Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (111 page)

When Nixon took office, Americans—and others—waited for him to unveil the secret plan that he had said would end the war. In fact, however, he had none, save the hope that efforts toward détente might encourage the Russians to put pressure on Hanoi. He also thought that he could scare the enemy—as Eisenhower was thought to have done to the North Koreans in 1953—into believing that they risked unimaginable American retaliation if they did not agree to settle. Apparently he confided his faith in this approach to Haldeman in early 1969 by touting it as his "madman theory" of ending the conflict: "I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do
anything
to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, 'for God's sakes, you know Nixon is obsessed about communists. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button'—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."
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Whether Nixon ever said this—he denied doing so—is unclear. But he did hope to frighten the enemy into a settlement within a year of taking office. The trouble with this approach was that it misread the "lessons" of history, which rarely repeats itself. The North Vietnamese, unlike the North Koreans in 1953, remained determined to prevail at whatever cost. As in the Johnson years, they refused to consider any agreement that permitted the United States to stay in Vietnam or that allowed Thieu, leader in the South, to take part in a coalition government in South Vietnam. Although Nixon stepped up military pressure by bombing heavily and greatly expanding South Vietnamese forces, the enemy did not bend. Nor did détente with the Soviets assist the American cause: Moscow continued to send military aid to Hanoi. Nixon's threats made no difference to the fundamental reality of the Vietnam War: the North and the NLF would fight to the end to win, and the South would not.
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Moreover, Nixon, like Johnson, personalized the issue. "I will not," he said in late 1969, "be the first President of the United States to lose a war." To back down, Nixon thought, would be to invite political assaults from the Right, to diminish the prestige of the presidency, and to tarnish the all-important "credibility" of the United States. Again and again he asserted that he would win "peace with honor." For these reasons, Nixon refused until 1972 to consider any settlement that would have permitted the North Vietnamese to keep troops in South Vietnam or that would have given any diplomatic standing to the NLF. Because Hanoi insisted on such terms, peace talks, which Kissinger and others conducted in Paris from 1969 on, went nowhere.
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Instead, Nixon persisted in the attempt to blast the enemy into talking, authorizing far greater bombing than Johnson had. The bombing increased already severe ecological damage to the countryside and uprooted masses of civilians from their homes. Nixon and Kissinger widened the war geographically as well by attacking neutral Cambodia, where North Vietnamese troops maintained sanctuaries. This further escalation of the war, for which he never sought congressional support, began in March 1969 with a highly secret campaign of bombing raids. When the
New York Times
printed a story about it nine days after the start of the bombing, Nixon and Kissinger enlisted the aid of the FBI to wiretap staff members of the National Security Council—their own advisers—in hopes of uncovering the leak. Meanwhile the bombing continued; in the next four years B-52S dropped more than a million tons of explosives on Cambodia. When a pro-American government led by Lon Nol staged a successful coup in Cambodia in March 1970, Nixon tried to bolster Nol's regime by authorizing a joint South Vietnamese-American invasion that he said was aimed at the enemy's sanctuaries. These interventions, which proved to be of limited military value, unleashed great anti-war protest in the United States and badly destabilized Cambodia, which later fell victim to fratricidal civil war.
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While escalating the war in these ways, Nixon also started the process of cutting back on aspects of the strictly American contribution to it. This was part of a process that sought to divide the anti-war movement, about which he and Kissinger were almost obsessive. In May 1969 he announced his support of a plan to change the selective service system so as to move from an oldest-first to a youngest-first order of call. This meant that local boards would pick 19 year-olds first and that older males (save those who left or graduated from college) would no longer be threatened. A lottery would determine which young men would be chosen. In September Defense Secretary Melvin Laird said that the call for October would be spread over three months and that there would be no draft calls for November and December. The total drafted in these months, some 30,000, was one-tenth the number called per month at the peak of escalation under the Johnson administration. In November Congress approved the lottery system, and on December 1 the first drawing took place. The lottery did not greatly democratize the process of raising manpower, for student deferments remained (until 1971), and physical exemptions continued to be relatively easy to get. But it did seem a little fairer. The falling off of calls was especially reassuring; no one with a number higher than 195 (out of 365) was ever called.
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Nixon was able to lower draft calls because he was pursuing a policy of what by late 1969 became known as Vietnamization.
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This was more or less the same approach that Johnson had begun to employ after Tet. It involved pouring money and arms into the military of the South Vietnamese, increasing the size of their army (from 850,000 to a million), and getting it to bear a greater brunt of the fighting. As early as June 1969 Nixon announced the withdrawal of 25,000 American combat troops from Vietnam. The policy of Vietnamization upset Thieu and South Vietnamese military leaders, who sensed that the United States was pulling the rug from under them. As it turned out, they were correct, but Nixon denied it at the time. The President insisted instead that the United States remained committed to the anti-Communist cause.

Vietnamization unintentionally helped to damage morale among Americans in combat. In May 1969 American troops struggled for nine days, absorbing great losses, to take an enemy position. This became known as Hamburger Hill. Ordered to try again, they almost mutinied, then finally succeeded. Having achieved their goal, they were told that the hill had no military value, and they withdrew. The battle of Hamburger Hill aptly summarized the bloody, apparently pointless nature of the war on the ground.
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As the near mutiny revealed, American troops were growing weary of this sort of effort. Before 1969 they had fought with great bravery and discipline. But when it became clear that Nixon intended to cut back on American troop strength, many wondered why they should pay the price. Enlisted men increasingly refused to carry out orders. "Fragging" of officers became serious: more than 1,000 incidents were reported betwen 1969 and 1972. Racial conflicts tore units apart. Desertions increased, to an average of 7 per 100 soldiers. More than twice that average were reported as AWOL. By 1971 it was estimated that 40,000 of the 250,000 American men then in Vietnam were heroin addicts.
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A vocal minority of American troops came home enraged and ready to protest against the war. In April of that year some 1,000 veterans camped out on the mall in Washington. Calling out the names of their dead buddies, they flung their medals on the Capitol steps.
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Vietnamization, which moved slowly at first, did little to dampen antiwar dissent. Draft resisters continued their efforts in 1969 and 1970, staging vehement protests against companies such as Dow Chemical and General Electric. Draft card burnings and turn-ins increased. Much more significant, however, was the swell of peaceful actions between mid-1969 and early 1971. Anti-war activists organized massive demonstrations, one of which, Mobilization Day in Washington and other cities on November 15, 1969, attracted crowds estimated at between 600,000 and 750,000 people. Demonstrations such as these, by far the largest in the history of the war, indicated that the collapse of organizations such as SDS was relatively insignificant. On the contrary, the anti-war movement by 1969 was moving well beyond the campuses and into the neighborhoods of America. It embraced an uneasily diverse coalition of people: draft resisters, students, anti-war veterans, blacks, working-class people, parents, the elderly, women for peace, and many others. Among people who opposed continuation of the fighting were mounting numbers of the "silent majority" who did not think, as many students did, that the war was "immoral." But they had come to believe that the war could never be won and that it must be ended before it tore up the United States.
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Nixon professed to be unmoved by anti-war activity. He made a show of telling people that he watched a Washington Redskins football game during one of the big demonstrations in Washington. "We've got those liberal bastards on the run now," he told his staff. "We've got them on the run and we're going to keep them on the run."
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Ever more fearful of anti-war protestors, he actively fomented backlash against demonstrators. Moreover, millions of Americans—they may in fact have been a silent majority—still hoped that the United States could end the war in Vietnam without losing. Many of these people (as well as some who opposed the war) were offended by the antics of the radical few, like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, who continued to seek—and to get—widespread media coverage. On Mobilization Day, Rubin and Hoffman marched to the Justice Department, raised an NLF flag, built barriers, and set fires, thereby distracting attention from a much larger peaceful march to the Washington Monument. Divisions within the anti-war movement, which were sharp along lines of age and class, created problems for the cause.
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Still, the rise of anti-war activity could not be ignored, never more so than following announcement of the American invasion of Cambodia on April 30, 1970. Before going ahead with the assault Nixon steeled himself by watching
Patton
at his retreat at Camp David. As rumors circulated of American involvement he went on a national TV hook-up to defend his actions. In this widely noted speech, he explained that the North Vietnamese sanctuaries had to be wiped out and that Americans would leave Cambodia when that limited objective was accomplished. But Nixon was otherwise belligerent, defiantly asserting his toughness. The speech, indeed, outlined as clearly as any President ever had the rationale for the involvement of the United States in Cold War ventures such as Vietnam. This was the credibility of American commitments. "If, when the chips are down," Nixon explained, "the world's most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and institutions around the world." He added, "I would rather be a one-term president and do what I believe was right than to be a two-term president at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power."
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The invasion of Cambodia set off a wave of protests, especially on the campuses. The next night students at Kent State University in Ohio flung bottles at police cars and smashed store windows, and the night after that persons unknown fire-bombed the university's ROTC building. The governor of the state, James Rhodes, sent in National Guardsmen to keep order. On May 4, however, some 500 protestors gathered, some of whom threw rocks at the guardsmen, who retaliated with tear gas. Although the closest demonstrators were sixty feet away, some of the guardsmen then opened fire, killing four students and wounding nine. None of the four who were killed was a radical; two of them were women walking to class. A presidential Commission on Campus Unrest later assailed the "indiscriminate firing" as "unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable."
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News of the killings at Kent State inflamed already super-heated college campuses. News a few days later that Mississippi policemen had killed two and wounded eleven black college students at Jackson State College ignited further protest. Campuses that until then had experienced little antiwar activity were convulsed by violence; three students were stabbed at the University of New Mexico. Student strikes that May affected some 350 campuses; demonstrations engaged some two million students, or 25 percent of university students in America—by far a record high. Thirty ROTC buildings were burned or bombed. The National Guard had to be called out in sixteen states and on twenty-one campuses. More than seventy-five colleges and universities had to close down for the remainder of the academic year.
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As in the 1960s, however, reactions on university campuses offered but a partial glimpse into the kaleidoscope of American public opinion about that most divisive and long-lasting of wars. A
Newsweek
poll taken a few days after the killings at Kent State discovered that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students, and only 11 percent the National Guard. Some 50 percent approved of the invasion of Cambodia, compared to 39 percent who opposed it. Amid the volatility following announcement of the invasion and the tragedy at Kent State it was difficult to know what to conclude from survey data such as these. Still, they suggested that something like a silent majority, while tired of the war, was sticking to some of its guns.