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

by Rick Perlstein

  Camp griots memorized the name of every prisoner they heard of, passing on stories of valor from cell to cell and camp to camp: legends upon which to build a resistance. “Everybody says we had nothing to do,” one of the returnees explained. “But we did have something to do . . . resist the North Vietnamese attempts to exploit us . . . the only weapons were our bodies and our pain.” Resistance, the more futile the better, became the way they gave meaning to their lives.

  “How the POWs Fought Back,” U.S. News headlined McCain’s essay. “Fighting back” was the way, as Captain James Mulligan said, “we walked out of Hanoi as winners.” In time the “we” became collective, expanding out to encompass the nation—which hadn’t really lost the war at all. The POWs’ survival proved it.

  Nixon spent more and more time working on Operation Homecoming, precisely in proportion to his mounting Watergate troubles. He fiddled with the prose of a presidential proclamation and the design for a POW medal; he micromanaged the sending of corsages to all the POWs’ wives (he specified the name and the address of the florist in Hawaii) and the planning for a White House gala on May 24. “They could have a great impact on the destiny of this country,” he explained to an aide on April 11, the day the Washington Post’s lead story was “Mitchell Aide Got $70,000 of Bug Fund,” and an arrest of twenty-one youths went down in Cincinnati “when a policeman noticed marijuana smoke ‘hanging over the neighborhood like a cloud. . . . There was marijuana fudge in the oven. They were boiling marijuana on the stove in tea bags and they had some burning in the fireplace. It was going up the chimney and we could smell it all over the neighborhood.’ ”

  It was also baseball’s opening day. A POW named Charlie Plumb threw out the first pitch at the new Royals Stadium in Kansas City. He had prayed silently from the pitcher’s mound: “Dear God, help me put this one down the chute.” He fired a strike, and felt as if the ovation that followed lifted the stadium three feet off the ground. Here was the sort of veneration reserved for saviors: men whose suffering might wash away a nation’s sins.

  THE SUSPICIOUS CIRCLES REMAINED APPALLED by Operation Home-coming. The American Psychological Association on April 11 put out a statement complaining that the POWs had been exploited “in an elaborate drama staged to provide justification for the President’s policy, to create the illusion of victory and to arouse a sense of patriotic fervor.” The New York Times reported on a citizen’s inquiry into Vietnam war crimes in which a witness recalled seeing an Army major gun down thirty-three women, children, and old men from his helicopter. Jane Fonda went on the news in Los Angeles: “The condition of the returning prisoners should speak for itself to prove the men have not been tortured,” she said. “I think the only way that we are going to redeem ourselves as a country for what we have done there is not to hail the pilots as heroes, because they are hypocrites and liars.” And wasn’t it suspicious that the prisoners who most vociferously claimed torture were the ones with the highest military rank? “We have no reason to believe that U.S. Air Force officers tell the truth,” she said. “They are professional killers.” It made her persona non grata in places like Georgia, where the showing of her movies was outlawed. In 1973, the Maryland Legislature proposed what would have been the first bill of attainder in its history to ban Fonda from the state and grant the government power to seize all money made from her films. “I wouldn’t go so far as to execute her, but I think we should cut her tongue off,” one legislator argued.

  But plenty of ordinary Americans thought what she said made sense. They could point to the constant affirmations of Pentagon spokesmen all through February and March of the “obvious good physical health” of the returnees, that they evinced only “a few instances of mild situation adjustment problems which required family counseling.” They could point out the absurdity of Nixon and his supporters’ justification for the “Christmas bombings”: if it had been done to free the prisoners, what to make, then, of the fact that the bombings themselves created more POWs than had been captured in the years 1969, 1970, and 1971 combined?

  And they could point out, in the face of the orgy of jingoistic discourse about an enemy whose cruelty knew no bounds, that however ugly the treatment of American POWs might have been, the treatment of prisoners by our South Vietnamese allies was exponentially worse. “The contrast . . . between our happy and apparently healthy POWs and the ‘grotesque sculptures of scarred flesh and gnarled limbs’ who have been ‘politically reeducated’ by Mr. Thieu,” a Time letter writer said, “might make one more prayer of thanksgiving in order: ‘Dear God, thank you for allowing me to be captured by the enemy, and not by the friends I was sent to fight for.’ ”

  BEHIND THE DEBATE LAY EXTRAORDINARY complexity. The philosopher Alistair Horne has written, “It is one of the most difficult things in this world to establish the truth about torture; whether it did or did not take place, and the nature and scale of it.” No torturer, in the centuries-long annals of the practice, ever admits that what he is doing is torture, and the North Vietnamese were no exception: they saw the way they treated their prisoners as a quasi-juridical attempt to prosecute criminals—“air pirates”—violating the Geneva Conventions. At the same time, “The plaintiff is as unlikely to tell the unadorned truth as his oppressor; for [to credibly claim torture] is so superlative a propaganda weapon given into his hands.”

  That weapon was deployed by the U.S. government constantly, in its claim that the enemy’s torture was world-historically cruel. It was not. The tormenters themselves had learned their techniques from the French, as captives in the very prisons they now commanded. Jeremiah Denton demonstrated them in photographs that accompanied his series of AP interviews: suspension upside down for hours at a time; solitary confinement lasting months or even years—and what the POWs called the “rope trick,” which in the Spanish Inquisition was known as the corda and celebrated as “the queen of torments,” and which reappeared in the twenty-first century in the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

  The complexity was compounded by conflicts within the POW community itself. North Vietnam was a war-ravaged nation struggling to throw off what it saw as a barbarian invasion, to heal the humiliation of death from the skies, to rouse its collective will to defeat a much more powerful adversary (which, by all accounts, North Vietnam did extraordinarily well). That required a tool of modern statecraft: propaganda. A surrendered, humiliated enemy saying exactly what the regime wanted him to say was the most powerful propaganda tool they possessed. Reason enough for any loyal, self-respecting American flier to resist, and to understand his own resistance as a contribution to military victory. But the queen of torments could not be resisted for long—even the most macho top gun soon learned that. Which introduced complications.

  As soon as the enemy’s enhanced interrogation methods became systematic, the ranking POWs devised ways to adjust the draconian strictures of their Code of Conduct and still be able to live with themselves. The first loosening, put out by tap code by Denton late in 1965, allowed soldiers to give the minimum of cooperation required to make it stop once they couldn’t stand it anymore. In time the allowances became more elaborate—a bizarre efflorescence of high military bureaucracy in dank concrete cells, complete with a Pentagon-style acronym, “BACK US.” One bright line: prisoners were never allowed to confess to crimes. This was war. The torture room was an extension of the battlefield. Americans would walk out of Hanoi as winners—so long as they mustered the heroic will never, ever, to confess crimes.

  And within the camps, that doctrine set off an American civil war.

  A flier named Richard Stratton reasoned that making up some harmless confession was preferable to making a substantive confession after passing out from pain. So he let himself be filmed making one so absurd the North Vietnamese were humiliated around the world when they released the film. Stratton considered that a victory. His “commanding officers” called it treason—defiance of a direct military order. So they issued another: ost
racize Stratton. Some prisoners judged that too nonsensical to take seriously. So two camps evolved, pragmatists and hard-liners. The pragmatists called the hard-liners zombies and masochists. Some became friends with their guards. But such indiscipline shook the very foundation of the hard-liners’ self-esteem, built under the most trying circumstances imaginable. And by 1968, a place that was represented five years later as an example of simple, stout-hearted American patriotism began displaying the same recriminatory divisions as the society from which it emerged.

  Then a new generation of prisoners began arriving in the camps, ones who agreed with the new arguments back home about the war’s illegality and futility. “There’s no glory or honor in Vietnam,” a crusty old colonel told one of them, Edison Miller, a promising young flier being groomed for general and shot down in 1967. “Don’t go over there and get your ass killed because that’s a lousy stinking war.” Some were not fliers at all: they were grunts. And while fliers wore clean socks and punched buttons at thirty thousand feet, and were career officers whose military honor (or simple career ambition) protected them from doubt, ground pounders knew enough to consider the war a shameful waste from their personal experience alone.

  And then, in 1969, for reasons never quite understood, something else occurred to unmoor the hard-liners’ carefully wrought identity as warriors: torture inexplicably stopped, never to return. Solitary confinement ended, too. Prisoners now inhabited a single communal jail, and its exercise yard included a basketball hoop, Ping-Pong table, pool, and communal barbecue pit—one reason the POWs returned looking so hale and hearty. For the hard-liners, there was no more war to give meaning to their suffering. So they invented superfluous occasions for conflict. When their captors limited church services to eight men at a time, for example, they went on a two-day hunger strike, bellowing choruses of “The Star Spangled Banner” all the while. For the anti–hard-liners—especially the Army GIs who’d been captured by the Vietcong and held in Spartan camps in the South Vietnamese jungle, and considered the “Hanoi Hilton” a comparative paradise—the John Wayne sound-alikes attempting to instill military discipline became outright enemies. Some declared loyalty to the antiwar movement. On Mother’s Day 1970, Edison Miller released a statement to the world: “Today America’s mothers must face the fact that their sons are killing fellow human beings and destroying foreign countries for an unjust cause, making our actions not only illegal but immoral.” Then he made a tape with another antiwar POW, Navy Commander Robert Schweitzer, arguing there was no need to follow the Code of Conduct because it didn’t apply in an illegal war. They began organizing their fellows into a “Peace Committee.” The gossamer simulacrum of good military order assembled by a valorous band of brothers disintegrated into an undisciplined chaos. Their “Battle of Hanoi” was being lost—by the enemy within. They themselves had said unpatriotic things over North Vietnamese radio, but only under torture. People like Miller (who argued that one of the reasons he was so hated was that he had stood up to torture better than they) did so voluntarily. His adversaries were men who had been racked by years of guilty sleepless nights for the simple act of giving their torturers more than their name, rank, and serial number—and feared they would be court-martialed upon their return for doing only that. At that thought, some ambitious spit-and-polish career officers seemed to snap.

  Jim Stockdale had been flying his fighter-bomber over the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2, 1964, when he witnessed the fact that the attack by which Lyndon Johnson created the pretext to begin the Vietnam War had not actually taken place at all. After he was shot down he came to understand this knowledge as enforcing upon him an overwhelming and awesome patriotic duty: to stand up to torture so manfully that the enemy could never extract from him the secret that would shame the United States in the eyes of the world. As his Congressional Medal of Honor citation explained, “He deliberately inflicted a near-mortal wound to his person in order to convince his captors of his willingness to give up his life rather than capitulate”—the first and only Medal of Honor awarded for a suicide attempt. He drew up new “Command Goals” that put constructing a coherent, heroic story upon their return—and debunking the stories told by the traitors—at its center. (They still sent their messages in code, which now concluded, “RWHSWDGBU!”—“Release with honor, stick with Dick, God bless you!”)

  After the Christmas bombings, the Peace Committee released a New Year’s statement: “We strongly appeal to the members of Congress to exercise all your legal and moral power to bring about peace. . . . This statement is made by those who know that more delay can only increase the suffering, lengthen our confinement, and aggravate the well-being of the country which we serve.”

  At that, a hard-liner named Theodore Guy, calling their message “insubordination on the battlefield,” drew up a military plan to “liquidate them.”

  Then they finally all arrived home. That freed hard-liners like John McCain and Jeremiah Denton to tell their stories. And Peace Committee members like Walter Wilber to tell theirs. He went on 60 Minutes and asked what was wrong about saying the same things about the Vietnam War that senators like Ted Kennedy and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield did. He called it a matter of patriotism: “Because I’m a military officer doesn’t reduce my citizenship rights a bit; in fact it just emphasizes them. . . . I do believe the First Amendment—the right to free speech—applies wherever I am in the world.” A twenty-seven-year-old POW named John Young said, “I was an American first, and I decided it was my duty to speak out.”

  But two of the hard-liners believed it was their duty to put men like this American in jail. One of the accusers was Ted Guy, the one who had to be talked down from shooting them “on the battlefield.” The other was James Bond Stockdale. He had been shocked at his inability to find anyone at the Pentagon who thought the Code of Conduct was even a legally enforceable document. How, he asked incredulously, had the government abandoned its own military code? Since the military brass wouldn’t be doing any courts-martial, Guy and Stockdale took advantage of a provision that let them initiate proceedings themselves.

  For a White House worried about military recruitment now that the draft had ended, desperate to put the divisions of Vietnam behind it, this new outbreak of the old civil wars over Vietnam was a headache indeed. In fact, on the same day the Post headlined “Mitchell Aide Got $70,000 of Bug Fund,” the political dilemma of POW against POW became the subject of an intense Oval Office meeting—alongside another Vietnam issue that threatened to become even worse.

  A SCENE FOR A FLY—OR a bug—on the wall of the Oval Office on April 11.

  Roger Shields, the Pentagon official running Operation Homecoming, listened patiently as the president unfurled his idea to deploy POW “superstars” like John McCain in an “indoctrination program” to sell the new all-volunteer armed forces: “It’s like a producer putting on a great play or a great movie. You have a hell of a bunch of stars in this one. It’s an all-star cast—even the bit players. . . . Oh, I know the service line is, well, you gotta treat the Admiral’s son just like, ah, the son of the enlisted man. That’s crap . . . they must be used in an effective way.”

  A starry-eyed thirty-three-year-old in the Oval Office for the first time, Shields gingerly attempted to change the subject.

  “Mr. President, I, I—”

  Mr. President interrupted him, riffing on.

  “It’s particularly important because the euphoria doesn’t last forever . . . we can’t let the, the fervent, uh, feeling that these men have, that there are things for them to do, ah, be dissipated . . . we’ve got to use them correctly.”

  Shields abandoned the attempt, going with the flow of his commander in chief. People tended to do that in the Oval Office. The president was going on about the “pitiful left-wing and media” people accusing Operation Homecoming of being staged when Shields ventured a second attempt: “We knew that there were, ah, some problems, a few problems with regard to misconduct.”

 
“Sure.”

  Shields then explained why the landings of the Freedom Birds had been staged the way they had, with one senior officer on each plane as tarmac spokesman: because frank exchanges between reporters and prisoners might reveal the civil war that had transpired in the camps. But the president did not seem to have the stomach for the discussion. It had been a difficult day. He recollected, fondly, Galan Kramer’s homemade banner reading GOD BLESS AMERICA & NIXON. Then, finally, he changed the subject to a politically sensitive press conference Shields was giving the next day, the topic Shields had been trying discuss in the first place.

  “You, ah, incidentally, you are working on the MIA, talking to our—”

  “That’s correct.”

  “To the extent you can.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “The, ah, the main thing there, of course, is to just—let it be known that these bastards probably aren’t going to come out with anything. Ah, we have got to make an enormous effort in the public relations sense as well as to what we do, ah, as I’m sure you know.”

  He was referring, in his awkward, vague way, to a bill come due from an extraordinary act of official deception. Operation Homecoming had returned 587 American prisoners of war—but for years Nixon had referred to 1,600 Americans being held in North Vietnam. That number folded in more than one thousand personnel, mostly pilots, who crashed in the dense Vietnamese brush and in previous wars would have been classed as “Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered”—but had been reclassified as “MIA” so the president could make the North Vietnamese look bad for his Paris negotiations. Now the families of those other 1,013 were making insistent noises: what was the government going to do about them?

  The Operation Homecoming statements by the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff included the promise that “we will not rest until all those still known captive are safe and until we have achieved the best possible accounting for those missing in action.” Holding the government to that pledge had now become the raison d’être of the National League of Families of American Prisoners of War and Missing in Southeast Asia, the organization that had taken off as a White House front group. VIVA was still selling bracelets hand over fist—now bearing the names of MIAs. It had even come up with a new flag honoring them: a forlorn, gaunt, hangdog flat-topped silhouette, barbed wire and a guard tower in the background, a military laurel, and the legend POW-MIA: YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN. Soon it adorned Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion posts across the land. On March 30 the brigadier general who supervised the release announced he “did not rule out the possibility that some Americans may still be held in Laos.” The commander of the “4th Combined POW Wing,” in a spirit of political hardball, told the press, “I am gratified that our nation appears prepared to follow through on comprehensive plans to account for those who are still missing in action.” Chicago MIA families were now saying that the administration was “abandoning” men “seen in photos coming out of Indochina or who have been reported alive by returning POWs.” It was one more aspect of the Americans’ lunatic semiology that baffled hapless Communist officials. “We have not come this far,” one declared in exasperation at being once more enjoined to “prove” they held no more prisoners, “to hold on to a handful of Americans, after all what would that prove?” The issue was a godforsaken mess.