The President was reported to be angry with both Vietnams; with Saigon for being mulish and with Hanoi for, as he saw it, going back on its word. On December 14 Kissinger left Paris in despair and Nixon cabled North Vietnam’s Premier Pham Van Dong, warning him that unless serious negotiations were resumed within seventy-two hours he would reseed Haiphong harbor with mines and unleash America’s aerial might: B-52s, F-4 Phantoms, and Navy fighter-bombers. General Curtis LeMay had once proposed bombing the North back into the Stone Age, and clearly the President had something like that in mind. It was no light threat; his Air Force generals assured him that in two weeks they could saturate the enemy homeland with more tonnage than in virtually all the great raids of World War II. Furthermore, this would be terror bombing on a scale never known before. The B-52 guaranteed that. Pinpoint attacks by them were impossible. Each carried forty tons of bombs in its belly. Flying in “cells” of three, each cell laid its missiles in “boxes” a mile and a half long by a half-mile wide. Until now they had never assailed a city. If they unloaded over Hanoi, massive civilian casualties would be unavoidable.
The seventy-two hours passed, Pham Van Dong did not reply, and Nixon sent the word to U.S. air bases on Guam and in Thailand and carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin: start the blitz. The result was the most savage chapter in the long history of American involvement in Vietnam. Hanoi was pounded around the clock by every type of American aircraft in every kind of weather. Using 100 of the huge green and brown B-52s, U.S. airmen flew over 1,400 sorties in the first week alone. Americans were stunned. Only a few days earlier—until mid-December, in fact—they had been expecting total U.S. disengagement in Indochina, with the prospect that American POWs, some of whom had been in captivity for nearly ten years, might be home for Christmas. Now they were confronted by this bewildering volte-face. And they were offered no presidential explanation. In the past, Nixon, like Johnson before him, had appeared on television to announce new developments in Vietnam. Now he made no attempt at justification. The only White House official to comment was Ziegler, who told reporters that the bombing “will continue until such time as a settlement is arrived at.”
The Pentagon briskly ticked off the military targets: truck parks, communications towers, power plants, warehouses, bridges, railways, shipyards, factories, roads, barracks, supply points, landing fields, and antiaircraft and surface-to-air missile (SAM) installations. But most of the objectives were in heavily populated parts of North Vietnam’s cities. The Hanoi thermal power plant, for example, was only a thousand yards from the center of the capital. Diplomats and foreign newsmen stationed there sent out descriptions of a stricken city, lacking electricity and often water. Vast neighborhoods were cratered and pocked by explosives. Schools were reduced to smoking sockets in the ground. Torn copybooks lay in the rubble. Parents frantically searched for their children among jagged chunks of shattered concrete.
In the Hanoi suburb of Thai Nguyen almost a thousand civilians were dead or wounded. Coffins were stacked on street corners. The Bach Thai hospital for tuberculars was razed. So was Bach Mai general hospital; doctors carried patients piggyback from the debris. A dispensary was destroyed. One bomb hit a POW camp—incensing Nixon, who reportedly blamed the North Vietnamese for putting prisoners where missiles might fall. The Polish freighter Josef Conrad was sunk in Hanoi harbor, killing three of her crew; a Russian and a Chinese ship were mangled. Men in the State Department, which was charged with apologizing for these outrages, were bitter. “The way things are going,” one American diplomat said gloomily, “we’ll hit the cathedral in Hanoi on Christmas Eve.”
In fact Nixon declared a thirty-six-hour truce over Christmas, but the moment it was over the deluge of death resumed. On walls still standing North Vietnamese chalked, “We will avenge our compatriots massacred by the Americans,” and “Nixon, you will pay this blood debt.” These were gestures of helplessness; the White House was over seven thousand miles away, and soon the last American ground troops would have left Indochina. North Vietnam’s only real hostages against the terror were captured U.S. fliers. In the seven years before this blitz B-52s had flown 100,000 sorties and only one had been lost to enemy gunners. Now Hanoi had the strongest antiaircraft defenses in the world, and in these last two weeks of 1972 their fuming muzzles brought down sixteen of the aerial dreadnoughts, each representing fifteen million dollars. More important, ninety-eight crewmen had been captured. The American onslaught over Tonkin had increased the stakes in Paris. There was more pressure on Kissinger as well as on Le Duc Tho.
Other incentives for peace had appeared. Nixon had, not for the last time, misjudged the public’s capacity for moral indignation. James Reston called the massive raids “war by tantrum,” and Republican Senator William Saxbe of Ohio, who had supported the President’s Vietnam policy, now came out against it, saying he was troubled “as an American” and thought most of his countrymen felt “the same way.” In Europe the reaction was sharper. London’s Daily Mirror said, “The American resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam has made the world recoil in revulsion.” In Paris Le Monde compared the air offensive to the Nazi leveling of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. Premier Olof Palme of Sweden went farther, equating it with the German extermination of the Jews. That angered the administration, which called the Swedish ambassador to protest, but the feeling in all western chancelleries was almost as strong.
If Washington had underestimated the depth of allied resentment, Hanoi had overestimated the wrath of the Communist world. Comment in Moscow and Peking was perfunctory. Speaking on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev made the mildest of references to the B-52 strikes, and he pointedly sent his children to meet Tricia Nixon Cox and her husband at a U.S. embassy reception there. Both the Russians and the Chinese were urging the North Vietnamese to settle with the Americans. The United States had lost its enthusiasm for opposing “wars of liberation,” but the eagerness of the USSR and the People’s Republic of China to support them had also diminished. This, perhaps more than the bombing, led Hanoi to send out urgent signals calling for new talks. On December 30 the White House announced a bombing halt and the rescheduling of talks between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for January 8. It was a sign of the American determination to find a solution that when Thieu sent two South Vietnamese diplomats to Washington with a threat to fight any treaty that did not meet his requirements, Nixon responded by dispatching General Alexander Haig to Saigon with a letter to Thieu telling him, in effect, to shut up.
Soon Kissinger was commuting between Paris and Key Biscayne with a briefcase containing fresh proposals. The break came in late January when the two bargainers met for their twenty-fourth round of talks in forty-two months. Two more days of dickering had been anticipated, but a final understanding was reached in just four hours. The formal end of the war came in the silk-walled conference room of Paris’s old Majestic Hotel; simultaneous announcements were broadcast in Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon. (Just working out that process, said Kissinger, had “aged us all by several years.”) President Nixon led the nation in prayer, praising the 2.5 million Americans who had served in Vietnam “in one of the most selfless enterprises in the history of nations.” He declared that he had achieved “Peace with honor.”
But honor had little to do with it. Kissinger appreciated that. In his thoughtful press briefing he observed that “it should be clear by now that no one in the war has had a monopoly of anguish and that no one has had a monopoly of insight.” He made no reference to honor, or valor, or glory, or any of the other martial concepts which had become irrelevant to this conflict. “Together with healing the wounds in Indochina,” he said, “we can begin to heal the wounds in America.” That was the right note to strike, because that was the issue for Americans. After some 46,000 U.S. battle deaths, 300,000 wounded, and the expenditure of 110 billion dollars, they were left, as a direct result of the war, with a grave domestic problem, a spiritual malaise. In the McLuhanesque global village
it was not possible to lay waste a distant land without inflicting hideous scars on the United States. Among the casualties had been public esteem for the Presidency, which had led the country into the war; for Congress, which had continued to appropriate vast sums for it; for the courts, which had failed to find it unconstitutional; and for the institution of democracy itself, which, having proved ineffectual in attempting to influence the makers of policy, had degenerated into chaos in the streets. “There has been a sharp decline in respect for authority in the United States as a result of the war,” Reston wrote on the occasion of the cease-fire, “a decline in respect not only for the civil authority of government but also for the moral authority of the schools, the universities, the press, the church, and even the family… something has happened to American life—something not yet understood or agreed upon, something that is different, important, and probably enduring.”
The week of the truce there was an ugly row at Madison Square Garden over whether “The Star-Spangled Banner” should be played before athletic events. At the same time a fresh epidemic of teacher strikes was disrupting classrooms across the country. Neither would have been conceivable during the Depression, the last great trial of the American spirit. The flag had flown over a poorer land then; there had been a great deal of physical suffering in the United States. Teachers had been among the greatest victims of the economic crisis. Often they had been paid in worthless scrip or not all, and some had shared the little food they had with starving children. But in that tightly disciplined society strikes by them, like disrespect for the national anthem, would have been inconceivable. That does not mean that America was a better country then; plainly it was not. It does mean that it was a different country, inhabited by other people facing challenges wholly unrelated to those of the 1970s.
Perhaps this was what Henry Adams meant when he wrote, in the early years of this century, that the test of twentieth-century Americans would be their capacity for adjustment. Change is a constant theme in the American past. The United States is the only nation in the world to worship it for its own sake, and to regard change and progress as indistinguishable. “We want change. We want progress,” Lyndon Johnson said in 1965, “and we aim to get it.”
But if that is one aspect of the American national character, there is another, the reverse of the same coin, which reemerged with the end of the Vietnam War. It is the yearning to renounce the present and find restoration in the unconsummated past. “America,” John Brooks observed, “has an old habit of regretting a dream just lost, and resolving to capture it next time.” The theme is a familiar one in American literature. One thinks of Willa Cather’s lost lady and Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Thomas Wolfe wrote: “Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” So it was that after intervening in foreign conflicts for a third of a century, the people of the United States turned inward once more, seeking comfort in insularity and renewal in isolation. “So we beat on, boats against the current,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote at the end of his finest novel, “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
EPILOGUE
Echoes
Surrounded by happy perjurers, Richard Nixon celebrated his second inauguration in a three-day, four-million-dollar extravaganza directed by up-and-coming young Jeb Stuart Magruder. The rhetoric of the January 20 inaugural address, in keeping with the retreat from far-flung world commitments, was less a promise of what the government would do than what it wouldn’t. Twelve years earlier another President of the same generation had vowed that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Now Nixon declared that “the time has passed when America will make every other nation’s conflicts our own, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs.” At the same time he prepared to liquidate the domestic programs of liberal administrations with a paraphrase of President Kennedy’s most memorable line. Nixon said, “Let each of us ask, not just what will government do for me, but what I can do for myself.”
As he paused for effect, a faint sound could be heard from several blocks away. A group of youths was chanting: “Murderer!” “Out now!” “End racism!”
“It’s disgusting,” a woman from Iowa told a New York Times reporter. “Just disgusting. I don’t see why we can’t do something about these kids.” Certainly it was indecorous. Yet counterdemonstrations, like the counterculture, were an expression of the continuing divisions in America, and they had to be endured. There is really no effective way to stifle dissent in an open society; if there were one, Magruder and his employer would have been the first to use it. The chanters—five hundred to a thousand Yippies, SDS militants, and members of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party—were the smallest and rudest band of protesters in the multitude of demonstrators roaming Washington that weekend. With them they carried a loathsome effigy—a ten-foot-long papier-mâché rat with Nixon’s face, bearing in its teeth a bloodstained baby doll. That was too much even for the indulgent District police, and they confiscated it. But apart from that group the only really ugly gesture at the inaugural was the lowering of American flags around the Washington Monument and the hoisting of Viet Cong banners in their stead.
The stateliest protest had been held in the Washington Cathedral on Wisconsin Avenue at 9 P.M. the previous evening. After brief remarks by Dean Francis B. Sayre Jr. and former Senator Eugene McCarthy, Leonard Bernstein led a pickup orchestra of local musicians in the gentle, contemplative strains of Haydn’s Mass in Time of War, with its urgent kettledrums and its final plea, “Dona nobis pacem” (Give us peace). In counterpoint, across the city Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra were saluting the President with Tchaikovsky’s bombastic 1812 Overture. Sixteen of Ormandy’s musicians had been excused because they felt it would be demeaning to play before such an audience. Presumably their absence removed any threat to Nixon’s life. Even so, the firing of blanks in a cannon, usually the climax of the overture, was omitted at the request of the Secret Service. It was one of the service’s less expensive suggestions under that President.
That same evening, critics of Nixon’s record in Vietnam delivered to a White House guard a petition setting forth their views. On the sidewalk outside, Father Philip Berrigan performed in a crude skit meant to show how the authorities had mistreated those who had dared to speak out against them. Berrigan pretended to manhandle a woman carrying a peace placard. Lest anyone miss the point of the drama, the priest wore a large sign around his neck reading POLICE. The next day Daniel Ellsberg, who at that time faced possible conviction and sentences totaling 115 years for publishing the Pentagon Papers, addressed a testimonial dinner held by the National Peace Action Coalition. Ellsberg ridiculed the President’s inaugural promise of a generation of peace, saying, “He’s winding down the war like he’s winding down my indictment,” and comparing the manufacturers of Vietnam war materiel to the designers of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Berrigan and Ellsberg were seen by few, but most of the counter-inauguration events were well attended. The Bernstein concert was heard by 3,000 people in the cathedral and another 12,000 to 15,000 who stood in the dank night outside and listened to it over loudspeakers. The petition had been signed by 50,000. And the largest demonstration of all, timed, like the SDS march, to coincide with the President’s address on Capitol Hill, drew between 75,000 and 100,000. It began when 2,500 members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War marched from Arlington National Cemetery to the Washington Monument, continued with the signing of a mock peace treaty there, and ended with an address by New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug, who had been listening to Nixon’s speech over a transistor radio and bellowed out her opinion of it.
Some youths in the audience carried obsolete signs reading STOP THE BOMBING. That
was ludicrous. The blitz had been stopped three weeks earlier. Other gestures of protest also bordered on the ridiculous. Some of them were wholly unrelated to Vietnam; as Nixon spoke, a tiny biplane, rented by a disgruntled millionaire and closely shepherded by police and Air Force helicopters, trailed a banner which read LEGALIZE GOLD. But there was nothing absurd about the concept of protest. It was far truer to the American spirit than the inaugural address, the cannonless Tchaikovsky overture, and the 1,976 saucily dressed Virginia high school musicians who paraded past the White House, a tribute to Jeb Magruder’s vision of what the nation’s second centennial would be all about.
In the darkest year of Joe McCarthy a West Virginia college president, testifying in behalf of an embattled liberal, was asked by counsel what America represented to him. He replied that it was “the right to be different.” He did not mean merely the eccentric and the whimsically wrong, though there will always be room in the United States for, say, the astrologists, the believers in flying saucers, and the Republican statesmen who bought big Washington houses in 1948 for occupancy during the first Dewey administration. But if liberty is to signify anything substantive, it must also be extended to the last limits of the endurable, shielding under its broad tent the genuinely unpopular champions of causes which the majority regards as reprehensible. Any people can cheer an Eisenhower, a MacArthur, a John Glenn, a Neil Armstrong; it takes generosity of spirit to suffer the Weathermen who hated LBJ, the Birchers who baited JFK, the Liberty Leaguers who heckled FDR.
In the lengthening memories of Americans who were entering their fifties in the Nixon years, the strains on the nation’s tolerance had been great. Sometimes it had been too much, and the names of the places where patience was exhausted stain the pages of U.S. history with shame: Attica, Kent State, My Lai, Birmingham, Oxford, the Republic Steel plant in Chicago, the California camps where Americans of Japanese descent were penned up during World War II; and the Bonus Army camp on Anacostia Flats whose destruction was described in the first pages of this book.
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