*2 The Chicago Study Team of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence investigated the 1968 Democratic convention protests, interviewing 1,400 witnesses as well as reviewing 180 hours of film and 20,000 pages of eyewitness statements. The so-called Walker Report, named for lead investigator Daniel Walker, was issued on December 1, 1968, and characterized the violence at the convention as a “police riot.” Here is an excerpt: “During the week of the Democratic National Convention, the Chicago police were the targets of mounting provocation by both word and act. It took the form of obscene epithets, and of rocks, sticks, bathroom tiles, and even human feces hurled at police by demonstrators. Some of these acts had been planned; others were spontaneous or were themselves provoked by police action. Furthermore, the police had been put on edge by widely published threats of attempts to disrupt both the city and the Convention. That was the nature of the provocation. The nature of the response was unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night. That violence was made all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat….Newsmen and photographers were singled out for assault, and their equipment deliberately damaged. Fundamental police training was ignored; and officers, when on the scene, were often unable to control their men. As one police officer put it: ‘What happened didn’t have anything to do with police work.’ ”
*3 The Youth International Party, or Yippies, was cofounded by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Stew Albert with the goal of politicizing the hippies, bringing social change, and becoming a media sensation. The Yippies were an anarchist guerrilla theater group who communicated their revolutionary message with humor and outrageous antics, like throwing money from the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange and trying to levitate the Pentagon.
*4 Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher and public intellectual who became famous when he published a pioneering book on media theory, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in 1964, in which he argued that “the medium is the message.”
*5 In one courtroom moment when Seale demanded his constitutional right to defend himself, he said to Judge Hoffman, “You have George Washington and Benjamin Franklin sitting in a picture behind you, and they were slave owners. That’s what they were. They owned slaves. You are acting in the same manner, denying me my constitutional rights.” Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, p. 252.
*6 At the end of the trial, Judge Hoffman cited the defendants and their two lawyers, William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, with 159 counts of contempt of court for courtroom outbursts and profanities, disrespecting the judge, challenging the judge’s rulings, and personal insults. All of the contempt charges were overturned on appeal in 1972.
*7 On April 2, 1969, twenty-one members of the New York Black Panther Party were indicted and charged with conspiracy to kill police officers and bomb several buildings, including five department buildings and the New York Botanical Garden. Bail was set for each defendant at $100,000. The trial, which lasted eight months, ended on May 12, 1971, when the defendants were acquitted of all 156 charges.
*8 Abbey Road, the Beatles’ last recorded album, was released October 1, 1969, in the United States.
*9 A provision tacked on to the 1968 civil rights bill by conservative southern senators in response to the civil unrest made it illegal to cross state lines in order to start a riot. It was called the “H. Rap Brown law.”
*10 Judy Collins sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Other character witnesses for the defense included Arlo Guthrie, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Phil Ochs, Timothy Leary, and Allen Ginsberg.
*11 Because Bobby Seale had very little involvement in the Democratic convention protests, his indictment seemed to most observers to be only to repress and intimidate the Black Panther Party. When Judge Hoffman demanded that William Kunstler represent Seale, Seale insisted that he had a constitutional right to defend himself. Seale refused to be silenced and called Hoffman a “racist,” a “fascist,” and a “pig.” The image of Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom became a powerful symbol of government racism and oppression and galvanized thousands of white activists to support the Panthers.
*12 Seale was one of the “New Haven Nine” and was very loosely implicated in the murder of nineteen-year-old Black Panther member Alex Rackley. The high-profile trial started in May 1970 and a year later charges against Seale were dropped.
*13 After shackling Seale, Judge Hoffman on November 5 cited Seale with sixteen counts of criminal contempt of court, declared a mistrial, and severed him from the case.
*14 On February 19, 1970, after the twenty-one-week trial, the jury acquitted all seven defendants of the conspiracy charges but found five defendants (excluding Weiner and Froines) guilty of traveling across state lines with the intent to incite a riot. Judge Hoffman imposed the maximum five-year jail sentence. On November 21, 1972, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit unanimously overturned the defendants’ criminal convictions and criticized Judge Hoffman and the prosecutor for their failure to fulfill “the standards of our system of justice.” The contempt charges against the lawyers and defendants were also overturned, in a separate proceeding, in May 1972.
CHAPTER 9
ELLSBERG
(1967–October 1969)
The irony was that just as the Weathermen were giving up on the establishment, members of that very establishment were beginning to risk treason charges.
—TOM HAYDEN,
The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama
In June 1969, Life magazine published a controversial cover story called “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll.” Photos of the 242 soldiers who were killed during a single week in June covered a ten-page spread. The previous year, in February 1968, CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite returned from a reporting mission in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive and declared the war “mired in a stalemate.” Cronkite’s short editorial suggested that the United States should withdraw. “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” President Johnson, who was watching the broadcast live, famously said to his aides, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”
Daniel Ellsberg was intimately familiar with the news from the front, and his knowledge about the hard truths of the war motivated him to act. A product of the Cold War U.S. defense intelligentsia and a former hawk, Ellsberg became convinced after spending two years on the ground in Vietnam with the State Department that the war was both immoral and unwinnable. Ellsberg’s inside knowledge that Nixon and Kissinger intended to escalate the war at a time when the general public believed it was winding down led him to risk everything to try to stop it.
MORTON HALPERIN (Defense Department expert)
I was sitting in my office one day in June of 1967 and there was a phone on my desk, which rang from Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton’s office, who was my boss. I was then his special assistant. My office was two feet away from his. My instructions were straighten your tie, put on your jacket, make sure you look presentable, and then come immediately into his office. So I did. And there was an old friend of mine—a guy named Colonel Robert Gard. Bob was then the second military assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and he was there to say Mr. McNamara wanted an encyclopedic history of the Vietnam War. And he wanted a memo about how to do it, which he would then approve, and then he wanted the study done. So I said, “Okay.”
So I wrote a memo that laid out that we had to do it in his office in order to get the cooperation that we needed; we needed twelve people, and it would take six months. It turned out, of course, to take three years. The memo said, “Since you attach this high importance to this, I propose that I spend full time on this for six months.” McNamara
responded, “All approved except I want Halperin available for other things. Get somebody else to run it.” So I recruited the deputy director of my policy planning staff—a guy named Leslie Gelb—and put him in charge full-time to run the study. I was involved mostly in recruiting people, so I recruited Dan Ellsberg to write a chapter.
Dan and I had been good friends since 1960, and he was at RAND,*1 which was one of the places we looked for people. These were people on contract with the Defense Department who were accustomed to being told by the government, “This is urgent. Stop what you’re doing. Do this for six months.” So we got a lot of our good people from there. Dan was a trained academic and he had spent time in Vietnam. He had six qualities of which any three would have been enough for us to want him to do this. So he was a natural for this.
When it was finally finished during the very beginning of the Nixon administration in January ’69, Mel Laird, Nixon’s secretary of defense, took the position that it wasn’t his study, it was McNamara’s study. Clark Clifford, who succeeded McNamara as LBJ’s secretary of defense, took the position it wasn’t his study, it was McNamara’s study. McNamara took the position that he had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with the study. So Laird asked Paul Warnke, who had replaced McNaughton as the assistant secretary; Gelb, who ran the study; and me to decide on a distribution list. We decided there should be fifteen copies. One went to the NSC [National Security Council], one went to the State Department, one went to the Kennedy Library, and one went to the LBJ Library. And the fateful copy went to me, Warnke, and Gelb, which we put at the RAND Corporation. It was forty-nine volumes, and each volume was one hundred, two hundred, three hundred pages. So, it was very long, about seven thousand pages.
Basically, what the study revealed is that the U.S. government systematically lied to the American people about the nature of the war, from the very beginning. Harry Truman was told that Ho Chi Minh was the nationalist hero of Vietnam, that he had the legitimacy and the support of the people, and that the people on our side had been the stooges of the French, and then of the Japanese, and had no credibility. He was also told that France would elect a communist government if we forced them out of Vietnam. And so he decided he had to support the French going back into Vietnam, because he believed this nonsense that the French in France would vote to be communist if we didn’t support them going back into Vietnam. And then the American people were told that Ho Chi Minh was a tool of the Chinese, Sino-Soviet bloc, and that we were going in to fight for the independence of the Vietnamese people. That was one big lie.
The second biggest—in a way, the most important lie—was that we sent combat troops into Vietnam at the urging of the South Vietnamese government. In fact, the Pentagon Papers make clear that we sent them against the bitter opposition of the South Vietnamese government. They thought they’d lose their sovereignty, and of course, soon after, we helped overthrow them. So, Diem*2 was right in not wanting us to come in. But we did flat-out lie. We said we’re doing this at their invitation, that they were urging us. Meanwhile, we told them we would withdraw more military aid unless they publicly said they wanted us. So they did. But the study showed, absolutely clearly, that they did not. There were many other places in which the government clearly, explicitly lied about what was going on. Those were the two that come to mind, and the most important.
I knew Henry Kissinger because we both taught together at Harvard and in November of ’68, after Nixon had won the presidential election, Kissinger asked me to work for him. At the time I was a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the LBJ administration. I liked being in the government, and I thought if you care about public policy issues, you want to be in the government. I’ve always believed that you can have more influence on an issue in an hour in the government than you can in five years outside the government. I thought as long as I had a chance to influence our getting out of Vietnam, I had to stay in the government to do that.
So I spent some of November and December and the beginning of January in New York, at the Pierre hotel, working with Kissinger on the Nixon transition. We wrote a memo on Vietnam for Nixon with the help of Dan Ellsberg and others at the RAND Corporation, which had a series of options, ranging from staying in at the current level to getting out of the war right away. We sent it to Nixon, and it came back saying there’s a missing option. Kissinger said, “What’s that?” Nixon said, “Escalation.” So we wrote in an escalation option, which is what was eventually carried out. So it was clear early on that Nixon thought escalation was a real option. Kissinger did not think it was until he realized Nixon thought it was, and then Nixon and Kissinger became very attached to escalation as an option.
ROGER MORRIS (national security expert)
I came over to the National Security Council in June 1967 as special assistant to McGeorge Bundy, LBJ’s national security advisor. After that assignment expired at the end of 1967, I was asked to stay on the staff under then–national security advisor Walt Rostow. This was all under President Johnson, of course. After Nixon’s election, they didn’t really have a very clear idea of what the new NSC staff was supposed to look like, except that the Nixon people wanted it to be Republican loyalists who reflected the administration’s view of things, and only two of us were kept on from Johnson’s NSC staff.
There was a great disparity between the public story, which was “We’ve got this in hand, the North Vietnamese are exhausted, and Tet is not an American defeat, it’s just a last spasm and we’re going to turn things around.” That was the rah-rah military view of the Pentagon and its people in Saigon, as opposed to the CIA view, which was a much more realistic and grim appraisal of what the political impact of the Tet Offensive was.
The common antiwar interpretation of all of this at the time was that Tet was a devastating blow to Lyndon Johnson, and eventually it drove him from office to the extent that it accounted for Eugene McCarthy’s 42 percent showing in the New Hampshire primary and Bobby Kennedy’s emergence. But there was the other dimension, which didn’t get much attention, which was Tet was devastating politically in South Vietnam. The war had already been lost politically in so many ways, but this was a numbering of the days for the South Vietnamese government that no one had been very realistic or honest about. And so the attacks showed the endurance, the resiliency, the creativity—the sheer effectiveness—of the other side. It showed that the more indigenous South Vietnamese Viet Cong were still a very formidable force. And though the VC took enormous casualties, the CIA was saying, “This is not a knockout blow. This is not the kind of last spasm that the Pentagon was seeing.”
The public story may have had elements of what the government thought it knew, but for the most part it was a deliberate misinterpretation of events. So it’s an intelligence mess. It’s an intellectual disgrace, really, when you think about it. We never really got a grip on the political character of the war in South Vietnam. Tet was an American political atrocity, as well as a disaster in the field, and my feeling at the time was that the war needed to end as soon as possible.
If you were not too cynical about things, one could take some hope from the Nixon campaign message, “I have a secret plan to end the war, and I’m going to start bringing the boys home; we’re going to recalibrate the negotiations.” Melvin Laird, this Wisconsin congressman who was secretary of defense, coined the term “Vietnamization,” a rather ugly little term, which just meant that we were going to have a withdrawal of U.S. forces and shift responsibility to the South Vietnamese. This plan had been on the table during the Johnson administration for years. But I think, looking back, there was serious reason to believe that the administration would move with some dispatch to do something about the war.
MORTON HALPERIN
I was inside enough to know that we were not getting out, and that Nixon was fighting with his secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, who definitely wanted to announce the next troop withdrawal and was clearly stringing it out as long as he could. It was clear to me th
at Nixon was going to get out slowly, and that he thought the key to U.S. popular support for the war was to end the draft, and that he was going to do that, and he was determined to stay in Vietnam until he got a deal that he thought was satisfactory. So I told him that this was not going to happen.
I found out about the secret bombing of Cambodia the day it started, March 18, 1969.*3 It was by accident. I was in Kissinger’s office talking to him about something else, and [Kissinger’s military advisor] Al Haig burst in and said, “We’ve gotten a whole slew of secondary explosions,” meaning that they had hit ammunition depots in Cambodia. Then he realized that I was in the room, and that I wasn’t one of the people cleared to know about the Cambodian bombing. I was not involved in drafting any of the papers, and I was not involved in anything afterwards.
I was unhappy about Nixon asking for an escalation strategy, but I still didn’t know that it meant he was going to implement it. But I gradually came to understand that he really was going to implement it, and that, along with a lot of other things, led me to decide that I could not fight the Vietnam War from inside anymore, and it was time to leave.
DANIEL ELLSBERG (RAND defense expert)
Mort Halperin called me midsummer of ’69, when everyone thought that Nixon was planning to get us out of the war, and told me elliptically, “Nixon’s staying in; he’s not getting out.”
In March of 1969, Nixon told the North Vietnamese, “The gravest consequences will follow if you don’t accept our terms.” The terms were basically for mutual withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces and U.S. forces from South Vietnam—a proposal which seemed to Mort and me to have some promise. It would have been good for them to accept it. But the North Vietnamese rejected it very quickly. They never came close to accepting it, and the North Vietnamese forces never did get out of South Vietnam.
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