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

 

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

 

 

CHAPTER TWO: All Enemies, Foreign – and Domestic. 

 

 

            Even before his inauguration, Richard Nixon had been haunted by the specter of hordes of hirsute college demonstrators bringing down his presidency.   He was certain, and most historians agree, that the academic antiwar movement had turned his predecessor Lyndon Johnson into a one-term president.   And he was willing to take any steps – including, as events would shortly bear out, the ultimate step – to become equally as certain that this would not happen to him.   As soon as he entered the White House, he began demanding that his enforcer H.R. Haldeman get his staff to “do something about the campus disorders problem”.   These demands became more shrill as the months passed “because things have gotten much worse and more widespread since his last statement.”   His historic meeting with Vietnamese head of state Nguyen Van Thieu had actually originated as a “way to get out of [a visit to] Ohio State because of planned disorders.”71  

 

 

          “Do something” did not refer to opening up a dialogue with student activists.   When a delegation of young Republican Congressmen visited the White House to urge such an initiative, the President and his men rebuffed them as “naïve”.   “Only George Bush seemed to understand their desire for confrontation, not solution.”72    As Haldeman summed up his chief’s position on the subject at year’s end, “Talking about moves to approach youth.   He says to forget it, that if we are alienating youth it is because we have to, can’t give in and coddle them.  We have to take them on,  silence would be approval or at least acquiescence.”73   When Kissinger and Ehrlichman met with student body presidents in the White House Situation Room at midyear, the latter – the supposed “liberal” in the Oval Office – dashed any possibility that “taking them on” had been mere rhetoric.   “If you people think you can break laws just because you don’t like them,” he barked, slamming his hand down on the table, “you’re going to force us to up the ante to the point where we’re handing out death sentences for traffic violations.”74

            Ehrlichman said nothing of this incident, and little on the subject in general, in his memoirs.75  Like sometime White House “special operations” agent Howard Hunt, he preferred to unburden himself of his darker insights in novels.   In one such that was made into the television-movie Washington Behind Closed Doors, his thinly disguised Nixon and Kissinger characters contemplated the advent of spring 1970 as the coming of the crisis, certain to bring “huge antiwar marches and rallies”.

 

                  And Monckton [Nixon] knew that the combined pressures, the military pressure of the enemy in the Far East, and

            political pressure of the militant protestors, magnified thousands of times by the television networks, could ultimately

            frustrate his foreign policy, and defeat him if he permitted them to.  He had to act quickly and vigorously.76

 

 

            As the administration’s thirst for confrontation waxed, however, the enemy disappeared from the field, except perhaps in Nixon’s imagination.   On April 19^th, 1970, the same day that Admiral McCain was regaling the President with his horrific vision of the communist takeover of Cambodia, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee announced that it was shutting down its national office due to lack of support and funds.    The antiwar movement had descended to impotence just five months after it had organized the greatest protest march in American history, bringing a half million marchers to file past the White House the previous November.   Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization – substituting Vietnamese combat troops for Americans, ending the shocking US casualties, and making it possible to start withdrawing the GIs – had lessened the immediacy of  many demonstrators’ concern about being killed in combat.    The leaders of the movement readily  “acknowledged that President Nixon’s troop withdrawal policy had knocked the legs from under the nonradical peace movement.”76 

            But they had been defeated only as a mass movement.    Those who remained, forced to reassess their objectives and tactics, now focused on the guiding insight they had learned by hard campaigning.   The war was not just an aberrant episode in the history of a fundamentally just society.   It was the logical and inevitable product of a fundamentally unjust system, capitalism in its newest and purest form, global in reach and now trafficking in human lives.    The new theoreticians were going beyond fundamentalist Marxism, which defined the Vietnam War as the classic imperialist conquest for raw materials and markets.   They realized that the MIC, the “military-industrial complex”, was a parasite which now dwarfed its erstwhile business host and would even feed at its expense.[78]   They also had reached the point of discarding the Old Left fixation on the dogma that the factory workers must be the most enlightened and politically catalytic element in society, as decisively as they were to discard the New Left’s romantic infatuation with peasant revolts.   The factory worker was becoming an endangered species as big capital moved its operations overseas to take advantage of cheap laborers with little in the way of due process rights.   The American farmer had already become one, the family farm vanishing with the rise of mass agribusiness.   The United States was being transformed from a producer of goods to a renderer of services.   And the new exploited and potentially explosive class consisted of the college students, workers “trained to sell more garbage to a society of people whose lives are increasingly defined in terms of their consumption of the garbage that is produced.”[79]

            Armed with this sharper vision, the remaining activists stopped making “statements” like marching on the Pentagon and pouring blood on draft files in favor of a direct attack on the nexus of the military and the corporation.   The first campaign of this more threatening revolutionary strategy succeeded beyond all expectations.   A year before its own self-destruction, the Students for a Democratic Society mobilized Stanford students and faculty against the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and its monopolization by war research.   In the process it gored one of the most sacred of the CIA’s corporate clients, with its charge that SRI had prostituted the university to the war because of its trustees’ connections to Union Oil (the political godfather of both Nixon and Reagan), Shell Oil, and Tenneco (which had moved into the Indonesian oil fields “after the right-wing massacre of 300,000 Indonesian and Chinese leftists in 1965”.[80]   After a brief, spirited struggle, the university ended its research in chemical and biological warfare and sold SRI.[81]

            In a  blow aimed at the global dimension of the new capitalism, students turned out in support of workers striking against General Electric that same year:

 

 

                        [T]he New Mobe called upon the Senate to investigate General Electric’s use of profits made in the Vietnam War to break the strike.    It pointed out that one-fifth of GE’s total business was in war contracts and its profits from these contracts and its cheap-labor plants in Southeast Asia helped GE resist the demands of the unions.[82]

 

 

 

 

            By April 1970, the annual meetings of some of the country’s biggest military contractors were being disrupted by protestors who had to be admitted because they were holding stock proxies.   Share-holding agitators penetrated the conclaves of A,T & T, United Aircraft, Honeywell, Gulf Oil, and Boeing, forcing executives to make defensive concessions or to rush through agendas, while supporters marched, clashed with police, or staged guerrilla theater productions outside.[83]   The antics of some of the demonstrators were light-hearted.   But the frontal assaults on America’s board rooms, the combat doctrine that capital was the mother of war, were not things to be taken lightly.    As one head of state whose country had been invaded by US Marines protecting American business interests pointed out, the US economy had been pulled out of recession in 1958 by the first massive infusion of aid to South Vietnam, and had not been able to dismount the tiger since.[84]   Although the war was now murdering the economy with runaway inflation, the armaments industry had gone too powerful to be denied – and even without an ardent partisan in the White House,  there seemed no other alternative to wholesale unemployment and recession.

            Worse still, anti-capitalism trembled on the verge of becoming an organized political force.   The vessel was the Coalition on National Priorities, which was prepared to treat the 1970 off-year elections as a referendum on militarism in American society.[85]   Starved for publicity by the corporate media – “the media was critical in keeping anti-war, and later anti-Nixon, protest from becoming the basis for a more systematic critique of the political, social, and economic system”[86]  --  the Coalition, by the very fact of coming into existence, was an indication to the power elite that the situation might be getting beyond control.   At such moments Richard Nixon, as unstable as he might be, could have his uses.   And the Cambodian invasion, as reckless as it was and as devastating as would prove its toll on the markets, might lure the antiwar movement into an explosive re-flowering, during which the blossoms could be cut down once and for all.

            A telling sign that such a trap was being set, and that the American psyche, being preconditioned for the bloody repression it would employ, appeared in a front-page article in the New York Times on April 12^th, that last serene Sunday for many a month.   To conclude that this story was planted in the very journal that the President listed among his worst enemies by agencies of the government seems worthy of the paranoia of the times.   And yet analysis of its content, and even more the circumstances under which it appeared, scarcely admits to another possibility.   It purported to describe a White House dinner hosted by the President for “neo-conservative” commentator Irving Kristol on March 12^th, “the same day that bombs exploded in three Manhattan office buildings”.   It includes no explanation of why the paper took a full month to report the event.   The diners allegedly dwelt at length on comparing American radicals to the Narodniki, youthful middle-class Russian, 19^th-century revolutionaries “who murdered [Tsar] Alexander II”.   The article also claimed that those present likened US black militants to Algerian rebels and that Mr. Kristol “told the President it was not unrealistic to expect the Latin American resort to political kidnappings to spread soon to Washington.”   An unidentified aide was quoted as asserting that the United States faced “the most severe internal security threat this country has seen since the Depression”, one that would require unprecedented government surveillance to control.   “We’re dealing with the criminal mind, with people who have snapped for some reason,” he decided.[87]

            The content of the article is decisively rebutted by two of the dinner guests.   Haldeman the diarist verifies that campus radicalism was the subject of a “heated” discussion which was however dominated by Attorney General John Mitchell, whom he characterized as “incredible”.   “Has an absolutely fixed point of view.   Wouldn’t listen, and when he did, he didn’t hear.   Insisted on expounding on and on.  P[resident Nixon] finally turned him off so we could hear a little from Kristol.  Must say Kristol didn’t add much.”[88]       Although Kristol had dealt with student unrest in his regular “Books and Ideas” column in Fortune magazine, and wrote his own opinion piece on the subject for the Times magazine that spring,[89]  he never mentioned precursors to the Russian Revolution as analogies, much less the Narodniki, nor does he once in his autobiographical collection of essays on American politics.[90]   He protested to the Times as soon as the story appeared:

“It was no kind of strategy session, as your story implies.   I have no idea as to how the Government should proceed in [sic] respect to terrorism….   and at no time was my opinion solicited or expressed in such matters.”[91]

            If as quite obviously not Kristol, then who had planted the notions that campus activists were the kith of rabid Russian radicals capable of murdering their head of state, mad dogs beyond reaching who had “snapped for some reason”, and that unparalleled domestic surveillance was urgently needed to cope with the threat?  and who provided the tag line, stated as objective fact, that “the liberals do not appear to have any answers to the problem of American radicalism”?

            In case the Sunday reader skipped even the first page and went straight to the magazine, it led with an article under a cartoon of a bearded radical swinging a hob-nailed boot at the reader while shouting, “Up against the wall, ruling class!”   It began with an extension of the Russian analogy, calling up the ghost of anarchist Sergei Nechayev – “now it is possible that his spirit has migrated to our shores” – and ended with a quote attributed to SDS leader Bernardine Dohrn lauding the Manson murders: “Dig it, first they killed the pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork in the victim’s stomach.

Wild!”[92]    And if this kind of false analogy, mis-attribution, and sensationalism about the activists was appearing in the pages of the nation’s most staid and prestigious journal, what was being printed in the books and periodicals that were identified in the mid-1970s as CIA proprietaries?   The process of agitation would now bear its sanguine fruit in eight days.

 

 

           

            As Sunday the 26^th waned, another meeting of the NSC convened.   Once again, Kissinger asked Watts to attend in his stead.   But Watts had gone the last mile with his chief.   “I’m against this action on every count, and I’m resigning,” he announced.

            “Your views represent the cowardice of the Eastern Establishment!” Kissinger bellowed.

            Watts walked out, leaving “K” throwing papers around the office.   Kissinger’s military aide, newly-minted general Alexander Haig, tagged after the apostate, asking, “What did you say to Henry?  He’s furious,” and then, “You just had an order from your Commander-in-Chief and you can’t refuse.”

            “Fuck you, Al,” Watts replied, “I just have, and I’m resigning.”[93]

            Vice President Agnew was not invited.   “Nixon was still smarting from Agnew’s unexpected sally and was determined to be the strong man at this meeting.”   Those who did attend sat passively, as if “merely listening to a briefing… [Nixon] construed [their] silence as assent.”[94]   At the meeting broke up, Kissinger drafting the order for the invasion and Nixon signed it.   Thus was the process of going to war further streamlined in America.

 

 

 

 

            In Vietnam, and without the knowledge of the Secretary of Defense, the invasion plans were already firm down through the brigade level.   The objective was to be COSVN (Central Office, South Vietnam), supposedly the supreme command center for the entire communist insurgency in Southeast Asia.   In his interviews with David Frost seven years later, Nixon would admit that this “Bamboo Pentagon”, or “Dr. No’s Palace”, had never existed, and blame the CIA for fabricating it.[95]   A highly-decorated  US combat colonel suggested that the fantasy was probably projective: since the high command in Saigon needed a vast computerized complex from which to operate, dubbed by the grunts “Disneyland East”, the communists must need a similarly sprawling citadel in Cambodia.  “No one seemed to grasp that COSVN was more than likely a couple of guys on bicycles.”[96]

            Lt. Gen. Elvy Roberts was to command the American axis of the invasion and General Do Cao Tri, the ARVN or South Vietnamese.   But Tri, after consulting his horoscope, said he would have to excuse himself from the battle.   “I will turn all my troops over to you and I will do nothing.  Because anything I do will be a disaster.”[97]   Whether Tri was really that superstitious, or just able to think on his feet, the full command responsibility for the invasion would now fall on the Americans.

 

 

 

 

            The President charged into the Oval Office Monday morning, flinging orders in all directions as if he were at the front.   “First move today on Parrot’s Beak.

(later moved to Tues.)    strong offensive – even if ARVN screw up    keep word out of success even if fail     get photogs in for pix – every rifle captured.”   The preliminary bombardment he was really interested in was targeted on the enemy at home, especially reporters (“esp hit press for double standard – point out who is aggressor --  Have VP take on nets in 2 days if they blast us as P. expects”), his cabinet (“Told K to play Rogers & Laird as if they’re with us”) and of course the student antiwar demonstrators (“strongest reason to abolish student deferments    will give Univ. ldship chance to control students”).   As if acting out the title role in Patton, he lashed out at his MACV commanders.   “Said this is not business as usual – cancel rotations – no replacement(s) – no fat-assed people.   The military is really on the spot and if blow it this time you’ve had it.   Act as if you’re out to win the battle.”[98]

            All this built up to a special meeting at eleven.   Already locked out of the NSC,  the two ranking cabinet officers now made a last and futile attempt to assert themselves,   Laird had become aware of the president’s “back channel” to the field commanders by the “uncanny resemblance between the cables he got from General Creighton Abrams and the arguments he heard in the White House.”[99]   And Rogers, on his way to the Hill to testify, wanted to know if he would be lying under oath if he said there was no plan to invade Cambodia.   He opened with a flat condemnation of the Cambodia operation.   Laird tried to assert that even Abrams was really against it “but waffled several times as K. answered back”.   Nixon agreed to consider other objectives beside COSVN, but “[p]rob w/ alternatives is all would required US troops but would be lesser benefit to us”.    Kissinger would later recall it as a “surrealistic… and ambiguous” session,[100]

a chance for Rogers and Laird to ventilate before Nixon proceeded to ignore their wishes and opinions.   “K. takes whole deal as test of P’s authority – and I think would go ahead even if plan is wrong – just to prove P. can’t be challenged.”[101]   Such was the sacrifice Kissinger was prepared to make in the name of the cult of authority – or as it was called in the land of his birth, the leadership principle.

            The next morning the two cabinet officers were called back so the president could “lay down the law” to them.   “He’s decided to go ahead with the full plan and told them so.”[102]    “There was no discussion of the subject matter of the meeting by others in attendance.”   The president confirmed that he had made his decision based on the information he had received from DCI Helms, Moorer, and “Admiral McCain and his staff at the briefing in Hawaii.”[103]   In somewhat of an understatement, Haldeman noted, “I think his action will greatly surprise most of the country.   Good or bad will depend heavily on how he sells it on TV.”[104]    The former ad man still believed that anything could be sold if it were packaged right.   But the President wasn’t taking any chances.   Nixon now withdrew from all into his “darkened hideaway in the Executive Office Building, Tchaikovsky playing on his stereo”, to pour his “resentments and pent-up tension” into his call to arms.[105]

            Before he went into seclusion, “he told patriotic group heads the gist of it…    It went well with them, anyway.”[106]   Almost a month later, Senator Albert Gore (D-Tennessee) rose on the floor to denounce Nixon for fully briefing the heads of these nine defense lobbies[107] about the Cambodian invasion while locking his own cabinet officers out of the decision-making process and having his surrogates lie to Congress and the press about it.[108]   Because of criticisms like this, Gore was successfully targeted for defeat in his re-election campaign that fall, Agnew visiting Tennessee in September to orchestrate the vilification of this leading “radical liberal” in the Senate.[109]

            Albeit in seclusion, Nixon could still reach out via that indispensable prop of his existence, the telephone.   He called Haldeman late on the 28^th and  “really worked me over… chewed me out worse than he ever has as P.” because younger First Daughter Tricia was getting less than the full hour of the 60 Minutes television program for her tour of the White House.   “Basically a release of tensions in (on?) the big decision – but potentially damaging if he starts flailing out in other directions.”[110]

 

 

 

 

            As night engulfed Washington, the army of South Vietnam poured over the Cambodian border.   Their armed might, like that of the Americans who would follow the next day, fell on thin air.   The totally corrupt ARVN had been penetrated by communist agents on every level and thus “the coming blow had been telegraphed in a dozen ways.”[111]     The guerillas simply retreated into the jungle interior, where they were now in a position to take over the country, instead of just using the border as a base area. 

            The President broke off his speechwriting again on the morning of the 29^th long enough to instruct press secretary Ron Ziegler on how to deal with the news of the South Vietnamese attack.   He ordered him to admit only that the administration was considering aid to the Cambodian regime.   He was to dismiss the invasion as a border incident; “there have been crossings before     these actions have taken place over a period of time”[112]    But, as with the Southern strategy, no one was getting fooled.   John Mitchell called to warn about an “enormous ‘anti’ reaction” building in the Congress, which was not even supposed to know about the operation.   Then Kissinger phoned to agree that “there was something amiss”.   He was convinced Laird was being evasive with him about what the legislators knew.

            As soon as South Vietnam announced its attack was underway, “all hell instantly busted loose on the Hill – Fulbright first…  And they hit totally on troops – not on aid which is what they expected.”  Kissinger suspected the two top cabinet officers had blown the whistle.   “Seriously appears that Laird & Rogers may have tipped this all off  -- in hopes that violent reaction would dissuade P. from going ahead with Phase III…  Will be a rough couple of days.”[113]

            Kissinger’s aides Roger Morris and Anthony Lake joined Watts in resigning.   They debated  holding a press conference to warn their countrymen about the impending disaster but decided against it because it might jeopardize Kissinger’s position in the White House.   They would realize too late that their former mentor would never need anyone’s help in protecting himself.   Morris later assessed the decision to remain silent as “the greatest failure of my life”.[114]   The only thing they accomplished by going quietly was to leave Haig in undisputed position as Kissinger’s chief deputy.   As the administration’s paranoia compounded, “the few remaining possibilities were tainted in one way or another in the litmus test of loyalty.”    Haig invited Lake out to lunch, ostensibly to beg him to stay, and used the occasion to attack Kissinger.[115]

            Early in the afternoon, the President retreated back into the EOB to work on his speech.   He called Haldeman later, asking him to have his secretary call his older daughter Julie and her husband David Eisenhower to ask that they come down to Washington from Amherst College, which he was attending – “have her come here.   campus may blow.”[116]

 

 

 

 

            For once, the President’s fears were understated.   He had revived a moribund giant.   In her Riverdale home in greater New York City, Cora Weiss was hosting the dispirited remnants of the antiwar leadership.   “[T]he coalition was broke and many participants were unsure of what to do next.”[117]   The phone rang and Weiss picked it up.   “Someone on the New York Times” told her that South Vietnam had invaded Cambodia and that American troops would follow across the border the next day.   “A stunned Mobe coordinating committee realized that the antiwar movement had been reborn” and voted immediately to organize a march on Washington for May 9^th.”[118]

            The resurrection of the activists was awaited by a grim predatory force they had called up in their prior days of glory.   That same day in Oceanside, California, a “person or persons unknown” drove by the office of the Movement for a Democratic Military and fired a .45 caliber machine gun into it, wounding a Marine deserter.   The brazen attack forced the San Diego field office of the FBI to temporarily suspend its COINTELPRO --  Counterintelligence Program, the euphemism for its war on the New Left – in that area.   By September the Bureau would have to issue a directive reminding agents that their “plants” in radical organizations “should not become the person who carries the gun, throws the bomb, does the robbery.”[119]    Throughout this period, the forces of law and order spent fortunes on informers and provocateurs in activist groups, who took the lead in advocating violence in order to maintain their “credibility”.[120]    These same agencies also “financed, helped organize, and supplied arms to right-wing terrorist groups that carried out fire-bombing, burglaries, and shootings” aimed at the youthful rebels when not disguised as their work.[121]

            Scarcely less careless of the law were the militia in many states, especially the one which epitomized the President’s Middle American constituency.   Ohio’s Governor James Rhodes, who had practiced statehouse anti-communism since the early 1950s, called his National Guard out whenever a chance arose to be the scourge of the campus “hippies”.   On the 29^th, however, he mobilized the ONG to patrol the state’s highways during a wildcat Teamster strike – or at least, that was the announced reason.   Local union boss William Presser had asked for the Guard ten days before, charging that the strike was a plot by “Communists who have infiltrated Teamsters’ locals in Akron and Cleveland.”   At that time, Rhodes had decided that the troops were not needed.   He did not say why he changed his mind as of the 29^th.[122]      Some of the soldiers, union men themselves, resented being sent against the strikers, “charging it was a political move by Rhodes to win votes in his tight race for the Republican Senate nomination.”[123]

            But were the wildcatters the real target of the callup?   Also on the 29^th, a disturbance erupted on the campus of Ohio State University at Columbus when black students and feminists began picketing a number of campus buildings in support of their demands.   The violence started when some of them closed large iron gates at a campus intersection to symbolize their determination to shut the university down if these were not met.   Two of those pushing the gates shut were not unmasked as state police undercover agents for six months.[124]   Uniformed state troopers stormed the gates and reopened them.   Some students (?) threw rocks and bottles.   The town police answered by firing tear gas “indiscriminately… even groups of three students standing quietly on a street corner drew canisters of gas.”[125]   Governor Rhodes sent in the National Guard.   Before dawn seven students were shot and twenty-nine others clubbed with rifle butts or bayoneted.  At 10:30 p.m., a Guard formation led by a tank swept the campus.[126]

 

 

 

 

            But that evening one of the country’s most prestigious Ivy League universities was vying with Ohio State for the honor of free fire zone.   Haldeman

 

 

                        [h]ad a session w/ E[hrlichman] this aft re probable violence at Yale this weekend.   Debate whether to send troops up on standby.   E & I oppose

            this on grounds it will only incite them & we’ll be accused of repression.   Mitchell & Kldst [Richard Kleindienst] are determined to go ahead – on grounds

            that it will take 14 hrs lead & potential for damage is too great to ignore.   Will settle tomorrow.[127]

 

 

 

 

            There was every reason to hope for an explosion at Yale.   In surrounding New Haven, Connecticut, the government had Bobby Seale and seven other leaders of the Black Panther Party on trial for the torture-murder of one of their own.   Strangers, many in counter-culture garb and hair, poured into town to protest on behalf of the defendants, passing families of Yale faculty and New Haven merchants being evacuated.   Many of the latter had shuttered their shops.   In the university’s art gallery, workmen transferred treasured exhibits to basement vaults.   “The Yale Law School wired alumni to notify them of the cancellation of the annual alumni weekend.[128]  Towns within a twenty-mile radius put their police and fire departments on 24-hour alert and cancelled all leaves; telephone companies put crews on standby, alert for acts of sabotage.[129]   Would the radicals try to free Seale and his comrades on May Day, the global holiday of socialism?   The rumors filling the air – from a source to this day undetected – portended revolution.

            The President worked on his speech all night.   He tried to break for some sleep, but “[a]fter tossing fitfully for an hour or so, I got up and sat in the Lincoln Sitting Room until 5:30.”[130]   Across the world, the grunts hunkered down at their invasion departure points along the Cambodia border, asking themselves the soldier’s eternal question, “Will I survive this son-of-a-bitch tomorrow?”[131]   And four students went to bed at Kent State University unsuspecting that they had five days left to live.

 

 

 

 

            April 30, 1970.   Scarcely bolstered by his hour of sleep, the President returned to work on the speech in the EOB.   But he hectored Haldeman all morning with phone calls, still on the subject of suppressing the expected domestic resistance to his decision:

 

 

                        esp. to be sure we are ready to hit the networks, etc., for bad coverage; activity in Cong. for support; be sure we kill or deflect Reid amendment

            that would stop efforts in Cambodia; shore up Rogers; keep Congl. criticism re Parrot’s Beak muted --  wait till you hear P. tonite; be sure to crank on

            Sens, etc.[132]

 

 

 

 

            The Reid Amendment was the creation of New York Congressman Ogden Reid, and the fact that he was a Republican meant that in Nixon’s eyes, it was not just threatening, but vile betrayal: “psychol. devastating – oppose it all out – take everyone off everything.”   As for Reid himself, Nixon had special instructions to relay to Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s hatchetman since the late 1940s: “file a candidate against Reid   put in 50 M against him     tear him up”[133]  

            At three that afternoon, the President called Haldeman and Kissinger over to the EOB and read them the speech.   “Very strong & excellent wrap up.   K and I both felt it will work.”[134]   Others who saw advance copies, on the First Staff, were not so sure.   “Nixon had done what only Nixon could do,” a speechwriter decided, “made a courageous decision and wrapped it in a pious and divisive speech.”[135]   “His speech was like a red flag waved in the faces of his critics in the Congress, in the media, and on the campuses,” a young aide later enmeshed in Watergate agreed, “It would have been better if he’d simply announced the invasion without a speech, rather than the one he made.”[136]   Conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak echoed that suggestion: “[I]t might have been better not to commit the president’s personal prestige, but to let the world know about it in an announcement from Saigon by General Abrams.”[137]   Of the grand objective of the operation, COSVN, Laird said “that was a phoney [claim]…  Kissinger put that in.   And I had a bad argument at five o’clock that afternoon with Kissinger [about it].”   Rogers was even more direct: “My God!   The kids will retch when they hear this kind of thing.   This is the kind of thing that is going to touch them off.”[138]

 

 

 

 

            As copies of the speech circulated through the inner circles in Washington, the President’s minions, uniformed and otherwise, feverishly prepared to smash the inevitable reaction to it.   New Haven’s up-from-the-ranks police chief, former seminarian James F. Ahern, didn’t need his finely-honed instincts to tell him his town was a target.   And those drawing a bead on it were not Black Panthers or student radicals.   “There is another wave of extremists coming into this city,” he warned, “and they’re right wing.”   The National Guard took up position at the Goffe Street Armory, two miles from the New Haven Green and the Yale campus.   Three newsmen who were trying to interview their commander counted nine armored personnel carriers being readied for action.   Ahern told the press pointedly that he hoped the Guard’s mission was “protecting the demonstrators’ right to dissent in the city of New Haven.”[139]     Someone may have given the Guard a sense of another mission: “An anonymous National Guardsman later wrote that he had been promised that they would ‘not be prosecuted if you shoot someone while performing a duty for the State of Connecticut.”[140]

            Four radical celebrity visitors – David Dellinger, Tom Hayden,and John Froines, accompanied by his wife Anne, defendants in the Chicago Seven Trial after the riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention – drank in the air of siege as they entered town through its deserted streets.   Yale President Kingman Brewster welcomed them into his home, as he had all the demonstrators to his town and campus.   After an hour or so of polite circumlocutions, Hayden finally blurted out what everyone knew.   “We are not necessarily your friends and allies,” he told Brewster, “But we – the Chicago defendants – agree with the Panthers that there should be no violence here this weekend.”[141]   Yale’s chaplain, William Sloan Coffin, Jr. – nationally renowned for his rapport with young dissidents, himself the leader of demonstrations against the war – professed admiration for the savvy of men like Hayden and Dellinger.   “Old pros, they knew some important tricks, such as scheduling the dullest speakers at the end of the rally so that many of the demonstrators would leave early, and no one would leave emotionally overheated.”[142]

            The hard-won paranoia of the “Chicago defendants” might have been taxed could they have but known that Coffin had worked for the CIA during the McCarthy period (or, as he preferred to recall it, “the Korean War period”).   And as street-smart as they were, could they have suspected Yale’s other identity as CIA U.? the alma mater of a whole echelon of its directors like the President’s favorite Congressman George Bush[143], James Woolsey (who as a student had infiltrated Yale Citizens for McCarthy)[144],  and the ultimate spook, Angleton himself[145]   who even then was seducing William Sullivan and Tom Huston with analogies between student demonstrators and pre-Bolsheviks.   Then-serving Yale trustee Cyrus Vance had midwifed the explosion of military intelligence-gathering on the domestic front, which by 1970 had created a hundred thousand dossiers on American citizens.[146]    (As a matter of fitting irony, one of them was on the Rev. William Sloan Coffin, Jr.)   “Vance’s proposals unleashed the military intelligence apparatus; they did little to control it.”[147]   “Like Yale President Brewster and Yale trustee John Lindsay,” Hayden later realized, “Vance now preferred a retreat in Vietnam to save America’s interests elsewhere, particularly at home.”[148]

 

            The radicals had descended into the belly of the Beast.   Like the Panthers, they would now prove cautious enough to suggest that they knew it, at least on the gut level.   Caution was well-advised.   Chief Ahern and University officials were stunned when, at 6:00 p.m. on the 30^th, they heard that shock troops of the 82^nd Airborne Division were arriving at Westover Air Force Base, a plane landing every ten minutes throughout the night.  A regiment of the Second Marine Division was simultaneously flown in to the naval air station at Quonset Point, Rhode Island.   The official justification for the massing of these elite shock troops was that the authorities had “evidence” that the violence might escalate beyond the ability of the police and the National Guard to control, but “[n]one of the ‘evidence’… was revealed to the public.”[149]

            To Ahern, the only “evidence” visible was the panicky, unevaluated “intelligence” of impending revolution flashing between Mitchell’s Justice Department and the “White House Strike Force” headed by John Dean and William Rucklehaus.   “[O]ne federal official warned beforehand that there would likely be ‘racial violence, widespread destruction, and even assassination at New Haven.”[150]   The chief realized that his town had been targeted by “a desire on the part of the Nixon Administration to make political capital out of the events by ‘getting tough’ with student demonstrators.”   The President “or his advisers fully expected this combination of events to explode into ‘war’ in New Haven.   And his reaction was to be ready with overwhelming mobility, manpower, and firepower.”[151]

            With the “war” about to break out, Kissinger discussed the speech with White House aides who had seen copies.   He never defended the invasion as military necessity (and never would), only as a negotiating ploy: “We’re trying to shock the Soviets into calling a conference, and we can’t promote this by appearing weak…  If we get through this, we should have a negotiation by July.”   When speechwriter Satire asked, “Doesn’t this fly in the face of the Nixon Doctrine?”, Kissinger thundered in reply, “We wrote the goddam doctrine, we can change it!”   As he departed, Haldeman added to Satire, “The thing to remember is that this is the best way to end the war, and this is the best way to save US lives.”   To which Haig added, “The basic thing is, we have to be tough!”   As the group broke up, Ehrlichman announced, mocking Kissinger’s thick German accent, “Tomorrow, right here a briefink on der operations around New Hafen.”[152]

 

 

            7:20 p.m.   The President left the EOB for the White House and the television cameras.   Rogers had been appointed to give an interim briefing for the cabinet, but could only manage a half-hearted endorsement  (“He’s obviously not the least anxious to go ahead with this & it’s very hard for him to back it…  He stayed home all day to avoid press.”)   Then at 8:15 the president himself briefed the cabinet and congressional leaders.   “Odd to watch Fulbright, Mansfield, Aiken, T. Kennedy – all of whom had blasted him yesterday and today.   They all stood and applauded at end.   Then to Oval Office for TV.”[153]

            MACV provided the overture, thirty-six strikes by B-52 heavy bombers followed by a barrage from a hundred artillery pieces, which went on for an hour.   Then 151 tactical air strikes razed anything that might have been left alive or standing.[154]   Like many such bombardments during the course of the war, this one fell on an enemy departed and instead blew up and burned the hapless peasants who had provided the majority of victims in the thousand-day war.   Survivors of the families that had otherwise been wiped out joined the insurgents, burning with hatred for the invaders.   It was only deepened by the care that the Americans and Cambodians had taken “to insure that all Europeans, such as French planters, were clear of an area before it was subject to saturation bombing and destruction.”[155]

            At Kent State – a suitcase campus in the Ohio State system untouched by the ferment on the Columbus campus that day – students gathered in the Union to watch the presidential address on television.   Perhaps many of them hoped it would announce further troop withdrawals.   Allison Krause, a tall, dark-eyed freshman honors student, had chided her father while home on spring break for not crediting the president with winding down the war.   Now she and her steady boyfriend Barry Levine took seats in the Union to see if she had been right.[156]   In the campus auditorium, students were watching a film by one of their own, depicting a campus radical undergoing persecution and immolation only to rise phoenix-like from the flames, brandishing a toy M-16 rifle and shouting the Weatherman slogan, “Gonna kick ass!”    As the film faded to black, someone rolled a television in to one side of the movie screen so that those so inclined could watch the speech instead of the next movie.   By the time Nixon’s ghostly image had utterly the third sentence – reminding the broadcast audience that he had sworn to take “strong and effective measures” in the face of “increased enemy activity” – the viewers had to face the numbing truth.   Their reaction was typically Kent State: a faint ripple of indignation (“That fucker!”) followed by a vast surge of apathy (“So what else is new?”)

            Nixon charged that the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had turned the entire Cambodian nation into a network of “major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunitions factories, air strips, and prisoner of war compounds” – “a vast staging area” that outflanked and doomed South Vietnam.[157]   At Yale, students watching the speech now started calling out the dates on which his predecessor Lyndon Johnson had made the same claims and charges.   “Then they began to skip ahead of Mr. Nixon, predicting the phrases to come.   Each time, they were correct.”[158]   Students at Berkeley, watching “like masochists”, had the same reaction: “We have heard all the phrases, we have watched the same TV show continually for the past six years."[159]

            “Tonight,” the President went on, “American and South Vietnamese troops will attack the headquarters for the entire Communist military operation in South Vietnam.”

            Allison’s father Arthur watched the speech at home with a few friends.   When they heard this sentence, they turned to each other with a single unanswerable question: “What in God’s name does he think he’s doing?”  “[A]ll of us were praying that he was going to get us out of that mess.   And then to throw it into Cambodia…  It just makes me sick.”[160]   Krause also had a faint but horrible sense of premonition about his daughter.   When she had been home on spring break, he had pestered the camera-shy Allison to let him take a picture of her.   She had finally snapped, “Look, maybe I just won’t come back.”

            Unlike the speech on the 20^th, the President was not giving it a “smooth read”.   “His tone was strident, his words were slurred, and he mopped the sweat from his upper lip,”[161] particularly when he anticipated where “anarchy” was most likely to erupt in response to his actions: “Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed.”   Even the upbeat Haldeman caught the “horrifying moment when he lost his place in the text.”[162]   Obeying what some decried as his tendency to drift into self-pity, he declared he would rather be a “one-term President” than allow a communist take-over with all its attendant “slaughter and savagery”.   Finally, he announced that this decision could not be challenged.   He admitted that “there are honest and deep differences” about this war, “[b]ut the decision I announce transcends those differences”.   And he wished his stunned nation good night.

            All Allison Krause could say was, “You know, Barry, the most disturbing thing is that he sounds so believable”.   She had no way of knowing that she had just heard her own death sentence.

 

 

 

 

            Whether he had feared it or expected it, the President had unleashed more than one army.   “Within hours of the president’s televised address, antiwar activists took to the streets in New York and Philadelphia.”[163]   Even less than the Cambodian guerrillas, the forces he had called up against himself needed neither general staff nor Pentagon.   Unlike the guerrillas, they discovered a new weapon: strike.   “[N]o national group initiated, controlled, or directed the strike.   It simply exploded with unprecedented force across the country, organized on each campus by whatever local activists there were.”[164]

            There had been a national student strike in the mid-1930s, when the United States had been nowhere at war, a mass movement against militarism per se dealt with summarily by police, militia, and the campus vigilante triad of athletes, fraternities, and ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps).[165]     The idea was revived in the early 1960s as a protest against the “uncontrolled movement toward nuclear proliferation.”[166]   The linkage with that issue had caused the concept to be forgotten during the more urgent ferment against the war in Vietnam.   But the concept underlay Academe like a sea of dry grass.   And on this particular night, Richard Nixon dropped a firebrand into it.

            There might be some debate as to where the strike erupted with greatest energy and involved the most students.   Few campuses could have plunged in more feebly than Kent State.   After the expulsion of the SDS leaders the previous spring and the jailing of its leaders, there were perhaps a dozen activists left in a university community of  twenty thousand.   One of these, Jacqueline Stewart, a graduate assistant in the Honors College, and a few friends decided to hold a rally on the Commons the following day to protest the invasion.   But in the end they only managed “to get a few crummy leaflets together.”[167]   Across town, Steve Sharoff and Tim Butz formed the World Historians Organized Against Racism and Exploitation (WHORE), which at that point consisted of themselves.   They resolved to bury a copy of the US Constitution, just “killed” by Richard Nixon, also the next day at noon, also on the Commons.   The mutual choice of time and place was not coincidental.    The Commons, a large quadrangle of grass dead center on the campus, was continually crossed and re-crossed by anyone on it.   As such it was the usual choice for outdoor meetings and assemblies of any kind.[168]

            Sharoff’s ambiguity of identity and allegiance was addressed fully shortly after these events[169]  without being resolved, and never has been since.   He was the only campus radical, if he was a radical, among those identified by the House Internal Security Committee the year before,[170] who took any part in the events of May 1^st – 4^th 1970.   Tim Butz was just as unambiguous.   A Vietnam veteran who had repudiated not only the war but all other forms of violence, he had just finished a solidarity hunger strike for the children of Holly Springs, Mississippi, observing “Maybe I can get rid of my beer belly.”[171]   Even after his friend Allison Krause was murdered, he did not come after her killers with their own sanguine methods, but by founding Counterspy, a guerrilla magazine designed to track the activities of the CIA.

            These three led and were the national student strike at Kent State on the night of April 30^th.   By way of contrast, 2500 students and faculty had packed the chapel at Princeton University and at midnight voted to strike --  “By morning, the strike was virtually solid.”[172]   But that was typical of Kent State and its milieu.   Two weeks before, antiwar organizers had tried to stage a protest march through the town.   They had drawn three thousand the year before; now barely 250 “sloshed their way through the Kent streets” in the pouring rain to little notice.”[173]   It is true – and the authorities would claim of great significance – that the four SDS leaders jailed after the crackdown the year before had just finished their sentences and were at liberty on April 30^th.   It was their determination to stay out of jail that decided them to shun the protest over Cambodia completely.   During the President’s address, chemistry instructor Bobby Franklin was driving Rick Erickson and one of his girl friends to Oberlin College.   A tail picked them up and followed them as far as Streetsboro.   When Franklin stopped at  a gas station, their shadow pulled over onto the shoulder – then, perhaps realizing s/he made been burned, turned around and headed back to Kent.   For once the radicals would have welcomed further surveillance.    A little ways down the road, the tail pipe fell off Franklin’s car and he had to walk back to the gas station with it.[174]

 

 

 

 

            As after his address on April 20^th, and to a much greater extent given his greater agitation, President Nixon was unable to “come down” after his telecast.

He returned to the residence, and his indispensable helpmate the telephone, making calls until 1:30 a.m. on the 1^st to elicit support and help scotch any possible opposition.   Nor was his staff spared; Haldeman and the others also manned the phones well into the morning.   Thus it was that Ehrlichman happened to be in a small basement lobby at an unlikely hour and for a totally unexpected encounter.   Chief Justice of the United States Warren Burger was heading for the elevator carrying “a thick, square envelope addressed to the President.   He just wanted to drop it off, he explained, because he wanted the President to know how much he supported him in this latest move in Vietnam.”[175]   In their upstairs quarters, First Daughters Julie and Tricia were surprised to hear the elevator coming up at that hour.   When they peeked out in the hall, they too bumped into Burger, who turned away without a word and “started walking down the long center hall.”[176]

            According to Nixon’s Memoirs, the Chief Justice had hand-carried the envelope to the White House at midnight instead of mailing it just to tell his president that the Cambodia speech “had a sense of history and destiny about it” and to applaud “the guts it took to make that decision.”   Nixon allegedly replied that if he felt his decision meant that “I can’t be re-elected”, he wanted Burger to seek the 1972 presidential nomination.[177]   William Satire has suggested a different reason for the visit: the Chief Justice was worried about whether Attorney General John Mitchell was going to attack the Supreme Court in his address to the Washington chapter of the American Bar Association scheduled for the next day.   The visit apparently paid off.   “The next day John Mitchell gave the Supreme Court of the United States a clean bill of health.”[178]   Naturally no one has suggested what this accommodation may have cost.   But one thing that could be said of Nixon – whatever his state of mental fatigue or agitation, he never lost his focus.   Whether he had just invaded a neutral nation without a declaration of war to the side, his priority remained “law and order” at home.

 

 

 

 

            Six years later, a noted commentator paused to speak some last words over Cambodia.    Marking April 30^th, he said, “It is a day that will live in the shame of Americans who know the good in their country and suffer when evil is done in its name…   It began five years of wanton, cruel, useless destruction, the destruction of a civilization.   If there is a reckoning, in this life or another, some Americans will bear a heavy burden for what they did to Cambodia.”[179]   For Richard Nixon, the reckoning would precede the next life.   But there was no way it could possibly be harsh enough