Abandonment of the Saigon government was out of the question, the White House declared, because the Communists were said to have a list of three million Vietnamese who would be “dealt with” in a “blood bath.” The existence of the list was a matter of some skepticism, and Americans in increasing numbers were ready to desert the regime of General Nguyen Van Thieu anyway. The South Vietnamese seemed unappreciative of their American ally, even hostile toward it. Saigon rioters burned Nixon in effigy, shouting “Down with the Americans” and accusing the United States of prolonging the war. Ominously, Buddhists with kerosene and matches were immolating themselves, as other bonzes had just before the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem. David Truong, the son of a South Vietnamese politician, toured the U.S. telling audiences that the grunts and the ARVN troops fighting beside them shared only a mutual hatred of each other.
Meantime the notion that Americans were fighting to defend an Asian democracy was becoming difficult to sustain. David’s father ran against Thieu and was clapped in jail, becoming one of over 80,000 political prisoners of the Saigon government. Americans in the field reported the torture of the regime’s critics and their convictions by kangaroo courts; the courts continued to sit even after Saigon’s supreme court ruled that they were unconstitutional. And Thieu’s demands for U.S. wealth appeared to be insatiable. After nearly a decade of unstinting support of Saigon by Washington, he continued to say that he needed more equipment from the United States, more time to train his troops, and a lot more money. Unless he got them, he said, he couldn’t take responsibility for the consequences.
The last thing Americans wanted that year was a war in another Southeast Asian country, but that was what the administration gave them. Actually their Air Force had been hammering Communist bases in eastern Cambodia for over a year, though few of them knew it. On orders from the White House, B-52s had conducted 3,630 secret raids on jungle sanctuaries there. The Joint Chiefs had long wanted to send in the infantry. Nixon had demurred at that; he knew that Cambodia’s ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, would protest the violation of his country’s neutrality. With double bookkeeping and tight security it was possible to suppress information about the B-52 sorties. Once U.S. troops lunged across the frontier that would be impracticable.
On March 18, however, the Cambodian situation was changed dramatically by a coup. Sihanouk, aware that his administration was threatened, was in Russia asking for Soviet help in his effort to get 40,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops out of his country, when Cambodian General Lon Nol took over the government. Lon Nol was a rightist; he wouldn’t denounce a U.S.—ARVN expedition to drive out the Communist intruders. Six weeks after the coup Nixon went on television to tell Americans that an operation to do just that was under way. Its goal was to be the destruction of the Vietnam nerve center, base camps, and underground arsenals above the “Parrot’s Beak” northwest of Saigon. “For five years,” the President said, “neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these sanctuaries because we did not want to violate the territory of a neutral nation.” He did not mention the clandestine bombing of Cambodia, which at that time had been in process for fourteen months.
The military value of the invasion of Cambodia was disputed. While it was still being mounted Nixon described it as “an enormous success—far exceeding expectations.” Asked about Pentagon claims that the Viet Cong would need six to nine months to recover from it, Thieu said, “I say they will never recover. Cambodia from 1964 to 1969 was a second North Vietnam, a whole rear area.” In Saigon, MACV claimed the seizure of 15 million rounds of ammunition, 7,250 tons of food, and 25,000 guns; the death of 11,285 enemy soldiers; and the capture of 2,156. Allied casualties were 1,138 killed and 4,911 wounded.
But now Cambodia had been drawn into the war. The Communist troops which had been squatting in the Parrot’s Beak responded to the offensive by driving westward against Lon Nol’s army, conquering half the country, threatening its capital, Phnom Penh, and establishing a new, secure supply route in the Mekong valley. Washington was now committed to a new regime which was even less defensible than Thieu’s. And some of the expedition’s Cambodian goals were unachieved because they had been wholly unrealistic. “American officials,” Frances FitzGerald noted in Fire in the Lake, “spoke of plans to capture the enemy’s command headquarters for the south as if there existed a reverse Pentagon in the jungle complete with Marine guards, generals, and green baize tables.” No such command post was found because, of course, there had never been any.
The greatest damage wrought by the Cambodian adventure was its impact on the home front. So great was the public outcry against this new involvement that the Senate, stirring at last to invoke the congressional right to declare war, passed a measure demanding an evacuation of American troops from Cambodia and an end to air support there by July. On campuses the reaction eclipsed all previous protests. By the end of May 415 colleges and universities had been disrupted. It was the first general student strike in the country’s history, and it was entirely spontaneous. At the end of the semester 286 schools were still paralyzed, and while 129 others in forty-three states had officially reopened, many classrooms were empty.
On the weekend of May 9–10, more than 100,000 students stormed Washington. The White House was transformed into an armed camp behind a bumper-to-bumper wall of transit buses. The President’s first response was contemptuous; talking informally with some Pentagon secretaries, he called the protesters “bums.” Then he decided to make a conciliatory gesture. On Friday night of that week he went to the Lincoln Memorial with his valet and Secret Service agents and tried to talk to students sleeping there. “I feel just as deeply as you do about this,” he said to them. Trying to find common ground, he launched into a discussion of football and asked one of the students, a Californian, if he enjoyed surfing. “The two Americas,” wrote a team of reporters for the London Sunday Times, “met and drifted apart in a state of mutual incomprehension.”
Equally bewildering for the President was a letter to him from Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel. Hickel had been a conversative businessman, but he was also the father of six sons. He protested that the administration was alienating youth. He was particularly incensed over attacks on the young by Vice President Agnew. Nixon’s public response was propitiatory; he assured the secretary that members of the administration would cool their rhetoric. But Hickel had committed a cardinal sin. His letter had appeared in the newspapers before it reached the oval office. On Thanksgiving eve Nixon summoned him to the White House and fired him for lack of “mutual confidence.” Within a few hours one of H. R. Haldeman’s assistants arrived at the Department of the Interior with a list of men to be purged. Six senior officials were told: “We want your resignation, and we want you out of the building by five o’clock.”
If that was tough, the actions on some campuses were rougher. A revolutionist’s bomb tore out the sides of the University of Wisconsin’s Army Mathematics Research Center, killing a physicist, wounding four, and doing six million dollars’ worth of damage.2 At predominantly black Jackson State, in Mississippi, an encounter between students and police in front of a dormitory ended tragically when officers opened fire with buckshot, machine gun, rifle and armor-piercing shells, killing two students and wounding nine. A presidential commission headed by former Pennsylvania Governor William W. Scranton called the 28-second fusillade “an unreasonable, unjustified overreaction,” but a local grand jury blamed the students, declaring that “when people… engage in civil disorders and riots, they must expect to be injured or killed when law enforcement officers are required to reestablish order.”
Mississippians weren’t the only Americans in that troubled year to feel that students were fair game, and Negroes weren’t the only victims. Flag-carrying hardhat Manhattan construction workers who marched into a crowd of antiwar demonstrators that May were enormously popular; when the White House commended them it was interpreted as smart politics. Hostility
toward youth cut deep. Older Americans were offended by almost every facet of the youthful subculture: the long hair, the tie-dyed jeans, the loud music, the language, the gestures, the very names of the rock groups—the Cream, the Stones, the Grand Funk Railroad. Most objectionable of all were the heavy drugs. The college students, whom younger teen-agers slavishly aped, put up outrageous psychedelic posters of bleeding colors and distorted images; they spoke casually of getting spaced out, turned on, tuned in, getting it on, getting into it, getting funky or freaky or heavy from narcotics, and they lured adolescents away from parents with rock jamborees which appeared to be, and sometimes were, steeped in sin.
Woodstock had been the high-water mark for the rock bacchanals. According to John Morthland, assistant editor of the weekly Rolling Stone, of the forty-eight major festivals slated the following year, only eighteen were held. “The major reason,” said Morthland, “is political. The day after a festival is announced, the city council and police come up with some emergency ordinance that makes it impossible to hold it.” Authorities taking such steps were acting with the approval—often the entreaties—of residents who had seen and heard enough of the subculture to know that they didn’t want it celebrated in their backyards. They felt vindicated and then some by stories about 1970’s most notorious rock gala: the Powder Ridge festival in Middlefield, Connecticut.
Actually Powder Ridge was a nongala; it never went on as scheduled. Promoters had signed up twenty-five bands to play at the three-hundred-acre ski area, but four days before the affair was to begin a citizens’ committee convinced a judge that the tiny community didn’t have to endure the noise, the pot, the kids in the buff, and the Viet Cong flags. He issued an injunction. That turned the musicians away, but it was too late to stop the audience from gathering; the occasion had been advertised in underground newspapers as far away as Los Angeles, the throng was already on its way, and it arrived, 35,000 strong, on the Friday of that first weekend in August. No entertainment awaited it, no food, no adequate plumbing facilities. Powder Ridge was a disaster waiting to happen, and it happened.
The heat was sweltering, and after pitching their colorful tents the youths divested themselves of clothes. On the first day they swam nude in a small pond beside the ski lodge, but so many of them voided and defecated in it that on Saturday the pond was declared a health hazard. Sanitation was a concern of Dr. William Abruzzi, a bearded, bald physician who was there as a volunteer, but it wasn’t his chief worry; that was narcotics. Peddlers roamed through the crowd hawking marijuana, cocaine, heroin (“only a dollar-five-oh for magic magic”), barbiturates, speed, and LSD (“Acid here, the quality goes in before the name goes on”). State police arrested seventy pushers leaving the crowd, one of them with $13,000 in his pocket, but most of them got away. Kids who couldn’t afford the hucksters’ prices could drink free from vast buckets of “electric water,” into which passers-by were asked to drop any drugs they could spare. This ugly stew was blamed by Abruzzi for many of the thousand bad trips he treated, more than the number at Woodstock, where the multitude had been over ten times as large. Every Middlefield resident had tales of what the doped youngsters did. One of the more sensational scenes, attested to by several witnesses, occurred in a small wood near some homes. A boy and a girl, both naked and approaching from different directions, met under the trees. On impulse they suddenly embraced. She dropped to her knees, he mounted her from behind, and after he had achieved his climax they parted—apparently without exchanging a word.
Obviously Powder Ridge had nothing to do with antiwar protest, but to its critics the subculture of the young was all of a piece; any one aspect of it reminded them of the others. The most memorable symbol of college backlash in the days after Nixon’s announcement of the Cambodian invasion, the Kent State tragedy, didn’t start as a protest. By all accounts the first phases of the disorders there would have occurred anyhow. Unlike Columbia and Berkeley, the university in Kent, Ohio, had no tradition of activism. Football was still big in Kent; after a triumph students would ring the Victory Bell on the Commons. There were proms and bull-and-beer joints in the town. Indeed, the trouble started with a beer bust that muggy Friday night.
Spilling out from a bar, students decided to dance in the street. An angry motorist gunned his engine as if to drive into them. Several young drunks climbed on the car, broke its windows, set fires in trash barrels, and smashed store windows. On orders from Mayor LeRoy Satrom, Kent policemen turned the roisterers out of the taverns. Driving them back toward the campus, they broke up the diehards with tear gas. The next day Kent State’s few political militants secured administration approval for a rally that evening. Out of an enrollment of nearly twenty thousand, about eight hundred students came. Shouting “One two three four, we don’t want your fucking war!” at faculty members and student marshals, the crowd turned the rally into a demonstration. It got out of hand and disrupted a dance; lighted railroad flares were thrown through the windows of a one-story ROTC building facing the Commons. When firemen appeared, the demonstrators pelted them with rocks and chopped up their hoses with machetes. The building burned to the ground.
Without notifying the university administration, Mayor Satrom appealed for help from the National Guard. Governor James Rhodes responded by sending a five-hundred-man contingent equipped with M-1 rifles, Colt revolvers, and tear gas. Students greeted them by spraying trees with gasoline and setting them afire, but by midnight on Sunday the fires were out and everything seemed to be under control. Meantime Governor Rhodes had arrived on campus. On Tuesday Ohio Republicans were going to vote in a senatorial primary, and Rhodes was one of the candidates. He was trailing badly—in the event he would lose—but he was making a last effort to turn the tide. The situation in Kent seemed exploitable. Calling a press conference, he declared an emergency and said of the students, “We’re going to use every weapon of law enforcement to drive them out of Kent…. They’re worse than the Brownshirts, and the Communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”
In fairness to Governor Rhodes, it should be pointed out that he was not the only student-baiter whose words reached the National Guardsmen. Attorney General Mitchell had attacked campus militants as rowdies; so had President Nixon and Vice President Agnew, who had been widely quoted as saying that “The troublemakers among the younger generation are only a bunch of hoodlums who don’t deserve to bear the title of American youth.” In Kent, Mayor Satrom was making inflammatory remarks, while Brigadier General Robert H. Canterbury of the Guard was virtually inciting to riot. Having sowed the wind, they reaped the whirlwind at noon Monday. Classes were resumed that day and the campus at first appeared to be quiet. Several students rang the Victory Bell at midday and about a thousand gathered for a peaceful demonstration on the Commons while another two thousand watched. Two jeeps appeared. Guardsmen in them shouted through bullhorns: “Evacuate the Commons area. You have no right to assemble.” Students raised their middle fingers, flung some stones and yelled: “Pigs off campus! We don’t want your war.” Brigadier General Canterbury told reporters, “These students are going to have to find out what law and order is all about.” Major General Sylvester Del Corso of the Guard, in full view of his troops, picked up several rocks and threw them back at students.
It was now about a quarter past twelve. Two skirmish lines of Guardsmen fired tear gas canisters into the crowd; a few students tossed them back, but they fell short. Other students fled, and a unit of about a hundred troopers chased some of them between two buildings. There the Guardsmen found themselves hemmed in, with a fence in front of them and rock-throwing students on either side. Their plight was not really serious; the rocks didn’t come close enough to hit them, and many of the onlookers were laughing. At this point the troopers ran out of tear gas and began retreating up a hill, looking apprehensively over their shoulders. It was a dangerous situation. The Guardsmen were capable of savagery—over the
weekend they had bayoneted three students—and their M-1 rifles were loaded with live ammunition. As a presidential commission headed by former Pennsylvania Governor William W. Scranton later put it, “all that stood between the Guardsmen and firing was a flick of a thumb on a safety mechanism and the pull of an index finger on a trigger.”
There were suggestions afterward that a group of troopers decided to fire on their tormentors. Photographs show eight or ten of them gathered in what witnesses described as a “huddle.” Another curious piece of evidence is a tape of the incident. On it, the fatal thirteen-second salvo is preceded by a single shot. This could have been fired, either as a signal or from fear, by Terence F. Norman, a spurious “freelance photographer” who was really an informer on the FBI payroll. (In addition he may have been in the employ of the university, which also had undercover men.) Norman had a gun, and some spectators say he drew it and fired it, either just before or just after the crucial moment. What is certain is that on reaching the top of the slope at 12:24 P.M. the troopers knelt, aimed at the students, who were hundreds of feet away, too far to harm them, and fired as though on command. (Brigadier General Canterbury, in their midst, managed to be looking the other way.) The fusillade was followed by an awful silence. Into it a girl screamed, “My God, they’re killing us!”
Thirteen students had been shot, and four—none of them a militant and one an ROTC cadet—were dead. A stream of blood was gushing from the head of one youth, drenching the textbooks he had been carrying; another boy was holding a cloth against a friend’s stomach, trying vainly to stem the bleeding. The troopers made no attempt to help their victims.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 182
