by Larry Berman
Bud offered a blistering indictment, charging that the White House, primarily through the OMB, had adopted the legal strategy of refusing liability in military and civilian cases of contamination involving toxic chemicals and nuclear radiation. The report also concluded that by suppressing and minimizing findings of ill health effects among Vietnam veterans that could be linked to Agent Orange exposure, the government had caved in to corporate lobbying, destroying government objectivity in critical research studies.
A few months following his report to Secretary Derwinski, the House Committee on Government Operations, chaired by Congressman Ted Weiss, issued The Agent Orange Cover-up: A Case of Flawed Science and Political Manipulation.102 The subcommittee report noted, “The White House compromised the independence of the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] and undermined crucial decisions guiding the course of research at the same time it had secretly taken a legal position to resist demands to compensate victims of Agent Orange exposure and industrial accidents.” Newspaper accounts focused on how the House committee concluded “that White House officials during the Reagan administration ‘controlled and obstructed’ a federal study of Agent Orange exposure among Vietnam War veterans. The congressional panel said a secret White House strategy to deny federal liability in toxic exposure cases led to the cancellation of the Centers for Disease Control study in 1987. The report by the House Government Operations Committee bolsters arguments of two veterans groups, the American Legion and the Vietnam Veterans of America, who filed a lawsuit last week seeking to have the CDC resume its study of the health effects of Agent Orange exposure during the Vietnam War.”103
Secretary Derwinski ended up recommending that all of the problems listed be covered. President Bush approved compensation for three diseases: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, soft tissue sarcoma, and chloracne. Congress also eliminated the CEHH and assigned statutory responsibility to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for scientific advice on health effects of Agent Orange. The NAS contracted with the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to review all scientific evidence and studies and provide advice every two years. Bud met with Dr. Kenneth Shine, president of the Institute of Medicine, and they agreed that the scientists being appointed to the IOM panels should not include “company docs” or those whose work already showed that dioxin was a human carcinogen. The IOM issued its first report in 1993, and as a result, seven more diseases were approved for compensation—Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma, porphyria cutanea tarda, lung cancer, bronchial cancer, laryngeal cancer, and tracheal cancer. The report stated, “The result is that Vietnam veterans have been denied for over 20 years the benefits which the law would have provided had scientific truth prevailed over pseudo-scientific manipulation.” In 1996 three more diseases were made compensable—prostate cancer, peripheral neuropathy, and the first of the birth defects affecting children of Vietnam vets, spina bifida.
Once the CEHH was dismantled, Bud formed the Agent Orange Coordinating Council, which he chaired. Membership consisted of representatives from most of the national veterans organizations and Vietnam veterans’ widows. Bud’s persistence never waned. “I have been carrying on a running battle with the government concerning the need to provide compensation for the diseases resulting from the exposure to Agent Orange,” Bud wrote to Ron Kirkwood, who served on rivers near Saigon, where he was certain he had been exposed to Agent Orange. “Thanks to President Bush and many others we have been able to win compensation for four such diseases. If I live we will win more such rulings.”104 He would live long enough to help many others, writing longtime friend Jerry Wages, who was fighting his own battle with prostate cancer, that twenty-eight health effects resulting from exposure to Agent Orange had been identified. “One by one we have flagged nine of them into the system over the bodies of the dead bureaucracy.”105
Bud’s handwritten notes from a talk he gave at a December 1992 Renaissance Weekend offer a glimpse into his public battle and private agony. Titling his remarks, “Whoops! Mistakes and Their Consequences,”106 Bud explained, “As many of you know . . . I was the Commander of the U.S. Naval Forces in Vietnam who decided in 1968 to use Agent Orange to defoliate the vegetation along the banks of the narrow canals and rivers of the Vietnam Delta. At the time it seemed to be an intelligent decision. The U.S. Army had been using Agent Orange for three years. They believed their experiences had confirmed what the military had been assured by the chemical companies—that the only known human ill effects was the development of chloracne on the skin of some exposed individuals. . . . As is well known, twenty years later, in August 1988, Mouza and I lost our first-born son, Elmo III, from both Hodgkin’s disease and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. . . . I have been deeply saddened by the additional insights I have gained: Chemical companies producing dioxin by-products have known for many years that these substances were harmful, have exchanged data amongst themselves about such harmful effects, and have delayed, in some cases, many years, in making reports to government concerning these harmful effects.”107
Bud had asked the right questions but received dishonest answers. He was intent on not allowing that to happen again. At the time of the Persian Gulf War, Bud’s thoughts were on the fact that it took the government fifteen years to deal with Agent Orange. Adding to his and Mouza’s anxiety was the fact that their surviving son, Jim, was deployed in the Gulf. As soon as President Bush began deployments, Bud called Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger to urge that the daily positions of each tactical unit be recorded so that future studies of health effects could take place. Despite assurances that this would be done, it was not. Bud met several times with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Bernard Rostker, the overall Pentagon coordinator for studies on Desert Storm syndrome, as well as Coast Guard Rear Admiral Paul Busick, who was on the National Security Council staff to oversee government agency work on Desert Storm syndrome.
There was still more work to be done, including a much heralded return to Vietnam. At one of the Renaissance Weekends at Hilton Head, Bud had mentioned to President Clinton that the time had come to lift sanctions against Vietnam and begin the process of binding the wounds of war. The president was favorably disposed to the idea and asked Bud to get General Westmoreland and others to support the decision.
In his capacity as chairman of the Agent Orange Coordinating Council and chairman of the Advisory Committee of the Vietnam Assistance for the Handicapped (VNAH) foundation, Bud led a much publicized four-member team to Vietnam. He was accompanied by Dr. Arnold Schecter, who had been conducting pilot studies on Agent Orange; businessman Ca Van Tran, president of VNAH; and his own son, Lieutenant Colonel James G. Zumwalt, as a representative of his late brother. “It was against this backdrop then—the pain and anguish of having lost a brother to the war in Vietnam still embedded in my mind—that we returned to the country where the seeds of Elmo’s death were sown,” recalled Jim.108
The goal of the trip was to achieve funding for research by U.S. medical organizations on populations in Vietnam exposed to Agent Orange, in order to provide more definitive scientific answers on exposure. This would entail the establishment of cancer and birth-defect registries throughout Vietnam to be used as a starting point for many avenues of research: studies designed to show whether dioxin was an initiator or promoter (or both) of cancers in humans and how it does so; studies of the effects of dioxin on reproduction and development and on the endocrine system—on the sex hormones, on the thyroid, and as a causal factor in diabetes; studies of immune deficiency and neurological damage from dioxin, especially on cognitive and behavioral deficits in children; studies to establish biomarkers of exposure and genetic sensitivity; and studies of dioxin’s effect specific to women—endometriosis and cervical, breast, and ovarian cancers.109
The agenda also provided Bud with a chance to come face to face with General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese army commander in chief during the war, and with Tran Van Tra, the wartime commander of the Vietcong in the South. Bud would also confer w
ith the president of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Le Duc Anh, and with the cabinet minister responsible for Agent Orange research, Tran Dinh Hoan. There were additional meetings with Dr. Hoang Dinh Cau and Dr. Le Cao Dai, the two senior officials on the 10-80 Committee (Committee for Investigation of Consequences of the Chemicals Used during the Vietnam War on Human Health), the government body in charge of Agent Orange/dioxin research in Vietnam. The Vietnamese were especially curious about the trip because in Vietnam the name Zumwalt was associated with responsibility for the use of this destructive chemical weapon.
In 1993 a Vietnamese American by the name of Ca Van Tran came to visit Bud with a remarkable story. Ca had served as an interpreter for U.S. Marine units during the war. Arriving at a refugee camp penniless and without any personal effects, Ca had only his U.S. Marine Corps identification card. Processors told him he would not need a sponsor and offered Ca and his wife airline tickets to any U.S. city of their choice. Ca selected Rochester, New York, because he remembered a marine who lived there. When they arrived at the home of the marine, it was packed with refugees. The next day, they decided to hitchhike south. A truck driver picked them up and took them all the way to Springfield, Virginia, depositing them at the Springfield Mall. Still without any money, they slept in the mall while looking for work during the day. The mall manager soon hired Ca as a janitor, where his diligence impressed the manager of a Mexican fast-food franchise, who hired Ca as an assistant chef. He soon became head chef and then manager. Ca and his wife saved their money, and before long they owned their own Mexican fast-food restaurant. By the time he came to see Bud, Ca owned five thriving restaurants and had become very prosperous.
Ca had a dream and needed Bud’s help. He wanted to take a portion of his wealth and help the Vietnamese people. He planned on selling three of his restaurants and using the proceeds to hatch a plan. He needed Bud to help him get funds from the Agency for International Development (AID) in order to establish a prosthetics facility in Vietnam to provide limbs for war victims and asked Bud to serve as chairman of the advisory board. “I told him that I would be glad to try to open doors for him at AID and in Congress, but that I thought the odds against success were very high.” Bud underestimated Ca’s tenacity. Within months he had generated support from Congress and the executive branch for seed money.
They named the new organization Vietnamese Assistance for the Handicapped (VNAH). Initially, wheelchairs and artificial arms and legs were purchased or solicited as charitable contributions and shipped to Vietnam. Later, VNAH supported the production of prosthetic devices at prosthetic facilities, first in the Mekong Delta town of Can Tho and later in Saigon. During their September 1994 trip, Bud, Jim, and Ca visited the facility where Bud had the thrill of fitting the limb on the twelve-millionth victim. “It was a moving experience to see my father, then 73, lift a double leg amputee out of a chair and place him in the first wheelchair the veteran had ever owned.” It was then that Jim understood that his father “had exorcized himself of any demons related to putting the tragedies of war behind him.”110
The meeting with General Giap allowed two old warriors to speak of their losses and the ravages of war. “It is time for you and me,” said Bud, “who have presided over so much destruction, to work together for reconstruction.” Giap took special note of Elmo’s death: “So you, like the people of Vietnam, suffer from that cruel, inhumane weapon.” Bud felt he had “a very special responsibility to help deal with the wounds of war.” He presented Giap with a signed copy of On Watch, with the inscription, “To Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap. With respect to a former adversary and new friend.” Bud joked with Tran Van Tra that he was surprised how easy it was to find him today. “I spent two years trying to find you the last time I was here and could not.” Giap laughed, telling Bud that the effectiveness of his programs during the war led him to approve the assassination attempt. Bud asked if he was still on their hit list. “No, Admiral; I give you my personal guarantee; now that you have returned to Vietnam as a tourist, not a military invader, you are most welcome.” On September 21, 1994, Bud wrote Giap, thanking him for the warm reception. “I was deeply moved by being able to meet you in peace and respect. . . . As a military man, I have always spoken my mind. But I regret that I dealt with the past since my desire is to have a friendly future. I intend to continue my efforts to bind the wounds of our two peoples and I am delighted that that is your wish too.”111
The year 1994 was a busy one for Bud, who worked ardently for the reelection of Senator Chuck Robb, running against Oliver North in a hotly contested race. Robb had been one of Bud’s strongest supporters during the Agent Orange hearings. In a widely circulated letter to veterans, Bud urged veterans to support Robb, not only because of his position on veterans’ causes, but also because, “He is running against a man, Oliver North, who has disgraced the military uniform by his violation of his constitutional oath and who continues to dissemble in his military life.”112 Virginia’s other senator, John Warner, had also opposed North, by endorsing an independent candidate, Marshall Coleman. In a razor-close finish, Robb defeated North, but conservative Republicans never forgave Warner for not supporting North, because Coleman had drawn support from North, not Robb.
Giving proof to the adage, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Bud came to the support of his old nemesis John Warner. Following Robb’s 1994 election, Bud wrote Warner that he was signing up to be a “Democrat for Warner” in 1996. “I want to give you my personal appreciation as a fellow Virginian for the key role you played in the defeat of Oliver North. It was courageous and necessary. Please sign me up as a Democrat for Warner in 1996.”113 Warner soon replied, “Our friendship strengthens as the years roll by.”114 After winning the Republican primary in 1996, Warner wrote Bud that “we sailors stick together. You have been a stalwart as I have faced the ‘heavy seas’ of politics.”115
This was an extraordinary turnaround from the time in 1982 when Warner stopped Bud’s appointment to an arms control advisory board, the ACDA’s General Advisory Committee. Bud’s nomination had been approved by the Senate but returned at the request of Warner, based on Bud’s role as a syndicated newspaper columnist. The nomination had cleared the Senate, but Byrd and Warner got the White House to call it back and return it to the Senate as a gesture of courtesy. This was an unusual request. By December the nomination was dead in lame-duck session because both Virginia senators wanted Bud questioned on a potential conflict of interest as a journalist since Bud was contributing weekly columns to the “Zumwalt/Bagley Report.” Warner warned the Senate that Bud’s nomination constituted a “very important precedent” and wanted him to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before proceeding to vote on the appointment to the General Advisory Committee of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Warner insisted it was not personal; rather, he did not want a journalist given access to confidential materials or sensitive national security documents.116
President Bill Clinton, with Bud Zumwalt as his counselor, became the strongest advocate veterans had ever had. On May 28, 1996, Bud, serving as chair of the Agent Orange Coordinating Council, joined President Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jess Brown in the White House. The press room was filled with veterans, many of whom had experienced firsthand the ferocious power of Agent Orange. They were there to hear President Clinton expand medical benefits for Vietnam War veterans by adding prostate cancer and peripheral neuropathy to the list of diseases covered. Clinton had come to announce that for the first time in history, the offspring of combatants would get benefits for birth defects they suffered. Clinton had sided with the veterans. His goal was “to ease the suffering our nation unintentionally caused its own sons and daughters.”
Before the president spoke, Vice President Gore introduced the “tireless advocate” who “has helped guide us down the road to truth.” Then, after thanking President Clinton for his support, the vice president spoke about the fact that for ma
ny years the government did not listen to arguments that veterans exposed to Agent Orange were entitled to disability payments as a result of their exposure. “I want to thank my longtime friend Admiral Bud Zumwalt,” said Clinton. “Vietnam veterans have had no greater champion.” The president joked about the “proselytizing of Admiral Zumwalt” over the past ten years. “No one has done more to demand that all of us do better for our veterans. No one has done more or shown more to take personal responsibility for our actions. Every single American with a heart and soul to love this country is in your debt today and we thank you.” The president then saluted his friend. The audience broke into spontaneous applause.
The relationship between Bud Zumwalt and President Clinton had evolved into a remarkably close one. In 1996 Bud served as an honorary member of the Veterans for Clinton/Gore National Steering Committee. Bud’s respect for Clinton went well beyond the Agent Orange issue.117 Bud never hesitated to offer ideas on national security issues that could contribute to the crafting of defense and security strategy for the next millennium. He was also unfailingly frank, as expressed in a November 1994 letter urging the president to recognize that with Republican control of the Congress, he would have far more freedom in foreign policy. It was imperative that he “devote increasing concentration to those issues and to enhancing your foreign policy team. In my lifetime I have found the brightest chapters often follow the darkest. I know you will find the same as you apply your great talents in the two years ahead.”118
The president consulted with Bud on a range of topics, starting with the lifting of sanctions against Vietnam but moving quickly to suggesting a replacement for Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, dealing with North Korea, enhancing the military budget, replacing Warren Christopher as secretary of state, and dealing with issues related to Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, and Agent Orange. Bud’s primary focus, aside from Agent Orange, was on the need to develop and articulate an overarching national security vision that demonstrated the inseparable linkages between domestic interests and international stability. He saw the task as analogous to Paul Nitze’s authorship of NSC 68, which provided such a vision prior to the Korean War. This vision could then serve as the foundation for all national security decisions, particularly for defense planning.