Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (78 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
To the war’s supporters on the right, the atrocity at My Lai was an aberration and Calley a victim of a “leftist” antiwar movement. To the war’s opponents, Calley and My Lai epitomized the war’s immorality and injustice. In a sense, My Lai was the outcome of forcing young Americans into an unwinnable war. It has now been well documented that this was not the only crime against civilians in Vietnam. It was not uncommon to see GIs use their Zippo lighters to torch an entire village. As one officer said early in the war, after torching a hamlet, “We had to destroy this village to save it.” That Alice in Wonderland logic perfectly embodied the impossibility of the American position.
Even though the United States would drop
7 million tons
of bombs—twice the total dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War II—on an area about the size of Massachusetts, along with Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants, the United States was losing the war. The political and military leadership of this country failed to understand the Vietnamese character, traditions, culture, and history. That failure doomed America to its costly and tragic defeat in Vietnam. As A. J. Langguth wrote in his excellent history of the war,
Our Vietnam
, “North Vietnam’s leaders had deserved to win. South Vietnam’s leaders had deserved to lose. And America’s leaders, for thirty years, had failed the people of the North, the people of the South, and the people of the United States.”
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
Astronaut
NEIL ARMSTRONG
(b. 1930) on July 20, 1969, as he became the first man to walk on the Moon:
That was one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.
Armstrong’s words, and the images of him stepping onto the lunar surface, were seen and heard by the entire world. The moment was the culmination of the obsessive push for putting a man on the Moon, a challenge that began with the humiliation of Sputnik (see Chapter 7). Armstrong and fellow Moon walker Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag on the lunar surface and left a plaque that read, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July, 1969
A.D.
We came in peace for all mankind.”
How did a successful break-in in Pennsylvania change the FBI?
On the night of March 8, 1971, burglars broke into the offices of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole more than a thousand documents. Within two weeks of the break-in, copies of the stolen material were being sent to members of Congress and the media by the enterprising and crusading burglars, who were never caught. One of the documents that appeared in the
Washington Post
used the word COINTELPRO. An NBC newsman who was an attorney made a Freedom of Information Act request for all COINTELPRO documents. After a series of legal maneuvers by the FBI, one of J. Edgar Hoover’s secrets was out: COINTELPRO, which stood for Counter Intelligence Program, was a twenty-year-old FBI campaign of illegal and improper activities aimed at harassing political targets. Begun under J. Edgar Hoover in 1956 to target the Communist Party in America for investigation and disruption, already then dwindling, the program continued for the next two decades. Eventually, domestic targets such as the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panthers, and the Ku Klux Klan were victims of the FBI’s illicit and almost laughably foolish smear campaigns and illegal wiretaps. In the early days of the program, Ronald Kessler writes in
The Bureau,
“Agents questioned party officials at their places of employment to intimidate their employers, . . . planted evidence so that local police would arrest party members, and left what appeared to be FBI informant reports on the cars of party officials so that the party would drop them as suspected snitches. . . . The bureau informed the parents of one woman that she was living with a Communist out of wedlock. . . . The tactics were no different than those used by the KGB in Russia.”
These might seem like innocent pranks, amateurish at times—
almost amusing, if they weren’t so potentially and actually dangerous, as events would prove.
By the early 1970s, COINTELPRO had widened its focus to include the antiwar movement and elements of the civil rights movement. When some antiwar groups turned to violence, most notably the Weathermen—or Weather Underground—Hoover turned COINTELPRO loose on them. During a wiretap of a Black Panther group, the FBI learned that actress Jean Seberg was pregnant. An international star of such movies as the French classic
Breathless
and
Lilith
, Seberg had become an outspoken opponent of both the war and American racism, and financially supported the Panthers. According to FBI documents, J. Edgar Hoover ordered, “Jean Seberg . . . should be neutralized.” In 1970, the FBI leaked the rumor that Seberg was carrying the child of a member of the Black Panthers to an accommodating media. She had apparently had affairs with some members of the group, but none of them was the father of her child. But her pregnancy became the focus of international attention, and the paternity of the unborn child was “smeared” in papers and magazines, including
Newsweek
and the
Los Angeles Times
. The child was born prematurely in 1970 and died two days later. The body was then displayed in an open coffin to prove that she was white. (Seberg and her estranged husband, Romain Gary, a French writer, sued
Newsweek
in France and the magazine was forced to pay damages for invasion of privacy.) Seberg became increasingly despondent over the years, turning to pills and alcohol, and finally committed suicide in 1979.
The Seberg rumors had been manufactured by COINTELPRO. When the COINTELPRO program was revealed in 1971, Hoover ordered it shut down. For years the most powerful man in Washington because of the secret files he maintained on almost every politician and celebrity in America, Hoover survived the calls for his resignation, serving as director of the FBI until his death in 1972. But America was going to soon learn that COINTELPRO wasn’t the only instance of the FBI being put to political use.
In the summer of 1971, President Richard Nixon learned that what you don’t know
can
hurt you.
In June 1971, the
New York Times
ran a headline that hardly seemed sensational: “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement.” What the headline did not say was that the study also traced thirty years of deceit and ineptitude on the part of the United States government.
In page after numbingly detailed page, the
Times
reprinted thousands of documents, cables, position papers, and memos, all referring to the American effort in Vietnam. Officially titled
The History of the U.S. Decision Making Process in Vietnam,
the material quickly became known as the Pentagon Papers. Richard Nixon was not aware of its existence. But it would shake his administration and the military establishment in America to their toes.
Ordered by Robert McNamara, one of Kennedy’s “best and brightest” prior to his resignation as defense secretary in 1968, this massive compilation had involved the work of large teams of scholars and analysts. The avalanche of paper ran to some 2 million words. Among the men who had helped put it together was Daniel Ellsberg, a Rand Corporation analyst and onetime hawk who, like McNamara himself, became disillusioned by the war. Working at MIT after his resignation from Rand, which was involved in collecting and analyzing the papers, Ellsberg decided to go public with the information. He turned a copy over to
Times
reporter Neil Sheehan.
When the story broke, the country soon learned how it had been duped. Going back to the Truman administration, the Pentagon Papers revealed a history of deceptions, policy disagreements within several White House administrations, and outright lies. Among the most damaging revelations were cables from the American embassy in Saigon, dating from the weeks before Prime Minister Diem was ousted with CIA encouragement and then executed. There was the discovery that the Tonkin Resolution had been drafted months before the incident occurred from which it took its name. And there were memos showing Lyndon Johnson committing infantry to Vietnam at the same time he was telling the country that he had no long-range plans for a strategy in Vietnam.
The papers did not cover the Nixon years, and White House reaction was at first muted, even gleeful at the prospect of the embarrassment it would create for the Democrats. But Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger (b. 1923), soon realized that if something this highly classified could be leaked, so could other secrets. Both men were already troubled by leaks within the administration. How could they carry on the business of national security if documents this sensitive could be photocopied and handed out to the nation’s newspapers like press releases? There was a second concern. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers had fueled the antiwar sentiment that was growing louder and angrier and moving off the campuses and into the halls of Congress.
The administration first tried to bully the
Times
into halting publication. Attorney General John Mitchell threatened the paper with espionage charges. These were ignored. Nixon then tried the courts and received a temporary injunction blocking further publication. But the brushfire started by the
Times
was growing into a forest fire. The
Washington Post
and the
Boston Globe
were also running the documents. A federal court ordered the
Post
to halt publication, and the question went to the Supreme Court. On June 30, the Court ruled six to three in favor of the newspapers on First Amendment grounds.
Kissinger and Nixon went nuclear. Said Nixon, “I want to know who is behind this. . . . I want it done, whatever the costs.”
When Ellsberg was revealed as the culprit, a new White House unit was formed to investigate him. Their job was to stop leaks, so they were jokingly called the “plumbers.” White House assistant Egil Krogh, Nixon special counsel Charles Colson, and others in the White House turned to former CIA man E. Howard Hunt and ex-FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy to bring their special clandestine talents to the operation. One of their first jobs was to conduct a break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. As a burglary, it was only marginally more successful than the next break-in planned by the group, at an office complex called Watergate.
Apart from setting into motion some of the events that would mutate into the Watergate affair, the publication of the Pentagon Papers had other important repercussions. From the government’s standpoint, American security credibility had been crippled, severely damaging intelligence operations around the world, for better or worse. On the other side, the antiwar movement gained new strength and respectability, increasing the pressure on Nixon to end the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And the Supreme Court’s action in protecting the newspapers from prior restraint established and strengthened First Amendment principles.
But the Pentagon Papers case also reinforced a “bunker mentality” that already existed within the White House “palace guard.” There was an us-against-them defensiveness emanating from the Oval Office. Publication of the Pentagon Papers made the Nixon White House far more aggressive in its defense of “national security,” an idea that was expanded to include the protection and reelection of Richard Nixon by any means and at any cost.
“To be or not to be.” For Shakespeare and the Supreme Court, that was and is the question. There is no other issue more emotionally, politically, or legally divisive in modern America than the future of abortion rights.
Many Americans thought the question was settled on January 22, 1973. That was the day the Supreme Court decided, by a seven-to-two margin, that it was unconstitutional for states to prohibit voluntary abortions before the third month of pregnancy; the decision also limited prohibitions that states might set during the second three months.
The decision grew out of a Texas case involving a woman who, out of desire to protect her privacy, was called Jane Roe in court papers. “Roe” was Norma McCorvey, a single woman living in Texas who became pregnant. She desired an abortion, but was unable to obtain one legally in her home state of Texas, and so she gave birth to a child she put up for adoption. Nonetheless, she brought suit against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade in an attempt to overturn the restrictive Texas abortion codes. The case ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which made the decision in the case known as
Roe v. Wade.
For sixteen years the
Roe
precedent influenced a series of rulings that liberalized abortion in America. To many Americans, the right to an abortion was a basic matter of private choice, a decision for the woman to make. But to millions of Americans,
Roe
was simply government-sanctioned murder.
The mostly conservative foes of legal abortion—who call their movement “pro-life”—gained strength in the 1980s, coalescing behind Ronald Reagan and contributing to his election. And it will ultimately be Reagan’s legacy through his appointments to the Supreme Court who determine the future of
Roe v. Wade.
In the summer of 1989, the Supreme Court decided five to four, in the case of
Webster v. Reproductive Health Services,
to give states expanded authority to limit abortion rights. The Court also announced that it would hear a series of cases that would give it the opportunity to completely overturn the
Roe
decision. (In 1998, McCorvey announced a conversion to Christianity and a complete break with the pro-choice movement. Henry Wade, the Dallas prosecutor she had sued and who also prosecuted Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, died in 2001.)
