hanoi, but in Washington Nixon found himself without any policy. The madman strategy was not working. North Vietnam kept insisting on its old demands: withdrawal of all American troops, removal of Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky from office, and participation of southern communists in a coalition government. Nixon and Kissinger hoped that the Soviet Union would bring pressure to bear on Hanoi. But Moscow wished desperately for a strategic arms limitation treaty, and after 1968 had started to lose interest in Vietnam; problems in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe seemed more compelling. Yet even as late as 1970 the United States still did not comprehend how independent of Chinese and Soviet control Hanoi was and had always been.

And the antiwar movement was becoming ever stronger. The trial of the “Chicago Eight ” began in September 1969. The government charged them with conspiracy to riot and obstruct justice during the Democratic National Convention the year before. The trial quickly turned into a media circus. Bobby Seale, the black activist, kept up a steady series of outbursts until Judge Julius Hoffman had him gagged and chained to his seat. The Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman petitioned to have his name changed so nobody “will think I am related to this fascist judge. ” Jerry Rubin of the Yippies and Tom Hayden, head of the Students for a Democratic Society, draped a Vietcong and an American flag across their defense tables. The trial lasted five months. In mid-February the jury acquitted them all of conspiracy charges, and later an appellate court overturned the convictions for contempt and rioting. During the fall of 1969, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee and the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam prepared a series of mass demonstrations. They developed a wide-reaching organization, secured endorsements from leading antiwar politicians, and placed advertisements in the major metropolitan dailies.

Millions participated in the October 15 moratorium. In Vietnam tens of thousands of American soldiers donned black armbands in support of the moratorium. More than 100,000 people gathered on the Boston Common and 250,000 marched in Washington. President Nixon reacted at once, releasing to the press a telegram from Pham Van Dong supporting the event. Then, in a television speech on November 3, Nixon made a patriotic appeal to his compatriots, most of whom, he believed, supported the war effort. In 1963 Madame Nhu had insisted that the “government of Ngo Dinh Diem is popular with a silent majority and is criticized only by a noisy minority of the population. ” Six years later Nixon made a similar argument with a similar phrasing: “Tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support. ” The silent majority remained silent, but the antiwar activists did not. On November 15, 1969, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee staged a march that brought 500,000 people to Washington, D.C., the largest demonstration in United States history.

The antiwar movement triggered a clash of cultures in the United States. At its roots, the controversy was based on class distinctions.

A large portion of the protesters were middle- and upper-class college students who had managed to avoid the draft, for the most part through student deferments. Those deferments were supposed only to put off conscription until students graduated, and to make the point that law specified that once a student took out a deferment his time of liability would extend from twenty-six, the conventional cut-off age, to thirty- four. But at least as long as the military had no need of a vast increase in draftees, twenty-six amounted to the practical age of exemption even for students. Beyond a young man's mid-twenties, he becomes less subject to military discipline and therefore less desirable as a soldier, regardless of his beliefs. Some students, just to make sure, went on to graduate school so that they would stay out of uniform until they reached the age of thirty-four. Youth privileged by class and money could fall back on other ways of exploiting the system. Instead of relying on the routine and often perfunctory physicals performed at army induction centers, for example, a young man with money might receive a private physical and show up an induction center with certifiable proof of disqualifying ailments. And when middle-class youth did get drafted, their education level might secure them jobs in the rear areas of the military bureaucracy. Typing skills or a few business classes could be enough to keep them out of harm's way. Undoubtedly most youth in college and graduate school remained students for the honest purpose of getting an education, but the privilege that went with enrollment in school seemed, and was, an unjust entitlement by the well-to-do. Even for several years after the Vietnam-era expansion in the number of draft calls, until it was abolished and replaced with a largely egalitarian lottery, the system continued to operate on its earlier basis. Blue-collar Americans found it insufferable that college youth, protected against conscription, used their safe status to denounce working-class youth as brutes murdering innocent Vietnamese. Many working-class Americans had painfully ambivalent feelings about the war and their country. They hated the war, loved their boys, and despised the antiwar movement.

Visceral resentment against the students and antiwar activism in general exploded into the “hard hat riot ” of May 8, 1970, in New York City. Construction workers had learned a few days earlier that antiwar demonstrators from New York University and Hunter College were planning a rally in the financial district. About two hundred construction workers, many of them wearing the hard hats required on the job, showed up at the rally and attacked the students, chanting “All the Way USA. ” They then marched to city hall and demanded that Mayor John Lindsay raise the flag, which had been at half-staff to mourn the dead students at Kent State. The workers sang the national anthem as the flag was raised. Seeing an antiwar banner over at Pace College, they broke into a building and beat up several students. Journalists called May 8 “Bloody Friday.”

Two weeks later, the Building and Trades Council of Greater New York sponsored a peaceful march that attracted more than 100,000 workers. They waved flags and praised the young men in the military who were putting their lives on the line. “For three hours,”
Time
magazine described the event, “100,000 members of New York's brawniest unions marched and shouted... in a massive display of gleeful patriotism and muscular pride. [It was] a kind of workers' Woodstock. ” Ralph Cole, a firefighter who had lost his son in Vietnam, caught the feeling of the workers: “You bet your goddam dollar I'm bitter. It's people like us who give up our sons for the country. The business people, they run the country and make money from it. The college types, the professors, they go to Washington and tell the government what to do.... But their sons, they don't end up in the swamps over there, in Vietnam. Let's face it: if you have a lot of money, or if you have the right connections, you don't end up on a firing line in the jungle. ” Cole's wife felt the same way: “I'm against this war, too—the way a mother is, whose sons are in the army, who has lost a son fighting in it. The world doesn't hear me, and it doesn't hear a single person I know. ”

Even Americans furious at the antiwar movement could be shattered by an incident that the journalist Seymour Hersh contributed to revealing, a mass rape and murder of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers a year earlier at My Lai in Quang Ngai province.
Life
magazine published grisly color photographs taken at the massacre—twisted bodies, bloodied black pajamas, naked, mutilated babies. Ever since 1967, when Task Force Oregon deployed to I Corps in the area, the killing machine had done its job well. Throughout 1967 and again in 1968, 50,000 civilians were killed or wounded in Quang Ngai, the vast majority of them victims of indiscriminate artillery bombardment, B-52 strikes, fighter- bomber napalm raids, and gunship attacks. But the deaths at My Lai were different. Indiscriminate bombardment could at least be explained away as accidental; the killing at My Lai could not. It had been a rampage by war-maddened troops.

My Lai was a rural hamlet of approximately 700 people. On the morning of March 16, 1968, Lieutenant William Calley led an infantry platoon into My Lai. With helicopter gunships circling at 1,000 feet monitoring the operation, Calley ordered his men to round up all the civilians. Tensions ran high. The troops were frustrated with their inability to distinguish civilians from the Vietcong. Calley suddenly opened fire and ordered his men to shoot as well. They plowed through the village shooting anything that moved. When it was over, nearly 500 people were dead: children, the elderly, the able-bodied. Not one of them appeared to be a Vietcong. Calley's men spent the day in an orgy of sexual violence— sodomy, rape, and rape-murder. There were a few moments that offered a sliver of moral redemption. Some soldiers refrained from the lunacy, and a three-man American helicopter team that happened upon the scene intervened to the point of preparing to fire on the marauding troops. Several decades later, the military bestowed formal honors on the three, one of whom was no longer alive.

March 1968—Bodies
of women and children lie on the road leading from the village of My Lai following the massacre of South Vietnamese civilians by American troops.
(Courtesy, Library of Congress.)