by Bob Woodward
Nixon, Butterfield later recalled, “blew it because I gave him too much information. All my life I was told, ‘Don’t give them too much information, just give what they ask.’ ”
For Butterfield it was an important study in the consequences of the president’s words. What had meaning? What could he change with words? His Vietnam policy, of course. And what could he not change? The population statistics, of course. But the press and the world were focused on Vietnam. What were Nixon—and Kissinger—up to? Where were they going? And with what consequences? Were the strategy and the bombing working?
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There is only the thinnest of membranes separating the unnoticed, largely silent crime, and the one that explodes in the media defining the event if not an era.
Butterfield watched the president in November 1969 as he erupted over a series of press reports by journalist Seymour M. Hersh on the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers on a search and destroy mission. The attack was led by Army Lieutenant William L. Calley in a village that would become infamous as the scene of the best-documented Vietnam War crime—My Lai.
Anything of concern to Nixon automatically became important to Butterfield. Because Nixon was so fired up about My Lai and Hersh’s intense focus and the drumbeat of his reports, Butterfield gathered in his archive numerous documents about the case.
Nixon had learned about My Lai, though apparently not its full dimensions, two months before Hersh’s first story. Secretary of Defense Laird had laid it out to Nixon in a confidential two-page memo: “Subject: The My Lai Atrocity.
“The known facts leave no doubt about the necessity of prosecution. . . . Publicity attendant upon such a trial could prove acutely embarrassing to the United States. It might well affect the Paris peace talks and those nations opposed to our involvement in Vietnam will certainly capitalize upon the situation. Domestically, it will provide grist for the mills of antiwar activists.”
A confidential accompanying statement of facts stated that the investigation was triggered by Ronald L. Ridenhour, a former soldier, who wrote a letter to the secretary of defense on March 29, 1969, alleging the American military had committed atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. After a three-month Pentagon investigation, some of the details were reported in the Daily Report to the President on August 5, 1969. It was determined that on March 16, 1968, a large number of Vietnamese were killed, including “women and children.” It added, “The villagers were all unarmed and were offering no resistance.”
If publicized, this was a clear political threat to Nixon’s strategy of Vietnamization. The design was to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese while withdrawing most of the U.S. troops. Nixon said his goal was Peace with Honor. Both the Peace and Honor were threatened by the My Lai revelation. The massacre would stiffen the enemy’s spine and justify its resistance. The mass slaughter of Vietnamese civilians, women and children, demolished any notion of honor.
Haig, Kissinger’s deputy, sent internal Army and Pentagon memos labeled SENSITIVE to Butterfield. They consisted mainly of lists of names of 36 witnesses to the massacre. Hersh, then a freelance reporter, had crisscrossed the country to track down some of the witnesses.
His first article had run November 13, 1969, under the headline “Lieutenant Accused of Murdering 109 Civilians” in various newspapers. The story a week later was filled with first-person witnesses willing to be named, recounting what they had seen. Sergeant Michael Bernhardt was quoted telling Hersh, “The whole thing was so deliberate. It was point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it. . . . One, they were setting fire to the hootches and huts and waiting for people to come out and then shooting them. Two: They were going into the hootches and shooting them up. Three: They were gathering people in groups and shooting them. As I walked in, you could see piles of people all through the village. . . . It’s my belief that the company was conditioned to do this.”
Another witness, Michael Terry, said, “They had them in a group standing over a ditch—just like a Nazi-type thing. . . . We just treated them like animals.”
In his November 25 story, Hersh had the most potent witness, someone who had not only seen the massacre but participated in it. Hersh had located Paul Meadlo, 22, at his mother’s home in the farm community of West Terre Haute, Indiana. The on-the-record self-incrimination by Meadlo was horrifying.
“So we stood about 10 or 15 feet away from them, then he [Calley] started shooting them. Then he told me to start shooting them. . . . I started shooting them. I used more than a whole clip—actually I used four or five clips.” Hersh noted that there are 17 M-16 shells in a clip, and Meadlo estimated they killed 15 Vietnamese civilians in that one shooting spree. In all he said that he thought 370 had been massacred.
The killings, Meadlo said, “did take a load off my conscience for the buddies we’d lost. It was just revenge, that’s all it was.”
Though he said he believed he was acting on orders, Meadlo said he had haunting memories. “They didn’t put up a fight or anything. The women huddled against their children and took it. They brought their kids real close to their stomachs and hugged them, and put their bodies over them trying to save them. It didn’t do much good.”
Meadlo’s mother told Hersh, “I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer.”
Time and Newsweek ran cover stories on the massacre. Then television entered the fray. Meadlo appeared on a new CBS television show called 60 Minutes, interviewed by Mike Wallace.
“Do you ever dream about this?” Wallace asked.
“I still dream about it,” Meadlo answered. “I see the women and children in my sleep. Some nights I can’t even sleep. I just lay there thinking about it.”
Many who didn’t believe Hersh changed their minds overnight. Stephen Ambrose, a leading military historian, said, “My Lai and the way it was presented on television just shook me to my roots. My Lai was the single most shocking thing to come out of the Vietnam War for me.”
The White House had known for some time that former soldier Ronald Lee Ridenhour had first blown the whistle on the massacre. He had sent a three-page letter to not just the secretary of defense and the Army, but to two dozen others, including some U.S. senators.
Butterfield flew to Florida with Nixon on November 27 for Thanksgiving. How to counter the My Lai incident was very much on Nixon’s mind. Across three pages of notes on a yellow legal pad, Butterfield recorded the president’s action plan, a classic Nixon attack. The president’s comments were so potentially explosive that Butterfield immediately classified his notes Top Secret.
“Check out the Claremont man,” since Ridenhour had gone to Claremont Men’s College.
“Check all talkers,” Nixon said, referring to all those speaking out publicly. “The Army photographer—Cleveland P/D man sold material to Life and to C P/D,” references to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “How much?”
Nixon continued, “They’re vulnerable on two counts: A, photographer’s mother and dad are Cleveland peaceniks; B, Meadlo too smooth for a farmer.”
Butterfield noted that the president thought the Pentagon was “too scared to investigate adequately.
“Another vulnerable spot
— $ passed
— Claremont fellow Jewish
— (lib Jew)
“We need some ammo in the hands of some Senators. . . . We need a big senator—a gut fighter—a stand up senator.”
Perhaps envisioning a replay of his own crusade on the House Un-American Activities Committee, the president proposed “some congressman who could dig into this one on a personal basis. We can feed info to them.”
“Get backgrounds of all involved—all must be exposed—” and he repeated “Meadlo too smooth.” John Ehrlichman, the White House counsel, could get an investigation going.
“Extent to which it happened greatly exaggerated.
“Let’s check this Mike Wallace (60 Minutes) too. He’s fa
r left.
“Discredit witnesses, discredit Time and Life for using this. Get right-wingers with us.”
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Butterfield was in the president’s cabin on Air Force One returning from Florida on November 30 when Nixon again raised My Lai. Nixon voiced sympathy for the young lieutenant who had been on patrol in the village. Nixon was “a Calley advocate,” according to Butterfield.
“I think this fellow Calley,” Nixon told Butterfield, “he’s probably a good soldier. I think we’re rushing into this thing. He may be getting a bum rap.” Nixon said that this “Goddamn what’s-his-name” Ridenhour had squealed to Seymour Hersh. “We ought to get someone on that guy. What is that guy? Learn more about him.” John Ehrlichman, the White House counsel, had a network of investigators, Nixon added.
“Now when we get back, you check in with John. John’s got people that can get on this guy’s tail,” the president said. “Tell Ehrlichman, I want the guy tailed. I want to know everything about him, tail him, put a tail on him.”
Butterfield passed the orders to Ehrlichman.
“Okay, I’ll take care of it,” Ehrlichman said, and the White House gumshoe apparatus went to work. In a SECRET memo to the president dated December 17, Butterfield reported that Ridenhour “was discreetly interviewed by a confidential investigator posing as a news reporter.”
Jack Caulfield, a former New York City police detective who did investigative chores for Ehrlichman, was on the case.
One purpose was to establish the relationship between Ridenhour and Hersh, “the apparent driving force behind the non-government release of alleged massacre information.”
Butterfield’s report noted that Hersh was a former press secretary to Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar senator, and that Hersh had “received a $1,000 grant to pursue development of the My Lai story. The grant came from the Edgar B. Stern Family Fund which is clearly left-wing and anti-Administration.”
Ridenhour had felt that during his interview Hersh had implied he was a “government official,” according to the SECRET memo, and he was unhappy with Hersh for manipulating the story and making it appear that Ridenhour had conducted extensive interviews with My Lai participants and witnesses. Ridenhour said of Hersh, “He’s a no-good son of a bitch,” according to the memo.
Future action, Butterfield said in the memo, should include “Putting a good lawyer in touch with Ridenhour, with instructions to make the most of Ridenhour’s ‘bitter feeling’ toward Hersh.” In addition, he said they should look more into “the activities of Hersh and the Edgar B. Stern Family Fund.”
The White House investigating led nowhere. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize. Calley was eventually convicted of premeditated murder and given a life sentence. Nixon ordered Calley removed from the stockade and confined to his quarters, where he served only three years.
And My Lai did as much as anything to turn war-weary Americans against Vietnam.
Butterfield thought Nixon had responded defensively to what was clearly an atrocity. In his memoir Nixon wrote, “Calley’s crime was inexcusable,” but the critics “were not really as interested in the moral questions raised by the Calley case as they were interested in using it to make political attacks against the Vietnam war.”
He said that “maintaining public support for the armed services and for the war had to be given primary consideration.” It was why he ordered Calley to be released from the stockade and confined to his quarters on his base.
“The whole tragic episode was used by the media and the antiwar forces to chip away at our efforts to build public support for our Vietnam objectives and policies,” Nixon concluded.
In Vietnam today there is a My Lai Museum. Hersh visited it in early 2015 for The New Yorker and noted the names and ages of the victims listed on a marble plaque. The count of the dead is no longer in dispute: a total of 504 people from 247 families; 24 families lost everyone—three generations, no survivors. Included in the 504 were 60 elderly men, and 282 women (17 of whom were pregnant). A total of 173 children were killed; 53 were infants.
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On Christmas Eve 1969, the president toured the ground floor of the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. According to his daily log, he walked around for 18 minutes to wish employees a Merry Christmas. But later that evening, according to Butterfield, the president stopped into several of the offices of the White House support staff, the General Service employees or civil servants. He found something very disturbing. A number of offices prominently displayed pictures of the late president John F. Kennedy.
I want all those pictures down today, Nixon ordered Butterfield. “Down from the walls and off the desks. Jesus Christ! If we’ve got this kind of infestation imagine what [Secretary of State] Bill Rogers has at the State Department.”
Since his days as a congressman pursuing Communist and State Department official Alger Hiss, Nixon believed the department was full of liberal, left-leaning bureaucrats.
In one office, Nixon told Butterfield, he had found not just one but two pictures of President Kennedy. He wanted this cleaned up immediately. If necessary, to ensure across-the-board loyalty from support staff, he directed they must assign one of their own people, a political appointee, to every support office. Or, he told Butterfield, they should just get rid of the whole support staff.
“Abolish all offices and start over from scratch,” he said. He wanted what he called a proper “picture policy” but he didn’t want it blamed on him. Coming on the heels of his walk-through, he said, a sweeping order to take down all JFK pictures might be taken as “Presidentially directed.” Butterfield was to move discreetly, take the initiative on his own, give the president cover.
Allegiance should be to the sitting president, Nixon said, and forget past presidents or their favorite president.
Butterfield thought this was unreasonable but orders were orders and this one was clear. It was just another day at the office.
A week later, while the president spent New Year’s Day in San Clemente at the Western White House, Butterfield made his own inspection. Over the next two weeks they discovered that of the 35 offices, six had photographs of one or more former presidents. All of these also displayed Nixon pictures, as did 21 of the other offices. In eight offices he found no pictures of any president.
Butterfield spoke with Bill Hopkins, the senior civil servant and chief clerk of the White House who oversaw the support staff of some 400.
What a surprise, Butterfield told him, to discover that civilian government employees would display pictures of a past president in federal offices. Taking down the pictures of the former presidents, Butterfield argued, would only be a gesture of common courtesy to a current president and underscore their “pledged loyalty” to him.
Hopkins seemed to understand but he insisted none of his people were disloyal.
Make a detailed check of possible infractions, Butterfield said. He did not tell him the president was ordering this.
Haldeman weighed in with a January 14, 1970, memo to Butterfield: “The president would like you to check to find out who the woman is in the EOB who has the two Kennedy pictures. What’s her background . . . is she new, old, someone we can trust, etc. Please get a report back to me on this quickly.” Haldeman added a handwritten note: “This has now delayed nearly a month—and he asks about it once a week—at least. H”
The office with the two Kennedy pictures, Butterfield discovered, was occupied by Edna Rosenberg, who had served nearly 41 years on the White House staff—longer than anyone else. Butterfield checked her personnel file and found her described as a “completely loyal American whose character, reputation, and associations are above reproach” by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (Nixon’s old committee as a congressman), the Civil Service Commission’s Bureau of Personnel Investigation, the State Department and its Passport Office, the CIA, the Secret Service and the FBI.
Leaving nothing unchecked, Butterf
ield discovered that Rosenberg had remained single and lived with her sister in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Since a new official Nixon photo had just been printed, Butterfield instructed Bill Hopkins to see that everyone received one and in the process of hanging it on the wall made sure all others were taken down “in accordance with normal policy.”
By January 14 all 35 offices displayed only Nixon’s photograph.
Nixon wanted a progress report. This was followed by a note to Butterfield from Haldeman expressing more impatience. So on January 16, Butterfield outlined all that he had done in a two-page memo to the president entitled “Sanitization of the EOB.” The photographic legacy of JFK had been expunged.
As Butterfield also noted in his memo, the second half of the project was under way. That was, he wrote, “to ensure across-the-board loyalty of all White House Support Staff personnel even if we find it necessary to [as the president had directed] ‘abolish current office arrangements and start over from scratch.’ ” It would take him two to three days to screen all the personnel records, he said, but later he found that no purge would be necessary.
As he recalled, Butterfield said, “JFK represented the group that Nixon had a thing about, the privileged class. Nixon called them ‘those sons of bitches who had everything given to them.’ That was almost visceral with him. And Kennedy was the poster boy for that group.
“I felt that this resentment that we’re talking about for those that had it given to them, not only was it very intense, but was always with him. In other words, he didn’t just think about it now and then and erupt. It was always there. And the resentment, instead of dissipating with time, it seemed to intensify.
“You would think over time he would mellow. But not Richard Nixon.”
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“What the hell is the president of Harvard doing on the White House grounds?” Nixon asked Butterfield one day in the spring of 1972 buzzing for him. Butterfield could tell Nixon was really steamed. This called for immediate action.
