Beating Plowshares Into Swords: An Alternate History of the Vietnam War (9 page)

Now let me say this: I have no first hand knowledge of how the Secretary came by this information. Some-such as Mr. Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson-claim it was through the use of military intelligence agency assets, specifically Army and Naval Intelligence units deployed under Secretary Nixon’s orders. Let me say that such actions would have violated certain legal statutes and there is no credible evidence-now or then-that anything like that ever occurred.

But no matter how it is obtained, knowledge is power, and Secretary Nixon certainly used the power this knowledge gave him to his advantage. It is a damn shame that a decent man like Vice President Humphrey got put on the list of those found to be false in their loyalty to the President, but it is undeniable that members of his senior staff had been talking to Kennedy’s people. It seemed the Vice President’s men were playing a double game, angling to have their guy emerge as a compromise candidate if President Johnson and Senator Kennedy deadlocked themselves. The Vice President had no knowledge of what his men were up to; I know this because Mr. Nixon told me as much. It did not stop him from ordering Mr. Haldeman to leak this particular story to the press two days before the convention was to convene; I’ve always known politics was a tough and dirty business, but I had no idea just how much so until that last week of August of 1968.

Ruth Eleanor Green:
Why did Robert Kennedy wait so late to challenge LBJ? His people would later say that it was the assassination of Dr. King and the accounts of Vietnamese suffering from horrible radiation sickness that appeared in the American press in the spring of ‘68 that finally motivated them to try and change the direction of the country. Maybe, but I think they were cowed too long by opinion polls that showed huge public approval for the President’s policy in Vietnam-immoral and criminal as that policy might have been.

In the end, they tried and thousands of us traveled to Chicago to stand witness and show our support; and for a few too short days it looked like we might actually succeed in toppling the warmongers. A group of us stayed with a school teacher on the South Side and watched a lot of what went down on her television set. That’s where we saw Senator Kennedy announce that his name would be put in nomination; I remember watching George McGovern’s speech on the opening day of the convention where he withdrew and threw his support to Bobby and thinking our momentum was unstoppable. We also watched as Hubert Humphrey, blinking back tears, stood before reporters and told them his name would not be put up for Vice President again. In that moment, I thought Lyndon Johnson’s house was falling apart and we would be the one to build something so much better once the rubble was cleared away.

On the third night of the convention we gathered in Grant Park with the intention of marching to the convention center in a show of mass support for Kennedy; there were thousands of us and we thought our time had come. I truly believed it in that moment despite all the setbacks and death, despite all my despair after Dr. King’s murder and the beatings of those wanting nothing more than peace.

But that moment was gone in a flash. We never got near the convention, Mayor Daley’s cops made sure of it; Johnson’s flunkies put the hammer down inside the hall and made sure everyone toed the line and those who didn’t could just get their collective asses the hell out of there. Hundreds did and marched up to Grant Park to join us; we cheered them, but it was the cheers of the defeated and everyone knew it.

What we didn’t know was that the worst was yet to come.

That would be when Richard Nixon was chosen to be Vice President on the ticket with Johnson. They called it a “national unity“ticket, but the only thing that united those two men was the mountain of Vietnamese corpses they were both standing on.

James Rice:
The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was the best drama ever. Watching little Bobby Kennedy try to crash Lyndon Johnson’s convention and have his ass handed to him was a sight to behold. Their whole plot to dump Johnson got exposed days before the opening gavel and all those party hacks that were secretly in the Kennedy camp lost their nerve; that along with the jettisoning of Hubert Humphrey and the battle over the rules and the platform made for great TV. But nothing topped the scene when Republican Richard Nixon walked out on the stage to accept the Vice Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

It was real political genius on Lyndon Johnson’s part to replace Humphrey with Nixon; he was in a dead heat at best with Rockefeller and both of them were barely ahead of Wallace, who was pulling down a whopping third of the vote if the polls were to be believed. But there were all those conservative Goldwater Republicans out there who just could not get over the fact that Rocky had given the cold shoulder to their man back in ’64. So old Johnson goes to Chicago and gives an acceptance speech where he says, “We were not afraid to go into South Vietnam and tell the bloodthirsty Communist hordes bent on conquest that they would go no further. We drew a line in the dirt and made them back down.” That was music to the ears of all those tough anti-Communists who suddenly forgot about LBJ signing all those Civil Rights Acts benefiting lazy Negroes whose only ambition was to get welfare checks paid for with hard working white people’s tax dollars. And the President didn’t say or do anything at Chicago that might have reminded them. It would have been a mighty different race if the Republicans had nominated Reagan, but it wasn’t in the cards.

My Dad started getting calls right after Labor Day, the first was from an old friend who’d raised big money for Goldwater in ’64 and who’d been a fellow Reagan delegate in ’68. The second was from John Connolly, the Texas Governor who’d run the convention for Johnson and made sure the so called “Kennedy Coup” got nowhere; the final one was from Tricky Dick himself. All of them were part of an orchestrated outreach to men like my father; men who had no use for Nelson Rockefeller and weren’t comfortable with the redneck rabble that was the Wallace campaign. Suddenly Dad was seeing virtues in LBJ heretofore hidden: yeah he was a big spending liberal and certainly a crook, but he’d sure kicked Commie ass over there in Southeast Asia. And he was smart enough to let Dick Nixon run the Pentagon and then promote him to Vice President. I think the clincher came when William F. Buckley wrote an essay saying how conservatives should follow their consciences on Election Day and vote for the man they thought was the toughest on the Communists.

So by the end of September, my father and many of his friends were sporting bumper stickers that simply said “Nixon for Vice President.” It was the perfect example of having your cake and eating it too. Their support was enough to tip California to Johnson on Election Day by the narrowest of margins; it off set Rockefeller carrying New York and New Jersey. They say Nixon was also responsible for the Democrats carrying Tennessee, Virginia and Florida and those states were enough for LBJ to pull it out in the Electoral College. It was nearly a year and a half after the official signing of the cease fire, but I think the Vietnam War really ended on the morning after Election Day 1968 when Johnson and Nixon stood together in the White House and claimed victory.

Ruth Eleanor Green:
I put on a stoic face during the election that fall, it seemed the best way to cope with our defeat in Chicago. There was talk of mounting a fourth party challenge, a Peace Party, but it was really too late by then to get a candidate on the ballot in all fifty states. So I went back to my teaching job and watched the campaign on TV. It was not an edifying sight: Rockefeller, the great “liberal Republican” spent most of the fall talking about how he would put criminals and drug dealers in jail if he were elected; if anyone brought up Vietnam, he just intimated he’d have gone nuclear sooner than Johnson if it had been his call. Wallace just stoked the rage of morons who thought the Confederacy should have won the Civil War and made it clear he’d jump at the opportunity to drop even bigger nukes on the Communists if by some miracle he was elevated to the oval office. Both Lyndon Johnson and his new best friend, Richard Nixon, went across the country making speeches that might well have been written for Senator Joe McCarthy in his heyday.

Yet I’ll hand it to Johnson, he had the guts to name Thurgood Marshall Chief Justice of the Supreme Court right in the middle of that campaign. It showed that despite the crimes he had committed overseas, he still had not forgotten there were wrongs back here in the USA he could still put right in some small way. I took that into account when I cast my vote on election day, all my friends in the Peace Movement said there was no choice, that all of them-LBJ, Rockefeller, Wallace-were part and parcel of the same corrupt system, but I went to my polling place and pulled the lever beside a name just the same. You can’t complain if you don’t vote, that’s all there is to it.

But after the Armageddon that was the ‘68 election-because it took Dr. King’s life and left the forces of reaction more firmly in control than ever-I just tuned politics out for most of the next ten years; seeing Bobby Kennedy shake hands and make peace with the man who was his family‘s worst enemy only made it worse. They call the 70’s the decade of Nixon, the man who is second only to FDR for time in the White House. Some even try to portray him as the most progressive President since the second Roosevelt; tell that to all the dead Vietnamese, to all the dead Nicaraguans, to all the dead Angolans, to all the dead Chileans, not to mention Daniel Ellsberg, who has rotted in prison all these years on a phony treason conviction because he blew the whistle on Nixon’s covert operations.

Instead I devoted myself to more personal causes: I was a founding member of Our Responsibility, an organization dedicated to raising money and providing proper medical treatment for the thousands of surviving Vietnamese victims of the Neutron attacks who were suffering from horrible cancers caused by the radiation to which they were exposed. In the late ‘60’s this was not a popular cause. My fundraising work, plus the fact that I was also a prominent activist on behalf of repealing Maryland’s restrictive abortion laws earned me a visit from one of Director Gordon Liddy’s FBI agents in 1976.

That incident pushed me back into political activism with a lot tougher skin this time; I was bloodied and unbowed when Reagan-Buchanan won and learned that the bad guys don’t get their way every time when Clinton and then John F. Kennedy Jr. ran.

Always persevere, stay the course, and never be afraid.

James Rice:
In the long run I think everything worked out, I stayed in the Army for a year after the cease fire and then went back to school and eventually got my Masters. Things really got screwed up for some people, one of my father’s partners had a son who claimed to be a “revolutionary” and joined the anti-war movement; his parents helped him go to Canada to avoid the draft and my father was so outraged that he never spoke to the man again. I got more out of my Vietnam experience than I realized at the time; five years later I helped put together a group of investors that built the Indochine Hotel in Saigon, the biggest hotel and casino in the Far East. Because of my service there during the war, I was instrumental in finding the site to build on. It’s all about turning negatives into positives.

That’s what my father did, it seemed Johnson and Nixon were quite intent on keeping on the good side of the people who helped deliver California to them; that’s why a construction company in which he owned a majority interest got a bunch of lucrative government contracts over the next three years to help renovate and expand the Naval base at San Diego and the docks at Long Beach. The statute of limits on any and all laws and regulations has long since expired, so I’m comfortable telling it now. Dad knew where his bread was buttered and remembered who’d scratched his back; I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, but on August 9
^th
of 1974, when LBJ finally went to that great White House in the sky, he lowered the flags in front of the big house in Torrance and the second home on Oahu to half mast.

Gen. Earl Halton:
I was in Mr. Nixon’s office at the Pentagon that final Thursday in August when he signed his resignation as Defense Secretary; a plane was waiting to fly him to Chicago where he would accept the second spot on President Johnson’s “Unity” ticket. “I’m sacrificing a lifetime of party loyalty here,” I remember him saying, “but I’ll be Goddamned if I’ll let those Kennedy’s piss away all the hard work I’ve accomplished in this place in the last three years. Bobby is just mad because Lyndon and I did in Vietnam what he and Jack could never do in Cuba. It’s nothing more than that.” Then he shook my hand and effusively thanked me for all the help during all those tough days. “You were a rock,” he told me, “a rock.” I took that as high praise.

But as I watched Mr. Nixon walk away, all I could think about was Hubert Humphrey and how he was getting on a plane to fly out of Chicago at that moment, kicked to the curb. He was the loser in a very tough game and I was standing in the wake of the ultimate winner, but at what a price. I’ll say this for Richard Nixon, on the day after he assumed the Presidency, the first call he made was to Mr. Humphrey, asking him to become Vice President again.

I stayed on after Clark Clifford took over at Defense, but moved over to the Chief of Staff of the Army’s office. It was pleasant duty and I had a chance to go over to the White House after President Johnson resigned because of his heart condition in April of 1971, but I turned it down; after so many years, I’d had enough of Washington, not the place, but the mentality.

So in January 1972 I took over command of MAACV in Saigon, but I did not find it a pleasant experience. I consider myself a soldier, not a viceroy, which is what that job had become in my opinion. We had gone to war to achieve a free and independent South Vietnam, not to establish an American satrapy in Southeast Asia. What I found particularly distasteful was dealing with the petty South Vietnamese politicians and Army officers who were constantly currying favor in order to get their hands on the millions of dollars America poured into their country every year. This was a situation that corrupted and degraded both countries and during my tour of duty I made many recommendations to Washington on ways to rectify the problem, including reducing our military commitment there. This did not win me many friends in the “Vietnam Lobby,” but unlike them I didn’t believe I deserved to get rich off my service to my country. These were the same people who opposed my efforts to allow radiation patients from the North come to the United States for medical treatment.