Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  DAVID MIXNER

  On October 15 we all holed up in our office. No press was allowed in to see us while we were waiting to get reports on what was happening. There were thousands of events in smaller towns like Muskogee, Oklahoma, where they read the list of the war dead. Church bells ringing for each of the war dead—it was extraordinary. Thousands and thousands of events in towns in Montana with fifty people, you know, one or two people reading the names of the war dead in the town square. The biggest events were where we least expected them. I mean we had 100,000 on the Boston Common, and 100,000 in Bryant Park. But it was like, 6,000 in St. Louis, which had never happened before. There were 10,000 in Denver, which had never happened, or Las Vegas, places where there had never been demonstrations. I’d say two million people participated, all over the country, in the Moratorium. It was truly remarkable.

  Credit 10.3

  More than one hundred thousand protesters came to the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam rally on the Boston Common on October 15, 1969. Two million people participated nationwide in peaceful teach-ins and demonstrations. It was the country’s largest ever protest against the war in Vietnam.

  DAVID HAWK

  On October 15 about two million people participated. It was enormous. There was now a recognition that the demonstrations were so mainstream and so big and nationwide—it was the largest nationwide demonstration ever, at least until Earth Day the next year.

  DAVID MIXNER

  That night Sam was on The Tonight Show and David was on another show, and poor Marge was never asked to be on anything, because she’s a woman. I was alone that night. I turned down all interview offers because I didn’t want to be visible. I lay down on this old couch in the lobby of the Moratorium office, and I played “We Shall Overcome” on my harmonica.

  RICHARD NIXON (RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon)*10

  A quarter of a million people came to Washington for the October 15 Moratorium. Despite widespread rumors that some of the more radical left-wing organizations would provoke violent confrontations with police, the demonstrations were generally peaceful….On the night of October 15 I thought about the irony of this protest for peace. It had, I believed, destroyed whatever small possibility may have existed of ending the war in 1969. But there was nothing I could do about that now. I would have to adjust my plans accordingly and carry on as best I could. At the top of the page of preliminary notes I was making for my November 3 speech, I wrote: “Don’t get rattled—don’t waver—don’t react.”

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  Nixon himself says in his memoir something like, “I realized that my threat had failed because of the Moratorium,” and his logic was simple: first, that the North Vietnamese hadn’t accepted his threat to escalate the war by that time, and second, with this amount of mobilization, without having used nuclear weapons yet, there was every reason to believe that if he were to carry out that threat in the next two weeks you would see not two million people on the streets, which is what you had on October 15, but ten million.

  DAVID HAWK

  The first Moratorium had exceeded our expectations, blown our strategy out of the water. We thought it might take three, four months to build up, so that we’d be coming into our strength in early spring. Essentially there was nothing that could be done to redo or build on what we did in October, and then the politics changed with Vietnamization and the “silent majority” attack on the students.

  * * *

  *1 Democratic U.S. senator from Minnesota and ardent Vietnam War opponent Eugene McCarthy challenged Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primary. College students flocked to work on McCarthy’s campaign. The “Get Clean for Gene” slogan was born in New Hampshire, where long-haired New Left student volunteers cut their hair and beards before canvassing for McCarthy, who with 42 percent of the vote came within 6 points of beating Johnson, thus signaling LBJ’s political vulnerability. Days later, New York senator Robert F. Kennedy jumped into the Democratic primary race.

  *2 John Ehrlichman was Nixon’s assistant for domestic affairs and the architect of the White House “Plumbers.” He was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in the Watergate scandal and served one and a half years in prison.

  *3 William Sloane Coffin (1924–2006) was the chaplain at Yale University and later a minister at Riverside Church in New York. He was a civil rights and peace activist and a leading voice of the Vietnam peace movement who espoused the use of civil disobedience.

  *4 A race riot broke out in the Watts neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles in August 1965 that lasted six days and caused thirty-four deaths, more than 1,000 injuries, and $40 million in property damage. The extensive violence shook the country and sounded the bell for black discontent over chronic unemployment, police oppression, and racial discrimination.

  *5 RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978; second edition, 1990), p. 399.

  *6 Seventeen senators and forty-seven members of the House of Representatives announced their support for the Moratorium, or M-day, as many called it, and presidents of seventy-nine colleges and universities signed a statement calling for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

  *7 Jasper Johns also created a print for the Moratorium that became one of the iconic images of the antiwar movement. It was a “toxic” American flag painted in camouflage green and black stripes, with black stars and a white bullet hole in the middle. Stenciled under the flag was one word: “Moratorium.”

  *8 On June 28, 1969, police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, sparking a riot that continued for several days. This marked the beginning of the gay liberation movement. In 1969, sodomy between consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes was illegal in forty-nine states, and homosexuals faced job and many other forms of discrimination. The first gay pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago a year later, on June 28, 1970.

  *9 Nixon, RN, p. 402.

  *10 Nixon, RN, p. 403.

  CHAPTER 11

  SILENT MAJORITY

  (November 1969)

  He declared the United States of Nixonland, and planted Old Glory on her surface.

  —RICK PERLSTEIN, Nixonland

  After the October 15 Vietnam Moratorium the country seemed to be at the cliff’s edge of a revolution. The Washington Post heralded a new era of “plebiscitary democracy.” When Attorney General John Mitchell watched protesters exchange the American flag on the Justice Department flagpole with a Viet Cong flag, he said he felt like he was witnessing the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1917.

  With the peace movement’s success came the Nixon administration’s most effective retaliation—an appeal to middle Americans who were not demonstrating in the streets against the war. Nixon called them the “silent majority” and asked for their support in ending the war. “The speech made the case brilliantly,” wrote historian Rick Perlstein. “That if you were a normal American and angry at the war, President Nixon was the peacenik for you.”*1 The November 3 Silent Majority speech succeeded beyond Nixon’s highest expectations.

  DAVID MIXNER (Moratorium organizer)

  The success of the Moratorium created Nixon’s November 3 Silent Majority speech. They knew that they were going to be brought down unless they went on the offense. I remember all of us watching the speech together crammed into the Vietnam Moratorium offices. We had this television with antennas wrapped in aluminum foil, and this big old box.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG (RAND analyst, peace activist)

  On November 2, Sam Brown invited me to come and help him do a response to Nixon’s November 3 speech. I said yes, and I flew from Los Angeles with my then girlfriend, now wife, Patricia, to D.C. on November 3. We went directly from Dulles Airport to Moratorium headquarters and got there minutes before the speech started. I come into the headquarters, and here were all these young kids with their long hair. Sam Brown, Dave Mixner, Marge Sklencar, and Dave Hawk were all th
ere.

  DAVID HAWK (Moratorium organizer)

  In response to the Moratorium, Nixon made the November 3 speech outlining his Vietnamization plan. They were going to withdraw American troops but increase the use of U.S. airpower.

  RICHARD NIXON SPEECH, NOVEMBER 3, 1969

  Under new orders, the primary mission of our troops is to enable the South Vietnamese forces to assume the full responsibility for the security of South Vietnam….After five years of Americans going into Vietnam, we are finally bringing American men home. By December 15, over sixty thousand men will have been withdrawn from South Vietnam—including twenty percent of all combat forces. The South Vietnamese have continued to gain in strength. As a result they have been able to take over combat responsibilities from our American troops.

  DAVID HAWK

  To us, all Vietnamization did was change the color of the corpses. This was the policy Nixon embraced. There was no more secret plan to end the war.

  RICHARD NIXON SPEECH, NOVEMBER 3, 1969

  …I recognize that some of my fellow citizens disagree with the plan for peace I have chosen. Honest and patriotic Americans have reached different conclusions as to how peace should be achieved.

  …And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.

  I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge.

  The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris.

  Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

  DAVID MIXNER

  Nixon went for a scare. I knew we were in trouble. That was when it shifted, and it really polarized the country, and they were successful.

  ROGER MORRIS (Nixon national security aide)

  I know the November 3 speech because I wrote some of those lines. The purpose of the speech was to say in blunt terms, “I’m going to do this on my own terms. I think that the majority of the country is behind me. I want peace in Vietnam, but not at the cost of our honor.” These are all deliberately nebulous terms, but it was a way of saying, “I’m going to conduct this policy. You can put another million people in the streets tomorrow, and I will still have the great silent majority with me, and I will still have my conviction that we will not be a party to a dishonorable settlement.”

  This is Nixon saying Frank Sinatra’s “I’m going to do this my way and fuck you.” And moreover, “I’m not in the minority. I’m not a president without major support. I’m morally sound and I’m politically okay.” It was Nixon’s declaration of independence from what the rest of the country had hoped would be a hostage taking by public opinion and public protest that they thought they had achieved with Johnson.

  TONY LAKE (Nixon national security staff)

  Roger Morris and I had written an early draft of the November 3 speech and we argued that it was a mistake for the president to take such a hawkish position on the war. We said Nixon would “sink into the Johnsonian bog” on Vietnam and make it his war. It wasn’t quite Nixon’s war yet. That was the heart of the argument I was trying to make, as Kissinger’s special assistant, and while working on the secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese, in which Kissinger and Nixon failed to scare them into a settlement.

  RAY PRICE (Nixon speechwriter)

  The president wrote the November 3 speech himself, working long and laboriously, late into the night, day after day at the White House and Camp David. “Silent majority” was a very apt description, because the people making the noise just wanted the country to think that they were everybody. They were a small part of it, but they were the noisy part. The serious people were not making the noises; it’s just not their nature. The media were mostly listening to the screechers and the screamers, and the yellers and the shouters, and the kickers, because that was more their style.

  TONY LAKE

  I remember writing a memo to Kissinger, which said once you start Vietnamization it’s going to be like salted peanuts. When the American public has developed a taste for one withdrawal, it’s going to keep demanding more and more. Therefore, our negotiating position is stronger now than it will be in six months or a year or two years, and we should get the best deal we can and get out now. Kissinger used the memo as a memo to the president opposing Vietnamization.

  STEPHEN BULL (Nixon aide)

  I remember the outpouring of support after the Silent Majority speech. It was not, to my knowledge, fabricated. People sent telegrams back then, huge piles of telegrams, and telephone calls were coming in—apparently there were fifty thousand telegrams and thirty thousand letters, mostly approving of the speech. There was a picture that we had of telegrams and letters piled on the president’s desk. It had quite an impact on the public, and the president’s approval ratings increased as a result of it. He was pleased at the reaction, and pleased at the success of it.

  RICHARD NIXON (RN: Memoirs of Richard Nixon)*2

  Very few speeches actually influence the course of history. The November 3 speech was one of them. Its impact came as a surprise to me; it was one thing to make a rhetorical appeal to the Silent Majority—it was another to actually hear from them….The November 3 speech was both a milestone and a turning point for my administration. Now, for a time at least, the enemy could no longer count on dissent in America to give them the victory they could not win on the battlefield. I had the public support I needed to continue a policy of waging war in Vietnam and negotiating for peace in Paris until we could bring the war to an honorable and successful conclusion.

  During the weeks after November 3 my Gallup overall-approval rating soared to 68 percent, the highest it had been since I took office.

  Credit 11.1

  After Nixon’s November 3, 1969, Silent Majority speech, the White House was flooded with fifty thousand congratulatory telegrams and thirty thousand letters. Some were suspected to have been ginned up by the White House staff.

  ROGER MORRIS

  It was a climactic moment after the November 3 speech. [White House special counsel] Chuck Colson and the boys ginned up a lot of artificial stuff, but there was also a genuine avalanche of cables and telephone calls and support for the president. It’s easy for the antiwar movement now to look back and to say the country was on our side, but that’s a function of history that’s not yet taken place in 1970. The country was brutally divided.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG (RAND analyst and peace activist)

  After the [Silent Majority] speech we all went to the Dupont Plaza [Hotel], where I spoke at a press conference, along with others. Meanwhile, I had one thousand pages of the xeroxed Pentagon Papers in my suitcase. There were seven thousand pages in the whole study. I hadn’t copied them all, by any means, by that time. I had in my suitcase top-secret documents to give to Senator [William] Fulbright, which I did later that week.

  I joined the movement that week, and I may have been its highest-ranking government insider. Plenty of people were resigning, or turning to other subjects, but none of them joined the movement. That would’ve ended their careers. They also probably despised the movement, and thought, These people have the right idea, but they’re not respectable. So none of them really took part, even in a peripheral way, in the movement, which was pretty broad at that time.

  I finally felt I was surrounded by people who, like myself, thought about Vietnam all the time. I don’t think an hour went by during the day, even during a movie, when I didn’t think thoughts about how to get out of Vietnam. There wasn’t an hour. So, in other words, we were obsessed, and that was the right way to be. That’s what people should’ve been thinking about. These were people who were determined to do whatever they could possibly do to end the war.r />
  RICHARD MOOSE (Senate staffer)

  I was on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee [chaired by Senator Fulbright] and I knew Dan Ellsberg slightly. When he came to Washington, his objective was to get the Foreign Relations Committee to release the papers, or if not the committee, then some member of the Congress. There was no way that the committee was about to do this. I saw a fair amount of Dan during that period, and I was not familiar with the papers myself. I had skimmed parts of them.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  It took Fulbright until December 1970 to decide not to put out the Pentagon Papers. He said, “After all, isn’t it just history?” I said, “Well, yeah, but I think it’s pretty important history, and it’s being repeated,” but I didn’t have the proof that it was being repeated. Mort Halperin and John Vann had led me to understand that it was being repeated, but I didn’t have documents to prove that. If I’d had the documents, I would’ve put those out and not even bothered with the Pentagon Papers.