Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  RICHARD NIXON (RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon)*5

  I was fully aware of the furor that this statement would cause. But having initiated a policy of pressure on North Vietnam that now involved not only our government but foreign governments as well, I felt that I had no choice but to carry it through. Faced with the prospect of demonstrations at home that I could not prevent, my only alternative was to make it clear to the enemy that the protests would have no effect on my decisions. Otherwise my ultimatum would appear empty.

  DAVID HAWK

  So, needless to say, after that press conference, the press came to us for our comments. We had learned how to do this kind of stuff from working in presidential campaigns, and instead of responding immediately, we called a press conference for Saturday morning, which was an unusual time. We had, in the meantime, been lining up endorsements from McCarthy and McGovern and Coretta Scott King and a whole bunch of grownups. Congressmen, senators—if we had a Democratic senator, we were careful to have a Republican. If we had a Republican member of the House, we’d have a Democrat member. We were always balanced and bipartisan, and we also had leading academics like John Kenneth Galbraith.*6

  So, Sam and I called this press conference, and our response was that the president misspoke, that no elected leader in a democracy would disregard the opinion of the public. Furthermore, we said it’s not just kids. It’s not just students. Here are our endorsers. And this effort is not going to be limited to students. It’s just starting with students. Sam and I ended up having our pictures on the front page of The Washington Post. The headline was “The President Misspoke.” So, here are these kids in their early twenties claiming that the president misspoke, not denouncing him as a baby killer. We were speaking Washington-speak. Our endorsements were included in the story, and it knocked us from the press who were assigned to cover students to the mainstream political reporters in Washington.

  RAY PRICE (Nixon aide)

  I worked at the New York Herald Tribune for nine years and was the last editor of the editorial page before the paper died in 1966. Nixon called me in 1967. He was a full-time lawyer in New York at Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander, but he was also preparing for a presidential campaign in ’68. I started working and traveling with him a lot, and he became a good friend. I became the head of the White House writing staff.

  As the first of the moratoria neared, there was extensive debate within the White House about what kind of stance to take toward it. Nixon’s decision was to pick up the gantlet and hurl it squarely back, which is why Nixon said, at the press conference September 26, that “under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it.”

  The protest was an organized attempt to disrupt the process of government, which was not helpful, especially when you’re in a time of war. And also, of course, it delighted the enemy. It encouraged them to fight on. The protesters were operating on an entirely upside-down notion of the way policies should be conducted. Policy is not just for emotions; it’s for reason. And they didn’t know what they were talking about, most of them. And they didn’t want to take the time to learn about it.

  DAVID MIXNER

  Rutgers University was the first to announce that they were closing on October 15, and urging its students and faculty to talk about the war. It was the big break. It was a traditional state university, it wasn’t an Ivy League school, it wasn’t a Catholic school; it was a state university that had no history of activism. It was the ideal fucking poster child. It couldn’t have been a bigger gift from God. After that we were in business. University after university, all we had to do was say, “Well, Rutgers is,” and then you had ten, and then you had twenty. It was the classic organizing model. It was decided by the university presidents, and students demanded it. Then suddenly communities were adopting it, because it started getting press.

  By the time we got to the Moratorium we were all pretty well known from the Eugene McCarthy campaign, or the National Student Association, or the march on Washington in ’67. The press loved us. It was a perfect combination, they loved Sam, they loved me, they loved Marge. Everyone loved the fact that the young people were making the president quiver. Who doesn’t like a David-and-Goliath story? We had created the Eugene McCarthy campaign to force the sitting president to resign. We had been beaten up in ’68 at the Democratic convention in Chicago. I mean it’s not a bad opening for your story when you’re trying to get on the front page. We were clean, and not hippies, and the press liked us personally. They loved the fact that I was this poor kid who actually knew someone who died in Vietnam, and Marge was this big, boisterous, great female organizer who was sort of a Mother Earth figure, and Sam was the son of a wealthy shoe company president who went to Harvard, and maybe someday would be president. David [Hawk] was this clean-cut, all American, good-looking swimmer who said, “Hell no, I ain’t going.” Come on, what’s not to love? They also fell in love with the poster: fathers and sons against the war.

  Credit 10.1

  A full-page newspaper advertisement urging citizens to participate in the October 15, 1969, Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam reads: “To be against the war in Vietnam and to do nothing about it is indefensible. To see your son or your neighbor’s son dragged off to the slaughter or to prison, and to do nothing about it is inexcusable.”

  SAM BROWN

  We ran a series of ads in The New York Times. One of them was a picture of an old-fashioned doorbell and it said, “Push button to end war.” It described people going door-to-door to talk to their neighbors about ending the war in Vietnam. Another one was a picture of a long-haired son and a very burly, hard-hat-y kind of father, and it said, “Fathers and Sons Together Against the War. October 15: An opportunity for generations to—” I don’t remember what the copy was, but it was focused on, “Look, this is a time for people who are having trouble with each other to figure out how to talk to each other again.”*7

  DAVID MIXNER

  My job was the unions and the Hill because I came from a constituency that was different. I worked with a guy named Bill Dodds, who was head of the political action stuff for the United Auto Workers, and we laid the groundwork that got me into a meeting with Walter Reuther, the head of the UAW.

  The argument I made to Mr. Reuther was, sitting across this desk from you is a man who’s buried four of his cousins, and they were workers. All the men who were being killed and brought home at the time were his membership’s sons. It certainly wasn’t the sons of Harvard, is how I put it. I could speak with some authenticity.

  Reuther became the first labor leader of the major unions to come out against the war. He was real nervous because his members were not necessarily antiwar. I remember when I was leaving his office, Sam was with me, and it was a done deal, and I remember Mr. Reuther putting his hands around our shoulders and telling us the famous story about the dentist: The man hated going to the dentist more than anything in the world, but he got in the dentist chair because he knew he had to do it. Just as the dentist had the drill coming towards his mouth, the guy grabbed ahold of the dentist’s balls and said, “We’re not going to hurt each other, are we, Doctor?” I looked at Mr. Reuther and said, “No, sir, we’re not. I give you my word.” And I kept it. When he agreed to come out against the war it was a huge victory, and I was very proud of it.

  DAVID HAWK

  We had enough bipartisan, mainstream political support that the mainstream politicians wanted to jump on this bandwagon. Nixon was in the process of making it a Republican war. So you had a lot of elements of the Democratic Party that weren’t outspoken when it was the Democratic president, but who became very outspoken. It was hard to maintain the bipartisanship, but we had Senator Mark Hatfield [Republican from Oregon] and Senator Charles Goodell [Republican from New York], and there were a dozen House Republicans. We had Hugh Scott, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, the Senate minority leader. It was a very, very, very different Republican Party. You still had Chuck Percy in Illinois. You
had moderate and liberal Republicans.

  Credit 10.2

  Vietnam Moratorium Committee members Marge Sklencar, Sam Brown, and David Hawk give a press conference on October 19, 1969. David Mixner, the fourth committee member, who at the time was being blackmailed for being gay, is notably absent.

  DAVID MIXNER

  I was terrified to tell my dad that if I was drafted, I wouldn’t serve. Which is sort of a joke now, because all I had to do was tell them I was gay and I’d have been out instantly. But being in jail for five years appealed more to me than letting anyone know that I was gay. It’s pretty powerful, isn’t it? That’s all I had to say. I would rather have gone to jail than have anyone know the truth about me. I wouldn’t have been allowed to do anything I was doing. I wouldn’t have been a cochair of the Vietnam Moratorium if I were gay. Hell, I had to fight to get Marge aboard. Women were not given good roles. I was one of Marge’s supporters. The movement was still misogynist at that time. Gay? Not a chance in the world would I be allowed to do any of it. I would have immediately been discarded.

  The Stonewall Riots in late June 1969*8 were hardly discussed at the Moratorium. It was like it didn’t happen. I don’t ever remember anyone saying, “Oh my God, did you hear about the gays in New York?” I had a mixed reaction to it. I was intrigued and in awe of it. I remember cutting the New York Times story out and putting it in my wallet. I have no idea why. I carried it around with me for two years. But then on the other hand, since many of those who were brave enough to be out [of the closet] and fight back tended to be the more marginalized and the more persecuted of those in our society, I didn’t identify with them. I was a twenty-three-year-old boy and I knew that if I got caught, I would do enormous damage to the movement, great shame to my family, and great shame to my compatriots.

  SUSAN WERBE (Moratorium press secretary)

  We didn’t know David was gay. There wasn’t even a suspicion. He always talked about having a girlfriend. I don’t think any of us understood gay rights; the movement hadn’t really started by then, at least no one ever talked about it. So when he came out years later it was a surprise at first, and then an “aha.” It all fell into place. Because he’d disappear and nobody knew where he was. He always projected himself as melancholy.

  DAVID MIXNER

  One night I got drunk, went to this really remote, dingy bar, and this vision from God came in, who was exactly my type: intelligent, handsome, masculine. And we ended up going home together. He said, “I know who you are, I work for the federal government, I don’t want you to panic. I want to create a safe place for you. I really have feelings for you.” He had everything I loved at his house: Tennyson, Neruda, Yeats, all the great poets that I loved, and Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin records. Anyhow, to make a long story short, we started an affair, and he did become a very safe place for me.

  About thirty days into it, he said he had to go away for the weekend. When he got back he said, “Let’s meet for lunch on Monday. I’ll come straight from the airport.” I said, “Great.” So I went to the Hot Shop on K and Sixteenth and sat in a booth waiting for him. Two guys in suits pulled into the booth and sat across from me and showed me their badges. When someone shows you a badge, how many times have you taken a look at it—especially in those days? I don’t know if they were real. They poured out on the table some naked pictures of the two of us having sex. It just was as if someone had stuck a knife into my gut. My first thought was, I have to warn Frank. So immediately afterwards I ran to his apartment to warn him. I used my key, got in, and the place was totally empty. There wasn’t a dust ball or anything else in the apartment. I never saw him again. The suits gave me three days to get out of the Moratorium or they were going to send these pictures to my family and the press. So I got very, very drunk and told my friends I had a heart condition and was very sick.

  I decided to kill myself. I bought a gun and put it underneath my mattress, and was going to kill myself, but I wanted to get drunk enough to do it. But then I had this moment of clarity and I realized that there was no way they could send the photos to the press, because how were they going to explain it? Did the government really want the press to know that they were filming homosexuals, and blackmailing them? Maybe they had as much to lose as I did? So I sobered up, and when they met up with me three days later and asked me, “Are you getting out?” I said, “Send it to them, I don’t care,” and walked away.

  Every time the phone rang and someone said, “Your mom and dad’s on the phone,” I thought they had gotten the pictures. I dreaded hearing from them. Or if the press called and said, “We want to speak to David,” every single time I worried that they had the photos. So I immediately pulled back and stopped speaking to the press.

  RICHARD NIXON (RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon)*9

  On October 14, I knew for sure that my ultimatum [to the North Vietnamese] had failed when Kissinger informed me that Radio Hanoi had just broadcast a letter from [North Vietnamese] Premier Pham Van Dong to the American people. In it Dong declared:

  This fall large sectors of the U.S. people, encouraged and supported by many peace- and justice-loving American personages, are launching a broad and powerful offensive throughout the United States to demand that the Nixon administration put an end to the Vietnam aggressive war and immediately bring all American troops home….

  We are firmly confident that with the solidarity and bravery of the peoples of our two countries and with the approval and support of peace-loving people in the world, the struggle of the Vietnamese people and U.S. progressive people against U.S. aggression will certainly be crowned with total victory.

  May your fall offensive succeed splendidly.

  To indicate the seriousness with which I viewed this blatant intervention in our domestic affairs, I asked [Vice President Spiro] Agnew to hold a press conference at the White House….He said, “The leaders and sponsors of tomorrow’s Moratorium, public officials, and others leading these demonstrations should openly repudiate the support of the totalitarian government which has on its hands the blood of 40,000 Americans.”

  …I had to decide what to do about the ultimatum. I knew that unless I had some indisputably good reason for not carrying out my threat of using increased force when the ultimatum expired on November 1, the Communists would become contemptuous of us and even more difficult to deal with. I knew, however, that after all the protests and the Moratorium, American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war.

  STEPHEN BULL

  I think Nixon was very, very frustrated trying to wind down this war, and on the exterior you had what almost appeared to be resistance to the ability to wind it down. It’s not a big help when you have five hundred thousand screaming banshees carrying torches calling him a killer when he’s trying to end the war so the killing can stop. I’m just saying that there’s a belief among some people that if there hadn’t been so much active, violent resistance to the Vietnam War, that the U.S. would have had a stronger hand in negotiating with the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong to end the war. But rather, the antiwar activity weakened the hand of the negotiators.

  RAY PRICE

  It was very important that the war end the right way. Not the wrong way. All the critics wanted to end it the wrong way by just cutting and running. That would have been the worst thing we could do. We would have lost all credibility if we did that. I used to call the protesters “the Arlo Guthrie Woodstock pot rock love contingent.” I disdained them. They were passionate, but they didn’t know shit about what they were passionate about. Most of them were too busy getting high to understand anything about the way the world works. Their arrogance was exceeded only by their ignorance.

  STEPHEN BULL

  On October 15 I walked out onto the Ellipse, and there I was, dressed in a coat and tie, with a short haircut, and here were all these scraggly kids. There’s free love, and they’re all doing drugs, and they’re having fun and drinking, and all that. And
I’m thinking, Now wait a second, we’re the same age. Why am I here? They were having more fun than I was. I was a straitlaced guy. There was a major disconnect.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  The vice president’s thirteen-year-old daughter wore a black armband, for which she was grounded for a month or something. I thought one of the better buttons of the whole war movement was “Free Kim Agnew.”

  I went to the L.A. march on October 15 with Jan Butler, who was the top-secret control officer of RAND, and a former girlfriend of mine, and my two kids. I remember we were at UCLA during that day and I wasn’t worried about being seen because I was in the middle of copying the Pentagon Papers, and I was expecting to be in prison shortly.

  CARL BERNSTEIN

  My beat at The Washington Post was covering the demonstrations in Washington. What was so extraordinary was that the last time numbers of people like this had taken to the streets was in the early part of the twentieth century. This is not a revolutionary country, despite our origins. The biggest demonstration that Washington had ever seen since the twenties or thirties had been the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. But the amazing thing about the antiwar movement was that it reached the proportions that it had reached, and that it was affecting policy, that Lyndon Johnson had been driven from office, not by the war, not by the coverage of the war, but by people in the streets.