American Experiment (360 page)

When Richard Nixon completed the first leg of his comeback from the bitter defeats of the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial race by easily winning the Republican nomination over New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, the stage seemed set for a climactic and even historic collision between warring philosophies, programs, and politicians. No one provoked Democrats as readily as Nixon, who intended to keep the focus on Democratic failures rather than Republican proposals. President Johnson’s anointment of Humphrey, however grudging, put the burden of defending the Democratic party record on the Vice President, however much he might want to strike out on his own. George Wallace’s entrance into the race challenged both parties but especially the Administration’s civil rights record. Eager to meet this challenge, black leaders stepped up their voter registration efforts. In a year already filled with tumult and bloodshed some observers anticipated a “real Donnybrook.”

The campaign did indeed get underway amid suspense and excitement, as Humphrey sought to reach out to the peace forces without antagonizing the still powerful and still proud President in the White House, as Nixon tried to go on the attack without reviving memories of the red-baiting “Tricky Dick” of the 1940s and 1950s, and as Wallace made a direct populist pitch to segregationists, fundamentalists, and blue-collar labor in their own vernacular. Wallace enlivened matters by choosing as his running mate on the American Independent ticket retired general Curtis E. LeMay, former chief of the Strategic Air Command, who presented a caricature of the bomb-wielding militarist and appeared, in Marshall Frady’s words, as “politically graceful as an irate buffalo on a waxed waltz floor.”

These political pyrotechnics were deceptive. The campaign became largely a battle of personalities rather than policies, mainly because Humphrey and Nixon hewed so closely to a centrist, consensual position on the issue of Vietnam that most voters saw little difference in their
positions—and those voters who did see a distinction did not agree on which candidate was more hawk or more dove. Nixon was a “master of ambiguity” on Vietnam, a scholarly study concluded, and Humphrey “alternated between protestations of loyalty to current policy, and hints that he really disagreed with it.” Wallace, charging that there was not a “dime’s worth of difference” between the Tweedledum and Tweedledee candidates, appealed directly to the “forgotten Americans” and their sense of political alienation, powerlessness, estrangement from government, loss of freedom— and to their chauvinism, racism, and hatred of war resisters in the colleges.

“I’m going to ask my Attorney General,” he said in his standard speech, “to seek an indictment against every professor in this country who calls for a communist victory”—voice rising—“and see if I can’t put them under a good jail somewhere.” Loud cheers. “I’m sick and tired of seeing these few college students raise money, blood, and clothes for the communists and fly the Vietcong flag; they ought to be dragged by the hair of their heads and stuck under a good jail also.”

In the end the election contest settled into the electoral pattern of the preceding two decades. After assiduously courting the southern vote, Wallace carried five states of the old Solid South and Nixon five of the southern “rim states”; Humphrey won only Texas. Since southern states had been voting Republican or independent for President off and on for several decades, this was a predictable outcome in light of the Democrats’ civil rights posture. Winning 9.9 million votes nationally against Nixon’s 31.8 million and Humphrey’s 31.3 million, Wallace ran the strongest race against major-party candidates since La Follette in 1924. Humphrey, holding the labor vote against Wallace, carried the old Democratic party bastions of the industrial Northeast.

In splitting their vote almost evenly between Nixon and Humphrey, voters gave little guidance to leaders on Vietnam, for the major-party candidates had given little guidance to them. Well could reporter David Broder sum up the central paradox of the 1968 election: “a year of almost unprecedented violence and turmoil, a year of wild political oscillations and extremes, produced a terribly conventional result.” But the election had one decisive outcome. Richard M. Nixon was the next President of the United States.

On January 19, 1969, the day before the inauguration of Richard Nixon as President, ten thousand “militant—but for the most part genial” demonstrators, led by four active-duty GIs, marched on the Capitol in
opposition to the continuing war. The next day, armed only with banners, chanting protesters organized by the National Mobilization Committee conducted a peaceful incursion into the inaugural ceremony and the parade to the White House. But as the presidential motorcade crawled down Pennsylvania Avenue, a shower of projectiles—sticks, stones, bottles, smoke bombs—landed on the limousines of the new regime. The Mobe publicly condemned this violent action by an SDS faction—the first such disruption of an inaugural.

The world did not pay much attention. Its eyes were on the new President, who had come back from the defeats of 1960 and 1962 to inch his way up to the top of the greasy pole. It was the new Nixon, certified so by publicists and politicians. The old President-watcher Walter Lippmann, in choosing him over Humphrey, had discerned a “new Nixon, a maturer and mellower man who is no longer clawing his way to the top.” Theodore White would say, in his best-seller on the 1968 election, that the “Nixon of 1968 was so different from the Nixon of 1960 that the whole personality required re-exploration.” A happy Nixon on election night had promised to “bridge the generation gap” and “bring the American people together.” His inaugural address was conciliatory too.

But was there indeed a new Nixon? The first test was bound to be Vietnam. Nixon had promised—and the country expected—more decisive action to end the war in Indochina without dishonor. But how? On what terms? Leaders of both parties had long broadly agreed on the strategy of “Vietnamization”—of phasing out American troops while South Vietnam took control of its own military defense. Johnson’s strategy had been gradual escalation, extensive though selective bombing, and promises to Saigon of support for the South Vietnam regime along with assurances to Hanoi that he would not challenge its legitimacy in the north. Nixon too favored help to Saigon along with a phased pullout, but twenty years later, after studying the available records and the myriad memoirs, historians were not clear whether Nixon and his adviser Henry Kissinger planned on keeping South Vietnam viable no matter what—the old policy—or on pulling out of South Vietnam no matter what. And that would be a crucial distinction.

“We will not make the same old mistakes,” Kissinger said in 1969. “We will make our own.” But the American people would not tolerate many more mistakes in Vietnam.

From the start Vietnam brought out Nixon’s basic dualism. He would step up negotiation with Hanoi and speed up withdrawal of American troops. Maintaining continuity with previous Presidents, he would “seek the opportunity,” as he said in an address to the nation in mid-May 1969,
“for the South Vietnamese people to determine their own political future without outside interference.” If the war had to go on, it was “a war for peace.” If that phrase reminded some less of Woodrow Wilson than of George Orwell (“War Is Peace”), the new President still was eager to end the bloodletting in Vietnam. “I’m not going to end up like LBJ,” he said, “holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face on the street. I’m going to stop that war. Fast.”

But his other means of stopping the war—“fast”—was to enhance it. He could not forget his days in the White House under Eisenhower when Ike had won a favorable settlement in Korea, as Nixon saw it, by threatening China with massive escalation, even the use of nuclear weapons. Surely a jolting threat would succeed against another obdurate enemy in Asia.

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob,” Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman reported his boss’s telling him during the 1968 campaign. “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 sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. 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.”

Certainly Ho was not begging for peace at the moment. Late in February his forces launched a new offensive that inflicted heavy losses on American troops, now approaching their peak level of 543,400. Within a few weeks the President expanded the bombing in Laos, sending in B-52S for the first time, and began a secret air war in Cambodia; for over a year the bombing orders were burned after each sortie. By intensifying the war outside Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger were showing Hanoi and Moscow that they would break the restraints LBJ had imposed. Sensing that the war would not soon end, the antiwar and black movements during Nixon’s first hundred days escalated in size and militance as dramatically as the secret enlargement of the war. More and more students were taking part in protests, which often brought a rash of strikes and building takeovers, amid considerable property destruction and violence.

And now a strange thing happened to the Nixon White House. It fell into the same Vietnam pattern as had the previous Administration it had so condemned—the same heavy military actions interspersed with clandestine negotiations, the same expansion and contraction of the war as the prospects of a settlement waxed and waned, the same effort to strengthen the South Vietnamese forces, the same caution about unduly provoking Moscow or Peking.

The White House did not understand that the Vietnam War, despite all the escalation, refused to fit the pattern of Western wars—authoritative
decisions by the political and military leaders at the top, the marshaling of disciplined armies on the field, the mobilization of patriotic support at home. To an extraordinary degree the course of events in Vietnam turned on the motivation, morale, and self-discipline of third cadres, whether regulars or guerrillas, in the field, and on the protesting activists in the streets and neighborhoods of America. The outcome of all wars of historic importance is determined to a degree by the skill and resoluteness of foot soldiers on the political battlefield as well as the military. The crucial role of these factors in Vietnam was enormously enhanced by the fact that not two opposing armies but five had thrown their weight into the shifting balance of forces: Hanoi’s regulars in the south, the NLF, Saigon’s troops, American GIs, and the army of protesters back home. These military and political cadres formed a grid of countervailing forces that dominated Nixon’s White House even more than Johnson’s.

Of the staying power of the communists there could be little doubt, after almost a decade of their battling the American invader following their earlier rout of the French. Despite extensive indoctrination by Hanoi in its version of Marxism, the regulars and the guerrillas were motivated far more by sheer hate—of all invaders, Chinese, Japanese, French, or American, of imperialists and exploiters who had controlled their country, cruel landlords, greedy police, and village officials who acted as puppets of the alien rulers—and by hope of freedom as they defined it. “Only by revolutionary violence can the masses defeat aggressive imperialism and its lackeys and overthrow the reactionary administration to take power,” their leader General Vo Nguyen Giap had written in 1964. Violent revolution was their means of achieving power; whether this means of achieving freedom might ultimately corrode that noble end was a question postponed. At times recruitment and morale sank, especially among the guerrillas, but their ideology of hate and hope and their refusal, unlike their enemy, to be distracted by the “illusion of peace” always brought them back to one transcending goal, victory.

With Nixon’s critical decision to push “Vietnamization” of the war in order to assure American families that their fathers, sons, and brothers, husbands and boyfriends, would soon be returning, the staying power of Saigon’s troops became of central importance to the White House during 1969. Most Americans in Saigon, forgetting that their own politicians had pioneered in the arts of bribery and boodle, had little but contempt for the corrupt, divided Saigon government with its brief king-of-the-rock regimes. They often lost patience with the South Vietnamese troops they sought to instruct in the techniques of mechanized war. Still, the fifth government after Diem was stabilized under Nguyen Van Thieu, and after
intensive efforts by Saigon and Washington to beef up and modernize the South Vietnamese armed forces, these numbered about a million strong by the end of 1969, with ample weapons and supplies at their disposal. Everything then depended on the working out by Saigon and Washington of long-range plans for an orderly and successful execution of Vietnamization, but the necessary control and consistency were lacking in both capitals. Given the weaknesses at the top, the South Vietnamese troops showed more staying power than might have been expected.

So did the American troops in Vietnam, but their situation was quite different. Fighting nine thousand miles from home, holding only the vaguest notions of what they were fighting for or against, facing day after day appalling mud, heat, dust, downpours, and an elusive enemy who attacked with grenades, mines, ambushes, night infiltrations, and other guerrilla tactics, the GIs held up relatively well until Nixon’s troop pullback policy left the remaining Vietnam force even less aware of the purpose of the war and even more eager to get out fast. As morale and discipline fell, a whole drug culture developed. Ugly racial hatreds surfaced. “Fragging”—men killing their own officers—rose to unprecedented heights. Americans at home were shocked to learn, eighteen months after it happened, that in March 1968 GIs had gunned down at least 450 helpless South Vietnamese civilians—children, women, old men—at My Lai. The great number of GIs dug in and held on, but by 1969 they were a declining part of the grid of countervailing forces.