The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  Finally there came a familiar Hollywood image: a tall, handsome man in a Stetson. But the still was from Midnight Cowboy, and the camera pulled back to show that the titular cowboy was hugging a shrunken and disheveled Jewish man, and Barbara Walters explained it signified the new Hollywood trend “toward dealing openly with homosexuality.”

  Assassinations and attempted assassinations: Malcolm X. Martin Luther King. Robert F. Kennedy. George Wallace.

  Fashion: “Unisex—remember that word. . . .”

  Some ninety minutes later, two chin-stroking penseurs were asked by the stern-voiced anchorman what was the most profound change the POWs faced. Answered the editor of Intellectual Digest: “For the first time Americans have had at least a partial loss in the fundamental belief in ourselves. We’ve always believed we were the new men, the new people, the new society. The ‘last best hope on earth,’ in Lincoln’s terms. For the first time, we’ve really begun to doubt it.”

  THIS PRETENSE THAT SOME SIX hundred POWs newly returned to their families would want to waste two hours of their lives learning about the latest slang from Gene Shalit felt a little bit fantastic. But the ritual was not for them. It was for us—all those Americans doubting for the first time that America might just not be the last best hope on earth. “Having missed much of the destructiveness of these past few years,” one letter writer to the Washington Post exulted, they had “preserved a vision of the way America ought to be.” As if these men might somehow be able to mystically deliver us across the bridge of years—to the time before the storm. It was their gift to us.

  On the CBS Evening News the same day as that Today show, a lovely bride was seen with a man in officer’s dress, a wedding march pealing forth from the organ. Walter Cronkite narrated:

  “Dorothy said her husband’s return was like a resurrection, and that for her it was like a new life beginning. So she went out and bought an all-new white wedding gown. And Dorothy and Johnny Ray reaffirmed the marriage vow they first made four and a half years ago.”

  (Cut to ten seconds on the long white train of her gown, then the cross above the altar; fifteen seconds of him slipping on the wedding ring.)

  “It was a short, simple ceremony.”

  (Kiss, organ, recessional.)

  “Captain and Mrs. Johnny Ray will soon be home to their three children in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma. David Dick, CBS News at the post chapel, Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas.”

  That was one sort of homecoming story. Here was another: at Balboa Naval hospital, where many POWs convalesced, a wife later told an oral historian, “It was like the Spanish Inquisition. Everyone asked how the wives had behaved. I could hear beatings in some rooms. A lot of women had been swinging.”

  Certain outlets told many similar stories—like the “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, which in 1878 had scolded the “small and suspicious circles” who dared suggest the Civil War had not ended America’s racial ordeal. The Times was a very different institution almost a century later. Most American institutions were very different from what they had been even a decade before. For the small and suspicious circles had expanded exponentially.

  On its front page on February 5 you could meet Alice Cronin, dressed in faded hip-hugging bell-bottomed jeans and no shoes, smoking cigarettes, hair flopping loose, posing outside her San Diego home as movers unloaded the fashionable puffy white leather couch she bought “for the return of her husband, a Navy pilot held by Hanoi for six years.” She was worried: “Mike married a very traditional wife. . . . Now my ideas and values have changed. . . . I can’t sit home and cook and clean house. I’m very career oriented, and I just hope he goes along and agrees with that . . . he’s missed out on a lot—liking a more casual lifestyle, being nonmaterialistic.” She hoped he understood why she didn’t trust a single thing the administration said about Vietnam. She also hoped he would go along with something else: “shifting sexual mores, the whole thing about relationships not necessarily being wrong outside of marriage. I know myself really well sexually, and he’s missed out on a good deal of that.”

  She was contrasted to Sybil Stockdale, a classic by-the-book officer’s wife, who spoke from “her sunny kitchen,” where she was busy mending the rug left over when her husband, James Stockdale, the highest-ranking Navy POW, took off for his first bombing mission over the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. For his return, she explained, “I want the living room to look the same.”

  There were two groups of POW wives, Alice Cronin explained. “I’m definitely in the second group.” There were, by 1973, two groups of just about everything. Two kinds of POW reports, for instance. Some played up the sentimental rituals of reconciliation. An example of the other kind ran on NBC—cutting from Operation Homecoming footage at Travis Air Force Base to the hospital bed of a sad-eyed, fidgety Marine private, paralyzed from the waist down, complaining, “We were kind of snuck in the back door.”

  Newspapers in small towns like Bend, Oregon; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Lewiston, Maine, ran with the Navy’s press release about the poetry written in captivity by a Navy commander in tribute to the “women who wait at home” (“Are not these women, of men gone to war / The unsung heroes, today as before. . . .”). But in the New York Times, columnists like Tom Wicker rued “the warped sense of priorities on the home front” that allotted so much more attention to “these relatively few POW’s than the 50,000 dead boys who came home in body bags, some of them with smuggled heroin obscenely concealed in their mangled flesh,” and “for whom the only bracelet is a band of needle marks.” He noted that the administration had frozen funding for treatment for drug-addicted veterans and in its fiscal 1974 budget proposed to arbitrarily limit the allowable number of patients in veterans hospitals. Meanwhile the Times editorialized that in the “succession of hand salutes, stiffly prepared statements, medical bulletins, and canned handouts concerning the joys of steak and ice cream” of Operation Homecoming, the “hard-won lessons of Vietnam are in danger of being lost.” Which, on the merits, was sound editorial judgment. For that had been Richard Nixon’s intention for the POW issue from the start.

  When American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam, U.S. policy had been pretty much to ignore them—part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile escalation from the public. The enemy, though, preferred publicity—which was why, in June 1966, they announced to the world these pilots would be put on trial as “air pirates,” and paraded them through Hanoi past jeering crowds for the cameras on the Fourth of July. In 1967 the first American flier was tortured into appearing on film to say he was being treated humanely. Also in 1967, the first American peace activists visited North Vietnam, documented widespread civilian carnage, and returned with a devastating argument: The Pentagon claimed its laser-guided bombs were the most accurate in the history of warfare. But if that was true, pilots had to know they were targeting civilian areas—and if that was false, then who knew what else the Pentagon was lying about?

  A war of position emerged, peaceniks versus the Pentagon, with the POWs tossed about like political footballs. Communist officials began releasing to antiwar activists small numbers of prisoners who had arrived at doubts about the war. The Pentagon worked to silence them. Meanwhile, Sybil Stockdale organized, against the Pentagon’s wishes, a “League of Wives of American Prisoners of War” (later the National League of Families of Prisoners of War), which agitated for attention to the prisoners’ plight. From two directions at once, Johnson’s attempt to play down the existence of hundreds of American prisoners came a cropper. And in 1969, the new Republican president had spied in the dilemma a political opportunity.

  One day in the first spring of Richard Nixon’s presidency, reporters at a routine Pentagon briefing perked up when the Secretary of Defense himself, Melvin Laird, took the podium. He confirmed the existence of from 500 to 1,300 of what he termed “POW/MIAs.” This was new phraseology, partly cynical and strategic:
downed fliers not confirmed as actual prisoners used to be classified not as “Missing in Action” but “Body Unrecovered.” Soon the administration began referring to these 1,300 as if they were, every one of them, actually prisoners. “The North Vietnamese claimed they were treated humanely,” Secretary Laird intoned gravely. “I am distressed by the fact that there is clear evidence that this is not the case.”

  It was the American public’s introduction to these men. Laird demanded that the enemy reveal their names, send home the sick and wounded, and allow impartial inspections and free exchange of mail—the Geneva Conventions, he announced, required no less. “Most importantly, we seek the prompt release of all American prisoners,” he said, before launching into an emotional peroration about the enemy’s cruelty: “Hundreds of American wives, children, and parents continue to live in a tragic state of uncertainty caused by the lack of information concerning the fate of their loved ones.”

  The North Vietnamese officials’ astonishment was like that of the British officer after the Great War who, witnessing the way America trampled on logic and good military order to get its troops home first, remarked, “How odd it is that only American boys have mothers.” These Vietnamese men had lost children themselves—to American bombers that by their lights flew in plain defiance of the most basic Geneva Convention requirements: that wars be declared, that civilians be spared. They had seen schools, hospitals, farmers’ fields obliterated. They had lined streets with mile after mile of underground concrete cylinders in which Hanoi residents cowered every time they heard the approaching airborne hum. They answered Secretary Laird that they would not so much as give out prisoners’ names “as long as the United States does not cease its war of aggression and withdraw its troops from Vietnam.”

  For Nixon, this was a political boon. A Washington Post editorial enshrined the bomber pilots as pluperfect victims: “It is hard to see how so retrograde a response advances the interests of any government that seeks to present itself to the world as fair and humane.” The Pentagon and State Department sent forth public relations cadres and co-opted Sybil Stockdale’s embryonic League of Wives of American Prisoners of War, sometimes inventing chapters outright. When Hanoi announced on July 4—a favorite day for Communist propaganda aimed at international opinion—that North Vietnam would be releasing more prisoners to antiwar activists, the Pentagon reversed its ban on its members speaking to the press. Images of families without fathers began showing up in the weekly picture magazines—martyrs to an enemy so devious, as the Armed Forces Journal put it, they denied hundreds of little boys and girls “a right to know if their fathers were dead or alive.” Their North Vietnamese captors, yet more astonished, reflected on the tens of thousands of prisoners whom America’s South Vietnamese allies kept likewise incommunicado, and redoubled their defiance.

  On Labor Day, 1969, the campaign intensified: the Pentagon put two freed prisoners behind a press conference podium, where they described solitary confinement in dark stone rooms, beatings, bodies bound in cruel contortions for hours with straps and ropes. They added cinematic embellishments: that POW Fred Cherry had been hung from the ceiling by his broken arm, which became so infected he almost lost it (on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base four years later, it became plain Cherry’s arm was in fact perfectly intact); that Navy flier Richard Stratton had had his fingernails pried loose (they weren’t). The timing was strategic: a peace group had just reported back on the treatment of prisoners by our South Vietnamese allies, in prison camps designed and built by us; they were manacled to the floor in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages,” many merely for the crime of advocating peace, but the American military’s advisor had described these prisons as being like “a Boy Scout recreation camp.”

  At the peace talks in Paris, the “POW issue” became the cornerstone of Nixon’s stalling tactics to settle the war on his preferred terms—another astonishment for the North Vietnamese: in previous wars, the disposition of prisoners had been something settled following the cessation of hostilities. Meanwhile, stateside, a dialectic unfolded: whenever the public showed signs of turning away en masse in disgust from the war, the martyrs in the Hanoi Hilton were symbolically marched to the foreground, their suffering families walking point.

  At Christmastime, precisely one month after investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed the My Lai Massacre, POW wives were invited to stand mute beside the president in the Oval Office while he lied that “this government will do everything that it possibly can to separate out the prison issue and have it handled as it should be, as a separate issue on a humanitarian basis.” On Christmas Eve, three airliners leased by Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot lifted off. One, christened “The Spirit of Christmas,” bore fifty-eight POW wives and ninety-four of their children to demand a meeting with Communist negotiators in Paris. The others, christened “Peace on Earth” and “Goodwill Toward Men,” tried to deliver thirty tons of Christmas dinners, holiday gifts, clothing, and medical supplies directly to the prisoners in Hanoi. (In Paris, the wives were lectured on truths stern-faced North Vietnamese diplomats considered self-evident: that the way to free their husbands was to prevail upon their government to stop the futile and sadistic terror bombing of North Vietnam, for which there was no sanction in international law. A wife asked: “What should I tell my son, age nine, when he asks where is my father and when is he coming home?” An apparatchik responded: “Tell him his father is a murderer of North Vietnamese children and that he is being punished.” The wives emerged too shattered to speak to the press.)

  In spring 1970, which bloomed in the shadow of the expansion of the ground war into Cambodia and the martyrdom of four college students at Kent State University in Ohio, seven hundred POW/MIA relatives were flown to Washington at taxpayer expense for a rally hosted by the Daughters of the American Revolution and funded by defense contractors. Ross Perot testified before Congress of the North Vietnamese’s incredulity at all this concern over “just 1,400 men.” (Americans were plainly more morally sensitive than Communists.) He then relayed how, when they told him of hospital wards shattered by American bombs, he promised to pay to rebuild them himself, as if that solved the problem. The first POW bracelets were unveiled at that spring’s annual “Salute to the Military” ball in Los Angeles. Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan presided, and Hollywood choreographer LeRoy Prinz, who had worked with Reagan on the 1944 film Hollywood Canteen, directed the grand cavalcade.

  By then, Jonathan Schell of the New Yorker observed, the American people were acting “as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.” Matchbooks, lapel pins, billboards, T-shirts, and bumper stickers (“POWs NEVER HAVE A NICE DAY!”) proliferated; fighter jets made thunderous football stadium fly-bys; full-page ads blossomed in every newspaper, urging Hanoi to have a heart and release the prisoners for the sake of the children. “They just dig holes in the ground and drop them in,” one wife explained to a magazine of her understanding of the Hanoi Hilton. “They throw food down to them, and let them live there in their waste.” She was confused. In fact she was precisely describing how prisoners were treated in South Vietnam, as revealed in a stunning photo essay from the American-built prison camp at Con Son Island in a July 1970 issue of Life.

  Here was how the Vietnam War had deformed America: by making such intellectual distortion systematic—a “lunatic semiology,” as a wise historian later described it, where “sign and referent have scarcely any proportionate relation at all.” It was one of the reasons the suspicious circles began expanding exponentially, even into the ranks of POW families themselves—who reasoned that if Nixon said there would be war so long as there were prisoners, and the Communists said there would be prisoners so long as there was war, as Tom Wicker wrote, “we may keep both troops and prisoners there forever.”

  In 1971, the summer the Times published the Pentagon Papers, revealing in the government’s own hand that most of what the Am
erican people had been told about Vietnam for twenty-five years had been lies, a rump group of antiwar wives broke off from Sybil Stockdale’s League of Families, demanding the White House stop treating their husbands as “political hostages.” They appeared on platforms with Jane Fonda and John Kerry, wrote letters to the president demanding “a complete troop withdrawal NOW!” and seconded the nomination of 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, who pledged to remove all American forces from Vietnam within sixty days of his inauguration.

  But Richard Nixon said that this would be surrender, and that Americans did not surrender. He won his reelection mandate, 61 percent and forty-nine states. Seventy-eight days later he triumphantly announced “peace with honor.” His critics argued there had been no honor: that the terms he had arrived at were the same ones on the table when Lyndon Johnson began peace negotiations in 1968—purchased at the expense of 15,183 more American dead and four million more tons of American ordnance over North and South Vietnam. The evening news, meanwhile, showed skirmishes still breaking out in all three Southeast Asian nations, and American bombing runs continuing into Cambodia, where the government had almost ceased to function despite hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid—it sounded a little like South Vietnam ten years earlier. The story the administration was telling about prisoners of war was instrumental to how it was attempting to occlude these facts.

  The POWs returned. God bless America. Let the healing begin.

  FOUR HUNDRED PHOTOGRAPHERS, CAMERAMEN, JOURNALISTS, and support staff encamped at Clark Air Base in the Philippines to cover the return. Then they learned their contact with the heroes would be third-hand and censored—the better to preserve the men’s health, the Pentagon insisted, though according to the telegram the New York Times fired off to the secretary of defense “they were healthy enough to eat anything, horse around in the hospital, go shopping, see movies, and talk to virtually everyone else who runs into them.” So why couldn’t they speak with reporters? The Los Angeles Times printed the concerns of a sociology professor: “The last thing the Pentagon wants is the inevitable necessity of the public—via its surrogate, the press—confronting these men and discussing, in however imperfect form, the war they wasted their years upon.” Then, the explanation shifted: access to POWs would be limited to protect their privacy. The New York Times responded to that on the news pages: “They did not say, however, why the prisoners would be placed under orders forbidding public statements if they wanted to make them.” Then the Times reported a Pentagon policy that civilian POWs would be given medical treatment only if they agreed not to talk to the press.