After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  The group that favored a Guard buffered with some riot-control training and some blacks won out. Each Guardsman in each state was to receive thirty-two hours of such training, and blacks were to be recruited intensively. Some administration officials who did not agree with this policy quietly quit. The Guard had become, in their view, a crucial issue that had to be uncompromisingly met. The strength of the country, they argued, had always lain in the ability of liberals and conservatives to police their extremes. Now neither left nor right was willing to cope with the question of the Guard—the right (which was currently out of federal office anyway) because of a belief in states’ rights and a feeling that people who got in a Guardsman’s way probably deserved what they got; the liberal left, which was in power, out of a fear that facing the issue of law and order in civil disturbances would further alienate the radical left, and also because of a reluctance to tinker with the haven of the draft-dodger. The regular army and the National Guard, in any case, preferred to pretend that civil-disturbance duty was not the major responsibility of either of them but, rather, devolved upon local police officers—who, in turn, preferred to think of themselves as delivering babies and solving ordinary crimes. The civil disturbances were not exactly revolutionary. They were simply anomalous—flash reactions against urban conditions and inequities that had not been resolved.

  For a year or more after the crash patchwork job on the Guard, all seemed to go well. The black-recruitment program was a failure and the hours of training in riot control went down, in most states, to less than six. There was no uniform procedure from state to state about whether to put ammunition in weapons, or what sort of weapons to use. But the “long, hot summers” never materialized. There were all sorts of civil disturbances (including one, at Grambling College in Louisiana, which Guard archives describe as a “riot for academic excellence”). But in the 1967 march on the Pentagon, Guard units behaved, under heavy provocation, extremely well; and nobody was killed by Guardsmen in any of the urban riots, in April 1968, over the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It looked all right, as far as National Guard behavior was concerned. Even at the Democratic Convention in Chicago (August 1968), nobody was killed.

  Guard duty in 1969 began with a blizzard in Pender, Nebraska, and went on through floods, train wrecks, downed planes, tornadoes, ice storms, forest fires, power failures, a hurricane (in Apalachicola, Florida), a “collapsed dam” (in Wheatland, Wyoming), “haul water” (in Berry and Oakman, Alabama), “flood” (in Soldotna, Alaska), “civil disturbance” (in Zap, North Dakota), and “searches for missing persons” (in such places as Rice Patch Island, North Carolina; Tallapoosa City, Alabama; and Tofte, Minnesota). True, there were “college disturbances” at Berkeley and Dartmouth, but the Guard did all right—as it did in the Moratorium March on Washington in October and, for that matter, at a Stamp Dedication Ceremony for the late Dwight David Eisenhower, in Abilene. The National Guard began again to stress its role in the national defense, and National Guardsmen, by 1969, were running 40 percent of the country’s (militarily obsolete but still functional) Nike and Hercules missile sites.

  A Harvard graduate, class of 1962, came to New York the summer after his graduation and took a job in a bank. His employer asked how he planned to fulfill his military obligation. The young man didn’t know. The bank gave him two letters of recommendation. Within a month, he had risen to the top of the waiting list at the Seventh Regiment Armory and begun his six months’ basic training, before returning to the bank. A young advertising executive, a friend of whose mother was the wife of a veteran of Squadron A, got into the squadron just before he received his draft notice, and about a year before Squadron A became defunct. “It’s a total joke,” he said of his Guard training. “It’s a farce. It’s a stupid movie. It’s just one constant snafu after another. At the armory drill, you just get into what they call a ‘skirmish line.’ Militarily, it’s obsolete. The equipment is all bad. They’re all badly trained. They’re all stupid. At scenic Camp Drum, in your tank, they wait till the end of the afternoon to issue ammunition. There’s no way to give it back. You have to get rid of it. So you just keep firing and firing until the gun barrel gets red—shells that cost the taxpayer ninety dollars apiece, guns that will knock down a whole building. Once, somebody made a mistake and started firing his machine gun at us, round after round, before he could stop it. He just said, ‘Uh-oh.’ ”

  A Guardsman who participated in what was intended to be the first of sixteen hours of riot-control training at some abandoned army barracks in Southern California said, “It was chaos. It was total confusion. We were divided in half—half ‘rioters,’ half ‘riot controllers.’ Nobody knew what to do. We raced around shouting. Then both sides started just destroying the buildings. We kicked in doors and smashed windows. After twenty minutes, the officers started blowing their whistles. They barely got people under control. Even at Guard drills now, discipline is on very thin ice. Every unit has lawyers, and officers know that dissident Guardsmen can make full use of the law. Marksmanship practice is a joke. The unit wants to look good. The rule is: everybody passes. There is a tremendous difference between the troops and the officers. The troops are better educated. The old guys just don’t want to know it, but if there were a war now these boys simply would not go.”

  Right after the shootings at Kent State—when it was still thought that the Guardsmen’s tear gas had run out, that they were surrounded, that they had been pelted with rocks, that some were injured, that it was simply a question of panic—friends of the Guard deplored the tragedy, while opponents of the Guard said the Guard had all along been a “farce” and a “scandal.” But friends and opponents agreed that the fact that there had not already been many Kent States seemed to them “a miracle.”

  “No, we’re not, we’re just not bloodthirsty,” Colonel W.D. McGlasson of the National Guard said to a recent visitor, in the National Guard Association’s office at 1 Massachusetts Avenue, in Washington. “Why, I remember when you didn’t have the draft to send you everybody. There was a time when having horse shows and whatnot was the only thing that kept the Guard together. Harry Truman once said that he used to have to pay twenty-five cents a drill for the privilege of drilling at his hometown armory. Now we have become, in reality, a federal force. They can shift us all the way to the North Pole if they want to. The waiting lists have fallen off a bit in the last two, three months, what with the lottery for the nineteen-year-olds. But these kids that come in for six years and then leave, they’re not Guardsmen in spirit. People who liked the hiking and the training, those were always the heart and soul of the Guard. Defense Secretary McNamara wanted to reduce us to a force of three hundred and forty thousand, but when he asked the adjutants general and the governors, state by state—well, we wound up with approximately half a million. Now with this Kent State thing, the newspapers are against us. Probably seventy-five percent of the press are not like that. It’s the large-circulation ones, mostly. But then, you know, we never killed a soul in all those April riots over Dr. King, all over this country. And national defense is really the Guard’s primary responsibility. As for civil disturbances, nobody has found an ideal solution. In this country, we’re so accustomed to the idea that if we have a problem there must be a way to resolve it. Well, there isn’t always a solution. And the problem has been” —Colonel McGlasson shook his head regretfully—“just when the racial thing was starting to simmer down, the antiwar movement popped up.”

  “You know, a Guard unit is not a unit. It’s a rabble of men,” said Arnold Sagalyn, former senior vice president of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) and now a consultant on urban affairs and a member of the President’s Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. “They have no sniper or gas teams, no discipline, no army sequence-of-force procedure—where first you give a warning, then you fix your bayonet, then you load your rifle, and so on. They’re forbidden even to carry out civil-disturbance training in
summer. In some cities, they’ve fired at shadows, fired at ricochets. In North or South Carolina, I forget which, Guardsmen were clearing a school, and they went through the doorway too close and started bayoneting each other. What we ought to have is some regular force—it would take just a fraction of what we spend on highways—ready to get to a disturbance fast, trained for it like a firefighter, trained to contain it, every man ready to file a report whenever he fires his weapon. Right now, a few militants making trouble in more than one city could put whole states out of action. The only answer is nonlethal weapons—make people sick, make them uncomfortable. It’s better than killing them. When the draft lottery gets so that the only people who join the Guard are the ones who really want to be in it, you’re going to get the wrong kind of people, the people who like to break heads. When I think of the way it is now, when I just think of the power of death that we entrust to them!”

  “Now, Guard procedures vary from state to state,” Lieutenant Colonel James Elliott, of the National Guard Bureau, said recently to a visitor in the Pentagon. “Now, in New York State, I believe, the Guard in civil disorders is not issued ammunition. I am not aware of the procedures in all the other states. But Ohio. Well, I guess that’s one state where they elect to lock and load.”

  “I believe that the Guard has no purpose,” said Paul Warnke, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. “And to the extent that it has a purpose, I don’t agree with it. Now, McNamara and Vance, after Detroit, they thought if you have a disturbance you just smother it in people. I think what you do is you train the police to see that it doesn’t spread. That’s the only function that’s essential. Now, if I were a major-league shortstop I wouldn’t want to be drafted, either. But if this country has become so Vietnamized that we need Regional Forces and Popular Forces to deal with domestic disorder, well, I certainly don’t think it has. And we already have three and a half million men under arms. But if this country is really at a stage where we need a special Guard to deal with domestic disorder, then I don’t think we need a Guard anyway, because if we were at that stage, then I wouldn’t give a damn.”

  “The army prefers the police in domestic disorders,” said Colonel Dan Henken, a public-affairs officer of the Defense Department. “Frankly, we at the Defense Department want no part of it. In Detroit, though, we had to wean the citizens off the regular army. A lot of our men were black, and people were bringing them sandwiches and asking them not to leave. Saying, ‘We don’t want trouble, we just don’t want those troublemakers around here.’ But that’s a police problem. If you send in the army, the voters get upset. What we ought to learn, though, is that you don’t shoot. You make people uncomfortable. There was a terrific fuss when we used eight canisters of tear gas at the Pentagon in 1967. Eight canisters. The public now accepts the use of tear gas. The National Guard, you know, is primarily for the national defense. And anyway, they have a state-to-state jurisdictional problem. I shudder to think what would happen if there were a civil disturbance on the Belt Parkway between Virginia and Maryland.”

  In general, people’s despair of the National Guard as a troop of lethally armed, untrained state anachronisms tends to correspond with a fear of extremists, right or left. People who are most sanguine about the country tend to think the Guard is one more evidence of the kind of muddling, and mix-up, and loophole, and bungling that makes the country work.

  “Look, they said we couldn’t break up the caste system and the Klan in the South,” said a former official of the Justice Department. “They said, ‘You can’t turn the FBI around.’ The FBI at the time was hunting Communists. Well, there weren’t many Communists in Mississippi, so it was a pretty sleepy Bureau. The Justice Department started doing its own investigating for civil rights. And the FBI’s pride got involved. And one day they were sending all their best men down there. The South got to be the proudest assignment an FBI man could get. Well, now, you throw yourself at a problem and if you can’t break it you throw yourself at it again, and if you still don’t break it—well, the next guy will. Now somebody’s got to throw themselves at this National Guard Bureau. Somebody’s got to say, ‘I don’t care about the patronage, and I don’t care about the draft-dodging, and I don’t care how elusive the problem is, I’m going to shake up that Guard Bureau.’ And when the Bureau’s shaken up and there are some good men in there, they’re going to start shaking up the National Guard in every state right along the line and make something of it. After Detroit, nobody wanted to tackle it, because it looked like bad public relations. But now somebody’s got to tackle it or we’re going to have killings. At least the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest has subpoena power. Now somebody has just got to tackle the Guard Bureau in Washington.”

  “The Bureau is just the purse strings of the National Guard,” said Lieutenant Colonel James Elliott at the Bureau offices in Washington. “We just do what the Department of Defense tells us to do, and we are a liaison between Washington and the governors and adjutants general of the states. We think our performance in civil disturbances is adequate, but of course it varies from state to state. In August, when the American Legion held its annual convention in Oregon, the state authorized sixty hours of civil-disturbance training for its Guard, and there was no disturbance. But that was the state of Oregon.”

  The New York Times of Friday, July 24, published an FBI finding that the National Guardsmen at Kent State were not surrounded, had not run out of tear gas, had not been hit by rocks or subjected to sniper fire, and were not in any way injured when they killed four students and wounded thirteen others on May 4. The Justice Department’s report found that six Guardsmen might be liable to criminal prosecution. It seemed at first astonishing that there should be an FBI report so rapid, so candid, and so devastating about any branch of the U.S. military. But the agent in charge of the investigation that led to the report was Joseph A. Sullivan, one of two Bureau chiefs who in the early sixties turned the Mississippi FBI to the cause of civil rights.

  The Guard having passed, in its domestic duties since World War II, through four not quite discrete phases—civil defense, protection of civil rights, intervention in urban disorders (primarily looting) from Watts through Detroit to the King riots of 1968, and what appeared to be a phase of disturbance on campuses—Arnold Sagalyn, who was becoming less sanguine every minute, had become extremely concerned that the Guard was taking no interest in nonlethal weapons, particularly the chemical agent CS, which he advocates in lieu of deadly firearms. He pulled out from his desk a report he had prepared for the Kerner Commission two years ago.

  “Its effect on rioters in Washington,” he had written of CS, “was described by one police official as ‘phenomenal.’ Those exposed to this nonlethal control agent were strongly deterred from any activity which would risk another dose. Some police officers reported that they found it to be so effective that if they merely tossed an ordinary beer can, which resembled the CS container, a crowd would quickly break up and scatter . . . . It was found that dropping it inside a store that had been broken into immediately deterred future rioters from entering.” Mr. Sagalyn put down the report. “When you have half a million Guardsmen armed to the teeth, with no uniform leadership or policy,” he said, “and you bear in mind that civilians—farmers, hunters, Panthers, vigilantes, extremists, housewives—have more guns than all the other military combined, you pray that the situation isn’t as volatile as it looks.”

  In mid-September, the National Guard Association of the United States, the lobbying group to which virtually all Guard officers belong, held its ninety-second annual convention, at the Americana Hotel in New York. The association, which goes by its acronym, NGAUS, had among its guest speakers General William C. Westmoreland, Chief of Staff of the United States Army; Dr. Curtis W. Tarr, director of the Selective Service System; General Lewis B. Hershey, former Director of the Selective Service System (to whom NGAUS was giving an award); Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York (whom v
arious peace groups had tried to persuade not to speak); and Senator John C. Stennis, of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. Major General James F. Cantwell, adjutant general emeritus of the New Jersey Guard and still president of NGAUS, was scheduled to open the convention, but since he was currently under indictment in New Jersey (for putting Guardsmen on active duty to work in remodeling his house), he did not attend. Major General Sylvester T. DelCorso, adjutant general of the Ohio National Guard (and a member of the NGAUS executive council), did not attend, either.

  There was a bomb scare on the first day of the convention, and some Guard officers discussed the possibility that a convention of the Guard at this time, with these speakers, at the Americana Hotel, might be construed by radicals as a provocation of some sort. But the convention quietly endorsed several resolutions, some military, some having to do with holding next year’s convention in Hawaii, where, the adjutant general of Hawaii assured them in a tape-slide travel lecture, they would find “some of our aloha spirit, which is so needed now.” But the major concerns of the conference were three: how to get less obsolete military equipment from the federal government in what most Guardsmen predicted would be a “weapons fallout” from the reduction of fighting in Vietnam; how to get combat veterans to enlist in the Guard, and six-year enlistees to reenlist for another term; and, most important, how to profit from the “Laird Memorandum,” issued in early September by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. The Laird Memorandum proposed, in essence, an all-volunteer professional army, a “zero draft,” and a better-trained, better-armed National Guard and Reserve to constitute, instead of draftees, the genuine first line of reserve in the country’s defense.