Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  So when people say to me now, “Well, unlike Edward Snowden, who’s putting out all this current sensitive stuff, and Bradley Manning, Ellsberg just put out history. That’s why he was all right. He was a good guy. He was discriminating.” That’s what I’ve been hearing the last few years. But if I’d had current documents, I would not have put out the history. I would’ve put out the current documents. I give Snowden and Manning credit for putting out stuff that’s current, because that makes all the difference.

  RICHARD MOOSE

  I never felt that the Pentagon Papers really substantiated the most extreme claims made about them. They were far more careful than the press and the antiwar movement chose to believe. It was the struggle over their release that really drew more attention to them, but also led to the over​characteriza​tion of them as bearing out the proposition that the administration had lied to the public. I mean, untruths were told, and some bald-faced lies, but it was a far more complicated situation than that.

  It was the executive branch misrepresenting things up and down the line to each other, for example. The CIA and MACV [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam] were more or less in continuous disagreement about key aspects of the war, like how many Viet Cong or North Vietnamese had been killed. So MACV had one view, the CIA had another view, the army had one view, the Defense Department, the State Department; everybody had their own slant on the thing.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  After the November 3 speech, Senator William Fulbright canceled the [Foreign Relations Committee] hearings, which were calling on Nixon to get out of Vietnam within one year. Fulbright told me that his committee was not with him anymore. They were convinced Nixon was getting out, and we didn’t have to take this stand and split from him.

  DAVID HAWK

  In mid-November, you had the preplanned Vietnam mobilizations, which weren’t dispersed nationwide—it was a march on Washington.*3 It was centralized, and very much focused on Nixon and Kissinger and John Mitchell, the attorney general. Mitchell because the Chicago Seven trial was going on, which was for the radical pacifists, the student left, and the Yippies, and the Black Panthers. John Mitchell’s Justice Department had put together a conspiracy trial in Chicago.

  SAM BROWN

  In early November, Bill Ayers came to see me. He gave me this long pitch about how he thought that we didn’t share the Weathermen’s vision of the future, and we didn’t have the same sort of dialectical understanding of the nature of American society. I don’t think he ever used the word sellout, because he had a purpose for this meeting. His point was we didn’t actually get it about how America worked, and he did, but if we were prepared to stand in fraternal solidarity with them, instead of going to the Justice Department the day of the march [November 15], they would withhold their action and not screw up the march by diverting the inevitable: when a hundred radicals get the same attention as five hundred thousand sensible people. For twenty thousand dollars we could show fraternal solidarity, and I explained to him that I might not know much about American politics, but I understood the words blackmail and extortion when I heard them, and I thought he should just leave the office.

  And as it happens, there were two or three other people in the office at the time, which is how it ended up in The New York Times. Anyway, that was the texture of the relationship. It was a very strange, fraught relationship, not just with the Weathermen, which was understandable, but also with a large part of the leadership of the MOBE,*4 and it came down to fights about who was going to speak on November 15.

  DAVID HAWK

  SDS had gone off the deep end. They were living in some other political universe; the New Left had lost its moorings. These people just got deeper and deeper into anticapitalist, anti-imperialist rhetoric and analysis that was ever more detached from intellectual, political, and even moral bearing—some of these people ended up committing armed robbery to get money for political action, or bombings that were going to kill civilians. This was not only intellectually but morally despicable.

  DAVID MIXNER

  The night of November 14 there was teargassing and the breaking of windows at Dupont Circle when the Weathermen tried to storm the South Vietnamese embassy.

  STEPHEN BULL (White House aide)

  I remember noticing that the Washington Monument, which is ringed with flagpoles, the American flags had been torn down, and Viet Cong flags were flying. Which annoyed the heck out of me. I had no sympathy for the Viet Cong, and I didn’t like the idea of the American flag being desecrated. I figured these were all a bunch of commies. You have to understand where I was at the time.

  Credit 11.2

  On Saturday, November 15, 1969, the Moratorium March on Washington drew five hundred thousand peaceful antiwar protesters—the biggest ever single antiwar protest. Five speakers, Senators Charles Goodell and George McGovern, David Dellinger, Coretta Scott King, and Dick Gregory, were accompanied by musicians: Peter, Paul & Mary, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger.

  DAVID MIXNER

  At the big demonstration November 15, a group of people with Viet Cong flags tried to get up to the stage, but we barricaded them into just one little section. There was just one little pocket up near the front with Viet Cong flags, but it was so clear that they were isolated, and we were policing them.

  There were huge battles with the MOBE, over whether Sam [Brown] would speak, or someone from the MOBE would speak. So we agreed on five speakers: Senator Charles Goodell, Senator George McGovern, Dave Dellinger, Coretta Scott King, and Dick Gregory. I said we ought to have a lot of music, and we did. There was Peter, Paul & Mary; Richie Havens; Joan Baez; and Pete Seeger.*5 The cast of Hair, which was playing on Broadway at the time, sang “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In.”

  As far as the eye could see there were people. I’ve never seen anything like it.

  The police said that there were six hundred thousand people there. It was the biggest-ever march on Washington at the time. It was incredible.

  ROGER MORRIS

  Tony [Lake] and I and Bill Watts all had wives and kids who were marching in these demonstrations. I remember standing with Bill and Tony on the South Lawn of the White House watching the November Moratorium coming down Pennsylvania Avenue. There was this sea of people coming from Capitol Hill to the White House, and there were machine gun nests on the South Lawn, and buses turned over. I remember standing there thinking, It’s going to climax at the Washington Monument, and my wife is out there with one toddler and another in a stroller, and Tony’s got two kids and his wife, and Bill’s wife and kids.

  We were on the wrong side of the fence. But we were on that side of the fence because up until the spring of 1970 we thought we really could make a difference, and really could bring this thing to an end. You knew, given the mentality, as Henry would say, “Policy will not be made in the streets,” that the demonstrations were never going to do anything.

  RAY PRICE (Nixon aide)

  When the protesters marched outside the White House on November 15, Nixon drove home his point by letting it be known that he had spent the afternoon watching football on television.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  The strategy inside the White House was to put out the word that the president was watching a football game, and he didn’t take the protest seriously, which was, of course, untrue. Every ten minutes he was calling the Situation Room and finding out what was going on, getting the reports from the U-2s on crowd size, and that sort of thing. He was totally absorbed with the Moratorium. Many people remembered that. I used to ask auditoriums, when I used to discuss the subject, “How many of you here remember the football game?” It turns out that everybody remembers the football game. It was very effective.

  DAVID MIXNER

  My proudest moment was organizing the March Against Death. Someone had the idea that people would start at Arlington National Cemetery, and there would be placards that you’d hang around your neck with forty-five thousand names of the [Amer
ican] war dead on them, and the names of villages in Vietnam that had been destroyed. One by one with a candle, we left Arlington Cemetery, we went across Arlington Bridge single file to the Lincoln Memorial, we went around the Lincoln Memorial, and we walked in front of the White House, and as we got in front of the White House, we shouted out the names of the war dead. I shouted out Russell’s name. Then we walked up Pennsylvania Avenue, single file, and put the placards in wooden caskets that were built by the carpenters outside the Capitol.

  Credit 11.3

  The March Against Death began Thursday, November 13, 1969, and continued until the morning of November 15 as more than forty-five thousand people walked single file from Arlington National Cemetery down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House to the Capitol Building carrying placards with names of dead American soldiers and destroyed Vietnamese villages.

  It started Thursday night [November 13] and it went for thirty-eight hours all Thursday night, all Friday, all Friday night, and into Saturday, November 15, which was the Moratorium—single file, unbroken, uninterrupted, hour after hour. It was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had. On the day of the Moratorium, we closed the caskets, and they were carried ahead of us, with the names inside, down to the White House.

  Credit 11.4

  When the March Against Death finished in front of the Capitol Building, the forty-five thousand placards with names of dead American soldiers and destroyed Vietnamese villages were placed in wooden coffins. The march lasted for thirty-eight hours, from Thursday night until Saturday morning, November 15.

  * * *

  *1 Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), p. 435.

  *2 Nixon, RN, pp. 410–11.

  *3 A month after the first Moratorium came the second one, on November 15. Undaunted by Nixon’s successful appeal to pro-war, patriotic middle America, the antiwar movement upped the ante and produced a three-day march on Washington, bringing more people to the capital city than there had ever been for one peace protest.

  *4 The MOBE, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, was a coalition of antiwar organizations founded in 1967 to organize large antiwar demonstrations.

  *5 Pete Seeger led the crowd in singing John Lennon’s new song, “Give Peace a Chance.”

  CHAPTER 12

  MY LAI

  (October–November 1969)

  The war wasn’t all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet. For instance, I remember a little boy with a plastic leg. I remember how he hopped over to Azar and asked for a chocolate bar—“GI number one,” the kid said—and Azar laughed and handed over the chocolate. When the boy hopped away, Azar clucked his tongue and said, “War’s a bitch.” He shook his head sadly. “One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo.”

  —TIM O’BRIEN, The Things They Carried

  A new antiwar slogan appeared on signs at the November 15, 1969, Moratorium in Washington, D.C.: “Free the Pinkville People.” Just two days earlier thirty-two-year-old freelance investigative journalist Seymour Hersh had published a story that exposed one of the war’s most horrific atrocities. Hersh discovered that U.S. soldiers had killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, most of them women and children, in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai, an area called Pinkville by the American military, on March 16, 1968, and that the Pentagon was in the process of covering up the crime. The story exemplified the Pentagon’s unwritten “kill anything that moves” policy and its quest for high body count over all else. It also exposed a deeper truth—that American soldiers could not distinguish their allies from their enemies. They were on a mission to nowhere. On December 5, Time magazine summed up the significance of Hersh’s story: “[M]en in American uniforms slaughtered the civilians of My Lai, and in so doing humiliated the U.S. and called in question the U.S. mission in Viet Nam in a way that all the antiwar protesters could never have done.”

  SEYMOUR HERSH (investigative reporter)

  I quit the AP [Associated Press], where I covered the Pentagon, and did a stint as Eugene McCarthy’s speechwriter. By 1969, I’m freelancing and doing my nickel-and-dime stuff, trying to make a living. I get this tip in October ’69. I couldn’t say for twenty-five years who it was, but it was Geoffrey Cowan, an antiwar lawyer, whose brother was a reporter for The Village Voice. I didn’t even know who he was. He just knew who I was because of what I’d been writing for the AP and as a freelancer for a little news service called Dispatch News Service, which would publish my antiwar rants.

  So Cowan calls me and he says, “Sy, there’s been a terrible massacre. Some GIs have gone crazy and killed a lot of people. I think fifty or seventy,” and he said the GI [William Calley] was at a base in South Carolina. So I go to the Pentagon and talk to my source. We’re walking down a hallway and I say, “So, what about this guy that shot up things?” He hit his bad knee with the side of his hand, hard, and he said, “Sy, that guy, Calley, he didn’t kill anybody higher than two feet, little kids. I don’t think they were Viet Cong, do you?” So I had a name.

  Sure enough there it was in the clip file, a one-graph announcement two months earlier of a lieutenant named William L. Calley, Jr., who was being investigated for a possible crime against unspecified noncombatants. The New York Times ran it on Saturday on something like page fourteen or sixteen. It said he was from Florida. I called the PR guy at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He looked him up and said Calley “shot up a gin mill.” Which is what they were told to say. He wasn’t lying. Calley had been reassigned there and was waiting for the investigation. There was nothing to it. He said there’s nothing here. I didn’t say I thought there was more to it.

  WAYNE SMITH (Vietnam vet)

  I knew I would have gotten drafted, and would have gone into the infantry; so volunteering was a way to have some control over what I did. I wanted to be a medic. I really wanted to save lives, and I thought that I had a knack, or some kind of gift.

  When I first got off the plane in Saigon, it was shocking—my first inhalation was of this putrid air and rotting vegetation. You couldn’t smell death at first, but diesel fuel, and humidity. It was an assault on your senses. The heat was another thing that you felt immediately, and you had to defend yourself with a towel and water, just to keep hydrated. As we got off the plane, we got on these buses that had corrugated steel covering the windows. Someone asked, “Why are these things on the window?” and they said, “So grenades won’t come inside the bus. Welcome to Vietnam, guys.”

  It was September of ’69 when a medic with the Second Battalion, Sixtieth Infantry, of the Ninth Infantry Division was killed. I believe his last name was Best—Doc Best. So I replaced Doc Best, and was assigned to a base called Tan Tru, the Ninth Infantry Division, Company D. This is a hot area. The Second of the Sixtieth boys loved combat. I introduced myself, “Yeah, I’m Wayne. I’m from Providence,” and the first thing they all wanted to know was, “You know, Doc, if I get hit, are you going to come get me?” They waited until I answered. I was like, “What do you mean? Of course I’m going to come get you. Aren’t we in this together?” Some of the training was “Don’t get too close to people. You are the medic. You are the one they’re going to confess themselves to. They’re going to tell you their secrets. They want to be your friend because if there’s a bunch of casualties, they want you to go to them first.”

  SEYMOUR HERSH

  I said I need the name of Calley’s lawyer and he said there’s a guy named George Latimer, who had been an army lawyer for years and then became an army judge and then got on the Court of Military Appeals, and he apparently was representing Calley. He was a Mormon out of Salt Lake City. So I called him up in Salt Lake City and I said, “I’m going to be going to the West Coast and there’s a plane that stops in Salt Lake. I want to talk to you about the Calley thing.” And he said, “Oh yes, it’s a terrible case. What a miscarriage of justice.” So I got the right guy.r />
  When I met Calley’s lawyer in his office in Salt Lake City, he told me that it was just a mistake. There was a firefight and Calley got in the crossfire. There weren’t a lot of casualties, but it was a terrible battle, and he fought his way out. They were fighting the North Vietnamese division. That’s what he was told. That’s what he believed, and that was his defense. Calley wouldn’t plead. They wanted him to plead but he wouldn’t plead. He’s now back being processed. They investigated and they’re going to make a determination whether he’s going to be held for a court-martial. I’ll never forget this part. He opened up his desk and he pulled out a piece of paper and he put it in front of him. It was the charge sheet against Calley. I saw the first sentence of the charge sheet, which said, “Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., is accused of the premeditated murder of one hundred and nine,” get this, “Oriental human beings.” I’ll never forget that. So I went to Fort Jackson.

  OLIVER STONE (Vietnam veteran, filmmaker)

  I was raised conservative Republican in New York City. I’d dropped out of Yale twice. I didn’t have a future, and I didn’t like those elitist, privileged kids at Yale, like George Bush and that whole gang. The cliques of kids were snotty and preppy and all that shit. I wanted to see the wider world, so I decided I would volunteer for the draft and I insisted on them sending me to Vietnam infantry, frontline duty. I wanted to see the whole hog. I didn’t want to be sent to some camp in Germany or Korea. They obliged me. They offered me to apply to Officer Candidate School and I refused.