After the Tall Timber (28 page)

Looking back on previous urban riots—the “killed by mistake” of Watts, the “killed by stray bullets” of Filmore and Hough—officials of the departments of Justice and Defense began to find the performance of Guard units, state by state, surreal. Guardsmen were in the habit of arriving by tank or truck, weapons loaded, and shooting out street lamps at night, for protection, then deluding themselves that the sound of their own shots in the dark was “sniper fire.” Since their aim, moreover, was bad, the rounds of ammunition required to dispatch a single street lamp often injured people in apartments blocks away or in cars on other streets. The first person killed by Guardsmen in Newark, for example, was a small boy in a family car being driven home from a restaurant. In Newark, coordination between the local police and the New Jersey Guard was so bad that Director of Police Dominick Spina told the Kerner Commission, “Down in the Springfield Avenue area, in my opinion, Guardsmen were firing upon police and police were firing back at them.”

Police Director Spina, who was tried and acquitted of charges arising out of alleged Mafia operations two years ago, and who was dismissed from his job on July 1 of this year, emerges, in the Newark riots of 1967, as something of a hero, on the order of
High Noon
. According to the Kerner Commission:

The Guardsman said that he had fired the shot to scare a man away from a window, that his orders were “to keep everyone away from windows.”

By this time, four truckloads of National Guardsmen had arrived, and troopers and policemen were again crouched everywhere, looking for a sniper.

The Director of Police stayed at the scene for three hours. The only shot he heard was the one fired by the Guardsman.

And so on, in Newark. The result of calling in National Guardsmen began to seem, in retrospect, frightened Guardsmen, frightened police, and a toll of babies in distant bassinets, grandmothers in distant kitchens, mothers with their backs to windows, idle spectators, and unarmed citizens of every sort. But Detroit was the worst.

Governor George Romney, to begin with, was extremely reluctant to issue an official request that the Michigan National Guard be federalized—although local police, supported by the Guard under state control, were exhausted and had been unable to cope with rioting and looting for several days—because federalization of the Guard implies an “insurrection,” which exempts insurance companies from paying damages to holders of insurance policies. Governor Romney repeatedly made urgent, unofficial requests for federal help to Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus R. Vance, who (according to his subsequent report of events in Detroit) felt that he had to reject them on the ground of their unofficial language. Deputy Secretary Vance, Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas (not in his capacity as Supreme Court justice but as friend and political adviser to President Johnson), Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and others were pacing with President Johnson on the White House lawn, discussing their own reluctance to federalize the Guard, or to send in more competent regular army troops, because they preferred to avoid the precedent of a liberal administration’s sending troops to cope with urban rioting, in an action that might be construed as repressive or racist. In response to more urgent requests from Governor Romney, President Johnson sent Deputy Secretary Vance and a team of officials from the departments of Defense and Justice to Detroit, to study the situation and to discuss it with Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh and other local citizens. While legal and philosophical deliberations concerning federalization were going on, the number of incidents in Detroit continued to climb. At 2310 hours on July 24 (about twenty-four hours after Mayor Cavanagh and Governor Romney had first telephoned Attorney General Clark about the emergency), Deputy Secretary Vance recommended to President Johnson that the Michigan National Guard be federalized and put under regular army command. Ten minutes later, the President federalized the Guard, under the command of Army Lieutenant General John L. Throckmorton, and sent in regular army troops as well.

The Guard’s behavior until the President’s move, and after, was a revelation and a nightmare. Some of the Guardsmen had traveled two hundred miles and been put on duty for thirty hours straight—most of which they spent firing. Guardsmen in Detroit fired off more than 13,326 rounds of ammunition, compared with 201 rounds fired off by the regular army. Some Guard units got lost in the city, and panicked. Two Guardsmen assigned to an intersection on Monday were still there on Friday. Guardsmen kept pulling up in tanks, shooting out streetlights, scaring themselves with the sound, and then blasting out the walls of whole buildings. At four o’clock one morning, a regular army unit went to the rescue of a Guard troop crouched behind a high school, claiming to be pinned down by sniper fire. The army colonel, hearing no shots at all, ordered all lights in an adjoining building turned on. The residents were terrified and unarmed. The Guardsmen had shot out every window. Mistaking a lighted cigarette in one window for a sniper, two Guard tanks drew up and a machine gunner opened fire, nearly severing the arm of a young woman and killing her four-year-old niece.

General Throckmorton, whose soldiers were doing fine without much shooting, thought tension might be reduced by less firing, and ordered ammunition removed from all weapons. The Guardsmen apparently never received the order. The Kerner Report continues:

Julius Dorsey, a black private guard, was trying to defend a market from looting. He fired three shots from his pistol into the air. The police radio reported, “Looters. They have rifles.” Three National Guardsmen arrived and, seeing a distant crowd of fleeing looters, opened fire. They killed Julius Dorsey. The only soldier killed in Detroit in 1967 was Larry Post, a National Guardsman caught in a cross fire between two units of National Guardsmen.

After Detroit, it became clear that something would have to be done about the National Guard. In most states, Guard units—on the “first line of military reserve” theory—received no riot-control training at all, and in states where they did receive it, it was short and not uniform. There seemed, at the time, to be three basic positions about the Guard. One, that it was inevitably a corrupt, ungovernable mess of untrainable incompetents, and that it should be abolished as a peacekeeping force; local police forces should be better trained, and on those rare occasions when civil disturbances became extreme emergencies, the regular army, which has training and discipline, should be called in. Two, that nothing is perfect, that the Guard had done as well as could be expected, and that people in an area where there is rioting (even if they happen to be in their bathrooms or bassinets), though they may not merit the death penalty exactly, are in some sense “asking for” whatever they get. Three, that the Guard should be buffered with some immediate riot-control training, and that since the regular army soldiers, many of whom were blacks, had done so much better than the Guard, the Guard should immediately recruit as many blacks as possible.

The history of blacks in the American army and militia is a kind of absurdist tale of its own. The South drafted some slaves, and the North drafted some freedmen for its 150 regiments of blacks in the Civil War. But when the North took Louisiana, a southern black unit was caught in the middle and ultimately became the Union’s Corps d’Afrique. Black militia briefly terrified some southern states in the early years of Reconstruction; then the black units were disbanded and the white southern militias started terrorizing blacks again. In New York City, Colonel William Hayward started a black National Guard regiment, the Fifteenth New York Infantry (Colored), with its own armory in Harlem and tried vainly to get it attached to any American unit in World War I. Finally, the unit simply attached itself to a division in the French Army, and served with considerable distinction throughout the war. In World War II, black divisions were still segregated, and although one of them, the Ninety-second Infantry (Buffalo) Division, took part in the liberation of Italy, most black soldiers were in service or maintenance units. After President Truman desegregated all divisions of the armed services, the black soldier—in Korea and, of course, still more in Vietnam—came militarily into his own. There have been, not surprisingly, hardly any black National Guardsmen since the National Guard began.

The group that favored a Guard buffered with some riot-control training and some blacks won out. Each Guardsman in each state was to receive thirty-two hours of such training, and blacks were to be recruited intensively. Some administration officials who did not agree with this policy quietly quit. The Guard had become, in their view, a crucial issue that had to be uncompromisingly met. The strength of the country, they argued, had always lain in the ability of liberals and conservatives to police their extremes. Now neither left nor right was willing to cope with the question of the Guard—the right (which was currently out of federal office anyway) because of a belief in states’ rights and a feeling that people who got in a Guardsman’s way probably deserved what they got; the liberal left, which was in power, out of a fear that facing the issue of law and order in civil disturbances would further alienate the radical left, and also because of a reluctance to tinker with the haven of the draft-dodger. The regular army and the National Guard, in any case, preferred to pretend that civil-disturbance duty was not the major responsibility of either of them but, rather, devolved upon local police officers—who, in turn, preferred to think of themselves as delivering babies and solving ordinary crimes. The civil disturbances were not exactly revolutionary. They were simply anomalous—flash reactions against urban conditions and inequities that had not been resolved.

For a year or more after the crash patchwork job on the Guard, all seemed to go well. The black-recruitment program was a failure and the hours of training in riot control went down, in most states, to less than six. There was no uniform procedure from state to state about whether to put ammunition in weapons, or what sort of weapons to use. But the “long, hot summers” never materialized. There were all sorts of civil disturbances (including one, at Grambling College in Louisiana, which Guard archives describe as a “riot for academic excellence”). But in the 1967 march on the Pentagon, Guard units behaved, under heavy provocation, extremely well; and nobody was killed by Guardsmen in any of the urban riots, in April 1968, over the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It looked all right, as far as National Guard behavior was concerned. Even at the Democratic Convention in Chicago (August 1968), nobody was killed.

Guard duty in 1969 began with a blizzard in Pender, Nebraska, and went on through floods, train wrecks, downed planes, tornadoes, ice storms, forest fires, power failures, a hurricane (in Apalachicola, Florida), a “collapsed dam” (in Wheatland, Wyoming), “haul water” (in Berry and Oakman, Alabama), “flood” (in Soldotna, Alaska), “civil disturbance” (in Zap, North Dakota), and “searches for missing persons” (in such places as Rice Patch Island, North Carolina; Tallapoosa City, Alabama; and Tofte, Minnesota). True, there were “college disturbances” at Berkeley and Dartmouth, but the Guard did all right—as it did in the Moratorium March on Washington in October and, for that matter, at a Stamp Dedication Ceremony for the late Dwight David Eisenhower, in Abilene. The National Guard began again to stress its role in the national defense, and National Guardsmen, by 1969, were running 40 percent of the country’s (militarily obsolete but still functional) Nike and Hercules missile sites.

A Harvard graduate, class of 1962, came to New York the summer after his graduation and took a job in a bank. His employer asked how he planned to fulfill his military obligation. The young man didn’t know. The bank gave him two letters of recommendation. Within a month, he had risen to the top of the waiting list at the Seventh Regiment Armory and begun his six months’ basic training, before returning to the bank. A young advertising executive, a friend of whose mother was the wife of a veteran of Squadron A, got into the squadron just before he received his draft notice, and about a year before Squadron A became defunct. “It’s a total joke,” he said of his Guard training. “It’s a farce. It’s a stupid movie. It’s just one constant snafu after another. At the armory drill, you just get into what they call a ‘skirmish line.’ Militarily, it’s obsolete. The equipment is all bad. They’re all badly trained. They’re all stupid. At scenic Camp Drum, in your tank, they wait till the end of the afternoon to issue ammunition. There’s no way to give it back. You have to get rid of it. So you just keep firing and firing until the gun barrel gets red—shells that cost the taxpayer ninety dollars apiece, guns that will knock down a whole building. Once, somebody made a mistake and started firing his machine gun at us, round after round, before he could stop it. He just said, ‘Uh-oh.’ ”