Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  *7 The Motor City Nine were nine female members of the Weathermen who in September 1969 performed a “jailbreak” at a high school in Detroit and lectured the students about racism and imperialism.

  *8 On September 7, 1968, four hundred women protesters picketed outside the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They held signs that read, “Welcome to the Cattle Auction” and “No More Beauty Standards.” The demonstration received heavy media coverage, bringing national attention to the women’s liberation movement for the first time. Coverage centered around the “Freedom Trash Can,” a receptacle where protesters threw items such as household cleaners, cosmetics, magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, and bras. False rumors spread that the trash can was set on fire, inspiring the moniker bra burners, which reporters and others used to describe women’s liberation activists for years to come. Believe it or not, bras were never burned in Atlantic City.

  *9 Estimates of the number of illegal abortions performed in the United States during the 1950s and ’60s range from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. As many as 5,000 women died annually from botched illegal abortions.

  *10 On April 11, 1970, Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed a bill that legalized abortions in New York State. Rockefeller credited women’s liberation groups with playing an important role in the bill’s passage.

  *11 On May 4, 1972, in Chicago, seven women were arrested during a police raid and charged with operating an illegal abortion clinic. Jane members were charged with three counts of performing abortions and three counts of conspiracy to perform abortions. Abortion became legal nationally in 1973 with the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.

  *12 Morgan’s 1970 anthology of feminist essays, Sisterhood Is Powerful, is credited with launching several important feminist writers, including Kate Millett, Florynce Kennedy, and Naomi Weisstein. It was the first major anthology of the second-wave feminist movement.

  CHAPTER 18

  CAMBODIA

  (March–May 1970)

  Kissinger said Nixon usually wanted to intensify the bombing. “He was in the habit of wanting more bombing…his instructions most often were for more bombing.”

  —BOB WOODWARD,

  The Last of the President’s Men

  On April 20, 1970, president Nixon announced the withdrawal of 150,000 American ground troops from Vietnam as part of his Vietnamization policy, designed to pacify domestic opposition to the war. The military reported fewer American war casualties in the first three months of 1970 than in any first quarter since 1965. During this same time, the administration engaged in a secret bombing campaign against North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia. In the fourteen months leading up to April 1970, Nixon authorized 3,360 flights over Cambodia, which dropped 110,000 tons of bombs.*1 The secret bombing campaign soon escalated into an invasion with American troops on the ground. The first voices to protest the invasion came from inside the White House walls.

  ROGER MORRIS (Nixon National Security Council aide)

  The briefing memos from the February and March secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese that Henry [Kissinger] carried to Paris will never be available.*2 All of that is in classification way beyond any FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request. We were down to a power-sharing arrangement in the South. We called it the “leopard spot” settlement, that would divide authority [in South Vietnam] between a South Vietnamese communist–Viet Cong military political presence and the Saigon government, with a withdrawal of the North Vietnamese main force. Now, a withdrawal of main force troops across the border was a little bit like withdrawing from Manhattan across the GW Bridge. Everybody understood that they could’ve come back in quickly, but the whole idea of the settlement was to buy time. We’re talking about appearances here.

  By early spring 1970, the negotiations are looking really encouraging, but it’s at that moment that the coup takes place in Cambodia, and Prince Sihanouk is overthrown.*3 The coup was really a tipping point, and it set off not only the Cambodian communists, who we now know, and we should’ve known then, were quite independent of Hanoi. The communist Cambodians and Vietnamese looked like a monolith to many in Washington, but it was anything but. It not only set them off, but it also triggered anxieties and a counter-escalation in Hanoi, so that the flow of men and matériel into Cambodia [from North Vietnam] became heavier.

  What agreement we thought we were close to achieving with North Vietnam by February or March of 1970 was set back enormously by the coup. When the intelligence began to come in about the other side’s response to the coup, Nixon was thoroughly pissed. He thought his manhood was at stake and we were being tested and provoked.

  That’s the origin of the planning for the Cambodian invasion, the “incursion,” as it was called. In any case, the Cambodian coup triggers the counters by the other side [North Vietnam], and triggers in turn Nixon’s descent toward the madness of the incursion. It killed the seeming progress that had been made in the secret negotiations.

  If there is ever this great show trial about who did what to whom, and if anybody’s going to stand in the dock, it certainly needs to be two American presidents, and the people who aided and abetted them. The guys who encouraged or nodded assent to the Cambodian generals in 1970, and who had been in close touch with them for quite a while before that, deserve to be right up there. It was a catastrophic event, and not just because it leads to the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields*4 and that genocidal nightmare, but it leads to four more years of a very bloody war, and all of the bombing of North Vietnam. When you start totaling up casualties in Indochina and in the whole peninsula, that coup looms very, very large.

  I remember reading cable traffic and seeing this stream-of-consciousness stuff come from Nixon—the “Butterfieldgrams” we called them—as he read the intelligence and saw the news accounts after the coup.*5 It was clear that the invasion of Cambodia was building, and it was going to be on the table very soon.

  Tony Lake, I love him, is a very quiet, cooperative, congenial personality—a thoughtful, decent man. We had adjacent offices in the Executive Office Building, those beautiful, old, ornate offices, with marble fireplaces. I remember going in and startling my dear friend, who I used to ride on the back of his motorcycle with every night to go home to Chevy Chase. I slammed my fist down on his desk to the point where most of the papers rose off the surface of the desk and said, “If there is one fucking American trooper across that line, I’m out of here.” It was just a way of expressing that any American military response to what was going on in Cambodia was going to make matters worse, and would certainly kill all the work that we had done to try to develop some kind of peaceful settlement with North Vietnam.

  I never had this discussion with Kissinger; in fact, I’ve never seen him refer to it anywhere—I’m sure that Henry would say that there wasn’t really anything that promising or that serious on the negotiation table. But that’s not true. I thought we were very, very close, and he did, too, to the point where there were not so frivolous jokes about a Nobel Peace Prize for Kissinger. His whole thing was about celebrity from the get-go.

  But in any case, to me, it was real. Tony and I were sitting there at the summit of the American government. Now, bear in mind that you’re getting up to go to work every day in the same building with Spiro Agnew. We called them the Gestapo, the Berlin Wall. Ehrlichman*6 and the entire Nixon staff were made up of these right-wing, quasi-Nazis. I mean, it was a terribly squalid and reprehensible political culture to be a part of, but you’ve got a president whose approval ratings are a hell of a lot better than Obama’s are now.

  TONY LAKE (National Security Council aide)

  The central tension leading up to our resignation was on the one hand, working in the government gave me extraordinary access. I always argued on the margins, and argued on tactics, but I’d never argued on my growing belief that we simply could not succeed and therefore invading Cambodia was a deeply immoral venture because it could not lead to success, and any benef
its could not possibly equal the terrible costs. That sounds very abstract, but it was far more emotional then. I was determined to argue it more with Kissinger, and he welcomed that, and I did my best, often with Roger.

  The problem was that while I had that access and that opportunity to argue on the inside, the people I tended to agree with were free to voice their opinions in a way that I could not. So, while my friends were outside the ring of buses,*7 both metaphorical and a couple of times real, ringing the White House to keep them outside, I was inside being asked to write a statement opposing what they were doing, and what I believed. You can only do that if you’re arguing honestly. But if you begin to understand that you’re not effective enough inside to justify doing that, then you shouldn’t stay.

  ROGER MORRIS

  The actual decision to invade was not considered by the September Group.*8 If you contrast the care and the time and the information that went into the September Group planning, the invasion was a matter of the Pentagon putting forward these contingency plans, which they had on the shelf, and Nixon saying yes. It was never a full-fledged debate in the U.S. government. It’s sort of Ludendorff and Hindenburg.*9 You’ve got Nixon and Kissinger running the show at this point, and even somehow if Rogers and Laird and [Richard] Helms at the CIA, even if these people had somehow mounted some kind of opposition to the invasion—and none of them did—it would have been unavailing, I’m sure.

  I think that Kissinger’s secret Paris negotiations were doomed by their very success. I think Kissinger thought that he could get back to where he was [with the “leopard spot” agreement] in the spring of 1970 very quickly. And, of course, it took him more than two years to do that. It isn’t until late in ’72, when he says, “Peace is at hand,” and even then it’s not at hand. They still have to do the awful Christmas bombing of Hanoi in ’72 and ’73. So we’re a long way away from getting back to anything like a leopard spot arrangement. And ironically, the South Vietnamese government is like a frail, older person. Time is not on their side. They are a weak and weakening government, and so the longer they last, the less able they are to cope on their own. When the final withdrawal takes place, it’s like a house of cards.

  If somebody had said to me after the November 3 [Silent Majority] speech, “You’re going to be gone from here within six months, and within six months there will be an overthrow of Prince Sihanouk, and the Marines will be in Cambodia,” I would’ve said, “You’ve been smoking what they brought back from Saigon.” Those are two very different worlds, the world of early November 1969 and the world of April–May 1970. And that’s not very long. It’s a five-month period in which the world turns upside down, in many ways.

  TONY LAKE

  On a Saturday morning, about a week before what they called the incursion, but it looked like an invasion to me, Kissinger called in four of us—Roger and me, Larry Lynn, and Bill Watts. I remember as we walked into the office, Kissinger said to Bill, who was his duty officer that morning, “I’m meeting with my bleeding hearts.” Kissinger laid out the plan and my recollection is that I did a good bit of the arguing simply because I was the one who’d been working on Vietnam the most, and had been arguing with Kissinger all along. At the end of the meeting, Kissinger said, “Tony, I knew what you were going to say.” I remember thinking to myself, I can leave now because if I’ve become that predictable, then I obviously don’t have that much influence. So Roger and I wrote a letter of resignation, gave it to Al Haig, and said, “Please deliver this on the day of the invasion,” which was about a week later. Haig hesitated a day or two and then gave it to Kissinger.

  ROGER MORRIS

  Kissinger called us into a meeting and we told him that this was one more flawed and futile measure, and that it was not going to have any decisive effect on the war. We all knew that there was no magic capital that you had to capture across the Cambodian border. We knew that this would have a huge effect in Cambodia, and in Vietnam would invite further escalation, would not seriously or fatally wound the other side, which was the conclusion of the September Group about a massive bombing campaign. I mean, an incursion into Cambodia by a few brigades with APCs [armored personnel carriers] and some air was just picking a scab. It wasn’t really going to achieve anything, and it was going to snuff out the chance for a peaceful settlement.

  We didn’t believe that this was going to threaten the president’s base. Hell, the president’s base was cheering, “It’s about time we kicked their butt.” But we did say that there was going to be a violent and very bitterly divisive reaction in the United States. Kissinger was not very argumentative, but was disdainful and dismissive, and thanked us for our opinions. The decision had already been made. There were various theories that Kissinger had to go along with the Cambodian invasion in order to preserve his position, because, after all, he was the only hope for sanity in a government dominated by Haldeman and Ehrlichman and all the rest. And we didn’t disagree with that. Part of the decision to not make a big deal publicly about our resignation, which I think is the biggest mistake I ever made in my life, was because Kissinger was already under fire for having what the White House thought were a bunch of Harvard communists on his staff, and subversives, who were undercutting the president. The irony is that nothing could be further from the truth. I never had any political loyalty to any president. Most of us were former Foreign Service officers. We were close enough to the dreams of our boyhood that nobody was playing partisan politics. We really were trying to bring out the best in a president who was an extraordinarily mixed bag, and capable of statesmanship, and capable of madness. So the high and the low were always there, the dark and the light. But no one was undercutting anybody. And there really was a serious effort to bring about a peaceful settlement.

  Our resignations were extraordinarily rare at the moment. We were utterly alone in terms of any kind of precedent. In fact, it’s a very select club even since then. A few people resigned over Serbia and Kosovo. A few people resigned over Iraq. But it’s a very, very small group of people exiting American foreign policy on matters of principle and policy. We were at the end of a long and continual frustration with the administration. We knew how distorted and seedy things were even though we didn’t really know about the beginning of the Plumbers. We knew that there had been some phone tapping of the staff, as, indeed, there had been. I’d been warned by [former NSC member and Kissinger aide] Larry Eagleburger about that. “Don’t say anything on your phone you don’t want Haldeman to read over breakfast.” We knew that there was a lot of paranoia and a lot of division in the government. We knew that the people around Nixon were unreconstructed know-nothings.

  Should I have stayed that long? Should I have gotten out earlier? Should I have left when Johnson left? Maybe, but I don’t regret the experience, and I don’t regret the decision. I think that the one big mistake was not blowing the whistle as loud as we possibly could in every corner we possibly could, and we didn’t.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  When the four of them resigned, they agreed that they did not want to embarrass Kissinger, because they had the impression, falsely, that Kissinger was a restraining influence on Nixon, so they didn’t want to hurt Kissinger’s influence. They were quite wrong. Kissinger fanned the flames for Nixon. He was fooling them. But they said, “We will not have a press conference and say why we’re leaving,” which was because of Cambodia.

  ROGER MORRIS

  There was no formal announcement. We didn’t call a press conference. We should have, and been very specific about it. But I think Bill Watts went to a friend at the time, and it was buried inside The New York Times. This was the price we paid for trying to preserve Henry.

  NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 23, 1970

  FOUR MORE LEAVE KISSINGER’S STAFF

  by Robert M. Smith

  The National Security Council staff headed by Henry A. Kissinger is losing at least four more members and there are unverified reports that one other is also quitting….

 
ROGER MORRIS

  I didn’t know I was going to cross the aisle and go to the Hill and work for a Democrat, but I knew that whatever I was going to do, I would be trying to join an effective opposition to get this guy Nixon out of office. Tony ended up working for Muskie, and I worked for Mondale. Tony and I, we were trying to build what we knew needed to be a much stronger congressional base of opposition to the war.

  Everybody in Washington who was in the know understood why we left. Mary McGrory, who was this wonderful columnist for The Washington Post, for example, was a friend of mine, and she called up and said, “Good going,” and “Where do you want to go next?” She was the one who was responsible for introducing me to Mondale. Everybody on the Hill knew it. Mondale would take me around to meetings in Minnesota and elsewhere, whether it’s a high school rally or a bunch of donors in a smoky basement, and would say, “Here’s my aide, Roger Morris. The night they invaded Cambodia he walked out, and thumbed his nose, and told them all to go fuck themselves.” There would be cheers and applause and “Hey, good for you,” and “Now let’s move on to really important business. Let’s see, how about that check you promised for the campaign?”

  TONY LAKE

  After I got out, I did start writing op-eds, and opposing the war, and after a decent interval I went to work for Muskie. I became the foreign policy coordinator in his campaign. Together we fought with Clark Clifford, Paul Warnke, Les Gelb, and others, urging Muskie*10 to take a strong stand on the war. By the way, the White House kept the wiretap on my phone while I was working for Muskie, and picked up advance word of his speeches, which is not my definition of democracy in action. I sued them. It was settled many years later.