Friendly Fire (35 page)

“I don't believe that either. I think there are more troops there than that.”

“That's the figure,” Dole said.

“Okay then, eighty percent of that is two hundred thousand. Do you honestly believe you can get two hundred thousand troops out of there in two months?”

“I do.”

“Senator Dole, Nixon doesn't have the one hundred fifty thousand he promised out of there last April, yet,” Peg said. “He isn't even much over one hundred thousand.”

“I can't help that. That's what the President is going to do.”

“Well, your saying it doesn't make me nearly as ill as the fact that everybody simply sat there and listened to you. Nobody challenged you or said a word. I mean it burns me up that people sit and swallow that stuff and never ask a question. They don't know anyth—”

“Mrs. Mullen, I—”

“—ing, or maybe they don't care. But I've even got nuns over at the local parochial school reading antiwar books. Some of th—”

“Mrs. Mullen, I've got to go.”

“—old ones who didn't even know there was a war on, Senator. But the people of this nation will soon find out.…” Peg's voice trailed off. The Senator had hung up on her.

About this time the Mullens became convinced their telephone line was tapped. They had been suspicious ever since that summer when a lady had called Peg and asked, “What goes on at your house? I called you direct and got the third degree. Someone broke in on the line and wanted to know who I was, where I was calling from and so on. I've never had that happen before.”

The Mullens share a party line, and one of their neighbors, too, thought the line was tapped. Peg had laughed off the suggestion because she suspected the neighbor was just paranoid. On the last day of February, however, the Mullens received what they considered proof.

All that week Peg had been making tapes for radio stations to play in advance of President Nixon's March 1 visit to Des Moines. On these tapes Peg asked mothers and other concened citizens to join her in peaceful protest of the continuing Vietnam War and the recent Dewey Canyon II incursion into Laos.
*
Although American ground forces were forbidden by congressional ban to cross the border into Laos—a legislative action which had grown out of congressional and public outrage at the President's invasion of Cambodia ten months before—more than 20,000 South Vietnamese troops supported by U.S. Air Force B-52 bombers, Navy and Marine fighter-bombers, 2,600 U.S. helicopters and American artillery had launched an invasion into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh supply routes and Communist supply lines. On that last Sunday before the President's arrival, the Mullens received a great many telephone calls from other organizers, including several from the Another Mother for Peace group confirming their plans to visit the Mullen farm to make a short film. That evening Mary Mullen called her mother from Kansas City and suddenly asked, “Mother, what's the matter with your phone?”

Immediately they heard a man say, “Shut that thing off!”

“Mother, what is it?”

“Oh, it's just more of the same that goes on here all the time,” Peg said.

Later that same evening the Moratorium Committee telephoned from Des Moines. They told Peg that a young Iowa state representative planned to present a peace petition containing 15,000 signatures to President Nixon when he addressed the state legislature in Des Moines. The next day that young state representative was approached by the Secret Service and told if he even tried to move in his seat while the President spoke, he would be escorted out of the Capitol. The Moratorium Committee could not understand how advance word of the young man's plans had reached the Secret Service.

“I can tell you how,” Peg informed them later. “You mentioned over my telephone what you were going to do.”

The conversation with Peg Mullen was the only leak the Moratorium Committee could discover.

That Sunday night, moreover, during her phone call with her daughter Mary, there was a continuous click-click-click on Peg's telephone and Mary's voice would fade in and out. Peg wasn't surprised that her telephone might be tapped; Peg's experience with the government made such a violation of her civil rights seem absolutely natural and inevitable.
*
She simply shrugged it off and returned to painting the protest sign she would carry with her the next day during the President's visit: 55,000
DEAD,
300,000
WOUNDED
.
MY SON
,
JUST ONE
.

At eight o'clock, Monday morning, March 1, 1971, Peg Mullen left to rendezvous with the President of the United States in Des Moines. During the hour and a half drive to the state capital Peg could not shake the memory of that March 1 one year before. No crowds greeted Michael. No Secret Service guarded his body. No one cheered or waved a flag. No newspapers or posters marked the sacrifice he had made in the war.

Peg was anxious and depressed about participating in any public gathering protesting the United States. In spite of her abhorrence of Richard M. Nixon, she continued to hold his office in high esteem. Like her fellow Iowans, she had been brought up to believe in the inherent goodness of the United States. Respect for the presidency dies hard … but it dies.

Peg, too, felt a fierce elation that she was directly to confront the one man who, to her, epitomized the dark forces which had taken her son. She wanted to stand before Nixon face-to-face, wanted him to see her sign, feel her rage. She dared even hope she might speak to him, tell the President exactly what she thought.

When Peg, carrying her sign, reached the snow-covered lawn in front of the Statehouse, where the President was scheduled to speak, she was relieved to see not only young people there. There were farmers from Iowa, South Dakota, Missouri, Nebraska, their wives and children and even some elderly grandmothers. Although Peg realized many of them had come not to protest the war but simply to see the President or to protest some farm or labor legislation which they felt should or should not have been passed, she was comforted by their presence. The President, his advisers and the press would find it hard to ignore so large a turnout of middle-aged Americans.

Protest signs were everywhere. The labor groups' signs reflected their resentment at administration efforts to keep their wages low. The farmers were bitter about the years of hardship they had put into their farms without profits of any kind. But the majority of placards were peace signs, protest banners, Another Mother for Peace posters reading
WAR IS UNHEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS
.

Peg positioned herself on the steps leading to the west entrance to the Statehouse and looked down Walnut Avenue, the street selected as the President's route. It was practically deserted. Where were the flag wavers, the greeters who might normally have been expected to provide a huge turnout for whatever visit an American President might make to a Midwestern state? Did the poor attendance reflect the cold or the President's lack of support? President Nixon, Peg felt, had demonstrated how little he cared for what the people thought; perhaps the people were showing how little they thought of him. The President would certainly know what
she
felt. There would be no way for him to climb those steps without passing directly by Peg Mullen and her sign.

Peg heard, before she could see, the President's motorcade. The motorcycle outriders were the first to come into view, followed by a Secret Service automobile, the huge black bulletproof presidential limousine and another Secret Service automobile. Suddenly it became clear that the President would not be arriving at the west entrance as announced, and the crowds, angry and frustrated, surged around the Capitol to reach the other side. By the time the protesters reassembled the President had already disappeared within.

During the next thirty minutes, while the President addressed the assembled Iowa legislators and the young state representative with the peace petition remained motionless in his seat, the protesters outside stamped their feet and blew into their hands to keep warm. Union representatives, farmers, clergymen, antiwar spokesmen took turns addressing the crowd, but the speakers were soon drowned out by the young gathered along the police barricades, who had pushed as close as possible to the President's parked car. They were chanting,
“One-Two-Three-Four, We don't want your FUCKING WAR!”
Peg winced at the obscenity, not only for herself but for the older people there.

The east doors opened, and Secret Service men emerged. The President was preparing to leave. Peg dreaded what might happen. If Nixon went into one of his typical arm-waving V signs, there was no predicting what this cold and angry crowd might do. Peg had abandoned any hope of actually confronting the President; when he had been driven to the east entrance instead of the west, she had lost her vantage point of being near where he would pass.

As Nixon started to raise his arms in salute, a roar of outrage climbed the steps toward him. The President jerked his arms down as if stung and was swiftly hustled by the Secret Service into the presidential car. Peg was surprised to find herself shocked that the President had been booed. She herself, stilled by some apparent, hidden reserve, had not uttered a word. Half amused, half angry, she watched the President's automobile depart while the younger protesters flung snowballs after it.

Peg walked slowly away from the Statehouse. She decided to follow the crowds to the President's next stop, the Hotel Fort Des Moines. Upon her arrival she discovered the entire north wall of the hotel was lined with more protesters. Again, they were of all ages, and many carried private messages on hand-painted signs. Peg was distracted by the presence of an ambulance parked at the hotel's front entrance. A chief of state's appearance now generated an all too familiar dread. One could not witness a presidential motorcade without remembering what had occurred in Dallas eight years before. American tragedy had written itself a new score with music provided by electric generator trucks, winding down jet engines, reporters' motor-driven reflex cameras, hot arc lights hissing in gentle, misty rains. Peg forced herself to look away.

More and more people were arriving. The crowds spilled over onto adjoining blocks. The young began chanting again,
“One-Two-Three-Four, We don't want your FUCKING WAR!”
Some of the older people joined in. The chanting had grown so loud Peg was certain it could penetrate the thick walls of whichever conference room contained the President. All about Peg stood the farmers with stern, worn, weather-etched faces, and their middle-aged women, some wearing veils of mourning.

Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, Peg saw something white arc out of the crowd toward the hotel entrance. At first she thought it was another snowball or a wad of paper. But Peg saw the next egg clearly. The photographers quickly moved to get their shots. Peg wondered how many of them might be from the FBI. She twisted about to see if she recognized any of the cameramen from her Moratorium Day speech in Waterloo. When she turned back toward the hotel, the police had started moving into the crowd.

A line of policemen carrying a length of 1-by-14-inch lumber as a wedge was heading toward where Peg stood. “Move back! Move back!” the police were shouting. “Clear the street!” Peg was pushed backward against a street barricade and pinned. As much out of defense as defiance she held her sign out toward the advancing police. She wondered if this was how it had started at Kent State. A plainclothesman grabbed her sign, and Peg, feeling the rush of adrenalin, held on. They began to wrestle. In Peg's mind the confrontation choreographed itself into a symbolic ballet. The sign, held high, became her own son, her vision of America; the plainclothesman became the government's imperturbable façade. At last Peg was fighting an enemy she could see and touch. She made up her mind that no power on earth could make her release her poster. The plainclothesman unexpectedly lifted his right arm and smashed Peg across the face with his elbow. Peg's vision blurred, her knees buckled, but she didn't fall, couldn't fall because she was still trapped against the street barricade. Two young student marshalls rushed forward to assist her. They took Peg's arms and begged her to move back for her own sake, but she shook them off. Still furious, shivering with tension and rage, she defied the plainclothesman to strike her again. “Next time there will be a thousand mothers like me,” she shouted at him. “A thousand! Not just one!”

“Lady,” the man said wearily, “would you please just move back?”

Peg, still panting from fright and exertion, knew from the man's tone that his hitting her hadn't been anything personal, that he had a job to do. He was there to protect the President insulated deep within the hotel. The plainclothesman's attitude was all too understandable. It was the same dispassionate sentiment with which the government had reacted to the death of her son. The plainclothesman was typical; that was what so frustrated Peg. What did it take to make Michael's death, his family's grief and bitterness, meaningful to people like him?

Peg saw that there was something symbolic, too, about this President's visit to the heartland. In a speech delivered at Kansas State not long before, President Nixon had told his audience, “The heart of America is sound.… The heart of America is good.…” How could he know? He remained hidden behind barricades, behind sturdy hotel walls, behind barriers of bumper-to-bumper buses, armored steel and bulletproof cars. Did he not look outside because he didn't want to see? Was he unaware that everywhere he went Americans were being roped off, pushed back, struck, driven away? On this visit to the heartland, had he looked, the President would have seen Peg Mullen punched, seen the middle-aged woman standing next to Peg dragged backward by her hair. He would have seen some other American rush to the woman's aid, knock the plainclothesman away and carry the woman to safety inside the Firestone Building. The President would have seen the weeping, near-hysterical older woman shouting that she'd seen it all in Germany forty years before. Peg, safely out of the path of the police, glared up at the hotel's brick facade.