American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Caught between Hanoi’s steadfast pursuit of victory and the protesters’ demand for peace, Nixon suddenly switched from his intended ultimatum to a speech in defense of Vietnamization. Delaying his address for two days so that it would not adversely affect a Republican candidate in a New Jersey state election, the President contended that a quick pullout from Vietnam would produce a bloodbath and a loss of confidence in American leadership at home and abroad. Vietnamization would mean peace with honor. He had seen in San Francisco, he said, demonstrators with signs reading: “Lose in Vietnam, bring the boys home.” Well, he would not allow a “vocal minority” to prevail over “the great silent majority.” It was Nixon at his most ambidextrous:

  “Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”

  The protesters would have none of it. They saw Vietnamization as Nixon’s “invisibility” stratagem to turn over the ground war to Saigon while he further expanded the air war, which was less accessible to the media. By reducing troops, draft calls, costs, and caskets returning from combat, he would make a pretense of winding down the war while in fact it would become more destructive than ever. In November the Moratorium and the Mobe’s successor coalition, the New Mobe, in uneasy alliance, led the most ambitious demonstration yet, blanketing the nation but concentrated in Washington. In long, dark robes tens of thousands of protesters walked silently in a “March Against Death” from Arlington National Cemetery to Capitol Hill. Each wearing a cardboard placard with the name of an American soldier killed or a Vietnamese village destroyed, they shouted out the names as they passed the White House. The next day eleven coffins bearing the placards headed a vast procession from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Over half a million people gathered there in the cold, setting a new turnout record.

  By January 1970, the end of his first year in the White House, Nixon’s Vietnam policy was still wavering between attack and withdrawal. Given time—much time—he might have stayed atop his swaying tightrope indefinitely. But the dynamics of war were not so easily balanced abroad and brokered at home. In March 1970, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s Chief of State, who had been walking his own tightrope in dealing with Hanoi, Peking, Washington, and Saigon and with ambitious subordinates in his capital at Phnom Penh, was deposed while on a trip to Europe. Whether or not Washington had any hand in the overthrow—and Kissinger hotly denied it—the new President, Lon Nol, was friendly to the Americans.

  The coup upset a delicate balance. Hanoi’s forces had been taking advantage of long-established “sanctuaries” in Cambodia that protected their vital supply lines to the south, and Washington had been blasting these strong points. South Vietnamese certainly, and Americans probably, had been infiltrating across the South Vietnam border into Cambodia, for various reasons and with various covers. All parties concealed—or at least denied—their involvement. Now facing an unfriendly government in Phnom Penh, Hanoi’s forces in the sanctuary areas attacked farther west into Cambodia in order to avoid entrapment by U.S. and Saigon forces and strengthen their hand for future operations.

  Whether this episode remained merely one more of the age-old shifts of power in the murky politics of Indochina depended on how the rival capitals responded. Commander-in-Chief Nixon was already poised for action. Hanoi’s “aggression” struck at all his vulnerabilities—his feeling that he had been playing the good guy in not escalating the war, his awareness that the fall election campaigns would be starting soon and the Administration had little to boast about, his fear of “losing” Cambodia, and above all his concern that Hanoi was strengthening its capacity to disrupt Vietnamization. Bypassing his Secretaries of State and Defense, who had expressed qualms about the idea, but with the solid support of Kissinger and some of the military, the President late in April resolved on a joint “incursion” by Americans and South Vietnamese against Hanoi’s sanctuaries.

  “If, when the chips are down,” he said in announcing the invasion, “the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” Like so many of Washington’s much-touted operations in Vietnam, the Cambodia incursion gained mixed results at best. GIs and South Vietnamese forces captured large stocks of supplies and cleared a few square miles of jungle, but once again the elusive North Vietnamese troops and their headquarters personnel escaped the net.

  Back home the reaction of the antiwar forces was not mixed. Furious students protested on several hundred campuses, some of which were closed for months. Student outrage boiled over following press reports that Nixon during a visit to the Pentagon had said of other protesters, “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses.” At some universities students attacked or sacked ROTC buildings. After a weekend of turmoil at Kent State University in Ohio, during which the ROTC building was gutted, edgy National Guardsmen, ordered to disperse even peaceful assemblies, suddenly turned and fired on a crowd of demonstrating students. They killed two women and two men, two of them bystanders. Less noticed by a stunned nation was the even more arbitrary killing of two black students by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi. The Vietnam bloodbath had overflowed into the groves of academe.

  Militarily, Cambodia left the war little changed. Washington pulled its troops back by the end of June; Hanoi, its timetable somewhat disrupted by the operation, restocked its supply depots and reestablished its sanctuaries. There followed a year of fight-talk-fight on both sides. Hanoi could not mount a decisive attack, nor could the Americans. Protests continued, fueled by a rising number of Vietnam veterans, some of whom at Christmastime 1971 occupied the Statue of Liberty as a war protest and hung the American flag upside down from Liberty’s crown. The Administration appeared physically as well as politically under siege, as demonstrators ringed the White House.

  In his cell in the grim, fortresslike Latuna prison near El Paso, Texas, where he was doing two years for draft resistance, Randy Kehler opened his New York Times on a Sunday in mid-June 1971. Splashed across the front page was the first installment of the Pentagon’s own secret history of the Vietnam War, ordered by Defense Secretary McNamara in 1967 to uncover what had gone wrong. The forty-seven volumes of memos, cables, reports, and analysis documenting a pattern of governmental deception and confusion might never have seen the light of day without Kehler. For a few weeks publication of the Pentagon Papers in the Times and the Washington Post once again fired up the debate over Vietnam.

  The man who leaked the secret history was forty-year-old Daniel Ellsberg. For years he had seemed the model young careerist on the rise. After a stint as a Marine infantry commander, he had spent years as a national security bureaucrat, a specialist in crisis decision making and nuclear command and control, a Pentagon functionary involved intimately in the early escalation of the Vietnam War, a “pacification” officer in South Vietnam, and an author of the Pentagon history. He returned from Vietnam opposed to the war effort—at first not because it was wrong or immoral but because of its dishonesty, corruption, and futility. For two years he crusaded in the corridors of power, lobbying high officials like McNamara and Walt Rostow and advising presidential candidates in 1968, especially Robert Kennedy. Nothing seemed to work.

  Gradually Ellsberg fell in with people who had been remote from his world—a nonviolent activist from India who said that “for me, the concept of enemy doesn’t exist”; war resisters who defied the popular image of them as “guilt-ridden, fanatic extremists”; a Quaker activist, about to be locked up for refusing induction; and Kehler, who said he looked forward to joining David Harris and other friends in jail and had no remorse or fear, because he knew, he told a war resisters’ conference, that “lots of people around the world like you will carry on.” Later Ellsberg thought: these were “our best, our very best, and we’
re sending them to prison, more important, we’re in a world where they feel they just had to go to prison.”

  It was Kehler who provided the spark. Now Ellsberg knew that he would have to join the war resisters even if it meant jail. With the help of his children he xeroxed his top-secret volumes of the Pentagon report, and after fruitless efforts to involve prominent Senate doves, he turned the history over to The New York Times. When the Pentagon Papers appeared a month later the Justice Department won injunctions against further publication in the Times and the Post, a “prior restraint” on press freedom that was overturned by the Supreme Court.

  With his mind on reelection in 1972, Nixon saw the Pentagon Papers flap as an opportunity to create another Alger Hiss, who had served his earlier ambitions so well. By painting Ellsberg as the symbol of the extreme left, the Administration could tar with the same brush both the New Left and antiwar Democrats. As a political functionary named Charles Colson reported to the White House, moreover, the Pentagon Papers were “a tailor-made issue for causing deep and lasting divisions within the Democratic-ranks.” The Democratic party hardly needed GOP help on divisiveness. Already carrying their heritage of disunity, they were busy seeking to recruit blacks, students, war resisters, and women, all of whom had plenty of divisions of their own.

  Songs of the Sixties

  When they’d finally all arrived they were, they sang, half a million strong—probably an exaggeration by a hundred thousand or so, but the Woodstock festival appeared so grandiose, in scope of music, attendance, media coverage, and social significance, that hyperbole seemed the only way to communicate its bigness. Attendance reached twice the anticipated 50,000 per day before dusk the first evening—and the organizers were forced to declare the concert free to all who had made the trek that August 1969 weekend to Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York. A participant called it “three days of mud, drugs, and music.” And how it rained, defiantly, on the greatest assemblage of rock ’n’ roll and folk talent of the decade: Richie Havens; Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Joe Cocker; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Santana; the Jefferson Airplane; Sly and the Family Stone; Jimi Hendrix; and the Who.

  For three days music blasted from the amplifiers scattered around the eighty acres of natural bowl. But the music was secondary. Though Woodstock came “as a logical consequence of all the be-ins, love-ins, pop festivals, and tribal convocations that preceded it,” wrote Bruce Cook, it was more than all of these, giving “to an entire generation not so much a sense of who they are, but (much more important) who they would like to be.… The first Eucharistic Congress of a new rock religion.” And Life wrote: “Woodstock was less a music festival than a total experience, a phenomenon, a happening, high adventure, a near disaster and, in a small way, a struggle for survival.”

  The roots of rock ’n’ roll—so named by a white Cleveland disc jockey who wanted to avoid the racial stigma carried by rhythm and blues—lie embedded in the early years of blues and country music. Before the 1950s whites had recorded “white music” while blacks recorded “black,” and though their listeners crossed color lines, musically and thematically country and rhythm and blues remained equal but separate.

  In the mid-1950s, when white groups began recording black songs, rhythm and blues gained hold and rock took off. “To make R &B acceptable,” wrote composer and performer Frank Zappa, “the big shots of the record industry hired a bunch of little men with cigars and green visors, to synthesize and imitate the work of the Negroes. The visor men cranked out phony white rock.” But whatever the commercially imposed limitations of the music, it was an infusion of energy into popular culture. Rock ’n’ roll fans drove the new songs to the top of the charts. Opposition from the black artists whose works were being pilfered, from a Congress responding to industry pressure, and from the AM radio stations who recognized the exploitation for what it was, were all insufficient to halt the infestation of “phony white rock.”

  The music called “black” had faced all the usual objections from the conventional, but rock ’n’ roll encountered a new and unique brand of opposition. Many adults found rock loud, often incomprehensible, and intolerably sexual. “If we cannot stem the tide of rock ’n’ roll,” warned a Columbia University professor, “with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances.” Boston Catholic leaders demanded the banning of rock. The San Antonio city council banished it from municipal swimming pool jukeboxes because it “attracted undesirable elements given to practicing their spastic gyrations in abbreviated bathing suits.” Parents shuddered at such insinuating lyrics as “I need it / When the moon is bright / I need it / When you hold me tight / I need it / In the middle of the night” and their blood curdled when Little Richard yowled, “Wop-bop-a-loo-bop / A-wop-bam-boom!”

  But that was part of the idea—the more adults deplored rock, the more it meant to the young. Rock burst in on a generation that, Nik Cohn noted, felt it had no music of its own, no clothes or clubs, no tribal identity. “Everything had to be shared with adults.” The music began to generate its own social significance, at first vaguely and immaturely, but nevertheless giving a “divided people a sense that they may have something in common.”

  “The culturally alienated went in for cool jazz, and folk music was the vehicle for the politically active minority,” wrote Jeff Greenfield. Folk had its origins in depression-era, vagabond protest music, but it was only infrequently available on commercial releases, and usually heard by the already converted until the voices and vibrancy of Joan Baez; the Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; Phil Ochs; Pete Seeger; and, above all, Bob Dylan introduced a larger, if still selective, audience to the true music of protest and disaffection.

  Dylan was “discovered” in a Greenwich Village club in 1961, where, upon entering, he had been asked for proof of age. His roots were middle-class, middle-American, but his voice was coarse, his music was of the road, his style was that of “the hungry, restless, freedom-loving friend and comrade of the oppressed.” He rambled into New York from Minnesota with dreams of emulating Woody Guthrie—“the greatest holiest godliest one in the world.” After his “discovery” he made his first album, playing alone with a harmonica and an acoustic guitar. The record cost Columbia Records just $402 to produce.

  Dylan was not the popularizer of his greatest hit, “Blowing in the Wind.” He performed the song on tour and the mimeographed magazine Broadside published the lyrics, but not until the popular folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary heard and recorded it did it sell a million copies.

  How many roads must a man walk down

  before you call him a man?

  How many seas must a white dove sail

  before she sleeps in the sand?

  How many times must the cannonballs fly

  before they’re forever banned?

  The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,

  the answer is blowing in the wind.

  That recording single-handedly “established topical song as the most important development of the folk revival,” and Dylan as its premier artist.

  Though he was never to dominate the music industry as the Beatles would, Dylan earned a commitment from his fans perhaps even deeper than the loyalty the Beatles enjoyed. Yet his followers’ expectations of him as the “musical great white hope of the Left” proved a burden. When, on the last night of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan stepped onto the stage carrying an electric guitar and launched into a rocking version of “Maggie’s Farm,” the audience for a moment sat in stunned silence, then heckled him off the stage with shrill cries of “Play folk music! … Sell out! … This is a folk festival!”

  If Dylan’s folk fans felt betrayed by his electrification, he saw it as evolution and synthesis. Village Voice critic Jack Newfield commented, “If Whitman were alive today, he too would be playing an electric guitar.” Dylan had succeeded in bringing the feeling of folk—modern, protest folk—
to the masses of rock. Proof of his success came in one month of 1965, when no fewer than forty-eight Dylan originals were recorded and released to a rapturous public.

  They were four scruffy lads from the run-down port city of Liverpool playing seedy clubs in Britain and Germany until a shrewd manager repackaged them as waggish, cuddly moptops. The Beatles’ first success was sudden and phenomenal. In the annus mirabilis of 1963, their music became “one of the most persistent noises heard over England since the air-raid sirens were dismantled.” They sold more than two and a half million records that year, performed for royalty on the same bill with Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich, and needed squads of bobbies to protect them from screeching, scratching, fainting Beatlemaniacs.

  The Beatles commenced their personal conquest of the United States when, on February 7, 1964, ten thousand teenagers gave them a hysterical welcome at Kennedy Airport in New York. Airport officials were incredulous—they had seen nothing like it, “not even for kings and queens!” 73 million people watched the Beatles perform on Ed Sullivan’s television show. They played at Carnegie Hall in New York, and one fifteen-year-old fan from New Hampshire who was there with 6,000 others described the essential Beatlemaniacal delusion: “You really do believe they can see you, just you alone, when they’re up on the stage. That’s why you scream, so they’ll notice you. I always felt John could see me. It was like a dream. Just me and John together and no one else.”

  With such albums as Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles, and Abbey Road, the Beatles revolutionized rock and opened it to new possibilities. They spearheaded a British invasion that, as Ellen Willis noted, proved “that the mainstream of mass culture could produce folk music—that is, antiestablishment music.” Most antiestablishment and jolting to American sensibilities were Mick Jagger’s Rolling Stones, with their “twentieth century working-class songs.” As Jerry Hopkins put it, the “Beatles asked teenaged American females for their hands; the Stones asked for their pants.” Their music harked back to rock’s gritty, jarring, erotic origins in the blues, and in appearance the Stones cultivated ugliness and overt sexuality. They exuded contempt—and earned millions.