I had one more push in late September, revealing all I knew about biological weaponry in a second article for The New York Times Magazine. The article’s headline said it all: “Dare We Develop Biological Weapons?” I quoted Max McCarthy and paid homage to Gaylord Nelson and came down hard on the Pentagon’s now riddled claim that its CBW programs dealt solely with defensive measures. The key question I posed at the end of the piece went to the core in a more focused way than I did in closing the similar article in The New York Times Magazine more than a year earlier: “Does the United States really need to invest funds in a weapons system that may not work and will not deter? Unless the military can satisfactorily demonstrate that the C.B.W. threat from an enemy is as real as it thinks it is, the answer seems to be no.”
President Nixon, more and more enmeshed in the Vietnam War, tipped his hand on the issue in October by requesting a multiagency review of America’s CBW policy. On November 25, he announced that the United States would cease production of offensive biological warfare agents and destroy existing stockpiles. He also renounced the first use of lethal and incapacitating chemical warfare agents and pledged to resubmit the Geneva Protocol to the Senate for ratification. The President had been under pressure from Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense, to get out in front on the issue and ensure that any ban would not impact the continuing use of defoliants and herbicides in South Vietnam. His presidency revolved around the war. He had defeated Hubert Humphrey by telling America that he had a plan to end the war; his plan, as it turned out, was to win it. In his memoirs, Nixon made no mention of his renunciation of CBW but dwelled at length on the burgeoning antiwar movement that fall. Antiwar rallies in October and November had brought out millions across the nation, including an estimated 500,000 marchers in Washington.
I was out of the CBW business by then. Early in the fall, Robert Loomis, a senior editor at Random House, asked if the two of us could have lunch when he was next in Washington. I looked him up and learned that he was William Styron’s editor and good friend. Styron’s first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, about a southern world of which I knew nothing, had overwhelmed me when I read it in college. I was awed by Styron’s lush descriptions and vast vocabulary. Bob Loomis was not what I expected—not lush, but precise, careful, and very direct. He ordered a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks and ate only half of his lunch, as he would every time we lunched over the next decades. He said he had read and liked my work and had an idea for a book I should consider writing—a study of the Pentagon and its ability to influence society. I could not help but think, McNamara, McNamara. I visited Bob Ockene at his apartment in Brooklyn and got his okay—more than that, his approval—to work with Loomis. I also learned that Ockene, then thirty-four, was fighting leukemia. He died a few months later.
I was proud of my CBW journalism, and my role in changing American policy. I had not lobbied anyone in Congress or in the White House about CBW, but had helped force a change by my persistent reporting on an issue that needed public exposure. Many others, of course, were important—and undoubtedly more important. Matthew Meselson, with his determination and lobbying of Henry Kissinger, had brought the issue into the Oval Office, as Max McCarthy and Gaylord Nelson had done in Congress. But I had been in the game and had been a factor. In his book McCarthy acknowledged what he called his “debt to those who have done so much before me in often more comprehensive studies, especially Seymour M. Hersh.” The praise that mattered the most, however, came from two brilliant physicists, Dr. Joel Primack of the University of California at Santa Cruz and Dr. Frank von Hippel of Princeton University, who published Advice and Dissent in 1974, a study of the role of scientists in the political arena. In a praiseful chapter about the role of Meselson, the book noted that by 1967 a series of questioning newspaper and magazine articles began appearing about CBW. “These were followed by several books,” Primack and von Hippel wrote. “Seymour Hersh’s Chemical and Biological Warfare…published in spring 1968, was particularly forceful and well documented and succeeded in raising a considerable furor.”
I was thirty-two years old when Nixon capitulated on the CBW issue, and had been in the newspaper business for a decade. I had learned that the U.S. military would choose to lie and cover up rather than face an unpleasant truth. I had learned that some of my colleagues in the mainstream journalism world were equally adept in looking the other way, if need be, rather than writing about an unpleasant and unwanted truth. I had learned that Congress was overflowing with members and staff with integrity and courage who were willing to take a risk and help a journalist whom they respected.
I had only begun researching my new book when, late in September, I got my career-changing tip on an incident in a village known as My Lai in South Vietnam.
· NINE ·
Finding Calley
By the fall of 1969, I was working out of a small, cheap office I had rented—less than one hundred dollars a month—on the eighth floor of the National Press Building in downtown Washington. My neighbor a few doors down was a young Ralph Nader, also a loner, whose exposé of the safety failures in the American automobile industry had changed the industry. There was nothing in those days quite like a quick lunch at the downstairs coffee shop with Ralph. He would grab a spoonful of my tuna fish salad, flatten it out on a plate, and point out small pieces of paper and even tinier pieces of mouse shit in it. He was marvelous, if a bit hard to digest.
The tip came on Wednesday, October 22, as I was doing research into cost overruns on Pentagon projects. I had yet to find an innovative way into the Pentagon book. The caller was Geoffrey Cowan, a young lawyer new to town who had worked on the McCarthy campaign and was an old pal of Marylouise Oates’s. He’d been writing critically about the war for The Village Voice, and there was a story he wanted me to know about. The army was in the process of court-martialing a GI at Fort Benning, Georgia, for the killing of seventy-five civilians in South Vietnam. Cowan did not have to spell out why such a story, if true, was important, but he refused to discuss the source of his information. His words resonated nonetheless: He spoke with the authority of one who knew more than he was willing to say, or knew someone who knew more.
As I’ve made clear, I had learned while on the job in the Pentagon of the gap between what the men running the war said and what was going on. The lying seemed at times to be out of control, and there were reasons to believe the war was, too. Even those like Mark Hill, who supported the war, were troubled by the reliance on body counts in assessing progress in the war; it was clear that many of those claimed to be enemy soldiers killed in combat were civilians who may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or just were there, living where their ancestors had lived for generations. My many speeches about the perils of chemical and biological warfare had put me in contact with leaders of the antiwar movement around the country, and I was familiar with the war crimes research that had been published by the Quakers and other church groups.
One of the most unheralded critics of the war was Seymour Melman, a Columbia University economist who became an expert on war crimes in Vietnam and directed the research for In the Name of America, an extensive summary of reported war crimes that was published in January 1968 by a group known as the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The dense volume, which Melman pressed on me, reprinted many hundreds of excerpts from American newspaper and magazine reports in 1966 and 1967 that depicted war crimes, including the routine murder of prisoners of war and the killing by hand grenades of women and children who were cowering in their homes during American search-and-destroy missions. The volume included a 1967 New York Post dispatch that offered a helpful bit of Vietnamese slang for newly arriving American soldiers—Co di mo tom, feeding the lobsters. The newspaper said it meant killing prisoners.
After a speech in Berkeley in early 1969, I was approached by Joe Neilands, a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, who had traveled to North Vietnam in 1967 and
participated in the questioning of three American GIs at the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal that took place that year in Stockholm and near Copenhagen. Neilands, who passed away in 2008, gave me a published copy of the tribunal’s proceedings, which included devastating testimony from the three American GIs. One of them, David Kenneth Tuck from Cleveland, Ohio, who served as a specialist fourth class with the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division, told of freewheeling raids on villages in suspected Vietcong (Vietnamese communist, or VC) territory in which there routinely were what he called “mad minutes” during which all Americans involved—including machine gunners on tanks—opened fire and poured “everything that they had into this village, because…we had assumed that until proven otherwise every Vietnamese was a VC.” Tuck’s public testimony was summarized by the AP and relayed around the world, but only a few American newspapers published the dispatch, and I found no evidence of any effort by the American media to follow up on Tuck’s assertions. More typical of the response was a venomous attack on the tribunal by C. L. Sulzberger, the Times foreign affairs columnist, that personally vilified Russell, a Nobel Prize–winning philosopher and mathematician, who was then ninety-four years old. Russell, wrote Sulzberger, had “outlived his own conscious idea and become clay in unscrupulous hands.” The tragedy of the tribunal, Sulzberger added, “cannot fairly be laid at the door of the wasted peer whose bodily endurance outpaced his brain.”
A question I’ve been asked again and again by others, and one I’ve asked myself, is why I pursued Cowan’s tip. There was not much to go on. I did not know Cowan. I had not been to South Vietnam. There had been no public mention, not a hint, of a massacre on the scale cited by Cowan. The answer came from my days in the Pentagon pressroom, where such a rumor, or tip, would be dismissed by all, so I believed, without a second thought. My colleagues had scoffed at Harrison Salisbury’s firsthand account of systematic American bombing in North Vietnam, and a few had gone further: They had worked with Robert McNamara and Cyrus Vance to undercut the Salisbury dispatches. I chased Cowan’s vague tip because I was convinced they would not.
I knew what I was up against: There was a huge difference between testimony at an avowedly antiwar proceeding in Europe and the tip I had been given. If Geoffrey Cowan was right, it was the U.S. Army itself that filed the murder charges. If so, there would have to be some official report somewhere in the military system. Finding it was worth a few days or so of my time.
I had renewed my Pentagon press credentials because my contract with Random House necessitated access to the building. My first step was to review all of the recent army courts-martial that had been initiated worldwide by the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the army’s lawyers. I did so, and found no case hinting of mass murder. I hurriedly went through the same process with criminal investigations that had been made public by the military. Once again, no luck. If Cowan was right, the prosecution he knew about was taking place in secrecy. I felt stymied and went back to collecting data for my book.
What happened next was, in a sense, a one-in-a-million bank shot, but it grew out of my respect for those officers who did their job the way it was meant to be done. I was in the Pentagon a few days later, en route to an interview, when I bumped into an army colonel I knew to be a truth teller from my reporting on army training issues while at the AP. He had gone to Vietnam and had been wounded. He was limping as we walked together and he told me, with pride, that he had just learned he had been promoted to general. I teased him about taking a bullet in the leg just to get a promotion, and he laughed, as I knew he would—black humor is a military staple—and we kept on chatting. What was he doing now? I asked. He was assigned to the office of the army’s new chief of staff, General William Westmoreland, who had just returned from running the Vietnam War. Wow. If anyone knew about a murder case from Vietnam, it would be someone in that office. I asked the officer what he knew about the mass murder of civilians in Vietnam. I remember the gist of his angry, emphatic answer: “Are you telling me someone who kills little babies and goes around saying he’s killing Vietcong knows what he’s doing? He’s just crazy.” I want to believe I betrayed none of the excitement that flushed through me. “This Calley is a madman, Sy. He killed people that were no higher than this,” he said, slamming his hand against his right knee, the one that had been injured. “Little babies.” He whacked his knee again. “There’s no story in that.”
I now had a name. There was never more of a disconnect between an honorable military officer and a reporter on the hunt. The newly created general saw Calley as an aberration; I thought he was part of a hell of a story that needed to be told. Needless to say, I did not share my differing view with the officer. I did not want anyone in Westmoreland’s office to know I was onto the story.
It took hours of poring over newspapers on microfilm until I found a three-paragraph clip from page 38 of The New York Times for Monday, September 8, six weeks earlier, that quoted an information officer at Fort Benning, Georgia—the base Cowan had cited—as revealing that a twenty-six-year-old infantry officer named William L. Calley Jr., of Miami, had been charged with murder “in the deaths of an unspecified number of civilians in Vietnam.” The incident took place in March 1968, and the case, as the army was depicting it, involved the deaths of what was said to be more than one civilian. No one in my profession asked any questions at the time, because no reporter then, and now, so I thought, knew what I did about the enormity of the case.* News of the charges against Calley even made the Huntley-Brinkley evening news, a popular and highly regarded show on NBC, with the network’s Pentagon correspondent simply parroting the official press release. He told millions of viewers that Calley had been accused of the premeditated murder “of a number of South Vietnamese citizens. The murders are alleged to have been committed a year ago and the investigation is continuing. A growing number of such cases is coming to light and the Army doesn’t know what to do with them.”
There was an element of doubt, even with Calley’s name and its correct spelling. Geoffrey Cowan had said the mass murder had involved an enlisted man, not an officer. I called the library of The Miami Herald, Miami’s best newspaper, to see if the newspaper had anything on Calley. There was one clip: A William Calley Jr., then working as a switchman for the Florida East Coast Railway, had been arrested by Fort Lauderdale police in 1964 for allowing a forty-seven-car freight train to block traffic during rush hour for thirty minutes. He was later cleared of wrongdoing.
I owed my next step to what I had learned during my days as an AP reporter in the Pentagon. I’d written about cost overruns and pilot retention—issues that attracted the attention of the defense specialists working for the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. I was especially friendly with a senior aide on the House committee, then headed by Representative L. Mendel Rivers, a Democrat with a locked-in congressional seat from South Carolina. Rivers was an outspoken supporter of all things military, including the war in Vietnam, and I guessed that there was no way the Pentagon would not have given him a private briefing about the mass murders, if there were mass murders, in South Vietnam. Melvin Laird, the shrewd secretary of defense, had served in the House with Rivers for eight terms and had to understand the political importance of keeping a key player like Rivers up to date on the good, and the bad.
I managed to have a cup of coffee with my friend on Rivers’s staff. I had also learned from my AP days in the Pentagon that officials with top secret clearances were bored to death by reporters seeking to pry such information from them. (Gene McCarthy hated interviews for a different reason—because he was asked the same question again and again.) So I began my chat with my congressional friend not with a question but by telling him everything I knew about Calley and the charges against him. His response was not to deny the story but to warn me off it. “It’s just a mess,” he said, referring to Calley by name. “The kid was just crazy. I hear he took a machine gun and shot them all himself. Don’t write about
this one. It would just be doing nobody any good.” I understood my friend’s concern, as a senior aide to the very conservative Rivers, but I was not about to stop my reporting.
The story, as I was piecing it together, still did not make sense. One young officer did all the killing? What happened next added to my confusion. I telephoned the public information office at Fort Benning and, as casually as I could, asked the officer on duty for guidance on the Calley court-martial. The duty officer said he would check and, after a few moments, returned to the phone with an out-and-out lie: The Calley incident, he said, involved a shoot-up in a bar in Saigon after a lot of drinking. I understood that the young officer was simply doing his job and relaying what he was told to tell all who asked. Calley was the story, and my man, but something else was going on.
So I had to find Calley’s lawyer. The court-martial records for his case were sealed, and I got nowhere asking questions in the Pentagon. I was pretty timid, too, about doing so; I did not want any other journalist to get a sniff of what I was doing. I liked being the best, the leader of the pack, and I sensed there was a game-changing story that revolved around William Calley, wherever he was. I was going to be the first reporter to find him. In desperation I turned again to Geoffrey Cowan, who, so I learned, was a recent Yale Law School graduate who had played a major role in setting up the Center for Law and Social Policy, one of America’s early public interest law firms. I told him I was stuck and needed the name of Calley’s lawyer. It was a cry for help, a shot in the dark. Two days later, Cowan called with a name: Latimer. Nothing more. I did not waste time wondering what else Cowan could tell me, or where he was getting his information.
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