Return to the Charles A. Thomas Papers (KSU May 4 Collection)

 

Blood of Isaac
an e-book by Charles A. Thomas

 

 

The day after Agnew’s speech, Mrs. Cary Mayes stepped into the back room of her family-owned ghetto funeral parlor in Augusta, Georgia, to begin preparing the frail body of sixteen-year-old Charles Oatman, just received from the city jail, for burial.   “He had been beaten something awful,” she noticed, “and there were cigarette burns on his hands and feet – and – and, well, there were burns on his buttocks, too.”667   When word of the condition of the retarded boy’s body got back to County Medical Examiner Irvine Phinizy, he did an autopsy over the strenuous objections of other local officials.   He found that Oatman had died of “pulmonary edema, bilateral; and subdural hemorrhage, moderate, due to severe beatings.”   He also noted that the corpse was covered with “contusions, abrasions, scratches, and minor lacerations” as well as “roughly circular lesions that were healing burns that could have been caused by a cigarette pressed against the skin…  All skin lesions were of varying age.”668   In other words, the 104-pound youth had been tortured to death over a period of weeks and perhaps months.   Ms. Mays’ less scientific description had already spread through the black community.   That evening about two hundred of its citizens gathered in the park and walked over to the jail to confront the police.   Sheriff E.A. Atkins informed them that Oatman had died as a result of falling off his cot and hitting his head on the floor.

            He retreated from this absurdity the next day with the announcement that two of Oatman’s cellmates were being charged with murder.   This still failed to satisfy the community, where it was suspected that the boy’s jailers had murdered him horribly.   Black leaders went to the city-county administration building to protest further, while five hundred of their followers demonstrated outside the jail.     They pulled the American and Georgia flags down from their poles in front of the building.   They handed the American flag over to a black policeman.   They burned the Georgia flag, with its incorporated Confederate battle design.   Backed by twenty of his men who held riot guns on the demonstrators, police captain Jim Beck – widely feared and detested in the black population – broke up the crowd.   Elements of it drifted downtown, where they started breaking in storefront windows and throwing things as passing cars.   The black leaders, begging with police to let them restore calm, hastened to the scene.   But the police got there first, laying down tear gas.   This broke the rioters into yet smaller packs, which lobbed firebombs at Caucasian- and Chinese-owned stores, and pulled whites from cars and beat them.   Meanwhile the sun went down.

            It rose again over a burned-out ghetto business section.   Six people lay dead in the ashes, all of them black, all of them shot in the back with the standard police load of 00-buckshot.   Three turned out to be bystanders.   Two of the bodies were found in looted stores.   There has never been any indication of why the sixth had to die.[669]

            The FBI announced it would investigate.   A week later, Spiro Agnew phoned J. Edgar Hoover, mightily upset because more play had not been given to pictures of blacks looting Augusta.   The American people had to be clear, Agnew insisted, that the police did not kill people just because they felt like it.   Hoover replied “they were severely provoked at Kent and we will finish Augusta, Atlanta, and Jackson this week.”[670]   There is no indication of what he meant by “Atlanta”.   “Jackson” was a reference to the capital of Mississippi and/or the large black state college there.   On May 13^th, some of the students had staged a protest against the draft.   As darkness fell the next night, a force of town police and state troopers, backed by the National Guard, surrounded a women’s dormitory called Alexander Hall.   Between seventy-five and a hundred students gathered in the yard to shout defiance at them.   Then – the authorities would claim – a sniper fired on them.   The students would insist the sound had been made by a beer can or bottle hitting the pavement.   The police opened fire, not on the yard, but on the building – “a thousand rounds in seven seconds, all kinds of shotguns, rifles, pistols, hand guns, everything.”[671]  

            Only the fact that they were firing blind into a building held the fatalities to two.   Student Philip Gibbs was killed by a shotgun slug that entered his head just below the left eye and penetrated his brain.   Another ripped through the torso of non-student visitor James Earl Green, mutilating his internal organs as the pre-frag had those of Allison Krause.   Twelve others were wounded.   The window from which the police would claim the sniper had fired was the only one on that side of the building not shattered by gunfire.   Gregory Antoine, standing a few yards from the police line, did not hear any sniper shot.   As the echoes of the volley died away and the cops began picking up their casings, he did hear a highway patrol commander say into his radio, “You better send some ambulances.   We killed some niggers.”[672]

            The FBI announced it would investigate.   On the 24^th, Jerris Leonard, head of the Civil Rights Division at Justice, flew down to Jackson to head off a confrontation.   The local authorities were planning to remove the bullet-riddled façade of Alexander Hall.   The students, certain it was a move to destroy  crucial evidence, were determined to block them, with their bodies if need be.   The police were backed by 1300 National Guardsmen and a like army of state troopers.   Leonard averted a wholesale blood-letting by promising that the FBI would take custody of the façade.[673]   They might have been less mollified could they have known that Leonard was the one who had prevented a citizens’ group headed by former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg from doing an independent investigation of the killing of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by the Chicago Police.

            On the 15^th, a federal grand jury rejected the police version of the shootings which had killed Hampton and Clark, noting that the decedents’ apartment had been penetrated by 82 shots, in response to only one round fired from within.   But it was unable to indict any of the police because the surviving Panthers disdained to cooperate with the grand jurors, who were mere whites and not a “peer group”.[674]    Fred Hampton’s bodyguard turned out to have been an FBI plant who had given the police a diagram of the apartment.

 

 

                        [T]he FBI was shopping around for a law enforcement unit that was willing to conduct a raid that it, the Bureau, wanted to see carried out, but

            had no legal pretext for staging on its own…  [T]he Bureau might have tacitly encouraged the unprovoked killing of two Black Panthers at a time when

            there was no legal way of pursuing them otherwise.[675]

 

 

 

 

            Thus every few days the text of Stone Mountain was underlined in blood.   The national news media thunderously underplayed Jackson State.   The New York Times did run the story on the front page, but failed to link it with Vietnam/Cambodia – although it had begun as an anti-draft protest and the ROTC building had been stoned – or Kent State.   As if the Stone Mountain speech had never been given – and the paper buried the story of Agnew’s appearance there on Page 69 of the first section of the mammoth Sunday edition – it dismissed Jackson State “as almost entirely a Mississippi phenomenon”.   And this time, blacks noted bitterly, there were no nationally-televised interviews with the grieving parents.   As far as Nixon was concerned, it was as if the Stone Mountain speech had disposed of the “Negro problem”.   In late May, a group of black academicians called on him.   John A. Peoples, Jr., the president of Jackson State, showed him photographs of his dead students.   “Nixon leafed through the photos, then suddenly sat bolt upright and said, ‘Look, what are we going to do to get more respect for the police from our young people?”[676]    A hopeless silence descended over the meeting. 

            Haldeman didn’t even think Jackson State, let alone Augusta, worthy of mention in his notes or journals.   He mentioned the racial crisis only once that summer, as merely a nagging problem nibbling at the edges of the President’s grand designs:

 

 

After a long discussion decided he has to sign voting rights.   Feels veto would be better politics, but runs real danger of exploding the blacks.  Doesn’t feel we’ll gain any votes with blacks or young, but will hurt with our basic constituency, but still have to do it,  against the will of our leaders.[677]

 

 

 

 

Nixon’s core belief was that the blacks were a hopeless cause.   Soon after taking office, he “[p]ointed out that there has never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true.”[678]    The South knew how to deal with them, and herein lay another aspect of his genius in formulating  the Southern Strategy.     The Harry Dents could handle it.

 

 

 

 

            The Stone Mountain speech was given the same day as the giant anti-war rally took place in Washington.   It was to have been the moment of glory for the antiwar movement, a magic reanimation of the corpse it had become by April 19^th – and for every other activist faction that could attach itself to the moment.   For the American left, Cambodia and Kent State provided “the first issue with a potentially mass appeal since the 1930s.   Every aging group fully intended to capture the opposition to the war, so that a victory of the antiwar movement would also mean the triumph of their own.”[679]   “There was an innumerable number of groups, each of which thought, ‘This is our opportunity.   If we can take charge of this thing, we’re really going to make it.”[680]  

            Perhaps if they had been endowed with the fascist’s instinct for cohesion and order, the leaders of the New Mobe could have held these forces together at least until dusk on Saturday, May 9^th.   But the leadership was made not just of different, but of opposite, stuff and couldn’t even keep civil war from breaking out among themselves.   And, as with the collective suicide of SDS the preceding summer, government agents within their ranks – even or perhaps especially in the ranks of the leadership -- proved resourceful in exploiting doctrinal differences, “ego trips’, and personal jealousy to raise the natural anarchism of the left to new heights of discord.     A classic example of penetration was the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), heirs to the Trotskyite wing of the Russian Revolution.   “The Trotskyists were certain they knew how to organize an end to the war and drove many of their allies half-crazy with their takeover attempts.”[681]   The FBI had tasked its moles since 1968 with “exploiting the ‘hostility’ among the SDS and other New Left groups toward the SWP.”[682]   By 1970 and after, those moles had in many cases become the leaders.   When in 1975 a federal judge ordered the FBI to keep its infiltrators away from the SWP national convention, the Bureau appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court.   “The FBI explained that its informants were such senior officials that if they did not attend the convention their identities would immediately become obvious.”[683]

            The SWP was also heavily represented among the all-important demonstration marshals, who also included Quakers whose doctrine held that even nonviolent resistance was too violent.   David Dellinger thought that the time had come for a triumphal explosion of civil disobedience.   The marshals threatened to go to any means to prevent this.   “I was told by the cochairmen of the marshals, one a member of the Socialist Workers Party, one a pacifist, that if I advocated civil disobedience, the microphone would be cut off until they could gain control and denounce the call.”[684]    By the end of the week, the New Mobe leadership was reduced to organizational paralysis, many of its leaders to mutual loathing.   And yet in his dread of the great rally planned for Saturday, Nixon would treat it like the diabolical, monolithic conspiracy of his direst fantasies, and so walk the final mile down the road from reality.

 

 

 

 

            The Times did more than run upsetting pictures on Tuesday morning May 5^th.   The article on Kent State quoted General del Corso’s allegation that his men had shot the students down because a sniper had fired on them.   (This would have indefensible even if true; the Guard’s own doctrine called on units to withdraw under sniper fire and send in specially trained marksmen to suppress it.)   But author John Kifner added that “[t]his reporter, who was with the group of students, did not see any indication of sniper fire, nor was the sound of any gunfire audible before the Guard volley”.[685]    And an Ohio reporter quoted a Guardsman as saying “he didn’t fire on demonstrators because ‘I didn’t really feel my life was in danger’,” adding that “[t]here was a lot of disgust among the troops that Rhodes sent us in.    It wasn’t necessary.   It was a waste of time, effort, and, as it turned out, lives.”[686]

            That was not the only buzzard perched on the Oval Office lintel.   The American Civil Liberties Union greeted the White House with a telegram announcing that it would conduct its own investigation of the incident “to dispel the discrediting doubts occasioned by the government’s investigation of itself.”[687]    “Reaction very tough to the four killed at Kent State yesterday,” Haldeman noted glumly, “All our people trying to figure how best to handle -- & whether P. can perform any useful role.”   He hope that the tidal outrage could be muted by news of some smashing victory coming out of Cambodia.   “If not, we’re in for a bundle of trouble.”[688]

            Trouble was on the way and in the form that drove Nixon to frothing rage – treachery within his own cabinet.   His Interior Secretary, Walter J. (Wally) Hickel, a developer who had scarred the Alaskan landscape with housing projects and shopping centers, might have been appointed to deliberately infuriate the new environmental movement.   But he was also a genuine extravert who liked and listened to people.   And he had listened intently to the earnest young people who had invaded his agency on the first Earth Day the month before.   At his usual staff meeting at 8:30 a.m. on the 5^th, the usual banter went unheard and no one could concentrate on the agenda.    Finally his aide Mitch Melich said what was on everyone’s mind:           

 

 

I had a call from my daughter at the University of Utah last night.   She said the students out there are desperate.  They’re lost and angry.   She’s afraid her campus will explode like Kent State.   Could we ask Mike Levett how he assesses the situation?

 

 

 

 

Levett’s assessment was stark: Interior’s carefully crafted youth-outreach program had been leveled to smoking ruins since April 30^th.   No one connected with the administration had any credibility left in Academe.[689]   Hickel cancelled all his appointments and spent the rest of the day trying to get in to see the President or at least, Ehrlichman.   He was told the President couldn’t see him and that Ehrlichman was out of town (he wasn’t).   He finally went back to Interior and drafted and re-drafted a letter to Nixon.   He couldn’t get the wording right.   He circulated copies among his staff for their ideas.   They couldn’t help him get it in the shape that he wanted.

            Very early the next morning, Hickel sat up in bed and told his startled wife he knew what the letter had to say: the lesson of the American Revolution, whose ideals were framed by young men like Thomas Jefferson, was that government had to listen to those still young enough to have ideals.   He charged into his office at first light, dictated the letter, circulated this draft for comments, and then signed it.   His aide Dave Parker hand-delivered it to the White House twenty minutes later.   “Haldeman called me back about eleven-thirty or twelve and said, ‘I have the letter, but it’s already on the AP wire.’”[690]   Hickel realized that one of the drafts he had circulated the day before must have been leaked to the press.   He was sure the President would understand if only he could get to talk to him.

            Just before Hickel had phoned Haldeman, Ehrlichman had brought six Kent State students in to see the President.   Haldeman decided that “[t]he Kent State 6 was a good group & meeting went very well.”   Ehrlichman remembered it differently:

 

 

They were mostly tongue-tied before the president.   During one full hour, the communications hardly went beyond halting, embarrassing exchanges.   The students, despite their obvious agitation, remained frozen in the presence of the chief executive.   Nixon himself found the session trying and  unproductive, a test of patience rather than a valuable encounter.[691]

 

 

 

 

“As day went on, concern from outside re campus crisis built rapidly.”   Nixon “obviously realizes – but won’t admit it – his ‘bums’ remark very harmful.”[692]    The plans for the trip West were forgotten, to be replaced by elaborate defensive maneuvers: a meeting with selected university presidents the next day, a press conference Friday evening, and a meeting of the nation’s governors on Monday.   That afternoon Nixon convened a war council with his real cabinet – Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger – in the Executive Office Building.   Its theme: “Very aware of point that goal of the Left is to panic us – so we must not fall into their trap.”

 

 

P. realizes he’s up against a real tough one.   K. wants to just let the student go on a tear for a couple of weeks, then move in & clobber them   E. wants to communicate – esp. symbolically.    All agreed to the plan – but K. very concerned that we not appear to give in in any way.    Thinks P. can really clobber them if we just wait for Cambodian success.   I disagree – because then there’ll be a new excuse.[693]

 

 

 

 

            Haldeman knew that the Hickel letter had been leaked to the press without its author’s knowledge.   There is no record of whether he told Nixon.   It is problematical whether anyone knew what kind of play it would receive.   On the morning of the 7^th, the Times headlined “Hickel, In Note to Nixon, Charges Administration Is Failing Youth; Protests Close over 80 Colleges”, with subheads like “Agnew Criticized” and “Discontent Is Believed Spreading in Ranks of Government”.   Hickel called the White House again to explain.   Ehrlichman reassured him, “The President understands.   Don’t worry, Wally.”[694]   The President understood.   Hickel had betrayed him.   And not just Hickel.   Laird, Rogers – they were all disloyal.  

 

 

This led to a rising ‘anti-Cabinet’ feeling as he thought more about it.   Went back to deep resentment that none called him after speech & and none rose to his defense on this deal.   So he struck back by ordering the tennis court removed immediately.[695]

 

 

 

 

(Haldeman appends a note in his published Diaries to explain that Nixon didn’t play tennis but had let cabinet officers use the White House courts.   Now he would rip them out to spite them [not Haldeman’s wording].   Nixon added a curt order: “no more Cab. use of C.D. [Camp David].)[696]

            While Nixon was railing to Haldeman about the tennis courts, Ehrlichman received the worst new yet.    He received a memo from Jerris Leonard to the effect that, on the basis of the evidence the FBI was turning up at Kent State, the department might have no choice but to empanel a grand jury to determine whether the slain students had been deprived of their Constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights.[697]   Nixon the attorney knew that a grand jury probe could lead anywhere, including back up the path to the White House door.   Ehrlichman immediately called the FBI “concerning the Kent situation.   He said that he now has to get something to show what was being done and have it by early afternoon tomorrow, May 8, 1970, because they were pushing for it.”[698]

            At 11:12 on the morning of Thursday the 7^th, the White House opened a meeting with eight college presidents that lasted for an hour and a half.   When they emerged, the presidents told the press that they had received a commitment from Nixon that the inflammatory attacks on students by “administration officials” (i.e., the vice president) would cease.   They reported that the President had admitted that Agnew’s insensate remarks made a few hours after the Kent murders had finally gone too far.[699]   They neglected to even mention the most remarkable aspect of the meeting: an early explication of Nixon’s own theory on campus unrest, which he would claim was based on what the Kent State students had told him the day before.   (As noted, according to Ehrlichman, the students hadn’t said much of anything.)   “The students told him that the issue of Black Power had actually started the demonstration at Kent State, although Cambodia and Vietnam were soon added as issues.”[700]

            In the afternoon, the President took Haldeman on a tour of the south grounds, initially to underline his new obsession with ripping out the tennis courts.   But he quickly lapsed into a complaint about “life in general”.   Everyone expected him to do something about the national crisis and he was “basically helpless to deal with it”.   He was defeated at every turn by the media “as they build up everything to look as bad as possible”.   His impression of that day’s interface with Academe was that “the Univ. presidents were all scared to death – feels this now includes the non-radical students.”   (He did not say by whom, but, presumably, the radical students.)[701]   (Of course, if the college presidents had said any such thing, they omitted mentioning it to the press.)   Nixon then flew up to Camp David to study the briefing books for the press conference scheduled for the following evening.   It is unknown whether he watched any late television, specifically The David Frost Show.     If he did, it scarcely could have lulled him to sleep.     Spiro Agnew was the guest and, under orders to say nothing reflecting on the students, perhaps over-corrected:

 

 

DAVID FROST:  What if it is discovered there was no shot fired at them by a sniper and they just opened fire without a warning shot or anything?  Not having been fired on in any way; in that sense, what is the word for that, murder?

SPIRO AGNEW:   Yes, but not first degree…   when there is no premeditation but simply an over-response in the heat of anger that results in a killing, it’s murder.   It’s not premeditated but it’s murder and certainly can’t be condoned.[702]

 

 

 

 

Agnew made it clear that he was speaking as an attorney.    And Nixon the attorney knew that there was no statute of limitations on murder.

 

 

 

 

            By the afternoon of the 8^th, the protestors were already pouring into Washington for the antiwar rally the next day.   Kissinger’s military aide Al Haig welcomed them with a sneer as they filed past the White House fence, “waving their Vietcong flags and shouting their slogans and obscenities…  [T]he scene was a combination of demonic ceremony, class picnic, collective tantrum, and mating ritual…   They were a herd.”[703]   But he stayed inside the fence.   When Wally Hickel arrived, still trying to explain his letter and how it had gotten to the press, he had to use the side door; the main entrance had been sealed to prevent an invasion by the mob.   The only one who would speak to him was publicist Herb Klein.  “[I] said there was little he could say in clarification which would help.   He had jumped from the team.”[704]   Outside the fence, two concentric circles of D.C. transit buses were being drawn up around the White House grounds.   According to the newly-appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, “this same group that was at Kent” was plotting to have a student killed on the White House grounds, and the buses would keep him and his comrades out.[705]   Klein recalled a less specific threat of a “mob” storming the executive mansion.   “If some made it over the bus wall in numbers, they could be met by National Guardsmen who had been brought into the White House and bivouacked in our halls and offices.”[706]

            But the Enemy expected with such dread was too busy fighting itself to do anything else.   Now the administration’s gambit with the buses unwittingly triggered the final split between the “Trots” and Dellinger’s faction.

 

 

[T]he Trots were opposed to the sit-in.   The White House was already encircled with buses.   If we circled it with people, they said, there could be provocateurs who would set the buses on fire and blame it on us.   So the marshals (who had been trained by Bradford Lyttle and the Socialist Workers’  Party’s Fred Halstead) labeled CD [civil disobedience] as violent.   They violence-baited it.[707]

 

 

 

 

Dellinger walked out, pleading previously-scheduled speaking engagements.   And then, at the last possible instant, the Justice Department reversed its field.   It had been denying the demonstrators use of the Ellipse, the grassy common across the street from the White House, all week.   Now it was suddenly granted.   Was it a brilliant ploy to throw the Mobe into chaos – or further chaos than their plants had told them of?   Haldeman’s notes suggest not.   Mitchell was against the grant of permission, and Ehrlichman promoted it more as p.r. insurance than a chess move, although he was undoubtedly motivated by his horror at the prospect of an alternative scenario to cram the crowd into a kill zone at 16^th and H Streets.[708]   But the grant threw the Mobe into chaos anyway.   Its leaders now had to remake all their plans for accommodating a hundred and fifty thousand protestors as of dawn: microphones and sound systems, press releases and first aid stations, drinking water, police liaison, portable toilets --    And they hadn’t yet settled on a program.

 

 

 

 

            The President chopped in to his besieged White House in early evening, also at the last minute.   He looked, yet again, as if he hadn’t gotten any sleep.   He was extremely nervous about the press conference.   “Had said absolutely no phone calls after (because he was really concerned and unsure about this one.”[709]His media experts had arrived at the tactic of holding the press conferences late.   This one was delayed an hour, from nine to ten, so it would not have to compete with a basketball game on ABC (proving yet again that Nixon knew his audience).   “The networks volunteered to squeeze the President in at half-time, but he  refused.”[710]    Thus the reporters would be left with only minutes to file their stories before their papers had to go to press.   Some of them were reduced to composing their stories in their heads while the question-and-answer was in progress, which could only lead to fewer and less cogent questions.   But there must have been other factors as well that turned this into the most one-sided walk-over in presidential-media relations:

 

 

Rarely has a news conference been as pallid or synthetic a ritual as the one last May 8…  a pale shadow of the passion and trauma of the nation.  It was as real-life as a minuet, as illuminating as a multiplication table… more a fusillade of spitballs at 50 paces than a searching examination of the President’s mood and motives at a moment of crisis…   Mr. Nixon [was] as smooth as a cueball, and about as communicative.[711]

 

 

 

 

            Nixon himself could not believe it.   He had faced his second most dread enemy and toyed with them.   As on learning that the Apollo XIII astronauts were safe, his mood changed completely and even more dramatically.   He immediately rescinded the order about taking no phone calls when the press conference was over.   “Then he stayed up ‘til after 1:00 on the calls -- & we ran a batch through.   He was very tired and rambled a lot.”   What Haldeman actually meant was that he left the grounds around that time (“In trying to leave we were jammed in by the troop trucks unloading the 3^rd Army into the EOB.”)[712]    When he got home, ready to collapse onto his bed, Nixon was on the phone to him.   And the President called everyone else he could think of, some multiple times (like Kissinger and Billy Graham), staying on the phone until 4:22 a.m. – pausing for only an hour in a vain attempt to get some sleep – fifty calls in all.   He has depicted himself as roaming the halls, playing Rachmaninoff on the stereo in an attempt to soothe his nerves.   Finally, with everyone else departed, he sought out the one person he knew would still be there.   (“Haig’s always down there,” he had said once, indicating the West Basement, “while Kissinger is off having dinner in Georgetown.”[713] )  And now at this earliest of morning hours, the newly-minted general looked up to see his chief standing before him, “somewhat disheveled – tie a little askew, coat unbuttoned, hair slightly tousled.”   Nixon smiled wanly at his loyal retainer and said, “We’ve had a rough day, Al.   Things are bad out there.   But we’ve got to stick to our guns.   We’ve done the right thing and we have to go on.”[714]

            Just before dawn, a young aide named Egil Krogh who had the midnight watch was jolted awake by a call from the Secret Service:  Searchlight – the SS code name for the President – was on the lawn.   The agent said that Nixon had told him neither the press nor anyone on his staff was to be informed that he was going outside.   Krogh called Ehrlichman at the latter’s home to understate the problem: “it’s probably not a good thing for him to be out and about at this time in the morning” with thousands of people pouring into town to protest his policies.   Ehrlichman said to get the President back inside at once.   But when Krogh got out onto the lawn, Nixon was gone.

            Three coeds from Syracuse University wandered onto the Mall shortly after this, exhausted by the long drive to D.C.   As they started up the steps to the Lincoln Memorial, Secret Service agents told them to keep to the sides of the staircase.   A young man passed them, descending and muttering, “Freaky, freaky, freaky.   You gotta go up there and see for yourself.”   Before they could ask him what he meant, an older man came down to meet them “arms outstretched, in a Fellini-esque posture”.   “There’s the President,” one of them whispered.   “What President?” her bewildered companion asked.

            It was indeed Nixon, who had come down to the Memorial with only his valet to accompany him.   Krogh found him there, “in a surrealistic kind of scene”, talking with eight “obviously tired and obviously disheveled young people”.[715]   (He did not specify whether there were only eight present, or eight who spoke with Nixon while the others listened.)   Krogh was standing too far back, with some very nervous Secret Service agents, to hear what was being said, so the only source for this was Nixon himself.    He summarized the conversation for Garnett D. Horner, White House correspondent for the Washington Star, on returning to the executive mansion about two and a half hours later.   Amazingly, he admitted to rambling on about the importance of traveling and seeing the sights while still young, pollution and the best surfing beaches in California, the millions of people in China, Neville Chamberlain at Munich, cleaning up the cities, etc.    After about an hour of this, he started to run down and Krogh and the Secret Service began discussing how to extricate him.   But as he was descending the great staircase, he saw the three young women from Syracuse and decided he had to talk to them too.   They remembered not so much the content of what he said, but the condition of the man who said it:

 

 

LYNN SCHATZKIN:  His hands were in his pockets; he didn’t look anyone in the eyes; he was mumbling; when people asked him to speak up he would boom one word out and no more.   As far as sentence structure, there was none.

RONNIE KEMPER:   Somebody would ask him to speak up, he was mumbling at his feet.   And that would jolt him out of wherever he was and he’d kind of look up and shake his head around, but then he’d go back to looking at his feet and he was gone again.

JOAN PELLETIER:  …[W]e couldn’t even hear what he was saying from a few feet away.   He was talking to the floor, not looking up.  Everyone was stunned, because it was so freaky…   nothing he was saying was coherent or even in complete sentences…  At first I felt awe, and then that changed right away to respect.   Then as he kept talking, it went to disappointment and disillusionment.  Then I felt pity because he was so pathetic, and then just plain fear to think that he’s running the country.[716]

 

 

 

 

 

            Krogh finally got him into a limousine.   As it pulled away, a bearded youth darted through the Secret Service cordon to one of its rear windows and gave Nixon the finger.   This snapped Nixon out of his trance-like state and he responded with the same gesture.   “The son-of-a-bitch,” he said to his valet, “will go through the rest of his life telling everybody that the President of the United States gave him the finger.   And nobody will believe him.”[717]  Thus ended the scene that one chronicler of the Vietnam era decided defined it:

 

 

The scene is hallucinogenic.   How could these students and that president occupy the same historical moment?   Students who had traveled through the night to protest the policies of a murderous president; the president himself, avuncular, welcoming them to the capital, hoping they’d take in a few of the sights before they left.The president before dawn in earnest dialogue with the students is a vision not so much of the banality of evil as of the evil of banality.[718]

 

 

 

 

            The gesture of hostility exchanged animated the President, even left him upbeat.   Krogh still couldn’t get him to return to the White House.   Nixon insisted on going up to the deserted Capitol.   The only people they encountered at that hour were three black cleaning women.   One of them, Carrie Moore, held out the Bible she was carrying and asked him to autograph, adding, “I read it every day.”   Her piety led Nixon to take her hand, telling her, “You know, my mother was a saint.   She died two years ago.   She was a saint.   You be a saint, too.”   “I’ll try, Mr. President,” she replied.[719]

            By now Haldeman had joined the aides who had overtaken their chief and were trying to get him off the streets.   But Nixon decided he wanted to eat breakfast out, for the first time since he had been elected, so they all went to the Rib Room at the Mayflower Hotel.   “Very weird.    P. completely beat & just rambling on – but obviously too tired to go to sleep.”   When they emerged from the hotel and Nixon began insisting that he wanted to walk back to the White House, Haldeman frantically signaled to Krogh that this was enough, and the two of them hustled him into a limousine.   They got him back, but instead of going to bed, Nixon walked into the Oval Office to begin the day’s work.

            Then Haldeman had an inspiration.   He asked the President if he would like to go over to the EOB and talk to the Third Army soldiers who had bivouacked there overnight.   Dwight Chapin, tagging along, noted that indeed, “[t]he President looked great while he was talking to the men… [T]he men ‘turned him on’ and you could tell that he felt good about seeing the young soldiers.   He left their company with a choked-up, ‘It’s a good country.’…  The President was making reference to the youngmen whom he had just met and comparing them to the hard-corps [sic] demonstrators who were out knocking the country, etc.”[720]    It was the same comparison he had made on the 1^st,  between his good, loyal soldiers and the “bums”.   After the most soul-searing week in contemporary history, the man had learned nothing.

            Haldeman “finally got him to bed,

 

 

but he couldn’t sleep, so tossed around, made phone calls, was back up again… [H]e has had very little sleep for a long time & his judgement, temper & mood suffer badly as a result…  there’s a long way to go and he’s in no condition to weather it.[721]

 

 

 

 

Haldeman was still hoping to get his boss away for an extended vacation at Key Biscayne before he collapsed.   What he could not let himself admit, even to himself, was that for Richard Nixon, it might already be too late.

 

 

 

 

            Across the street, the antiwar rally collapsed even before it began.   Numbers of potential attendees were diverted.   Led by elitist schools like Princeton, students from all over the east were lured to New York City for a convocation of the Movement for a New Congress at the posh Penn-Garden Hotel, where they were exhorted to take a safe, gradualist approach to changing the system.   Of those who did make it to Washington, many more veered off on Capitol Hill, halfway to the demonstration site, to hear their elected representatives assure them that something would be done about the direction the country was taking – in time.   Of over five hundred members of Congress, five showed up at the rally.   Some, like Allard Lowenstein, may have felt that they had nothing to lose.   They had already been targeted for defeat in the fall elections by Murray Chotiner’s “dirty tricks” operatives.   (During the campaign, Lowenstein’s conspicuously pregnant wife Jenny was spat upon, jostled, and pelted with tomatoes).[722]

            At noon, when the rally was scheduled to begin, the organizers and featured speakers hadn’t even shown up yet.   But there was no shortage of those demanding to be heard, and no one controlled the microphone.   Each orator held forth oblivious to the others and to any kind of unifying theme.   Brad Lyttle struggled to bring order to the program, gave up, spat a few words of contempt at the other Mobe leaders on the platform, sat down, lowered his head into his hands, and began to weep over the victory that had been lost before the battle had even been joined.[723]      As one ideologically autistic speaker after another droned on, and the ever-present movement “crazies” enacted bizarre vignettes of “guerrilla theater” on the margins of the crowd, most of the people gathered on the grass drowsed in the unseasonable heat, or addressed themselves to their picnic lunches and playing with their children.   The attendant press, many of them burned out by a week of covering visceral when not shattering events, and battling the increasing editorial tendency to suppress anything that sounded like advocacy of revolution, quickly wrote off the event as another Woodstock.

            It was a superficial and irresponsible analogy.   “It was, in fact, a somber, serious, waiting crowd…. prepared for more than collegiate chanting in the streets.”[724]    But it was leaderless.    The antiwar leadership had decompensated as completely as the man they had come to condemn.   And beyond the anarchy, there was fear.   “[T]he killings at Kent State stripped the students of their feeling of safety.”[725]    As one of them put it, “These people here understand that we are surrounded by fully armed troops, and that if we started anything we’d be destroyed.”[726]   With that premise in mind, and as the rally’s leaders staged an appropriately inept finale – issuing two conflicting sets of orders for a march past the White House along two different routes and with two different destinations – the people decided it was time to go home.    And as the events of succeeding decades would prove, they decided to stay there.

            Ninety-eight thousand of them packed up their picnic baskets, put the babies into their strollers, and made for their distantly-parked cars.   Two thousand diehards stayed on.   The resulting battle was never witnessed, much less recorded, by established reporters anxious to file their innocuous copy about the braless young women at the “Washington Woodstock” and then retire to their five o’clock watering holes.   The fight raged from the Monument grounds to barricades in the streets around George Washington University.   “Tear gas, in unbelievably huge quantities, was the main police weapon.”[727]   Finally, in the secret blackness of three a.m., the Army brushed the police aside and swept the streets of the nation’s capital.   By dawn, all that was left of the March on Washington were a few stragglers wandering around on the Mall and Park Service crews picking up the food wrappers and discarded handbills.

 

 

 

 

            Nixon might have reserved Sunday as a time to give thanks for his deliverance from the hirsute hordes.   But his first order of business was enlarging on the humiliation of the administration’s chief apostate, Walter Hickel.   He was subjected to the ultimate ostracism for a Nixon cabinet member: being informed that he would not be welcome at the White House church service.   “Hickel pleaded that his wife was counting on the service and had invited two close friends from Alaska to join them,” Klein wrote, “I felt as if I were bleeding inside.   But I was firm.”[728]    But according to Hickel, Haldeman was the one who called to tell him he had been locked out of the church.   Hickel kept repeating, “This is incredible.   This has got to be incredible.   Is this the President’s wish?”   In his usual warm tones, Haldeman replied, “The President was in the room when the decision was made.”[729]

            Nixon made Hickel the example of his intentions for his disloyal cabinet.   Haldeman noted that the president

 

 

[h]as done a lot of thinking – I’m not sure how clearly – re probs. with Cabinet, etc…   Delighted to lern Abrams has already fired two of his Div. commanders cause they didn’t move fast enuf – feels we have to do the same thing.   Someone has to be made an example – this is K.’s line.[730]

 

 

 

 

                        have got to get the fear of God into our people…

                        we’re in a war now

                        when people don’t shape up they’ve got to go

                        our people have no fear

                        someone must be made an example.[731]

 

 

 

 

            On the first work day of the week, the president shifted into overdrive, reeling off orders for the attacks against his encircling enemies.   At a time when the acronym “COSVN” had discreetly disappeared from Pentagon press briefings, he insisted that the communist central command fortress existed and that his soldiers had captured it.   He insisted on making this claim the theme of his address to a gathering of the nation’s governors and from this segued into an impassioned defense of the “domino theory”:

 

 

                        country by county…

                        then to Philippines…

                        can we let Phippines fall           

                        ask the dominoes if the domino theory works

                        Then to Japan…

                        So you’re back to fortress America.[732]

 

 

 

 

            At that governors’ conference, the message was appalling, but not nearly as much as the condition of the man delivering it.

 

 

He did a darn good job – but went on & on – frequently irrelevant.   Still made his points – but would have done better in half as much time…Rogers called me afterwards very concerned about P.   Same reason as above.   Feels we’ve got to keep him on short leash until he gets rested up.

 

 

 

 

            After listening perpetually to Nixon complain about the way the press was treating him, Ehrlichman tried to point out what the May 9^th scene at the Memorial, among other things, was doing to his image.   “E. told him he was tired & not very effective – this made him mad – and it came up several times later in the day.   Real trouble is – he’s just totally pooped & is not up to his usual performance.”[733]   The mere suggestion infuriated the President so much that, after fuming about it for two days, he replied in a long memorandum, which began

 

 

I can understand why John Ehrlichman got the idea from the news reports that I was tired and all I talked about was surfing and nonsensical things... [E]ven when I am tired I do not talk about nonsensical things…

Perhaps the major contribution I could make to them [the students] was to try to lift them a bit out of the miserable intellectual wasteland in which they now wander aimlessly around.[734]

 

 

 

 

He then proceeded to reconstruct a “dialogue” as rambling and dissociative as the three women from Syracuse had claimed, although it made no mention of them or the bearded young man with the raised middle finger.

            He stepped up the pace on Tuesday the 12^th.   “Has new idea re cutting off all defense money to Univs that closed down – or caved in to demonstrators.”   He demanded that State Department officials who had signed a circular letter condemning the invasion of Cambodia be fired.[735]   He decided that he had to have a rally that would top the one on the 9^th:  “B Graham – bring ½ mill to D.C. for America     Graham, [Jackie] Gleason, J[ohnny] Cash     use Legions, etc.”   And he widened his circle of mistrust by ordering “JEdgar – send FBI reports to me [Haldeman]  not to K.    don’t send any to K or E any more.”[736]

            On Thursday, Haldeman got what he had been praying for: Nixon on a plane headed for a rest at Key Biscayne, Florida.   But the President was “still cranking on minute details” on the flight down “and not at all relaxed as he usually is on the way to Fla.”

 

 

This whole period of two weeks of tension & crisis preceded by two weeks of very tough decision making has taken its toll.   P. won’t admit it but he is really tired, and is, as some have observed, letting himself slip back to the old ways.   He’s driving way too hard on unnecessary things and because of this is not getting enough sleep – is up tight, etc.   All of this OK if he can unwind this weekend – and if nothing big comes[s] up in the

interim.   But could be rough if a new crisis arises – cause he’s not ready to handle it.[737]

 

 

 

 

 

(In a note that was increasingly creeping into his discourse, Nixon demanded his aides “put the hook into the Jewish boys     prob none of Jews in House voted with

us on Camb”).[738]

            Of the first day in Key Biscayne, Haldeman record that “[t]he unwinding process is not succeeding”.   The President was on the phone first thing

 

 

[a]ll uptight re UPI failure to give fair crowd estimate at the airport last nite – claims he knows it was intentional at desk.   (It wasn’t – it was reporter error by [illegible]).   Wants our lawyers mobilized to counteract a huge group from NY that will come to DC Weds.[739]

 

 

 

 

It is impossible to tell what the third sentence refers to.   There were no further demonstrations planned and, indeed, many of the Mobe leaders would never speak to each other again.   And, on the next day,

 

 

More of the same.   He just keeps grinding away call after call.   He is sleeping late in the mornings – which helps a little – but he sure has not gotten his mind off business.[740]

 

 

 

 

            Haldeman persuaded him to stay over until Monday, but they were back on the plane for D.C. before nightfall.   En route the President reviewed his ambitious plans for a purge of his administration:  “Say Mitchell has to go unless he can solve the Martha problem.   Kennedy has to go, Hickel.   Helms out of CIA & we’ll have Rush replace him.”[741]   That evening, during a yachting dinner aboard the Sequoia, Nixon paused in the midst of ranting at Kissinger about his staff’s leaks to the press and lapsed into a reverie that had Colson smelling brimstone:

 

 

The President’s finger circled the top of his wineglass slowly.   ‘One day we will get them – we’ll get them – we’ll get them on the ground where we want them.   And we’ll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist – right, Chuck, right?’   Then his eyes darted to Kissinger.  ‘Henry knows what I mean – just like you do in the negotiations, Henry – get them on the floor and step on them, crush them, show no mercy.

 

 

 

 

“The seeds of destruction were by now already sown,” Colson realized, “ – not in them, but in us.”[742]

            He was not alone in realizing that Nixon was out of control.   Toward the end of the month, Bernard Lasker – chairman of the Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange – demanded a summit meeting between the President and the financial elite Lasker represented over the worsening crisis on Wall Street.   The markets had not snapped back after Kent State.    Nixon’s visible lack of regret over the murders and the confrontational stance he continued to maintain toward the rising American generation, coupled with the Cambodian invasion’s failure to capture COSVN, sent prices on a steady downward track after the panic on May 4^th.    A confrontation with the Soviet Union at mid-month triggered fears that his recklessness would lead to World War III.[743]   The President finally invited Lasker and the archons of capital to dinner at the White House on the 27^th.   They paid for the sumptuous repast by having to listen to his lengthy discourse on why the Cambodian invasion had been a military masterstroke..   “He said they’d bought a year,” one diner groused, referred to the boasts of captured bags of rice and stands of small arms, “and he makes it sound like a smashing success.”[744]    As Nixon went off into a self-pitying tangent on the lonely burdens of command, he asked his audience, “Anybody here see the movie Patton?”[745]    But the bankers emerged with what they had sought: presidential assurance that  US troops would be out of Cambodia by the end of June, and out of Indochina soon afterwards.

            This accommodation lost Nixon another key constituency: the generals.   As one military commentator put it, after the President’s tough talk about “Let’s blow them all to hell!” at the Pentagon on May 1^st, “outtoughing the generals and admirals, Nixon walked into the glare of student and congressional protest and wilted under the political heat.”      The same writer noted that the President hadn’t been “bold or prescient” enough to let Abrams attack into Laos as well.[746]    After word of the June 30^th deadline for the withdrawal from Cambodia was announced, MACV actually leaked hints that commanders in the field might stall rather than comply – a de facto revolt of the generals.[747]    But in another way, the deadline was not unwelcome among the brass.   It had given them an excuse for the failure of the operation.   It was Nixon’s fault – Nixon and his Churchillian rhetoric during the April 30^th speech.   “[T]he operation was oversold because of political considerations and is being undercut because of political considerations.”[748]   Nixon returned the scapegoating with interest, particularly in his later life: it was the military that had lost Southeast Asia.   They had “been playing ‘how not to lose’ so long, now they can’t bring themselves to start playing ‘how to win’”; he accused them of “deliberate sabotage of the orders that I have given” as commander-in-chief.[749]

            The professional politicians in his own party soon had cause to shun him.   By the bloody example of May 4^th, he had neutralized the only force that could deny him re-election.   Now he rehearsed his 1972 campaign of political intimidation during the 1970 off-year congressional election contests, leading with Agnew and Chotiner in the specialties of bludgeon rhetoric and “dirty tricks” respectively.   But the revived slash-and-smear tactics of 1946 and 1950 were ill-adapted to the newly-lacerated public sensibilities of 1970.   Speaking for Republican candidates in the hinterland, Nixon evoked “all the subtlety and grace of a man running for sheriff in Mississippi; he had appeared at that time very unpresidential, the darkness and hostility had come exploding out of him, and he had seemed unworthy of his office.”[750]   The off-year election proved a disaster for the Republicans, not the least because of the “help” Nixon gave their candidates.   But he refused to admit his tactics had been wrong.   He decided he just hadn’t applied them ruthlessly enough.   In his re-election campaign two years later, this led to excesses that would eventually drive him from office in disgrace.

            As that final disaster began to unfold, he still refused to blame himself.   He sacrificed his two most loyal hatchetmen instead.   Spiro Agnew was dumped as soon as he ran into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service.   Far more telling, Nixon turned on the man who had raised him from total obscurity to the most powerful position in the western world.   He decided that Murray Chotiner was getting too old for the political arena and was too soft on Nixon enemies because he was a Jew.[751]   Meanwhile Chotiner was going through a messy divorce, with his wife threatening to write a “tell all” book about her husband’s black deeds as his chief’s executioner.   “She said the book would detail the President’s secret maneuvers in national and California politics and spell out Chotiner’s role in all that wheeling and dealing.”[752]

            On January 29, 1974, a Washington area hospital reported that Chotiner had been admitted because of a broken leg suffered during an automobile accident.   Two days later, another report added that he had died “of complications.”[753]  The event might have been regarded as fortuitous as some.   Whatever he could have told the Watergate investigation then gearing up died with him.  And what could he have told the federal grand jury about Kent State, particularly with his liaison with Governor Rhodes on Nixon’s behalf?    And one by one, Nixon’s other loyal retainers – Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, even Mitchell – followed him into the flames, until finally they consumed Nixon himself.

            But did he ever voice any guilt, or even reservations, about what had happened to America in the spring of 1970?   The invasion of Cambodia.   “What we did in Cambodia was absolutely correct.”   The war in Southeast Asia?   It was lost because “the stupid and short-sighted Congress undercut us.”   The alienation and spiritual ruin of an American generation?   “I was the one who had to face down those hippie hoodlums.”   And the murders of the four, the crime that had driven him mad; how did he remember that consciously?   “Of course, looked at what happened at Kent State.   Those kids were Communists, and the National Guard was defending itself.”[754]    Deceive himself as he might, could he convince others, the generations to come, of such colossal lies?   When he died, the corporate-owned news media he had seen as his direst enemies vied with each other to bathe Richard Nixon in adulation.   In the endless hours of saturation coverage, the words “Kent State” were never heard.   In death he had triumphed.   Nixon, the disgraced, the defeated, had remade America in his image.   And the truth was heard no more in the land.

 

 

 

 

                                                                        THE END