Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  George Ball, the incoming Secretary of State, worried about the release of so many classified documents.

  “Hell, George,” said his just-appointed deputy, former Johnson aide Bill Moyers. “They classify take-out menus at the Pentagon.”

  “Besides,” said Undersecretary of State Dick Goodwin, “it’s a little hard to argue that it’s a state secret that we blundered our way into Vietnam.” Then he turned to Kennedy.

  “You should know, Mr. President, that these papers don’t paint a pretty picture of any recent President—including President Kennedy.”

  “Well,” Robert Kennedy said, “maybe we’ll get some credit for openness. Besides, if they’re like every other government document, people will fall asleep before they’re halfway through. The only way they’ll become big news is if we try to suppress them.”

  ONE OF THE MOST significant acts of Robert Kennedy’s Presidency came before he ever took the oath of office (not counting the birth of his eleventh child on December 12, a daughter he and Ethel named Stephanie, after the brother-in-law who had saved his life). The private, very secret conversations with Anatoly Dobrynin at Hickory Hill convinced the Soviet ambassador that Kennedy was serious about his warnings to Hanoi not to rely on his opposition to the war for more favorable peace terms from the American side.

  “You must understand the United States,” Dobrynin told a group of top North Vietnamese officials at an urgently convened meeting in Hanoi. “The reactionaries always have the upper hand. They always manage to put the so-called liberals on the defensive. Look what happened back in 1960: Richard Nixon was the most notorious anti-Communist in the land, but it was John Kennedy who called for the overthrow of Castro; it was Robert Kennedy who prodded the CIA into attempts to depose, even kill Fidel; and it was the Kennedy brothers who took the world to the brink of war over those missiles in Cuba, even though they knew they did not really affect the balance of power. Why? For fear of being labeled ‘soft on Communism.’ Robert Kennedy told me if his brother had traded Cuban missiles for their obsolete missiles in Turkey, it would have been political suicide.

  “And look at your own country. Johnson ran a ‘peace’ campaign against that madman Goldwater. And six month later, bombs were falling all over the North. Now? You probably would have been better off if Nixon had won. No one doubts his anti-Communist credentials. He could recognize China and get away with it. But Robert Kennedy cannot be seen as making too generous an agreement with you.”

  Hanoi had listened to Dobrynin, and not just because he had spent six years as Moscow’s man in Washington. The Soviet Union was a principal supplier of aid to North Vietnam, and more important, solidarity with Moscow was Hanoi’s best protection against China; hostilities between Vietnam and China had stretched back centuries. The leaders of the North had no intention of abandoning their goal of reunification. But if the nearly quarter-century battle had to be extended for a few more years, if an armistice permitted Hanoi to restack arms and replenish its depleted ranks, well, there was simply no way the U.S. would ever find the political will for a second war in Vietnam.

  This was not the only way Hanoi signaled that it was indeed attuned to events in the United States. On January 19, after months of opposition to the idea, Hanoi agreed to a standstill cease-fire: “a gesture of goodwill,” one Hanoi diplomat told Agence France-Presse off the record. So on the day Robert Kennedy took the oath of office, the guns were stilled, bombs were not raining down on the North, napalm was not torching the hamlets of the South, American TVs were not telecasting images of dead and wounded GIs at the dinner hour.

  (“It’s like that Yankee pitcher Lefty Gomez once said,” Ronald Reagan reflected as he watched the Inaugural with close aides at his Pacific Palisades home. “ ‘I’d rather be lucky than good.’ Fellas, make sure you cook up a good-luck omen when I take the oath in four years.”)

  On April 2, an interim peace agreement was announced in Vietnam. It was an unwieldy arrangement, premised on the idea—or fantasy—that Catholics, Buddhists, military commanders, guerrilla warriors, neutralists, ex-colonialists, and staunch Communists could form a governing coalition. No one could say with assurance that the peace would hold. But its impact on the home front was immediate and profound.

  By early 1969, the war in Vietnam had exhausted America—not simply with its cost in blood and treasure but in the acrimonious divisions that had torn fathers from sons, brother from brother. Three hundred young men—boys, really—were coming home in body bags every week. Five hundred thousand were under arms 10,000 miles away; hundreds of thousands more lived their lives with a summons to combat hanging over their heads. Millions more were in a state approaching emotional combat. Many Americans were outraged by the refusal of their leaders to ends the conflict with a massive force of arms. What are all our weapons for if not to pound the enemy into submission? We should win and then get out. Some had grown to despise their own country so deeply that they were prepared to attack Army recruiting centers, government offices, government-funded research centers, with homegrown bombs.

  “There is no telling,” wrote columnist Walter Lippmann in April 1969 on the fourth anniversary of the escalation of the war, “what might be happening here at home if the war in Vietnam were to continue. Who would dare look ahead three or four years and confidently measure how much more violent the militant young might grow, how many centers of learning might become armed camps, how repressive the authorities might become in an effort to stem the violence? If Robert Kennedy’s luck—and ours—holds, we will, thank God, not have to ponder this bleak future.”

  Had Walter Lippmann focused on Vietnam’s next-door neighbor, his relief at what the war’s end had prevented would have been far more profound. For years, Cambodia’s mercurial, thoroughly manipulative leader, Prince Norodim Sihanouk, had been performing an intricate balancing act among North Vietnamese troops using his country as a staging area, homegrown Communist guerrillas (loosely organized under the “Khmer Rouge” banner), the hard-core anti-Communist Cambodian armed forces, and the U.S. military, eager to attack those North Vietnamese staging areas. As hostilities in Vietnam ceased, so did the pressures on Sihanouk. So when dissident general Lon Nol tried to organize a coup against Sihanouk’s government in early 1970, he failed to enlist any backing—official or otherwise—from the Americans.

  (“I hope everyone remembers the last time the United States sanctioned a coup in Southeast Asia,” President Kennedy remarked drily. “If we’d stayed on the sidelines, Diem might have kicked us out before we had a chance to stumble into a land war in Asia.”)

  With Sihanouk holding on, however uncertainly, to the reins of power, Cambodia became little more than a footnote. Later, when a Khmer Rouge leader named Ieng Sary fled to Thailand, he published an account of the Khmer Rouge’s intentions called Year Zero, in which he claimed that the movement’s chief, Pol Pot, had planned to “wipe out” the “corrupt” educated class of the nation. And if it cost two million lives, Pol Pot was quoted as saying, “That is a cost we can bear.” The charges were dismissed by Harvard professor Henry Kissinger as “the delusional rantings of a paranoid.”

  IN THE UNITED STATES, the timing of the peace accord turned out to be another accident of fate. Across America, hundreds of gatherings had been planned for April 4 to mark the first anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder. In many cities, there was more than a little uneasiness at what those gatherings might trigger. Instead, they turned into solemn celebrations nationwide, marked by tributes to the man who had lost his life in the service of non-violence and justice. (At Kent State University, in Ohio, two leaders of the protest movement, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, announced that a similar gathering would be held on campus every year to mark the end of the conflict.)

  President Kennedy announced the agreement in a brief, somber television address. “The victors,” he said, “are the young men who will not kill and be killed, the countless innocents, North and South, who will not die
in the service of an illusion . . .” White House Press Secretary Mankiewicz was closemouthed when reporters asked what venue Kennedy would choose to commemorate Martin Luther King’s death. Their questions were answered late that night when a small press pool was summoned to Andrews Air Force Base, with no further guidance. Twelve hours later, Air Force One and the press and staff plane landed at Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base just outside Saigon. From there, Kennedy and a small press contingent boarded three H-21 transport helicopters, accompanied by two H-1 Huey gunships, for brief visits to four bases across the South. At each stop, Kennedy greeted the men, and spent a few minutes thanking them for their service.

  “The war divided our country,” he said, “but on this much we are united: America’s fighters put their lives on the line because that is what they pledged to do; and it is because we have men like you who keep that pledge, our security is never in doubt. History will judge whether the judgments of your leaders were sound; but you have written your own history about your courage and sacrifice.” (Kennedy saw no need to address the other realities of what Vietnam had done to combat morale: the statistics on drug use, the stories of enlisted men attacking their own officers.)

  He returned home to an American spring characterized by a collective sigh of relief and weariness. There would be no celebrations of victory, no ticker-tape parades, no iconic photos of young women dashing into the ranks of GIs to plant impassioned kisses. Nor would there be images of American fighting men fading away in silent retreat as an enemy’s flag was hoisted in victory. Even as his opposition to the war deepened, Robert Kennedy had said, “We can’t just run up the white flag,” and he was speaking not just of domestic politics, but of the lessons America’s adversaries would take from such a defeat. So the peace agreement was just that: an agreement between adversaries who jointly acknowledged that the costs of violence had grown too high. For ardent proponents of victory—Governor Reagan and General LeMay among them—it was “an ominous moment in American history.” For most of the country, it was a welcome end.

  (There was one event that did provide a moment of high drama; on April 28, the first contingent of American prisoners of war arrived at Andrews Air Force Base aboard a U.S. military transport. Leading them out of the plane was Lieutenant Commander John S. McCain III, a thirty-two-year-old naval pilot who had been the target of intense physical abuse—torture, really—when he refused to accept early release after the North Vietnam learned that his father was an admiral who had command over all U.S. forces in Vietnam. Three weeks later, as McCain mingled with the other freed POWs at a White House reception, he was summoned by a protocol officer into the Blue Room, where President Kennedy was seated with Admiral McCain, whom he had ordered home from his command.

  “I have a feeling you two might want to get reacquainted,” the President said. He started to walk out of the room, stopped, and said to the younger McCain, “When you’re up and around, I’d like you to come into the White House and help me make sure the Vietnam vets get what they deserve.” It would be the start of McCain’s career as the Democratic Party’s most formidable spokesman on military matters.)

  Politics and popular culture joined in 1969 in turning away from the war. Life magazine had been working on a major effort to paint the war in starkly human terms: They had planned to run a multi-page spread of the faces of American GIs killed in one week’s fighting. When the peace agreement was announced, the editors briefly considered gathering the photos from the last week of war, and then decided, “No one really wanted a last look at it.” In Hollywood, director Robert Altman had begun shooting a black comedy about a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Uijeongbu, South Korea, clearly intended as an allegory to Vietnam. By the time the film was finished, 20th Century Fox found itself with a fine film that audiences shunned in droves. The movie grossed less than $4 million, and plans for a M*A*S*H television series were scrapped. Fox had similar bad luck with its much-anticipated Patton, starring George C. Scott as the larger-than-life World War II commander. Audiences, it seemed, simply wanted no part of any story that kept memories of war—any war—alive.

  A more significant retreat—and one that strikingly demonstrated the law of unintended consequences—came from America’s young. The 1960s had been (simplistically) viewed as a wholesale rejection of the “silent generation” of the 1950s. One of the enduring legacies of John Kennedy’s Presidency was the Peace Corps, in which men and women, mostly in their early to late twenties, spent two years of their lives working in distant, impoverished countries. Even for those who never enlisted, there were enduring memories of the long lines of applicants that had snaked through campuses when the Peace Corps recruiters came to call. In 1966, Time magazine had chosen the “Under-25 Generation” as its “Man of the Year,” proclaiming that “this is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation, [promising to] infuse the future with a new sense of morality, a transcendent and contemporary ethos that could infinitely enrich the ‘empty society.’ ” Hundreds of commencement speakers had showered praise on the young as “the most idealistic, most committed generation in history.”

  “What it seems to be turning out,” wrote Jimmy Breslin, “was that they were idealistically committed to not getting their rear ends shot off in a jungle.”

  Not that all that many mourned the decline of the more radical anti-war elements, who marched with flags of the National Liberation Front, who chanted, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh; NLF is gonna win.” When the National Mobilization Committee to End the War called for a demonstration to protest Kennedy’s failure to order a unilateral withdrawal, only 3,000 people showed up; that was enough to persuade organizer Rennie Davis to cancel plans for a giant Washington demonstration later in the year.

  “As Dylan put it,” Davis said, “‘you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’ Right now, there’s not even a hint of a breeze.” Even Kennedy’s refusal to end the draft or to pardon draft resisters failed to stir strong dissent. Without the fuel of a shooting war, without images of American soldiers setting fire to thatch-roofed villages, the fantasies of a violent revolution led by middle-class liberal arts majors dissolved.

  (Kennedy was adamant about the pardon issue. “How do you justify that to the millions who obeyed the law?” he asked. Indeed, when one of his very young speechwriters had told him during the campaign that he intended to refuse induction, Kennedy assured him, “I’ll see you get treated right; I used to have a lot of influence over the federal prison system. Besides, a lot of the greatest men in history have begun their careers by spending time in jail.”)

  What also faded was the appetite of the young for any engagement with the wider world—unless there was great music, and corollary sensual pleasures to draw them. When Robert Kennedy first heard of plans for a three-day summer music festival in Woodstock, New York, he called in his younger aides.

  “Shouldn’t we be offering them something else to do with their time? Couldn’t we organize a weekend to repair slums, or clean parks, or help fix up some schools?”

  After an awkward silence, one of the braver aides spoke up.

  “Well, Mr. President, you’d be offering them a choice between three days of hard, exhausting work in the middle of the summer or three days listening to some of the greatest rock bands in the world, along with drugs, and the very real possibility of frequent, uncomplicated sex. I don’t think it’s a fair fight.”

  The President nodded, and said, “I hope you realize that you’ve just made the most powerful argument for keeping the draft. I think we’re going to persuade a hell of a lot more young people to sign up for a domestic Peace Corps if there’s the chance of basic training in their future.”

  IN THOSE FIRST WEEKS and months, Robert Kennedy offered a down payment on his Presidency’s promise. The issues of race, crime, welfare, poverty, and jobs were like old-growth trees whose roots ran deep and intertwined with one another. What he could offer from the outset were gestures, designed to demonstrat
e that his administration knew the challenge; and that meant throwing himself personally into the fight.

  He began with a speech to a Joint Session of Congress in early February, where he said that “the conditions in the hidden corners of America demand nothing less than a fierce urgency of action, not to right every wrong immediately—that is neither possible nor wise—but to bring hope to millions who have lived without it for too long.”

  Ten days later, Kennedy embarked on the first of what his aides privately called the I meant what I said tours, revisiting some of the places he had visited in his Senate years. In mid-February, he flew into Lexington, Kentucky, a year to the day after he had first arrived in eastern Kentucky as part of a Senate committee hearing. In a one-room schoolhouse in Barwick, at the Letcher County Courthouse in Whitesburg, at the Prestonburg Library, the President brought with him the news that an emergency jobs program would soon put a few thousand unemployed miners to work repairing roads, schools, libraries, and courthouses across Appalachia and up into the southern tier of New York State. (“If anyone thinks it’s an accident that President Kennedy’s first trip was to a heavily white region,” Washington columnists Evans and Novak wrote, “they are no doubt moving their lips when reading this column.”)

  At the end of February, he set out on a two-day blitz of urban America, beginning in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, where two years earlier he had organized a Community Development Corporation, locally controlled, aided by a blend of public and private resources, designed to rehabilitate housing and inject jobs into the largest black ghetto in America.