There were many prominent reviews of my book, but the one that pleased me the most was written for The Washington Post by Ron Ridenhour, who had done more than anyone to help me expose the horror of My Lai. “ ‘Cover-Up,’ ” he wrote, raised “serious questions that cut to the core of the military as an institution” and laid “open to question the integrity of our top military and civilian leaders as well as the American brand of justice.” Ridenhour ended his essay by speculating that in future years questions would be asked about why the vital questions posed in my book “were allowed to go unanswered—as they surely will in a nation that has had the war up to here.”
Ron got it dead right, in terms of America turning away from the war. It certainly turned away from Cover-Up. The book was slow to sell, despite the advance New Yorker serialization and the reviews. It surely did not help that North Vietnam had initiated a major and immediately successful offensive on April 1 and pushed farther south with each day. The continuing failure of the South Vietnamese army to stand and fight, even with the support of American soldiers and American airpower, was beyond dispiriting.
I was sorry about the poor sales, primarily because I wanted more people to know that the insanities of the Vietnam War originated at the top of the chain of command and that the GIs doing the killing were being poorly served, in many instances, by their superiors. All of which made my May 1 date with the Washington bureau of The New York Times so enticing. I’d be reporting and writing for millions of daily readers. Bliss.
As it happened, my Times career began with a roar—at the Paris peace talks.
*Calley was sentenced to life in prison at hard labor for the premeditated murder of twenty-two Vietnamese civilians on March 31, 1971. The next day, President Nixon ordered him transferred from the army prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, to house arrest at Fort Benning. In February 1974, he was released from house arrest pending appeal. An appellate court confirmed his conviction, and Calley was returned to Leavenworth on June 13. He was freed on September 25, 1974, when his sentence and parole obligation were commuted to time served, leaving him a free man. He spent three months and thirteen days behind bars for the murder of twenty-two civilians in cold blood.
· TWELVE ·
Finally There
My first day as a New York Times man was Monday, May 1, 1972, and I spent it at the newspaper’s headquarters on West Forty-Third Street. I was to stay most of the week in the third-floor newsroom to meet the editors and my fellow reporters and get a feel, from the inside, of the energy that went into every day’s edition. I had not been in a newsroom since I fled the AP in 1967, and I hung around the foreign desk early that morning, listening to the editors check in with their foreign correspondents to discuss story ideas and begin shaping the next day’s news. I played it cool and spoke only when spoken to, but it was a long way from my days covering midwinter manhole fires for Bob Billings at the City News Bureau.
The news from Vietnam that morning was grim. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, whose political wing was known as the National Liberation Front (NLF), were continuing to make headway in their monthlong offensive and were sweeping down Highway 1, the main north-south drag, toward Saigon. Abe Rosenthal rushed up to me late in the morning and asked if I had my passport with me. I said of course not and his answer was out of a Ben Hecht play, something like “Go home, get it, pack a bag, fly to Paris, talk to the North Vietnamese delegation at the peace talks, and find out what the hell is going on.” I was taken to an office and handed an American Express credit card, an international air travel card, and a list of telephone numbers that would help in case of trouble.
Abe apparently assumed that my reporting on My Lai would guarantee me access to the Vietnamese. I wasn’t sure of that, but I did exactly what Abe wanted. Paris meant a late-night business-class flight from Washington to Paris, a plush room at the five-star Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde, a visit to the Times bureau, and my first meeting with two brilliant journalists, Anthony Lewis and Gloria Emerson. They took me to lunch at an offbeat joint near an outdoor French market, and we talked and talked about the war, about the paper, and, of course, about Paris. (Gloria later took me to lunch with Mary McCarthy, the famed novelist who hated the Vietnam War, as did Gloria, and was then writing incessantly about it.) Gloria and Tony would become dear friends and comrades in arms fighting the war inside the Times, but it never occurred to me that I would outlive both.
I had alerted someone I knew in Hanoi’s delegation to the United Nations of my trip to Paris, and shortly after my arrival I was invited to an off-the-record lunch—a commitment that is sacrosanct, or should be, in my profession—with Nguyen Co Thach, a senior deputy to Le Duc Tho, Kissinger’s counterpart at the talks. There were many reasons to agree to what could be seen as a courtesy meeting with the American journalist who had just returned from Hanoi. I was sure I would be told details of the current stalemate that were not publicly known, and at a minimum I would be able to privately fill in Rosenthal and the foreign desk about the impasse, as seen from the other side. The Times always had access to Kissinger, as Thach and his colleagues surely knew. I also guessed that at some point there would be at least one on-the-record meeting between me and a senior member of the opposition while I was in Paris, and what I learned from Thach would enable me to ask far more pointed questions.
The public dispute at the time between Washington and Hanoi still revolved around Hanoi’s insistence that President Thieu had to be replaced before serious talks could begin. The reality was that the war was being won on the ground by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong and no amount of American bombing and support for the outmatched and beleaguered South Vietnamese army was going to lead to a change in policy. The leaders of the North and Vietcong believed their people could withstand the American bombing and they were going to win the war. My extensive discussions two months earlier with Ha Van Lau and Hoang Tung in Hanoi had also left me with a solid understanding of their willingness to suffer to win the war.
I worked around the clock during my week in Paris. There was a large Vietnamese expatriate community there—perhaps as many as twenty thousand, some of whom supported each side—and their leaders had lots of contact with the North and South delegates to the peace talks. I shared terrific Vietnamese meals with as many expat leaders who would see me and wrote a story about the community, and the split therein, before leaving Paris. I was granted a background talk with a significant North Vietnamese official at his delegation’s villa at Choisy-le-Roi, a Paris suburb. It was a kick listening to him as chickens cackled in a courtyard somewhere behind us. A background conversation, however, didn’t do for the Times foreign desk. My story about our conversation, with its new details about the impasse, would have made headlines if I could have named the official, but it was shunted to an inside page, where it belonged. I needed Le Duc Tho or someone of equal stature to give me the lowdown on the record. I’d had a coffee a few days earlier with someone known to the Times to be a well-informed member of the CIA station in Paris who was undercover as a consular officer. (Such info was one of the perks of being a Times man.) I told him what I thought was going on, and he, understanding I would not attribute any information and insights to him, gave me an honest, and negative, view of the prospects for a breakthrough in the talks. I of course had requested a meeting with Kissinger or one of his deputies at the peace talks, but it was not agreed to; Kissinger, I would learn, chose to do much of his talking, on background, with James Reston and Max Frankel.
On May 8, President Nixon responded to the on-the-ground military success of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong with expanded bombing of the North and a warning that the American escalation would include the mining of harbors in North Vietnam and an all-out effort to prevent the shipping of war goods from China and Russia to the North. He also called for an immediate cease-fire throughout Southeast Asia and the release of American prisoners of war in exchange for a
commitment to withdraw all American troops within four months. I sensed I was going to get what I wanted even before I was granted an on-the-record interview two days later with Mrs. Nguyen Thi Binh, the charismatic head of the Vietcong delegation to the Paris talks. Madame Binh, as she was known, tore into Nixon and what she called his “speech of war” and mocked his conditions for a settlement—in the face of a successful enemy offensive—as even more bankrupt than previous offers.
Madame Binh’s criticism was unrelenting, and the story I filed later that day was equally so; I included none of the usual verbiage from Kissinger or someone in the White House suggesting that the President’s proposal offered a route to peace. The interview led the paper the next morning with a four-column headline, “Vietcong Turn Down Peace Plan,” and there was no effort by the editors to mitigate the Vietcong’s ferocious response to Nixon. I wrote a few more stories from Paris about the ongoing talks, including an analysis of the prospects for peace. Such opinion stories, not based on a specific news event, were known as Q headers inside the paper; they had rarely, if ever, been done by a reporter less than two weeks at the Times. I had made my presence known on the paper with a perhaps unprecedented splash, and I understood that Abe Rosenthal had made it happen. The paper’s coverage of the war itself, and the lack of progress, led by David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Charley Mohr, and others, had always been edgy, skeptical, and brilliant, and Rosenthal wanted more of the same from the Washington bureau. I sensed he was beginning to turn on the war and wanted his Washington bureau to do so, too, and I was to be his vehicle for change.
I finally got to my nirvana in mid-May: the Washington bureau of the Times. The city was humming with presidential politics. Many reporters were out of town, and I was given a temporary desk next to a longtime reporter for the paper, one of the few people actually at work in the bureau. There were a few pieces of mail for me and a large carton, full of books. It was from Erik Erikson, the famed psychologist and psychoanalyst whose first major book, Childhood and Society, with its concept of an identity crisis, had seemingly been on half the reading lists of the courses I took during my years at the University of Chicago. Erikson was preparing a series of lectures at Harvard and wanted permission to quote from my description, in the opening chapters of My Lai 4, of the slow descent into hell. It was not a surprise that Erikson was able to perceive what I had tried to do, aided by some sage advice from my psychoanalyst-to-be wife—describe without using any psychiatric or medical terms how a group of American kids could end up doing what they did at My Lai. I quoted Gregory Olsen, of Portland, Oregon, describing his shock soon after arriving in Vietnam when he and his colleagues “saw an American troop carrier drive by with ‘about twenty human ears tied to the antenna. It was kind of hard to believe. They actually had ears on the antenna.’ ” I wrote that a few weeks later “the company began to systematically beat its prisoners, and it began to be less discriminating about who was—or was not—a VC [Vietcong].” I quoted Michael Bernhardt, who grew up in a suburb of New York City, who said that the company’s officers thought that “everything that walked and didn’t wear any uniform was a VC.” It would take three months for Calley’s GIs to morph from occasional violence, always unpunished, to the massacre. In anticipation of my agreeing, Erikson wrote, he was sending me autographed copies of his published works. I was floored: Erik Erikson wanted to quote from my work.
Washington, amid an unpopular war and with a disliked president, was teeming with stories, and within a few weeks I was in the middle of a good one. Many in the military and Congress were mystified in early June by the sudden dismissal and demotion of General John Lavelle, who ran the air force’s bombing operations in the war. Four-star generals rarely got fired in wartime, and the Pentagon, which announced his firing and demotion, was refusing to answer questions from Representative Otis Pike, a Democrat from New York and former marine pilot who was a member of the House Armed Services Committee. I got an early taste of the power of the Times when Pike, who was convinced there was much more to the story, telephoned me—I did not know him—and urged me to find the mysterious Lavelle, who had gone into hiding, and get the truth.
No one in the media had interviewed Lavelle, and officials in the Nixon administration were not talking. The action against him was unprecedented in modern military history: Lavelle had been summarily fired and demoted one rank, but he had not been prosecuted. I’m not sure how diligently anyone in the Washington press corps worked the issue—summer was coming—because it turned out to be easy to track down the guy. All generals have a personal aide or two—bright young captains with ambition—and Lavelle, in his climb to four stars, had served in many commands in Washington and abroad that published telephone books; I knew how important military telephone books could be from my reporting on My Lai. Sure enough, I found the names of a few captains who had served as his aide over the years, and one of them, now a major, was on duty in the Pentagon. I telephoned the major at home, explained that I was a reporter for the Times and wanted to find Lavelle and get his side of the story. Being direct with someone in the military, I’d learned, invariably produced a direct answer. The officer, who was as curious as Otis Pike about what had happened to his former boss, gave me the general’s home address and telephone number in suburban Maryland.
I reached the general by phone the next morning and, as he lamented to an air force historian six years later, “conned” him into meeting with me. My memory of our talk is much different, of course. Four-star generals do not get “conned” or bullied into an interview. In fact, Lavelle readily agreed to meet me at a local golf course later in the day. I found him there with his two sons practicing on the driving range and I joined them. After a while, he asked his two sons to wait in the car, and we went into the clubhouse for a beer. I remember Lavelle took a big swig out of a bottle of Miller High Life, and I figured what the hell and asked right off why he was fired but not court-martialed. I’ll never forget his answer, given with a smile: “When was the last time a four-star general was court-martialed?” At that moment, I began to like him. He said he would tell me what happened if I did not directly quote him, since he had been cautioned not to speak publicly for fear of undermining the war effort. Because of that issue, he said, he could not tell me the truth on the record. I agreed and was glad I had done so, for the truth was startling: The war was going badly, and he had been fired for ordering the pilots in his command to bomb strategic targets in North Vietnam that were not on the approved target list. He added that everything he did was known to all in the chain of command, who looked the other way when the unauthorized bombings became known inside the government. He had taken it on the chin for the war effort. I told him I had to raise the issue of higher authority and somehow suggest in print that he had attacked unlawful targets at the request of someone high up in the Nixon administration. Jack Lavelle knew that I was referring to Henry Kissinger.
My dispatch was splashed all over the front page of the Sunday New York Times a few days later under an imprecise headline stating, “General Bombed in North Before President’s Order.” Some of the targets struck by Lavelle—anti-aircraft missiles, fuel depots—were no longer restricted by the time I got into the story. There were rules authorizing air force pilots to take aggressive action if attacked by North Vietnamese anti-aircraft rocket fire or if there were signs of radar activity at the North’s more sophisticated and more lethal surface-to-air missile sites. The procedure was known as protective reaction. Lavelle’s pilots had been cheating for three months—bombing with or without a prior enemy response—before getting caught. This was at a time when all air operations over the North were under constant monitoring. There was something wrong with the Lavelle story, as I wrote: “Was it possible for a battlefield commander to grossly violate operation orders and not be detected for three months?”
All reporters operate on instinct, and I was convinced that this guy was straight; there was no way he would chea
t so egregiously without knowing that he was doing what a higher authority wanted. My job, so I thought, was to find out who at the top had pushed Lavelle to violate the rules. I had flown to New York on Saturday morning to go over a proof of the story with Lavelle and to reassure him that he would not be directly quoted in the next day’s story. He took no issue with what I had written and even added an illegal target to the list I read to him. He had forgotten to mention it earlier, he explained. He was not ashamed of what he did.
I felt I was Abe Rosenthal’s hired gun and therefore free to make a crusade out of the Lavelle story. I wrote seven more articles about the issue in the next eleven days, aided by similar accounts from three present and former air force veterans who served under Lavelle in the Seventh Air Force. I had been given their names and contact information by an airman who was still on active duty in Southeast Asia. A former sergeant named Michael Lewis, then a student at the University of Michigan, who had been a photointerpreter in Lavelle’s command, described the activity as little more than a cover-up of obvious wrongdoing throughout the air war. That story led me to other photointerpreters who said that they were involved in the cover-up of as many as twenty illegal raids a month on off-limit targets in North Vietnam. I was contacted by a few Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who wondered, as I did, whether Nixon and Kissinger were somehow involved. A disheartened air force lieutenant on active duty then formally filed court-martial charges against Lavelle and held a news conference in Washington to voice his anger at the official cheating and breaking of rules. By now the story was getting widespread newspaper and television coverage, and the Times editorialized the next day that the officer’s charges should impel Congress “to take a harder and deeper look” at the Lavelle case.
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