Slowly his life-style changed. He left his wife and grew a beard. The custom-made suits were left in the closet; he now wore a Castro cap, tennis shoes without socks, a tattered field jacket, and faded green denims. Because he refused to pay his taxes, he wasn’t allowed to own property. He lived on the Anacostia River, in a houseboat belonging to a girlfriend. To a reporter he said, “I splice lines, paint the deck, and plot against the state.” His plotting was limited to lecturing on campuses, exhorting Panther rallies, and writing for Ramparts and Hard Times, but the FBI was watching him carefully.
His old friends, who were now running the government under Nixon, were dumbfounded. In the corridors of power they whispered stories about him. He was poaching on federal property. He had competed in a motorcycle race and broken a leg. He was seen in the company of known felons, trotting around the District with a knapsack on his back. He had advocated the expropriation of all public and corporate wealth, was carrying an IWW membership card, had been arrested in an antiwar riot, had been gassed in a march on Fort Dix, had spoken at a radical rally from a stage dominated by an enormous black flag, had won a Playboy award for the best nonfiction article of the year—a paean to libertarianism.
Aboard the houseboat Tranquil the soft-voiced, beefily handsome Hess continued to scheme away. Mounted on the fore bulkhead was his beloved rifle, representing his everlasting belief in the right of a man to protect himself from the bureaucrats who would enslave him. Papers surrounded him: drafts of speeches, notes for an autobiography, pamphlets, the manuscript of a book on the wickedness of the capitalist state. He lamented as “tragic, very tragic” the fact “that Goldwater has now taken his stand on the side of established authority.” He had heard that the senator refused to talk about him, but he understood that. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said reflectively, “if Barry thinks I’m crazy.”
THIRTY-THREE
The Year Everything Went Wrong
It was the year of the Hong Kong flu and Hair. The hundred-and-twenty-one-year-old Pennsylvania Railroad and the hundred-and-fourteen-year-old New York Central merged, and service was twice as bad. First-class postage went from five cents an ounce to six. Helen Keller, Edna Ferber, and John Steinbeck died. Mia Farrow divorced Frank Sinatra. The American ambassador to Guatemala was assassinated.
In Washington the Willard Hotel, where at least seven Presidents, beginning with Franklin Pierce, had been guests at one time or another, went bankrupt. Red China, as it was still called then, exploded its seventh atom bomb, France its first hydrogen bomb. Hitler’s bones turned up in Russia. A U.S. Strategic Air Command B-52 crashed in Greenland, near Thule, spilling wreckage contaminated with plutonium-235 over miles of ice, the thirteenth such accident. Biafra starved.
Some things went right. Barbra Streisand was marvelous in Funny Girl. Julie Nixon married David Eisenhower. Network censors cut Pete Seeger singing an antiwar song from a Smothers Brothers show, but six months later they changed their minds and let him do it. It was a big year for heart transplants, although only one patient in four lived more than six months. The Washington Daily News reported that one out of every eight Americans was getting social security benefits. Tiny Tim tiptoed into the limelight. The American Civil Liberties Union decided to support draft evaders. Laugh-In provided some lively graffiti: “Little Orphan Annie—call the eye bank,” “This is your slum—keep it clean,” “Forest fires prevent bears,” and “George Wallace—your sheets are ready.” Publishers issued John Updike’s Couples, Charles Portis’s True Grit, and Peter De Vries’s The Cat’s Pajamas and Witch’s Milk. It was also the year of Allen Drury’s Preserve and Protect. “When,” asked Time, “will Drury cease and desist?”
The general thrust of events was suggested by the disclosure that the Defense Department budget this year would be 72 billion dollars, a record and a depressing one. (Roosevelt’s entire annual budget, when he was accused of sending the country into the poorhouse, had been 8.8 billion dollars.) New Jersey Congressman Charles S. Joelson, told that the gun control bill had been watered down and that he would have to live with the new version, replied that “tens of thousands of Americans can die with it.” The great American traffic jam became denser with the announcement, by the U.S. Bureau of the Census and Public Roads Administration, that 99.9 million automobiles were now registered in the United States, that 78.6 percent of all families owned at least one car, and that every fourth family owned two or more. If a man was younger than twenty-one the chances were that he had sideburns and wore bell-bottoms. The young expressed approval of something by calling it “tough” or saying it had “soul” or was “out of sight,” and if you didn’t agree you were either straight or sick.
That year Dancer’s Image won the Kentucky Derby, was disqualified on charges that he had been drugged, and then, to confuse everyone, was designated the official winner—while losing the purse to the runner-up.
In West Virginia the Consolidated Coal Company’s No. 9 mine blew, entombing seventy-eight men. The U.S. submarine Scorpion was lost with ninety-nine men, which would have been the greatest naval disaster of the year had it not been overshadowed by the spectacular fate of another U.S. ship in the waters off North Korea.
***
The U.S.S. Pueblo was labeled an “environmental research ship” by the Pentagon, but she was really an electronic snoop, bristling with antennas and complicated radar gear which enabled her to cruise slowly through the Sea of Japan, taking readings of what was happening to North Korean electronic devices on land. This was perfectly legal, provided she stayed twelve miles out. The North Koreans knew all about her. During the first two weeks of her first mission in 1968 they had tried to distract her with patrol boats and, overhead, low-flying MIGs. Her crew was therefore not surprised when, on January 23, a fleet of PTs sailed out and began circling her. Then one of the small boats signaled: “Heave to or I will open fire on you.” That was new. Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, the Pueblo’s captain, replied, “I am in international waters.” The PT said: “Follow in my wake.” Bucher ignored that until another boat began backing toward him. Seeing that its fenders were rigged with rope mats and rubber tubes to cushion a collision, Bucher radioed his base in Japan: “These fellows are serious.” Before the boarding party could arrive, he ordered his men to destroy as much of his intelligence ship’s secret equipment as they could, shredding codes and wrecking the gear with sledgehammers, axes, and hand grenades.
The news that a U.S. Navy vessel had been captured—the first since the British seized the U.S.S. Chesapeake in 1807—stunned the United States. Dean Rusk said it was “a matter of the utmost gravity” and an “act of war.” Republican Senator Wallace F. Bennett of Utah demanded that American ships storm Wonsan harbor, recapture the Pueblo, and free her crew. Democratic Senator Thomas J. Dodd wanted the Navy to seize all ships flying the North Korean flag “wherever they may be found on the high seas.” Most of Washington took the advice of Rusk to remain calm, however. North Dakota’s Karl Mundt, no appeaser, pointed out that “We have enough war worries on our hands without looking for another one.” Others on the Hill said that belligerence would merely doom the Pueblo’s crew. Two appeals to Russia, asking the Soviet Union to act as mediator, were rejected. Arthur Goldberg, the former Supreme Court justice who was now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, tried to get the U.N. Security Council to review the incident. He failed.
In the end the case was taken up by American and North Korean negotiators in the tin-roofed Panmunjom shed where the armistice between their armies had been negotiated fifteen years ago. Meanwhile the North Korean Central News Agency was broadcasting what was called a confession by Commander Bucher, saying that he had committed a “criminal act” and “an act of sheer aggression” for which he had “no excuse whatever.” An open letter from the commander and his crew said that they were being “provided with all the necessities of life,” but the letter was stilted, almost in pidgin English, and therefore not reassuring. In the United States bu
mper stickers appeared reading, “Remember the Pueblo,” as though it were possible to forget.
***
Exactly one week after the seizure of the Pueblo, the North Vietnamese launched their most spectacular offensive of the war three thousand miles to the south. General Westmoreland was expecting it, and he thought he knew where it would come: at the big U.S. Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh. Khe Sanh was in many ways like Dienbienphu, the bottom of a red clay, shell-pocked bowl of hills athwart the Communist enemy’s chief infiltration route to the south. “This is the cork,” an American major explained to reporters. “If they can get past us, they can tear up the countryside way over to the coast.”
The bowl was in fact an enemy objective, and was invested by 20,000 North Vietnamese troops. It was to remain under siege for seventy-six days before Operation Pegasus, a force of 30,000 American troops, could break the siege. But Khe Sanh wasn’t the chief target of General Vo Nguyen Giap. Giap planned instead to attack almost every population center of any size in South Vietnam.
Tet, the lunar New Year, was observed with a kind of fatalistic gaiety in South Vietnam’s cities on the evening of Tuesday, January 30. The next day would be the first of the Year of the Monkey, the most inauspicious of them all. It was going to be worse than they dreamed. Evidence of that was around them, had they known how and where to look. One sign was the large number of husky young strangers arriving in the towns by sampan, scooter, and bicycle. Another was the incredible number of funerals, celebrated with the traditional gongs, flutes, firecrackers, and coffins—coffins packed, it would later be learned, with things other than corpses. Shortly after midnight, when those who had celebrated Tet were fast asleep, the strangers—all members of elite Viet Cong units—assembled and assaulted key points in the capital and a hundred other cities from one end of the country to another: police stations, military bases, government buildings, radio and power stations, and foreign embassies, including that of the United States, which had just been rebuilt after the last terrorist raid at a cost of two and a half million dollars.
Altogether some 60,000 Viet Cong were being committed to the Tet attack. After twenty-five days of the offensive they controlled large areas of the countryside, including most of the Mekong Delta. Inch by inch American and South Vietnamese troops drove them from the large population centers. The biggest battle was for the ancient imperial city of Hue, where 70 percent of the homes were in ruins. It was of Ben Tre, after air and artillery strikes there had routed the Communists, that an American officer made the memorable comment: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” After counting enemy bodies and finding that there were many more of them than of Americans and South Vietnamese, U.S. commanders triumphantly announced that they had won. President Johnson told a press conference that in military terms the Viet Cong drive had been “a complete failure.” On television Secretary McNamara said, “It is quite clear that the military objective… has not been achieved.”
“If this is failure,” said Senator George D. Aiken of Vermont, “I hope the Viet Cong never have a major success.” Robert F. Kennedy of New York warned against “the delusion” that the Tet campaign constituted “some sort of victory,” and Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota said that “if capturing a section of the American embassy and several large cities constitutes complete failure, I suppose by this logic that if the Viet Cong captured the entire country, the administration would be claiming their total collapse.” Another senator probably spoke for the largest number of Americans when he asked in bewilderment, “What happened? I thought we were supposed to be winning this war.” Certainly that was what the country had been told. Only two months ago General Westmoreland had reported that he could see light at the end of the tunnel. And now this.
As David Halberstam later pointed out, the real casualties of the Tet offensive were “the credibility of the American strategy of attrition” and “the credibility of the man who was by now Johnson’s most important political ally”—Westmoreland. If Westmoreland was no longer believable on the war, neither was Johnson. His administration began to come unstuck. John Gardner resigned as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Goldberg quit the U.N. McNamara left the Pentagon and was replaced by Clark Clifford.
By April 19, 1968, the American force level in Vietnam had risen to 549,000 troops. U.S. combat deaths reached 22,951, and on Sunday, June 23, the war became the longest in American history, surpassing the War of Independence. Both of President Johnson’s sons-in-law were there, which in another time would have elicited sympathy for him. But bitterness over the war was too intense now. Draft evaders and Army deserters were forming colonies in Canada and Sweden. Then, as summer and the national conventions of 1968 approached, two events swelled the ranks of the protesters: General Westmoreland asked for 206,000 more men and his headquarters announced that “the Khe Sanh base in Quang Tri province is being inactivated.” So much for the cork. All those Marine Corps casualties, all that bravery, and now the general didn’t even want it.
On April 10 the White House announced a change in command for U.S. troops in Vietnam. On June 30 the new chief would be a West Point classmate of Westmoreland’s, General Creighton Abrams. (“A tough, plain-speaking New Englander,” Time called him, “…who could inspire aggressiveness in a begonia.”) What was needed was a man who could preside over an orderly withdrawal, for it was increasingly evident that it would come to that sooner or later. For a time there was hope that it might be soon. In May Hanoi proposed peace talks in Paris. They were scheduled to begin May 10 in the old Hotel Majestic, with Averell Harriman facing Xuan Thuy, who had retired as Ho Chi Minh’s foreign minister three years earlier.
But nothing had changed. Six weeks of tortuous diplomacy were required before delegations could be brought into the same room, and then they quarreled about the shape of the table. Meantime enemy attacks had made May the bloodiest month of the war, with 2,000 Americans killed. President Johnson told American Legion and VFW conventions that there could be no truce until the Viet Cong showed some “restraint.” Harriman advised him that that seemed unlikely. Clark Clifford toured Vietnam and reported that the Communists were “refitting, regrouping, and rearming” for another blitz. General Abrams studied Westmoreland’s plans for a new campaign. They bore the code name Operation Complete Victory.
***
Angered by Nick Katzenbach’s brusque claim that the Tonkin Gulf resolution was sufficient authority for waging war in Vietnam, Senator Eugene McCarthy was further aroused, in October 1967, by Dean Rusk’s remark that the real threat to American security was “a billion Chinese.” Afterward McCarthy said, “At this point, I thought I would call a halt.” Urged by Allard K. Lowenstein, the leader of an antiwar campaign in search of a candidate, the Minnesota senator filed for the New Hampshire presidential primary. The polls predicted he would get at most 20 percent of the Democratic vote, but two factors increased his chances: the Tet offensive and the support of thousands of college student workers who shaved, scrubbed, and dressed to be “clean for Gene.”
On March 12, the day of the primary, McCarthy electrified the country by polling 42 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 48 percent. If Republican crossovers were counted, he almost defeated the President, with 28,791 to Johnson’s 29,201. Suddenly LBJ looked beatable. The most important immediate consequence of the vote was its impact on Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy hadn’t entered the primary, and as recently as January 20 he had said, “I would not oppose Lyndon Johnson under any foreseeable circumstances.” He had explained then that he hesitated because his campaign would divide the party “in a very damaging way.” Now he declared that he was “reassessing” his position, and on the Saturday after the New Hampshire primary he elated his admirers—and infuriated McCarthy’s—by declaring: “I am announcing today my candidacy for the Presidency of the United States.”
The next big primary was in Wisconsin, and the news from there was bad for Johnson. His organization was disintegrating; even t
he sons and daughters of loyal Democratic politicians there were stumping for McCarthy. Kennedy wasn’t entered there, but each day’s newspaper brought fresh evidence of his growing strength. Theodore Sorensen, Kenneth O’Donnell, and Arthur Schlesinger had joined his team, and Lawrence F. O’Brien had resigned as postmaster general to manage it. With that as background, President Johnson went on television March 31. He had ordered a reduction in the bombing of Vietnam, he said, and he spoke of the strife in the country, with “all of its ugly consequences.” The nation needed unity, he said. Then:
“I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year…. I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes…. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
Once the impact of Johnson’s withdrawal had worn off, it became clear that the contest for the Democratic nomination was going to be a three-way race between McCarthy, Kennedy, and, once he was ready to declare, Vice President Humphrey. Of the three, only McCarthy was on the Wisconsin ballot; he had been running against Johnson there. It was too late to take the President’s name off the ballot; McCarthy took 57.6 percent of the Democratic primary vote while Nixon, whose most serious opponents had been George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller, polled 81.3 percent of the Republican vote.
Humphrey announced his candidacy on April 27. Except for Oregon, in which McCarthy won narrowly, the rest of the primaries were all Kennedy. His strongest stands were against the war and for the poor and underprivileged. The leaders of the black movement were his natural allies. This was especially true of Martin Luther King, who had reached the conclusion that Vietnam was the largest serious obstacle to progress for his people; Negroes provided more than their share of combat troops, and money which should have been spent in the ghettos was going into the war. King said: “No one can pretend that the existence of the war is not profoundly affecting the destiny of civil rights progress.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 169