They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  The week Hanson was hired, Wilbur Emery sent a congratulatory note, chief to chief. “May your new position be replete with pleasantries,” Emery wrote, “and each challenge you confront an instance where the state university and our community benefit from your administrative ability.” Though he did not have a college degree, Hanson took UW extension courses all through the 1960s and was studying sociology and constitutional law as the world was cracking around him in1967. He read David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, looking for lessons on alienation and the reasons for youth rebellion. His instructor gave him a B, but his ability to deal with confrontational students won him even higher marks from the administration. After the 1966 sit-in at the administration building, then-chancellor Fleming sent him a note of praise: “Not only did you keep hours which must have pushed you close to exhaustion, but you remained good humored throughout and managed to maintain rapport with students.” After the first Dow protest in February 1967, which was decidedly more confrontational, Joe Kauffman wrote to him: “In the past year we have all come to realize how sensitive a position such as yours can be in calming or irritating highly emotional situations. We have all learned a great deal from our confrontations, including the fact that some cannot be prevented from being disruptive. But your reactions illustrate our reasonableness, as well as firmness, and this makes all the difference in maintaining the respect of the entire campus community.”

  As the second coming of Dow approached in October, Hanson understood that his skills would be put to their toughest test. Although few at the university knew it, he was also dealing with a career distraction. He had driven down to the University of Chicago early that month and interviewed for its chief of security job. Along with an expense report—twenty-four dollars for gas at eight cents a mile, three ten for tolls, twelve dollars for lodging, and a buck and a quarter for breakfast—he also sent word back to UC that he found his discussions there “inspiring” and that he had “no doubt that whoever gets the appointment will have plenty of challenge, but he will also have plenty of backing, which is most essential.” Hanson’s wife was from Chicago, they had just had their second child that August, a son, and the job at the private school paid better. The decision would take several weeks. In the meantime there were preparations to be made for Dow.

  At meetings with Kauffman’s team in the dean’s office, Hanson was noted for both his humor and his endearing way of mangling words. His favorite phrase, when presenting a plan, was “Okay, here’s the scene-a-rio.” “The what?” Kauffman might say. “The scenario?” “Yeah, the scene-a-rio.” The scene-a-rio after Kauffman’s October 11 statement was not so bright. A collision of wills now seemed likely, especially since the student activists voted at that October 13 meeting of their ad hoc committee (the one Hanson was asked to leave but that the undercover Madison cop attended) to go ahead nonetheless with plans to sit in and obstruct the Dow interviews. Hanson’s officers, and the off-duty city cops who would supplement them, had no riot training. There had been no physical confrontations at previous demonstrations, aside from a few minor shoves between individual officers and activist leaders. He did not expect violence this time, but it was possible, and he wanted to make sure that at least the men under his command knew what they should and should not do, so he prepared a six-point plan on police guidelines and another five-point memorandum explaining the “limitations” of police action.

  Every instruction Hanson put on paper seemed aimed at avoiding violence. Police would “exercise patience, tolerance and restraint, as well as good judgment,” he wrote. If established rules were violated, the first response would be for university officials to talk to student leaders. If violations persisted and police had to act, first they would inform the students of the violations and again ask them to conform. If that didn’t work, the students would be asked to identify themselves. If they did and the problem stopped, no further action would be taken. If the violators refused to identify themselves and kept breaking the rules, they would be subject to arrest. But arrest was the last resort, and if “in attempting to implement an arrest” there were “significant physical efforts of other students” to thwart it, the police would not force the issue but instead back away “to preclude further physical violence.” In that case they could prepare arrest warrants to be issued later. “Mass noise-making, chanting, and other disruptive tactics, short of blocking, obstruction or physical harm” would not be reason for arrests. And mass obstruction that was “beyond the control of police manpower at the scene” would be “tolerated” until a decision was made “to involve further police manpower or cancel the interviews.”

  Chapter 11

  Johnson’s Dilemma

  FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS WHO STROLLED over to the Rex Hotel in the hot, leaking heart of Saigon wanted numbers at the daily five o’clock military briefings, if only to question them. The Pentagon needed numbers, if only to bolster believers back home. So numbers in endless procession are what U.S. public affairs officers in Saigon provided. In the late afternoon of October 15, the numbers of war seemed imposing even at the end of a quiet Sunday.

  American and allied forces were in the field on sixty operations of battalion size or larger that day in South Vietnam. The Ninth Infantry Division had seized nearly five hundred weapons in Viet Cong tunnel complexes east of Saigon. Although cloudy weather over Hanoi forestalled bombing near the northern capital, U.S. air power pounded the lower panhandle of North Vietnam, with marine, navy, and air force pilots flying 125 missions. In the South, U.S. aircraft made almost five hundred tactical air strikes, and helicopter and fixed-wing support aircraft flew nearly eleven thousand sorties. Three U.S. marines died near Con Thien when an American bomb fell short of its mark, but an estimated forty enemy troops were killed, placing the “kill ratio,” as it was known at the Pentagon, comfortably above General Westmoreland’s preferred rate of four to one.

  What was the sum of all the numbers? Progress or no? Winning or losing? If only there were an easy formula that could provide the answer, the military equivalent of the Dow Jones average. Twelve mid-level Vietnam experts from the CIA, Pentagon, and other intelligence units were meeting in isolation at Vint Hill Farms in northern Virginia that week with the assignment of concocting an equation that would define American progress in Vietnam. Stay out there until you figure it out, they were told, but it would be a doomed mission. The war was beyond mathematical expression. Anecdotes and hunches came more readily, if with less precision. What did the numbers add up to? Readers of the New York Times Magazine would awake that Sunday morning to one old soldier’s confident answer. General Maxwell D. Taylor had made a grand tour of Vietnam in late summer, and now the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former ambassador to South Vietnam had his byline on an article asserting that “the cause in Vietnam is being won.”

  At the White House, military aides in the situation room kept vigilant watch on statistics flowing out of Saigon, and Lyndon Johnson himself pressed constantly for more reports like the one from General Taylor. He was in never-ending search for evidence to disprove, or discredit, the pessimists who had pronounced the war an unwinnable stalemate. He hungered for numbers and good news, and many members of his staff were now reassuring him with confidential memos brimming with positive interpretations. From aide William Leonhart, who helped run the pacification effort and had once served in the U.S. embassy in Japan, came a report on “A Japanese View of the War” based on a dinner conversation he had that week with General Sugita, retired chief of staff of Japanese self-defense forces. Sugita had arrived in Washington after visiting Vietnam, where he spent time with the First Infantry Division at Lai Khe. The general came away convinced that “Hanoi and the VC have lost the war,” Leonhart wrote to the president. “Much hard fighting may be ahead, but the NVA and VC can only lose more the longer they hold out. In Sugita’s view, Hanoi’s military may already understand this.” That had been the word spreading through Lai
Khe. Even Clark Welch had heard it, and in one letter home to Lacy he expressed surprise about a rumor that the North would stop fighting before the end of the year.

  If Hanoi understood, why couldn’t the press corps and the American public? Along with the drumbeat of skeptical news reports from Vietnam, there were also increasing signs of uncertainty about the war at home. Every few months in 1967, the Gallup Poll asked the same question: “In view of developments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam?” In May half the respondents said no. By July the figure had dipped to 48 percent, and by October only 44 percent of those polled thought American involvement in Vietnam was not a mistake.

  For war managers in the Johnson administration, the art of persuasion now seemed as important as the art of war. “We are losing support in this country. The people just do not understand the war,” the president had lamented weeks earlier at a meeting of his war council. After that meeting a cable had gone from the White House to the embassy in Saigon urging officials there to “search urgently” for ways to show progress. Ellsworth Bunker, the ambassador in Saigon who had succeeded Henry Cabot Lodge in April, was on his way to see his wife in Katmandu when the cable arrived. (“Avast, belay, I am on the way,” the patrician Bunker announced joyously in a telegram. “Great day yesterday. Assembly validated election just before midnight…and Boston Red Sox won the pennant.”) First things first with the ambassador, so his deputy, Eugene M. Locke, took up the progress assignment.

  Locke responded to the urgent plea from Washington with a long memorandum that was circulating through the White House in mid October. The embassy had stepped up its public relations effort, he said, and had developed a plan to “demonstrate to the press and the public that we are making solid progress and are not in a stalemate.” There would, Locke promised, be more comparisons of where they stood militarily compared with two years earlier, more use of captured documents to make the case, concerted efforts to brief the press in detail about pacification progress in specific villages, encouragement of “selected press-men” to visit those areas for in-depth stories, and “hard-hitting briefings” on subjects about which the press had expressed doubt.

  Locke’s central argument, echoed by General Taylor in his magazine piece, was that the Americans were “winning where it counts, that is, in the minds of the people.” Not the American people, perhaps, but the Vietnamese, or at least some Vietnamese. Newspaper accounts from Saigon that week reported “an intensifying anti-American mood” in the South Vietnamese capital, especially among students, professors, local journalists, and Buddhists who believed that the United States had rigged the election of General Thieu. But Locke’s countervailing argument that the Americans were in fact winning Vietnamese minds was based on signs of disarray within the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese ranks. There was ample evidence, Locke argued, that “the enemy is losing control of the people for his side. His recruitment has dropped off sharply, he is having food shortages, and he is having serious problems collecting Viet Cong taxes. Furthermore, he admits losing control over the people (see captured documents). This is a much more significant measurement of who is winning than territory gained.”

  The enemy documents Locke cited included a captured letter dated August 8, 1967, that described a meeting that day attended by twenty-eight Viet Cong cadres. According to a CIA translation it noted seven problems:

  The majority of the Viet Cong soldiers in Giong Trom district are tired of the length of the war.

  They are afraid of air strikes, artillery and M-113 armored personnel carriers.

  Leadership cadres do not want to work harder to indoctrinate guerrillas.

  Many Viet Cong soldiers robbed or oppressed the people.

  Many Viet Cong soldiers were undisciplined, used weapons to kill each other or have caused dissension among various units.

  Many Viet Cong cadres were not dedicated politically.

  Many Viet Cong soldiers were tired of warfare and did not think they would defeat the government of Vietnam or the Allies.

  A second document, captured April 22, 1967, was addressed to all district committees and party chapters in the southern provinces. According to the CIA translation, it “expressed concern over the number of persons who rallied to the Government of Vietnam [meaning deserted from the Viet Cong to the allied forces] following Operation Cedar Falls in January, 1967, when a large number of cadres [approximately 530, by U.S. military estimates] took the opportunity to surrender…some because of personal dissatisfaction with the Viet Cong.”

  Truth and falsehood, falsehood and truth. On that same Sunday at the midpoint of October, the Viet Cong were telling another story entirely through their propaganda channels. “President Johnson is now in a dilemma,” declared a broadcast on Liberation Radio, as translated by the CIA. “The Vietnamese problem is like an ox bone stuck in his throat. He can get this piece of bone out of his throat only if he agrees to undergo the pain of a surgical operation. But instead of doing this, he is trying to swallow another bone.”

  Colorful metaphors were part of LBJ’s Texas storytelling tradition, but the ox bone analogy was not one the president could appreciate then, even if in its own way it came as close to the truth as most memos reaching his Oval Office desk.

  THE DAYS OF OCTOBER had been one hard swallow after another for LBJ. He had closed September by traveling to San Antonio on the twenty-ninth and delivering a speech that was described as an “upbeat” account of the war but was aimed primarily at negotiating a way out. The United States would begin a bombing pause, he said, if Hanoi indicated it would enter into “productive discussions” leading toward a negotiated settlement. “Why not negotiate now? so many ask me,” Johnson had said in that speech. “The answer is that we and our South Vietnamese allies are wholly prepared to negotiate tonight. I am ready to talk with Ho Chi Minh, and other chiefs of state concerned, tomorrow. I am ready to have Secretary Rusk meet with their Foreign Minister tomorrow. I am ready to send a trusted representative of America to any spot on this earth to talk in public or private with a spokesman of Hanoi.”

  The most promising back channel to peace talks was already under way and involved Dr. Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor who was serving as an informal consultant and middleman for the White House. Since midsummer Kissinger had been orchestrating contacts between a North Vietnamese diplomat named Mai Van Bo and two French civilians, Herbert Marcovich, a biologist, and Raymond Aubrac, an old friend of Ho Chi Minh. The Kissinger contacts and what was known as the San Antonio formula became linked, and discussions about negotiating a bombing pause dominated White House deliberations during the first half of October, even as the president and his aides expressed doubts that a pause would have any beneficial effect. Johnson was uncertain but leaning toward a pause, though in darker moments he suspected that the North Vietnamese were “playing us for suckers” and had “no more intention of talking than we have of surrendering.” Day after day the full measure of LBJ’s dilemma came into view.

  On the evening of October 3, the president met from 6:10 to 9:32 with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, CIA Director Richard Helms, National Security Adviser Walter W. Rostow, and Press Secretary George Christian. Aide Tom Johnson was in the room taking notes. At LBJ’s request, Rusk began with a report on his recent trip to the United Nations in New York, where the General Assembly had opened a new session. Rusk said he held “forty-seven bilateral meetings and one hundred in various groups” and could not find anybody who could tell him “what will happen if we were to stop the bombing.” Even the Russian foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, was no help, claiming that the Soviets had “given up any attempt to try to influence Hanoi.” When Johnson brought up the back channel negotiations, he was told there might be an answer in two days. “Kissinger told them that we are against waiting any longer, that we are getting impatient,” Rusk said. “Bo wrote a message which is on the way
by air mail special delivery. In his phone call with Kissinger, Bo said something like talks will start after the cessation of bombing.”

  Rostow jumped in, pointing out a semantic discrepancy, as well as revealing his own skepticism: “To correct that, it was that talks could start but no other assurances were given.”

  Helms, the spy chief, then noted the vagaries of communications, even when they involved an issue of grave importance to people who usually had the most sophisticated technology in the world at their command. “There were some great difficulties,” he said of a conversation between Kissinger and his French contacts, “because we had an American who does not understand much French talking to a Frenchman who does not understand much English over a trans-Atlantic phone call. It is important that we wait and see what the written message actually says.”

  LBJ rambled into a monologue about the deficiencies of his South Vietnamese allies. He said President Thieu had to be pressured to bring more progressive civilians into the government. He compared it to the situation when home rule was established in the District of Columbia and he had told the new mayor, Walter Washington, that there was “a need to ‘get with it’ out there.” South Vietnam needed programs for health and education and land reform. They had to show they knew what they were doing. And Westmoreland had to snap the South Vietnamese army into line. “They have got to get in where the fighting is,” Johnson said. “We cannot have our fatalities running higher than are on the [South] Vietnamese side. I want to know it first if this is a white man’s war, as so many people are charging.”

  According to Tom Johnson’s notes, LBJ then turned his attention from the war to the antiwar. He had met with congressional leaders the night before, he said, and they had brought up the subject of a massive antiwar rally being planned for Washington on the weekend of October 21–22. The word from Capitol Hill was that the leadership “would nottolerate” the large demonstration, Johnson said. He had instructed McNamara to “get going on plans to protect the White House, the Pentagon, and the Capitol.”