Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (77 page)

For more than half a century, the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.

Few politicians of the twentieth century have changed life in America as fundamentally as this lawyer born in Winsted, Connecticut, the son of Lebanese immigrants. Ralph Nader graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School and was working for the Department of Labor to crusade for “consumer protection”—the defense of the rights of consumers to safe products and ethical behavior from companies. His landmark book,
Unsafe at Any Speed,
argued that the U.S. automobile industry emphasized profits and style over safety. The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, which established safety standards for new cars, resulted largely from his work.

In later years, his studies resulted in stricter controls of the meat and poultry industries, coal mines, and natural gas pipelines. He publicized what he felt were the dangers of pesticides, food additives, radiation from color TV sets, and excessive use of X-rays. In 1971, Nader founded Public Citizen, Inc., which specialized in energy problems, health care, tax reform, and other consumer issues. Nader and his staff conducted a major study of Congress in 1972, and their findings were published in
Who Runs Congress?
In 1982, another Nader group published a study of the Reagan administration called
Reagan’s Ruling Class: Portraits of the President’s Top One Hundred Officials.
Nader was a coauthor of
The Big Boys: Power and Position in American Business
(1986), which looked at the structure and control of corporate business in the United States. Nader won another battle in 1989, when General Motors announced it would make air bags standard equipment on many 1990 models. Nader had promoted the use of the safety feature for more than ten years.

The same year that
Unsafe at Any Speed
was published witnessed another landmark event. Congress established a national Clearinghouse for Smoking and Health and ordered every cigarette package to come with a new label: “Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.” It was the beginning of a long anticigarette campaign that would fundamentally transform American society as few other social movements ever have. Before the surgeon general’s 1964 report that linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer, cigarettes were part of the American way of life. By the end of the century, antismoking legislation had converted smokers into near pariahs, changing eating patterns in restaurants and work routines as smokers were forced to grab a smoke during breaks while standing outside their office buildings.

Who was Miranda?

For anyone who grew up on a TV diet of Joe Friday and
Dragnet
,
Streets of San Francisco
,
NYPD Blue
, and a hundred other cop shows, “Read him his rights” is a familiar bit of requisite dialogue. That is, for any cop shows that came after 1966. To America’s lawmen, that was the year that the world started to come unglued.

Ernesto Miranda was hardly the kind of guy who might be expected to change legal history. But he did, in his own savage way. A high school dropout with a criminal record dating from his teen years, Miranda abducted a teenage girl at a Phoenix moviehouse candy counter in 1963 and drove her into the desert, where he raped her. Having a criminal record, Miranda was soon picked up, and was identified by the victim in a police lineup. After making a written confession in which he stated that he had been informed of his rights, Miranda was convicted and sentenced to prison for forty to fifty-five years. But at the trial, Miranda’s court-appointed attorney argued that his client had not been told of his right to legal counsel.

The American Civil Liberties Union took the case of
Miranda v. Arizona
all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was heard by the Warren Court in 1966. The issue was the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination. On June 13, 1966, the Court announced a five-to-four ruling in favor of Miranda that said a criminal suspect must be told of his right to silence, that his remarks may be used against him, and that he had a right to counsel during interrogation, even if he could not afford one.

Depending on your point of view, it was either a great milestone for civil liberties and the protection of the rights of both the innocent and the criminal, or the beginning of the end of civilization.

And the notorious Miranda? On the basis of new evidence, he was convicted again on the same charges of kidnapping and rape, and imprisoned. He was eventually paroled, and ten years after the Court inscribed his name in legal history, Ernesto Miranda died of a knife wound suffered during a bar fight.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

M
UHAMMAD
A
LI,
heavyweight boxing champion:

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

That’s why they call me Muhammad Ali.

Few athletes reflect, or actually change, history as Muhammad Ali did. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, Muhammad Ali (b. 1942) became a professional boxer after winning the light heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics. In 1964, he won the world heavyweight championship by knocking out Sonny Liston in an upset. And there the controversy began, and it would soon extend far beyond the boxing ring, or even sports.

Profoundly influenced by Malcolm X, Cassius Clay joined the Black Muslims, or Nation of Islam, in 1967 and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, rejecting his birth name as a “slave name.” (In fact, American slave holders had typically given their slaves the names of Roman nobility.) He said he even threw his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River.

During the next few years, Ali became one of the most colorful and controversial boxing champions of all time, said to be the world’s most recognizable man. Widely admired for his extraordinary grace, speed, and boxing skills, he was equally disdained for his boastfulness as he made up poems that mocked his opponents or predicted, in verse, the round in which he would score a knockout.

But if he was disliked for these attitudes before 1967, his name change and adoption of the Muslim faith further alienated much of white America, which in the 1960s still wanted its athletes to be seen—on the playing fields—but not heard. Especially if they were considered “loudmouthed and uppity,” as Ali was widely viewed. But in an era when “Black is beautiful” became a new motto for young blacks and soul singer James Brown was beginning the chant of “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud,” Muhammad Ali was the living embodiment of both phrases. As other black leaders, like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, fell, Muhammad Ali was lionized by a younger generation that was no longer content with the status quo.

The stakes changed later in 1967, when Ali offered a different rhyme:

Keep asking me no matter how long—

On the war in Vietnam I sing this song—

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.

Saying that “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger,” Ali refused induction into the United States Army, basing his decision on religious principles. He was convicted on charges of refusing induction and sentenced to prison, but appealed the decision and stayed out of jail. However, most boxing groups stripped Ali of his title and, after his conviction, Ali could not box for three and a half years. While out of the ring, Ali remained on the world stage, and his views on the war and a racist America profoundly influenced a younger generation that was rejecting both the war and racism. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, American sprinters hung their heads and raised their fists in a clenched-fist “black power” salute during the medal ceremony. It was an audacious display that cost the sprinters their medals and indicated how divided the country had become.

In 1971, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed Ali’s conviction and he began a remarkable comeback and second career with a series of legendary fights against Joe Frazier. He regained the heavyweight championship by knocking out George Foreman, the defending champion, in Africa in 1974. Early in 1978, Ali lost the title to Leon Spinks in one of the greatest upsets in boxing history, but regained the title for a fourth time when he defeated Spinks in a rematch. In 1979, Ali gave up his title and announced his retirement. But in 1980, he came out of retirement and fought Larry Holmes for the World Boxing Council version of the title. Holmes defeated Ali by a technical knockout.

A few years later, Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which many doctors attributed to the many severe blows he had absorbed in his remarkable career.

What happened at My Lai?

On March 16, 1968, in a small Vietnamese village, “something dark and bloody” took place. With those words, a lone veteran of the war forced the U.S. Army to reluctantly examine a secret that was no secret. America was forced to look at itself in a manner once reserved for enemies who had committed war crimes. With those words, America found out about the massacre of civilians by U.S. soldiers at My Lai.

The GIs of Charlie Company called it Pinkville. That was how it was colored on their maps of Vietnam’s Quang Ngai province, because the village was suspected of being a stronghold for the Vietcong. Under the command of Lieutenant William L. Calley, Charlie Company of the Americal Division’s Eleventh Infantry had nebulous orders from its company commander, Captain Ernest Medina, to “clean the village out.” In the previous three months, Charlie Company had taken about 100 casualties without even seeing action. Sniper fire and booby traps were to blame. Frustrated and angry at the hand they had been dealt in a war in which there were no uniforms to separate “good gooks” from “bad gooks,” the men of Charlie Company were primed to wreak havoc on a phantom enemy they had never been able to confront in an open battle.

Dropped into the village by helicopter, the men of Charlie Company found only the old men, women, and children of My Lai. There were no Vietcong, and no signs of any. There were no stashed weapons, no rice caches, nothing to suggest that My Lai was a staging base for guerrilla attacks. But under Lieutenant Calley’s direct orders, the villagers were forced into the center of the hamlet, where Calley issued the order to shoot them. The defenseless villagers were mowed down by automatic weapons fire. Then the villagers’ huts were grenaded, some of them while still occupied. Finally, small groups of survivors—some of them women and girls who had been raped by the Americans—were rounded up and herded into a drainage ditch, where they, too, were mercilessly machine-gunned. A few of the soldiers of Charlie Company refused to follow the order; one of them later called it “point-blank murder.”

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

V
ARNADO
S
IMPSON,
a member of Lt. Calley’s unit, describing My Lai on March 16, 1968 (quoted in
Four Hours in My Lai
by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim):

That day in My Lai, I was personally responsible for killing about twenty-five people. Personally. Men, women. From shooting them, to cutting their throats, scalping them, to cutting off their hands and cutting out their tongues. I did it. I just went. My mind just went. And I wasn’t the only one that did it. A lot of other people did it. I just killed. . . . I didn’t know I had it in me.

During the massacre, Hugh C. Thompson, a twenty-five-year-old helicopter pilot, saw the bodies in the ditch and went down to investigate. Placing his helicopter between the GIs and a band of children, the pilot ordered his crew to shoot any American who tried to stop him. He managed to rescue a handful of children. But that was one of the day’s few heroic deeds. Another witness to the massacre was an army photographer who was ordered to turn over his official camera, but kept a second, secret, camera. With it, he had recorded the mayhem in which more than 560 Vietnamese, mostly women and children, were slaughtered. Those pictures, when they later surfaced, revealed the extent of the carnage at My Lai. But not right away. Although many in the chain of command knew something “dark and bloody” had happened that day, there was no investigation. The mission was reported as a success back at headquarters.

But Ronald Ridenhour, a veteran of Charlie Company who had not been at My Lai, began to hear the rumors from buddies. Piecing together what had happened, he detailed the events in a letter he sent to President Nixon, to key members of Congress, and to officials in the State Department and Pentagon. The dirty little secret of My Lai was out. Then reporter Seymour Hersh also got wind of the story and broke it to an incredulous America in November 1968. Within a few weeks, the army opened an investigation, but it remained secret. More than a year had passed since the day My Lai became a killing ground. It would be another two years before anyone was tried in the case.

In the immediate aftermath of the investigation, several officers still on active duty were court-martialed for dereliction of duty for covering up the massacre, a word the Pentagon never used. At worst, they were reduced in rank or censured. Four officers—Calley, Medina, Captain Eugene Kotouc, and Lieutenant Thomas Willingham—were court-martialed. Medina was acquitted, but later confessed that he had lied under oath to Army investigators. The other two officers were also acquitted. Only Lieutenant Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder of twenty-two villagers at My Lai, on March 29, 1971. Two days later, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. But President Nixon then reduced his sentence to house arrest in response to an outpouring of public support for Calley, who was seen as a scapegoat. Calley was later paroled. A documentary about My Lai that was broadcast in 1989 showed Calley, a prosperous businessman, getting into an expensive foreign car and driving off. He refused to comment on the incident.