Tag: JFK

Luminat Media finishes their disappointing series on the Vietnam War by underplaying the evil done by Nixon and Kissinger in Cambodia and Laos, and in dragging on a conflict that could have ended in 1969. All because of the figurehead of Thieu.

Turning Point, Part 5

The peace talks on ending the war began under Lyndon Johnson. As we have seen, Richard Nixon covertly sandbagged Johnson’s negotiations through the Chennault Affair. So the talks continued under Nixon’s presidency. As with Johnson, there were two sets of talks, one open and observed, the other secret. Under Johnson, the secret negotiator was Averill Harriman. (No Peace, No Honor by Larry Berman, p. 25) Under Nixon, it was Henry Kissinger.

I

As many have commented, North Vietnam handled these negotiations adroitly. And it was all in keeping with their strategy that the long run was important. In other words, the longer they could delay any kind of truce or ceasefire, the more time they would have to attack and infiltrate their men into the south. I could not find anywhere in Turning Point, Parts 4 or 5, where this important issue was delineated. To me it is crucial to understanding how the war was decided. Hanoi also understood that the longer the war dragged on, the more that both Congress and the public would grow simply sick of all the violence. These tactics turned out to be effective.

On the other hand, Richard Nixon had told the Russian ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, “I will not be the first president to lose a war.” (Berman, p. 48). But, as we also have seen, Nixon understood that the war itself was lost. Therefore, with a war that was becoming more unpopular as it proceeded, Nixon decided to turn over the actual fighting of the war to Saigon. And he would incrementally withdraw American combat troops. Nixon’s term for this was Vietnamization. By expanding the war into Laos and Cambodia, and dropping much bomb tonnage, Nixon hoped to make Hanoi understand that he would drive a hard bargain. What he first proposed was a mutual withdrawal of forces and no coalition government in the south. (ibid, p. 53)

The first meant that all American military forces and PAVN forces would leave the south. The second meant that President Thieu would stay on until there were free elections there. In the opening rounds of the 1969 negotiations, it became clear that Hanoi was dead set against the first request and was almost as firm against Thieu staying. It was also clear that they understood that public and political opinion would provide pressure on Nixon. (Berman, p. 66)

Let us explain–which the film does not–why the North would not agree to the first request. Hanoi was well aware that they had defeated the French on the battlefield in 1954. Dien Bien Phu was a terrible blow to not just France, but the concept of European colonialism. But they also realized that they lost the treaty at Geneva. They never should have agreed to an artificial separation of the country at the 17^th parallel, and then reunification under free elections two years later. American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had committed hundreds of millions in aid to the French struggle, and he even offered the use of atomic weapons to Paris. With that kind of investment, America was not going to go away easily. Or as he said, it was “best to let the French get out of Indochina entirely and then to try to rebuild from the foundation” ourselves. (Michael Swanson, Why the Vietnam War?, p. 114) Dulles thus subverted the Geneva Accords, and through a series of covert and overt actions, he exchanged French colonialism for American imperialism. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, pp. 137-39)

Ho Chi Minh, and later Hanoi leader Le Duan and his chief negotiator Le Duc Tho, were not going to let that happen again. They were not going to settle for less than they had won on the battlefield. So they were not going to agree to remove their soldiers in the south. In fact, they were going to present Nixon and Kissinger with a surprise in that regard.

II

The Easter Offensive took place in March of 1972. Turning Point glances over it and ignores the real importance of the action. The three-pronged attack ended up being a military failure. But it only failed because Nixon had to use an extensive amount of both Air Force bombing and Navy shelling to stop it. In just six months, Operation Linebacker dropped over 155,000 tons of explosives on North Vietnam. This was the first instance of the usage of laser-guided missiles. (Berman, p. 132)

There are two points to be made about this attack. Without American air power, in all probability, it would have succeeded in winning the war. Which meant that Vietnamization was not going to work. Secondly, Kissinger told the Russians that Nixon would now accept a cease-fire in place, and this included leaving PAVN troops in the south–even those from the Easter Offensive. (Berman, p. 125) The film does note the second point; I could not find the first.

There is also an outright clear deception that the film should have noted by Nixon. It is important not just because of the lie, but because it reveals how worried he was that the war was about to be lost. In his pathetic apologia of a book, titled No More Vietnams, he said that he never seriously contemplated either bombing the dikes or using atomic weapons in Vietnam. This was false. As Jeffrey Kimball discovered, Nixon considered doing both at the same meeting with Henry Kissinger. This was during the Easter Offensive when General Giap’s attack was threatening to take Saigon. (Jeffrey Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, pp. 214-19; Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, p. 386) All of this because Kissinger refused “to believe that a little fourth rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point.” (Stone and Kuznick, p. 363)

I could not detect that crucial quote in the film. But Kissinger turned out to be wrong about it. What happened of course was that the USA had a breaking point. It was the same breaking point that Edmund Gullion warned JFK about back in 1951 in Saigon. And like Gullion warned about France, America could not win a war of attrition in Indochina since the home front would not support it.

After the Easter Offensive, Congress was much opposed to extending more funding for the war. Nixon and Kissinger were very aware of this issue. Because soon, about two months after it was over, the Democratic caucuses were to vote overwhelmingly against more funding. (Berman, p. 221) After the near success of the Easter Offensive, the writing was on the wall. The Saigon regime could not survive without massive and indefinite American intervention. And the Democrats were not going to go along with the continued financing of an endless and futile war.

III

Nixon’s admission to leaving PAVN troops in the south was a tell-tale sign about what he and Kissinger had really planned.

Nixon and Kissinger now began to design their infamous “decent interval”. Knowing that Nixon’s Vietnamization plan would never defeat Giap’s PAVN and the Viet Cong, they began to plan the withdrawal of all United States forces–leaving only a bare bones maintenance mission behind. They only wanted assurances from China that the fall of Saigon would take place at what they termed a “decent interval”, after a peace treaty had been signed–they suggested something like two years. (Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 187) To show how complete Nixon’s abandonment of Saigon and President Thieu was, the South was not represented at the secret Paris Peace talks. President Thieu was not told about them in advance, but only given brief summaries after the fact. (Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor, pp. 43-44, 69) Nixon’s abandonment was so inclusive that, at the end, he allowed over approximately 150,000 PAVN troops to stay in the south. Combined with the Viet Cong, there were well over 200,000 total enemy troops there after the peace treaty was signed. Many of these were in places Hanoi had secured during the Easter Offensive. This whole “decent interval” strategy is not at all adequately dealt with in the film. Even though Frank Snepp, a former Saigon CIA officer who wrote a book with that title, is in the film.

How badly did Nixon throw over Thieu? As we have seen, in 1968 Nixon had conveyed to President Thieu that if he would boycott Johnson’s peace talks, he would get a better deal from him than he would from LBJ. Nixon gave him many pledges of support. For instance, he gave him his personal assurances that the USA would react very strongly and rapidly to any Hanoi violation of the peace agreement—which he did not. (Berman, p. 187) At Midway Island in 1969, Nixon promised Thieu he would provide 8 more years of support, four as military and four more as economic aid. (Jerrold Schecter, The Palace File, p. 34)

It did not take long for all that to go up in smoke. In fact, when Kissinger handed him a copy of the final agreement, Thieu noted the fact that it did not even mention a separate country of South Vietnam. There were only three countries in Indochina: Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. To rub salt in the wounds, when Thieu was handed the agreement, it was in English. (Berman, p. 163) Quite naturally, he did not want to sign the treaty. In fact, he actually began to speak out in public against it. (Ibid, p. 148) Nixon threatened to enact the agreement without his signature, but he was bluffing.

Thieu had over 60 objections to the proposed ceasefire. Nixon and Kissinger decided to be as fair as they could with him so he would sign. So they actually presented these to Hanoi in Paris. (Berman, 189) Thus began the notorious Christmas Bombing of late 1972. It was due to the demands made by Thieu. When Hanoi’s chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho, said he had to journey back home to get approval, the bombing began. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this did not bring Le Duc Tho back; Nixon had to ask him to return. (Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, pp. 279-80) But even then, he was reluctant to do so. The Chinese convinced him to return. They told him that Nixon had spent his last dollar on this bombing, and his political problems with Watergate were not going to disappear. They told Tho to return, sign the agreement, and they would get everything they wanted in the long run. (Berman, p. 221) The agreement was signed on January 27, 1973; and the Chinese were correct about the long run.

IV

Nixon hailed the signed agreement as one which would determine the future of South Vietnam without outside interference. Secondly, that it was a peace with honor for America. And third, that it had the full support of President Thieu. These were all either extreme hyperbole or knowingly false.

Like President Diem, President Thieu never had any real legitimacy in Vietnam. In fact, Ellsworth Bunker, the next-to-last ambassador in South Vietnam, admitted that his re-election was rigged. (Berman, p. 145) One of the problems he had was the literally tens of thousands of political and military prisoners he held in indefinite detention. How could America be supporting democracy if we were rigging elections and holding that many people in prisons?

Nixon kept Thieu for two reasons. First, he owed him something for the cooperation Thieu rendered in the October Surprise of 1968, the Chennault Affair. Without that subterfuge, it is highly likely that Hubert Humphrey would have won the 1968 election. (Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, p. 60) Secondly, he also understood that Thieu would allow him to apply air power if need be to enforce the peace. Because Thieu had no legitimacy, the two men needed each other. This problem was made even worse because Le Duc Tho was fully cognizant of it—which is another very notable fact that Turning Point severely discounts. Le Duc Tho quite candidly said to Kissinger that Vietnamization was not working; that Nixon’s assault in Laos had been forlorn; that Rolling Thunder had not achieved its objective. He concluded, correctly, that America had failed in Vietnam.

He then delivered his left hook about Vietnamization:

Before, there were over a million US and puppet troops and you failed. How can you succeed when you let the puppet troops do the fighting? Now, with only US support how can you win? (Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 127)

This, of course, was an accurate observation. And Kissinger knew it was so. It is why he and Nixon decided on the decent interval strategy as an endgame. But the absolute necessity was that Saigon had to fall after the 1972 election. In fact, Kissinger had said this to Nixon in August of 1972. All they needed was a way to keep the country together for a year or two beyond the agreement. He then added that afterwards, “Mr. President Vietnam will be a backwater, no one will give a damn.” (Ken Hughes, Fatal Politics, pp. 84-85). In fact, Kissinger had made this agenda clear with the Chinese. (Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 187) It is notable that Ken Hughes is a commentator, but I did not hear him use that rather pungent quote in the film. Hughes also could have stated that both Nixon and Kissinger denied the decent interval strategy in their books, No More Vietnams and The White House Years. But yet it is proven out by the declassified record.

Years later, Alexander Haig, who worked directly with Kissinger on the agreement, explicitly stated that it was all a sham peace. It was designed to deceive the public with the hollow motto that Nixon had gained a peace with honor. Which he had not. As Kissinger wanted, Saigon fell in 1975, two years after the agreement had been signed. The final American evacuation was a disaster, symbolic of the whole experience there. Kissinger had performed poorly at planning the whole exodus, and his ambassador, Graham Martin, was utterly hapless in executing it. The film uses a lot of screen time depicting this debacle and trying to explain Martin’s incomprehensible actions. But I don’t think anyone will ever chronicle this better than Rory Kennedy did in her fine film, Last Days in Vietnam.

V

Although Nixon always used Watergate as his excuse for not enforcing the peace treaty, that was not really the case. Both Congress and the American public had turned against the war by 1973. (Berman, p. 265) For example, the Case-Church amendment effectively cut off funding for combat activities in Indochina in 1973. Thieu was so hapless toward the end that the CIA actually tried to start a coup against him in order to set up a coalition government. Even Martin favored a coup. It was scheduled for April 23, 1975, but Thieu resigned two days before. Like everything else about Vietnam, it came too late since Saigon fell on April 30^th. Martin had to be ordered to leave. As the last helicopter departed, about 420 Vietnamese were in the courtyard of the embassy looking skyward. Someone had scrawled on the wall, “Turn off the light at the end of the tunnel when you leave.” (ibid)

This segment gave short shrift to the Holocaust that happened in Cambodia as a result of the Nixon/Kissinger decision to invade that country with a combined USA/ARVN force in mid-1970. This was allowed to occur because Prince Sihanouk had been deposed by General Lon Nol in an overthrow just previously, which incidentally, Le Duc Tho accused Kissinger and Nixon of orchestrating. (Berman, p. 73) In fact there is some evidence that the CIA at least encouraged the overthrow. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, pp. 152-53)

Lon Nol allowed the invasion, something Sihanouk would not have done. (William Shawcross, Sideshow, p. 390) In their almost mad objective of weakening Hanoi by going after strongholds in Cambodia, Nixon and Kissinger actually added to the chaos in that country and strengthened Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The chaos began in 1969 with something called Operation Menu. This was the Nixon/Kissinger secret bombing of Cambodia to disrupt the movement of supplies, arms and men through the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which cut through both Laos and Cambodia. Nixon decided that this mission should be utterly secret and disguised in every way. The pilots were not to talk about it; there would be a second set of papers to disguise what they were doing as missions over Vietnam, and there would only be one raid in order to knock out a North Vietnamese headquarters that was allegedly commandeering the entire war effort. (Shawcross, pp. 22-26)

The one raid, in March of 1969, turned into a 14-month air campaign that included 3,630 sorties by B-52 bombers. The idea was to pulverize all of Hanoi’s troops and bases along the border between Cambodia and South Vietnam. Collectively known as Menu, the differing campaigns were called Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Dessert, among other meal titles. (Shawcross, p. 28) As noted, this was then supplemented by a land invasion. That air/land invasion reduced villages to rubble, killed hundreds of innocent civilians, and the refugees now began a long march away from the B-52s into the countryside. The Cambodian economy had been all but destroyed. (Blum, p. 154)

In 1973, the air war was increased into an operation called Freedom Deal. (Shawcross, p. 215) The Pentagon ended up dropping 500,000 tons of explosives on Cambodia from 1969-73. Due to this, many Cambodians grew disillusioned with Lon Nol and joined the Khmer Rouge. The membership rose from about 4,000 to 60,000 by 1973. (Shawcross, p. 296) Two years later, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh.

I won’t go into the horrors that now befell Cambodia under Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge machine. Once the city was secured, the mad tyrant ordered everyone out and a march to the countryside. It did not matter if you were in the hospital or a woman who was pregnant. If you stopped, you were shot. The latest estimates from judicial hearings place the total number killed at about 1.7 to 2 million. The killing fields in Cambodia were mass graves, sometimes consisting of 20,00 dead bodies. Sihanouk later stated that “There are only two men responsible for the tragedy in Cambodia today, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger.” He then added that those two spent 4 billion on the Cambodian campaign, and they achieved the opposite of what they tried to do, including losing all of Indochina. He then added, “…and they created the Khmer Rouge.” (Shawcross, p. 391)

Richard Nixon did all he could to keep his tapes and papers secret until he died. We now fully understand why. Nixon was a very bad president, and what he did in Indochina was even worse than what Johnson did. Johnson did not invade and destabilize two neighboring countries, thus killing over 2 million people.

The Turning Point series is actually worse than mediocre. Any program that is going to comment at length on what Richard Nixon did in Vietnam should feature the work of the foremost scholar on that topic, namely Jeff Kimball. Bill Moyers would have been a very good commentator about LBJ and Vietnam. He is quite old, but there are many tapes of him on this subject. Gordon Goldstein interviewed McGeorge Bundy at length before he passed on, and he would have been good on Johnson also. The two best commentators on Kennedy and Vietnam would have been John Newman and Jamie Galbraith.

But this was not going to be. Luminant Media and director Brian Knappenberger seem to have an agenda from the start. It was first to skimp and to blur how America got into Vietnam in the fifties, which was through Nixon, Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Second, to smear Kennedy by blaming him for the war and to eliminate all the evidence of his withdrawal. Third, to then skip over 1964 and how Johnson reversed Kennedy and got the combat troops into Indochina. Finally, if anything, to be kind of soft on Nixon and Kissinger.

With all we know today about Vietnam, there is really no excuse for this. There is almost no doubt today that if Kennedy had lived, Johnson and Nixon would never have been able to do the incredibly evil things they accomplished in Indochina. Even the Pentagon Papers admitted this. In the Gravel edition, there is a chapter entitled Phased Withdrawal 1962-64. One of the aims of that withdrawal was “ to avoid an open-ended Asian mainland land war.” (Part 4 B-4, p. ii) For any program to avoid that historical fact today is rather incomprehensible.

Click here to read part 1.

Richard Nixon’s honorable peace includes invading two other countries, dropping more bomb tonnage on Indochina than Johnson, condoning My Lai, and prosecuting Daniel Ellsberg for releasing the Pentagon Papers.

Turning Point: The Vietnam War, Part 4

Part 4 of Turning Point begins with the Nixon Administration. It will end with the huge controversy over the release of the Pentagon Papers. As we shall see, the program is not inclusive or completely accurate about the latter issue.

As Defense Secretary Robert McNamara tried to tell President Johnson, Rolling Thunder—the bombing campaign over Vietnam—was not working. But Johnson thought it could be used as a bargaining chip to begin talks with Hanoi. During the 1968 campaign, GOP candidate Richard Nixon said that he would find an honorable way to end the war in Indochina–although he was not specific about how he would do it. In October, Nixon had a comfortable lead of about 15 points. Mainly because Vice President Hubert Humphrey was reluctant to separate himself from LBJ on Vietnam, an issue the film does not articulate. But when Johnson announced a bombing halt over the north, the peace talks—which began in May—would gain traction. And, as the film shows, Humphrey began to cut into Nixon’s lead significantly.

To thwart this, the Nixon campaign now set out to start the original October Surprise scheme. This maneuver worked mainly through GOP power broker Anna Chennault. The object was to subvert the cease fire negotiations before one could be announced. The Nixon campaign, through intelligence passed to it from Henry Kissinger, conveyed to the government of Saigon that if they held out, they would get better terms from Nixon. (The Nation, story by Greg Grandin, 11/02/16)

It is important to recall that, by this point, there were 500,000 combat troops in Vietnam, over a million Vietnamese had been killed, and about 30,000 Americans had died. (Robert Parry, Consortium News, 3/3/12; 1/18/13). The original tip about the Chennault sabotage came into the White House from a Wall Street financier to National Security Advisor Walt Rostow. At this same time, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker relayed the message that Saigon’s President Thieu was now balking at a cease-fire. On November 2, 1968, Thieu made a highly publicized speech boycotting his government from the peace talks.

Smelling a rat, Johnson ordered FBI, CIA, and NSA investigations. The inquiry discovered the roles of Chennault and Washington’s Saigon ambassador Bui Diem, who acted as a middleman. The president complained about it to GOP Senator Everett Dirksen: “They oughtn’t be doing this. This is treason.” On a phone call, Johnson confronted Nixon and threatened to go public. Nixon lied to him about it.

But Beverly Deepe, from the Saigon office of the Christian Science Monitor, had heard of the subterfuge through local sources. She handed her story to her editor, Saville Davis, in Washington. Ambassador Bui Diem denied it all, and after a conference with his top advisors, Johnson decided not to confirm the story for Davis—even though the president knew it was true. (ibid, Parry) Thus Nixon’s subterfuge remained hidden. And he lied about it until the end. In his interviews with David Frost, he said 1.) He did nothing to undercut Johnson’s negotiations, and 2.) He did not authorize Chennault’s attempts at subterfuge.

I have gone into more detail about this than the film does, but Turning Point misses the true denouement to Nixon’s interference. Many MSM writers have attributed the origins of Nixon’s Plumbers Unit, and therefore Watergate, to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. Robert Parry discovered that such was not really the case. The new president was told by J. Edgar Hoover about Johnson’s surveillance of the Chennault affair. As revealed on the Watergate tapes, Nixon thought Johnson and Walt Rostow had stored their evidence on his subversion at the Brookings Institute. Nixon instructed Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman to break into Brookings and even advised him to use someone like E. Howard Hunt to do so.

Nixon was wrong about the location. Walt Rostow sealed the materials and sent them to the LBJ Library. In an accompanying note, he labeled the papers as Top Secret, not to be opened until June of 2023. We are lucky that the late Bob Parry found out about them much earlier. (ibid)

II

In addition to the above, it is important to know that, as historian Jeffrey Kimball wrote, Nixon knew about the Wise Men meeting I discussed in Part 3. In March of 1968, he told three of his speechwriters:

I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage. (Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, p. 52)

In other words, before he took office, Nixon knew that the war could not be won by Saigon. But he decided to continue the conflict for political reasons. It is important to recall that Nixon was instrumental in getting America directly involved in Vietnam, and he was the first politician to ever recommend the use of American combat troops. This was during the siege of Dien Bien Phu. At that time, he also pushed for the use of atomic weapons. (John Prados, Operation Vulture, Chapter 9, JFK Revisited, by James DiEugenio, p. 131). Anyone who knows anything about Nixon understands that he was tutored in foreign policy by John Foster Dulles. It was Dulles who so memorably said after the collapse of the French empire, “We have a clean slate there now, without a taint of colonialism. Dien Bien Phu was a blessing in disguise.” (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, p. 139)

As I noted earlier, one of the many problems with the series is that it skimps over the origins of the American involvement in the fifties. Because of that, one cannot really understand Nixon’s near schizophrenic mania about the war. And if you do not delineate his role at the start, it is not possible to explain the fruity extremes he went to– knowing Saigon could not win.

For example, Nixon ended up dropping more bomb tonnage over Indochina than Johnson did. This is because he greatly expanded the air war over Laos and Cambodia. (Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 21; William Shawcross, Sideshow, pp. 70-71) Again, in my view, the series seriously underplays this aspect; it is a significant expansion from what Johnson did. And Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia the first week he was in office. (Shawcross, p. 91) It began in March of 1969 and continued for 14 months, entailing 3,630 B-52 sorties. This campaign had horrific political effects. It began to undermine the neutralist government of Prince Sihanouk and allowed the beginning of the growth of the Khmer Rouge. To protect himself, Sihanouk appointed General Lon Nol as prime minister. Lon Nol then deposed Sihanouk, and he allowed Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to supplement the air war with a land invasion of Cambodia—by American and ARVN troops– in the spring of 1970. For all intents and purposes, this was the beginning of the end of Cambodia.

In 1971, Nixon authorized an invasion of Laos by the ARVN. By most objective accounts, this ended in failure; so much so that Nixon later relieved General Creighton Abrams, who supervised American support of the operation. Even though Operation Lam Son 719 was a failure, the bombing did not stop. This bombing was even more pointless in Laos, since that was even a more backward country than Vietnam or Cambodia. (Blum, p. 160) As one commentator noted, Laos was a fledgling society the USA was trying to make extinct, to strangle in its crib, so to speak. They were so senselessly desperate in this aim, they created phony invasions from North Vietnam, not once but twice—all in order to boost military aid to a country that was landlocked and poor. (Blum, p. 159) But with the announcement of a ceasefire in Vietnam in 1973, another coalition government was announced. It would last until 1975. Up until then, due to the bombing and the incursion, “Laos had become a land of nomads without villages, without farms, a generation of refugees, hundreds of thousands dead, many more maimed.” It might not have been as bad as Cambodia, or what was to happen in Cambodia, but it was pretty much inexcusable. Eisenhower was simply wrong when he told Kennedy that Laos was worth going to the mat over. Khrushchev also wondered why Washington even bothered so much about the country, since it bored him. (Blum p. 159). But Nixon thought it was worth invading.

III

The expansion of the war through the invasions—Nixon called them incursions—into Cambodia and Laos brought the peace protests to a pinnacle of scope and fury. And these created tragedy at Kent State and Jackson State. At Kent State, four were killed and nine wounded by the National Guard. Chic Canfora, one of the program’s commentators, was at Kent State with her brother—who was wounded—and she does a helpful commentary on how it happened. She states in the film that the ROTC building, which was set on fire, had been scheduled to be taken down already. But further, a presidential commission concluded that the blaze was not started by Kent State students. (Commission on Campus Unrest, p. 251)

There can be little doubt that Nixon and Governor James Rhodes despised the demonstrators and egged on the reaction to them. On the day the campus protests began, May 1, 1970, Nixon called the students bums who were burning up books and blowing up campuses. And he contrasted them with the bravery of the troops in the field abroad. (New York Times, May 2, 1970, story by Juan de Onis) Reporter Bob Woodward later stated that a year later, Nixon compared the Kent State demonstrators to the prison rioters at Attica and said Kent State might have been beneficial to his administration. On the tape, Woodward said Nixon tells Bob Haldeman, “You know what stops them? Stops them? Kill a few. Remember Kent State….” (WCBE Radio, Ohio Public Radio, May 6, 2019)

The day before the shooting, Rhodes held a press conference in the town of Kent, and he called the demonstrators un-American revolutionaries who were trying to destroy higher education in Ohio. He said he would use law enforcement “to drive them out of Kent. We are going to eradicate the problem.” Rhodes compared the students to Hitler’s paramilitary Brownshirts who helped bring him to power. (Cleveland.com, May 3, 2020, story by Thomas Suddes; Kent State/May 4, edited by Scott Bills, p. 13)

At Jackson State in Mississippi, two students were killed and 12 wounded. The shootings were by the Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol and the Jackson police force. As more than one commentator has stated, unlike Kent State, there was an element of racism in this shooting. (Nancy Bristow, The Nation, May 4, 2020) All told, the demonstrations against the Cambodian attack generated protests at more than 700 college campuses. More than 200 Foreign Service employees issued a petition against the expansion of the war. Four of National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s aides registered their disagreement with their resignations. (Stone and Kuznick, p. 370)

In his half-mad pursuit of a war he knew could not be won, Nixon had brought forth submerged demonic forces amid the American populace. He was intent on polarizing the country over Vietnam. In his April 30, 1970 speech revealing the Cambodian action, he said that in the USA ”‘great universities are being systematically destroyed.” Previously, he had appealed to what he called the great Silent Majority that could not abide by America looking “like a pitiful helpless giant” in Vietnam, as opposed to the bums who wanted to burn books and try to impose their will on the country by demonstrations in the streets. RMN was consciously pitting idealistic students against lunchpail factory workers and trying to split the Democratic party on cultural grounds. With Malcolm, both Kennedys and King gone, it worked.

IV

Even this does not show just how unhinged Nixon was on Vietnam and how effective and heroic the anti-war movement was. In 1969, Nixon designed an above top-secret plan code-named Operation Duck Hook. It included direct American infantry attacks on the north, air strikes on bridges along the Chinese border, and the mining of three seaports. (Jeffrey Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 101. Other sources say that it included saturation bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong and possible use of atomic weapons–see Stone and Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, pp. 362-64) Nixon held it so close to his vest that even his Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird, was ignorant of it. The president called it off when he saw the immense scope and intensity of the October/November Moratorium. (ibid, Kimball, p. 105; Stone and Kuznick, p. 362) It was then that he decided to give his Silent Majority speech, facing off the demonstrators against his perceived constituency.

I could not detect Duck Hook in this series.

At the Nixon Library in 2014, there was discovered—or some say rediscovered– evidence that Nixon and Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman intervened in the court-martial of Lt. William Calley over the My Lai Massacre. (CBS News, March 23, 2014, story by Evie Salomon) The notes made by Haldeman indicate there was a task force for My Lai, and they should employ dirty tricks that did not go to a high level. They should also use the atrocity at Hue for countering purposes, “discredit one witness”, “use a senator or two”, and to “keep working on the problem.” According to author Trent Angers, Nixon and Haldeman were going to target Hugh Thompson and Larry Colburn, who actively tried to halt the massacre. In fact, two congressmen working with Nixon managed to seal Thompson’s testimony, hurting the cases against others who were accused. When Calley was convicted, almost immediately, Nixon had his prison sentence turned into house arrest. (NY Times, 4/2/71, story by Linda Charlton) He was paroled after a bit more than three years.

I mentioned in the last section that the film does an above-average job on the My Lai Massacre through Ron Haeberle, the military photographer. But I could not detect any examination of Nixon’s role in the Calley trial and aftermath.

V

As a result of My Lai and the following cover-up, people like Jane Fonda, Mark Lane and Vietnam veteran Donald Duncan originally helped organize a public tribunal on other atrocities that had taken place in Vietnam. Eventually, this went on for three days in Detroit, January 31-February 2, 1971. It was called the Winter Soldier Investigation. The film briefly shows some of the hearings but does not go into Nixon’s reaction to them, which was to try to discredit the proceedings. (Washington Post, 12/17/17, story by Michael Dobbs) Nixon and Haldeman tried to smear the organizers as being “Kennedy supporters.” They also tried to mobilize veterans of Vietnam who were still for the war against the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. (Andrew Hunt, The Turning, p. 73, p. 84) Nixon’s ploys worked to a degree. The film made from the hearings was not successful. Only when it was re-released in 2005 did it meet with acclaim. (Click here for a segment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9KI0BUzr70)

John Kerry became a national figure at this time when he began speaking out against the futility of the Vietnam War. His testimony before the Fulbright Committee is not included. In fact, I did not see any of those hearings on the war in the series. Yet these lasted until 1971. They were well reported on, some were even broadcast, and they were effective in ultimately cutting off funds for the conflict. Ken Hughes, one of the interview subjects, understands all this, as he wrote about it in his book, Fatal Politics.

This segment ends with the leakage and publication of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. There have been several books written about that whole, long, celebrated episode, and how it rocked the MSM and Washington. I have read up on it, and interviewed some of the principals involved, e.g., the late Daniel Ellsberg, and attorney James Goodale of the New York Times. Some background is in order.

Ellsberg was working at the Rand Corporation offices in Santa Monica when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara commissioned a study on the entire expanse of the Vietnam War, from its beginnings to the end of the Johnson administration. In other words, it did not include what Nixon had done in that regard. But Nixon decided to take action due to the (poor) advice of two people: Henry Kissinger and Attorney General John Mitchell. (Steve Sheinkin, Most Dangerous, p. 221; James Goodale, Fighting for the Press, p. 73).

When the Times and then the Washington Post published the classified material, a legal battle broke out on three fronts. One was in court in Washington to stop publication. The administration lost 6-3 on a decision that went up to the Supreme Court. They then tried to convict Ellsberg and his friend Anthony Russo in California. That case was dismissed when the judge found out that, among other things, the White House had burglarized the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. (Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets, pp. 444-49) Third, the White House opened grand jury proceedings in Massachusetts against Beacon Press for their efforts to publish a more complete version of the Pentagon Papers than the Times did. That did not succeed because Beacon’s version was based on the papers given to Senator Mike Gravel, and he recited them into the congressional record and then submitted the rest. One should add that it was that version of the papers which included a subject called Phased Withdrawal 1962-64. For whatever reason, the Times version did not.

Nixon had begun the so-called Plumbers Unit over his fear of being caught for his sabotage of the 1968 election. He wanted a break-in at the Brookings Institution, where he (mistakenly) thought those papers were. Both acts, the subterfuge and the break-in, were illegal. But as the reader can see from the above, that was just the beginning of a record of perfidy on Indochina that is both incredulous and horrifying. This film is too kind to the criminal.

Click here to read part 5.