The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  On February 21 the newspaper of record, noting how the POWs’ praise for Richard Nixon sounded suspiciously close to the administration’s own catchphrases, reported that “the military’s repatriation effort was carefully programmed and controlled” by a team of nearly eighty military public relations men. The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Robert C. Maynard, echoed the argument the next morning in an essay headlined “Return of the Prisoners: Script by the Military.” “Not surprisingly,” he concluded, “we received a number of paeans to ‘honorable peace’ and could only wonder how that phrase happened to be among the first to pop out of the mouths of men in captivity for such long periods of time.” He also said, “They return to a society more surely programmed in ‘them-against-us’ terms than the one they left.”

  That was true enough. The Post, led by its investigative reporting team of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, had led all other media in foregrounding the scandal that ensued after men tied to Nixon’s White House and reelection campaign were caught breaking into the Watergate hotel and office complex back in June. The White House had made excoriating the Post’s alleged vendetta against it—and characterizing the Post as a pillar of the “liberal establishment”—central to its campaign rhetoric. And in March 1973, Nixon’s opinion of the Post was echoed when the entire letters page was given over to readers’ responses to the ombudsman’s report. Many defended the president. The POWs’ “feel gratitude toward [Nixon] for sticking out the war and making their own sacrifice meaningful,” a Henry T. Simmons of Washington wrote. “This has got to be intolerable to the Washington Post.” A retired Air Force officer wrote: “The media . . . must be embarrassed and galled. . . . Most Americans were thrilled. . . . You can be sure that I am not following a military script when I say, as I now do, ‘God bless America!’ ” A housewife from Staunton, Virginia, signing her letter “Mrs. Frank J. McDonough,” noted, “Imagine Maynard’s reaction . . . if the men had returned bitter at their country and praising Hanoi the way he wanted them to. No mention would have been made of Hanoi propaganda, or the one-sided views of America presented in newspapers like yours that they were undoubtedly permitted to read. We would have heard nothing but praise for their ‘courage’ and ‘forthrightness’ in presenting ‘the truth.’ As a matter of fact, if even one POW does attack America, I’m sure it will be all over your front page.”

  Others, however, spoke for the suspicious circles: “You really told it like it is,” a Dorothy Woodell of Sacramento, California, wrote, noting she had made Xerox copies of the article to send “to everyone I know.” She was certain “there is more to be said on the issue,” but added “I’m sure that if you had said it, it never would have been printed anyhow.”

  THE POW STORY TOOK SHAPE as a domestic civil war. A new york Times dispatch from the Philippines recorded, “When one man deplaned here, his wife rushed toward him—but he warned her off with a stern whisper: ‘I have to salute the flag, don’t bother me.’ ” A February 23 front-page story by Seymour Hersh reported that “camp life included occasional fist fights, a few near-suicides, and many cliques. . . . One pilot reportedly pulled a knife on another prisoner during an argument.” It ran the day of returnees’ first stateside press conferences, where they insisted that with most of their comrades still in the hands of the enemy, they wouldn’t comment on what had happened in captivity. Aggressive network correspondents pushed and pushed, as if to break them. Rattled, Captain James Mulligan (who had recently learned his own wife had been an antiwar leader) grabbed a microphone. “I feel very strongly that it’s about time the American people started pulling together. It’s about time we all realize where we’re going! It’s about time we start raising the flag instead of burning it. I know people have strong feelings! . . . But we are all Americans. And it’s about time we all get back to, to—the main thing!”

  The follow-up questions grew sharper. (“Are you 100 percent satisfied with the way the Nixon administration handled the war?”) The answers became more defensive. One POW said he was “fantastically impressed with the courage that President Nixon displayed in an election year”; Robinson Risner, one of the most famous of the POWs, who had been on the cover of Time in 1965 as “the classic example of the kind of dedicated military professional who was leading the American effort in Vietnam,” felt “beyond any doubt” that war protesters “kept us in prison an extra year or two.” “What do you think of the divisiveness?” an airman was asked. He responded, “Once a week we would get up and say the Pledge of Allegiance; we could not understand how people could be so unpatriotic as to condemn the Government in time of war and like Captain Mulligan said—and I think it’s a beautiful phrase—I think it’s time we start raising flags instead of burning them.” (The president underlined those words in his briefing on the press conferences.)

  The New York Times kept rolling out exposés—for instance, reporting that the California-based organization known as VIVA, or “Voices in Vital America” (originally formed, with the intention of harassing campus antiwar activists, as the “Victory in Vietnam Association”), had earned $3,693,661 in 1972, “almost entirely” from sales of POW bracelets, which it marked up for a 400 percent profit, and that it hoped “sales of the bracelets with the names of those still missing may pick up now.” NBC ran an exposé from the South Vietnamese prison island of Con Son. Anchorman John Chancellor began by reminding viewers that North Vietnam had always offered to release American prisoners in exchange for prisoners held by South Vietnam, and that still, a month after the peace settlement, “the South Vietnamese are holding about 100,000 political prisoners.” He appeared stricken by the cruel absurdity of the facts he was forced to relate. The reporter in the field, who had long hair, interviewed two American hospital workers in South Vietnam who said that if prisoners didn’t give the right answers to interrogators they “reached under the ribs and cracked the rib,” and presented before the cameras a feeble old woman, a former Con Son prisoner, her eyes swollen shut, being hand-fed like a baby because she could not eat by herself. Time’s correspondent described the released prisoners he had seen as “grotesque sculptures of scarred flesh and gnarled limbs. They move like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms.”

  On Wednesday, February 28, a shouting match broke out on the floor of the New York State Assembly. One assemblyman offered a resolution honoring Vietnam Veterans Week—“in support of liberty and freedom of all men” and in “rededication to the precepts that have made America such a tower of strength among the nations of the world.”

  “This is a lot of bunk!” exploded Assemblyman Franz S. Leichter, Democrat of Manhattan. “We were fighting for Thieu and bamboo cages for his political opponents!”

  A Republican from Brooklyn: “Your opposing this resolution is a disgrace as far as I’m concerned!”

  A conservative Democrat: “I have stood this nonsense long enough. For three years I’ve listened to him and his peace movement. I ask you all in the spirit of America and the spirit of the American flag to vote in favor, and God bless America.”

  A liberal: “There’s a lot of difference between blessing America and blessing Richard Milhous Nixon.” He added that it was “a credit to a nonwhite race who’d been invaded and pillaged that they did treat the prisoners the way they did.”

  That Thursday, newspapers ran a United Press International interview with a Minnesota POW who reported that his darkest day in captivity came when he heard of the reelection of the president. On Friday the Nixon administration worked furiously on political damage control after its controversial announcement that North Vietnam would enjoy reconstruction aid as part of the postwar settlement. Routine in the case of previous wars, this time the proposal brought down a rain of political vituperation. After all, hadn’t the president himself said these Communists were merciless torturers?

  On Sunday the next batch of 106 POWs left Hanoi, their cult more insistent, more pious, more defensively reactionary: “We wanted to come home, b
ut we wanted to come home with honor,” a colonel boomed from the tarmac microphone at Clark. “President Nixon has brought us home with honor. God bless those Americans who supported our President during our long ordeal.” On Monday the Post featured a profile headlined “Free Navy POW Sure U.S. Right in Asia,” whose subject said he was “glad to put my wife back in skirts. I think a woman should be a woman and not whatever they’re trying to be with all these movements.”

  The skeptics were growing more insistent, too. “These people had their feet on the ground while in prison,” a Pentagon source told the Times’ Seymour Hersh for his article “POWs Planned Business Venture.” “They heard enough and knew enough . . . ‘to realize that there would be demands for books, speeches, and endorsements. . . . There’s really nothing sinful in taking advantage of what’s left,’ the officer said. ‘That’s the way to play the game.’ ” “The POWs: Focus of Division,” the Times reported the next morning in a summary of Operation Homecoming so far. “It scares me in a way,” they quoted an official of the National League of Families as saying. “If the prisoners are not careful they will destroy their credibility. They’ve been away so long, they don’t realize the depth of division in this country.”

  That depth of division: the same afternoon CBS announced a program it would be featuring in prime time, two nights later, an adapted version of a surreal off-Broadway drama that would soon win the Tony Award for best play, Sticks and Bones, by Vietnam veteran David Rabe. It opened on a bucolic suburban sitcom family. A sergeant shows up at the door to return their son, blinded in Vietnam. He can’t stay for coffee: “I’ve got trucks out there backed up for blocks. . . . And when I get back they’ll be layin’ all over the grass; layin’ there all over the grass, their backs been broken, their brains jellied, their insides turned into garbage. No-legged boys and one-legged boys. I’m due in Harlem; I got to get to the Bronx and Queens, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Reading. I don’t have time for coffee. I’ve got deliveries all over this country.” The father is named “Ozzie.” The mother is “Harriet.” They are so horrified that their son has fallen in love with a Vietnamese woman that they manipulate him into killing himself, then throw out his body with the trash.

  Newsweek’s reviewer, a fellow traveler of the New Left who wrote under the pen name “Cyclops,” rhapsodized of the playwright: “Like a wounded Dreiser or a young O’Neill, he blunders into deep terrors and thrashes there. Such is his strength that he pulls us in after him. We are back among primal things, evil ceremonies, the sacrifice of the blind seer, the scapegoat become garbage, the rites claustrophobic. The final image on the TV screen is so perfect and so perfectly appalling that your mind will want to throw up.” The Times’ critic thought the production “not very good,” though he said it went without saying that it had to be broadcast nonetheless.

  Local CBS affiliates disagreed. “We did not feel it was appropriate for TV in Detroit, where our working-class audience would be offended,” said one station manager. An executive in Mississippi said, “They can’t sanitize it enough to what suits me.” After only two minutes of commercials were sold for the two-hour block, CBS’s president released a statement: “In light of recent developments, many of us both at the network and among the stations are now convinced that its presentation on the air at this time might be unnecessarily abrasive to the feelings of millions of Americans whose lives or attention are at the moment emotionally dominated by the returning POWs and other veterans who have suffered the ravages of war.”

  The producer, Joseph Papp, said CBS was obligated to put on the show no matter who objected; it was a First Amendment issue. The American Civil Liberties Union got involved. A Syracuse, New York, station manager begged to be allowed to carry the feed: “Dammit, it’s real. Life isn’t just a bowl of cherries.” But when the network broadcast was canceled, he was forced to show a Steve McQueen movie just like every other affiliate. “Only a society with a great deal more self-confidence than ours could stand the disruptiveness of high art on TV,” wrote a liberal columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

  On March 28, the last POW shot down over North Vietnam landed at Clark Air Base. His last name, coincidentally, was “Agnew,” just like the jingoistic vice president. But this Agnew brazenly told the press there was neither honor nor peace in the Paris settlement. It was a cover-up, he said, predicting that as soon as the last American troops left, Communist troops would overrun South Vietnam. That same day, the Yale psychology professor Robert J. Lifton, who a decade and a half earlier had helped explain how Communist captors had “brainwashed” American POWs during the Korea War, argued in the New York Times that it was the American people who now were being brainwashed—in the very act of sanctifying men whose job was “saturation bombing of civilian areas with minimal military targets,” but who were now held up as vessels of “pure virtue,” propaganda tools for the “official mythology of peace with honor,” in order to prevent the possibility of “extracting from this war its one potential benefit: political and ethical illumination arising from hard appraisals of what we did and why we did it.”

  And also on that same day, CBS president William Paley gave word on Sticks and Bones: “We will run the show when things have calmed down.” When things have calmed down: that had been what Operation Homecoming was supposed to have done.

  There were two tribes of Americans now.

  One comprised the suspicious circles, which had once been small, but now were exceptionally broad, who considered the self-evident lesson of the 1960s and the low, dishonest war that defined the decade to be the imperative to question authority, unsettle ossified norms, and expose dissembling leaders—a new, higher patriotism for the 1970s. They lived, for example, in the sleepy suburb in Northern California visited by a New York Times writer who reported back that “people think and feel differently from what they once did. They ask questions, they reject assumptions, they doubt what they are told.” They said things like, “Now I’d rather not say the pledge; it has such little meaning to me. The things that are in it just aren’t true.” They even included, among their numbers, career military men, like the returned POW who told NBC how much he appreciated returning to a country finally willing to reconsider its prejudices—“shedding its Linus blankets, starting to think for itself.” They included officials of the big, “mainline” Protestant churches, who took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, on the day the last POW came home, criticizing Nixon for hosting South Vietnam’s torture-master president, for whose preservation the nation had sacrificed some fifty-eight thousand soldiers and billions of dollars of treasure, as a “spiritual disaster for America”; and the American Psychological Association which proclaimed that the POWs had “been assigned the role of heroes in a war that has no heroes, the central role in an elaborate drama staged to provide justification for the President’s policy, to create the illusion of victory and to arouse a sense of patriotic fervor.”

  And they included Lyndon Johnson’s former press secretary, Bill Moyers, whose job had once been to sell America on the nobility of the Vietnam cause, and who now was an avuncular commentator for the Public Broadcasting Service. On TV he grilled General Maxwell Taylor about whether the recent “unworthy and unwinnable war” had made it harder to recruit forces for the new all-volunteer force, now that the draft had ended with the beginning of 1973. The general responded that those who had fought in Vietnam would refuse that characterization. Moyers asked why, if that were so, record numbers of them had deserted. The general insisted that was only because they had been poisoned by the liberal media. Moyers then asked why, if that was the case, so many of our allied European governments opposed the Vietnam War, too. Taylor responded that this was because they read the U.S. press—which, he said, should have been subject to wartime censorship.

  General Taylor had once been a favorite general of Kennedy-era liberals. Robert F. Kennedy had called him “relentless in his determination to get at the truth,” and named one of his sons after him. N
ow Maxwell Taylor was a tribune of the other tribe, the one that found another lesson to be self-evident: never break faith with God’s chosen nation, especially in time of war—truth be damned.

  This was Richard Nixon’s tribe. The one that, by Election Day 1980, would end up prevailing in the presidential election. Though Richard Nixon, like Moses, would not be the one who led them to that promised land.

  THE LAST FREEDOM BIRD ARRIVED at Travis Air Force Base in California to a spontaneous chorus of “God Bless America” from the crowd of 6,500 who had waited hours through typhoon-like rains that tore chunks off nearby buildings. A new round of celebrations blossomed: local boys throwing out first pitches for opening day; drum and bugle corps; ice cream, steak, endless proud patriotic bluster from bunting-draped platforms. The ceremonial bestowing of gifts: Free use of a brand-new Ford LTD for a year. Free admission to Walt Disney World. Free passes, plated in gold, to every major-league baseball game—forever. Captain John Nasmyth appeared, impromptu, on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.