My Life So Far (59 page)

It was very different this time. Not only had the bombing of the North stopped, but having Tom there to buffer and support allowed me to relax. It had been what I had learned about hope, on my first trip to Hanoi, that had motivated me to have another child. Now here was Troy, actually in Hanoi, a little bundle of manifested hope.

W
e went directly from North Vietnam, that spring of 1974, to six weeks of around-the-clock lobbying in Washington, D.C., to persuade Congress to stop funding the Thieu government. We found that the lobbying effort we had helped mount during the tour was generating thousands of letters and phone calls to congressional offices. One congressman was so inundated with mail that he pleaded, “Please call your people off. I’m voting with you, okay?”

In 1973 I had filed a lawsuit against the Nixon administration to compel the various government agencies to admit they had been carrying on a campaign of harassment and intimidation in an attempt to silence and impugn me. I wanted them to acknowledge that this was improper and to cease and desist. One afternoon that spring of 1974, I went with my friend and attorney, Leonard Weinglass, to take the deposition of former White House special counsel Charles Colson. Before, we met off the record with David Shapiro, Colson’s law partner and chief legal adviser for Watergate matters. Tom was with us.

Shapiro told us it was Attorney General John Mitchell who ordered the Watergate break-in and also admitted that “my client [Colson] is not cleaner than driven snow. He heads the list of the biggest sons of bitches in town and they say everything points in his direction . . . but he has committed no crimes.” His was merely “peanuts and popcorn politics,” said Shapiro of Colson, who was in charge of compiling the White House enemies list and of destroying Nixon’s opponents (who included not simply activists but antiwar Democrats, heads of major corporations, newspaper editors, labor leaders, and presidential candidates).

After thirty minutes Colson came in with a stenographer and the formal deposition began. I recall staring at an enormous cross that hung around Colson’s neck and rested atop his potbelly. That’s right, I thought, he has a cross to bear. It was an odd experience sitting in that posh office in the presence of this well-groomed, well-heeled, cross-bearing man who had been so involved in subverting American democracy. Colson admitted there were memos on me in the White House files but said they came from John Dean. He denied any official ties with the government other than his publicly known job and said he knew nothing about the enemies list. Nonetheless Mr. Colson was indicted on March 1, 1974, on one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and one count of obstruction of justice.*
 
¹⁰

M
y lawsuit against the Nixon administration was settled in 1979. The FBI admitted that I had been under surveillance from 1970 to 1973; that they had used counterintelligence techniques, in violation of my constitutional rights, to “neutralize” me and “impair my personal and professional standing”; that they had seized without subpoena my bank records during that time and had made pretext calls and visits to my home and office to determine where I was.

In addition, the CIA admitted to opening my mail. I am told this was the first time the Agency had ever acknowledged conducting a mail-opening campaign in the United States against an American citizen. The suit also revealed that the State Department, IRS, Treasury Department, and White House all kept files on me. By then new guidelines and laws had been put in place by Congress and the new attorney general that prohibited all of these activities without judicial process.

I
n 2001 the Bush administration got Congress to pass the Patriot Act, which has rolled back the post-Watergate protections of our constitutional rights, expanding the government’s authority to conduct wiretaps and allowing a noncitizen suspected of associating with terrorists to be detained without a warrant and without the right to consult an attorney. Even more Big Brotherish, the Patriot Act gives the FBI broad power to require libraries and bookstores to identify individuals who read or purchase books the government deems suspect; and the law provides that such individuals may not be notified that they and their reading habits are being investigated.

I
n the spring of 1974 Nixon’s supplemental aid bill for Thieu was roundly defeated. In August impeachment proceedings began in Congress. That week Nixon became the first president in American history to resign from office. In addition to the Watergate crimes, the Senate Armed Services Committee had developed evidence suggesting Nixon had violated the law by permitting secret ground operations in Laos and Cambodia. But in the end it was for the narrower issues of illegal cover-ups in response to antiwar dissent, not because of the war itself, that Nixon was finally forced to resign. In the wake of the Watergate scandals, when asked what I thought of it all, I replied, “I’m still here. The last government’s in jail.”

Gerald Ford became president, pardoned Nixon one month later, and by attempting to reinstate funding for Thieu proved that the United States was still unwilling to give up its corrupt South Vietnamese ally and leave Indochina to the Indochinese. But in the spring of 1975, after more than ten years of war, the North Vietnamese and their supporters in the South entered Saigon. The war was over.

It was hard to believe. There was joy that it was over, but there was sadness, too, as we watched the scenes unfold on television: helicopters lifting out embassy personnel, Vietnamese allies of the United States clinging to the skids. It didn’t need to end this way. All along the Vietnamese had offered olive branches, believing that we who had fought our own war of national independence would understand them. So many wasted, lost lives on both sides. So much land and forest destroyed for no reason.

I
have not returned to Vietnam since the war ended thirty years ago, and not all that I have heard about the situation there makes me happy. In North Vietnam the “hard-liners” won out over more moderate leaders, and they were heavy-handed and disconnected from the people in the southern cities when they set about trying to bring order out of chaos. Thousands of former Saigon administrators and military officials were put into reeducation camps with no rights of appeal. Economic reforms were rigidly instituted without sensitivity to what people wanted and needed in the South. The Hanoi government went about imposing a centralized economy and social order ill suited to local conditions, with almost the same sense of entitlement that had allowed the United States to try to reorganize South Vietnamese society according to
our
westernized concept: an urban consumer culture. Still, none of this justifies what the United States did—and none of it seems to be keeping American tourists from spending their holidays there or U.S. corporations from investing there.

The Vietnamese were expecting the United States to honor its agreement to provide reconstruction aid. Instead the economic embargo of the North was extended throughout the country, all Vietnamese assets in the United States were frozen, and the United States blocked Vietnam’s entry into the United Nations. The country was in desperate need of aid. Without it terrible hardships were imposed on South Vietnam, where years of war had taken the hardest toll, where hundreds of thousands of refugees were crowded into cities. The North Vietnamese hard-liners had to deal alone and ineptly with severe problems. On top of this there was a massive exodus from Vietnam. Mostly the ethnic Chinese (Hoa) fled the country in makeshift boats; tens of thousands died at sea. U.S. officials claimed that the “boat people” were victims of massive political persecution, and the crisis became the new “See? I told you so” justification of the war.*
 
¹¹

W
hatever hardships were foisted on the Vietnamese people by the new Communist regime, the widespread publicity put out by the Pentagon that, should they take over, the Communists would murder hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people turned out to be propaganda to manipulate American public opinion—like Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” in 2003.

T
here have been plenty of people who accused me of romanticizing the Vietnamese. Well, yes. They were easy to romanticize during the war, as they battled the mighty U.S. military power. The David and Goliath legend hasn’t survived the centuries for nothing. Do you know anyone who roots for Goliath (except maybe those who want something from him)? It’s the Davids who touch our hearts.

A FINAL WORD

T
here are still many Americans who believe the United States could have won the war had we “gone all out.” Because of this, I cannot conclude the Vietnam chapters of this book without addressing this question.

The U.S. military did everything that General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and his successor, Creighton Abrams, asked for: bombing Laos and Cambodia to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, mining Haiphong harbor and imposing a naval blockade, dropping more bomb tonnage on Vietnam than we did on
all
of Europe during World War II, pummeling Hanoi and Haiphong with B-52 bombers, and waging an all-out air assault against the rest of North Vietnam.

We could win battles, and did. Our soldiers fought bravely and well. But we couldn’t win the war, at least not by conventional means. Of course, we could have dropped a nuclear bomb on them, and Nixon was threatening to do so. In other words, if we couldn’t defeat them, we could at least have annihilated them. But if the mighty United States had had to annihilate a country of rice farmers and fishermen in order to win, wouldn’t that have cost us our national soul? I’m sure there are those men—Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney most likely among them—who think that mentioning “soul” shows we’re soft, unmanly. If you feel this way, then forget about soul and think more pragmatically about the issue of global capitalism—apparently not an invalid reason to send our boys to die. But from an investment point of view we never had to fight a war there at all: Since way back in the 1940s Ho Chi Minh had said he would turn Vietnam into a “fertile field for American capital and enterprise.” He even suggested he might offer the United States a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay if we helped his country stay independent from the French.

Today—fifty-eight thousand American lives and millions of Indochinese lives later—even with the “enemy” running the country, the United States has more than $1 billion invested in Vietnam; trade between the two countries has reached $6 billion a year; the United States is Vietnam’s largest export market. In the fall of 2003 Vietnam’s defense minister, Pham Van Tra, was received in our nation’s capital with full honor guard at the Pentagon. All the dominoes are still standing. Vietnam is considered one of the safest havens for tourism and business.

The real question isn’t how we prosecuted the war but whether the entire United States enterprise in Vietnam was wrong from the get-go. We sent our men to die there
not
to help the Vietnamese gain freedom, but to destroy an indigenous nationalist movement because it threatened U.S. influence and control over the country and because we needed to maintain our “credibility as an ally,” to quote the Pentagon Papers. This was a betrayal of what we stand for. In a battle that pits bamboo against B-52, the victory for bamboo symbolizes hope for the planet.

The U.S. loss represented our nation’s chance for redemption. But we did not learn the lesson, and then we tried to rewrite history to blame it all on the very people who tried to stop it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I’M
BAAAAAACK!!

The world changes according to the way people see it,
and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way . . .
people look at reality, then you can change it.

—J
AMES
B
ALDWIN

O
NCE THE WAR WAS OVER,
I returned to filmmaking and Tom began to investigate the pros and cons of running for the U.S. Senate. Although I did not see it at the time, in hindsight I realize that this marked the beginning of a less harmonious time in our marriage. For three years we had been joined together, at the heart and hip, in our effort to end the war. Now I was resuming a career that would have more impact on our lives than either of us anticipated—an impact that would both please and dismay Tom.