The USA in the Time of Richard Nixon
1969-1974
By Mike Donovan
Watergate - Whittier and Duke - Only President to Resign - VP Spiro Agnew - “I Am Not a Crook” - Gerald Ford – Defensive End for Whittier College 1930-32 - $18,000 Slush – Alger Hiss - “Tricky Dick” -
Nixon was in more presidential elections than anyone in US history. He was on the ticket in 1952, 1956, 1960, 1968 and 1972. That's one more than FDR.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Opening Take
Cabinet
Cabnotes
Bio
Election of 1968
The Also Ran - Hubert H. Humphrey
Inauguration
War Between USSR and China!
Lunar Landing - 1969
TWA 840 - 1969
The Vietnam War
Cambo 1969-71
Conviction of William Calley
Ping Pong Diplomacy - April 1971
Middle East to 1972
Black September - Palestine vs. Jordan
UK Withdraws From ME
Kent State - May 4 1970
Birth of Bangladesh
Laos 71
Pentagon Papers - June 1971
Down Goes Jackson - August 21 1971
Time Gives You the News - You Can Always Trust Time
1972 N.V. Offensive
Election of 1972
Christmas Bombing - 12 72
Treaty Ends Vietnam War - January 1973
Phlemboyant Coming Come
Nixon’s Trip to China - 1972
The Comet Kahoutek
The 1973 Yom Kippur War
Oil Retaliation - The Embargo
More on the Oil War
Watergate 1971-74
A Key Election in NYC
The Radford-Moorer Affair
Enter John Dean
The World of Henry Darger
Agnew Resigns the Vice Presidency
Abduction of Patty Hearst - Berkeley - February 4, 1974
Hibernia bank of SF - Ides of April 1974
Ford O’Brien
Ellsworth
Tape Everything ... Unless You’re the President
Expletive - Deleted
Saturday Night Massacre
Pardon Me - July 4 1974
A Dependable Ford
Fordian Slip
August 8 1974
August 9 - Get on That Copter and Don’t Come Back!
Supreme Court
Pop History - Woodstock and Jim Morrison
After Office
Conclusion
Sources
Coming Attractions
OPENING TAKE
It's not a good sign for the legacy of a president if his most famous quotation is, “I am not a crook.”
You certainly were. If not for the presidential pardon Gerald Ford gave him when he took over in 74, Nixon would have done prison time.
America supposedly hated Nixon because of Vietnam, but it really was more a matter of the cultural war than the Vietnam. I hated Nixon because everyone else did and I was a hippie and that was part of my job. Did I really understand all the issues and did I come to my conclusions about him after a socratic dialectic analysis? You know the answer.
Nixon's downfall came as a result of his extreme paranoia and distrust of everyone. RN was a 'power-tripper' who enjoyed revenge a little too much and used every arm of the government and then some to “get” his enemies. And his list of enemies could fill a big city phone book. It was ridiculous. Nixon decided at one point that a stand-up comedian named Richard M. Dixon needed to be investigated. His crime? He made jokes about President Nixon in the movie Millhouse. The White House thugs had Dixon's phone tapped and undercover Nixon spies actually followed the comic was followed Dixon around. About the best they could come up with on the guy was that he once spent an afternoon at a cheap motel with a chubby waitress, bought a nickel bag of reefer after a show, and that he owed a bookie $90. They decided not to bust Dixon. A lot of taxpayer and Republican campaign treasury funds were wasted trying to prove that a comedian was a no good un-American Commie.
Popular vote 1968-----------------------------Nixon 31,785,000
Humphrey Jr. 31,275,000
Wallace 9,906,000
Electoral vote 1968 Nixon R) 301
Humphrey Jr. D)191
Wallace AI) 46
It's a remarkable thing of American history how many times the popular vote is very close but the Electoral vote is not and still somehow almost always favor the one who won the slim popular vote. The Electoral College still works most of the time. [see my Boston Herald article of December 2000 for more on that thought]
Alabama governor George C Wallace was the leader of the so-called “American Independent Party.” Wallace was really pulling a Teddy Roosevelt 1912. George was a long-time Democrat but knew he could not win the nomination of his party, so he formed a party whose platform was anything the candidate says it is. The AIP carried four states. For a sample of his material, how about this,
“I say segregation now, segregation tomorra, and segregation forever!”
Wallace hurt himself in 68 when he chose former air force general Curtis LeMay as his running mate. LeMay had wanted to start a nuclear exchange with Russia during the Cuban missile crisis and in 1968 made no secret of his belief that we should introduce nuclear weapons into the Vietnam War. LeMay wanted mushroom clouds so badly he must have been on mushrooms. Wallace was always too extremist for most voters and needed to tone that down with his VP choice. Instead he chose loony LeMay, causing dismay for many Wallace supporters.
Popular vote 1972 ----------------------Nixon 45,767,000
McGovern 28,357,000
Electoral vote 1972 ------------------ Nixon 520
McGovern 17
The Democrats had a great chance in 72 to unseat the rather unpopular Mr. Nixon but they blew it by nominating an extreme liberal for the top post and for VP a man who had undergone shock therapy for depression and didn't tell anybody.
Nixon didn't finish two years of his second term.
Not only did Nixon resign in 74, but the year before, his Vice President, the pompous Spiro Agnew of Maryland had to resign his office in a separate personal scandal.
CABINET
Secretary of State------ William P. Rogers-----1969-1973
Henry Kissinger-----1973-1974
Sec. of War------------Melvin R. Laird----------1969-1973
Elliot L. Richardson-----1973
James R. Schlesinger----1973-1974
Sec. of Treasury----------David M. Kennedy ----1969-1970
John B. Connally--------1970-1972
George P. Schultz-------1972-1974
William E. Simon-------1974
CABNOTES
Will Rogers never met a treaty he didn’t like. Connally was the guy in the limo with JFK in Dallas. Schultz went on to become Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan and is, in my opinion, the number one unsung hero in the victory of the Cold War, for his services in the 1980’s.
BIO
Richard Nixon was born January 9, 1913 in Yorba Linda California. The Nixons werw far from rich and had their share of tragedy including the death of a brother, a boy that Richard greatly admired.
Little Richard was a great orator. He even participed in oratory contests in Yorba Linda Grammar School. “We must have more crayons!” he expounded forcefully to win one contest.
From 1926 to 1928 Nixon attended Fullerton High, before spending his senior year at Whittier Union High School, where was president of his high school class.
The Harvard Club of California Nixon awarded a scholarship to Harvard Mass, but Richard was financially incapable of moving to Cambridge and supporting himself, so he declined. Instead he enrolled in a Quaker school, Whittier College in California where he finished number 2 in his class. For this he was given a $250 scholarship to Duke N.C. (this was when one dollar could but three cars) and studied post grad law at Duke. Nixon majored in Constitutional Law, with a minor in federal tax law, which was ironic because he trampled the Constitution with the Watergate cover-up and illegally used the IRS to prosecute political enemies.
Nix returned to California to practice law but later landed his first Washington job, a minor post at Franklin Roosevelts’ Office of Price Administration. Nixon was one of many lawyers at the OPA.
From 1940 to 1942 Nixon was in the frozen orange juice business. RN was one of three partners in CITRA-FROST CO., a small business that ran out of juice and folded.
Nixon enlisted in the US Navy in World War II. Historian Stephen Graubard most unfairly infers that Nixon's only motive for enlistment was political long term gain. He writes that Nixon, “aspired to a political career, and realized that service in some military capacity was a sine qua non.” Aside from the snobby Latin, this is a cheap shot. The man chose to risk his life for his country, and some egghead 50 years later calls him a conniving opportunist from his desk at Brown University. Graubard goes on to imply that Nixon never saw any fighting, writing that Nixon had “abundant time to read, play poker, and write daily letters to his wife.”
Nixon in fact did see some action and danger. Rich made Lieutenant. They don't promote men in the Navy for writing letters to his wife.
In fact, like John Kennedy, Nixon saw action in the Solomon Islands. Nixon didn't foolishly get his PT Boat cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, but he was there in the Solomons with JFK. Richard served in the Combat Air Transport Command in logistical support, and won citations for meritorious performance at Bougainville and Green Islands. Sure, he didn't face the kind of action that Kennedy did, but that doesn't mean it's all right to make it seem that he was behind the lines guarding the books, like a professor Grabuard.
Nixon studied Texas Five Hole poker and was such an intelligent player that he left the Navy with a tidy sum of winnings at the expense of his less intelligent fellow servicemen. The semi-dirty dough helped him get a new start after the service. I could have used his coaching in Atlantic City once or twice last year.
Nixon ran for Congress in California against incumbent Jerry Voorhis in 1948 and won. The Nixon-Voorhis campaign marked the beginning of his dirty fighting tactics that would last a lifetime, sending him to the top and then sending him down from the mountain just as surely.
Voorhis was an FDR Democrat, a group that didn't exactly have the momentum at the 1948 moment. It was a good time to try to upset an old New Dealer. The Nixon campaign began to distribute flyers that accused Voorhist of being a “tool of the Communists.” Once a person is accused of something like that, even denying it gives the charge more publicity and its a no win situation for the targeted individual. Some of Nixon's flyers had a spot of anti-semitism, accusing Voorhis of being a stooge of “international Jewry.” As election day closed in, thousands of phone calls went out to voters saying that Voorhis was in fact, a Communist, not just a tool. Nixon won and served two terms.
Nixon was elected to the US Senate at the same time as John F Kennedy of Massachusetts. The two future contenders for the Presidency had offices close to each other and by all accounts were quite friendly. Each at one point wrote a personal check for the other's campaign for re-election.
Congressman Nixon reached national fame in the Alger Hiss Case. Nixon said that many state department employees were either Communists themselves or were Communist stooges. At the top of his State Department list of scoundrels was Alger Hiss. Nixon never completely proved his charges but a jury convicted Hiss of perjury on flimsy evidence. People said that the Hiss case was a red herring and that Nixon was just a red baiter, but I say Hiss was guilty. (boo! hiss!)
Cal voters elected Nixon to the US Senate in 1952. He beat Helen Gahagan Douglas with the help of some serious red baiting. Critics ripped Nixon for this dirty campaign for the rest of his life. "She's pink down to her underwear," he taunted. Helen responded that Nixon was yellow down to his socks. Helen used to be a Broadway opera singer of some renown before she moved over into politics like Al Franken. HG couldn't sing a tune powerful enough to overcome Nixon's red-baiting. Nixon's campaign pamphlets denouncing her were printed on pink paper.
It was after defeating Douglas that his opponents gave Nixon the derisive nickname “Tricky Dick,” a name that was still quite popular with the crowd I ran with as a teen-ager when he was President.
In 1952 the Republicans chose Eisenhower for President. Ike chose Nixon for VP because only RN fit the ideological bill. Party veterans all wanted Taft of Ohio for VP. But Ike didn't like the isolationism of Mr Taft, nor the isolationism of any of the other front-runners for VP. Dwight settled on Nixon for his political opinions. It went against the political tradition where only personal connections advanced a person in politics. Ike had never met Nixon when he chose him to be his running mate. Nixon was the only man anti-Communist enough to suit Eisenhower's taste. Ike also liked the way Nixon favored co-operation with foreign countries to defend America. Like Ike, Nixon felt that Washington's Farewell Address no longer applied. It was time for America to get involved in all the world's foreign affairs as the only way of keeping these troublemakers in line and preventing them from starting yet another world war.
Shortly after accepting the 52 Vice Presidential nomination Nixon nearly had to withdraw from the race. The charge was made that Richard was making himself 'Richie Rich' by accepting some illegal gifts and of maintaining an illegal slush fund of cash. Nixon defended himself in the famous nationally televised "Checkers" speech in which he sarcastically declared that he had received a gift of a dog for his little girl and he was darn sure going to keep it no matter what anyone said.
The corny speech worked and Ike decided not to drop Nixon from the ticket in 52. It's worth a look. Don't miss the part where he says that his wife Pat doesn't own a mink coat but “does have a respectable Republican cloth coat,” as the camera pans over to Pat who sits as still as a mannequin.
RN served as Vice President for 8 years but Ike didn’t confide in him very often. After losing to Kennedy in 1960 Mr. Nixon retired briefly before running for California Senate in 1962. He lost that one and at the post-game press conference famously snapped at the press that, “you aren't going to have Nixon to kick around any more.”
Nixon returned to private law practice and wrote a book called Six Crisis that sold well. It was about six political crisis in his political career including the incident in Venezuela when the racist xenophobic chauvinists there spit on him and violently surrounded his car. Nixon barely got out of Venezuela alive and became a hero back in the states for the abuse he took abroad. Today, President Chavez continues the fine tradition of hatred towards America by brave Venezuelan chihuahuas barking at the rotweiler with the window rolled up. Try that abusive language and behavior in Brooklyn.
Most people thought Dick was finished, but he rose from the dead. Nixon's election in 1968 was one of the great political comebacks of American History.
Nixon rose to power as a domestic anti-Communist and then made the White House by taking anti-Communism into the international plane. By 1968 the domestic Communist threat was not the platform to victory among conservative voters it once had been. But the threat of nuclear war with Communist countries was as potent as was the threat of Communist political subversion in earlier decades. So Nixon could still play the card to get in. Ironically, once he got in, he built bridges to the Communist world that a liberal could not have dared to attempt.
ELECTION OF 1968
If 1968 was not the most controversial election in American history it was probably the most violent. The Democratic Convention in Chicago was a scene of rioting between hippies and the Chicago police. Today no vid-byte TV piece on the 1960’s is complete without footage of the police clubbing the hippies in the windy city.
The violence of the Vietnam War, the body bags, and one-legged GI’s coming home from Indochina were part of the 72 stage-drop. The front-runner for the presidency was just recently assassinated a few short weeks after he gave a moving speech about the assassination of the nation’s greatest black leader.
What is less remembered about 68 is that the Republican Convention in Miami was also marred by a riot in which police killed three blacks. My sister lived in Miami in 1968 and she still talks of the army tanks in the streets. It’s something you don't easily forget. I saw 3 M1-Abrahms tanks come up my street in 1992 as part of the St Patricks Day Parade. It was a one-shot deal for the parade and I’ll never forget it. Imagine seeing them on your street in anger.
Many Democrats wanted to challenge Johnson for re-election but it would be a discourtesy to challenge the Party incumbent, especially one trying to win a foreign war. Eugene McCarthy alone came out openly to throw his left leaning hat into the ring. Then Johnson gave his overplayed “I shall not seek” speech on March 31 declining the re-nomination.
All of a sudden hats started landing in the Demo ring as if LBJ had just scored three goals. Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and George Wallace, to name four, all entered the race for the Demnom.
The favorite of the antiwar movement for some time was Gino McCarthy, but even his youthful fans had to accept that he was un-electable. Even though todays young film producers don't get it, most Americans in 1967 still supported Johnson in his Vietnam effort. There wasn't much hope that a candidate of either major party could run and win on a platform of immediate unilateral American withdrawal from Nam, and that's what McCarthy was selling. (McCarthy was actually a poet on the side by the way, so I could never have voted for him. Who is more useless than a poet? Even the town drunk is at least good for a laugh.)
This guy was a liberal anti-war left Dem before it was hip. McCarthy spoke out against the war in 1967 unequivocally and he entered the Presidential race as a Democrat on October. Genie knew it was rude to challenge LBJ, but McCarthy felt that the war was so wrong and so serious a matter that if Johnson wouldn't get the United States out of there, some other Democrat would have to seize the nomination and get in there and do it themselves.
The Tet Offensive in January 1968 swung the center to the left and suddenly McCarthy found himself a mainstream candidate overnight. All of a sudden this fringe lefty extremist was viable!
Then McCarthy shocks the nation by winning two of the early Democratic primaries over Hubert Humphrey and Libertarian Charles Lashua. Then LBJ shocks the nation by saying he isn't going to be a candidate. Only then does Robert F. Kennedy jump into the race as a peace candidate.
Not only was RFK stealing McCarthy's act, he was doing it only after McCarthy had polished it for six months in Peoria first to make sure it worked. The Little Red Bobby Hen was showing up to eat the peace cake after Genie had baked it.
The Kennedys had all the money and the power and the Jack Kennedy legacy to milk. Bobby got momentum fast. He was more handsome, young, and rich than McCarthy. The family knew how to win. Soon the Kennedy people were asking McCarthy to drop out of the race in the name of party unity. You can imagine how mad that made the McCarthy people. It's making me mad just to write about it.
The Kennedy Klan argued that the idea was to win, not to nominate whoever could boast that 'I told you so,' on Vietnam.
George Wallace was the candidate of the old ‘solid racist South.’ When he knew he could not win the Democratic nomination in his wildest segregationist dreams Wallace decided to run as an “Independent.” Without Wallace the election would have gone to Nixon in a walk. Nixon's poll numbers were up to 20 points ahead of any Democrat in the early summer. But Wallace siphoned off the entire redneck vote from the Nixon train and his spoiler role made the election of 1968 a photo-finish.
Robert Kennedy was on his way to winning the Democratic nomination when an Islamaniac gunned him down for no reason. Bobby had just won the California primary and seemed unstoppable. Sirhan Sirhan slayed RFK in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in June of 1968. When SS emptied his 22 caliber pistol in the pantry, the nomination was still up for grabs.
When the Republican Convention met in Miami it was the Vice Presidency that was still very much up for grabs. The Republicans chose Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland partly because he was a tough ‘law and order’ type. It was this choice of Spiro triggered the race riot in Miami.
America in 1968 was a white supremacy world where blacks still weren’t generally allowed on television unless they were carrying bags at the train station. But that doesn’t mean that when they deliberately start violence it should be re-written with protectionist euphemistic slick writing as if they were the innocent victims. This is exactly how historian Bill Clinton describes the Miami riot in his dripping of relentless unfair political bias memoir My Life. He uses his biography as a canvass on which to polemicize all of the American history he lived through. Note in the passage how the riot just seems to have somehow happened. No one started it. It just happened.
The riot originated with a black activist group calling itself the ‘Poor People’s Campaign.’ According to historian Clinton the PPC decided to meet in Miami to hopefully influence in a gentle way Nixon’s choice for VP. Right. As if any one of them had the remotest interest in steering the Republican Party in one direction or another.
“The Poor People’s Campaign moved from Washington
to Miami Beach in hopes of influencing the Republican
convention in a progressive way. They were disappointed
by the platform, the floor speeches, and Nixon’s appeals
to the ultra-conservatives. After the Agnew nomination
was announced, what had been a peaceful gathering
against poverty turned into a riot. The National Guard
was called out, and the by now predictable scenario
unfolded: tear gas, beating, looting, fires. When it was
over three black men had been killed, a three-day curfew
was imposed, and 250 people were arrested and later
released to quiet charges of police brutality.”
BC
Clinton implies at the end that police brutality was a large part of this event but if this were true then the Miami riot would have been spotlighted by the liberal media for the past 38 years as a dual event to match up with the police brutality of the Chicago riot.
The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago produced the big famous riot between the hippies and the police. This is the one they seem to have miles of good color footage of. Hippies were throwing rocks and burning the flag. Many were waving the flag of North Vietnam and chanting "Ho Ho Ho Chi Mihn."
Throughout the anti-war protest movement there were always these extremists spoiling it for the rest of the reasonable people. There is also the leftist contention that most of these disgraceful rads were FBI double undercover agents. A few slick undercover agents led the rest of the moral supremacist hippies in the wrong extremist direction in order to discredit them.
If the FBI had double agents making the crowd seem evil, they did the job a little too well and somehow forgot to inform the Chicago Police. The white helmeted Chicago finest overreacted and went through the crowd of hippies beating them randomly with clubs and breaking a lot of bones. By attacking the crowd they made victims out of the aggressors and if these cops were conservatives, they didn't help their cause. They made these hippies, and many of their charlatan leaders into martyrs and folk heroes for decades to come. It was already cool to be an anti-war hippie, but now you were part of a cause with casualties and purple haze hearts.
Humphrey won the Democratic nomination in spite of a spirited challenge by Shirley Chisolm of New York.
The national election was close, very close.
Nixon beat Johnson's Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey (D) in the battle of the VP's. Nixon won the popular vote by only one percent, but won in the Electoral College by 20 percent!
1968 The Whole World Was Watching
Without Wallace, Nixon wins easily. On the other hand, the states carried by Wallace were southern states, which usually go Democratic so in that sense he may have helped Nixon. The solid South didn't flip, but it was neutralized.
In any case, Nixon probably could not have beaten front-runner Robert F. Kennedy. Humphrey was no RFK.
THE ALSO-RAN – HUBERT H HUMPHREY
I have a special place in my heart for Hubert H Humphrey. He played a role in helping me get into show business. Humphrey was one of my first impressions. He had a very distinctive high pitched squeal of a voice with an unmistakable energetic staccato rhythm. And he was garrulous to a fault. All the TV comedians did a Humphrey impression and it was easy for a 13 year old boy to imitate the impressionists. In later years I learned to do a direct impression of the people I impersonated. But back then I didn’t do John Wayne, I did Rich Little’s John Wayne, and Frank Gorshon's Hubert Humphrey.
Humphrey was a liberal’s liberal. He was raised in a tiny town in South Dakota during the Great Depression, a real double-whammy. Either one would be hard enough to take alone. Most South Dakota towns were not even called towns, they were called “commerce-centers.” A feed-store and a gas station at a windswept crossroads did not have the nerve to call it self a town.
Humphrey’s dad was a pharmacist and little Hubie grew up listening to political gossip in the store. Father Humphrey was one of about four registered Democrats in Doland, SD. There were about 400 Republicans. Mr. Humphrey worshipped FDR. Reading Humphrey’s autobiography is the best argument for the positive achievements of FDR’s New Deal that I have ever entertained. It is an excellent case in point for the benefits to the common people of some well timed and well placed big government interference in the way things are run. In particular the REA, the Rural Electrification Administrations, paid positive dividends in the world of the Humphreys and their South Dakota neighbors.
The Great Depression hit the western world of small farms long before it got near Wall Street. The world of the South Dakota farms was crashing for the entire decade of the 1920’s while it was roaring for the cities of the east. Then, when the entire national economy hit the skids, the Dakotas were plagued by severe drought. Dust storms added to the economic terror. Then plagues of grasshoppers swarmed in to eat the paint off the houses. It was a biblical horror show.
Humphrey’s dad had been elected to the S.D. state legislature and his name was being tossed around as a possible candidate for governor. But little Hubert wanted to get away and go to college in Minnesota. If the boy went away and left dad to run the store alone, then Humphrey senior would have to give up his dream to run for governor.
Hubert did it. He left home and went off to study at the University of Minnesota, destroying his father’s dream of rising in politics. The selfish bum! It’s a good thing the son rose in life enough to enable his father to live the dream vicariously.
Hubert Humphrey rose to prominence as a Minnesota politician and almost won the nomination for president in 1960. He settled for becoming LBJ's VP in 1964.
In early 1968 HHH was the conservative Democrat compared to Gino McCarthy or RFK, the two lefty lilies of the field. After a life time in politics as one of the most famous liberals in Washington, Humphrey was now, by default, the one candidate who was not the liberal.
All of the Democrats and even Nixon, were planning on finding a way to extract the United States from the Vietnam War. There was no Vietnamization plan in the works if Humphrey had won. Hubert had even broken with his president a little bit over this in recent months while the two were still in office. Humphrey was in a bad spot because he had to show he was loyal to his president Lyndon Johnson, but with Johnson’s Vietnam policies clearly an abject failure, Humphrey had to somehow propose a change without offending Johnson. Hubert was going to end the VW in a way that was about halfway between the ideas of Nixon and the McCarthyists.
Humphrey was always opposed to the bombing operations against North Vietnam something that irked President Johnson and kept Humphrey out of many national security meetings.
INAUGURATION
When Nixon said, 'So Help Me God' in January of 1969, a lot of Democrats said “Please Help us God”
1969 was the first time since 1849 that a new President had to start his term with a Congress controlled in both houses by the opposition.
Nixon was in more presidential elections than anyone in US history. He was on the ticket in 1952, 1956, 1960, 1968 and 1972. That's one more than FDR.
WAR BETWEEN THE USSR AND CHINA!
Only one month into Nixon's new presidency, news arrived that the Soviet Union and Communist China were engaged in heavy artillery duels along the Ussuri River. Imagine that the two worst bullies at school were beating each other up in the gym while everyone else looked on with a satisfied grin. What could be nicer than this? Not much. That was the picture for the USA and the rest of the “Free World” when this news circled the globe
Of course the first thing everyone asked was, “Where the hell is the Ussuri River?”
Ussuri River - Where two Communist Giants Went to War in 69
These battles broke out in March of 1969. Much of the fighting was centered on control of Zhendong Island. Chinese artillery killed 24 Soviet troops in one particularly bad day that also saw the loss of a Soviet Tank.
Casualty figures for both sides in this famous 1969 border clash (it was all over the front pages of the US news magazines) is still secret, for some reason. Both China and the USSR never officially released their own casualty figures, but the Soviets claimed in the press that more than 800 Chinese troops had died trying to take Zhendong Island.
I'm not sure why 800 Chinese troops would die trying to take Zhendong Island from the Soviet Union at a time when China and Russia were cooperating fully in trying to win the Vietnam War for the cause Communism. The Russians provided more military hardware to Vietnam than China did, but China provided plenty and China facilitated transportation for Soviet supplies through China to Vietnam. Did it make any sense that China and Russia were going to war in a remote border region at the same time they were cooperating to win the Vietnam War?
The entire border war was a staged play of disinformation for western consumption, and it worked brilliantly. Kissinger and Nixon fell for the bait and thought they saw an opportunity to divide the Communist bloc by courting the favor of China and making the Soviets jealous and very mad. Kissinger thought he was a genius in driving a wedge between Russia and China by arranging his “secret” trip to China like a four-eyed James Bond. Henry thought he was winning the Cold War singlehandedly as only someone with his ego could even think oneself capable of doing. He still thinks it was a giant win in American political history and I say it was a disastrous defeat of diplomacy. The USSR and China made complete fools out of Henry and Uncle Sam by pretending we were splitting them up into hating each other, when they were just maneuvering themselves that much closer to the greatest communist victory of the post WWII era, the big W in Vietnam. And Kissinger and Nixon played their chump roles to perfection.
I am not a Kissinger hater, and I think he did some great work in trying to make a difference in Vietnam and the Middle East. I've read all of his boring and brilliant books. Every stinking one of them. I could have earned a degree in chemistry from MIT in the time I gave to his books. Overall I don't say that Kissinger was a fool. But on this major issue I say he was a fool. Henry, how can you manage American foreign policy and never factor in even the possibility of Soviet or Chinese disinformation plays to win through snake diplomacy what they cannot win on the economic or military battlefield.
Russia and China had so much to gain by doing this that it should defy logic to think that they wouldn't try it! Yet people think its loony to suggest that they would try it. If America thinks that the Cold War is a joke and see proof in the USSR and China having bloody artillery duels on the Ussuri River, then America will reduce its military capability accordingly. It will also shut down aggressive containment diplomacy accordingly. The two big Communist powers could win through one week of fake clashes, what it couldn't win with ten armed divisions against eight from NATO. One fake clash could reduce NATO weaponry and preparedness better than the entire Red Army could ever dream of doing.
Two major books back me up. There is a Soviet KGB defector named Golitsyn who says all of this in his 1984 masterpiece book, New Lies For Old. And a famous American non-fiction author (if there is such a creature) named Jay Edward Epstein in his 1990 book Deception, also takes an extreme view of the seriousness of Soviet disinformation and how it has worked so terrifyingly well. He specifically says that the great Sino-Soviet split was a hoax and has a whole chapter about it. It then goes on to affect every other chapter in one way or another. This fake split is at the heart of my interpretation of American foreign policy history for at least 1960-1995. Like beets, it bleeds over into the other foods on the political history plate. You can't get away from its permeating red liquid and bad smell. It ruins all the other foods that should taste great on their own. Its frustrating to real all political history if you believe in the fake hoax as I do. It becomes the frogs of the perfidious man.
I don't remember where I read this, but there is a fable about a perfidious man who frustrated all those around him with his lies, half truths and misinformation. Every time he said something perfidious, a frog escaped from his lips. This frog was the lie and everyone in the room had to chase down the lie and capture the truth. The people with difficulty tracked down the first couple of frogs. But every time the man spoke another frog was on the loose. Soon it became impossible to win. There were simply too many frogs and the people had to submit to the idea that the perfidious man could not be stopped or controlled.
That is the story of the fake split between the USSR and China that supposedly began in the late 1950's and peaked in 1969 with this war on the Ussuri River. Show me a thousand books on American foreign policy between 1965 and 1995 and I'll show you at least 995 that are poisoned by the endless frogs of the perfidious Sino-Soviet split. Even if the split only comes up a few times in a 400 page book, it still spreads its misinformation tentacles far and wide across the boundaries of American foreign policy decision making.
Kissinger and Nixon have literally spent thousands of pages boasting about their brilliant China policy, when in fact it was the worst thing he ever did in his whole life.
Its good that the first big event in the Administration was the Sino-Soviet split battle of the Ussuri. It spares me the trouble of explaining my Golitsyn/Epstien philosophy later on, and it creates callback for Chinese frogs that appear later on.
Isn't it perfect that they wait until Nixon just takes over before they start the big border battle. Why wait till later when the long term benefits would be the lesser. Get this lie into Nixon's brain early on, while he is still more impressionable, and plant the seed for long term growth over a probable two-term presidency. It worked out fine for Russia and China as Gerald Ford retained Kissinger as Secretary of State when Nixon quit. Ford was no foreign policy scholar and he let Kissinger have his way with China. The Battle of the Usuri River paid dividends for 7 years and 10 months of Kissinger in the White House.
LUNAR LANDING - 1969
In July 1969 Americans were incredibly exited when the USA became the first country to successfully place a man on the moon. Within a few years, we became rather blasé about it. The lunar landings were powered down and phased out by 1972 but not before three missions successfully put humans on the moon and returned them safely.
The Christopher Columbus of space travel was Neil Armstrong who stepped onto the moon on July 21 and said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The quote has gone down in history as one of the biggies along with “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” and, “Don’t give up the ship.”
But Armstrong actually butchered the copy he was supposed to recite. He was using man and mankind in the same context, as the human species, so what he said was redundant. He was essentially saying, “That’s one small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.”
What he was supposed to say was, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” He forgot the “a”. But everyone knew what he meant anyway, so all but English teachers and other fastidious debunkers have overlooked the error.
As the lunar program was very costly and produced few tangible productive results, the public, in a liberal mood swing already, began to condemn it as wasteful. The billions spent by NASA was just another offshoot of the insensitive establishment. The economy was in bad shape, people were poor, and the idea of sending more and more people to the moon for no great reason seemed arrogant and senseless.
In the short term, yes, but the sun is going to run out of battery power in a few million years so we had better get on the ball again at some point.
TWA 840 – AUGUST 1969
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked a TWA jetliner out of Rome's Leo Da Vinci Code Airport in August 1969 because they thought that Yitzak Rabin, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States was on board. They were mistaken, but they hijacked the jet anyway and took it to Damascus.
Several Americans were on board the unlucky liner. Kissinger notified President Nixon by telephone. Nixon was in San Clemente California, with two big shot pals, Bebe Rebozo, and Bozo the Clown (I might have the second name wrong.) Nixon gave a startling response to Kissinger. “Bomb, Damascus,” he told Henry. “We'll teach those PLO squids a lesson this time.”
Kissinger had been dealing with Nixon for years now and felt that he knew his style, and how to best cope with it. Kissinger was sure that Nixon was just showing off, playing tough guy in front of his tough friends, but that he couldn't possibly really want the United States Navy or Air Force to just go in and “bomb Damascus.” Nixon hadn't even specified the exact mission. It was a just a vague and deadly order to bomb Damascus, the capital of Syria. If Nixon had given that order to some trigger-happy hawk lunatic general like Curt LeMay, you might have seen downtown Damascus in ruins by the next evening. But Nixon knew he was dealing with Kissinger on the other end of the phone and he knew that Kissinger wouldn't react directly to that order. He felt safe to show off in front of his guests because he knew that Kissinger would not take him completely seriously. Nevertheless Kissinger passed the order on to Secretary of Defense Mel Laird, with a personal explanation about Nixon's style. Laird explained to Kissinger that you don't have to worry. Mel didn't take the order seriously either, but he had to obey it to some extent so he moved two US Carrier Fleets in the Mediterranean past the eastern end of Cyprus so as to seem to be threatening Damascus.
The next day Nixon asked Kissinger and Laird how the military plans were going. They told him that fleets were being moved but there was obviously no standing orders to attack so they are not at full alert. “Good.” said Nixon, approving a stand-down on two fleets he had just the night before ordered to “bomb Damascus” just to impress two millionaire fundraisers.
Kissinger tells this story as an example of Nixon's cryptic style of leadership. Nixon is the most psycho-analyzed president of all time by nine miles, and this story gives us an idea why. He wasn't just a weird guy, he was a weird guy in charge of the nukes!
The TWA hostage drama ended when 133 of 135 passengers and crew were released. Two Israelis were held and the PFLP blew the nose off the plane with a small bomb. The two Israelis were held captive for four more months. They were exchanged for 65 Egyptian PW's from the 1973 war.
THE VIETNAM WAR
Johnson handed the Olympic torch of Vietnam to Nixon, but with only the flame for a handle.
Nixon had quite a few options for dealing with the Vietnam War. Unfortunately none of them were good options. His natural instinct was to try and win the war, but it was Kissinger's opinion that the opportunity to win the war had been lost by the Johnson Administration and the only way to go now was to find a way to withdraw with a draw. The US hoped to leave with dignity and somehow keep our South Vietnamese allies in power without our military presence. That was some tall order.
Some of Nixon's advisors wanted him to take aggressive offensive military action. They wanted him to take the war to the NVA and VC. They suggested bombing the dikes of the North. This would have devastated the land quite effectively, but the loss of civilian life would be so enormous that Nixon did not have the heart to do it (believe it or not). There was also the serious consideration of using small (tactical) nuclear weapons in combat areas. A tactical nuke had never been used in anger before and using them in Nam might create a whole new dynamic in international conflicts. Then Russia could justify using them 20 years later in Afghanistan, for example. No. Nixon rejected that idea also, thank Christ.
When Nixon took office the USA had already lost 31,000 KIA in Vietnam. Johnson left office with no exit strategy of any kind for his successors to latch on to.
It seemed insanity to maintain an unpopular war as far away from home as the physical earth allows. It was ten thousand miles to Vietnam, one mile for every day it lasted.
I always thought it was odd that Nixon seemed to be continuing to fight the Vietnam War while winding ti down at the same time. This forked-tongue policy made no sense to my teen-aged mind, as if I wanted to say “make a call!” But Nixon had to show he was winding down the war in order to continue to fight it. There was so much Congressional and popular pressure to end the war now that if he tried to fight to win in a straightforward manner the Congress would have passed one resolution after another making it impossible for him to do anything productive from a military offensive standpoint for his ally Thieu. But if he could demonstrate that he was consistently withdrawing American troops then the radicals in Congress would be appeased enough to put their spears away and Nixon could throw his at the North Vietnamese. He had to wind down the war in order to fight it. It was a contradictory policy, but it makes sense. By January 1 1972 there were only 135,000 American troops in Vietnam. None of them were in the front line. Incidentally this was the time when GHW Bush was supposedly shirking his duty by not reporting to the National Guard as often as required. Here was the Vietnam War going on, charge his critics, and W was no where to be found. As if any NG pilots were being shipped over to Vietnam in 1972. Bush was AWOL at times to help with Congressional elections for Republicans in the fall of 72.
It's easy to forget that the public, press and Congress originally supported the Vietnam War Vietnam War overwhelmingly. When Kennedy was sending 16,000 "advisors" to Nam, and when Johnson in 63 and 64 was continuing our participation, there were no mobs in the streets turning the flag upside down and there were no vets throwing their medals away on the Capitol Hill grounds. The polls showed strong support for American actions in Vietnam until at least 1965, and a slightly preponderant support until 1967.
It started as a case of good against evil in terms of international behavior. North Vietnam invaded three countries without provocation. These were Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia were not democracies but they did not deserve to be invaded. These Communist invasions violated several specific treaties, and international law in general. South Vietnam was a fledgling democracy full of corrupt officials but it too did not deserve therefore to be invaded by the atheist Communists.
The United States supported Laos against the Communists until the Communists won there in 62. Then we supported South Vietnam until we left in 73 and that is the only reason the Communists won in 75. They were allowed to win. They did not win on the battlefield. They won on the American home front.
We pulled out. They walked in. But they could have fought us for a hundred years and never would have taken over South Vietnam if that had been our determination. Unfortunately for the four million good citizens of South Vietnam and Cambodia who would be murdered when the Communists took over, this was not our determination. Our determination was to get out, period. Damn the South Vietnamese people, their soldiers who had fought beside us, and the principles we were there for. Damn them all if that’s what it takes, just get us out of there. That was the mood of the country in 1971 and beyond and was the mood of much of it before that. By 71 it was just “out NOW!” I know. I lived it. I felt the same way. The war had gone on too long. There were too many casualties. It was an endless stalemate. “Out Now” was the big slogan. When it was all reduced down to those two magic words as a national mantra, no one cared about any details or arguments. It was all reduced by then to the two magic words; Abra cadabra, - out now.
Anti-war demonstrations plagued the administration from day one. I was in one of those ant-war demonstrations at the age of 16 in Boston in May of 1971. There were 200,000 of us and without my two friends and I it would have been 199,997. All we did was sit on a hill and listen to a lot of speeches. But but I was there. Actually we heard so many boring leftist speeches about issues having nothing to do with the Vietnam War that we left early and took the bus back to Southie.
CAMBO 1969-1971
The secret bombing, then the invasion of Cambodia in 1969-1971 by US forces was the biggest issue amongst us lefties. Kissinger was a war criminal and so was Nixon. The left (and that included almost all of the center by 1971) believed that the Cambodian invasion was illegal, unconstitutional and fascist. They still feel that way today. The left has not retracted the condemnation of the invasion of Cambodia.
Cambodia was bad enough politically on its own. It was also the event that triggered the killings at Kent State. You could call Kent State “Cambo State” as a memory device.
The left throughout it all was not of the attitude, 'Blame America First.' We went one better. To us it was 'Blame America Only.'
The ruler of Cambodia was Prince Sinahouk. Red Cambodians (literally the Khmer Rouge) were invading his country. The Prince was a devout anti-communist. NVA, VC and KR army units had completely occupied the eastern border area of his country. The key word is completely. Sinahouk himself said that there was not so much as a single water buffalo of Cambodian blood left in this area. East Cambo was a safe haven for offensive operations against American troops. VC and NVA troops were entering the South Vietnam war zone in safety, killing US troops and then retreating into Communist occupied East Cambodia. The Commie Cambo sanctuaries were resulting in the highest US KIA rates of the entire war, as much as 400 dead per week by early 1971.
Nixon and Kissinger ordered the B-52 raids on the sanctuaries with the expectation that North Vietnam would protest to the world. The US was prepared to admit to the bombings and to explain all the details of the situation to the world as well as to the American public. Key members of Congress on both sides of the aisle were confidentially informed of the bombings before they took place and when they happened, there was no outcry against it at home, at least not from Congress at first.
But the North Vietnamese then surprised everyone by not admitting that the bombings ever took place. Why? Because they did not want to admit to the world that they were illegally there as the aggressors!
Sinahouk made it clear that he wanted the US to get the Communists out of Cambodia but he also indicated that the USA would have to do it without his official permission because it would threaten his political survival to openly side with the Americans. It was in concession to Sinahouk for his cooperation that Kiss-Nix decided to keep the B-52 raids a secret. They were secret because we were trying to protect out Cambo ally, not because the United States was innately slimy.
In any case, the bombings took place and there were no civilian Cambodian casualties. Neither Cambodia nor North Vietnam ever even claimed there had been any Cambodian civilian casualties. Yet millions demonstrated in America against our murderous bombing of the innocent Cambodian people!
The raids were not enough to change the strategic picture. The NVA continued to increase its military presence in the sanctuaries for a two-fold military/political goal. Goal 1 was to help the Khmer Rouge overthrow Sinahouk and win Cambodia for the Communists, and goal 2 was to inflict casualties on US troops in South Vietnam. It should be stressed that the VC and NVA attacking South Vietnamese areas had no specific military objective in mind other than killing Americans. There was no great ammo dump to capture like at the Battle of the Bulge; there was no Dien Bien Phu to surround and lay siege to; and there was never a chance that they could capture Saigon. The strategy was to wear down American morale at home by killing American soldiers. It was a terrorist military strategy.
Sihanouk went on vacation to Paris in March of 1970, a foolish move. While he was away a rebellion broke out against him in Phnom Penh. 20,000 protestors, mostly young people enraged over the Communist occupation of eastern Cambodia, attacked the North Vietnamese and the NLF embassies there. The Cambodian Parliament demanded that the Army expel the Communists from the eastern sanctuaries. Juxtapose this against the college hippie protests in the United States the bad guy for allegedly murdering the Cambodian people by bombing Communist sanctuaries. We were supposed to be destroying a helpless innocent nation, when in fact the mass protest was against the Communists, and Sinahoak for tolerating their occupation of “Eastie” (that was Roger Hillsman's nickname in his memos that he gave to Eastern Cambodia)
Sihanouk grabbed a plane to Moscow and asked the Soviets to pressure the North Vietnamese to withdraw their troops. While this was going on, the Cambodian Assembly voted 92-0 to depose Sihanouk and replace him with Lon Nol, the acting Prime Minister. Sihanouk then went to Peking where he switched sides in a desperate attempt to retain power. He called for victory against the new Cambodian government. Suddenly Lon Nol and his new cabinet were “stooges for American imperialism.”
Lefty authors have implied that the CIA was behind the coup in Cambodia that put Lon Nol in power. That can hardly be true. At the time, the United States didn’t even have up to date intelligence on events in Phnom Penh, let alone intelligence agents. Sam didn't have the means to start a coup there even if he had the will.
Lon Nol now openly asked for assistance from the United States, but Nix and Kiss decided that they did not want to give the NVA any just cause to launch a full-scale invasion of the Cambodia proper. They later regretted the decision because the NVA launched the invasion anyway. Cambodia would have defended the assault more effectively if the US had sent assistance as soon as Nol requested it. Lord knows what the college protestors would have done if we had intervened that openly in Cambodia, at Lon Nol's request, but still might have been worth a try.
In early April of 1971 the NVA and the VC invaded Cambodia. Benedict Sihanouk was waiting in the rear guarding the Communist mail. He was available as the head of a new Communist state. The NVA captured a full one fourth of the country by the end of the month. They were closing in on the capitol, Phnom Penh. Soon Cambo would become one of the Red states on the political map.
Finally in April of 1971 Nixon ordered USA ground troops across the border into Cambodia to attack these Communists who were occupying all of the eastern border area of Cambodia.
The response at home was college students, college professors, housewives and future presidential candidates, telling the world that the United States soldiers were the terrorists. Nixon was a Nazi and Kissinger too. America was the murderous aggressor. It was the Blame America First crowd’s finest hour.
The Khmer Rouge overran Cambodia in 75 a short time after we finally withdrew in 1973. Their 1975 invasion, in full alliance with North Vietnam was a combo Communist Cambo operation, and a glorious triumph. The Communist victory resulted in the installation of a totalitarian communist regime that committed genocide against the Cambodian people. Three million Cambodians died in the worst horror-show since Nazi Germany exterminated the Jews in the concentration camps. The Com-Cam leader was Pol Pot. These were the bad guys we were fighting in Vietnam and Cambodia.
And yet the modern history textbook, The Enduring Vision has a passage and footnote that lays the blame for this genocide on the USA. The writing is slick. Blaming The United States for the Cambodian holocaust is like blaming the UK for the invasion of Poland in 1939.
First the text that spawns the footnote blames the USA for all the killing and destruction. Dateline February 1973:
Relieved that the long nightmare of the war was past,
most Americans quickly put the conflict aside. Few
considered the extent to which American involvement
in the war had physically devastated much of Vietnam,
caused 2 million Vietnamese casualties, and brought
severe human and material losses to Cambodia and Laos*
How can it be that the USA was responsible for all the casualties and all the damage? Doesn’t it take two to fight a war? Didn’t we all celebrate the downfall of communism in 1989? Was that not who and what they were? Did they not conduct offensive operations against at least 3 non-belligerent countries in Southeast Asia, in violation of the United Nations Charter for starters? Now the asterisk
The US bombing and invasion of Cambodia, for example,
had further disrupted an already divided nation and opened
the door for the seizure of power by the communist Khmer
Rouge rebels in 1975.
This gives the false impression to the student that the communists took over the country in some sort of a 1975 coup. “Seizure of power,” is a ludicrous description of the total invasion and military conquest of Cambodia by the communist armies. The term rebels is really too kind, also. This was a large army by 1975, superior in numbers, armaments, logistics, training, morale and political support, and they were rolling up the field in a one-way onslaught in the spring of 75. The Khmer Rhouge was supported politically and supplied militarily by North Vietnam, China and the USSR. The Soviets sent weapons through China. This was no “rebel” army.
The footnote concludes with this on the fact that 40 percent of the population of Cambodia was then murdered;
This genocidal horror, too, was part of the legacy of the
Vietnam War.
Yes it was part of the legacy, but not in the way you imply. This genocide was the kind of thing that we were trying to prevent. This genocide was a result of our departure from Vietnam, not our arrival.
CONVICTION OF WILLIAM CALLEY 3.29.71
An American platoon massacred an entire village of Vietnamese women, old men and children. A few months later word got out and those deemed responsible were brought to trial.
It is hard to understate how much public attention was paid to the Bill Calley case during the early 70’s. It was bigger than the OJ trial because the political implications matched and surpassed the spectacular events of the crime itself.
Journalist Seymour Hersh first brought the My Lai story to national attention.
Before Hersh a soldier named Ron Ridenhour had tried to get the story out. Ronnie had joined Charlie Company after rotation had changed Charlie’s entire roster since the massacre. But scuttlebutt about what happened was floating around without shame, nor any apparent concern for the legal danger. The more soldiers Ridenhour talked to the more he realized that something horrible had happened and that the world did not know, and should know.
When Ridenhour was discharged and returned to the states he began writing letters to US government officials, including the President, telling of the stories he had heard. There was little or no response, certainly none from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Journalist Hersh got involved and the ball got rolling.
Calley had to be prosecuted as soon as possible. If Calley left the Army then he’d be protected from prosecution. The Supreme Court in 1955 had decided in that once a serviceperson is discharged, they can no longer be prosecuted for crimes committed in uniform. This worked in the favor of the prosecutors however in one respect. Discharged Vietnam soldiers could testify about crimes they witnessed or participated in without fear of legal reprisals. They could talk about My Lai as long as they were back in the states and in time many came forward and did.
At first the national sentiment was against Calley. He had herded a group of unarmed civilians into a ditch and them killed them all with machine gun fire. There was no doubt that he had done it. Other members of his unit had murdered too, just not to the degree he had. ‘Charlie Company” murdered defenseless civilians who had already surrendered. Cally's immediate commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina was charged with murder in a separate trial.
Slowly at first and then in torrents there arose a backlash in his favor. Current and former servicemen felt that if Calley could be convicted then any serviceman could be convicted, since there was always a fine line between soldier and civilian in hot combat areas. “I killed in V.N,” spray painted one veteran on Calley’s car windshield during his trial, “Hang me too.”
I was a 16 year-old hippie and after a while even I began to wonder. No matter how much one was against war or this war, there developed a reasonable doubt in virtually everyone’s mind that perhaps Calley was doing what he was trained to do in a stressful situation, and his insane deed may have been part of an insane training and an insane situation. His murder trial raised gray area issues of combat that were not resolved.
If old men, women and children are making munitions, booby traps, helping to lay mines, reporting enemy positions to its combat units and feeding and supplying their soldiers voluntarily and with spirit, are they innocent civilians entitled to protection from violence? Furthermore, if there are documented cases of children and old women walking into a cluster of soldiers and killing them with a grenade, is it not reasonable for other civilians to therefore lose the protections of the Geneva Conventions regarding rules of warfare? These are questions, not answers, questions still on the table in Iraq today where civilians murder US troops and then retreat behind the protective masonry of the word civilian.
Calley and his Charlie Company were green and had already lost several men to minefields. Calley had already been traumatized by a helicopter ride out of a minefield in which he shared the cabin with six pair of boots with the feet still in them but nothing else. Parts of dead men’s faces stared at him from the floor.
The assault on My Lai was to come early in the morning. Speed, surprise and full scale attack were considered essential. My Lai was such a hot zone that it was designated ‘free-fire,’ meaning it was so hostile that it was basically ok to shoot anything that moves. In fact, My Lai demonstrated the insanity of the free-fire-zone concept. The villages of the My Lai hamlet were considered heavily defended. The previous month (February 1968) many fierce fights had taken place there. It had long been a stronghold of the Viet Cong. In fact, when the mid-50’s Geneva Accords were agreed on partitioning the country in half, the My Lai area was one of the only places where most of the refugees actually fled into the Communist North from the South. And it was far more people than Cabot Lode’s claim of ‘a handful’ that moved South to North. Maybe if they had divided the country a little further to the South there would not have been a Vietnam War.
The Army mission was to Shermanize all of My Lai ‘fortified hamlets’ as one intelligence report had called them. But they weren’t supposed to kill everyone in them. Charlie Company was going in to raze the villages and destroy all crops and any other means of succoring Viet Cong troops.
Charlie Company had not been specifically ordered to slay the town but several factors were dovetailing into a mind-set for massacre.
Calley was personally responsible for his actions because he had displayed the same behavior earlier in less stressful situations. Two soldiers at his trial reported an earlier incident in another village where he was questioning an old Vietnamese man and then brought him to the edge of the town well. Calley threatened to throw him into the well if the old man did not give the right information. A splash was heard and then a gunshot. A soldier went back and saw a well red with blood. It was not a combat situation.
Captain Medina was acquitted of 102 counts of murder.
Calley was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on 3.29.71, but Nixon reviewed the case and in August reduced his sentence to 20 years. For a few months Nixon resisted pressure from veterans groups and others to pardon the Lieutenant. But then after things cooled off a little, he gave the My Lai maniac a complete pardon. Calley today manages his father’s jewelry store in Georgia. Give him credit for one thing. He hasn’t tried to write a best seller about his deed.
A soldier named Thompson at one point in the massacre stood between Calley and a house full of civilians that Calley was going to kill. It was a situation where Thompson literally was saying you will kill these civilians over my dead body. Calley backed down. Thompson had saved their lives. About 35 years later Thompson went back to Vietnam with a CBS film crew and was hugged by the people he had saved.
The My Lai massacre is pointed to as proof that we were no better than the enemy in our murderous cruelties. It proved also that the war was bad. There wasn’t even a good guy to root for. It was bad versus bad.
Then they say that there were hundreds of other My Lai’s out there that we didn’t hear about.
The Communists in the Vietnam were far more terrorist than we were. They had assassinated thousands of village officials before the US arrived in any significant force. The South was not committing a similar campaign of terrorism against the North. My Lai was a disgrace that did not represent typical American behavior. The genocide in Cambodia after the Communists took over speaks for itself.
PING PONG DIPLOMACY – APRIL 1971
On April 12 1971 some members of the US table tennis team visited Peking to participate in sporting exhibitions. This would be no big deal today. I played at two comedy clubs in still Communist China in 2005, one of which is named Chopshticks located in Shanghai. But 1971 was another world. The Cold War was in full swing; the Vietnam war was on and the UN still recognized only the leaders of Taiwan as the legitimate government of China. There were no formal diplomatic relations between the eagle and the panda. No American had officially been allowed into China since it became Communist in 1949.
The arrival of the ping pong team was big news all over the world. It was a marker, a symbol, and a stepping stone for change, a bridge towards the next step of a Nixon visit to China in 1972. I remember that everyone was talking about it. It passed the diner test. The opening of US-China relations through table tennis was given the media nickname, ‘ping-pong diplomacy.’
MIDDLE EAST TO 1972
Nixon took over in 1969 at a rough time for US-Middle East relations.
The 1967 Arab-Israeli War was officially settled but it wasn't really. Israel and Egypt were having artillery duels in the Sinai desert on an almost daily basis. Casualties in both sides resembled those in an active war.
On April Fool's Day 1969 President Nasser played the part by declaring the Six Day War cease-fire of 1967 no longer operative. In was a declaration of undeclared war, and it was April foolish. Israel was stronger than Egypt. Terminating the cease-fire made the stronger Israel the victim and encouraged more and better US support for the Jews. Nice going, Abdel.
In 1970 the fighting in the Sinai desert reached horrific proportions. Half a million Egyptian civilians had to evacuate the Suez Canal region entirely. Israeli Phantom Jets hit targets deep inside Egypt and this caught the Soviet attention.
In June of 1970 Nasser went to Moscow to speak directly with Gensec Brehznev about the Sinai headache. Abdel told Leo that Egypt needed new and bigger weapons to stop Israel from its incursions and to prepare for an offensive to settle the old score of 67. Nasser needed a victory to match his blustering rhetoric if he wanted to stay in power in the assassination prone region. But Brezhnev said no. The USSR had given enough.
Nasser got mad and said that if the Russians would not help with more muscle, then he would have no choice but to accept the American peace plan for the Middle East. This time Brezhnev hit the roof and the two translators had a red in the face shouting match right there behind he high Kremlin walls.
Nasser flew back on an Aeroflot plane and Brezhnev was still mad at him and forced him to fly coach. But Leonid got over it and indeed stepped up Soviet military aid. Soviet Sam-2 and Sam-3 missile sites were picked up and moved far foreward to the edge of the disputed sandy border, a not inconsiderable effort. Now they could threaten Israeli jets as soon as they touched Egyptian territory. These SAM moves would make a major difference in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Soviets also dispatched more squadrons of top flite MIG-21-j aircraft, and this time they were to be piloted by Russian men.
Nasser had new confidence and began to go public with his call for a new war to avenge the year of the Yaz. When people ask who started the 1973 war, it is useful to recall that from 1970 on Nasser (and then Sadat) was telling the world that the Arab world had every intention of attacking Israel. It was only a matter of time. There was no pretense of pre-emtive motive. The Egyptians and Syrians weren't saying, 'we know that Israel is planning to attack us at some point in the future, so we are going to attack them first in pre-emptive self-defense.' That would have been a tough argument to sell anyway, since no one has ever accused Israel of planning to wipe its Arab enemies off the face of the earth. The reverse is true, of course, if that means anything to anyone when evaluating who is the overall aggressor in the region. No, from 1970 on, Egypt was telling any journalist who cared to sit down with a pencil and a notebook that a new war was coming and Egypt was going to 1- take back what it had lost in 1967, and 2 – do humanity a favor and destroy Israel.
Prez Nasser died of a blackheart attack on September 28 1970.
On October 1 more than half a million Arabs wept in the streets of Cairo and other ME capitols. The same radicals who had been threatening to assassinate him for being too moderate and the same moderates who were threatening to assassinate him for being too radical were marching arm in arm and tear for tear over poor Anwar. He united the Arabs in death as he hadn't been able to do in life for some years. There were a lot of anti-American placards in the funeral rallies.
It was quite an elaborate Nasser funeral. Not as elaborate as Michael Jackson's; nothing could be quite as important as that, and I guess it's an unfair comparison as no political leader is as important as a famous entertainer, but it was big.
(Pardon the bitter sarcasm. In 1960 TV shows called BIOGRAPHY were exclusively about world leaders – In 1975 it was 90% world leaders and 10% entertainers – Today in 2010 it is 100% about entertainers – Porn stars and flash-in-the-pan country music teen-age singers get one hour biographies on TV in prime time. In the meantime excepting England and Russia, no one on the street can name a single foreign leader today. It's really shocking and vomit inducing how far my culture has travelled down the wrong road. And I'm being generous suggesting that average Americans can even name the leader of Russia or Britain. But they damn sure know who lost last night's NBC talent contest and should have won but the judges must have been drunk.)
BLACK SEPTEMBER – PALESTINE VS JORDAN
Israel had it's hands full with the Palestinian problem but Jordan unwittingly stepped in and did some of Israel's fighting for it. Jordan fought with the PLO throughout 1970 and 71. The Palestinians assassinated the Jordanian Prime Minister. The Palestinians jijacked four different passenger jet planes in September of 1970 and then blew them up in front of a pack of news cameras. It was a portent of 9/11 but no one appreciated it at the time.
The Hashemite/dolemyte Kingdom of Jordan was anti-Israel, but it was anti-PLO too. It was doing Israel's bidding when it cracked down on the PLO. Thousands of people died in the bloody civil war between Jordan's leaders and the radical rebels of the PLO. King Hussein eventually won out and expelled the Palestinians out of Jordan and into Lebanon. The PLO eventually had to flee Lebanon to Syria. So Jordan and Syria became Allies again in the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel, even though Syria had provided safe harbor two years earlier to the PLO during its civil war with Jordan.
These conflicts of interest permeated the political landscape.
Russia wanted detente with the United States but it needed to appear to support the Arab states against Israel. That led to some conflicting policy interests in Moscow. The Arab conservative oil states needed revenue from oil trade with the United States, yet the Saudis and Kuwaitis could not appear to be soft on Israel, and by proxy could not appear to be soft on the United States. Again, another conflict of interest. The United States needed Arab oil, yet it had to remain a firm ally of Israel. There is an obvious conflict of interest there.
UK WITHDRAWS FROM ME
In January of 1968 Great Britain announced that it was withdrawing from the Middle East, including Southwest Asia. Britain had provided security for the Persian Gulf for decades and that was all going to come to a sudden end. Britian had no plans for who was going to take over that police duty. The temptation for a Soviet move to 'the oil jugular' was scary obvious.
The US was hesitant. If the United States would have jumped right in to fill the void if it had not been bogged down in Vietnam. It is also likely that American influence and power could have prevented the outbreak of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. But Nam had LBJ and Nixon pinned down on both counts.
For Britian it was more a matter of money than any desire to abandon its traditional foreign policy goals of peace and empire through strength. The small Gulf states even offered to pay the expenses if England would provide the military force. It was an interesting offer but it wasn't dignified enough for British pubic relations. Johnny Bull just said no to Arab funding for British military operations.
The United States Navy would eventually have to do most of the work of protecting the Middle East from itself. Regional conflicts must be prevented. The US also had to look out for one certain Socialist outsider.
But the US Navy was stretched out over 24,000 miles of US foreign policy. America had warships in every corner of the globe, and a destroyer keeping an eye out on Baffin Island. Nixon didn't have the ships to patrol all the nooks and crannies of South Asia and the Suez region. Even if he had the will he didn't have the way unless he wanted to downgrade US capabilities in Vietnam, Korea, or the North Atlantic.
The best alternative in Kissinger-Nixon thinking was to employ one of the Gulf States to become the police power in the region and keep the Soviets out and prevent local wars through strength. It was a simple matter of giving a lot of first-rate US weaponry to the Gulf friend of our choice. Since no power in the region had much military might, whomever got the bag of toys from Uncle Samta would rule the Gulf. America named Iran to be the princely power, and the Shah of Iran was more than willing to go along.
When the Shah heard that Britian was leaving the Gulf, he immediately proclaimed that Iran was going to fill the power vacuum. This was before the United States had even approached Iran to be its very friendly power in the Gulf. Before the Shah became a problem on his own, we might as well reign him in to do our foreign policy bidding in exchange for all the guns and ammo he needed.
This policy had problems for America as far as its other “friends” in the Gulf were concerned. The rest of the states of the Middle East in Asia did not look with favor on a rising Iranian power in the region. Iranian hegemony was at least as frightening to the Gulf states as Western or Soviet hegemony (eggheads pronounce it with the accent on the second syllable – he GE mo ny.) Iran was also a threat to its neighbors for two natural reasons. Iran was not really an Arab state. It was a Middle Eastern state of its own race and heritage. Iran was an oil state, and it was Islamic. But it was racially Persian, not Arab. Iranians spoke Farsi, not Arabic. I asked a car salesman from Teheran last month if he spoke any Arabic, and he said, “one or two sentences.”
The United States balanced the pillar of power in Iran with a second pillar in Saudi Arabia. These two countries would now do our bidding in the Middle East at opposite ends of the Gulf. The addition of the second pillar would give an Arab power enough weapons and prestige to not have to fear Iran. The American-armed Saudis could keep an eye on American-armed Iran on behalf of its fellow Arabs.
This policy of surrogate US security policemen in the Gulf, regardless of their political affiliations, was known as the “Nixon Doctrine.” It was Machiavellian. The ends justified the means. It was a shame we had to make deals with Arab states that had been condemning us and trying to destroy Israel, but Nixon had to do what Nixon had to do.
KENT STATE - MAY 4, 1970
There were many anti-war demonstrations in reaction to the Cambodia invasion but one of the most severe was the one’s at Kent State University in Ohio. The action began days before the tragedy. The peace protestors were throwing rocks and bottles through campus windows and at campus police cars. They made a serious attempt to firebomb the ROTC building on campus. Governor Rhodes of Ohio declared martial law on May the third, and ordered 3,000 National Guard troops to the campus to protect the rent-a-cops from the unruly hippies who demanded that others give peace a chance.
On May 4 600 students left the books back at the dorm and demonstrated against the war, the ROTC, the National Guard, Nixon, Kissinger and our fascist nation. The college cops ordered them to disperse. Under martial law, the gathering was illegal. They chanted bad things and threw rocks. Then the National Guard fired tear gas into the crowd. As the crowd made an orderly retreat up a hill the Guardsmen inexplicably opened fire on the unarmed demonstrators killing 4 and wounding 11. One of the dead students had chosen not to retreat. He had stood before the advancing guardsmen displaying a defiant middle finger that cost him his life. I have seen this inspirational photo. The bravest hippie of them all.
Nothing could have hurt the administrations war policy more severely than this insane military answer to a college demonstration. Domestic and international opinion turned against the war like the Johnstown flood. Now the Cambodian invasion was proven wrong, even though the two events did not in reality connect directly.
Kent State has retained historical fame but an equally horrible event took place on May 15 at Jackson State College in Mississippi. State troopers handled a student protesters at a JSC female dorm by shooting at them, killing two and wounding 11. All of this triggered a hysterical wave of protests all over American colleges. 400 had to temporarily shut down normal academic activities. It's strange how Kent State gets all the glory and Jackson State is largely forgotten.
The bible of the ‘Fascist America invaded peaceful Cambodia” point of view is Sideshow by William Shawcross.
The US Ambassador to Cambodia during these years in a sworn statement said much later that much of the book is totally erroneous.
Once again let’s look at how The Enduring Vision explains things to students. First the authors claim that the bombings did not disrupt the communist supply bases in Cambodia. However, they assert,
They did help to undermine the precarious stability of that
tiny republic and to precipitate a civil war there between
pro-American and communist forces.
Well that’s interesting. We are to blame for the civil war and genocide in Cambodia. It is odd that the authors admit that there were pro-American forces there at all. I seem to recall that we were the bad guys attacking a strictly neutral country. Just who were these “pro-American forces” in Cambodia that the writers speak of? How could we have bombed these sanctuaries in total disregard of the wishes of that entire country if you also tell us that there were “pro-American forces” on one side of their civil war?
The answer is that there were indeed pro-American forces in Cambodia. It was the established leadership of the nation and its standing army. They had been totally intimidated by the communists, were afraid to seek our help openly, and were happy to let us bomb the NVA out of their sanctuaries, or at least try to.
Or are the authors suggesting that the country was completely neutral until later when all of a sudden a civil war erupted and for some strange reason a great faction appeared that was totally in favor of the nation that had bombed their land viciously and without provocation? How does one logically account for these “pro-American forces” in Cambodia?
Later they add this about our “invasion” (it was an incursion that is always referred to as an “invasion”);
The invasion ended Cambodia’s neutrality, widened the war
throughout Indochina and provoked massive protests.
“Throughout Indochina”? I think all of Indochina was already quite involved.
Oliver Stone, a Vietnam vet and filmmaker also blames the US for the Cambodian genocide. In his film NIXON, in which he demonizes his subject so much that he even portrays his faithful wife Pat as having hated him (an unforgivable offense), he closes out the film with an epilogue voiceover in which blames the USA for Pol Pot’s 3 million murder victims.
Bitter veterans do not speak for all veterans. A half a million Vietnam vets came home and joined the VFW and the American Legion. The John Kerry crowd isn’t the only voice on the issues.
But then, as now, the anti-war crowd gets all the spotlight from the liberal press as though they speak for everyone. Anti-war vets get the red carpet and the hawks don't get an interview from the Telegraph Creek Montana weekly Gazette. Today, the fat left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore is publishing a new book of letters he has received from soldiers in Iraq who condemn the war, as though these letters speak for all of our troops. The book is small and he needed letters from relatives and ex-servicepersons from other wars to fill it up enough to call it a book. But talk in person (and I have) to anyone who served over there and they all say the same thing to me. “You know, there’s a lot of good things going on over here that you never hear about on the news.”
William Shawcross has admitted that his Cambo book was wrong.
My father was a Boston police officer through the Vietnam years and he was face to face with angry young left demonstrators dozens of times. The crowds, by the way, also threw bags of feces at the cops. And if some cops reacted they were labelled fascist pigs. How would you react? I'd buy a flamethrower with refills, and make them all do their Saigon Budhhist monk impression for me.
I'm not saying that I support the Guardsmen at Kent State. But I'd feel like doing that, absolutely. The Kent State guys did what ten thousand other cops and guardsmen had felt like doing to the violent hippies for many years now. The guards were immoral for acting upon these animal impulses, but the hippies were immoral for their provocative self-righteous hatreds and their escalatory violence. You punch someone. He stabs you. You die. His charge gets reduced to first degree manslaughter because you provoked his violence. He will have to pay for escalating it too far but you started the violence with yours. Playing with men's animal instincts, especially those carrying helmets and guns, is playing with matches.
Dad had some arguments with my older sister who took the side of the demonstrators. Usually I just listened. However there was there was one remarkable two-hour slugfest about the meaning of the term, “Off the Pig!” Its possible that I'm the only one of the three of us who remembers the argument for reasons I'd rather not say.
“Off the Pig!” was a popular slogan with the hippie left back then. It was essentially a Black Panther position but the hippies showed crossover solidarity and embraced it. The furious black left and the only very angry white left had a strange alliance for about 12 years or so. Seeing a 17 year-year-old upper middle class white teen-aged girl at a concert with a button on her pocketbook that said “Off the Pig!” was certainly an example. You could literally buy that bumper sticker and I saw it myself many times in stores, but I never recall seeing anyone actually have the guts to put it on their car.
OTP was a very common phrase - Advocating the murder of police officers at random because the left was so holy and good and the “establishment” so evil that it had to be eliminated, “by any means necessary.” So if you are profound, in the right, and eloquent, it's ok to murder. To hear my sister under intense questioning finally come out and admit that she though the Black Panthers had every right to kill cops at random was a night I'll always remember. I took Dad's side on that one. I didn't interject much, but I took his side with my one sentence per half hour. That was a sad night. My sister fortunately grew out of that mind-set over the years.
BIRTH OF BANGLADESH
A political map of today’s world shows a country east of India called Bangladesh. In 1970 this country didn’t exist. In 1970 this area was known as East Pakistan, an irredentist partner to West Pakistan. Both regions collectively were one country, Pakistan.
In the fall of 1971 a series of border clashes between India and Pakistan erupted into full-scale war. India won the war and eliminated East Pakistan from the face of the earth. A new nation was formed, with a government favorable to India and it was to be called Bangladesh.
Starvation and overpopulation plague the country from that to this day.
The United States came closer to involvement in the I-P War than is widely known. Though seldom remembered today, The Indo-Pakistani war was banner headlines in even the Boston newspapers for two straight months.
LAOS 71
The South Vietnamese Army, under US guidance launched an incursion into Laos to try to clean out the Communist military sanctuaries there. But the campaign was an embarrassing disaster, like Mussolini's invasion of Greece in 1940. The invaders attacked a superior foe and soon the hunters were the hunted. Charlie smashed the offensive back into South Vietnam. The Laos loss added to Nixon’s weak political position on Vietnam.
PENTAGON PAPERS - JUNE 1971
The Pentagon Papers, an expose of US foreign policy in Southeast Asia, were a national sensation in 1971, and when they were fully published in newspaper installments they then became a best-selling five volumes book collection.
The Times had published the first installments of exiting material beginning on June 13, 1971 under the working title, The Pentagon Papers. The PP were a sensation. They revealed that the American public had been lied to repeatedly on Vietnam, especially in the Johnson era. The Papers were damaging to the war effort in general and Nixon was angry with Ellsberg for leaking the work to the press. The president then acquired a court order forbidding the New York Times from further publication of PP. But NYT took it all the way to the Supreme Court and won. The issue was “prior restraint.” Censorship is occasionally legal in this country as long as the material is heard in public once before it is declared obscene, dangerous or defamatory. You cannot restrain the material prior to a public floating, only after the fact. We have the right to see it once. And that applies to anything.
The papers actually dealt with US government decisions on Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson, not Nixon. In those Dean Rusk years Kissinger was only a peripheral player, so he actually was not under the gun when they came out. But Henry felt that if these papers could be leaked, then anything he said, did or wrote in confidence could also be leaked, so something had to be done.
Ellsberg became a nationally famous person overnight and remained so for sometime. I still see him pitching in his two cents on political talk shows as a talking head in a four corner box. The Pentagon papers gave him a real celebrity life. I don't care much for him, for he has a Messiah complex. He thinks he is the voice of God and that God is hard left.
When Kissinger and the Plumbers found out that Ellsberg was the bad guy they broke into his office to try to find some dirt on him. But the burglary of his office was discovered and the event backfired on Kissinger's plumbers, making them the bad guy and Ellsberg a martyr. Instead of giving the squares some ammo to use against the hippies, the break-in gave the hippIes more ammo to hurl at the squares.
DOWNS GOES JACKSON - AUGUST 21 1971
My friend in Atlantic City saw me reading a history book and asked me if I had ever read anything about George Jackson?
“Who?”
After reading about him I feel foolish that I hadn't heard of him. GJ is quite a story and should be made into a movie. I told Isaac he should write the screenplay since he already knew so much about him.
George Jackson was a Black Panther who died in a prison shoot-out.
The Black Panther Party was an important force in American politics during the Nixon years. These people were “militant.” That's a euphemism for “criminally violent.” But the white race had oppressed the black race for so long that liberal whites took their side, even knowing their methods. One of the important parts of being a good hippie was to support the black militants, even they were openly Communists. You couldn't support a white Communist openly, but a black one, yes.
On August 21 1971 a Black Panther Party member named George Jackson died in a shootout with San Quentin Prison guards. George became a martyr and hero for the Panthers.
Jackson had been in prison since 1959. In 1970 with 11 years behind him and some hope for getting out, Jax killed a guard in a fit of rage. Two others along with Jackson, were charged with first degree murder.
I can't blame him for being short-fused. Jax had gone into prison in 59 when it was almost impossible to get to first base on a second date. Now he's in the can and it's 1970 when any bozo on the outside can get almost any woman to go all the way on the first date with minimal effort, and this poor guy is in the can just looking on. Any heterosexual would snap if they were locked up in that time line.
George already 'had a record' when Barstow police arrested him for robbing a gas station at gunpoint. The court gave him “One year to life.” That is a quite a discretionary sentence, leaving plenty of room for racist enforcement. It was another thing to be steamed about on top of the dating game.
So in July of 1970 he and two other black men had a fight with a guard and the three black guys won. The guard was dead and the three inmates were up for murder.
Some famous black radicals came forward to defend George Jackson when he was on trial for icing the guard. Jackson wrote more than 130 letters from prison. An edited collection became a best-selling paperback. Now Jackson could afford a good lawyer, but he didn't need any money. A dozen famous leftist lawyers were willing to defend him for free.
George Jackson became a household name for the time being.
Then on August 7 1970 his son tried to spring him by kidnapping the court! Jonathan Jackson and several heavily armed Black Panther Party members invaded the courtroom in Marin County where GJ was on trial. They took the judge hostage! The judge died in a hail of bullets as police tried to storm the hostage scene!
Why isn't this a movie?
George Jackson survived the shoot-out and gets convicted to a long sentence. A year later on August 21, 1971 Jackson started up an insurrection at San Quentin with guards taken hostages. When the guards stormed the rebel controlled cell block, George Jackson went down like Tony Montana in the final scene of Scarface.
TIME GIVE YOU THE NEWS - YOU CAN ALWAYS TRUST TIME
During the Vietnam War, one of the top US correspondents in South Vietnam was Phan Xuan An. He worked for Time magazine. Phan had covered Vietnam for Reuters for many years before Time gave him a raise and a new job covering the war for the United States.
Stan Karnow worked for Life and he also covered the War in Vietnam. An and Karnow were good friends. In 1982 Karnow went back to Vietnam and found out that they weren’t friends. It turned out that Phan Xuan An was Viet Cong all along, a double-agent of a reporter. For years Time magazine was dlivering its Vietnam coverage through a Vietnamese Communist spy. It goes to show how liberal biased the media was back then that PXA got his material past the Time editor every week without controversy. An’s copy fit right in.
1972 NV OFFENSIVE
The North Vietnamese, taking advantage of U.S. endless withdrawal of troops, launched the “Easter Campaign” an all out attack on South Vietnam in April of 1972. Nixon responded with heavy bombing attacks on the north. The South Vietnamese Army held. Later the December bombing campaign called “Linebacker II” brought Hanoi to the bargaining table in a reasonable mood at long last. The US air arm in Linebacker II was for the first time allowed to hit with full conventional force across the North including the cities.
ELECTION OF 1972
Bullets rather than ballots decided the election of 1968. A few snowflakes and an Oldsmobile decided the election of 1972.
It didn’t add up on the surface. The entire country had gone hippie. Senators and hockey players had long hair. An overwhelming majority of Americans were against the war. Leftism was mainstream to a degree unparalleled in all of US history. Yet in the middle of that playing field, a likable Democrat got clobbered by an unlikable Republican in one of the most one-sided elections of all time in any free country. I watched the election of 1972 with amazement. How could this happen? This was “our” chance and we ran into a speeding freight train at the polls. How could this be?
The Democrats put up a candidate from their own extreme left, while the Republicans put up a candidate from their moderate left. Nixon was a cold warrior, but he was no redneck. Nixon was too liberal even for the Eastern Establishment. It didn’t matter that the hippies considered Richard a fascist reactionary right-wing war-monger. What mattered was that to the silent majority of mainstream voters, extremism is always a vice. The Democrats ran an extremist version of itself and the Republicans didn’t. It was 1964 in reverse.
The Democrats offered the most left-wing candidate in the field. George McGovern, was a Senator from South Dakota and a former B-24 bomber crew member in World War II. McGovern wanted to govern. He had seen war and was against it. He was the candidate of the anti-war hippies, plus the intellectual left, plus the traditional power bases of the party. I met him once. We talked about the joy of studying history. It was an 15 second conversation. I’m sure he remembered me to his dying day. GM is a good person.
The Democrats started off ok. They were putting up a good fight until scandal rocked the ticket. It's a “depressing” story, and is famous enough now that it gets a mention even in the quick sound byte TV versions of American History. This scandal is mentioned every Presidential Election year by all the pundits.
In 1972 it came out that Vice Presidential nominee Tom Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy for depression a few years earlier. Tom had not told anyone of it, not even his own Democratic party. Eagleton resigned as the Vice Presidential aspirant. McGovern made a show of asking TE to stay on but everyone knew that the Eagle had landed and was not to fly again.
Instead of an underdog team with rising momentum, the Democrats now had a candidate and a ticket that was behind in the polls and appeared to be running an inept and embarrassing campaign. No one likes to back a loser. The ticket went from hip to un-hip in a shock-therapy heartbeat.
Let's look at the campaign in more detail. Late in 1971 the front-runner for the Democrats was husky Edmund Muskie, the Senator from Maine. But then came the famous crying in the snowstorm incident just before the New Hampshire Primary. As Edmund wept away, he got swept away. Like Eagletons' depression confession, Muskie's tearful press conference is part of all TV sound byte histories.
Here's what happened. It started when a New Hampshire Newspaper, or, should I say, the New Hampshire Newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader wrote an article about Muskie in which he was quoted (in a letter) as saying that it was perfectly OK to use the word “Canuck” to describe French-Canadiens. I guess this was a sensitive issue in New Hampshire where there's a lot of Canucks registered to vote. A lot of the road signs in New Hampshire are in both English and French.
Muskie swore that the charge was false. No photocopy of the alleged Canuck letter was ever produced so he was probably right. But the Union Leader also included criticism of his wife. They said that she chewed gum and wasn't always terribly ladylike.
Whoa!
Muskie was a hot tempered guy to begin with (he had once put a waiter in a headlock for a spot of dirt on his scrambled eggs) and he went berserk. He was in Manchester at the time, (the manufacturing city named after the bigger one in England,) and immediately called for a press conference.
If Muskie had held that press conference indoors the entire course of world history might have been different. He might have won the Presidency in 1972. But he held it outdoors and it was snowing. Muskie defended these charges with passion and with some solid arguments of disproof.
But too many snowflakes came crashing down upon his warm cheeks. They began to melt and it sort-of looked like he was crying. A few scummy reporters ran to their phones and wired headlines back to their rags that “Muskie Breaks Down Crying at Press Conference.” The story spread like wildfire. Even if he could now prove he had not cried, the political impact could never compete with the amount of publicity that was generated when it was reported that he had cried. Accusations get 90 points out of a possible 100. Successful denial gets 10 at best. You lose by being accused and “not guilty” carries the same penalty as guilty; Political damage.
If Muskie had worn a felt hat he might have won the nomination. He probably wouldn't have picked Eagleton, so that scandal would never have happened and the Democrats might have beat Nixon. There never would have been a Watergate, no resignation nor a President Ford. Vietnam would have closed sooner for the US; Muskie probably would have been re-elected. There never would have been a Jimmy Carter; and Reagan might never have been installed as a reaction to Carter's pacifist foreign policy; A few snowflakes changing the course of history.
George Wallace was once again a powerful third-party candidate in the race. He was a real player, a real factor. If somehow the other top candidates cancelled each other out, Crazy George might actually get in. It was a scary thought, and few people discounted that possibility completely. But others saw it as a real danger. Then tragedy struck in the form of a lunatic gunman named David Brenner. No, check that, his name was Arthur Bremmer. (David Brenner is a comedian who made me laugh one time in a 90 minute show.)
Governor Wallace was campaigning at a shopping mall in Maryland on May 15, 1972 when Arthur Bremmer reached out from the crowd with a pistol and emptied six shots into Wallace and the crowd. There is a chilling film record of the event. The sound is brutal. Wallace was paralyzed for the rest of his life. George Wallace withdrew from the 1972 race, to fade from history as a black mark on our national record. Today the name George Wallace means a black Las Vegas comedian.
Historians interpret this horrible shopping mall event as a help to Nixon. On the other hand with Wallace out of the race the South was an open field all over again, and the traditional Democratic “Solid South” could conceivably still go McGovern. But McGovern was too liberal for the solid South. He not only wanted the USA to unilaterally and immediately withdraw from Vietnam with no quid quo pro, he also wanted a blanket amnesty for the draft dodgers who had fled the country and now wanted to come back. Ouch. There goes ten million Southern votes right there. And McGovern had better sleep with one eye open.
72 was another gypsy moth election. Everywhere in the country there was universal hatred for Nixon. It seemed that no one, absolutely no one supported this guy. On the television and in the newspaper it was the same story. But on Election Day the Republican voters came out of the woods and somehow voted him in by a big margin. It's a shame he let those voters down with his dishonest criminal actions in the Watergate cover-up. Nixon coined the term "the silent majority" to describe his supporters and he was correct. By the time of the next presidential election he had successfully undermined that majority with his illegal actions and made it almost impossible for Ford to win. He ruined the Silent Majority he had named.
Senator McGovern carried only the District of Columbia and my home state of Massachusetts. Long after the election was over, during the Watergate crisis and Nixon’s downfall there was a popular bumper sticker I saw a thousand times that read “Don’t Blame Me. I’m From Massachusetts.” One history textbook says that the popular bumper sticker in Massachusetts read “I Told You So.” I'm from Massachusetts and I never saw a single one that said “I Told You So,” and I'm telling you so right now.
They call right wingers who never served in the military, a “chickenhawk.” Former history professor McGovern was the reverse, a “bravedove.” George (like Howard Zinn) was a World War II bomber pilot. McGovern had seen war and hated it. “McGove-dove had seen real combat and real danger.
On the other hand a lot of the anti-war youth were “chickendoves.” They just didn’t want to get maimed or killed in Vietnam or anyplace else and used high and moral arguments to avoid admitting their real gut motives. McGovern was lucky he got back alive from WWII. You have to respect a guy like that when he says he thinks America is wrong about something.
Will Rogers once said that if there was one thing he knew after looking around the country for his whole life it was that when all is said and done, this country is liberal. Apparently not that liberal. McGovern was the most left-wing major presidential candidate in American history. The Dems learned their lesson. Their party took an unacceptable beating. From now on, their nominees would have to either be moderate liberals or centrists, or, if they were liberal, they would have to deny it and pretend to be center leaning.
Incidentally Arthur Bremmer wrote a book in prison called Assassin's Diary. This diary of a stalker assassin was the inspiration for the deadly lead character in the movie Taxi Driver. There is a chain of connection between the Wallace 72 and Reagan 81 failed assassination attempts. Hinckley saw Taxi Driver 40 times and got it into his head to shoot Reagan.
All this lunacy led to a wise law that stipulated that henceforth any criminal assassin who wrote a book about the crime had to give all profits to the victim and their family. But they could still enjoy the fame from prison.
CHRISTMAS BOMBING -- 12 72
US F-105 Reindeer jets dropped a lot of bombs on North Vietnam over the Christmas holidays in 1972. Apparently the Communists had been naughty this past year. They got a half a million lumps of coal in their stocking with TNT in the middle.
Liberals at the time and liberal historians talk about this as a most insensitive international crime. What did it matter that the Communist had murdered a million people in Southeast Asia and were getting ready to murder four million more as soon as the USA withdrew? What did it matter that the Communists were atheists and didn't believe in Christ or Santa? What did it matter that the US was doing this because it seemed like the only way to get the Communists ... excuse me.. the “Vietnamese Nationalists” to act reasonably at the bargaining table, and thereby the only way to end the war. What did it matter that it worked and that the peace agreement of January 1973 was, at least according to all insiders, a direct result of the show of force of the Xmas bombing?
All that does not matter much. What matters is that the big bad United States bombed the noble peasants of North Vietnam and did it on Christmas, for Pete's sake. Blame America First!
TREATY ENDS VIETNAM WAR –JANUARY 1973
In 1972 only 300 US servicemen died in Vietnam. It's cold to use the word “only” but compared to 1968 that was a true “only” 300 if there ever was one. In 1968 that many US GI's sometimes died in single week.
I turned 18 on January 26 1973. The Vietnam War and the draft ended on January 27 1973.
Saved by the bell!
The Vietnam war cost the United States 56,019 dead. Many more were wounded. Estimates vary. The United States lost a lot of international prestige and power as it withdrew from Southeast Asia. Estimates do not vary.
Material losses were high. For starters, more than 5,000 helicopters were shot down.
The Paris Agreement of 1973 was very clear on not allowing any resumption of military hostilities. From Chapter 5, Article 15;
The reunification of Vietnam shall be carried out step
by step through peaceful means on the basis of
discussions and agreements between North and
South Vietnam, without coercion or annexation by
either party.
The United States withdrew from Vietnam not in defeat, but as part of a this treaty of peace signed in January of 1973 between the warring states of Nam. North Vietnam later reneged on these agreements and America did not go back to enforce the terms that had been violated. The peace agreements of January 1973 therefore were dishonored. The United States had signed these treaties along with North and South Vietnam.
This was not deliberate betrayal on Nixon and Kissinger’s part. They had every intention of honoring the commitment if the North Vietnamese violated the agreement. But when the North invaded and it was time to act, it was 1975 and the Congress and the American people would not allow it. Gerald Ford was in office by then and was proud to address a college crowd and make his famous foreign policy statement, “The Vietnam War is over as far as America is concerned.” The crowd cheered wildly. While the North was overrunning the South, the crowd cheered over the idea that the USA would do nothing. The tough foreign policy approach on Nam (and elsewhere) from Truman to Nixon was over. Isolationism/pacifism set in. Certainly, at the very least with regards to Southeast Asia.
Laos took the fall too for the Vietnam settlement. It was sad and pathetic as Laos fell to the Communist Pathet Lao as soon as the Americans left. But the world was too busy to notice. Hardly anyone here even knows that Laos fell to Communism in 1975.
Bill Calley shouldn’t be the most famous soldier to come out of the Vietnam War. Plenty of U.S. guys honored their uniform but their names aren’t remembered like the name of the guy who stained it. For every Calley there were 10 men who won the Medal of Honor, but they aren't famous names. Only Calley the killer, Kerry the protestor, and Cleland, the lefty dismembered Member of Congress represent the famous soldiers of Nam. Not one Medal of Honor winner is a household name!
There are plenty of movies and TV shows showing Americans behaving badly, but very few about any positive relationships Americans might have formed with some Vietnamese people, or heroism shown in battle. All the kindness, courage, assistance, and nobility that American troops ever offered in SE Asia, are tossed into Nick Lenin’s famous “trash bin of history” (that’s where he predicted all the capitalist states were headed.) All that is ever remembered, all that is ever celebrated in American retro-culture, are American war crimes against the Vietnamese people.
A PHLEMBOYANT COMING HOME
There is a common image of the later years of the Vietnam War of hippies spitting at men in uniform on American streets, and calling them “baby killers!” among other bad things. For about 20 year I have believed that this was a big exaggeration. There was an incident like that here and there, but to suggest that it was commonplace was a lie of exaggeration.
However I have read a few memoirs by men who served in Vietnam and men I trust for veracity. There is a consistent pattern - each one tells a tale exactly like that. What impresses me is that in each case, the author isn’t trying to make a big political point about it. They are just telling that story that this happened to them as part of their larger auto-biography. There’s nothing contrived about it. In face they seem to tell these stories merely in passing. That they got home from Vietnam and to their utter shock a bunch of hippies accosted them, spit on them and called them “baby killers!” I have to conclude that this really did happen quite a lot and it’s disgusting. The disdain that the nation developed for anyone in the military and anyone especially who served in Vietnam is an historical disgrace. I was a 16 year old hippie rad, but I can assure you never gave that sort of behavior a thought. However I was not representative of the heart of the movement. The spitters were in their early 20’s and occasionally included women.
Aside from it being unfair on about 40 levels, it is unpatriotic and, more important, grandly hypocritical. You claim to stand for peace and love and to stand tall against war and violence, but your behavior is breathtakingly violent. Young men with long hair pretending to stand for “love, not war” are still young men and they tend to want to fight, period. Love beads can’t hide your macho import. You want to hurt anyone who doesn’t agree with you. You don’t want to love and understand those who do not agree with you.
What is more sickening is that the hippies made real heroes out of the Viet Cong and don;t try to tell me they didn’t! They not only spit on our GI’s, they praised the VC in their placards, their poems, their songs, and their writing. And don’t try to tell me they didn’t! That was the hardest part of being a hippie for me, seeing the left praising the Communists who were killing our guy. I believed in a leftist revolution because the times were too long too conservative, and I was reacting to that, plus I was a naive idiot.
Here’s a sample of the spitting times. An Army major named Hugh Shelton was on leave in New Orleans in full uniform in February 1972. It was Mardi Gras. Women were flashing their belly buttons for beads and everyone was drinking and having a good time. “Shelly” was just walking down the street with a friend who was in an Air Force dress uniform. Suddenly a tall hippie dressed as a priest barrels out of a bar, chases them down and gets in front of them, trying to block their path. Harry Hippie is calling them both “baby killer!” and he keeps spitting right on them, daring them to do something. The Air Force guy ignored it, and, like a ballplayer who doesn’t rub the place where he got hit by the pitch, pretended there was no spit on his uniform and kept walking. But Shelton lost it. The future head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff grabbed the hippie and slammed his head into a cement wall and held him up there giving him a piece of his mind,
“You ignorant sack of scum! That is a Colonel in the United States Air Force and if you ever do anything like that again you will die. He’s fighting to keep your sorry worthless hide free! You will die because I will kill you!”
The hipped collapsed to the cement and Shelton walked away. This validates how the hippies were violently abusive to servicemen, but there is also a subplot. If there had been the right witnesses and police witnesses too, Shelton might have been arrested and convicted of aggravated assault and felonious threats. He would probability never have made general and gone on to lead US military forces under Clinton and Bush. Shelton doesn’t even get it, that the story makes the hippies look good, and that Shelton is an intrinsically violent and unthinking person. On the very next page Shelton talks of regaling raw recruits about times that he had to shell V-villages with 105 mm howitzers and that was just something you have quickly learn to live with. “It’s either them or you and you can’t hesitate,” he warns his awed listeners. Then he tells of gunning down a VC in the back with an expert shot just in the nick of time before the guy in the black pajamas made it to cover. This is one page after he is outraged that a hippie had the nerve to call him a pig and a baby killer!
Like everything else about on the Vietnam War, this segment ends up with mixed and equivocating messages.
Damn the violent hippies, but I guess they were sort of right, in a way, to some extent.
NIXON’S TRIP TO CHINA 1972
Don’t get me started on this one. Nixon and Kissinger thought they were isolating North Vietnam diplomatically by establishing diplomatic relations with Red China!
In opening diplomatic relations with China, Nixon did something no Democratic President could have done. If a Dem had tried to connect with the Red Chinese, it would have looked pink. But since Nixon had a life-long record of loyal anti-communism, he could extend a hand to the Communist Chinese and the American people would let the Maoists shake it back.
Good. They gave diplomacy a chance in China. But they thought that North Vietnam was shivering in its boots when Nixon went to China because in order to normalize relations with America, China would be in effect abandoning its support for North Vietnam. I don't agree with that logic.
It might be a progressive and Christian thing to do by recognizing China, but it did not win us the war in Vietnam as these two guys sincerely believe it did.
This subject is the most frustrating thing in the study of the war, this constant mind-boggling idiocy about the “great historic enmity” between Vietnam and China, and Nixon driving a wedge between them.
If this ‘historic enmity’ is true it made fools out of those seeing Red China behind the North Vietnamese cause. This is part of the standard left slanted historical science on the war. Anti-Communist crusaders were now safely seen as laughing stocks. Of course the Vietnam war was not part of some “vast red-wing conspiracy” as the loony’s thought. China and Vietnam were historic enemies! That’s how foolish the US was in prosecuting this stupid war.
The opposite was true. The North Vietnamese Communists hated China like the Canadians hate the Americans, and the Americans hate the French. They might at worst have been the teenager who thinks he hates his parents but lives off their money and loyally sees them on the holidays without a bad word between anyone. The Vietnamese are children of the Chinese culture. They are racially close to the Chinese, and their language and writing of it are both derived from China.
Without China’s committed support, North Vietnam could never have won the Vietnam Civil War. Some enemy. Even the argument that it was Russia, not China, that supplied 90% of the money and military equipment to North Vietnam is useless. No one denies that China supplied the other 10% and most of the supplies passed from the USSR through mainland China. Would an enemy ever do that for his enemy? The very concept is scary stupid.
Ho Chi Minh depended heavily on China throughout the rise to power of the Communists on the North. The first areas to come under NV Communist control was the northernmost provinces, those closest to China. More than 300,000 Chinese troops served in the Vietnam War under the direction of North Vietnamese leaders. Some enemy.
It will be pointed out of course that in 1979 China had a war with North Vietnam, proving that the two were enemies. But it was a phony war with next to no casualties, a war of show and disinformation designed to validate the ‘historical enmity’ jive. It was a war for western public consumption, and one devoid of worthwhile military objectives for either side. More on that war in the Carter chapter.
Nixon and Kissinger also thought that by engaging in relations with Communist China, they were also isolating the Soviets, another ridiculous concept. As if the ties between these two Communist giants were not strong; as if the mere diplomatic recognition of China meant that the Russians had lost their old ally to our sphere of influence. It is so insane, but that is exactly what Nixon and Kissinger thought, and that’s the way a lot of history books still tell it. I say the Sino-Soviet split was a load of spit.
As with Vietnam and China, the USSR and China were also supposedly “historic enemies.” China seems to have a lot of historic enemies. These two Commie behemoths were always on the verge of war. I’ve seen many national news magazine covers concerning the possibility of nuclear war between China and Russia over the decades and even very recently. I laugh every time to keep from getting too frustrated.
Communist China owed its very existence to the Soviet Union. They shared the same religion, Communism. Russia was the wise old priest and China the young rebel priest who wants some changes in the ceremonies. On the basis of these lame, weak and inconsequential differences of philosophy, the United States sincerely thought that China and Russia were about to go to war any day now. For decades we have believed this. It’s not a dead issue even today.
China thought the Communist worldwide revolution should be primarily agrarian, with the farmer as hero, while the Soviets thought that the industrial worker was the national hero around which the socialist structure should be built. Big deal. The Sino-Soviet split was a conflict of pamphlets without real physical disputes and issues. The idea that these two giants were preparing for war over ideological hair-splitting is as silly as Gulliver’s Lilliput, where the two kingdoms were going to war over the best way to cook an egg.
Nixon and Kissinger thought that by this “triangular diplomacy” they were manipulating these three Communist nations into separating from each other. In fact the three were united and making fools of us. They were quite united especially in promoting the image of disunity.
THE COMET KAHOUTEK
In February of 1973 astronomers discovered a large meteor headed towards our solar system. It was named Kahoutek. The meteor wasn't on a path to strike the earth directly, but it was probably going to come close enough for everyone to see, and the earth would pass through the debris from its tail.
Kahoutek passed through the Solar System in October of 1973. It wasn't as bright and spooky as people feared (or hoped.)
In the summer of 1973 I had bought a little paperback with the cover ripped off called 'The Comet Kahoutek,' by Joseph F. Godavage. The book was a study in the history of comets that came close to hitting the earth but in the process left a tail of outer space debris that the earth had to pass through. Goodavage argued that the records of history prove that every time the earth passes through the tail of a major comet, it is a time of spectacular events, way out of proportion to normal times. Joe predicted that when Kahoutek passes by, and earth passes through its tail in October of this year, it will be a time of upheaval. Great political events will happen. the earth might see a major war break out.
I read this book with interest and waited patiently for October of 1973 to roll around to see what happens.
So did anything unusual happen in October of 1973 as the book predicted? The Arab-Israeli War of 1973 broke out leading to terrifying near-nuclear confrontation between the USA and the USSR; The Arab oil embargo was imposed on the United States, leading to a disastrous economic crisis; Inflation and recession ran riot as the gas shortage changed the world; The Vice President of the United States resigned in scandal; The Justice department decided that Nixon had to hand over incriminating tapes that would force him to resign the Presidency; The Congress passed the War Powers Act making it almost impossible for the U.S.A. to send troops into action without a long drawn out Congressional debate and vote; Willie Mays embarrassed himself on the baseball diamond.
I watched these events unfold and I had that kooky Kahoutek in the back of my mind.
Today this book, published only in paperback, is forgotten and almost impossible to find. There are books about Kahoutek by learned astronomers, but they don't talk about the events connection. Godavage's accurate predictions might as well have never happened, but if they had been wrong, he would have been ridiculed.
Godavage is a well-respected astrologer, and his bulls-eye predictions never made headlines because he was a well respected astrologer. Godavage would have been taken more seriously if he had claimed to be a psychic who spoke to the dead. JFG later wrote a best seller called How to Write Your Own Horoscope.
The amazing prediction of Goodavage has never gone down on record. The guy was either a lucky guesser crackpot, or perhaps there was something to his astonishing thesis, and its incredible accuracy.
I tell you this story in part to set up the dramatic month of October, 1973.
1973 YOM-KIPPUR WAR
Since 1970, the Arabs had made it clear that they planned to attack Israel again. It was not a matter of if, it was a matter of when. Israel and Syria had artillery duels and aircraft dogfights along the Golan Heights. Egypt and Israel fought in the Sinai. Jordan stayed out of trouble with Israel, mostly because it had its hands full fighting the Palestinians.
Egypt and Sadat were the fathers of this conflict. Sadat wanted to make peace with Israel in order to stop spending 20% of his national budget on defense. Egypt had lost badly in the ’67 war and Israeli troops were still stationed in the Sinai desert in former Egyptian territory. Sadat knew that Israel was in too strong a position to even want to negotiate for a return of the Egyptian lands. So he felt that a fresh war could help, and he didn’t even have to win the war to win his political objectives. A win would be great but if he fought to a draw but brought Israel to the table for a permanent peaceful settlement, then the war would have done Egypt good. It could save billions on defense spending. This is more or less how it all worked out.
First Anwar had to make sure that the US did not perceive his attack on Israel as a proxy Cold War sally by the Soviet Union through one of its client allies. Sadat therefore in 1972 expelled the Soviet political personnel and later the 20,000 military advisors spread throughout his armed forces.
Israel became worried that the Arabs were planning an attack soon. Recon photos showed a serious build up in tanks on both the Golan Heights and the Suez canal. But US intelligence officials assured the Israelis that it was just another typical Arab bluff to intimidate the Jews to make concessions. During late September it had become quite clear to Israel that both Syria and Egypt were planning to attack Israel soon. The IDF (Israeli defense Forces) asked Goldie Mier for permission to launch a pre-emptive attack on their enemies to save Israel from impending disaster, just like in 1967.
But the 1967 parallel was the key. yes, the pre-emptive attack in 67 had won the war and averted disaster, but the political consequences were heavy. Most of the world accused Israel of being the aggressor in the Six Day War, even though two squadrons of Egyptian jet fighter-bombers were actually in the air on the way to attack Israel when Egypt got hit first by the pre-emtive bombs of the IAF. For years the jews had to listen to the dirty lie that they had started the 1967 War when it was a clear a case of self defense. If you knock a guy out with one punch who is reaching for a knife to stab you with, who is the aggressor? The fact that he didn't get the knife out of his pocket doesn't absolve him. This time the Israeli political leadership decided that it would sit still and let the Arabs land the first punch. This time the world would clearly see who was the aggressor. It was politically shrewd and militarily dangerous. Israel almost lost the war because it didn't want to look like the bully. The Arabs were far more heavily armed and better trained than 1967. This time they had six years of Soviet weapons deliveries and military advisor assistance behind them.
Sadat expelled the Soviets from Egypt on the eve of the war but he didn't expel their tanks and planes. And Syria had not expelled the Soviets at all.
The Egypt-Syrian (the former United Arab Republic) attack took place on the most holy day in Israel, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It was the Arabs who wanted atonement, for 1967.
The anti-Semites calculated that this was the day that the vaunted Israeli military forces would be least prepared to respond. To add more evil genius to the attack, Sadat had staged threatening maneuvers several times in recent months, which caused the Israelis to react with full and expensive mobilization for war. By the time he was ready for real war, the threatening maneuvers would be ignored. It was a military preparedness version of the boy who cried wolf.
On the Golan Heights the two sides were separated by what was known as the Purple Line. The was a no man's land based on the positions of the forces at the time of the cease-fire in 1967. There was a small zone on neutrality that was supposed to be temporary pending a final political settlement, but since to merely negotiate with Israel meant to recognize Israel, the Arabs were never going to negotiate that boundary and it remained until many mapmakers deemed it official.
On the Israeli side of the Purple Line the democrats had structed a series of tiny armored forts. In between them tank platoons covered two miles between them. It was an ersatz version of the old french Maginot Line of 1939. The soldiers nicknamed it the “Saul Goldberg Line.”
The Syrians had built up their forces for many months and on the eve of war they had nearly 1,000 tanks supplied free of charge by their detente-loving Soviet allies. The Israelis had less than 100 tanks on th Goldberg line when the intelligence reports became to pour in the Syria was going to attack. By Yom Kippur they had tank strength up to 144, but it was still bad. Syrian artillery concentrations were just as numerically superior and the Syrian Air Force had more numbers ready there too.
The situation in the Sinai desert was similar. Israel occupied the East Bank of the Suez Canal, a waterway that was forbidden to them from commercial or military use. The Russian SAMS and FROGS (small surface to surface missile systems 'Free Rocket Over Ground') had been moved up real close. The Rusiand had given them hundreds of MIG 21's and Mikhail 55's, the second best fighters and bombers they had, respectively.
Being set up on the east bank of the Canal was politically good for Israel but militarily bad. Unlike 67, Egyptians did not have far to go to attack the Jewish pigs (read the Koran for that reference) in 1973. 'The Gips' could hit the Jews with mortars. Men in rowboats could slip across the Canal during the night and hit the Jews with hand thrown grenades. Sadat's boys didn't need to fly 40 minutes across the Sinai at supersonic low level speed to hit them this time.
The Israelis weren't defending the inner supply and defense lines of their nation, but the outer. The Israelis were stretched thin at the extensions of occupied territory they had accidently on purpose acquired as a result of their victory of 1967. Irael at the core was as strong as these two opponents, but on the fringes of the Golan and the Sinai they were weak and vulnerable. Israel was Davey and Sadat and Syria were the Jew-hating Goliaths.
With the help of surprise, the attack by Syrian and Egyptian forces was at first an overwhelming success.
In light of the Egyptian/Syrian Yom Kippur strategy it is interesting to note that by contrast, the United States from 1990 to 2007 has consistently made it a cornerstone of its foreign policy in the Middle East to not conduct military operations against any Arab state during the holy month of Ramadan. They do the opposite.
In October of 1973 the Arab states surrounding Israel were preparing to attack Israel. The Israeli Air Force began striking Egyptian forward positions. The Arab states then launched a full scale invasion of Israel that nearly succeeded in wiping Israel off the map before Israel counterattacked with the help of US military supplies and intelligence.
At one point the Soviets threatened to intervene on behalf of its Arab allies, especially Syria. The USA warned the Rooskies that intervention would be answered with US intervention. There was real danger of a third world war. US nuclear forces world wide were put on full alert or “defcon 4.” Defensive condition five means war is actively under way. Defcon 1 means all is well. Defcon four is very bad.
Both superpowers officially stayed out, thank God.
The Arab-Israeli 1973 war ended in something of a draw, but with an Egyptian army trapped in the Sinai desert and Israel in full control of the Golan Heights in Syria.
OIL RETALIATION - THE EMBARGO
American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War angered the oil-rich anti-Semitic Arab states. OPEC voted to stop the sale of oil to the USA. It was a body blow to the United States economy.
The Arab embargo triggered a gasoline crisis in America. We even gave it a name with capitals, “The Energy Crisis.” Like depressions that preceded The Great Depression, there was the periodic energy crisis but then there was The Energy Crisis. That would be the one in 1973-4 when my father paid me 20 bucks to go wait in a two mile long gas line in order to be allowed to fill up his tank half way only. It was never even certain that there would be any gas available when you reached the front of the motorcade.
The OPEC embargo on 73 took an already unstable American economy and made it far worse. Oil is the lifeblood of the world’s economy but don’t try to explain that to those who think oil is evil and any American effort to protect it’s free flow is evil too.
The middle aged Americans of 1973 who were on their way up in Washington carried the wounds of the Embargo for decades. They became the old and powerful men of much later Presidencies. The deep resentment over the Middle East mistreatment in 1973 had much to do with the belligerent attitude of both Bush administrations towards the Middle East. It is not just anti-terrorism and the 9-11 attacks that inspired the older leaders running the country when they assess what to do about places like Syria, Iran and Iraq. Revenge for 73 and 79 (hostage crisis to be covered later) are always in play also. Rumsfeld and Cheney were major players in the Defense department in the Nixon-Ford years. They had payback time opportunities in the two Bush wars of 1991 and 2003.
The neo-hippies today have no perspective on how the US was mistreated and bullied by the Middle Eastern states in these years.
The momentum was swinging against American influence. America was on the downslide in international prestige already as a result of it’s exit from Vietnam in the January 73. The Watergate scandal was emerging, weakening Nixon’s international prestige and with it Kissinger’s ability to make his 'shuttle diplomacy' effective. Then, just at the moment when America was at it’s 20th century nadir in international clout, the Arab-Israeli War broke out, the bad guys almost won, and the in the aftermath the USA was punished like a delinquent schoolboy by a bunch of small states with large oil wells who knew they could hide behind the geographical safety of the region. The USA had no physical presence in the Middle East with which to threaten military force if it wanted to for political purpose. It is a crucial difference today that since the 1991 Gulf War we do have that physical presence and this increases the options the President has in foreign policy..
The Arab Embargo of 1973 damaged the NATO alliance and our good relations with Japan. The OPEC states threatened to cut off oil to our friends if they dared to stand by us in our support for Israel. For the first time since World War II America lost the open support of its allies, the same allies we had protected militarily and supported financially and politically since World War II. It was something of a stab in Uncle Sam’s back. We got pails of sand thrown in our face by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq, while France, Britain, Japan, and Italy looked the other way and helped the Arabs refill the buckets.
Then NATO and Japan let the Arabs dictate terms on continuing to give them oil. These nations were far more dependent of foreign oil than was the United States and they were geographically closer to the Middle East so it is understandable (if not forgivable) that they accommodated OPEC’s racist blackmail.
The OPEC states did not have anything to lose economically by letting Israel continue to exist. If anything Israel’s financial resources and growing population could have created an more integrated Middle Eastern economy beneficial to all. At least the Nazi’s honestly felt that the Jews were a threat to German jobs, and their moneylending was ruining Germany’s financial structure. The Nazis were driven by racism plus selfish reasons. The Arabs had no sane selfish reason to even think that Israel was hurting them. It was strictly on bigoted religious grounds that the Arabs tried to destroy Israel many times and it was only for religious and racial hatred that OPEC made me and my father wait in two hour gas lines.
OPEC used oil extortion to put our allies in a half-nelson until they cried uncle and said “Israel is bad and you guys are good.” The only European nation to stand by the United States during the Arab oil embargo was the Netherlands. The Arabs hated the Netherlands because it is a nation with a large and powerful Jewish population. OPEC singled out the Dutch for special mistreatment and made it clear that it would even give oil to the Great Satan before it would give any to the Netherlands.
The Netherlands responded by reminding the rest of Europe that it supplied half the natural gas to western Europe and would “defend its interests” if its European allies left it stranded. The larger European states shrewdly found ways to re-export some Arab oil to the Netherlands on the sly.
The NATO allies and Japan accommodated anti-Semitism by accommodating the Arabs on the oil issue. Our allies denounced America’s support for Israel, denounced Israel, and sang songs of support for the Arab cause even though every word out of their press releases was made under duress. In reality they loved freedom and democracy, but they loved oil a little more. They saw the United States as a toothless tiger in a cage while the Arabs were seen as the oil Santa Claus sailing on a magic carpet of political clout with flying camels pulling the rug. Santa Sheik had made a list and was checking it twice. He wanted to see which countries had been naughty enough to stand up for democracy and freedom in Israel and which ones had been nice enough to stand up for autocracy in the oil rich sheikdoms of the anti-Semitic OPEC block. On Christmas morning 1973 France, Japan, Italy, West Germany, and Great Britain got the oil powered train set while we and the Dutch got a card that said ‘Die in your sleep, Jew-lover.’
The sand sheikdoms became very rich at a rate that dazzled everyone. The Arab OPEC states were looking at a surplus of $67 billion by the middle of 1974, a figure five times what it had been three years earlier. They were swimming in oil and swimming in dough. These countries went on a spending spree. They didn’t hoard it. They built and bought airports, skyscrapers, oil facilities, ships, and above all military weapons. In fact, by 1979 the oil surplus cash was entirely gone.
In December 1973 Kissinger went to Saudi Arabia to try and get the Arab OPEC states to give us back the Middle Eastern oil on which our economy so depended. He got a lecture from the King on how the Jews and communists were trying to take over the Middle East. The King indicated that he really wanted to end the embargo against the United States but he needed some concessions to take back to his Arab brothers. Kissinger had none to offer. Faisal said that for starters, Jerusalem had to be declared an Islamic Arab city.
The King truthfully wanted these conditions and he honestly wanted to end the embargo against America. Unlike more naïve oil states, the Saudis realized that their economy was integrated into the world’s economy and therefore the new Saudi stocks and money would painfully devalue if the United States, the foundation of the earth’s economy, was hit with a devastating recession or inflation as a result of the oil shortage. In the short run it was fun to tweak the nose of the big bad Americans but in the long term it was in the Saudi interest to support the American economy, not sabotage it.
Saudi Arabia therefore wanted to produce at only slightly below normal rates to help stabilize American banks while still giving punishment a little and keeping the prestigious embargo on the table. Iran disagreed and wanted severe curtailments in OPEC oil production to keep the prices rising and the west hurting. To solve the impasse over production at one point two OPEC output quotas were agreed to, one for Saudi Arabia and one for everyone else in the cartel.
The consumer states began to adjust to the embargo. They were still taking a beating but they were showing some signs of a comeback. A serious movement was growing for developing alternative energy sources, such as mass production of electric cars and solar toilets. This alarmed the Arabs. The west began to look for oil supplies outside of OPEC.
In February of 1974 Great Britain broke with the hostage nations and decided that it had had enough. It wasn’t worth what little and expensive oil that it was getting from the Middle East. It wasn't worth it if meant kow-towing to nations with no military power, only oily political power. The Brits had survived Hitler. They were tired of having to dance for their oil.
The US told the Arabs that in light of the affront of the Embargo it would not use it’s power influence or diplomacy to help reach a full armistice and repatriation on the Syrian and Egyptian theatres still simmering from the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. To recap, Arab armies were trapped in place when the shooting stopped and Israel had not loosened the knot. Israel was holding the Arab armies hostage to a settlement recognizing Israel’s right to exist. This the racist Arabs would never agree to. At least we actually had something the OPEC blackmailers wanted; Enough influence over Israel to probably be able to broker a deal that sent the Arab soldiers back to their families.
All these factors added up to a settlement and the Arab oil embargo was rescinded by an OPEC vote on March 18, 1974. My life got better when it was lifted. It had made living conditions difficult in my America. No one could even drive around to look for a job. There weren’t any and if there were, you couldn’t get there to apply. Then I heard these college students chanting in 1990 and in 91 during the Gulf War “No Blood For Oil!” and wonder if any of them ever cracked a history book in their lives. How could you not realize that oil is one of the few things on this globe that is worth fighting for? If you wouldn’t want to see the USA defend it’s oil supply, then what are we keeping a military for? To guard the nations amusement parks?
MORE ON THE OIL WAR
In the 1950's Eisenhower had imposed import quotas so that the US would not become dependent on foreign oil. There were always extra reserves in America to use and drill for, so we didn’t need the foreign oil.
Years later the Shah of Iran requested that the US lift these oil quotas so he could sell us more oil, but Nixon had to turn him down. Domestic issues had to prevail.
But by the 70’s our reserves were running out and Nixon decided to lift the import quotas, replacing them with a tariff. The result was still a flooding of the US market with foreign oil. New US importation and consumption affected the amount of world reserves. The short margin in world's available reserves further tightened the margin of error in the world market. Now a minor crisis could have a major impact on the stability of oil.
There were other new pressures on the oil market. Abroad, the coal kingdom, otherwise known as the United Kingdom, was by 1972 for the first time more dependent on oil than coal. Japan, the world’s number 1 importer was exceeding 200 million tons of oil consumed annually for the first time in 1972.
For the Japanese government, greed for oil security meant a switch to what they euphemistically referred to as, “resource diplomacy.” This meant that they were going to shift their foreign policy more towards the Arab states. OPEC had them up against the wall at the point of a gas nozzle and they responded with 'take my wallet! Just don't shut off my oil!'
In the USA, new environmental laws were restricting the use of coal, and the large utilities were forced to change from coal to oil. Demand in general was up and cars were exploding in population. Nixon’s price controls had diminished home production (what was the motive to drill for oil that was price controlled in an inflationary economy?) and stimulated consumption at the same time.
The first clear warning to the west of an impending oil crisis came with a controversial April 1973 article in Foreign Affairs magazine by a State Department and White House energy analyst by the name of Jimmy Atkins. He had earlier warned in his writings that the supply and demand situation was tighter than it had ever been before and that after a 20-year surplus we had reached,
“a sellers market, with any one of several major suppliers being able to create a supply crisis by cutting off oil supplies.’
The Atkins story was called ‘The Oil Crisis, This Time the Wolf is Here.’ A rival publication, Foreign Policy, then published a counter-article called ‘Is the Oil Shortage Real?’ in which the oil crisis was called “a fiction.”
In 1970 the US imported 3.2 million barrels of foreign oil per day. By the summer of 1973 that figure had reached 6.2 million barrels a day.
On September 1, 1973 Khadafy announced that he was nationalizing (seizing) the last western oil companies in Libya. In response Nixon warned publicly that Libya would learn the hard way as Mossadegh did that if they shut off the oil, we could shut off the markets.
But this was not the late 50’s with reserves untapped at home and abroad. There were next to no reserves anywhere. Demand had outstripped supply and even if the supply was there, the infrastructure to keep the new oil flowing steadily to markets was insufficient. Either way Khadafy could laugh off the Nixon warning. By the time Nixon was trying to scare Khadafy, oil was consistently selling above the posted price, reversing a 20-year trend of the real price being below the posted price. The trends were clearly dangerous for the west.
Then came the Yom Kippur War. The oil embargo of 1973 and the Yom Kippur War are part of the same story. In 1974 I was waited in Yom Kippur gas lines.
The turning point in the oil crisis came in October 1973. Atkins had been right. That was the year the Arab oil producing states put the squeeze on the United States and Holland for supporting Israel in the Yom Kipper War. They did not place an oil embargo on Germany or France or the UK or Japan. Those nations had shown the proper neutrality in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. But America and Holland were two countries that loved the Jews and loved democratic institutions and these were two things that the Arab nations were opposed to.
The embargo was felt immediately. The price of oil rose 400% between October and December of 1973. Americans every day faced mile long gas lines for the privilege of buying overpriced limited allowance gas. It caused, inflation, high unemployment and the ousting of the party in power. OPEC bullied the Republicans Nixon and Ford and helped elect the Democrats (Carter), who got bullied even worse, giving us back the Republicans (Reagan.).
The Arab producing states put pressure on the oil companies to put pressure the US government into changing its policy on Israel. This strong-arming was a partial success. Acording to Robert Engler (CUNY) as soon as the war broke out in the Middle East, the oil chiefs of Exxon Texaco, and Socal pleaded with Nixon not to ship any oil to Israel. It would alienate the Arabs that much further against US oil companies and might lead to a complete expropriation of US oil assets in the Arab states. King Faisal ordered Aramco to stop shipments to the United States and to increase supply to the Arab states. Aramco complied and a few months later Senator Church held hearings with Aramco chiefs on the hot seat. Aramco pleaded that it had no choice, and objected to charges that its compliance was unpatriotic. They claimed that to refuse would have worsened the situation for the United States. Even if that were true, it was still unpatriotic.
An interesting sidebar here;
During World War II the US Government considered taking over the assets of the U.S. oil companies of the Middle East with compensation, and of constructing a U.S. owned pipeline and refinery. The oil companis put up a fight and talked FDR out of it.
But imagine if the United States had done that? Imagine if the power of the United States government was involved when the Arabs began seizing oil concessions and bullying the foreign exploiters? It would have been a different world history.
The Arab embargo never succeeded in getting the US to change the degree of support for Israel. But it did succeed in getting the US to become bi-lateral in its overall support. The embargo made the US more supportive of the Arab enemies of Israel without reducing the US commitment to the defense of Israel. Overall of course it was a net loss for Israel, who now had to share its American friendship with its open enemies. Ordinarily the friend of my enemy is not my friend but that was the anomaly that came out of the triangular relations between US, Israel and the Arab states in the 1973 embargo bargain. Israel had to still love us while we were trying to love their enemies. We didn’t back down when the OPEC states demanded that we stop supporting Israel, but in the end we had to do some favors to get our oil back.
WATERGATE – 1971-1974
What happened to make Nixon resign? The book Silent Coup, throws a major monkey wrench into the Watergate Story as it has been conventionally told and accepted. Before we get into to that advanced take on it, lets go over the basic outline of what happened from 1969 to 1974 that forced Nixon to quit.
It all really started with the illegal wiretaps Nixon put on several reporters after they had the audacity to write about the secret bombing of and hit and run invasion of Cambodia in 1969. The left always refers to it as the “illegal” and secret bombing of Cambodia, and I will not. But Nixon certainly tried to keep it a secret.
Willie Beecher of the New York Times broke the Cambo story to the disappointment of Nix and Kiss. So the crafty Nixon responded by putting illegal wiretaps on the phone of columnist Joseph Kraft and many other innocent hard-working decent journalists who just happened to be liberals who hated him and wrote with a partisan spirit (I have no problem with “illegal” in this case.) There is nothing illegal about partisan writing, Dick. But wiretapping journalists because you do not like what they write, that is far worse than what they write, even if what they write is nasty and unfair at times.
Next came Huston. No, not the great director, but a member of Nixon's staff named Tommy Huston who in July of 1970 outlined a wicked plan than Nixon approved of to the point where it was really Nixon's plan. Huston as writing to please his managing editor.
The Huston plan was a strategic outline for all the dirty stupid things Nixon did to bring himself down. He was going to get back at his old enemies, his new enemies, the press, lefty celebrities, and anyone else who dared to get on his bad side.
Richie would use the IRS to audit his enemies. That's as low and you can go, bro. The President of the United States would use the CIA, the NSC, the FBI and any other group of three letters he could get his hands on to spy illegally on his enemies and use the issue of “national security” to avoid prosecution for the persecution. There was actually talk about camps in the west where all the left wing people who violated some “national security law” could all be herded up in the same building, a Hanoi Hilton for dangerous lefties. This was really bad.
The Huston Plan was so bad that right-wing lunatic FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said that almost all of it was completely unacceptable and un-American. You know you're an extremist when Hoover is furious with you from the left. Hoover shut most of HP down before it got a chance to start. Hoover did allow a few items, and these illegals wiretaps came back to haunt Nixon as he tried to hold on to the Presidency in 1973-4.
Next came the plumbers. They were going to fix the sources of leaks in the Administration. They did not care much about legalities because the ends justified the means. National security and power loyalty to Richard M. Nixon. The Plumbers on September 3 1971 went criminal.
The Plumbers found out that Ellsberg was the bad guy on the Pentagon Papers they broke into his psychiatrist's office to try to find some dirt on him. But the burglary of his office was discovered and the event backfired, making Ellsberg a martyr. Instead of giving the squares some ammo to use against the hippies, the break-in gave the hippIes more ammo to hurl at the squares.
As we have seen, 'The Plumbers' on September 3 1971 broke into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Now it was payback time. They would dig up some dirt on Danny boy from the notes of his psychiatrist. Nixon showed that he was one who needed a psychiatrist.
A KEY ELECTION IN NYC
At around this time an old politician in a New York Congressional district lost his seat and changed the fate of Nixon.
A very conservative old school Democrat named Manny Celler decided to semi-abdicate by joining the Independent Party and running for re-election without campaigning one bit. He was 80 years old. The new Congresswoman from Brooklyn was Flo Belinski Holtzman, and she became one of Nixon's worst nightmares on the Impeachment Committees.
Celler was the Chairman of the Congressional Judiciary Committee and when he semi-abdicated (Holzman tells of this election as though she pulled off a big fighting upset. The guy didn't campaign) Peter Rodino took over as Judiciary Chair and he was much more to the left. If Celler had been in the Chair from 1972-4 the Congress might not have given Nixon 'the chair.' The Impeachment Articles might have been stopped in committee. The Holtzman upset in NYC was fateful.
The Nixon Mafia break-in at the upscale Watergate Apartments Complex on June 17 1972 was actually a re-break. Mugsy had bugged that pad weeks ago but now the software had glitches and the Four Stooges were breaking in to fix it and forget it.
One of the burglars arrested that night was Jack McCord an ex-CIA officer and a bona-fide CREEP, that is, a member of The Committee to Re-Elect the President.
The core-four were brought before Judge Sirica in January of 1973. He threatened them with 30 year jail sentences if someone didn't start talking soon about who hired them. McCord sang like Perry Como at Christmastime.
With McCord throwing all the Nixon men under the bus, the Congress had enough to start up the senate Watergate Investigation Committee headed by hillbilly San Ervin of Carolina. Justice Sirica was the real power that created it, special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was the power in charge, but Sam Ervin ran it on the Hill. It was on National TV all the time and it was always boring.
Poindexter John Dean entered the picture and changed the board. 'Deano' testified that President Nixon told him about all sorts of cover ups and illegal activities, and John had to tell the truth now.
Next a White House official named Al Butterfield testified that there were eight different recording devices installed in the White House to tape conversations, often with some participants having no idea they were being recorded. The press called this the “Butterfield 8.”
When Congress heard this they were delighted. Now they could subpoena these tapes and find out the truth one way or another.
But Nixon refused to give up the tapes, defying the court orders by citing national security priority. It was an arm-wrestling between the Congress and the Judiciary versus the executive, the likes of which American history had not seen since Lincoln or Jackson, if at all.
Cox demanded the tapes and Nixon demanded that Cox resign or stop going after him on those stupid tapes. “They are low quality recordings, on Radio Shack cassette tapes,” he wrote Cox. “You won't be able to decipher any of the conversation over the hiss and the machines will keep eating the tapes up.” Cox wrote Nixon back, “Just hand over the tapes.”
Nixon then ordered Attorney General Eliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson and his Vice AG Ruckleshaus both resigned in protest. Then Robert Bork agreed to sign on as temporary AG and fire Cox. A bunch of other Nixon enemies got fired that October 20, 1973. It has come down to history as the Saturday Night Massacre.
The mass firings only postponed the tsunami working towards impeachment. Every day more and more Republicans were beginning to fall in with the demands for honesty or impeachment. You're only chance to get out of this is to come clean, Dicky, and if you don't you have to just step down. If revealing all reveals you are a crook, you have to step down. Either way it was all about those tapes.
On February 6 1974 the Congress to a big step forward with resolution 803 which was easily passed. 803 created an Inquiry into Impeachment, and gave the Judiciary Committee much more power to investigate the man from San Clemente. The Dems got a Republican named John Doar (of the Boston Law Firm of Hale and Doer) to lead this committee. The Dems wanted to give this whole business and air of bi-paritsan lynch mob, and what can stop that?
The Congress finally got the tapes and it was really bad for Nixon. It was his Mel Gibson moment as the whole country heard him on the tapes acting looney power-hungry, swearing and planning all sorts of illegal things to cover up his legal threats.
The Haldeman business was bad. White House insider H.R. Haldeman had sworn under oath that Nixon never told him to lie or ever coached him for sworn testimony. The tapes told another story as Nixon told H.R. in a soon to become famous quote,
“Haldo, I want you to go up there and swear on that Bible and then lie like a rug. Just get me out of this!”
Some of the committee members actually laughed out loud when they heard that one. In late July 1974 the Judiciary Committee adopted three of the five articles of Impeachment.
Nixon knew the jig was up and he resigned rather than face the humiliation of getting punted out of office like a frozen football in front of the foot of the late George Blanda.
THE RADFORD-MOORER AFFAIR 1971
Radford-Moorer is where the entire chain of events began that led to the downfall of President Nixon. Charles Radford was only a Navy Yeoman, but he had been stealing papers from the National Security Council, copying them, and passing them on to the Joint Chiefs of Staff through his Navy boss Admiral Moorer for about two years.
Why did the JCS not have this information anyway and why was he stealing? Was Chuck acting on his own or we he ordered or encouraged to steal?
Basically, the NSC is supposed to be a supplemental arm of the national government working on equal terms at best with the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Congress, the heads of military intelligence, and a few other groups we could name.
But Nixon and Kissinger wanted to run the government as a private fiat, and keep all those other groups out of the loop.
The bottom line was that Nixon distrusted just about everyone, including his cat. The paranoid prez had aides put a blindfold on “mittens” whenever he read intelligence reports in her presence.
NSC was not supposed to be the top organization because its members were informally appointed and not subject to Congressional approval or public scrutiny. Nix and K and made it the number one organization in running the country for those precise reason. The NSC had many members, but it essentially came down to Kissinger and Al Haig. These three guys ran the country in secret and circumvented all the major organizations that were supposed to be running it as a big team.
Nixon distrusted his Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird because Laird wanted to do crazy things, like play by the rules and do things with Congressional approval or at least after Congressional debate. So a 'backdoor channel' was opened between the White House and the military. The White House gave orders to its top military commanders through secret channels, so that the man whose job was to run the nation's military in a monitor overseer capacity, the Secretary of Defense, was kept in the dark.
Most of the major decisions on the Vietnam War under Nixon were made without the knowledge of Defsec Laird, who usually found out only after the operation was well under way. The man who was supposed to help make the key decisions on national defense and then implement them, was not even aware of the decisions he might have to implement.
Department heads serve at the pleasure of the President,but they do have the important right to resign and tell the public why they resigned. That has been done often and is an important freedom, even though it isn't written into the Constitution. Laird didn't even get a chance to do that because he didn't know what was going on.
By opening up this backchannel, the President may not have been violating any specific Constitutional wording, but he was essentially knowingly violating the spirit under which our national government had long been operating, and violating the Constitution as its implementation had so far been interpreted for the last 190 or so years.
So the NSC is running the country and the JCS is unhappy about it. Not that any of us want the military to be running the country either, but they should at least have some input into how things are done with their troops and ships.
The key to all this now is Al Haig, who came into the Nixon White House as a colonel and left as a one star General. He was promoted to general for services to Nixon, not for deeds in the field of combat. His star was earned for political combat. If Nixon knew that Haig was stabbing him in the back all along Haig probably would have retired as a colonel and certainly wouldn't have been later made White House Chief of Staff in the second Nixon administration and certainly wouldn't have made it to the post of Secretary of State in the Reagan administration. As an added bonus, he certainly wouldn't have been able to run for president in 1984 and 1988 lousing up the Republican primary debates with his rude ego.
Haig is the key because he had a gay-looking (this is significant) yeoman on his staff named Charles Radford who was stealing documents right under Haig's nose from the NSC and sneaking them over to the JCS. This was being done on the direct orders of two Admirals, whose names aren't that important, but the chain led to a third admiral whose name is important. Admiral Thomas Moorer was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and when the stolen documents were reaching his desk regularly, we can see a dual government at odds with each other, a serious situation and one which would not sit right with the American people if they knew about it.
There were hundreds of cases of the stolen documents from yeoman Radford, but I'll just give you an obvious extreme one to make it clear how serious was this espionage on one branch of the government from another.
Henry Kissinger was engaged in secret negotiations with Communist China to open diplomatic relations with the United States for the first time since the Cincinnati Reds took over in 1949. It was going to be blockbuster stuff when Nixon announced this diplomatic triumph to the world and it was supposed to help him win re-election in 1972. With the Vietnam war going on, and the Tom Eagleton affair still to come, Nixon was not a lock for 72. If he could open diplomatic relations with China it would be theoretically great for the country, for world peace, and for his re-election. Kissinger was the main front man for opening up the new relationship with our old enemy Communist China, and the negotiations were secret.
But the military was by and large against opening diplomatic relations with Communist China. Moorer was no admiral admirer of Chou en Lai or Mao and didn't even like Chinese food. He was an old fashioned anti-Communist from the 1950's and, unlike Nixon, had no political motive to change his mind about it.
So through all of this development, yeoman Radford was often in contact with important people, including Kissinger. Radford went through Kissinger's briefcase regularly when no one was around, made photocopies of secret documents, and passed them on to the admirals who passed them on up to Admiral Moorer.
Through this spy process the military knew all about the upcoming diplomatic opening to China, and when Nixon announced it to the world he was not announcing it to the military, he was rehashing old news.
This is a serious and obvious example to show what was going. But Radford was doing more than he had to, more than he had been asked to. Sometimes he eavesdropped on people who trusted him and then made memos on the conversations (memcons) to be passed up the chain of military command, that is the military command.
Radford was not acting on his own. He was following orders. But he did become addicted to the spy stuff. If back-stabbing spying were combat he would have been up for a 30 pieces of silver star.
Most of the time he was on the staff of Al Haig, but Haig never “knew” what was going on right under his nose. Haig was a key liaison between the JCS who loved him, and the White House/NSC who trusted him. Even the sly neurotic Kissinger trusted him. Haig was the missing link between the military and the White House. Nixon was circumventing the military, but he couldn't do it to such an extreme that the military would rebel, so Haig's job was to keep a modest bridge open between the branches. Nixon and Kissinger didn't realize that Haig was taking sides all along, playing a dirty double game, and was betraying his commander in chief all along. Haig was pretending to not know that there was a spy in his camp. That way Haig could always stay clean even if his spy got caught. Radford was stupid enough to think that he was pulling off this incredible spy stuff right under Haig's brass hat, but he was being played like a piano by a superior scum.
This is going on for much of 1970 and all of 1971. Then in December, Jack Anderson writes a column about US relations with India and Pakistan during their major war in late 71. In this war the United States pretended to be neutral, but secretively, the United States was “tilting” towards Pakistan. A Jack Anderson column spilt the tilt on Nixon favoring Pakistan. This might not have been so damaging to Nixon but for the fact that Pakistan got whipped in the war, so Nixon's shrewd diplomacy looked foolish because he had backed a loser.
It just so happened that spy Radford had become a casual acquaintance of columnist Anderson and his wife in recent months. The relationship was based on several small favors that Radford had done for Anderson's elderly parents. But Radford's boss, the admiral that was fencing his stolen goods and ordering him to spy on Nixon, became emotional when he incorrectly surmised that Radford had “leaked” the Pakistan tilt story to Anderson over the course of their social times.
The admiral then began to spy on his own spy! He reported to Nixon's people that his own spy was leaking the Pakistan story to Jack Anderson, though obviously he didn't tell them that his suspect spy was also spying on Nixon!
Nixon ordered Radford's phone tapped, and asked John Erlichman, his close aide and confidant to investigate whether Radford was having a homosexual affair with Jack Anderson! Apparently Nixon thought that the young Radford who looked like a gay movie star, was attracted to chubby old men who didn't look gay at all. Or maybe he thought Anderson was a sugar daddy gay lover who bought young Radford “nice things” in exchange for X-rated favors. Erlichman couldn't bring himself to investigate the gay angle, so he told Nixon that he had looked into it but had come up empty handed. The phone taps on Radford only produced two boring phone calls between Anderson and Radford in which Anderson thanked the yeoman for another small favor and invited Radford and his wife to the Anderson's for dinner. Radford declined the invitation. But Radford had once actually gone to the Anderson's for dinner and swears that they never discussed politics, and certainly not India or Pakistan.
But the Nixon White House was not satisfied. They asked Radford to come to the White House and take a lie detector test. Radford thought the jig was up and that his spy days were over. Yeoman Radford was a religious guy who had justified his spying activities because he felt (with arguable justification) that Nixon's secret White House was immoral if not illegal, and that he was doing justice and the American people a heroic service by spying on Nixon and Kissinger for the military.
Radford waited for the killer questions and was utterly surprised when the questions were all about his relationship with Jack Anderson. He was relieved to answer these questions easily, denying any sordid relationship with Anderson, political or personal.
But then the interrogators accidentally caught a big fish while trying to catch a smaller one. They asked him is he ever had illegally taken documents from a source he was not authorized to take them from and delivered them secretly to someone else.
Radford's heart raced, his face went pale. The interrogators knew they hit the jackpot, but they weren't quite sure what it was.
They all took a break and Radford telephoned his admiral spy-boss. He told him, “They're asking me some tough questions. What am I supposed to do now?” The admiral completely misinterpreted what Radford was asking because the admiral was still mad at Radford because he incorrectly presumed that Radford was the leaker to Jack Anderson and he wanted him to confess to this. “Well son,” said the admiral in a magic moment, “just tell them the truth.”
To Radford, a religious guy, this sounded like, “turn yourself in, turn me in, turn us all in, the game is over so we'll all feel better if we just get it all out in the open.” It meant nothing of the sort, but it was too late for anyone to stop the chain of events from here on in.
Radford spilled his guts on all his spying and on all his Navy superiors that had ordered him to do it. The Nixon people were looking for a leaker to a newspaper column, and they hit the jackpot on a military spy ring targeting White House and the NSC. They were stunned and thrilled in a negative way. This was big. Wait till the boss hears about this.
Soon the admiral spymaster was summoned to the White House for a showdown. He too was asked to take a polygraph test and they began firing questions at him about Radford and the spy system in operation against the Nixon boys. The admiral had no choice but to admit to as much of it as he could while finding some ways to tone the damage down to save his job. He admitted to everything, but denied how important the information was and tried to deny how high up the chain the information went after he got it. They asked the admiral to sign a full confession but he refused, at least at first.
Once Admiral W. broke down, it was clear that Nixon had more leaks than a screen door on a submarine. Erlichman brought the tape to Nixon. Erlichman was surprised when Nixon declined to listen to it. The President felt that he should be shielded from knowledge of any of the specifics so that he could always truthfully say 'I didn't know,' if anything were investigated later. But he was glad to know the basics.
The culprit at the top of the chain, not including those who facilitated the spy process, was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Moorer. Erlichman and Kissinger thought that the Admiral should be removed from his post and the spy ring exposed in public.
But Nixon did not want to be embarrassed by the inefficiency of his administration. He preferred to let Admiral Moorer know that from this point on the White House knew what was going on. Then he could keep Moorer in office with that hanging over his head. Instead of a fired ex-JCS complaining to the press about his dismissal, he would have a pliant Chairman “on a short leash.” It was shrewd really. You've been caught, now as punishment you have to stay on the job knowing that you've sinned and we're on to you. Instead of having power disproportionately large for the job you would have the reverse.
Kissinger was very upset that his briefcase was being pilfered. Nixon told Henry not to worry about it, that the leaks to Moorer was a very manageable situation, and they could even play it to their advantage, something Kissinger did not buy for a moment. Several accounts in major memoirs say that Nixon liked to toy with Kissinger, tweaking the NS Advisor with in-fighting instigated by the President. If Nixon could now and then force Kissinger into something of a nervous breakdown in front of people, the President felt that it kept a leash on Kissinger's power, which Nixon feared. So while Nixon depended heavily on Kissinger and confided in him greatly, he also played devious games to make sure Kissinger was having fights with others within the cabinet, while Nixon played innocent bystander.
Kissinger in particular was always complaining about Secretary of State William Rogers. It seemed the Secretary of State occasionally wanted to be included in important foreign policy decisions, something Kissinger could never tolerate. Nixon enjoyed the Kissinger-Rogers feud and did nothing to solve it. Kissinger's White House memoirs are filled with long winded complaining about the problems caused by the supposed incompetence of Will Rogers.
The key to it all was the interview with Admiral W. In it he definitely but indirectly implicated Al Haig as someone who surely knew about the leaks and did nothing to stop it, and in fact enabled it by being dumb and blind to them. Haig more or less made sure that doors were left unlocked and that Radford was the one asked to turn the lights out in the room before he left.
Moorer, whom Admiral W. had passed up the spy news to, now made a key move to protect Haig. He asked that a second hot-seat interview be conducted with Admiral W. But this time the admiral was carefully coached to recite all the same confessions, but this time omit the name of Al Haig. That would produce a second tape of the W. confessions and if Congressional investigators asked for the confession, they would be given the tape of the second interview in which Haig was safely unnamed.
Now we come to the famous Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, the man who broke the Watergate story, the man who won the Pulitzer, the intrepid “gotchya” journalist who always has the inside story and never reveals his sources. People associated Watergate with Woodward and Robert Redford played him in the movie, with Dustin Hoffman as his fighting sidekick at the Post, Ratzo Rizzo (I may have gotten the name wrong.)
Woodward has recently written three books on the W. Bush administration and how it conducted the War on Terror and the War in Iraq. I've read three of his books and I find him annoyingly vague. He seems like he's taking a stand or making a point but then retreats and he has said nothing at all. Just when you think he's about to indict someone he doesn't. I read his book about John Belushi and didn't like it. It seemed to come down to his siding with whoever agreed to an interview and going after whoever didn't agree to an interview.
Woodward' big source on the Watergate book, All the President's Men was one of the nation's top mysteries for thirty years. The source was nicknamed “Deep Throat” and the country begged Woodward to tell us who it was and he never would.
Woodward always annoys me because he never uses profanity in his writing but he always quotes his subjects whenever he catches them swearing. If anyone quotes Nixon or Bush dropping an 'F bomb' Woodward has to include the exact quote. But he remains above board in his own text. Its cheap and I hate when any writer does that. He likes being naughty. Then Woodward had to name his secret source “deep throat.” (Deep Throat was not a popular animated Disney Movie about a orphaned giraffe.)
I never cared a hoot about “who was deep throat?” any more than I cared “who shot J.R.?” I think the mystery was driven by the movie connotation of the nickname more than any real need for the average America to know who was BW's secret insider source was on the Watergate story. Woodward generated this racy momentum for his source name and his book quite on purpose. If the source had been nicknamed, “Charley Lashua” no one outside of Washington would have worried about it much, and certainly not for decades.
The actual source, the real Deep Throat finally confessed on his death bed just about three years ago and it disappointed the nation because he wasn't even a famous name and so all the speculation about how might be Al Haig or Henry Kissinger or Jackie Gleason went out the window. I forget who the real source turned out to be. The ending was boring and it took 30 plus years to finish the play.
The focus here is not his source, but the reporter Mr. Woodward, the super secretive insider who always has sources within the top ranks of every administration he will not reveal. No one has a chance against this kind of writing and reporting,
“Mike Donovan is the kind of guy stabs you in the back at the drop of a hat,” a close colleague said, who asked to remain anonymous. “Mike never once told the truth in his entire life as far as we all knew,” said another unnamed source. “If Donovan ever did a kind thing in his life, no one I know can name it,” said one member of his family who wished not to be identified because she “might get grounded.” Another close friend of Donovan told us that “Mike once tried spying for the Soviets, but decided he didn't like the pay. He felt guilty about it and just decided to stop. I'm not trying to put him down. Everyone makes mistakes. In fact, I know that now he is back to being a loyal American.” A former employer told me in a 1993 interview that “Donovan can only be trusted as as far as he can throw Pavarotti.”
If Woodward's targets were actually on trial in a court of law they would have the legal right to confront their accusers. But since they are being tried and fried in the court of Woodward, they cannot. Millions of readers draw their conclusions based on one side of the story presented by a famous reporter, backed by a famous newspaper, backed by a famous publishing house, with no chance for cross-examination.
The authors of the book Silent Coup gave Woodward a taste of his own medicine. They conducted a hundred interviews with people who knew and worked with Woodward and came to some startling conclusions. They called Woodward up and told them what the people said about him and Woodward hit the roof, snapping into the phone, “Who told you that? That's a lie! No way, no way! Who told you that. Name me the dirty dog! I want names! You have no proof!” The reporters smugly reminded Bobby that he never reveals his sources, why should they? Woodward finally barked that “you guys can write anything you want about me,” and hung up the phone. Authors Colodney and Gettlin took him up on that offer.
What does Silent Coup conclude about Mr. intrepid truth seeker Woodward? It seems that Woodward was never an anti-war left winger at all, but he posed as one to maintain his credibility with the public and his left leaning sources. In fact, he was double-dealing in his image in order to get the scoop while actually helping to create it.
Bob Woodward was an important military intelligence communications officer in the Navy. The key word is important. He had access to all the important communications and was completely trusted for his loyalty, his talent and his dedication. He was right-wing workaholic military man insider who channelled messages from all the top military people.
Woodward was so good at his job that just when he was about to retire from the Navy with honors, he was offered a job as a liaison officer from the Navy to, are you ready for this, the White House! That's right, Bob Woodward used to go to the White House and deliver top secret briefings from the military. Woody did it often, and he did it well. He was completely trusted to brief top White House personnel and then go back and brief the military in the other direction.
It gets better. Woodward flat out denies it! He denies that he ever had this job! The man had an office in the basement of the White House and worked like a spy in top secret conditions and he denies it. There are dozens of people who were interviewed by the authors of Silent Coup who burst out laughing when they were told of Woodward's denial. “I saw him go in and out a hundred times, what a turkey,” said one unnamed source for example. “I was there while he delivered the briefings on several occasions, what a liar,” said another close friend.
So why deny the truth about once having a great job? Woodward in his own biographical interviews always maintains that he hated the Navy, didn't like the work, was doing nothing particularly important, and was bored silly. Wow. Something fishy going in here, eh? You want to talk about all the deceits and lies flying around the Nixon White House, you can start with the guy who posed as the man exposing all the deceits and lies around the Nixon White House! Its quite a story. I'm giving you the shortened version, but you can read Silent Coup if you've got the spare time for the full version.
Here's more. Guess who Woodward briefed regularly at the White House. Was it Rose Mary Woods, the Presidents trusted Secretary? No. Was it Pat Nixon? No. It was General Alexander Haig. And Woodward vehemently denies that he ever briefed Haig! Why deny it? What sin is it to be an intelligence liaison and brief General Haig. Obviously because Haig was Woodward's top insider unnamed source inside the White House. Woodward was Deep Throat 2! Haig had known Woodward for years and trusted him completely based on an earlier relationship when Woodward was doing Navy work.
But its even worse than it sounds because Haig was completely trusted by Nixon as having his first loyalty to Nixon and his top NSC team, but Haig was stabbing Nixon in the back all the while and Woodward was providing a set of steak knives and keeping them freshly sharpened.
The NSC was basically a three man troika of Nixon, Kissinger and Haig. Men like Laird and Rogers, JCS Chairman Moorer, J. Edgar Hoover at FBI, and even Helms at CIA were completely blocked out of the major decision making process.
Not only were these powerhouse insiders turned into outsiders, they were pretty well unanimous in their opinion that they didn't like the decisions being made in the foreign policy field. They understood it was the President's prerogative, but the policy debating process should belong to a wider field than the neurotic Nixon, the egoist Haig, and the detested Harvard professor Kissinger.
So the military, the CIA, and the State Department all felt left out. The State department thought that much of the Vietnam policy was too hawkish, and the military thought it was too pacifistic and compromising. The military was plotting the downfall of the President through controlled leaks, and the facilitators included the trusted Al Haig and his trusty briefer Bob Woodward, who shared Haig's right-wing military values and has never been honest with the American people about that and his role in the fall of Nixon. Woodward won awards for his expose, but it's really the author that needs exposing.
ENTER JOHN DEAN
If you asked me a year ago to describe Watergate John Dean I would have tried to show off how much I knew about history by describing him as “that super-square poindexter type with the real short hair and glasses who was always on TV during the Watergate hearings. In an era of hipsters, Dean was the squarest square that ever square danced his way down the square pike.”
I would have only been flashing my ignorance. Yes, that is exactly the image that Americans generally remember about this key player in the Watergate story. And that was exactly what Dean was trying to impress on the American public during these hearings.
But the image of Dean, like that of Woodward, was an image flipped for propaganda purposes. John Dean III in actuality was exactly the opposite. In an era when the White House of Nixon was a bastion of the last few remaining short haired squares in America, Dean was the resident hippie rebel. John Wesley Dean III became the new Counsel to the President and soon played a sinister role in the Watergate affair and became a nationally famous name for his role. Dean eventually went to jail for obstruction of justice, while his boss got the pardon from Ford.
But Dean arrived as an annoyance to the rest of the White House staff. “JD” had long hair, drove fancy sports cars to the White House and had big fancy boots up on the desk while he made calls to tonight's babe date. The other House staffers talked about him as the resident hippie playboy in the White House. Dean annoyed the gang of true squares he later pretended to be part of.
When he got indicted Dean appeared in national court as a reverse image of himself and I bought it. 35 years later I'm reading about the real Dean in Silent Coup and feel foolish for having so fallen for the switch. I bought his publicity kit. He didn't.
Silent Coup indicates that Dean played a much more duplicitous role in the entire Watergate affair than his own confessional memoir Blind Ambition would indicate.
My problem as a charlatan scholar is that its all the Watergate stuff got very boring and the more books that came out about it, the less I wanted to read them. Now I'm crash coursing Watergate when I should have developed some strength there from having lived through it. But the Watergate scandal dominated the news for many years. It got so tiresome that before it even came to a climax, I was pleading “enough!” Then all the major participants wrote tell-all biographies and by then I didn't care what they had to tell. Off hand I thought I knew a great deal about Johnny Dean, but as a student I do not make the dean's list. Maybe it was better that I waited so long, because Silent Coup seems to be the real starting point for all the other books to measure up to. Even Nixon wrote letters to some of the other players recommending it! And they write about how “I should have known it was Dean all along!”
I never would have taken Silent Coup seriously except for one important fact. The major participants in the Watergate break-in and the fall of Nixon were not only impressed with the book, they actually corresponded with each other with an excitement as in we have now been enlightened. Haldeman is writing to Erlichman saying, 'no wonder so and so did such and such, that clears that up. That was going to bug me forever.'
Dean ended up doing time as if he was Nixon loyalist taking the fall for Nixon's crimes. But Dean helped to bring about Nixon's fall and it was deliberate. Then he pretended that he had been caught trying to help Nixon illegally.
As for Woody Woodward, he never stops writing books with inside unnamed sources. He has been posing as a hero of the liberal crowd. Bob went to Yale (class of 64) and claims today that while there he underwent a “sea change” in his political thinking. He says he was unhappy and distraught about American policies in Vietnam.
But two key facts do not bear this out. First of all he was at Yale undergoing this sea change and turning left wing anti-war at a time when no one else was. This was in 1963-1964 and there was not much of a commitment of United States forces in Vietnam. There were no protest demonstrations against the war at Yale or anyone else. The nations politician and press were decidedly supportive of the US commitment to stop the Communist takeover of Southeast Asia. It's odd that Woodward said he underwent this epiphany when famous lefties all over the nation still had not. So he was way ahead of the Jerry Rubins of the world in 1963!
The other key fact is that everyone interviewed by the authors of Silent Coup who knew Woodward in 1963-4 said that he was very conservative and a real joiner and never expressed any anti-Vietnam War sentiments publicly or privately. Even his ex wife said that was nonsense and they were still friends when she said that.
[more to come]
THE WORLD OF HENRY DARGER
Now a sidebar story from 1973 and a personal note. A man named Henry Darger died in 73. He was a janitor and an artist. He liked to write. When they went into the dead man’s house they found a manuscript of 15,141 pages single-spaced. It was a novel. It was titled The Story of the Vivian Girls.
Henry Darger is a legend because he wrote the longest book in the world. He is the record holder. 9 million words. 15,141 pages.
The Vivian Girls was never published, but, by it’s sheer size, it made Darger a famous man.
Last night, December 16 2011 I made a word count of my 49 chapters of American history by a stand up comedian. My figure was 1,541,844 words. But mine is published on my website. That is rinky-dink pathetic publishing, yes. I agree heartily. But it’s published. If Darger counts with his unpublished novel, I’m in the contest too. It is possible that I have written the longest book ever published in English. Clarissa, a novel from 1747 is estimated at about 1.5 million, but it’s rounded off, so I don’t know if my 1.54 tops the rounded off 1.5. I think it’s fair to say that if I get to 1.6, I get to the mountaintop.
I like the fact that my entry in the contest is about relevant stuff and isn’t some stupid endless novel!
I have found lists of novels with the most words. I have not been able to find any lists of non-fiction books with the top word count. It’s possible that there is a non-fiction book that are more than 1.5 million written and published in English by a single author, but it’s also possible that there isn’t.
At this writing I am 56 years old, almost 57. It took me 7.3 years to write 4,300 pages of US history in my own style. To take the Darger record down I will have to increase my pace by about 20% continue to write every day until I am about 89. If I get the chance, if I get the time, I intend to take Darger down!
There may well be a work of nonfiction that is more than 1,54 million words, but I can’t find a list of non-fiction marathons.
I intend to get to ten million words. And all of it about things that matter.
AGNEW RESIGNS THE VICE PRESIDENCY
Vice President Spiro T. Agnew had been so popular a figure within the Party at one time that it was feared at the 1968 Convention that he would hurt the ticket by getting a bigger ovation from the crowd than Nixon would. All that would change in 1973 when a bribery scandal rocked his world.
Charges against he VP surfaced that year. Because a sitting Vice President could not be prosecuted while in office, Agnew actually went to the Congress and requested that he be impeached! That was the only way he could defend himself while still serving out his term. Request was denied.
Charges of bribery and corruption against Agnew piled up until he finally in October of 1973 decided to resign.
Nixon now had to appoint the next Vice-President of the United States. The Senate would have to confirm it, so the choice had to be made carefully. Nixon had to worry about who would be objectionable to his own party as well as the Democrats. Richard had to find a popular Republican without too much baggage, someone what was not too liberal or maverick for the Republicans, and someone who wasn't too right wing for the Democrats.
There were a few names that came up on everyone's short list. The press and all of Washington speculated feverishly. Nixon was already in trouble with Watergate and it was well appreciated that the next Vice President of the United States would probably be the next President of the United States. It was the first time in American history that a president had the power to King the next President. Andy Jackson chose Van Buren to succeed him, but Marty still had to go through the formalities of winning the 1840 election. This time it was a special situation and if Nixon resigned, his new VP would walk in without so much as a confirmation hearing. He's have to survive a confirmation process to make VP, but not if and when he took over as Prez. Nixon was choosing the next President!
John “Magic Bullet” Connally, the governor of Texas who was wounded in JFK's Lincoln, was a possibility. JC was the only big person in politics that Nixon never made a denigrating remark about. But Connally, while being nearly martyred in Dallas was in a Democrat limo that November 22, 1963. John Connolly in 1973 had only recently switched over to the Republican Party. It didn't seem fair to make him President.
Governor Ronald Reagan was in the hunt. But Nixon wanted a shadow for Vice-President, not an equal or a superior. Reagan would surely upstage Nixon with the media and the public, and would never be a quiet supportive presence around the White House, no matter how often he gave out warm smiles. Nixon's ego would not tolerate a Vice-President Reagan. Besides, RR was a hard-line conservative, and might face a tough Senate challenge for confirmation. More important, Nixon did not like hard-right conservatism, period.
Nixon once told Kissinger that the country was divided by three factions defined by three candidates. There was the right, represented by Reagan. The left represented by Humphrey, and the center represented by Nixon. He told Kissinger that a move to liberal leadership would lead to US retreat around the globe and then there would be a reactionary right-wing war to correct it. That seems like a prediction of the 2003 US Invasion or Iraq after Clinton's eight years of passive resistance to terrorism.
Imagine if Nixon did choose Reagan. There's no way an incumbent President Reagan would have lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976. No way. Then, if in 1979 the same Iran Hostage Crisis took place, the whole thing would have turned out a little differently.
Other names in the hunt included George Romney, George Bush, George Harrison and George George. But the winner was a Congressman from Michigan named Gerald Ford.
If Gerald Ford was your tax accountant or your postman, you would consider him a man of great strength and charisma. You would tell him that he missed his calling and that he should be a leader in some better profession. But amongst a world of great men and women in Washington, Gerald Ford was an ordinary man. So many historians rip his as being dull and simple that I don't want to pile on. But Ford was dull and simple by presidential standards. Everyone said it about him so it had to be true. Again, my only input on this is that, like a major leaguer who hits .250 and is a bum, you really have to be a person of great ability to get that far so you can be called a mediocrity. It takes greatness to get called mediocre in the big leagues.
THE ABDUCTION OF PATTY HEARST - BERKELEY 4 1974
Her grandfather was the world famous William Randolph Hearst. She was rich and pretty and her name was Patricia Randoplh Hearst. The kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbianese Liberation Army in Berkeley California was the top true crime story of the Nixon years in my opinion.
The story is historic on its own for the interest it generated for a full two years. Young people today probably do not know much about it, but you talk about passing the diner test; people were talking about the Kidnapping and the strange “turning” of Patty Hearst for two years. The level of public interest was almost that the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979.
Patty is the poster-woman for ‘Stockholm Syndrome.’ Patty fell in with her kidnappers and began to help them commit more crimes! A rich spoiled young babe with little political activisim in her lifetime get kidnapped by these violent left-wing nuts, and she ends up joining them.
HIBERNIA BANK OF SF - IDES OF APRIL 1974
Patty Hearst was missing for two months, the talk of the USA. She reappeared as a bank robber of all things. The SLA robbed the Hibernia Bank of San Francisco on the morning of April 15, getting away with ten large and shooting two customers on the way out. One of the five bank robbers was clearly identified on film as Patricia Hearst.
Photographs of the young kidnap victim robbing the bank were all over every newspaper and magazine short of Bird Fancy. This was bizarre. The victim of kidnap had become one of the kidnappers, joining their cause and risking her life to rob banks.
People wondered if Patricia was just faking it to stay alive, pretending to believe in their left wing causes. But Patty sent tapes to the press in which she went into great detail about how she believed in the cause of the stupidly named Symbionise Liberation Army. She was no long Patricia Hearst. Her new name was Tania. This was a nickname of a nickname. Tania was the fake revolutionary name of the girl-friend of Che Guevera.
To give you some idea of how big this story was in the last months of Nixon, I am currently reading a book about it called The Strange Case of Patty Hearst. It is a popular Signet paperback. It was published in 1974. Patty hadn’t even been arrested yet. No one knew how the whole thing was going to turn out and people are buying books about it.
SLA TAKES 5 KIA - MAY 17 1974
The Symbionese Liberation Army, the Marxist Communist Left Radicals of convicts and criminals and morons, came to an end as an effective fighting force on May 17 1974. The LAPD
got a top that the top SLA brass was staying at 1466 East 54th Street. They surrounded the place with 400 cops and gave them the classic bullhorn “come on out with your hands up! SLA! We have you surrounded. The scene played out like a movie. Tear gas, big shootout, five SLA members dead, one cop wounded.
The country waited anxiously to find out if Patty Hearst was among the dead or if she was in the house at the time. She was not. Most of the SLA was dead, but not all.
When Nixon left office Patty Hearst was still on the lam and I was living in Bath New York and
the cops let me have a spare wanted poster for her and her accomplices Emily and Claude Harris.
She was arrested in the fall of 1975.
By the way, Patty Hearst never saw Citizen Kane. That is her assertion. The film is a hatchet job on her tycoon grandfather.
FORD OBRIEN
Gerald Ford is the Conan O'Brien of Presidential politics and I'm going to get in a lot of trouble for this, but here goes. Ford got his shot because he had was in the right place at the right time and he was good, but not good enough to be threatening.
What I am about to tell you I believe is true, but I only heard about it from two different people in Hollywood and I can't prove it, so lets just say that this hearsay is true for purposes of the Conan-Ford analogy.
When Jay Leno signed his first long-term contract to host The Tonight Show, the top late night job in America, he had a condition. NBC and Leno knew that a new comedian would have to be found to replace Letterman at 12:30 who was moving to CBS. But Leno insisted on having approval rights on who was chosen to come on the air after him. He didn't want anyone on the air who was too good. He didn't want anyone behind him whose popularity could inspire NBC to switch time slots. The new guy couldn't be too funny, or too talented. And that's how Conan O'Brien made it to the number two late-night job at NBC. It makes sense. Conan wasn't even a stand-up comedian and they hired him to do a seven minute monologue with new material every night! It made no sense at all!
And it all worked out for Jay as planned. Conan's lack of super-talent enabled him to get back to his old time slot when the 10:00 p.m. show failed in 2009.
That was Gerald Ford. He was the Conan O'Brien of his time. Nixon needed someone behind him who would not inspire America to push Nixon out as soon as possible. If Nixon was on the verge of impeachment or resignation, the nation would look to Conan Ford and say, we'd like to stick with Jay Nixon if you don't mind. It was smart thinking, but it was too late by then. The wheels of justice and investigation were already turning inexorably towards impeachment, and it didn't matter who was Vice president as far as the prosecutors and critics were concerned. If Nixon in October of 1973 was absolutely certain he could not hold back the Frankenstein torch-light mob gathering across the land to impeach him, he might well have saved the Party for 1976 by appointing a more talented leader. But he thought he could pull a Conan and it turned out he couldn't, so a second-rater made Prez for sub-noble reasons.
Comedians all around the country were scratching their heads back in 1995 wondering how this Conan guy got picked over 300 vastly more capable and well-known people. Look at Gerald Ford and stop wondering.
ELLSWORTH
One Nixon target was a defense department egghead named Dan Ellsberg who had provided the New York Times with a large volume of the material he had analyzed on the Vietnam War. The Times published the first installments of exiting material beginning on June 13, 1971 under the working title, The Pentagon Papers. The PP were a sensation. They revealed that the American public had been lied to repeatedly on Vietnam, especially in the Johnson era. The Papers were damaging to the war effort in general and Nixon was angry with Ellsberg for leaking the work to the press. The president then acquired a court order forbidding the New York Times from further publication of PP. But NYT took it all the way to the Supreme Court and won. The issue was “prior restraint.” Censorship is occasionally legal in this country as long as the material is heard in public once before it is declared obscene, dangerous or defamatory. You cannot restrain the material prior to a public floating, only after the fact. We have the right to see it once. And that applies to anything.
Nixon responded by having his plumbers break into Ellsworths' office to try and find some Danny dirt. They got caught and Nixon had the dirt on his hands.
TAPE EVERYTHING ....UNLESS YOU'RE THE PRESIDENT
Young comics who are foolish enough to ask my advice always get a quick response. “First of all, tape everything. Record your shows and edit them studiously. If you're smart enough to get this far, you're smart enough that I don't even have to tell you how to grow from listening to your tapes.”
That may be good advice for comedians, but its definitely bad advice for Presidents. I would tell a young President to “Tape nothing. If you're dumb enough to tape all your private conversations and phone calls, you're dumb enough to be impeached when a judge listens to those tapes.”
The biggest reason Nixon had to resign from the Presidency was not the Watergate burglary. The biggest reason Nixon had to resign was that he taped everything except his nighttime snoring. Here was a guy who specialized in the most unscrupulous political dirty fighting of any President in US history, and he's the one that had tape recorders all over the White House. That's dumber than a bag of hammers.
From the time of the Watergate arrests, once word got out to his enemies, and fair minded legalists (those annoying people) that there were 2,000 hours of recorded phone calls with the voices of very important figures in the Washington White House, much of it pertinent to the Watergate case, a war began for those tapes. Judges and prosecutors and enemies spent nearly two years trying to get a hold of those tapes.
There's about 700 700-page books on Watergate but it can be summarized in two sentences. --
Nixon taped everything, much of it incriminating, and the legal system fought him for two years to get their hands on those tapes. When Nixon lost the fight and the tapes were on the way to the judges office, Nixon went on TV and resigned the Presidency. --
The courts never even had to listen to the tapes to bring him down. Just the knowledge they were going to hear them was enough that the jig was up.
EXPLETIVE - DELETED
“Expletive, deleted. Deleted.... expletive.” Portions of the tapes leaked out in print form and we all got to read some of them in the papers. What the nation learned was that Nixon and his CREEP thugs used to swear a lot. Today, half of the curse words on the tapes would be acceptable for mainstream TV. But back then you couldn't say many words that are commonplace on TV now. You know, the little swears, the wimpy swears, the swears that do the dance just under the bar. Everyone goes out of their way to use those little swears on TV now. I don't think it adds to anything. Either swear like a trucker or don't swear at all. That's what I say. I hate wimpy swearing. “Forget you man!” Oh, I'm scared now.
The newspapers kept using the words “deleted” and “expletive” so much that it became a national joke. There were so many 'deleted' and 'expletive's that it just made it annoying to read. TV comedy shows were doing skits where the running gag was about the words 'deleted' and 'expletive.' It has to be mainstream before it gets to comedy.
It was all based on rough language in the Nixon White House. The cursing shouldn't have been the focal point of the revealed excerpts but it was. That was partly because these first batches of excerpts that got out didn't have that much juice in them politically. Nixon still had the lock on the real incriminating tapes. So the media took a disappointing batch of tapes and turned them into a story about swearing. I'm not saying that the media people did it deliberately, and 'deleted' you if you think they did.
SATURDAY NIGHT MASSACRE
This was the night when Nixon fired everyone he had appointed to investigate him. Arch Cox was the special prosecutor who was demanding that Nixon hand over the incriminating tapes of his White House conversations. So Nixon fired him and appointed a new special prosecutor. But men resigned rather than fire a person who had only done his job honestly. Several people were being fired because they refused to fire people Nixon had fired unjustly. This is the short version of the Saturday Night Massacre.
PARDON ME – JULY 4 1974
This one may be hard to believe but it's true. Nixon was an experienced lawyer and by all accounts a very good one. The last desperate plan he came up was legally brilliant.
Nixon knew he couldn't keep his job. Now he had to keep from going to jail. He thought it out and came up with the idea of a Presidential pardon ... for himself! Sure it was slimy, but who wants to go to the can in a three piece suit with a bunch of prisoners singling you out for taunting?
Nixon met with Haig on July 4 1974 and launched this holiday bombshell.
Nixon: “What's to stop me from granting myself a full Presidential pardon and then resigning?”
Haig: “Technically you could be right, but the American people would roast you alive. The aftermath could be more difficult for you than prosecution for obstruction of justice.”
Nixon; “Easy for you to say, Haig. You're not the one looking at jail time. How is that going to look, the President of the United States in an orange body suit. Go see Ford and see if you get him to support me on it. If he takes over and backs up the pardon by doing nothing, its over and I'm out of the woods.”
Haig; “It's a million to one shot. It'll never work.”
Nixon: “You got a better idea?”
Haig stared back. He wanted to say “Yeah, about 40 of em” but he didn't want to ruin the moment. It was never tried.
A DEPENDABLE FORD
By now it was obvious to everyone but Nixon that Nixon had to resign the presidency. His best friends in Congress were openly telling the press that the only solution now was for Nixon to step down.
VP Ford was in a tough spot in the middle. A Vice President's first job is to support his President, but with the whole world yelling at Nixon to quit, Ford was caught in the middle.
The press was beginning to criticize Ford for his equivocal behavior.
But while the image of Ford being a stumbler, and not too bright are both not fair and not true, the charge that Jerry was too much of a nice guy for high office was true. Ford could not bring himself to distance himself from Nixon, even when Nixon was being exposed as a criminal. Ford was the mom who refuses to believe that her son did it, even when shown the video of the crime. The country had a sharp eye on Ford in these final weeks and days of the Nixon Presidency. They watched everything he said and did. A lot of people felt that if Ford would only come out and make a definitive statement that Nixon must step down for the good of the country, it would push Nixon over the ledge and end this misery. But Ford continued to say that he was confident that Nixon would be cleared of all charges, which made Ford a liar; a charitable liar due to his nice guy streak, but a liar nevertheless. Ford's closest friends were begging him to stop being loyal to Nixon. They told him that he would take office as damaged goods if he came into power as the only person left in America still saying that Nixon was “innocent of all charges.” The nation needed change, not corrupt continuity. They needed a person who was going to take the bad smell out of the White House, not add a new and only slightly less bad smell. To this day some of Ford's old friends insist that he would have beaten Jimmy Carter in 1976 if he had made one strong statement denouncing his boss in the week before Nixon resigned.
Even allowing for the later pardon, Ford could have saved the Party for 76 if he hadn't showed so much Party loyalty in 74. It would be one thing to pardon Nixon after wisely piling on near then end. It was another to later pardon Nixon later after blindly defending him during “The Final Days.”
FORDIAN SLIP
It was very obvious that Ford was going to be the next President. On Monday August 5, he gave a speech in New Orleans before the Disabled American Veterans Convention in New Orleans. 2,100 DAV's and their supporters gave Ford a rousing cheer as he finished up and walked off the stage. The MC grabbed the mic and, like a pro, tried to grab the audience at the peak of the cheer and pick it up even more (as sadly few stand-up MC's know how to do.) He said in a near shout, in rhythm with the cheering throng,
“Thank you Mister President!”
The crowd went from roaring with approval to roaring with laughter. Ford looked back with a smile as the MC ad-libbed,
“Folks, I want you to know that I do not have any inside information.”
This got another big laugh. That's how obvious it was that Nixon was finished.
AUGUST 8 1974 – NIXON QUITS
Nixon passed the Presidency to Ford on August 9, but he made the decision to resign on the morning of August 8, and gave the TV speech to the nation about it on the evening of August 8.
AUGUST 9 – GET ON THAT COPTER AND DON'T COME BACK!
Nixon exited the White House from the sky. He sailed off in Marine One helo as Ford was taking the Oath of Office. Nixon was using his own oaths in the helicopter.
Nixon never “lost it” during it all. But his family gave way. Julie Nixon broke down sobbing and the photographers showed no pity. Of course, if they make a “based on a true story” movie about that day it will be Julie showing strength, while her father cries and falls apart.
SUPREME COURT
Nixon named four men to the Supreme Court, but the Senate rejected two of his too conservative choices.
First he replaced the retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren with Warren Burger (no relation to Hamilton Burger of the Perry Mason courtroom – was 'Ham Burger' a private joke among the writers?)
Nixon nominated Clement Haynesworth of South Carolina as an associate justice. But many Senators felt that his Clement’s life was associated with injustice and voted against him. 17 Republican senators said no to Clem. Nixon was angry and decided to nominate a replacement just as redneck on civil rights as Clem was. G. Harrold Carswell of Florida got his name sent up and, again, the Senate sent him it down, this time 13 Republican Senators joined the gang tackle.
Minnosota's Harry Blackmun was approved by the Senate.
Lewis Powell was another Nixon appointment. Nixon apparently didn't hold a grudge because Powell's great grandfather had tried to kill Secretary of State Seward.
President Nixon’s last Supreme appointment was “Wild Bill” Rehnquist of Arizona who lasted a long time. The left hated Rehnquist for decades. (sp)
POP HISTORY - WOODSTOCK AND JIM MORRISON
Personally, I don't think Woodstock belongs in a general history of the United States, but it seems that all he new history textbooks consider this entertainment event a part of American history. Ok, I'll try to go with it as a sidebar and offer my own experience.
By my 17th birthday I was a full fledged fledgling hippie. But I was 14 at the time of Woodstock and everyone was wiffle-cut in my town in 1969. Yet we were talking about Woodstock in my neighborhood for weeks before it happened, and we weren't even hippies.
It was all the greatest bands in rock and roll for “A three day festival of music, peace, and love.” As opposed to a Frank Sinatra or Perry Como show which stands for hate and war.
What made Woodstock unique and exiting was part of what made the early days of stand-up comedy clubs exiting. Both groups pioneered the business so there were no elder statesmen, no generation above showing the kids the ropes, not even cool elders.
But in 1969 the generation gap was so severe that only the young could produce a show that was based only for the young with invitations to a young audience of 150,000 people. The whole country was watching to see if the new generation could pull it off on its own. Would there be violence? The loving hippies had been causing a lot of property damage on college campuses and downtown department stores in recent times. Could more than 100,000 hippies get together and not have any trouble?
Yes!
They did it!
That was the big story of Woodstock. See the film. Its great and its a valuable historic time capsule. But the big story is how proud the hippies were that they got together at plus 100,000 for three days and nights and there was no violence.
I could have gone if I really wanted to. My sister asked me if I wanted to go and I told her I was worried that the hippies might beat me up because I had a wiffle cut. My sister laughed at me and said I didn't understand what it was all about. I only understood the rules of the South Boston where any guys from another street were a potential problem when you walked by them. I'd seen the hippies rioting in the streets for years on TV. I was a square. I was in another tribe. I thought it would be dangerous. And I had seen the long-hairs burning college campus buildings on TV. I was as afraid of the long-hairs as an Indian in Arizona in 1880.
Just after Woodstock a neighborhood woman ranted before a group of people about what a disgrace the thing had been. I asked her why, and she shook her head and condemned them for the amount of garbage they left behind. I said, “What were they supposed to do, hitchhike back to Oregon with bags of garbage?” She was 20 and I was 14. That line got a big laugh from six people. I sort of won the argument with one zinger.
I had a tougher time with Detective Logan.
He came to my Catholic High School about three months after Woodstock. We all had to file into the auditorium to hear his lecture on the evils of drugs. This guy was good. He didn't need a stage or a microphone. He marched up and down the center aisle and gave his talk about drugs like a drill sergeant with senatorial oratory skills. He was a passionate and angry man, a dynamic speaker.
His main theme was that it is a myth that people on pot get mellow. In fact all the evidence suggests that people high on marijhuana are more violent, not less,
“Hashish comes from the word 'assassin!' “
“Hashish!” - “Assasssin!”
Long pause looking everyone up and down.
“Hashish!” ....”Assassin!”
“Are there any questions.”
I raised my hand and asked,
“You say that marijuana leads to violence. There was a lot of marihuana at Woodstock, so why was there was no violence?”
I had never smoked marijuana in my life and I was a square. I liked Bobby Darrin better than the Beatles. I had no selfish motive to ask.
Detective Logan lit into me with one great long livid speech. It went on about a lot of very vague things and it was all directed at me. There was fire coming out of his tongue and he railed like Goebbels about how all sorts of different bad things are violent in their own way. After four minutes or so he wrapped it up with this shouted crescendo,
“There were three illegitimate children born that weekend! Don't you stand there and try and tell me there was no violence at Woodstock!”
Well at that point the auditorium erupted in a fantastic cheer. Logan had scored the winning basket with time expiring in a playoff game. As the crowd went wild a kid in the row in front of me turned around and said, “Donovan, you feel like s---.”
To be honest, it didn't upset me all that much. I knew that he had not answered my question and I felt inside just a big shoulder shrug. Even the crowd cheering didn't bother me that much. I'm not saying I felt good about it, but crowds don't bother me, that's why I'm a public performer. I had sang solo in the school choir for years, and was in oratory contests. I knew this guy was good but I also understood histrionics, and that all he had done was beat me with that. The Detective had cheated.
We all went back across the street to homeroom classes after the big event, the drug guy talk for 1,000 students. After everyone had settled in, my homeroom nun, who was not especially fond of me, stood and waited until the room was completely silent,
“Before we begin ... I just want to say to you Michael Donovan...
that Mr. Logan was very unfair to you. He did not answer your question and he had no right to treat you that way.”
Then she went on to business as usual.
It took me 40 years to finally get the real message of Woodstock. The lesson is that Woodstock non-violence was such a spectacular shock that it only proves that the hippies were usually violent. They expected and got medals for not causing trouble, like the Million Man March. Big deal. Proves you usually are unruly and unreasonably partisan.
There's a great scene in the Woodstock movie where it's pouring rain and most people are handling it in a fun way, but some are griping. A group of hippies marches by a camera-man and one of them stops and gives the lens a piece of his mind. He's not joking either when he says,
“I want to know why the police and the CIA and the FBI are seeding the clouds, man! They just don't want to see this work. We saw the planes fly by and they're seeding the clouds to make sure it rains! Why isn't anyone reporting this, man!”
Then he walks off shouting,
“Stop seeding the clouds!”
Rent the movie. It's really great. And you'll get to see this classic do-do bird. This guy would have fit in great at the Occupy Wall Street Festival.
I met rock-star Jim Morison of the Doors in 1970 and he saw how stunned I was to meet him and he joked,
“Hey man, I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
The two young women he was with laughed and they three of them walked away and that is a true story. Jim was so fried that if the two women weren’t holding him up he could not have walked away without falling.
AFTER OFFICE
Nixon was not heavily involved in political events after office, excluding the pardon. He wrote political books, and travelled the world making some speeches, but they weren't running interference on Democrat Presidents under the guise of universal love for humanity. That was the Carter style, and in that sense he was a better former president than Carter (who is supposedly the greatest ex-president of all time.) And Nixon's books after office are literally ten times more interesting, thorough and readable than Carter's.
Nixon did a series of TV interviews with David Frost that were a TV Blockbuster. They made that into a movie in 2009.
RN won the nation's sympathy shortly after leaving office when he had a bad case of phlebitis and almost died from it. The nation followed his medical condition every day. It was odd, the country having just unleashed a waterfall of hate for the guy and now had to pray for him to get well.
RN's best post-office book is called The Real War, published in the early 80's. Real War's chapter, THE OIL JUGULAR should be required reading for anyone who is interested in the origins of the Persian Gulf Conflict of 1991
Nixon arbitrated an umpire strike in major league baseball in the mid-1980’s. He told them if they didn't settle the strike he would run for President again.
CONCLUSION
Nixon was not the one.
We all hated Nixon. That was a given. I spray painted harsh graffiti against Nixon on a wall in my neighborhood. It was on that wall for three years. I feel bad about it. It was pretty mean. I don't even want to tell you what it said.
I know the smug conceits of the lefties because I was one of them. It all starts by condemning all politicians as corrupt, making you, by inference, a superior and a more loving being. It’s spiritual conceit. You are now part of a cause, a revolution of good against evil. You won't join the military but you are not a pacifist. You just fight for a different goal. You are a soldier for your causes and your great overall cause is peace. I never truly hated Nixon, but we all had to so I did my best to say I hated him. It was just a rule I had to follow.
Nixon is not as bad as I thought he was, but I can’t exactly embrace him on a reconsideration. He was not a leftist, needless to say, but he was not a true representative of strong Republican thinking either. His only ideology was survival in the game of politics. Nixon saw it all as a fascinating political battle but not a fight between people who get it and a bunch of blabbermouth lefty holier-than-thous who don't get it, which is the way I see it.
Some of my Republican fellow-travelers try to defend Nixon in mixed company (R&D) and when they turn to me for support I just look at the ground. I try to tell them in private, ‘look sometimes you just have to cut your losses and move on. If you concede a point now and then you establish your credibility. Make concessions where your position is untenable anyway, you win on both ends. Now you slip out of an impossible argument and pick up points for being fair and reasonable.’
Give them Nixon.
SOURCES
The 10,000 Day War, by Michael MacLear – The liberally slanted 12 part TV documentary is based on this liberally slanted book. Or was it the other way around?
All the President's Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – The book of the Watergate story by the two intrepid Washington Post Reporters reporters who broke the story and told the world. But was Bob Woodward's role in the investigation more sinister than that of mere reporter, or was he actually helping to make events take place and only then reporting them? That is the question raised by the 1991 book, Silent Coup.
Calley, The Full Compelling Story od a case as Bitterly Controversial as the Vietnam War Itself, by Arthur Everett, Kathryn Johnson, and Harry F. Rosenthal - c) 1971 - Dell
Apparently, Bill Calley had murdered some V civilians before the My Lai Massacre. He just didn’t get caught until the big one.
In Confidence, by Anatoly Dobrynin – The Soviet Ambassador to the United States in the era has a few things to say about Nixon.
Enduring Vision; Boyer-Clark c) – General college history.
The material on Vietnam is orthodox left and sometimes infuriating to this reader. Tell all sides, will ya? You can even make a call and pick a team at the end, but at least give the conservative side an audition.
This is a huge book but you can see with the expanding size of our history, there is shorter and shorter space for each subject. The Whig Party gets a collective page. Histories of the same size in 1930 gave it five pages.
The Final Days-Bernstein-Woodward – This book was a smash sensation when it came out, especially the negative personal portrait aspect. People ate it up, for it essentially laughed at Nixon, even though it was outwardly a serious book.
Hats in the Ring, An Illustrated History of American Presidential Campaigns, by Evan Cornog and Richard Whelan c) 2000 Random House
Cornog wrote most of the text. He points out that Wallace really cut into Humphry's labor vote. The workin' man loved a good ol redneck like Wallace.
A Heartbeat Away – Richard M. Cohen Jules Witcover of the Washington Post - c) 1974 - Viking Press
The usual song and dance by Rich M. Cohan and cover boy. The story of the fall of Vice President Agnew. I read it from witcover to cover.
The Making of the President, 1972, by Theodore H. White. One of the first political books I ever read. MP72 blew me away when I was 17. My paperback with the cover ripped-off (sure sign that the author and publisher got ripped-off) gave me the feeling of ‘the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.’ I like this one best out of his Making of the President book series.
The eccentric White may have some anti-Republican and anti-Nixon bias. Teddy White was a good friend of John F. Kennedy.
The National Experience – Part Two A History of the United States since 1865 – by John M. Blum (Yale), Edmund S. Morgan (Yale), Willie Lee Rose (The Johns Hopkins University), Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (CUNY), Kenneth M. Stampp (UC Berkeley), and C. Vann Woodward – c) 1981 HBJ
Stampp wrote the famous book, The Peculiar Institution, Woodward, The Strange Death of Jim Crow, and Schlesinger a three volume history of the FDR years.
No More Vietnams; Nixon – This is a must book for every high school senior. If schools are going to force our kids to read Chaomsky and Zinn, then in the name of fairness, Nixon should be able to speak his side of the argument. Its un-American to not be allowed to confront your accusers and present evidence. Nixon presents a simple and lucid defense of America’s role in the Vietnam War. Agree with him or not, NMV is a double history because he wrote it and then he wrote it.
On the Hill, by Alvin Josephy Jr. - c) – This history of the US Congress had a pro-Dem bias, so you can imagine how it treats Nixon.
Out of Many, A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale); Mary Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke); and Susan Armitage (Washington State), c)1994 – Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs New Jersey
This PC outrageous liberal pseudo-history is not always forthright on the history of Nixon and Vietnam.
My deaf Aunt Betty Ann lives in Englewood Cliffs and I should visit her on my way to my next Atlantic City gig.
Palace Politics, by Robert Hartmann – c) 1980 – Ford's Chief of Staff tells the story of Ford's elevation to the Vice Presidency in 1973 in some detail.
Presidential Campaigns, by Paul F. Boller, Jr. of Texas Christian University - c) 1984 – Oxford University Press.
Boller likes everyone, and even he doesn’t seem to like Nixon very much.
RN; Richard Nixon, his memoirs – This is a great book, especially his early life. He overcame much tragedy and adversity in his rise to success, but it began to bore me when it got to Watergate, as Watergate always did. The telling of his early life left a lasting and positive impression on me.
The Nam chapters are very valuable and more detailed than his follow-up book on Vietnam subject mentioned below.
The Selling of the President 1968, by Joe McGinnis – c) 1969
This was a big best-seller ripping Nixon for winning in 1968 by explaining the slimy way he did it. The cover had Nixon's face on an open pack of cigarettes. I get it, Joe, I get it.
A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garrity of Columbia – c) 1977 Harper & Row
Its almost comical watching Garrity have suppress his urge to write what a rat he thinks Nixon is. He has to use others as the cat's paw,
“To foes of the Vietnam War, Nixon's decision to bomb Cambodia seemed appallingly unwise.”
This is a fun history schoolbook, but Garrity can bore at times too. Enough about the poets, pal.
Sideshow, by William Shawcross –
Very influential book denouncing and describing the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. The left still cites this book as proof of this and that, but ignore the important fact that William Shawcross has come out and said this is was fundamentally in error and he has revised his conclusions and his opinions. Shawcross wrote a book in 2004 adamantly supporting the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003
Silent Coup – A breathtaking revisionist version of the fall of the President. It's hard to get me to stick with books about Watergate because its boring. O'm only 70 pages into this and it has altered my thinking completely. The the other Watergate books were boring because they weren't accurate.
Six Crisis, by Richard Nixon - One of his first books. It details some events in his early political life. I like the chapter where he gets spit on in Caracas.
Steal This Book; Jerry Rubin – This ultra-leftist hippie handbook influenced me as a teen-ager. I loved it. He was a real hero. Today I am anti-Jerry Rubin, and I resent the influence this big jerk had on me when he was alive and famous. What a better person I might have been if it weren't for these hippie leaders and their brainwashing.
The Ten Thousand Day War, by Michael MacLear, c) 1981
I quarrel with Mike Mac in the margins vociferously.
Vietnam: A History, by Stanley Karnow - c) 1983 - Viking
I haven’t got to the Nixon chapters yet, but this is a very good book. Very nice writing on such an important subject. It’s one thing to write smoothly about wine, it’s another to write a smooth 669 page history of the Vietnam War.
Vietnam at War, The History 1946-1975, by Lt. General Phillip B. Davidson – c) 1988 To my mind, this is the most detailed military history of the Vietnam War, and without an axe to grind. I've bought new books for much less than I paid for this used. I'd say it was worth every penny. What I like most about it is that Phil is a retired military man and has no big writers ego to clog off the work with show off prose. By not trying to be a fine writer he is one.
White House Years, by Henry Kissinger
Kissinger was a free-roaming cabinet advisor, but had more influence with the President than the Secretary of State William Rogers. This led to an open and mean spirited rivalry between the two courtiers. In the end Kissinger won and became the new Secretary of State.
It took a long time to finish all of these Kissinger memoirs. This is the first of a series. It was worth the time. The K certainly presents a strong case in his own defense against all specific criticism on the Cambodia incursion. Its easy to say 'Kissinger is a Nazi!' because he invaded Cambodia, but at the very least he deserves to be heard if a charge this large is made. White House Years is slow reading but not above any general reader, a few big words notwithstanding.
I think its very important when considering today’s events in the Middle East in American foreign policy to consider the historical political perspective. Read Kissinger trying to negotiate for the United States in the Middle East in the later Nixon years. Arab states both large and small were in the driver’s seat and did not treat him or any other of our emissaries well. They had us over an oil barrel especially after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. I had to feel sympathy and anger when reading these detailed accounts of these negotiations. It is some satisfaction to know that we can no longer be pushed around over there, because we are now over there.
The Yom Kippur War, by Peter Allen – c) 1982 Scribner NY
Undoubtedly a pro-Israel slant – Allen tends to get flowery with his descriptions, a trait I don't like in a writer but many editors obviously do. A solid history of an understudied war.
FILM
Frost-Nixon – This movie looks Nixon look 40 times worse than he could possibly have been.
Nixon, a film by Oliver Stone … Is an invaluable resource for students interested in an insane version of the events in the life of Richard Nixon. Look for the voice of Stone as the reporter interviewing Nixon’s mother.
The Ten Thousand Day War - PBS
This 15 hour documentary tells a biased liberal version of the war very well. Did they really have to add fake sound effects over black and white battle footage out of the North? Why add sound effects from US bombs hitting targets 8,000 feet below, when it makes no sense to hear the explosion, and even less sense to hear it at the same time it happens?
They interview a lot of very important players who are now dead or as good as dead, but of course they splice in only the few words that suit their lefty orthodox slant. The book makes the documentary seem redneck.
Putney Swope
You want to get the feel for 60’s hippie leftism and its bond with black panther radicalism? See this time piece movie. This is a rare film today that no one outside of the 60’s has ever heard of. But when it was out, it was a very popular film. Putney Swope could pass the Peoria test. You ask ten people walking down Main Street in Peoria if they’ve ever heard of Putney Swope and eight would say yes. The violent leftism in here is what is worth noting because it passed the Peoria test. Left wing violent hatred and revolutionary seething was so accepted, that a film like this could get produced and distributed in 50 states. It’s an unpleasant all over the road acid trip of let wing hate. Check it out!
COMING ATTRACTIONS
VIETNAM WAR/PROTEST MOVEMENT
WEATHER UNDERGROUND BOMBS US CAPITOL 3-71
LAUGH-IN -NIXON GOES ON COMEDY SHOW
KISSINGER INFLUENCE
Shooting of Wallace
More on the Vietnam War
Nixon’s Enemies List
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