I looked around the room. The faces were intent and strained. Some of the strongest doves were there: Fulbright, Mansfield, Aiken, Kennedy. The sincerity of my words must have reached them, even though they remained opposed to the decision I had made. As I left the room, everyone stood and applauded.
I began the speech by describing how the Communists had responded to my recently announced troop withdrawal by stepping up their attacks throughout Indochina. “To protect our men who are in Vietnam and to guarantee the continued success of our withdrawal and Vietnamization programs,” I said, “I have concluded that the time has come for action.”
I used a map to explain the geographic and strategic importance of the Cambodian sanctuaries and to describe the South Vietnamese operation in the Parrot’s Beak. Then I announced that a joint U.S.–Vietnamese force would go into the Fishhook.
I stressed that this was not an invasion of Cambodia. The sanctuaries were completely occupied and controlled by North Vietnamese forces. We would withdraw once they had been driven out and once their military supplies were destroyed. The purpose, I said, was not to expand the war into Cambodia, but to end the war in Vietnam by making peace possible.
Setting my decision in its widest context, I continued, “If, when the chips are down, 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.”
For an hour after the speech I sat with my family in the Solarium while they discussed the speech and tried to gauge the reactions to it. Then I went to the Lincoln Sitting Room and began returning calls that had come in after the speech.
Just after 10:30 I was informed that Chief Justice Warren Burger was at the gate with a letter for me. I instructed the Secret Service agent on duty to have him shown up immediately.
“I didn’t want to disturb you, Mr. President,” Burger said, “but I wanted you to know that I think your speech tonight had a sense of history and destiny about it.”
I said that the critics had already begun denouncing the speech and the decision, but he said that he was sure it would be supported by the people. “I think anyone who really listened to what you said will appreciate the guts it took to make the decision,” he added. He also pointed out that anyone who thought about it would realize that, as a shrewd politician, I would obviously not do anything that might damage Republican chances in the November elections unless I felt that it was absolutely necessary for national security.
“Speaking in the greatest confidence, Mr. Chief Justice,” I said, using his formal title as I always did when addressing him, “I am realist enough to know that if this operation doesn’t succeed—or if anything else happens that forces my public support below a point where I feel I can’t be re-elected—I would like you to be ready to be in the running for the nomination in 1972.”
When I finally went to my bedroom around three o’clock, I found a note from Julie.
Dear Daddy,
I was very proud of you tonight. You explained the situation in Vietnam perfectly—I am sure the American people will realize why you made your decision. I especially want to tell you how effective—and heartfelt—your final message to the people of South and North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and the United States was. I feel that the strongest message which resulted from your speech was: We cannot abandon 17 million people to a living death, and we cannot jeopardize the chances for future world peace by an unqualified pull-out of Vietnam.
I know you are right and, again, I am so proud.
Love,
Julie
Reactions to the speech were along predictable lines. Senator Muskie said, “This speech confirms a judgment that I’ve been reluctant to reach: the President has decided to seek a military method of ending this war rather than a negotiated method.” Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota said, “This is not only a tragic escalation, which will broaden the war and increase American casualties, but is outright admission of the failure of Vietnamization.”
The New Republic began a front-cover editorial with the sentence: “Richard Nixon is going down in history, all right, but not soon enough,” and said my speech was “insensitive,” “phony,” “a fraud,” “indifferent,” and “dangerous.” The New York Times said I was “out of touch” with the nation.
In Britain, The Economist took a different point of view: “It is not the Americans who have brought the war to Cambodia, but the Communists. For years, North Vietnam has violated the neutrality of this country—with barely a chirp of protest from the rest of the world. . . . To condemn the United States for ‘invading’ neutral Cambodia is about as rational as to condemn Britain for ‘invading’ formally neutral Holland in 1944.”
Despite very little sleep, I was up early on the morning after the speech. I went to the Pentagon for a firsthand briefing on the Cambodian operation from the Joint Chiefs and their top advisers. As I walked through the halls to the briefing room, I was mobbed by people cheering and trying to shake my hand. “God bless you!” “Right on!” “We should have done this years ago!” they shouted.
The atmosphere in the briefing room was generally positive if somewhat more restrained. A huge map of the battle area almost covered one wall. Different colored pins indicated the positions and movements of the various forces. As the briefers described the initial success of the operation, I found myself studying the map more and more intently. I noted that in addition to the Parrot’s Beak and the Fishhook, four other areas were marked as occupied by Communist forces.
Suddenly I asked, “Between the ARVN and ourselves, would we be able to mount offensives in all of those other areas? Could we take out all the sanctuaries?”
The reply to my question emphasized the very negative reaction any such action would receive in the media and Congress.
“Let me be the judge as far as the political reactions are concerned,” I said. “The fact is that we have already taken the political heat for this particular operation. If we can substantially reduce the threat to our forces by wiping out the rest of the sanctuaries, now is the time to do it.”
Everyone seemed to be waiting for someone else to speak. Usually I like to mull things over, but I made a very uncharacteristic on-the-spot decision. I said, “I want to take out all of those sanctuaries. Make whatever plans are necessary, and then just do it. Knock them all out so that they can’t be used against us again. Ever.”
As I left the Pentagon after the briefing, once again employees rushed into the halls. By the time I reached the lobby, I was surrounded by a friendly, cheering crowd. One woman was particularly emotional as she thanked me on behalf of her husband, who was serving in Vietnam. As I thought of these men and women with loved ones fighting in Vietnam, I could not help thinking about those students who took advantage of their draft deferments and their privileged status in our society to bomb campuses, set fires, and tyrannize their institutions.
“I have seen them,” I said about our soldiers in Vietnam. “They’re the greatest. You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about this issue. . . . Then out there, we have kids who are just doing their duty. And I have seen them. They stand tall, and they are proud.”
That afternoon, while the tempest of reaction over Cambodia continued to build, I decided to get my family away from the White House for at least a few hours of relaxation after the great tension we had all experienced. It was a warm, clear day, so I suggested that we sail down the Potomac to Mount Vernon on the Sequoia.
It is the custom for all naval vessels passing Mount Vernon to honor George Washington, who is buried there. When we neared the spot, I had everyone move onto the deck and face the shore. Pat was next to me, then David, Julie, and Bebe Rebozo. As we passed by the first President’s
tomb, over the Sequoia’s loudspeaker came “The Star-Spangled Banner.” We all stood at attention until the last note died away.
By the time the Sequoia had returned to Washington, the indignant reaction to my “bums” statement that morning at the Pentagon had almost overwhelmed the response to the Cambodia speech itself.
All through the spring of 1970 the country had faced wave after wave of violent campus unrest. As with the disturbances at the beginning of 1969, the issues were largely campus-oriented, dealing with disciplinary regulations, campus administration, and minority admissions.
What distinguished many of the 1970 campus disturbances from all earlier ones was the increase in bombings and violence connected with them. Radical groups openly encouraged the bombing of institutions of which they disapproved.
In the academic year 1969–70 there were 1,800 demonstrations, 7,500 arrests, 462 injuries—two-thirds of them were to police—and 247 arsons and 8 deaths.
April 1970 had been a particularly violent month. For the second time, a bank near the University of California at Santa Barbara was set on fire. A fire was set at the University of Kansas that destroyed buildings worth $2 million. At Ohio State University protesters demanding the admission of more black students and the abolition of ROTC on campus engaged in a six-hour battle with police. There were 600 arrests and 20 wounded. Governor James Rhodes finally had to call in 1,200 national guardsmen and impose a curfew to quiet the campus.
It was criminal and barbarous to burn banks as a protest against capitalism or to burn ROTC buildings as a protest against militarism. But to me the most shocking incidents were those that I considered to be directed at the very quality of intellectual life that should characterize a university community. In March, an arsonist caused $320,000 damage to the University of California library at Berkeley. At the end of April as part of a demonstration in support of Black Panthers charged with murder in New Haven, $2,500 worth of books were set on fire in the basement of the Yale Law School.
The most shameful incident occurred at Stanford University. On April 24 an anti-ROTC group set a fire at the university’s center for behavioral studies. One of the offices that was completely gutted belonged to a visiting Indian anthropologist, Professor M. N. Srinivas. His personal notes, files, and manuscripts went up in flames.
When Pat Moynihan told me about this tragedy, I wrote to Professor Srinivas:
As did countless other Americans, I responded with disbelief at the news that your study at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences had been firebombed, and that much of the work of a lifetime had been destroyed.
It can be small consolation for you to know that the overwhelming proportion of the American people, and of the American academic community, utterly reject the tactics of the person or persons who did this. To say that they are deranged, does not excuse them. To say, what is more probably the case, that they are simply evil, does not make them go away.
I hope that the great insights of social anthropology that you have brought to your studies might serve in this moment to help you understand this tragedy. Please at all events know that you are an honored and welcome guest, whose work is appreciated and valued in this nation as indeed throughout the world.
I do not think that anyone who heard my comments at the Pentagon or who heard the tape recording of it, had any doubt that when I talked about “bums” burning up the books and blowing up the campuses, I was referring to the arsonists at Berkeley and Yale and the Stanford fire-bombers and others like them. The Washington Post headline the next morning accurately reflected my meaning: Nixon Denounces Campus “Bums” Who Burn Books, Set Off Bombs.
But the front-page headline in the New York Times conveyed a slightly different meaning: Nixon Puts “Bums” Label on Some College Radicals; and the inside continuation of the story was headlined: Nixon Denounces “Bums” on Campus.
Within a few days, it was the widespread impression that I had referred to all student protesters as “bums.”
The media coverage and interpretation of the “bums” statement added fuel to the fires of dissent that were already getting out of control on many campuses. The National Student Association called for my impeachment, and editors of eleven Eastern colleges, including most of the Ivy League schools, ran a common editorial in their campus newspapers calling for a nationwide academic strike.
At the University of Maryland, just outside Washington, fifty people were injured when students ransacked the ROTC building and skirmished with police. In Kent, Ohio, a crowd of hundreds of demonstrators watched as two young men threw lighted flares into the Army ROTC building on the campus of Kent State University, and burned it to the ground. Governor Rhodes called in the National Guard. He said that 99 percent of the Kent State students wanted the school to remain open, and that the rest were “worse than the brownshirts.”
On Monday, May 4, I asked Haldeman to come to the EOB office to go over trip schedules with me. He looked agitated. “Something just came over the wires about a demonstration at Kent State,” he said. “The National Guard opened fire, and some students were shot.”
I was stunned. “Are they dead?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so. No one knows why it happened.”
It appeared that an uneasy confrontation had begun brewing around noon. Finally, a large crowd of students began throwing rocks and chunks of concrete at the guardsmen, forcing them up a small hill. At the top the soldiers turned, and someone started shooting.
In the newspaper the next day I saw the pictures of the four young people who had been killed. Two had been bystanders; the other two had been protesting a decision they felt was wrong. Now all four were dead, and a call was going out for nationwide demonstrations and student strikes. Would this tragedy become the cause of scores of others? I could not get the photographs out of my mind. I could not help thinking about the families, suddenly receiving the news that their children were dead because they had been shot in a campus demonstration. I wrote personal letters to each of the parents, even though I knew that words could not help.
Those few days after Kent State were among the darkest of my presidency. I felt utterly dejected when I read that the father of one of the dead girls had told a reporter, “My child was not a bum.”
Kent State also took a heavy toll on Henry Kissinger’s morale. Members of his staff had resigned because of Cambodia, and former Harvard colleagues whom he had considered among his most loyal friends wrote bitter letters to him demanding that he make his professed moral position credible by resigning.
On a day several of these letters arrived, he came into my office and sat staring disconsolately out the window. Finally he said, “I still think you made the right decision as far as foreign policy considerations were involved. But in view of what has happened I fear I may have failed to advise you adequately of the domestic dangers.”
I told him that I had been fully aware of both the military and the political risks. I had made the decision myself, and I assumed full responsibility for it. Finally I said, “Henry, remember Lot’s wife. Never turn back. Don’t waste time rehashing things we can’t do anything about.”
I was shocked and disappointed when an apparently intentional leak to the press revealed that Bill Rogers and Mel Laird had been opposed to my Cambodian decision. The operation was still in a critical stage, and I called Rogers and told him that I felt the Cabinet should get behind a decision once it had been made by the President.
Walter Hickel, the Secretary of the Interior, chose a more public way to express his conviction that I should listen to the students and spend more time with the Cabinet. In what he later explained as a mishap, a copy of a letter he had written to me raising these points was already going out over the AP wire before it had been delivered to the White House. Several other Cabinet and administration members also took public positions of less than full support.
In the midst of all the furore, it meant a great deal to me when one of the two livin
g Americans who could really know what I was going through wrote to me.
I received a note from Johnson City: “Dear Mr. President,” it read, “I hope you have a chance to read this. My best always. LBJ.” Attached to it was a recent column by one of Johnson’s former assistants, John P. Roche, entitled “The President Makes the Decisions.” It began: “What distinguishes the Republican regime from that of Lyndon Johnson is that Mr. Nixon announced an ‘open administration,’ with the consequence that everyone above the rank of GS-15 feels free to comment on the wisdom of the President’s actions.” After noting examples of Cabinet members dissociating themselves from my Cambodian decision, Roche concluded by making the point that “Nixon was elected to make a choice and he made it. One can attack it on the merits if he so chooses, that is, say it was mistaken. Or one can support his actions (as I do). But under the Constitution no one has the right to impeach his decision because he did not consult Senator Fulbright, Secretary Finch, Pat Moynihan or the International Security Affairs section of the Pentagon.”
Kent State triggered a nationwide wave of campus protests. The daily news reports conveyed a sense of turmoil bordering on insurrection. Hundreds of college campuses went through a paroxysm of rage, riot, and arson. By the end of the first week after the killings, 450 colleges and universities were closed by student or faculty protest strikes. Before the month was over, the National Guard had been called out twenty-four times at twenty-one campuses in sixteen states.
A national day of protest was hastily called to take place in Washington on Saturday, May 9. I felt that we should do everything possible to make sure that this event was nonviolent and that we did not appear insensitive to it. Ehrlichman urged that we make whatever gestures of communication were possible. Kissinger, however, took a particularly hard line on the demonstrators. He was appalled at the violence they provoked and at the ignorance of the real issues they displayed. He felt strongly that I should not appear more flexible until after the Cambodian operation was successfully completed. As he put it, we had to make it clear that our foreign policy was not made by street protests.
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